graeber, d. - fragments of an anarchist anthropology [prickly paradigm press, 2004]

7/31/2019 Graeber, D. - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology [Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004]

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Fragments of an

Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS

CHICAGO


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Anarchism:The name given to a principle or theory of life

and conduct under which society is conceivedwithout governmentharmony in such a societybeing obtained, not by submission to law, or by

obedience to any authority, but by free agreementsconcluded between the various groups, territorialand professional, freely constituted for the sake ofproduction and consumption, as also for the satis-faction of the infinite variety of needs and aspira-tions of a civilized being.

Peter Kropotkin (Encyclopedia Brittanica)

Basically, if youre not a utopianist, youre aschmuck.

Jonothon Feldman (Indigenous Planning Times)

What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches ofpotential theories, and tiny manifestosall meant tooffer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radicaltheory that does not actually exist, though it mightpossibly exist at some point in the future.

Since there are very good reasons why ananarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we mightstart by asking why one doesntor, for that matter,

why an anarchist sociology doesnt exist, or an anar-chist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchistpolitical science.

2004 David GraeberAll rights reserved.

Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC5629 South University AvenueChicago, Il 60637

www.prickly-paradigm.com

ISBN: 0-9728196-4-9LCCN: 2004090746


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So are academics just behind the curve here?Its possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy willbe overrun by anarchists. But Im not holding mybreath. It does seem that Marxism has an affinity withthe academy that anarchism never will. It was, afterall, the only great social movement that was inventedby a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movementintending to rally the working class. Most accounts ofthe history of anarchism assume it was basicallysimilar: anarchism is presented as the brainchild ofcertain nineteenth-century thinkersProudhon,Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.it then went on to inspire

working-class organizations, became enmeshed inpolitical struggles, divided into sects... Anarchism, inthe standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxismspoorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed butmaking up for brains, perhaps, with passion andsincerity. But in fact, the analogy is strained at best.

The nineteenth-century founding figures did notthink of themselves as having invented anythingparticularly new. The basic principles of anarchismself-organization, voluntary association, mutual aidreferred to forms of human behavior they assumed tohave been around about as long as humanity. Thesame goes for the rejection of the state and of allforms of structural violence, inequality, or domination(anarchism literally means without rulers), even theassumption that all these forms are somehow relatedand reinforce each other. None of it was presented assome startling new doctrine. And in fact it was not:one can find records of people making similar argu-ments throughout history, despite the fact there is

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Why are there so few anarchists in the

academy?

Its a pertinent question because, as a political philos-ophy, anarchism is veritably exploding right now.

Anarchist or anarchist-inspired movements aregrowing everywhere; traditional anarchist princi-plesautonomy, voluntary association, self-organiza-

tion, mutual aid, direct democracyhave gone fromthe basis for organizing within the globalizationmovement, to playing the same role in radical move-ments of all kinds everywhere. Revolutionaries in

Mexico, Argentina, India, and elsewhere have increas-ingly abandoned even talking about seizing power,and begun to formulate radically different ideas of

what a revolution would even mean. Most, admit-tedly, fall shy of actually using the word anarchist.But as Barbara Epstein has recently pointed out anar-chism has by now largely taken the place Marxismhad in the social movements of the 60s: even those

who do not consider themselves anarchists feel theyhave to define themselves in relation to it, and drawon its ideas.

Yet all this has found almost no reflection inthe academy. Most academics seem to have only the

vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismissit with the crudest stereotypes. (Anarchist organiza-tion! But isnt that a contradiction in terms?) In theUnited States there are thousands of academic

Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozenscholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists.


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has become a model for how radical intellectuals, orincreasingly, all intellectuals, treated one another;rather, the two developed somewhat in tandem. Fromthe perspective of the academy, this led to many salu-tary resultsthe feeling there should be some moralcenter, that academic concerns should be relevant topeoples livesbut also, many disastrous ones: turningmuch intellectual debate into a kind of parody ofsectarian politics, with everyone trying to reduce eachothers arguments into ridiculous caricatures so as todeclare them not only wrong, but also evil anddangerouseven if the debate is usually taking placein language so arcane that no one who could notafford seven years of grad school would have any wayof knowing the debate was going on.

Now consider the different schools of anar-chism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists,Individualists, Platformists... None are named aftersome Great Thinker; instead, they are invariablynamed either after some kind of practice, or mostoften, organizational principle. (Significantly, those

Marxist tendencies which are not named after individ-uals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, arealso the ones closest to anarchism.) Anarchists like todistinguish themselves by what they do, and how theyorganize themselves to go about doing it. And indeedthis has always been what anarchists have spent mostof their time thinking and arguing about. Anarchistshave never been much interested in the kinds of broadstrategic or philosophical questions that have histori-cally preoccupied Marxistsquestions like: Are the

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every reason to believe that in most times and places,such opinions were the ones least likely to be writtendown. We are talking less about a body of theory,then, than about an attitude, or perhaps one mighteven say a faith: the rejection of certain types of socialrelations, the confidence that certain others would bemuch better ones on which to build a livable society,the belief that such a society could actually exist.

Even if one compares the historical schools ofMarxism, and anarchism, one can see we are dealingwith a fundamentally different sort of project. Marxistschools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from themind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists,

Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... (Note howthe list starts with heads of state and grades almostseamlessly into French professors.) Pierre Bourdieuonce noted that, if the academic field is a game in

which scholars strive for dominance, then you knowyou have won when other scholars start wonderinghow to make an adjective out of your name. It is,presumably, to preserve the possibility of winning thegame that intellectuals insist, in discussing each other,on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Mantheories of history they would scoff at in just aboutany other context: Foucaults ideas, like Trotskys, arenever treated as primarily the products of a certainintellectual milieu, as something that emerged fromendless conversations and arguments involvinghundreds of people, but always, as if they emergedfrom the genius of a single man (or, very occasionally,

woman). Its not quite either that Marxist politicsorganized itself like an academic discipline or that it

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tice; it insists, before anything else, that ones meansmust be consonant with ones ends; one cannot createfreedom through authoritarian means; in fact, as muchas possible, one must oneself, in ones relations withones friends and allies, embody the society one wishesto create. This does not square very well with oper-ating within the university, perhaps the only Westerninstitution other than the Catholic Church and Britishmonarchy that has survived in much the same formfrom the Middle Ages, doing intellectual battle atconferences in expensive hotels, and trying to pretendall this somehow furthers revolution. At the very least,one would imagine being an openly anarchistprofessor would mean challenging the way universitiesare runand I dont mean by demanding an anarchiststudies department, eitherand that, of course, isgoing to get one in far more trouble than anythingone could ever write.

This does not mean anarchist theory is impossible.

This doesnt mean anarchists have to be againsttheory.After all, anarchism is, itself, an idea, even if a very oldone. It is also a project, which sets out to begincreating the institutions of a new society within theshell of the old, to expose, subvert, and underminestructures of domination but always, while doing so,proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner whichitself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary.Clearly any such project has need of the tools of intel-lectual analysis and understanding. It might not need

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peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (Anarchistsconsider this something for the peasants to decide.)

What is the nature of the commodity form? Rather,they tend to argue with each other about what is thetruly democratic way to go about a meeting, at whatpoint organization stops being empowering and startssquelching individual freedom. Or, alternately, aboutthe ethics of opposing power: What is direct action? Isit necessary (or right) to publicly condemn someone

who assassinates a head of state? Or can assassination,especially if it prevents something terrible, like a war,be a moral act? When is it okay to break a window?

To sum up then:

1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analyt-ical discourse about revolutionary strategy.

2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourseabout revolutionary practice.

Obviously, everything Ive said has been some-thing of a caricature (there have been wildly sectarian

anarchist groups, and plenty of libertarian, practice-oriented Marxists including, arguably, myself). Still,even so stated, this does suggest a great deal of poten-tial complementarity between the two. And indeedthere has been: even Mikhail Bakunin, for all hisendless battles with Marx over practical questions, alsopersonally translated Marxs Capitalinto Russian. Butit also makes it easier to understand why there are sofew anarchists in the academy. Its not just that anar-chism does not tend to have much use for high theory.Its that it is primarily concerned with forms of prac-

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individuals have unique and incommensurable views ofthe world means they cannot become friends, orlovers, or work on common projects.

Even more than High Theory, what anarchismneeds is what might be called Low Theory: a way ofgrappling with those real, immediate questions thatemerge from a transformative project. Mainstreamsocial science actually isnt much help here, becausenormally in mainstream social science this sort ofthing is generally classified as policy issues, and noself-respecting anarchist would have anything to do

with these.

against policy (a tiny manifesto):The notion of policy presumes a state orgoverning apparatus which imposes its will onothers. Policy is the negation of politics; policy isby definition something concocted by some form ofelite, which presumes it knows better than othershow their affairs are to be conducted. By partici-pating in policy debates the very best one can

achieve is to limit the damage, since the verypremise is inimical to the idea of people managingtheir own affairs.

So in this case, the question becomes: Whatsort of social theory would actually be of interest tothose who are trying to help bring about a world in

which people are free to govern their own affairs?This is what this pamphlet is mainly about.For starters, I would say any such theory

would have to begin with some initial assumptions.Not many. Probably just two. First, it would have to

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High Theory, in the sense familiar today. Certainly itwill not need one single, Anarchist High Theory. Thatwould be completely inimical to its spirit. Much better,I think, something more in the spirit of anarchist deci-sion-making processes, employed in anything from tinyaffinity groups to gigantic spokescouncils of thousandsof people. Most anarchist groups operate by aconsensus process which has been developed, in many

ways, to be the exact opposite of the high-handed, divi-sive, sectarian style so popular amongst other radicalgroups. Applied to theory, this would mean acceptingthe need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives,united only by certain shared commitments and under-standings. In consensus process, everyone agrees fromthe start on certain broad principles of unity andpurposes for being for the group; but beyond that theyalso accept as a matter of course that no one is evergoing to convert another person completely to theirpoint of view, and probably shouldnt try; and thattherefore discussion should focus on concrete ques-tions of action, and coming up with a plan thateveryone can live with and no one feels is in funda-mental violation of their principles. One could see aparallel here: a series of diverse perspectives, joinedtogether by their shared desire to understand thehuman condition, and move it in the direction ofgreater freedom. Rather than be based on the need toprove others fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeksto find particular projects on which they reinforce eachother. Just because theories are incommensurable incertain respects does not mean they cannot exist oreven reinforce each other, any more than the fact that


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proceed from the assumption that, as the Brazilianfolk song puts it, another world is possible. Thatinstitutions like the state, capitalism, racism and maledominance are not inevitable; that it would be possibleto have a world in which these things would not exist,and that wed all be better off as a result. To commitoneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,since how can one have certain knowledge of suchmatters? It might possibly turn out that such a worldis notpossible. But one could also make the argumentthat its this very unavailability of absolute knowledge

which makes a commitment to optimism a moralimperative: Since one cannot know a radically better

world is not possible, are we not betraying everyoneby insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce,the mess we have today? And anyway, even if were

wrong, we might well get a lot closer.

against anti-utopianism (another tiny mani-festo):Here of course one has to deal with the inevitable

objection: that utopianism has lead to unmitigatedhorror, as Stalinists, Maoists, and other idealiststried to carve society into impossible shapes, killingmillions in the process.

This argument belies a fundamental miscon-ception: that imagining better worlds was itself theproblem. Stalinists and their ilk did not kill becausethey dreamed great dreamsactually, Stalinists werefamous for being rather short on imaginationbutbecause they mistook their dreams for scientific

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certainties. This led them to feel they had a right toimpose their visions through a machinery of violence.

Anarchists are proposing nothing of the sort, on eithercount. They presume no inevitable course of historyand one can never further the course of freedom bycreating new forms of coercion. In fact all forms ofsystemic violence are (among other things) assaults onthe role of the imagination as a political principle, andthe only way to begin to think about eliminatingsystematic violence is by recognizing this.

And of course one could write very long booksabout the atrocities throughout history carried out bycynics and other pessimists...

So thats the first proposition. The second, Idsay, is that any anarchist social theory would have toreject self-consciously any trace of vanguardism. Therole of intellectuals is most definitively not to form anelite that can arrive at the correct strategic analysesand then lead the masses to follow. But if not that,

what? This is one reason Im calling this essayFragments of an AnarchistAnthropologybecausethis is one area where I think anthropology is particu-larly well positioned to help. And not only becausemost actually-existing self-governing communities,and actually-existing non-market economies in the

world have been investigated by anthropologists ratherthan sociologists or historians. It is also because thepractice of ethnography provides at least something ofa model, if a very rough, incipient model, of how non-

vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice mightwork. When one carries out an ethnography, one

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Graves, Brown, Mauss, Sorel

Its not so much that anthropologists embraced anar-chism, or even, were consciously espousing anarchistideas; its more that they moved in the same circles,their ideas tended to bounce off one another, thatthere was something about anthropological thought inparticularits keen awareness of the very range of

human possibilitiesthat gave it an affinity to anar-chism from the very beginning.

Let me start with Sir James Frazer, eventhough he was the furthest thing from an anarchist.Frazer, chair of anthropology in Cambridge at theturn of the (last) century, was a classic stodgy

Victorian who wrote accounts of savage customs,based mainly on the results of questionnaires sent outto missionaries and colonial officials. His ostensibletheoretical attitude was utterly condescendinghebelieved almost all magic, myth and ritual was basedon foolish logical mistakesbut his magnum opus,

The Golden Bough, contained such florid, fanciful, andstrangely beautiful descriptions of tree spirits, eunuchpriests, dying vegetation gods, and the sacrifice ofdivine kings, that he inspired a generation of poets andliterati. Among them was Robert Graves, a Britishpoet who first became famous for writing bitinglysatirical verse from the trenches of World War I. Atthe end of the war, Graves ended up in a hospital inFrance where he was cured of shell shock by W. H. R.Rivers, the British anthropologist famous for the

Torres Straits Expedition, who doubled as a psychia-

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observes what people do, and then tries to tease outthe hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics thatunderlie their actions; one tries to get at the waypeoples habits and actions makes sense in ways thatthey are not themselves completely aware of. Oneobvious role for a radical intellectual is to do preciselythat: to look at those who are creating viable alterna-tives, try to figure out what might be the larger impli-cations of what they are (already) doing, and thenoffer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but ascontributions, possibilitiesas gifts. This is more orless what I was trying to do a few paragraphs ago

when I suggested that social theory could refashionitself in the manner of direct democratic process. Andas that example makes clear, such a project wouldactually have to have two aspects, or moments if youlike: one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in aconstant dialogue.

None of this has much to do with whatanthropology, even radical anthropology, has actuallybeen like over the last hundred years or so. Still, therehas been a strange affinity, over the years, betweenanthropology and anarchism which is in itself signifi-cant.


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Graves books is that hes obviously having so muchfun writing them, throwing out one outrageous thesisafter another, that its impossible to tell how much ofit is meant to be taken seriously. Or whether thatseven a meaningful question. In one essay, written inthe 50s, Graves invents the distinction betweenreasonableness and rationality later made famousby Stephen Toulmin in the 80s, but he does it in thecourse of an essay written to defend Socrates wife,

Xanthippe, from her reputation as an atrocious nag.(His argument: imagine you had been married toSocrates.)

Did Graves really believe that women arealways superior to men? Did he really expect us tobelieve he had solved one mythical problem by fallinginto an analeptic trance and overhearing a conversa-tion about fish between a Greek historian and Romanofficial in Cyprus in 54 CE? Its worth wondering,because for all their current obscurity, in these writ-ings, Graves essentially invented two different intellec-tual traditions which were later to become major theo-retical strains in modern anarchismif admittedly,generally considered two of the mostoutr. On theone hand, the cult of the Great Goddess has beenrevived and become a direct inspiration for Pagan

Anarchism, hippyish performers of spiral dances whoare always welcome at mass actions because they doseem to have rather a knack for influencing the

weather; on the other, Primitivists, whose mostfamous (and extreme) avatar is John Zerzan, who hastaken Graves rejection of industrial civilization andhopes for general economic collapse even further,

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trist. Graves was so impressed by Rivers that he waslater to suggest professional anthropologists be placedin charge of all world governments. Not a particularlyanarchist sentiment, certainlybut Graves tended todart about between all sorts of odd political positions.In the end, he was to abandon civilizationindus-trial societyentirely and spend the last fifty years orso of his life in a village on the Spanish island of

Majorca, supporting himself by writing novels, butalso producing numerous books of love poetry, and aseries of some of the most subversive essays ever

written.Graves thesis was, among other things, that

greatness was a pathology; great men were essen-tially destroyers and great poets not much better(his arch-enemies were Virgil, Milton and Pound),that all real poetry is and has always been a mythiccelebration of an ancient Supreme Goddess, of whomFrazer had only confused glimmerings, and whosematriarchal followers were conquered and destroyedby Hitlers beloved Aryan hoards when they emergedfrom the Ukrainian Steppes in the early Bronze Age(though they survived a bit longer in Minoan Crete).In a book called The White Goddess: An HistoricalGrammar of Poetic Myth, he claimed to map out therudiments of her calendar rites in different parts ofEurope, focusing on the periodic ritual murder of theGoddess royal consorts, among other things a surefire

way of guaranteeing would-be great men do not getout of hand, and ending the book with a call for aneventual industrial collapse. I say claimed advisedlyhere. The delightful, if also confusing, thing about

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rary, and the inventor of French anthropology. Mausswas a child of Orthodox Jewish parents who had themixed blessing of also being the nephew of EmileDurkheim, the founder of French sociology. Mauss

was also a revolutionary socialist. For much of his life,he managed a consumer coop in Paris, and wasconstantly writing screeds for socialist newspapers,carrying out projects of research on coops in othercountries, and trying to create links between coops inorder to build an alternative, anti-capitalist, economy.His most famous work was written in response to thecrisis of socialism he saw in Lenins reintroduction ofthe market in the Soviet Union in the 20s: If it wasimpossible to simply legislate the money economyaway, even in Russia, the least monetarized society inEurope, then perhaps revolutionaries needed to startlooking at the ethnographic record to see what sort ofcreature the market really was, and what viable alter-natives to capitalism might look like. Hence his Essayon the Gift, written in 1925, which argued (amongother things) that the origin of all contracts lies incommunism, an unconditional commitment toanothers needs, and that despite endless economictextbooks to the contrary, there has never been aneconomy based on barter: that actually-existing soci-eties which do not employ money have instead beengift economies in which the distinctions we now makebetween interest and altruism, person and property,freedom and obligation, simply did not exist.

Mauss believed socialism could never be builtby state fiat but only gradually, from below, that it waspossible to begin building a new society based on

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arguing that even agriculture was a great historicalmistake. Both the Pagans and the Primitivists, curi-ously, share exactly that ineffable quality which makesGraves work so distinctive: its really impossible toknow on what level one is supposed to read it. Itsboth ridiculous self-parody, and terribly serious, at thesame time.

There have also been anthropologistsamongthem, some of the founding figures of the discipline

who have themselves dabbled with anarchist, or anar-chistic, politics.

The most notorious case was that of a turn ofthe century student named Al Brown, known to hiscollege friends as Anarchy Brown. Brown was anadmirer of the famous anarchist Prince (he of courserenounced his title), Peter Kropotkin, arctic explorerand naturalist, who had thrown social Darwinism intoa tumult from which it still has never quite recoveredby documenting how the most successful species tendto be those which cooperate the most effectively.(Sociobiology for instance was basically an attempt tocome up with an answer to Kropotkin.) Later, Brown

was to begin affecting a cloak and a monocle, adoptinga fancy mock-aristocratic hyphenated name (A. R.Radcliffe-Brown), and ultimately, in the 1920s and30s, becoming the master theorist of British socialanthropology. The older Brown didnt like to talk toomuch about his youthful politics, but its probably nocoincidence that his main theoretical interest remainedthe maintenance of social order outside the state.

Perhaps the most intriguing case though isthat of Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Browns contempo-

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mutual aid and self-organization in the shell of theold; he felt that existing popular practices providedthe basis both for a moral critique of capitalism andpossible glimpses of what that future society would belike. All of these are classic anarchist positions. Still,he did not consider himself an anarchist. In fact, henever had anything good to say about them. This was,it appears, because he identified anarchism mainly

with the figure of Georges Sorel, an apparently quitepersonally distasteful French anarcho-syndicalist andanti-Semite, now mainly famous for his essay

Reflections sur le Violence. Sorel argued that since themasses were not fundamentally good or rational, it

was foolish to make ones primary appeal to themthrough reasoned arguments. Politics is the art ofinspiring others with great myths. For revolutionaries,he proposed the myth of an apocalyptic GeneralStrike, a moment of total transformation. To maintainit, he added, one would need a revolutionary elitecapable of keeping the myth alive by their willingnessto engage in symbolic acts of violencean elite which,like the Marxist vanguard party (often somewhat lesssymbolic in its violence), Mauss described as a kind ofperpetual conspiracy, a modern version of the secretpolitical mens societies of the ancient world.

In other words, Mauss saw Sorel, and henceanarchism, as introducing an element of the irrational,of violence, and of vanguardism. It might seem a bitodd that among French revolutionaries of the time, itshould have been the trade unionist emphasizing thepower of myth, and the anthropologist objecting, butin the context of the 20s and 30s, with fascist stir-

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rings everywhere, its understandable why a Europeanradicalespecially a Jewish onemight see all this as

just a little creepy. Creepy enough to throw cold watereven on the otherwise rather appealing image of theGeneral Strikewhich is after all about the least

violent possible way to imagine an apocalyptic revolu-tion. By the 40s, Mauss concluded his suspicions hadproved altogether justified.

To the doctrine of the revolutionary vanguard,he wrote, Sorel added a notion originally culled from

Mauss own uncle Durkheim: a doctrine of corpo-ratism, of vertical structures glued together by tech-niques of social solidarity. This he said was a greatinfluence on Lenin, by Lenins own admission. Fromthere it was adopted by the Right. By the end of hislife, Sorel himself had become increasingly sympa-thetic with fascism; in this he followed the sametrajectory as Mussolini (another youthful dabbler withanarcho-syndicalism) and who, Mauss believed, tookthese same Durkheimian/Sorelian/Leninist ideas totheir ultimate conclusions. By the end of his life,

Mauss became convinced even Hitlers great ritualpageants, torch-lit parades with their chants of Seig

Heil!, were really inspired by accounts he and hisuncle had written about totemic rituals of Australianaborigines. When we were describing how ritual cancreate social solidarity, of submerging the individual inthe mass, he complained, it never occurred to usthat anyone would apply such techniques in themodern day! (In fact, Mauss was mistaken. Modernresearch has shown Nuremberg rallies were actuallyinspired by Harvard pep rallies. But this is another


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The anarchist anthropology

that almost already does exist

In the end, though, Marcel Mauss has probably hadmore influence on anarchists than all the other onescombined. This is because he was interested in alter-native moralities, which opened the way to thinking

that societies without states and markets were the waythey were because they actively wished to live thatway. Which in our terms means, because they wereanarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchistanthropology do, already, exist, they largely derivefrom him.

Before Mauss, the universal assumption hadbeen that economies without money or markets hadoperated by means of barter; they were trying toengage in market behavior (acquire useful goods andservices at the least cost to themselves, get rich ifpossible...), they just hadnt yet developed very

sophisticated ways of going about it. Mauss demon-strated that in fact, such economies were really gifteconomies. They were not based on calculation, buton a refusal to calculate; they were rooted in anethical system which consciously rejected most of

what we would consider the basic principles ofeconomics. It was not that they had not yet learned toseek profit through the most efficient means. They

would have found the very premise that the point ofan economic transactionat least, one with someone

who was not your enemywas to seek the greatestprofit deeply offensive.

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story.) The outbreak of war destroyed Mauss, who hadnever completely recovered from losing most of hisclosest friends in the First World War. When theNazis took Paris he refused to flee, but sat in his officeevery day with a pistol in his desk, waiting for theGestapo to arrive. They never did, but the terror, and

weight of his feelings of historical complicity, finallyshattered his sanity.


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It is significant that the one (of the few)overtly anarchist anthropologists of recent memory,another Frenchman, Pierre Clastres, became famousfor making a similar argument on the political level.He insisted political anthropologists had still notcompletely gotten over the old evolutionist perspec-tives that saw the state primarily as a more sophisti-cated form of organization than what had comebefore; stateless peoples, such as the Amazonian soci-eties Clastres studied, were tacitly assumed not to haveattained the level of say, the Aztecs or the Inca. But

what if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirelyunaware of what the elementary forms of state powermight be likewhat it would mean to allow some mento give everyone else orders which could not be ques-tioned, since they were backed up by the threat offorceand were for that very reason determined toensure such things never came about? What if theyconsidered the fundamental premises of our politicalscience morally objectionable?

The parallels between the two arguments areactually quite striking. In gift economies there are,often, venues for enterprising individuals: But every-thing is arranged in such a way they could never beused as a platform for creating permanent inequalitiesof wealth, since self-aggrandizing types all end upcompeting to see who can give the most away. In

Amazonian (or North American) societies, the institu-tion of the chief played the same role on a politicallevel: the position was so demanding, and so littlerewarding, so hedged about by safeguards, that there

was no way for power-hungry individuals to do much

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with it. Amazonians might not have literally whackedoff the rulers head every few years, but its not anentirely inappropriate metaphor.

By these lights these were all, in a very realsense, anarchist societies. They were founded on anexplicit rejection of the logic of the state and of themarket.

They are, however, extremely imperfect ones.

The most common criticism of Clastres is to ask howhis Amazonians could really be organizing their soci-eties against the emergence of something they havenever actually experienced. A naive question, but itpoints to something equally naive in Clastres ownapproach. Clastres manages to talk blithely about theuncompromised egalitarianism of the very sameAmazonian societies, for instance, famous for theiruse of gang rape as a weapon to terrorize womenwho transgress proper gender roles. Its a blind spotso glaring one has to wonder how he could possiblymiss out on it; especially considering it provides ananswer to just that question. Perhaps Amazonian men

understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power,backed by force, would be like because they them-selves wield that sort of power over their wives anddaughters. Perhaps for that very reason they wouldnot like to see structures capable of inflicting it onthem.

Its worth pointing out because Clastres is, inmany ways, a naive romantic. Fom another perspec-tive, though, theres no mystery here at all. After all,we are talking about the fact that most Amazoniansdont want to give others the power to threaten themwith physical injury if they dont do as they are told.Maybe we should better be asking what it says about


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situations, since few historical states had the means toroot such institutions out, even assuming that they

would have wanted to. But Mauss and Clastres argu-ment suggests something even more radical. Itsuggests that counterpower, at least in the mostelementary sense, actually exists where the states andmarkets are not even present; that in such cases, ratherthan being embodied in popular institutions whichpose themselves against the power of lords, or kings,or plutocrats, they are embodied in institutions whichensure such types of person never come about. Whatit is counter to, then, is a potential, a latent aspect,or dialectical possibility if you prefer, within thesociety itself.

This at least would help explain an otherwisepeculiar fact; the way in which it is often particularlythe egalitarian societies which are torn by terribleinner tensions, or at least, extreme forms of symbolic

violence.Of course, all societies are to some degree at

war with themselves. There are always clashesbetween interests, factions, classes and the like; also,social systems are always based on the pursuit ofdifferent forms of value which pull people in differentdirections. In egalitarian societies, which tend to placean enormous emphasis on creating and maintainingcommunal consensus, this often appears to spark akind of equally elaborate reaction formation, a spectralnightworld inhabited by monsters, witches or othercreatures of horror. And its the most peaceful societies

which are also the most haunted, in their imaginativeconstructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of

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ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort ofexplanation.

toward a theory of imaginary counterpower

This is what I mean by an alternative ethics, then.Anarchistic societies are no more unaware of humancapacities for greed or vainglory than modern

Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy,gluttony, or sloth; they would just find them equallyunappealing as the basis for their civilization. In fact,they see these phenomena as moral dangers so direthey end up organizing much of their social lifearound containing them.

If this were a purely theoretical essay I wouldexplain that all this suggests an interesting way ofsynthesizing theories of value and theories of resis-tance. For present purposes, suffice it to say that Ithink Mauss and Clastres have succeeded, somewhatdespite themselves, in laying the groundwork for atheory of revolutionary counterpower.

Im afraid this is a somewhat complicatedargument. Let me take it one step at a time.

In typical revolutionary discourse a counter-power is a collection of social institutions set inopposition to the state and capital: from self-governing communities to radical labor unions topopular militias. Sometimes it is also referred to as ananti-power. When such institutions maintain them-selves in the face of the state, this is usually referred toas a dual power situation. By this definition most ofhuman history is actually characterized by dual power

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laced with elements of destructive madness.Similarly, while the Piaroa are famous for theirpeaceablenessmurder is unheard of, the assump-tion being that anyone who killed another humanbeing would be instantly consumed by pollutionand die horriblythey inhabit a cosmos of endlessinvisible war, in which wizards are engaged infending off the attacks of insane, predatory godsand all deaths are caused by spiritual murder andhave to be avenged by the magical massacre ofwhole (distant, unknown) communities.

Case 2:The Tiv, another notoriously egalitariansociety, make their homes along the Benue Riverin central Nigeria. Compared to the Piaroa, theirdomestic life is quite hierarchical: male elders tendto have many wives, and exchange with oneanother the rights to younger womens fertility;younger men are thus reduced to spending most oftheir lives chilling their heels as unmarried depen-dents in their fathers compounds. In recentcenturies the Tiv were never entirely insulatedfrom the raids of slave traders; Tivland was also

dotted with local markets; minor wars betweenclans were occasionally fought, though more oftenlarge disputes were mediated in large communalmoots. Still, there were no political institutionslarger than the compound; in fact, anything thateven began to look like a political institution wasconsidered intrinsically suspect, or more precisely,seen as surrounded by an aura of occult horror. Thiswas, as ethnographer Paul Bohannan succinctly putit, because of what was seen to be the nature ofpower: men attain power by consuming thesubstance of others. Markets were protected, and

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perennial war. The invisible worlds surrounding themare literally battlegrounds. Its as if the endless labor ofachieving consensus masks a constant inner violenceor, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact theprocess by which that inner violence is measured andcontainedand it is precisely this, and the resultingtangle of moral contradiction, which is the prime fontof social creativity. Its not these conflicting principlesand contradictory impulses themselves which are theultimate political reality, then; its the regulatoryprocess which mediates them.

Some examples might help here:

Case 1:The Piaroa, a highly egalitarian societyliving along tributaries of the Orinoco whichethnographer Joanna Overing herself describes asanarchists. They place enormous value on indi-vidual freedom and autonomy, and are quite self-conscious about the importance of ensuring that noone is ever at another persons orders, or the needto ensure no one gains such control over economic

resources that they can use it to constrain othersfreedom. Yet they also insist that Piaroa cultureitself was the creation of an evil god, a two-headedcannibalistic buffoon. The Piaroa have developed amoral philosophy which defines the human condi-tion as caught between a world of the senses, ofwild, pre-social desires, and a world of thought.Growing up involves learning to control andchannel in the former through thoughtful consider-ation for others, and the cultivation of a sense ofhumor; but this is made infinitely more difficult bythe fact that all forms of technical knowledge,however necessary for life are, due to their origins,

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ered wrong for adults to be giving one anotherorders, especially on an ongoing basis; this wasconsidered to make even institutions like wagelabor inherently morally suspect. Or to be moreprecise, unmalagasythis was how the Frenchbehaved, or wicked kings and slaveholders longago. Society was overall remarkably peaceable. Yetonce again it was surrounded by invisible warfare;just about everyone had access to dangerous medi-cine or spirits or was willing to let on they might;the night was haunted by witches who dancednaked on tombs and rode men like horses; justabout all sickness was due to envy, hatred, andmagical attack. Whats more, witchcraft bore astrange, ambivalent relation to national identity.While people made rhetorical reference toMalagasy as equal and united like hairs on a head,ideals of economic equality were rarely, if ever,invoked; however, it was assumed that anyone whobecame too rich or powerful would be destroyed bywitchcraft, and while witchcraft was the definitionof evil, it was also seen as peculiarly Malagasy(charms were just charms but evil charms were

called Malagasy charms). Insofar as rituals ofmoral solidarity did occur, and the ideal of equalitywas invoked, it was largely in the course of ritualsheld to suppress, expel, or destroy those witcheswho, perversely, were the twisted embodiment andpractical enforcement of the egalitarian ethos of thesociety itself.

Note how in each case theres a strikingcontrast between the cosmological content, which isnothing if not tumultuous, and social process, which

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market rules enforced by charms which embodieddiseases and were said to be powered by humanbody parts and blood. Enterprising men whomanaged to patch together some sort of fame,wealth, or clientele were by definition witches.Their hearts were coated by a substance called tsav,which could only be augmented by the eating ofhuman flesh. Most tried to avoid doing so, but asecret society of witches was said to exist whichwould slip bits of human flesh in their victims food,thus incurring a flesh debt and unnatural cravingsthat would eventually drive those affected toconsume their entire families. This imaginarysociety of witches was seen as the invisible govern-ment of the country. Power was thus institutional-ized evil, and every generation, a witch-findingmovement would arise to expose the culprits, thus,effectively, destroying any emerging structures ofauthority.

Case 3: Highland Madagascar, where I livedbetween 1989 and 1991, was a rather different place.The area had been the center of a Malagasy state

the Merina kingdomsince the early nineteenthcentury, and afterwards endured many years of harshcolonial rule. There was a market economy and, intheory, a central governmentduring the time I wasthere, largely dominated by what was called theMerina bourgeoisie. In fact this government hadeffectively withdrawn from most of the countrysideand rural communities were effectively governingthemselves. In many ways these could also beconsidered anarchistic: most local decisions weremade by consensus by informal bodies, leadershipwas looked on at best with suspicion, it was consid-


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degree, I suspect all this turbulence stems from thevery nature of the human condition. There wouldappear to be no society which does not see human lifeas fundamentally a problem. However much theymight differ on what they deem the problem to be, atthe very least, the existence of work, sex, and repro-duction are seen as fraught with all sorts of quan-daries; human desires are always fickle; and thentheres the fact that were all going to die. So theres alot to be troubled by. None of these dilemmas aregoing to vanish if we eliminate structural inequalities(much though I think this would radically improvethings in just about every other way). Indeed, thefantasy that it might, that the human condition,desire, mortality, can all be somehow resolved seemsto be an especially dangerous one, an image of utopia

which always seems to lurk somewhere behind thepretentions of Power and the state. Instead, as Ivesuggested, the spectral violence seems to emerge fromthe very tensions inherent in the project of main-taining an egalitarian society. Otherwise, one would atleast imagine the Tiv imagination would be moretumultuous than the Piaroa.

That the state emerged from images of an impossibleresolution of the human condition was Clastres pointas well. He argued that historically, the institution of thestate could not have possibly emerged from the polit-ical institutions of anarchist societies, which weredesigned to ensure this never happened. Instead, itcould only have been from religious institutions: hepointed to the Tupinamba prophets who led the wholepopulation on a vast migration in search of a land

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is all about mediation, arriving at consensus. None ofthese societies are entirely egalitarian: there arealways certain key forms of dominance, at least ofmen over women, elders over juniors. The nature andintensity of these forms vary enormously: in Piaroacommunities the hierarchies were so modest thatOvering doubts one can really speak of male domi-nance at all (despite the fact that communal leadersare invariably male); the Tiv appear to be quiteanother story. Still, structural inequalities invariablyexist, and as a result I think it is fair to say that theseanarchies are not only imperfect, they contain withthem the seeds of their own destruction. It is hardly acoincidence that when larger, more systematically

violent forms of domination do emerge, they draw onprecisely these idioms of age and gender to justifythemselves.

Still, I think it would be a mistake to see theinvisible violence and terror as simply a working outof the internal contradictions created by thoseforms of inequality. One could, perhaps, make thecase that most real, tangible violence is. At least, it isa somewhat notorious thing that, in societies wherethe only notable inequalities are based in gender, theonly murders one is likely to observe are men killingeach other over women. Similarly, it does seem to bethe case, generally speaking, that the morepronounced the differences between male and femaleroles in a society, the more physically violent it tendsto be. But this hardly means that if all inequalities

vanished, then everything, even the imagination,would become placid and untroubled. To some

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without evil. Of course, in later contexts, what PeterLamborn Wilson calls the Clastrian machine, that setof mechanisms which oppose the emergence of domi-nation, what Im calling the apparatus of counterpower,can itself become caught in such apocalyptic fantasies.

Now, at this point the reader may beobjecting, Sure, but what does any of this have to do

with the kind of insurrectionary communities which

revolutionary theorists are normally referring to whenthey use the word counterpower?

Here it might be useful to look at the differ-ence between the first two cases and the thirdbecause the Malagasy communities I knew in 1990

were living in something which in many ways resem-bled an insurrectionary situation. Between the nine-teenth century and the twentieth, there had been aremarkable transformation of popular attitudes. Justabout all reports from the last century insisted that,despite widespread resentment against the corruptand often brutal Malagasy government, no one ques-

tioned the legitimacy of the monarchy itself, orparticularly, their absolute personal loyalty to theQueen. Neither would anyone explicitly question thelegitimacy of slavery. After the French conquest ofthe island in 1895, followed immediately by the aboli-tion of both the monarchy and slavery, all this seemsto have changed extremely quickly. Before a genera-tion was out, one began to encounter the attitude thatI found to be well-nigh universal in the countryside ahundred years later: slavery was evil, and monarchs

were seen as inherently immoral because they treated

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others like slaves. In the end, all relations ofcommand (military service, wage labor, forced labor)came to be fused together in peoples minds as varia-tions on slavery; the very institutions which hadpreviously been seen as beyond challenge were nowthe definition of illegitimacy, and this, especiallyamong those who had the least access to highereducation and French Enlightenment ideas. BeingMalagasy came to be defined as rejecting suchforeign ways. If one combines this attitude withconstant passive resistance to state institutions, andthe elaboration of autonomous, and relatively egali-tarian modes of self-government, one could see whathappened as a revolution. After the financial crisis ofthe 80s, the state in much of the country effectivelycollapsed, or anyway devolved into a matter of hollowform without the backing of systematic coercion.Rural people carried on much as they had before,going to offices periodically to fill out forms eventhough they were no longer paying any real taxes, thegovernment was hardly providing services, and in theevent of theft or even murder, police would no longercome. If a revolution is a matter of people resistingsome form of power identified as oppressive, identi-fying some key aspect of that power as the source of

what is fundamentally objectionable about it, andthen trying to get rid of ones oppressors in such a

way as to try to eliminate that sort of powercompletely from daily life, then it is hard to denythat, in some sense, this was indeed a revolution. Itmight not have involved an actual uprising, but it wasa revolution nonetheless.


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To sum up the argument so far, then:

1) Counterpower is first and foremost rooted inthe imagination; it emerges from the fact thatall social systems are a tangle of contradictions,always to some degree at war with themselves.Or, more precisely, it is rooted in the relationbetween the practical imagination required tomaintain a society based on consensus (as any

society not based on violence must, ultimately,be)the constant work of imaginative identifi-cation with others that makes understandingpossibleand the spectral violence whichappears to be its constant, perhaps inevitablecorollary.

2) In egalitarian societies, counterpower might besaid to be the predominant form of socialpower. It stands guard over what are seen ascertain frightening possibilities within thesociety itself: notably against the emergence ofsystematic forms of political or economic

dominance.

2a) Institutionally, counterpower takes theform of what we would call institutions ofdirect democracy, consensus and mediation;that is, ways of publicly negotiating andcontrolling that inevitable internal tumultand transforming it into those social states(or if you like, forms of value) that societysees as the most desirable: conviviality,unanimity, fertility, prosperity, beauty,however it may be framed.

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How long it would last is another question; itwas a very fragile, tenuous sort of freedom. Manysuch enclaves have collapsedin Madagascar as else-

where. Others endure; new ones are being created allthe time. The contemporary world is riddled withsuch anarchic spaces, and the more successful theyare, the less likely we are to hear about them. Its onlyif such a space breaks down into violence that theresany chance outsiders will even find out that it exists.

The puzzling question is how such profoundchanges in popular attitudes could happen so fast?

The likely answer is that they really didnt; there wereprobably things going on even under the nineteenth-century kingdom of which foreign observers (eventhose long resident on the island) were simplyunaware. But clearly, too, something about the impo-sition of colonial rule allowed for a rapid reshufflingof priorities. This, I would argue, is what the ongoingexistence of deeply embedded forms of counterpowerallows. A lot of the ideological work, in fact, ofmaking a revolution was conducted precisely in thespectral nightworld of sorcerers and witches; in redef-initions of the moral implications of different formsof magical power. But this only underlines how thesespectral zones are always the fulcrum of the moralimagination, a kind of creative reservoir, too, ofpotential revolutionary change. Its precisely fromthese invisible spacesinvisible, most of all, topowerwhence the potential for insurrection, andthe extraordinary social creativity that seems toemerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments,actually comes.

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pretty vexed question but I am afraid it cant beavoided, since otherwise, many readers might not beconvinced theres any reason to have an anarchistanthropology to begin with.

3) In highly unequal societies, imaginative coun-terpower often defines itself against certainaspects of dominance that are seen as particu-larly obnoxious and can become an attempt toeliminate them from social relationscompletely. When it does, it becomes revolu-tionary.

3a) Institutionally, as an imaginative well, it isresponsible for the creation of new socialforms, and the revalorization or transfor-mation of old ones, and also,

4) in moments of radical transformationrevolu-tions in the old-fashioned sensethis isprecisely what allows for the notoriouspopular ability to innovate entirely new poli-tics, economic, and social forms. Hence, it isthe root of what Antonio Negri has calledconstituent power, the power to createconstitutions.

Most modern constitutional orders see them-selves as having been created by rebellions: the

American revolution, the French revolution, and soon. This has, of course, not always been the case. Butthis leads to a very important question, because anyreally politically engaged anthropology will have tostart by seriously confronting the question of what, ifanything, really divides what we like to call themodern world from the rest of human history, to

which folks like the Piaroa, Tiv or Malagasy arenormally relegated. This is as one might imagine a


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Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been allsorts of successful experiments: experiments withworkers self-management, like Mondragon;economic projects based on the idea of the gifteconomy, like Linux; all sorts of political organiza-tions based on consensus and direct democracy...

Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolatedexamples. Im talking about whole societies.

Anarchist:Well, its not like people haventtried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolutionin Republican Spain...

Skeptic:Yeah, and look what happened tothose guys! They all got killed!

The dice are loaded. You cant win. Becausewhen the skeptic says society, what he really meansis state, even nation-state. Since no one is going toproduce an example of an anarchist statethat wouldbe a contradiction in termswhat were really beingasked for is an example of a modern nation-state withthe government somehow plucked away: a situation in

which the government of Canada, to take a random

example, has been overthrown, or for some reasonabolished itself, and no new one has taken its place butinstead all former Canadian citizens begin to organizethemselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this

would never be allowed to happen. In the past, when-ever it even looked like it mighthere, the Pariscommune and Spanish civil war are excellent exam-plesthe politicians running pretty much every statein the vicinity have been willing to put their differ-ences on hold until those trying to bring such a situa-tion about had been rounded up and shot.

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Blowing Up Walls

As I remarked, an anarchist anthropology doesntreally exist. There are only fragments. In the first partof this essay I tried to gather some of them, and tolook for common themes; in this part I want to gofurther, and imagine a body of social theory thatmight exist at some time in the future.

obvious objections

Before being able to do so I really do need to addressthe usual objection to any project of this nature: thatthe study of actually-existing anarchist societies issimply irrelevant to the modern world. After all, arent

we just talking about a bunch of primitives?For anarchists who do know something about

anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. Atypical exchange goes something like this:

Skeptic:Well, I might take this whole anar-chism idea more seriously if you could give mesome reason to think it would work. Can you nameme a single viable example of a society which hasexisted without a government?

Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. Icould name a dozen just off the top of my head: theBororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, theEma, the Tallensi, the Vezo...

Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primi-tives! Im talking about anarchism in a modern,technological society.

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edging a common set of legal principles...), but whichlack a state apparatus (which, following Weber, onecan define roughly as: a group of people who claimthat, at least when they are around and in their offi-cial capacity, they are the only ones with the right toact violently). These, too, one can find, if one is

willing to look at relatively small communities faraway in time or space. But then one is told they dontcount for just this reason.

So were back to the original problem. Thereis assumed to be an absolute rupture between the

world we live in, and the world inhabited by anyonewho might be characterized as primitive, tribal,or even as peasants. Anthropologists are not toblame here: we have been trying for decades now toconvince the public that theres no such thing as aprimitive, that simple societies are not really allthat simple, that no one ever existed in timeless isola-tion, that it makes no sense to speak of some socialsystems as more or less evolved; but so far, wevemade very little headway. It is almost impossible toconvince the average American that a bunch of

Amazonians could possibly have anything to teachthemother than, conceivably, that we should allabandon modern civilization and go live in

Amazoniaand this because they are assumed to livein an absolutely different world. Which is, oddlyenough, again because of the way we are used tothinking about revolutions.

Let me take up the argument I began tosketch out in the last section and try to explain why Ithink this is true:

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There is a way out, which is to accept thatanarchist forms of organization would not lookanything like a state. That they would involve anendless variety of communities, associations,networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, over-lapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine,and possibly many that we cant. Some would be quitelocal, others global. Perhaps all they would have incommon is that none would involve anyone showingup with weapons and telling everyone else to shut upand do what they were told. And that, since anarchistsare not actually trying to seize power within anynational territory, the process of one system replacingthe other will not take the form of some sudden revo-lutionary cataclysmthe storming of a Bastille, theseizing of a Winter Palacebut will necessarily begradual, the creation of alternative forms of organiza-tion on a world scale, new forms of communication,new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will,eventually, make currently existing forms of powerseem stupid and beside the point. That in turn wouldmean that there are endless examples of viable anar-chism: pretty much any form of organization wouldcount as one, so long as it was not imposed by somehigher authority, from a klezmer band to the interna-tional postal service.

Unfortunately, this kind of argument does notseem to satisfy most skeptics. They want societies.So one is reduced to scouring the historical andethnographic record for entities that look like anation-state (one people, speaking a commonlanguage, living within a bounded territory, acknowl-


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national power which then led to rapid industrial-ization. As a result almost every twentieth-centurygovernment in the global south determined to playeconomic catch-up with the industrial powers hadalso to claim to be a revolutionary regime.)

If there is one logical error underlying all this,it rests on imagining that social or even technolog-ical change takes the same form of what ThomasKuhn has called the structure of scientific revolu-tions. Kuhn is referring to events like the shiftfrom a Newtonian to Einsteinian universe:suddenly there is an intellectual breakthrough andafterwards, the universe is different. Applied toanything other than scientific revolutions, itimplies that the world really was equivalent to ourknowledge of it, and the moment we change theprinciples on which our knowledge is based, realitychanges too. This is just the sort of basic intellec-tual mistake developmental psychologists say weresupposed to get over in early childhood, but itseems few of us really do.

In fact, the world is under no obligation to liveup to our expectations, and insofar as reality

refers to anything, it refers to precisely that whichcan never be entirely encompassed by our imagina-tive constructions. Totalities, in particular, arealways creatures of the imagination. Nations, soci-eties, ideologies, closed systems... none of thesereally exist. Reality is always infinitely messier thanthateven if the belief that they exist is an unde-niable social force. For one thing, the habit ofthought which defines the world, or society, as atotalizing system (in which every element takes onits significance only in relation to the others) tendsto lead almost inevitably to a view of revolutions as

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a fairly brief manifestoconcerning the concept of revolution:The term revolution has been so relentlesslycheapened in common usage that it can meanalmost anything. We have revolutions every weeknow: banking revolutions, cybernetic revolutions,medical revolutions, an internet revolution everytime someone invents some clever new piece ofsoftware.

This kind of rhetoric is only possible becausethe commonplace definition of revolution hasalways implied something in the nature of a para-digm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture inthe nature of social reality after which everythingworks differently, and previous categories nolonger apply. It is this which makes it possible to,say, claim that the modern world is derived fromtwo revolutions: the French revolution and theIndustrial revolution, despite the fact that the twohad almost nothing else in common other thanseeming to mark a break with all that came before.One odd result is that, as Ellen Meskins Wood hasnoted, we are in the habit of discussing what we

call modernity as if it involved a combination ofEnglish laissez faire economics, and FrenchRepublican government, despite the fact that thetwo never really occurred together: the industrialrevolution happened under a bizarre, antiquated,still largely medieval English constitution, andnineteenth-century France was anything but laissezfaire.

(The one-time appeal of the Russian revolu-tion for the developing world seems to derivefrom the fact its the one example where both sortsof revolution did seem to coincide: a seizure of

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will almost certainly not be quite such a cleanbreak as such a phrase implies.

What will it be, then? I have already madesome suggestions. A revolution on a world scalewill take a very long time. But it is also possible torecognize that it is already starting to happen. Theeasiest way to get our minds around it is to stopthinking about revolution as a thingthe revo-lution, the great cataclysmic breakand insteadask what is revolutionary action? We could thensuggest: revolutionary action is any collectiveaction which rejects, and therefore confronts, someform of power or domination and in doing so,reconstitutes social relationseven within thecollectivityin that light. Revolutionary actiondoes not necessarily have to aim to topple govern-ments. Attempts to create autonomous communi-ties in the face of power (using Castoriadis defini-tion here: ones that constitute themselves, collec-tively make their own rules or principles of opera-tion, and continually reexamine them), would, forinstance, be almost by definition revolutionaryacts. And history shows us that the continual accu-

mulation of such acts can change (almost) every-thing.

Im hardly the first to have made an argument likethissome such vision follows almost necessarilyonce one is no longer thinking in terms of the frame-

work of the state and seizure of state power. What Iwant to emphasize here is what this means for howwe look at history.

cataclysmic ruptures. Since, after all, how elsecould one totalizing system be replaced by acompletely different one than by a cataclysmicrupture? Human history thus becomes a series ofrevolutions: the Neolithic revolution, theIndustrial revolution, the Information revolution,etc., and the political dream becomes to somehowtake control of the process; to get to the pointwhere we can cause a rupture of this sort, amomentous breakthrough that will not just happenbut result directly from some kind of collectivewill. The revolution, properly speaking.

If so its not surprising that the momentradical thinkers felt they had to give up this dream,their first reaction was to redouble their efforts toidentify revolutions happening anyway, to thepoint where in the eyes of someone like PaulVirilio, rupture is our permanent state of being, orfor someone like Jean Baudrillard, the world nowchanges completely every couple years, wheneverhe gets a new idea.

This is not an appeal for a flat-out rejection ofsuch imaginary totalitieseven assuming this were

possible, which it probably isnt, since they areprobably a necessary tool of human thought. It isan appeal to always bear in mind that they are justthat: tools of thought. For instance, it is indeed avery good thing to be able to ask after the revolu-tion, how will we organize mass transportation?,who will fund scientific research?, or even, afterthe revolution, do you think there will still befashion magazines? The phrase is a useful mentalhinge; even if we also recognize that in reality,unless we are willing to massacre thousands ofpeople (and probably even then), the revolution


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were right to assume that whatever it was thatmade it possible for Europeans to dispossess,abduct, enslave, and exterminate millions of otherhuman beings, it was a mark of superiority and thattherefore, whatever it was, it would be insulting tonon-Europeans to suggest they didnt have it too. Itseems to me that it is far more insulting to suggestanyone would ever have behaved like Europeans ofthe sixteenth or seventeenth centuriese.g.,depopulating large portions of the Andes or centralMexico by working millions to death in the mines,or kidnapping a significant chunk of the populationof Africa to work to death on sugar plantationsunless one has some actual evidence to suggest theywere so genocidally inclined. In fact there appear tohave been plenty of examples of people in a posi-tion to wreak similar havoc on a world scalesay,the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth centurybutwho didnt, not so much because they scrupled to,so much as because it would never have occurred tothem to act this way to begin with.

In the end it all turns, oddly enough, on howone chooses to define capitalism. Almost all the

authors cited above tend to see capitalism as yetanother accomplishment which Westerners arro-gantly assume they invented themselves, and there-fore define it (as capitalists do) as largely a matterof commerce and financial instruments. But thatwillingness to put considerations of profit aboveany human concern which drove Europeans todepopulate whole regions of the world in order toplace the maximum amount of silver or sugar onthe market was certainly something else. It seemsto me it deserves a name of its own. For this reasonit seems better to me to continue to define capi-

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and social arrangements, state organization, and therest in 1450 were in no way more advanced thanwhat prevailed in Egypt, or Bengal, or Fujian, ormost any other urbanized part of the Old World atthe time. Europe might have been ahead in someareas (e.g., techniques of naval warfare, certainforms of banking), but lagged significantly behindin others (astronomy, jurisprudence, agriculturaltechnology, techniques of land warfare). Perhapsthere was no mysterious advantage. Perhaps whathappened was just a coincidence. Western Europehappened to be located in that part of the OldWorld where it was easiest to sail to the New; thosewho first did so had the incredible luck to discoverlands full of enormous wealth, populated bydefenseless stone-age peoples who convenientlybegan dying almost the moment they arrived; theresultant windfall, and the demographic advantagefrom having lands to siphon off excess populationwas more than enough to account for the Europeanpowers later successes. It was then possible to shutdown the (far more efficient) Indian cloth industryand create the space for an industrial revolution,

and generally ravage and dominate Asia to such anextent that in technological termsparticularlyindustrial and military technologyit fell increas-ingly behind.

A number of authors (Blaut, Goody,Pommeranz, Gunder Frank) have been makingsome variation of this argument in recent years. Itis at root a moral argument, an attack on Westernarrogance. As such it is extremely important. Theonly problem with it, in moral terms, is that ittends to confuse means and inclination. That is, itrests on the assumption that Western historians

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be more precise, the West might have introducedsome new possibilities, but it hasnt canceled any ofthe old ones out.

The first thing one discovers when one tries tothink this way is that it is extremely difficult to do so.One has to cut past the endless host of intellectualtricks and gimmicks that create the wall of distancearound modern societies. Let me give just oneexample. It is common to distinguish between whatare called kinship-based societies and modern ones,

which are supposed to be based on impersonal institu-tions like the market or the state. The societies tradi-tionally studied by anthropologists have kinshipsystems. They are organized into descent groupslineages, or clans, or moieties, or ramageswhichtrace descent to common ancestors, live mainly onancestral territories, are seen as consisting of similarkinds of peoplean idea usually expressed throughphysical idioms of common flesh, or bone, or blood,or skin. Often kinship systems become a basis of socialinequality as some groups are seen as higher thanothers, as for example in caste systems; always, kinshipestablishes the terms for sex and marriage and thepassing of property over the generations.

The term kin-based is often used the waypeople used to use the word primitive; these areexotic societies which are in no way like our own.(Thats why it is assumed we need anthropology tostudy them; entirely different disciplines, like soci-ology and economics, are assumed to be required tostudy modern ones.) But then the exact same people

who make this argument will usually take it for

talism as its opponents prefer, as founded on theconnection between a wage system and a principleof the never-ending pursuit of profit for its ownsake. This in turn makes it possible to argue thiswas a strange perversion of normal commerciallogic which happened to take hold in one, previ-ously rather barbarous, corner of the world andencouraged the inhabitants to engage in whatmight otherwise have been considered unspeakableforms of behavior. Again, all this does not neces-sarily mean that one has to agree with the premisethat once capitalism came into existence, itinstantly became a totalizing system and that fromthat moment, everything else that happened canonly be understood in relation to it. But it suggestsone of the axes on which one can begin to thinkabout what really is different nowadays.

Let us imagine, then, that the West, howeverdefined, was nothing special, and further, that therehas been no one fundamental break in human history.No one can deny there have been massive quantitative

changes: the amount of energy consumed, the speed atwhich humans can travel, the number of booksproduced and read, all these numbers have been risingexponentially. But let us imagine for the sake of argu-ment that these quantitative changes do not, in them-selves, necessarily imply a change in quality: we arenot living in a fundamentally different sort of societythan has ever existed before, we are not living in afundamentally different sort of time, the existence offactories or microchips do not mean political or socialpossibilities have changed in their basic nature: Or, to

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erable class mobility, when asked to adduce examplesall they can usually come up with is a handful of ragsto riches stories. It is almost impossible to find anexample of an American who was born rich and endedup a penniless ward of the state. So all we are reallydealing with then is the fact, familiar to anyone whosstudied history, that ruling elites (unless polygamous)are never able to reproduce themselves demographi-cally, and therefore always need some way to recruitnew blood (and if they are polygamous, of course, thatitself becomes a mode of social mobility).

Gender relations are of course the very fabricof kinship.

what would it take to knock down these walls?

Id say a lot. Too many people have too much investedin maintaining them. This includes anarchists, inci-dentally. At least in the United States, the anarchists

who do take anthropology the most seriously are the

Primitivists, a small but very vocal faction who arguethat the only way to get humanity back on track is toshuck off modernity entirely. Inspired by MarshallSahlins essay The Original Affluent Society, theypropose that there was a time when alienation andinequality did not exist, when everyone was a hunter-gathering anarchist, and that therefore real liberationcan only come if we abandon civilization and returnto the Upper Paleolithic, or at least the early Iron

Age. In fact we know almost nothing about life in thePaleolithic, other than the sort of thing that can be

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granted that the main social problems in our own,modern society (or postmodern: for presentpurposes its exactly the same thing) revolve aroundrace, class, and gender. In other words, precisely fromthe nature of our kinship system.

After all, what does it mean to say mostAmericans see the world as divided into races? Itmeans they believe that it is divided into groups whichare presumed to share a common descent andgeographical origin, who for this reason are seen asdifferent kinds of people, that this idea is usuallyexpressed through physical idioms of blood and skin,and that the resulting system regulates sex, marriage,and the inheritance of property and therefore createsand maintains social inequalities. We are talking aboutsomething very much like a classic clan system, excepton a global scale. One might object that there is a lotof interracial marriage going on, and even more inter-racial sex, but then, this is only what we should expect.Statistical studies always reveal that, even in tradi-tional societies like the Nambikwara or Arapesh, atleast 5-10% of young people marry someone theyrenot supposed to. Statistically, the phenomena are ofabout equal significance. Social class is slightly morecomplicated, since the groups are less clearly bounded.Still, the difference between a ruling class and acollection of people who happen to have done well is,precisely, kinship: the ability to marry ones childrenoff appropriately, and pass ones advantages on to onesdescendants. People marry across class lines too, butrarely very far; and while most Americans seem to beunder the impression that this is a country of consid-

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word literally means those who do not cut their hair.This refers to a Sakalava custom: when a king died,his male subjects were all expected to crop off theirhair as a sign of mourning. The Tsimihety were thosewho refused, and hence rejected the authority of theSakalava monarchy; to this day they are marked byresolutely egalitarian social organization and prac-tices. They are, in other words, the anarchists ofnorthwest Madagascar. To this day they have main-tained a reputation as masters of evasion: under the

French, administrators would complain that theycould send delegations to arrange for labor to build aroad near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the termswith apparently cooperative elders, and return withthe equipment a week later only to discover thevillage entirely abandonedevery single inhabitanthad moved in with some relative in another part ofthe country.

What especially interests me here is the principle ofethnogenesis, as its called nowadays. The Tsimihetyare now considered afokoa people or ethnic groupbut their identity emerged as a political project. Thedesire to live free of Sakalava domination was trans-lated into a desireone which came to suffuse allsocial institutions from village assemblies to mortuaryritualto live in a society free of markers of hierarchy.

This then became institutionalized as a way of life of acommunity living together, which then in turn cameto be thought of as a particular kind of people, anethnic grouppeople who also, since they tend tointermarry, come to be seen as united by commonancestry. It is easier to see this happening in

Madagascar where everyone pretty much speaks the

gleaned from studying very old skulls (i.e., in thePaleolithic people had much better teeth; they alsodied much more frequently from traumatic head

wounds). But what we see in the more recent ethno-graphic record is endless variety. There were hunter-gatherer societies with nobles and slaves, there areagrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian. Even inClastres favored stomping grounds in Amazonia, onefinds some groups who can justly be described as anar-chists, like the Piaroa, living alongside others (say, the

warlike Sherente) who are clearly anything but. Andsocieties are constantly reforming, skipping backand forth between what we think of as different evolu-tionary stages.

I do not think were losing much if we admitthat humans never really lived in the garden of Eden.Knocking the walls down can allow us to see thishistory as a resource to us in much more interesting

ways. Because it works both ways. Not only do we, inindustrial societies, still have kinship (and cosmolo-gies); other societies have social movements and revo-lutions. Which means, among other things, thatradical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly overthe same scant two hundred years of revolutionaryhistory.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries thewest coast of Madagascar was divided into a seriesof related kingdoms under the Maroansetra dynasty.Their subjects were collectively known as theSakalava. In northwest Madagascar there is now anethnic group ensconced in a somewhat difficult,hilly back country referred to as the Tsimihety. The


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only some ways analogous to Webers routinization ofcharisma, full of strategies, reversals, diversions ofenergy... Social fields which are, in their essence,arenas for the recognition of certain forms of valuecan become borders to be defended; representationsor media of value become numinous powers in them-selves; creation slips into commemoration; the ossifiedremains of liberatory movements can end up, underthe grip of states, transformed into what we callnationalisms which are either mobilized to rallysupport for the state machinery or become the basisfor new social movements opposed to them.

The critical thing here, it seems to me, is thatthis petrification does not only apply to social projects.It can also happen to the states themselves. This is aphenomenon theorists of social struggle have rarelyfully appreciated.

When the French colonial administration establisheditself in Madagascar it duly began dividing the popula-tion up into a series of tribes: Merina, Betsileo,

Bara, Sakalava, Vezo, Tsimihety, etc. Since there arefew clear distinctions of language, it is easier here,than in most places, to discern some of the principlesby which these divisions came about. Some are polit-ical. The Sakalava are noted subjects of theMaroantsetra dynasty (which created at least threekingdoms along the West coast). The Tsimihety arethose who refused allegiance. Those called theMerina are those highland people originally unitedby allegiance to a king named Andrianampoinimerina;subjects of other highland kingdoms to the south,who the Merina conquered almost immediatelythereafter, are referred to collectively as Betsileo.

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same language. But I doubt it is that unusual. Theethnogenesis literature is a fairly new one, but it isbecoming increasingly clear that most of humanhistory was characterized by continual social change.Rather than timeless groups living for thousands of

years in their ancestral territories, new groups werebeing created, and old ones dissolving, all the time.

Many of what we have come to think of as tribes, ornations, or ethnic groups were originally collectiveprojects of some sort. In the Tsimihety case we aretalking about a revolutionary project, at least revolu-tionary in that sense I have been developing here: aconscious rejection of certain forms of overarchingpolitical power which also causes people to rethinkand reorganize the way they deal with one another onan everyday basis. Most are not. Some are egalitarian,others are about promoting a certain vision ofauthority or hierarchy. Still, one is dealing with some-thing very much along the lines of what wed think ofas a social movement; it is just that, in the absence ofbroadsides, rallies and manifestos, the media through

which one can create and demand new forms of (whatwed call) social, economic or political life, to pursuedifferent forms of value, were different: one had to

work through literally or figuratively sculpting flesh,through music and ritual, food and clothing, and waysof disposing of the dead. But in part as a result, overtime, what were once projects become identities, evenones continuous with nature. They ossify and hardeninto self-evident truths or collective properties.

A whole discipline could no doubt be inventedto understand precisely how this happens: a process in

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school. The Sakalava are quite another story.Sakalava is still very much a living identity on theWest coast, and it continues to mean, followers ofthe Maroantsetra dynasty. But for the last hundredand fifty years or so, the primary loyalties of mostSakalava have been to the members of this dynastywho are dead. While living royalty are largelyignored, the ancient kings tombs are still continuallyrebuilt and redecorated in vast communal projectsand this is what being Sakalava is seen largely to be

about. And dead kings still make their wishesknownthrough spirit mediums who are usuallyelderly women of commoner descent.

In many other parts of Madagascar as well, it oftenseems that no one really takes on their full authorityuntil they are dead. So perhaps the Sakalava case isnot that extraordinary. But it reveals one verycommon way of avoiding the direct effects of power:if one cannot simply step out of its path, like the Vezoor Tsimihety, one can, as it were, try to fossilize it. Inthe Sakalava case the ossification of the state is quite

literal: the kings who are still worshipped take thephysical form of royal relics, they are literally teethand bones. But this approach is probably far morecommonplace than we would be given to suspect.

Kajsia Eckholm for example has recently madethe intriguing suggestion that the kind of divine king-ship Sir James Frazer wrote about in The GoldenBough, in which kings were hedged about with endlessritual and taboo (not to touch the earth, not to see thesun...), was not, as we normally assume, an archaicform of kingship, but in m

graeber, d. - fragments of an anarchist anthropology [prickly paradigm press, 2004]

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