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David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

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Page 1: David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments of anAnarchist Anthropology

David Graeber

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESSCHICAGO

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

and conduct under which society is conceivedwithout government—harmony in such a societybeing obtained, not by submission to law, or byobedience 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 you’re not a utopianist, you’re aschmuck.

Jonothon Feldman (Indigenous Planning Times)

What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches ofpotential theories, and tiny manifestos—all 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 doesn’t—or, for that matter,why an anarchist sociology doesn’t 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?It’s possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy willbe overrun by anarchists. But I’m 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 thinkers—Proudhon,Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.—it then went on to inspireworking-class organizations, became enmeshed inpolitical struggles, divided into sects... Anarchism, inthe standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’spoorer 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 anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred 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 theacademy?

It’s 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-ples—autonomy, voluntary association, self-organiza-tion, mutual aid, direct democracy—have gone fromthe basis for organizing within the globalizationmovement, to playing the same role in radical move-ments of all kinds everywhere. Revolutionaries inMexico, Argentina, India, and elsewhere have increas-ingly abandoned even talking about seizing power,and begun to formulate radically different ideas ofwhat 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 thosewho 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 thevaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismissit with the crudest stereotypes. (“Anarchist organiza-tion! But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”) In theUnited States there are thousands of academicMarxists 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 results—the feeling there should be some moralcenter, that academic concerns should be relevant topeople’s lives—but 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 anddangerous—even 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, thoseMarxist 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 Marxists—questions 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 inwhich 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: Foucault’s ideas, like Trotsky’s, 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). It’s 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 one’s meansmust be consonant with one’s ends; one cannot createfreedom through authoritarian means; in fact, as muchas possible, one must oneself, in one’s relations withone’s 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 run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchiststudies department, either—and 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 doesn’t mean anarchists have to be against theory.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 someonewho 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 I’ve said has been some-thing of a caricature (there have been wildly sectariananarchist 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 Marx’s Capital into Russian. Butit also makes it easier to understand why there are sofew anarchists in the academy. It’s not just that anar-chism does not tend to have much use for high theory.It’s 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 isn’t 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 dowith 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 canachieve 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 inwhich 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 manyways, 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 shouldn’t 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 we’d 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 not possible. But one could also make the argumentthat it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledgewhich makes a commitment to optimism a moralimperative: Since one cannot know a radically betterworld is not possible, are we not betraying everyoneby insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce,the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’rewrong, we might well get a lot closer.

against anti-utopianism (another tiny mani-festo):Here of course one has to deal with the inevitableobjection: 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 dreams—actually, Stalinists werefamous for being rather short on imagination—butbecause 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 that’s the first proposition. The second, I’dsay, 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 I’m calling this essay“Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”—becausethis 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 theworld 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

It’s not so much that anthropologists embraced anar-chism, or even, were consciously espousing anarchistideas; it’s more that they moved in the same circles,their ideas tended to bounce off one another, thatthere was something about anthropological thought inparticular—its keen awareness of the very range ofhuman possibilities—that 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 stodgyVictorian who wrote accounts of savage customs,based mainly on the results of questionnaires sent outto missionaries and colonial officials. His ostensibletheoretical attitude was utterly condescending—hebelieved almost all magic, myth and ritual was basedon foolish logical mistakes—but 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 theTorres 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 waypeople’s 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, possibilities—as gifts. This is more orless what I was trying to do a few paragraphs agowhen 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 he’s obviously having so muchfun writing them, throwing out one outrageous thesisafter another, that it’s impossible to tell how much ofit is meant to be taken seriously. Or whether that’seven a meaningful question. In one essay, written inthe ‘50s, Graves invents the distinction between“reasonableness” 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? It’s 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 anarchism—if admittedly,generally considered two of the most outré. On theone hand, the cult of the Great Goddess has beenrevived and become a direct inspiration for PaganAnarchism, hippyish performers of spiral dances whoare always welcome at mass actions because they doseem to have rather a knack for influencing theweather; 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, certainly—but Graves tended todart about between all sorts of odd political positions.In the end, he was to abandon “civilization”—indus-trial society—entirely and spend the last fifty years orso of his life in a village on the Spanish island ofMajorca, supporting himself by writing novels, butalso producing numerous books of love poetry, and aseries of some of the most subversive essays everwritten.

Graves’ thesis was, among other things, thatgreatness 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 Hitler’s 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 surefireway 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. Mausswas 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 Lenin’s 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 toanother’s 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: it’s really impossible toknow on what level one is supposed to read it. It’sboth ridiculous self-parody, and terribly serious, at thesame time.

There have also been anthropologists—amongthem, 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, Brownwas to begin affecting a cloak and a monocle, adoptinga fancy mock-aristocratic hyphenated name (A. R.Radcliffe-Brown), and ultimately, in the 1920s and‘30s, becoming the master theorist of British socialanthropology. The older Brown didn’t like to talk toomuch about his youthful politics, but it’s 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-Brown’s 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 mainlywith the figure of Georges Sorel, an apparently quitepersonally distasteful French anarcho-syndicalist andanti-Semite, now mainly famous for his essayReflections sur le Violence. Sorel argued that since themasses were not fundamentally good or rational, itwas foolish to make one’s 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 violence—an 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 men’s 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, it’s understandable why a Europeanradical—especially a Jewish one—might see all this asjust a little creepy. Creepy enough to throw cold watereven on the otherwise rather appealing image of theGeneral Strike—which is after all about the leastviolent 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 fromMauss’ 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 Lenin’s 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 Hitler’s great ritualpageants, torch-lit parades with their chants of “SeigHeil!,” 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 anthropologythat 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 thinkingthat 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 hadn’t yet developed verysophisticated 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 ofwhat we would consider the basic principles ofeconomics. It was not that they had not yet learned toseek profit through the most efficient means. Theywould have found the very premise that the point ofan economic transaction—at least, one with someonewho was not your enemy—was 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, andweight 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. Butwhat if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirelyunaware of what the elementary forms of state powermight be like—what 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 offorce—and 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. InAmazonian (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 therewas no way for power-hungry individuals to do much

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with it. Amazonians might not have literally whackedoff the ruler’s head every few years, but it’s 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. It’s 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 menunderstand 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.

It’s worth pointing out because Clastres is, inmany ways, a naive romantic. Fom another perspec-tive, though, there’s no mystery here at all. After all,we are talking about the fact that most Amazoniansdon’t want to give others the power to threaten themwith physical injury if they don’t 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 theywould 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 symbolicviolence.

Of course, all societies are to some degree atwar 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 it’s the most peaceful societieswhich 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 modernAmericans 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.

I’m 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 an“anti-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 theirpeaceableness—murder is unheard of, the assump-tion being that anyone who killed another humanbeing would be instantly consumed by pollutionand die horribly—they 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 women’s 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 alsodotted with local markets; minor wars betweenclans were occasionally fought, though more oftenlarge disputes were mediated in large communal“moots.” 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. It’s as if the endless labor ofachieving consensus masks a constant inner violence—or, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact theprocess by which that inner violence is measured andcontained—and it is precisely this, and the resultingtangle of moral contradiction, which is the prime fontof social creativity. It’s not these conflicting principlesand contradictory impulses themselves which are theultimate political reality, then; it’s 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 person’s orders, or the needto ensure no one gains such control over economicresources that they can use it to constrain others’freedom. 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, unmalagasy—this 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. What’s 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 werecalled “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 there’s 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 kingdom—since the early nineteenthcentury, and afterwards endured many years of harshcolonial rule. There was a market economy and, intheory, a central government—during the time I wasthere, largely dominated by what was called the“Merina 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 thenthere’s the fact that we’re all going to die. So there’s 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 utopiawhich always seems to lurk somewhere behind thepretentions of Power and the state. Instead, as I’vesuggested, 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 systematicallyviolent 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 inequalitiesvanished, 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 I’m 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 dowith the kind of insurrectionary communities whichrevolutionary 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 third—because the Malagasy communities I knew in 1990were 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 monarchswere 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 people’s 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. Being“Malagasy” 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 ofwhat is fundamentally objectionable about it, andthen trying to get rid of one’s oppressors in such away 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 anysociety not based on violence must, ultimately,be)—the constant work of imaginative identifi-cation with others that makes understandingpossible—and 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 economicdominance.

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 collapsed—in 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. It’s onlyif such a space breaks down into violence that there’sany 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 didn’t; 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. It’s precisely fromthese invisible spaces—invisible, most of all, topower—whence 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 can’t beavoided, since otherwise, many readers might not beconvinced there’s 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 transformation—revolu-tions in the old-fashioned sense—this 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 called“constituent power,” the power to createconstitutions.

Most modern constitutional orders see them-selves as having been created by rebellions: theAmerican 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 the“modern” world from the rest of human history, towhich 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 withworker’s 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. I’m talking about whole societies.

Anarchist: Well, it’s not like people haven’ttried. 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 can’t 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 state—that wouldbe a contradiction in terms—what we’re really beingasked for is an example of a modern nation-state withthe government somehow plucked away: a situation inwhich the government of Canada, to take a randomexample, 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 thiswould never be allowed to happen. In the past, when-ever it even looked like it might—here, the Pariscommune and Spanish civil war are excellent exam-ples—the 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 doesn’treally 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, aren’twe just talking about a bunch of primitives?

For anarchists who do know something aboutanthropology, 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! I’m 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 iswilling to look at relatively small communities faraway in time or space. But then one is told they don’tcount for just this reason.

So we’re back to the original problem. Thereis assumed to be an absolute rupture between theworld 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 there’s no such thing as a“primitive,” 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, we’vemade very little headway. It is almost impossible toconvince the average American that a bunch ofAmazonians could possibly have anything to teachthem—other than, conceivably, that we should allabandon modern civilization and go live inAmazonia—and 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 can’t. 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 cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, theseizing of a Winter Palace—but 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 we’resupposed 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 thanthat—even 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 wecall “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 it’s 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 thing—“the” revo-lution, the great cataclysmic break—and 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 relations—even within thecollectivity—in 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.

I’m hardly the first to have made an argument likethis—some 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 it’s 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 totalities—even assuming this werepossible, which it probably isn’t, 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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portant. In one sense everyone, every community,every individual for that matter, lives in their ownunique universe. By “blowing up walls,” I mean mostof all, blowing up the arrogant, unreflecting assump-tions which tell us we have nothing in common with98% of people who ever lived, so we don’t really haveto think about them. Since, after all, if you assume thefundamental break, the only theoretical question youcan ask is some variation on “what makes us sospecial?” Once we get rid of those assumptions, decideto at least entertain the notion we aren’t quite sospecial as we might like to think, we can also begin tothink about what really has changed and what hasn’t.

An example:There has long been a related debate over whatparticular advantage “the West,” as WesternEurope and its settler colonies have liked to callthemselves, had over the rest of the world thatallowed them to conquer so much of it in the fourhundred years between 1500 and 1900. Was it amore efficient economic system? A superior mili-tary tradition? Did it have to do with Christianity,or Protestantism, or a spirit of rationalistic inquiry?Was it simply a matter of technology? Or did ithave to do with more individualistic familyarrangements? Some combination of all thesefactors? To a large extent, Western historical soci-ology has been dedicated to solving this problem. Itis a sign of how deeply embedded the assumptionsare that it is only quite recently that scholars havecome to even suggest that perhaps, WesternEurope didn’t really have any fundamental advan-tage at all. That European technology, economic

a thought experiment, or, blowing up walls

What I am proposing, essentially, is that we engage ina kind of thought experiment. What if, as a recent titleput it, “we have never been modern”? What if therenever was any fundamental break, and therefore, weare not living in a fundamentally different moral,social, or political universe than the Piaroa or Tiv orrural Malagasy?

There are a million different ways to define“modernity.” According to some it mainly has to dowith science and technology, for others it’s a matter ofindividualism; others, capitalism, or bureaucratic ratio-nality, or alienation, or an ideal of freedom of one sortor another. However they define it, almost everyoneagrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seven-teenth, or eighteenth centuries, a GreatTransformation occurred, that it occurred in WesternEurope and its settler colonies, and that because of it,we became “modern.” And that once we did, webecame a fundamentally different sort of creature thananything that had come before.

But what if we kicked this whole apparatusaway? What if we blew up the wall? What if weaccepted that the people who Columbus or Vasco daGama “discovered” on their expeditions were just us?Or certainly, just as much “us” as Columbus and Vascoda Gama ever were?

I’m not arguing that nothing important haschanged over the last five hundred years, any morethan I’m arguing that cultural differences are unim-

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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 didn’t have it too. Itseems to me that it is far more insulting to suggestanyone would ever have behaved like Europeans ofthe sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—e.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 plantations—unless 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 scale—say,the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century—butwho didn’t, 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 theauthors 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 terms—particularlyindustrial and military technology—it 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 hasn’t 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 groups—lineages, or clans, or moieties, or ramages—whichtrace descent to common ancestors, live mainly onancestral territories, are seen as consisting of similar“kinds” of people—an 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.(That’s 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 peoplewho 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 quantitativechanges: 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 who’sstudied 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?

I’d say a lot. Too many people have too much investedin maintaining them. This includes anarchists, inci-dentally. At least in the United States, the anarchistswho do take anthropology the most seriously are thePrimitivists, 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 IronAge. 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 it’s 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 they’renot 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 one’s childrenoff appropriately, and pass one’s advantages on to one’sdescendants. 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 theFrench, 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 abandoned—every single inhabitanthad moved in with some relative in another part ofthe country.

What especially interests me here is the principle of“ethnogenesis,” as it’s called nowadays. The Tsimihetyare now considered a foko—a people or ethnic group—but their identity emerged as a political project. Thedesire to live free of Sakalava domination was trans-lated into a desire—one which came to suffuse allsocial institutions from village assemblies to mortuaryritual—to 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 group—people who also, since they tend tointermarry, come to be seen as united by commonancestry. It is easier to see this happening inMadagascar 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 headwounds). 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, thewarlike Sherente) who are clearly anything but. And“societies” are constantly reforming, skipping backand forth between what we think of as different evolu-tionary stages.

I do not think we’re 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 interestingways. 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 an“ethnic group” ensconced in a somewhat difficult,hilly back country referred to as the Tsimihety. The

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only some ways analogous to Weber’s “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 call“nationalisms” 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 the“Merina” 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 ofyears 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 we’d think ofas a social movement; it is just that, in the absence ofbroadsides, rallies and manifestos, the media throughwhich one can create and demand new forms of (whatwe’d call) social, economic or political life, to pursuedifferent forms of value, were different: one had towork 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 beabout. And dead kings still make their wishesknown—through 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 quiteliteral: 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 most cases, a very late one.

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Some names have to do with where people live orhow they make a living: the Tanala are “forestpeople” on the east coast; on the west coast, theMikea are hunters and foragers and the Vezo, fisher-folk. But even here there are usually politicalelements: the Vezo lived alongside the Sakalavamonarchies but like the Tsimihety, they managed toremain independent of them because, as legend hasit, whenever they learned royal representatives wereon the way to visit them, they would all get in theircanoes and wait offshore until they went away.Those fishing villages that did succumb becameSakalava, not Vezo.

The Merina, Sakalava, and Betsileo are by farthe most numerous however. So most Malagasy,then, are defined, not exactly by their political loyal-ties, but by the loyalties their ancestors had some-time around 1775 or 1800. The interesting thing iswhat happened to these identities once the kingswere no longer around. Here the Merina andBetsileo seem to represent two opposite possibili-ties.

Many of these ancient kingdoms were little morethan institutionalized extortion systems; insofar asordinary folk actually participated in royal politics, itwas through ritual labor: building royal palaces andtombs, for example, in which each clan was usuallyassigned some very specific honorific role. Withinthe Merina kingdom this system ended up being sothoroughly abused that by the time the Frencharrived, it had been almost entirely discredited androyal rule became, as I mentioned, identified withslavery and forced labor; as a result, the “Merina”now mainly exist on paper. One never hears anyonein the countryside referring to themselves that wayexcept perhaps in essays they have to write in

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mass defection by those wishing to create new formsof community. One need only glance at the historicalrecord to confirm that most successful forms ofpopular resistance have taken precisely this form.They have not involved challenging power head on(this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not,turning into some—often even uglier—variant of thevery thing one first challenged) but from one oranother strategy of slipping away from its grasp, fromflight, desertion, the founding of new communities.One Autonomist historian, Yann Moulier Boutang, haseven argued that the history of capitalism has been aseries of attempts to solve the problem of workermobility—hence the endless elaboration of institutionslike indenture, slavery, coolie systems, contractworkers, guest workers, innumerable forms of bordercontrol—since, if the system ever really came close toits own fantasy version of itself, in which workers werefree to hire on and quit their work wherever andwhenever they wanted, the entire system wouldcollapse. It’s for precisely this reason that the one mostconsistent demand put forward by the radical elementsin the globalization movement—from the ItalianAutonomists to North American anarchists—hasalways been global freedom of movement, “real glob-alization,” the destruction of borders, a general tearingdown of walls.

The kind of tearing down of conceptual wallsI’ve been proposing here makes it possible for us notonly to confirm the importance of defection, itpromises an infinitely richer conception of how alter-native forms of revolutionary action might work. This

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She gives the example of the Kongo monarchy, whichwhen the Portugese first showed up in the latefifteenth century doesn’t seem to have been particu-larly more ritualized than the monarchy in Portugal orSpain at the same time. There was a certain amount ofcourt ceremonial, but nothing that got in the way ofgoverning. It was only later, as the kingdom collapsedinto civil war and broke into tinier and tinier frag-ments, that its rulers became increasingly sacredbeings. Elaborate rituals were created, restrictionsmultiplied, until by the end we read about “kings”who were confined to small buildings, or literallycastrated on ascending the throne. As a result theyruled very little; most BaKongo had in fact passed to alargely self-governing system, though also a verytumultuous one, caught in the throes of the slave-trade.

Is any of this relevant to contemporaryconcerns? Very much so, it seems to me. Autonomistthinkers in Italy have, over the last couple decades,developed a theory of what they call revolutionary“exodus.” It is inspired in part by particularly Italianconditions—the broad refusal of factory work amongyoung people, the flourishing of squats and occupied“social centers” in so many Italian cities... But in allthis Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratoryfor future social movements, anticipating trends thatare now beginning to happen on a global scale.

The theory of exodus proposes that the mosteffective way of opposing capitalism and the liberalstate is not through direct confrontation but by meansof what Paolo Virno has called “engaged withdrawal,”

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is a history which has largely yet to be written, butthere are glimmerings. Peter Lamborn Wilson hasproduced the brightest of these, in a series of essayswhich include reflections, on, among other things, thecollapse of the Hopewell and Mississippian culturesthrough much of eastern North America. These weresocieties apparently dominated by priestly elites, caste-based social structures, and human sacrifice—whichmysteriously disappeared, being replaced by far moreegalitarian hunter/gathering or horticultural societies.He suggests, interestingly enough, that the famousNative American identification with nature might notreally have been a reaction to European values, but toa dialectical possibility within their own societies fromwhich they had quite consciously run away. The storycontinues through the defection of the Jamestownsettlers, a collection of servants abandoned in the firstNorth American colony in Virginia by theirgentleman patrons, who apparently ended upbecoming Indians, to an endless series of “pirateutopias,” in which British renegades teamed up withMuslim corsairs, or joined native communities fromHispaniola to Madagascar, hidden “triracial” republicsfounded by escaped slaves at the margins of Europeansettlements, Antinomians, and other little-knownlibertarian enclaves that riddled the continent evenbefore the Shakers and Fourierists and all the better-known nineteenth-century “intentional communities.”

Most of these little utopias were even moremarginal than the Vezo or Tsimihety were inMadagascar; all of them were eventually gobbled up.Which leads to the question of how to neutralize the

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state apparatus itself, in the absence of a politics ofdirect confrontation. No doubt some states and corpo-rate elites will collapse of their own dead weight; a fewalready have; but it’s hard to imagine a scenario inwhich they all will. Here, the Sakalava and BaKongomight be able to provide us some useful suggestions.What cannot be destroyed can, nonetheless, bediverted, frozen, transformed, and gradually deprivedof its substance—which in the case of states, is ulti-mately their capacity to inspire terror. What wouldthis mean under contemporary conditions? It’s notentirely clear. Perhaps existing state apparati will grad-ually be reduced to window-dressing as the substanceis pulled out of them from above and below: i.e., bothfrom the growth of international institutions, andfrom devolution to local and regional forms of self-governance. Perhaps government by media spectaclewill devolve into spectacle pure and simple (somewhatalong the lines of what Paul Lafargue, Marx’s WestIndian son-in-law and author of The Right to Be Lazy,implied when he suggested that after the revolution,politicians would still be able to fulfill a useful socialfunction in the entertainment industry). More likely itwill happen in ways we cannot even anticipate. But nodoubt there are ways in which it is happening already.As Neoliberal states move towards new forms offeudalism, concentrating their guns increasinglyaround gated communities, insurrectionary spacesopen up that we don’t even know about. The Merinarice farmers described in the last section understandwhat many would-be revolutionaries do not: that thereare times when the stupidest thing one could possibly

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Tenets of a Non-existent Science

Let me outline a few of the areas of theory an anar-chist anthropology might wish to explore:

1) A THEORY OF THE STATEStates have a peculiar dual character. They are atthe same time forms of institutionalized raiding orextortion, and utopian projects. The first certainlyreflects the way states are actually experienced, byany communities that retain some degree ofautonomy; the second however is how they tend toappear in the written record.

In one sense states are the “imaginary totality”par excellence, and much of the confusion entailedin theories of the state historically lies in aninability or unwillingness to recognize this. For themost part, states were ideas, ways of imaginingsocial order as something one could get a grip on,models of control. This is why the first knownworks of social theory, whether from Persia, orChina, or ancient Greece, were always framed astheories of statecraft. This has had two disastrouseffects. One is to give utopianism a bad name. (Theword “utopia” first calls to mind the image of anideal city, usually, with perfect geometry—theimage seems to harken back originally to the royalmilitary camp: a geometrical space which is entirelythe emanation of a single, individual will, a fantasyof total control.) All this has had dire politicalconsequences, to say the least. The second is thatwe tend to assume that states, and social order,even societies, largely correspond. In other words,we have a tendency to take the most grandiose,

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do is raise a red or black flag and issue defiant declara-tions. Sometimes the sensible thing is just to pretendnothing has changed, allow official state representa-tives to keep their dignity, even show up at theiroffices and fill out a form now and then, but other-wise, ignore them.

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touch when it came to the day-to-day control of itssubjects’ lives, particularly in comparison with thedegree of control exercised by Athenians over theirslaves or Spartans over the overwhelming majorityof the Laconian population, who were helots.Whatever the ideals, the reality, for most peopleinvolved, was much the other way around.

One of the most striking discoveries of evolu-tionary anthropology has been that it is perfectlypossible to have kings and nobles and all the exte-rior trappings of monarchy without having a statein the mechanical sense at all. One should thinkthis might be of some interest to all those politicalphilosophers who spill so much ink arguing abouttheories of “sovereignty”—since it suggests thatmost sovereigns were not heads of state and thattheir favorite technical term actually is built on anear-impossible ideal, in which royal power actuallydoes manage to translate its cosmological preten-sions into genuine bureaucratic control of a giventerritorial population. (Something like this startedhappening in Western Europe in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, but almost as soon as it did,the sovereign’s personal power was replaced by afictive person called “the people,” allowing thebureaucracy to take over almost entirely.) But so faras I’m aware, political philosophers have as yet hadnothing to say on the subject. I suspect this islargely due to an extremely poor choice of terms.Evolutionary anthropologists refer to kingdomswhich lack full-fledged coercive bureaucracies as“chiefdoms,” a term which evokes images more ofGeronimo or Sitting Bull than Solomon, Louis thePious, or the Yellow Emperor. And of course theevolutionist framework itself ensures that such

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even paranoid, claims of world-rulers seriously,assuming that whatever cosmological projects theyclaimed to be pursuing actually did correspond, atleast roughly, to something on the ground.Whereas it is likely that in many such cases, theseclaims ordinarily only applied fully within a fewdozen yards of the monarch in any direction, andmost subjects were much more likely to see rulingelites, on a day-to-day basis, as something muchalong the lines of predatory raiders.

An adequate theory of states would then haveto begin by distinguishing in each case between therelevant ideal of rulership (which can be almostanything, a need to enforce military style discipline,the ability to provide perfect theatrical representa-tion of gracious living which will inspire others, theneed to provide the gods with endless humanhearts to fend off the apocalypse...), and themechanics of rule, without assuming that there isnecessarily all that much correspondence betweenthem. (There might be. But this has to be empiri-cally established.) For example: much of themythology of “the West” goes back to Herodotus’description of an epochal clash between the PersianEmpire, based on an ideal of obedience andabsolute power, and the Greek cities of Athens andSparta, based on ideals of civic autonomy, freedomand equality. It’s not that these ideas—especiallytheir vivid representations in poets like Aeschylusor historians like Herodotus—are not important.One could not possibly understand Western historywithout them. But their very importance and vivid-ness long blinded historians to what is becomingthe increasingly clear reality: that whatever itsideals, the Achmaenid Empire was a pretty light

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if one considers the matter historically, it’s hard tounderstand why it should be. Modern Westernnotions of citizenship and political freedoms areusually seen to derive from two traditions, one orig-inating in ancient Athens, the other primarily stem-ming from medieval England (where it tends to betraced back to the assertion of aristocratic privilegeagainst the Crown in the Magna Carta, Petition ofRight, etc., and then the gradual extension of thesesame rights to the rest of the population). In factthere is no consensus among historians that eitherclassical Athens or medieval England were states atall—and moreover, precisely for the reason that citi-zens’ rights in the first, and aristocratic privilege inthe second, were so well established. It is hard tothink of Athens as a state, with a monopoly of forceby the state apparatus, if one considers that theminimal government apparatus which did existconsisted entirely of slaves, owned collectively bythe citizenry. Athens’ police force consisted ofScythian archers imported from what’s now Russiaor Ukraine, and something of their legal standingmight be gleaned from the fact that, by Athenianlaw, a slave’s testimony was not admissible asevidence in court unless it was obtained undertorture.

So what do we call such entities? “Chiefdoms”?One might conceivably be able to describe KingJohn as a “chief” in the technical, evolutionarysense, but applying the term to Pericles does seemabsurd. Neither can we continue to call ancientAthens a “city-state” if it wasn’t a state at all. Itseems we just don’t have the intellectual tools totalk about such things. The same goes for thetypology of types of state, or state-like entities in

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structures are seen as something which immediatelyprecedes the emergence of the state, not an alterna-tive form, or even something a state can turn into.To clarify all this would be a major historicalproject.

2) A THEORY OF POLITICAL ENTITIESTHAT ARE NOT STATES

So that’s one project: to reanalyze the state as a rela-tion between a utopian imaginary, and a messyreality involving strategies of flight and evasion,predatory elites, and a mechanics of regulation andcontrol.

All this highlights the pressing need for anotherproject: one which will ask, If many political entitieswe are used to seeing as states, at least in anyWeberian sense, are not, then what are they? Andwhat does that imply about political possibilities?

In a way it’s kind of amazing that such a theo-retical literature doesn’t already exist. It’s yetanother sign, I guess, of how hard it is for us tothink outside the statist framework. An excellentcase in point: one of the most consistent demands of“anti-globalization” activists has been for the elimi-nation of border restrictions. If we’re to globalize,we say, let’s get serious about it. Eliminate nationalborders. Let people come and go as they please, andlive wherever they like. The demand is oftenphrased in terms of some notion of global citizen-ship. But this inspires immediate objections: doesn’ta call for “global citizenship” mean calling for somekind of global state? Would we really want that? Sothen the question becomes how do we theorize acitizenship outside the state. This is often treated asa profound, perhaps insurmountable, dilemma; but

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it. At the very least we need a proper theory of thehistory of wage labor, and relations like it. Sinceafter all, it is in performing wage labor, not inbuying and selling, that most humans now wasteaway most of their waking hours and it is thatwhich makes them miserable. (Hence the IWWdidn’t say they were “anti-capitalist,” much thoughthey were; they got right to the point and said theywere “against the wage system.”) The earliest wagelabor contracts we have on record appear to bereally about the rental of slaves. What about amodel of capitalism that sets out from that? Whereanthropologists like Jonathan Friedman argue thatancient slavery was really just an older version ofcapitalism, we could just as easily—actually, a lotmore easily—argue that modern capitalism is reallyjust a newer version of slavery. Instead of peopleselling us or renting us out we rent out ourselves.But it’s basically the same sort of arrangement.

4) POWER/IGNORANCE, orPOWER/STUPIDITY

Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument thatidentifies knowledge and power, and insists thatbrute force is no longer a major factor in socialcontrol. They love it because it flatters them: theperfect formula for people who like to think ofthemselves as political radicals even though all theydo is write essays likely to be read by a few dozenother people in an institutional environment. Ofcourse, if any of these academics were to walk intotheir university library to consult some volume ofFoucault without having remembered to bring avalid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway,they would soon discover that brute force is really

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more recent times: an historian named Spruyt hassuggested that in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies the territorial nation-state was hardly theonly game in town; there were other possibilities(Italian city-states, which actually were states; theHanseatic league of confederated mercantilecenters, which involved an entirely differentconception of sovereignty) which didn’t happen towin out—at least, right away—but were no lessintrinsically viable. I have myself suggested that onereason the territorial nation-state ended up winningout was because, in this early stage of globalization,Western elites were trying to model themselves onChina, the only state in existence at the time whichactually seemed to conform to their ideal of auniform population, who in Confucian terms werethe source of sovereignty, creators of a vernacularliterature, subject to a uniform code of laws,administered by bureaucrats chosen by merit,trained in that vernacular literature... With thecurrent crisis of the nation-state and rapid increasein international institutions which are not exactlystates, but in many ways just as obnoxious, juxta-posed against attempts to create international insti-tutions which do many of the same things as statesbut would be considerably less obnoxious, the lackof such a body of theory is becoming a genuinecrisis.

3) YET ANOTHER THEORY OF CAPITALISM

One is loathe to suggest this but the endless driveto naturalize capitalism by reducing it to a matterof commercial calculation, which then allows oneto claim it is as old as Sumer, just screams out for

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rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it.This is why violence has always been the favoredrecourse of the stupid: it is the one form ofstupidity to which it is almost impossible to comeup with an intelligent response. It is also of coursethe basis of the state.

Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies donot create stupidity. They are ways of managingsituations that are already inherently stupid becausethey are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness offorce.

Ultimately this should lead to a theory of therelation of violence and the imagination. Why is itthat the folks on the bottom (the victims of struc-tural violence) are always imagining what it must belike for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of struc-tural violence), but it almost never occurs to thefolks on top to wonder what it might be like to beon the bottom? Human beings being the sympa-thetic creatures that they are this tends to becomeone of the main bastions of any system ofinequality—the downtrodden actually care abouttheir oppressors, at least, far more than theiroppressors care about them—but this seems itselfto be an effect of structural violence.

5) AN ECOLOGYOF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS

What kinds exist? In what environments do theythrive? Where did the bizarre notion of the“corporation” come from anyway?

6) A THEORY OF POLITICAL HAPPINESSRather than just a theory of why most contempo-rary people never experience it. That would be easy.

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not so far away as they like to imagine—a man witha big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hitpeople with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.

In fact the threat of that man with the stickpermeates our world at every moment; most of ushave given up even thinking of crossing the innu-merable lines and barriers he creates, just so wedon’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. Ifyou see a hungry woman standing several yardsaway from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrencefor most of us who live in cities—there is a reasonyou can’t just take some and give it to her. A manwith a big stick will come and very likely hit you.Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted inreminding us of him. Residents of the squattercommunity of Christiana, Denmark, for example,have a Christmastide ritual where they dress inSanta suits, take toys from department stores anddistribute them to children on the street, partly justso everyone can relish the images of the copsbeating down Santa and snatching the toys backfrom crying children.

Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to atheory of the relation of power not with knowl-edge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Becauseviolence, particularly structural violence, where allthe power is on one side, creates ignorance. If youhave the power to hit people over the head when-ever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourselftoo much figuring out what they think is going on,and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hencethe sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, toignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives,passions, insights, desires, and mutual understand-ings that human life is really made of, is to make a

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pleasure. If one wishes to emphasize commonality,the easiest way is to point out that they also feelpain.

9) ONE OR SEVERAL THEORIES OFALIENATION

This is the ultimate prize: what, precisely, are thepossible dimensions of non-alienated experience?How might its modalities be catalogued, or consid-ered? Any anarchist anthropology worth its saltwould have to pay particular attention to this ques-tion because this is precisely what all those punks,hippies, and activists of every stripe most look toanthropology to learn. It’s the anthropologists, soterrified of being accused of romanticizing thesocieties they study that they refuse to evensuggest there might be an answer, who leave themno recourse but to fall into the arms of the realromanticizers. Primitivists like John Zerzan, whoin trying to whittle away what seems to divide usfrom pure, unmediated experience, end up whit-tling away absolutely everything. Zerzan’s increas-ingly popular works end up condemning the veryexistence of language, math, time keeping, music,and all forms of art and representation. They areall written off as forms of alienation, leaving uswith a kind of impossible evolutionary ideal: theonly truly non-alienated human being was noteven quite human, but more a kind of perfect ape,in some kind of currently-unimaginable telepathicconnection with its fellows, at one with wildnature, living maybe about a hundred thousandyears ago. True revolution could only meansomehow returning to that. How it is that affi-cionados of this sort of thing still manage to

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7) HIERARCHYA theory of how structures of hierarchy, by theirown logic, necessarily create their own counter-image or negation. They do, you know.

8) SUFFERING AND PLEASURE: ON THEPRIVATIZATION OF DESIRE

It is common wisdom among anarchists, autono-mists, Situationists, and other new revolutionariesthat the old breed of grim, determined, self-sacri-ficing revolutionary, who sees the world only interms of suffering will ultimately only producemore suffering himself. Certainly that’s what hastended to happen in the past. Hence the emphasison pleasure, carnival, on creating “temporaryautonomous zones” where one can live as if one isalready free. The ideal of the “festival of resistance”with its crazy music and giant puppets is, quiteconsciously, to return to the late medieval world ofhuge wickerwork giants and dragons, maypoles andmorris dancing; the very world the Puritanpioneers of the “capitalist spirit” hated so much andultimately managed to destroy. The history of capi-talism moves from attacks on collective, festiveconsumption to the promulgation of highlypersonal, private, even furtive forms (after all, oncethey had all those people dedicating all their timeto producing stuff instead of partying, they didhave to figure out a way to sell it all); a process ofthe privitization of desire. The theoretical question:how to reconcile all this with the disturbing theo-retical insight of people like Slavoj Zizek: that ifone wishes to inspire ethnic hatred, the easiest wayto do so is to concentrate on the bizarre, perverseways in which the other group is assumed to pursue

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Q: How many voters does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. Because voters can’t change anything.

There is of course no single anarchist program—norcould there really be—but it might be helpful to endby giving the reader some idea about current direc-tions of thought and organizing.

(1) Globalization and the Elimination ofNorth-South Inequalities

As I’ve mentioned, the “anti-globalization movement”is increasingly anarchist in inspiration. In the longrun the anarchist position on globalization is obvious:the effacement of nation-states will mean the elimina-tion of national borders. This is genuine globaliza-tion. Anything else is just a sham. But for the interim,there are all sorts of concrete suggestions on how the

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engage in effective political action (because it’sbeen my experience that many do quite remarkablework) is itself a fascinating sociological question.But surely, an alternative analysis of alienationmight be useful here.

We could start with a kind of sociology ofmicro-utopias, the counterpart of a paralleltypology of forms of alienation, alienated and non-alienated forms of action... The moment we stopinsisting on viewing all forms of action only bytheir function in reproducing larger, total, forms ofinequality of power, we will also be able to see thatanarchist social relations and non-alienated formsof action are all around us. And this is criticalbecause it already shows that anarchism is, already,and has always been, one of the main bases forhuman interaction. We self-organize and engage inmutual aid all the time. We always have. We alsoengage in artistic creativity, which I think if exam-ined would reveal that many of the least alienatedforms of experience do usually involve an elementof what a Marxist would call fetishization. It is allthe more pressing to develop such a theory if youaccept that (as I have frequently argued) revolu-tionary constituencies always involve a tacitalliance between the least alienated and the mostoppressed.

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The point is that despite the endless rhetoricabout “complex, subtle, intractable issues” (justifyingdecades of expensive research by the rich and theirwell-paid flunkies), the anarchist program wouldprobably have resolved most of them in five or sixyears. But, you will say, these demands are entirelyunrealistic! True enough. But why are they unreal-istic? Mainly, because those rich guys meeting in theWaldorf would never stand for any of it. This is whywe say they are themselves the problem.

(2) The Struggle Against Work

The struggle against work has always been central toanarchist organizing. By this I mean, not the strugglefor better worker conditions or higher wages, but thestruggle to eliminate work, as a relation of domina-tion, entirely. Hence the IWW slogan “against thewage system.” This is a long-term goal of course. Inthe shorter term, what can’t be eliminated can at leastbe reduced. Around the turn of the century, theWobblies and other anarchists played the central rolein winning workers the 5-day week and 8-hour day.

In Western Europe social democratic govern-ments are now, for the first time in almost a century,once again reducing the working week. They are onlyinstituting trifling changes (from a 40-hour week to35), but in the US no one’s even discussing that much.Instead they are discussing whether to eliminate time-and-a-half for overtime. This despite the fact thatAmericans now spend more hours working than any

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situation can be improved right now, without fallingback on statist, protectionist, approaches. Oneexample:

Once during the protests before the WorldEconomic Forum, a kind of junket of tycoons, corpo-rate flacks and politicians, networking and sharingcocktails at the Waldorf Astoria, pretended to bediscussing ways to alleviate global poverty. I wasinvited to engage in a radio debate with one of theirrepresentatives. As it happened the task went toanother activist but I did get far enough to prepare athree-point program that I think would have takencare of the problem nicely:

• an immediate amnesty on international debt(An amnesty on personal debt might not be a badidea either but it’s a different issue.)

• an immediate cancellation of all patents andother intellectual property rights related to tech-nology more than one year old

• the elimination of all restrictions on globalfreedom of travel or residence

The rest would pretty much take care of itself. Themoment the average resident of Tanzania, or Laos,was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis orRotterdam, the government of every rich andpowerful country in the world would certainly decidenothing was more important than finding a way tomake sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred tostay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come upwith something?

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out a way to find out about. The elimination ofradical inequalities would mean we would no longerrequire the services of most of the millions currentlyemployed as doormen, private security forces, prisonguards, or SWAT teams—not to mention the military.Beyond that, we’d have to do research. Financiers,insurers, and investment bankers are all essentiallyparasitic beings, but there might be some useful func-tions in these sectors that could not simply bereplaced with software. All in all we might discoverthat if we identified the work that really did need tobe done to maintain a comfortable and ecologicallysustainable standard of living, and redistribute thehours, it may turn out that the Wobbly platform isperfectly realistic. Especially if we bear in mind thatit’s not like anyone would be forced to stop workingafter four hours if they didn’t feel like it. A lot ofpeople do enjoy their jobs, certainly more than theywould lounging around doing nothing all day (that’swhy in prisons, when they want to punish inmates,they take away their right to work), and if one haseliminated the endless indignities and sadomasochisticgames that inevitably follow from top-down organiza-tion, one would expect a lot more would. It mighteven turn out that no one will have to work morethan they particularly want to.

minor note:Admittedly, all of this presumes the total reorgani-zation of work, a kind of “after the revolution”scenario which I’ve argued is a necessary tool toeven begin to think about human possibilities, even

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other population in the world, including Japan. So theWobblies have reappeared, with what was to be thenext step in their program, even back in the ‘20s: the16-hour week. (“4-day week, 4-hour day.”) Again, onthe face of it, this seems completely unrealistic, eveninsane. But has anyone carried out a feasibility study?After all, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that aconsiderable chunk of the hours worked in Americaare only actually necessary to compensate for prob-lems created by the fact that Americans work toomuch. (Consider here such jobs as all-night pizzadeliveryman or dog-washer, or those women who runnighttime day care centers for the children of womenwho have to work nights providing child care forbusinesswomen...not to mention the endless hoursspent by specialists cleaning up the emotional andphysical damage caused by overwork, the injuries,suicides, divorces, murderous rampages, producingthe drugs to pacify the children...)

So what jobs are really necessary? Well, for starters, there are lots of jobs whose

disappearance, almost everyone would agree, wouldbe a net gain for humanity. Consider here telemar-keters, stretch-SUV manufacturers, or for that matter,corporate lawyers. We could also eliminate the entireadvertising and PR industries, fire all politicians andtheir staffs, eliminate anyone remotely connected withan HMO, without even beginning to get near essen-tial social functions. The elimination of advertisingwould also reduce the production, shipping, andselling of unnecessary products, since those itemspeople actually do want or need, they will still figure

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with the Zapatistas’ rejection of the idea of seizingpower and their attempt instead to create a model ofdemocratic self-organization to inspire the rest ofMexico; their initiation of an international network(People’s Global Action, or PGA) which then put outthe calls for days of action against the WTO (inSeattle), IMF (in Washington, Prague...) and so on;and finally, the collapse of the Argentine economy, andthe overwhelming popular uprising which, again,rejected the very idea that one could find a solution byreplacing one set of politicians with another. Theslogan of the Argentine movement was, from the start,que se vayan todas—get rid of the lot of them. Insteadof a new government they created a vast network ofalternative institutions, starting with popular assem-blies to govern each urban neighborhood (the onlylimitation on participation is that one cannot beemployed by a political party), hundreds of occupied,worker-managed factories, a complex system of“barter” and newfangled alternative currency systemto keep them in operation—in short, an endless varia-tion on the theme of direct democracy.

All of this has happened completely below theradar screen of the corporate media, which also missedthe point of the great mobilizations. The organizationof these actions was meant to be a living illustration ofwhat a truly democratic world might be like, from thefestive puppets to the careful organization of affinitygroups and spokescouncils, all operating without aleadership structure, always based on principles ofconsensus-based direct democracy. It was the kind oforganization which most people would have, had they

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if revolution will probably never take such an apoc-alyptic form. This of course brings up the “whowill do the dirty jobs?” question—one whichalways gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians.Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacyof the argument. There’s no particular reason dirtyjobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasanttasks equally, that would mean all the world’s topscientists and engineers would have to do themtoo; one could expect the creation of self-cleaningkitchens and coal-mining robots almost immedi-ately.

All this is something of an aside though because whatI really want to do in this final section is focus on:

(3) DEMOCRACY

This might give the reader a chance to have a glanceat what anarchist, and anarchist-inspired, organizing isactually like—some of the contours of the new worldnow being built in the shell of the old—and to showwhat the historical-ethnographic perspective I’ve beentrying to develop here, our non-existent science,might be able to contribute to it.

The first cycle of the new global uprising—what the press still insists on referring to, increasinglyridiculously, as “the anti-globalization movement”—began with the autonomous municipalities of Chiapasand came to a head with the asambleas barreales ofBuenos Aires, and cities throughout Argentina. Thereis hardly room here to tell the whole story: beginning

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convert others to one’s overall point of view; the pointof consensus process is to allow a group to decide on acommon course of action. Instead of voting proposalsup and down, then, proposals are worked andreworked, scotched or reinvented, until one ends upwith something everyone can live with. When itcomes to the final stage, actually “finding consensus,”there are two levels of possible objection: one can“stand aside,” which is to say “I don’t like this andwon’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else fromdoing it,” or “block,” which has the effect of a veto.One can only block if one feels a proposal is in viola-tion of the fundamental principles or reasons for beingof a group. One might say that the function which inthe US constitution is relegated to the courts, ofstriking down legislative decisions that violate consti-tutional principles, is here relegated to anyone withthe courage to actually stand up against the combinedwill of the group (though of course there are also waysof challenging unprincipled blocks).

One could go on at length about the elaborateand surprisingly sophisticated methods that have beendeveloped to ensure all this works; of forms of modi-fied consensus required for very large groups; of theway consensus itself reinforces the principle of decen-tralization by ensuring one doesn’t really want tobring proposals before very large groups unless onehas to, of means of ensuring gender equity andresolving conflict... The point is this is a form ofdirect democracy which is very different than the kindwe usually associate with the term—or, for that matter,with the kind usually employed by European or North

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simply heard it proposed, written off as a pipe-dream;but it worked, and so effectively that the police depart-ments of city after city were completely flummoxedwith how to deal with them. Of course, this also hadsomething to do with the unprecedented tactics(hundreds of activists in fairy suits tickling police withfeather dusters, or padded with so many inflatableinner tubes and rubber cushions they seemed to rollalong like the Michelin man over barricades, incapableof damaging anyone else but also pretty much imper-vious to police batons...), which completely confusedtraditional categories of violence and nonviolence.

When protesters in Seattle chanted “this iswhat democracy looks like,” they meant to be takenliterally. In the best tradition of direct action, they notonly confronted a certain form of power, exposing itsmechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in itstracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated whythe kind of social relations on which it is based wereunnecessary. This is why all the condescendingremarks about the movement being dominated by abunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideologycompletely missed the mark. The diversity was a func-tion of the decentralized form of organization, andthis organization was the movement’s ideology.

The key term in the new movement is“process,” by which is meant, decision-makingprocess. In North America, this is almost invariablydone through some process of finding consensus. Thisis as I mentioned much less ideologically stifling thanit may sound because the assumption behind all goodconsensus process is that one should not even try to

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on the tradition of ancient Greece. Majoritariandemocracy, in the formal, Roberts Rules of Order-type sense rarely emerges of its own accord. It’scurious that almost no one, anthropologists included,ever seems to ask oneself why this should be.

An hypothesis.Majoritarian democracy was, in its origins, essen-tially a military institution.

Of course it’s the peculiar bias of Westernhistoriography that this is the only sort of democ-racy that is seen to count as “democracy” at all.We are usually told that democracy originated inancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it wasa Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear whatthis is supposed to mean. Are we supposed tobelieve that before the Athenians, it never reallyoccurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all themembers of their community in order to makejoint decisions in a way that gave everyone equalsay? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there havebeen plenty of egalitarian societies in history—many far more egalitarian than Athens, many thatmust have existed before 500 BCE—and obviously,they must have had some kind of procedure forcoming to decisions for matters of collectiveimportance. Yet somehow, it is always assumedthat these procedures, whatever they might havebeen, could not have been, properly speaking,“democratic.”

Even scholars with otherwise impeccableradical credentials, promoters of direct democracy,have been known to bend themselves into pretzelstrying to justify this attitude. Non-Western egali-

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American anarchists of earlier generations, or stillemployed, say, in urban Argentine asambleas. InNorth America, consensus process emerged morethan anything else through the feminist movement,as part of broad backlash against some of the moreobnoxious, self-aggrandizing macho leadership stylesof the ‘60s New Left. Much of the procedure wasoriginally adopted from the Quakers, and Quaker-inspired groups; the Quakers, in turn, claim to havebeen inspired by Native American practice. Howmuch the latter is really true is, in historical terms,difficult to determine. Nonetheless, Native Americandecision-making did normally work by some form ofconsensus. Actually, so do most popular assembliesaround the world now, from the Tzeltal or Tzotzil orTojolobal-speaking communities in Chiapas toMalagasy fokon’olona. After having lived inMadagascar for two years, I was startled, the firsttime I started attending meetings of the DirectAction Network in New York, by how familiar it allseemed—the main difference was that the DANprocess was so much more formalized and explicit. Ithad to be, since everyone in DAN was just figuringout how to make decisions this way, and everythinghad to be spelled out; whereas in Madagascar,everyone had been doing this since they learned tospeak.

In fact, as anthropologists are aware, justabout every known human community which has tocome to group decisions has employed some variationof what I’m calling “consensus process”—every one,that is, which is not in some way or another drawing

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The explanation I would propose is this: it ismuch easier, in a face-to-face community, to figureout what most members of that community want todo, than to figure out how to convince those who donot to go along with it. Consensus decision-makingis typical of societies where there would be no wayto compel a minority to agree with a majority deci-sion—either because there is no state with amonopoly of coercive force, or because the state hasnothing to do with local decision-making. If there isno way to compel those who find a majority decisiondistasteful to go along with it, then the last thing onewould want to do is to hold a vote: a public contestwhich someone will be seen to lose. Voting would bethe most likely means to guarantee humiliations,resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction ofcommunities. What is seen as an elaborate and diffi-cult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a longprocess of making sure no one walks away feelingthat their views have been totally ignored.

Majority democracy, we might say, can onlyemerge when two factors coincide:

1. a feeling that people should have equal say inmaking group decisions, and

2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing thosedecisions.

For most of human history, it has been extremelyunusual to have both at the same time. Where egali-tarian societies exist, it is also usually consideredwrong to impose systematic coercion. Where amachinery of coercion did exist, it did not evenoccur to those wielding it that they were enforcingany sort of popular will.

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tarian communities are “kin-based,” arguesMurray Bookchin. (And Greece was not? Ofcourse the Athenian agora was not itself kin-basedbut neither is a Malagasy fokon’olona or Balineseseka. So what?) “Some might speak of Iroquois orBerber democracy,” argued Cornelius Castoriadis,“but this is an abuse of the term. These are primi-tive societies which assume the social order ishanded to them by gods or spirits, not self-consti-tuted by the people themselves as in Athens.”(Really? In fact the “League of the Iroquois” was atreaty organization, seen as a common agreementcreated in historical times, and subject to constantrenegotiation.) The arguments never make sense.But they don’t really have to because we are notreally dealing with arguments at all here, so muchas with the brush of a hand.

The real reason for the unwillingness of mostscholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village councilas “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism,the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaugh-tered with such relative impunity were quite on thelevel as Pericles—is that they do not vote. Now,admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? Ifwe accept the idea that a show of hands, or havingeveryone who supports a proposition stand on oneside of the plaza and everyone against stand on theother, are not really such incredibly sophisticatedideas that they never would have occurred toanyone until some ancient genius “invented” them,then why are they so rarely employed? Again, weseem to have an example of explicit rejection. Overand over, across the world, from Australia toSiberia, egalitarian communities have preferredsome variation on consensus process. Why?

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This in turn might help explain the term“democracy” itself, which appears to have beencoined as something of a slur by its elitist oppo-nents: it literally means the “force” or even“violence” of the people. Kratos, not archos. Theelitists who coined the term always considereddemocracy not too far from simple rioting or mobrule; though of course their solution was thepermanent conquest of the people by someoneelse. And ironically, when they did manage tosuppress democracy for this reason, which wasusually, the result was that the only way thegeneral populace’s will was known was preciselythrough rioting, a practice that became quite insti-tutionalized in, say, imperial Rome or eighteenth-century England.

All this is not to say that direct democracies—as practiced, for example, in medieval cities or NewEngland town meetings—were not normallyorderly and dignified procedures; though onesuspects that here too, in actual practice, there wasa certain baseline of consensus-seeking going on.Still, it was this military undertone which allowedthe authors of the Federalist Papers, like almost allother literate men of their day, to take it forgranted that what they called “democracy”—bywhich they meant, direct democracy—was in itsnature the most unstable, tumultuous form ofgovernment, not to mention one which endangersthe rights of minorities (the specific minority theyhad in mind in this case being the rich). It was onlyonce the term “democracy” could be almostcompletely transformed to incorporate the prin-ciple of representation—a term which itself has avery curious history, since as Cornelius Castoriadis

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It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greecewas one of the most competitive societies knownto history. It was a society that tended to makeeverything into a public contest, from athletics tophilosophy or tragic drama or just about anythingelse. So it might not seem entirely surprising thatthey made political decision-making into a publiccontest as well. Even more crucial though was thefact that decisions were made by a populace inarms. Aristotle, in his Politics, remarks that theconstitution of a Greek city-state will normallydepend on the chief arm of its military: if this iscavalry, it will be an aristocracy, since horses areexpensive. If hoplite infantry, it will have anoligarchy, as all could not afford the armor andtraining. If its power was based in the navy or lightinfantry, one could expect a democracy, as anyonecan row, or use a sling. In other words if a man isarmed, then one pretty much has to take his opin-ions into account. One can see how this worked atits starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells thestory of an army of Greek mercenaries whosuddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in themiddle of Persia. They elect new officers, and thenhold a collective vote to decide what to do next. Ina case like this, even if the vote was 60/40,everyone could see the balance of forces and whatwould happen if things actually came to blows.Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.

Roman legions could be similarly democratic;this was the main reason they were never allowedto enter the city of Rome. And when Machiavellirevived the notion of a democratic republic at thedawn of the “modern” era, he immediatelyreverted to the notion of a populace in arms.

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use that very instability to justify their ultimatemonopoly of the means of violence. Finally, the threatof this instability becomes an excuse for a form of“democracy” so minimal that it comes down tonothing more than insisting that ruling elites shouldoccasionally consult with “the public”—in carefullystaged contests, replete with rather meaningless joustsand tournaments—to reestablish their right to go onmaking their decisions for them.

It’s a trap. Bouncing back and forth betweenthe two ensures it will remain extremely unlikely thatone could ever imagine it would be possible for peopleto manage their own lives, without the help of “repre-sentatives.” It’s for this reason the new global move-ment has begun by reinventing the very meaning ofdemocracy. To do so ultimately means, once again,coming to terms with the fact that “we”—whether as“the West” (whatever that means), as the “modernworld,” or anything else—are not really as special aswe like to think we are; that we’re not the only peopleever to have practiced democracy; that in fact, ratherthan disseminating democracy around the world,“Western” governments have been spending at least asmuch time inserting themselves into the lives ofpeople who have been practicing democracy for thou-sands of years, and in one way or another, telling themto cut it out.

One of the most encouraging things aboutthese new, anarchist-inspired movements is that theypropose a new form of internationalism. Older,communist internationalism had some very beautifulideals, but in organizational terms, everyone basically

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notes, it originally referred to representatives of thepeople before the king, internal ambassadors infact, rather than those who wielded power in anysense themselves—that it was rehabilitated, in theeyes of well-born political theorists, and took onthe meaning it has today.

In a sense then anarchists think all those right-wing political theorists who insist that “America is nota democracy; it’s a republic” are quite correct. Thedifference is that anarchists have a problem with that.They think it ought to be a democracy. Thoughincreasing numbers have come to accept that thetraditional elitist criticism of majoritarian directdemocracy is not entirely baseless either.

I noted earlier that all social orders are insome sense at war with themselves. Those unwilling toestablish an apparatus of violence for enforcing deci-sions necessarily have to develop an apparatus forcreating and maintaining social consensus (at least inthat minimal sense of ensuring malcontents can stillfeel they have freely chosen to go along with bad deci-sions); as an apparent result, the internal war ends upprojected outwards into endless night battles andforms of spectral violence. Majoritarian direct democ-racy is constantly threatening to make those lines offorce explicit. For this reason it does tend to be ratherunstable: or more precisely, if it does last, it’s becauseits institutional forms (the medieval city, New Englandtown council, for that matter gallup polls, referen-dums...) are almost invariably ensconced within alarger framework of governance in which ruling elites

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ANTHROPOLOGY(in which the author somewhat reluctantlybites the hand that feeds him)

The final question—one that I’ve admittedly beenrather avoiding up to now—is why anthropologistshaven’t, so far? I have already described why I thinkacademics, in general, have rarely felt much affinitywith anarchism. I’ve talked a little about the radicalinclinations in much early twentieth-century anthro-pology, which often showed a very strong affinity withanarchism, but that seemed to largely evaporate overtime. It’s all a little odd. Anthropologists are after allthe only group of scholars who know anything aboutactually-existing stateless societies; many have actuallylived in corners of the world where states have ceasedto function or at least temporarily pulled up stakes andleft, and people are managing their own affairsautonomously; if nothing else, they are keenly awarethat the most commonplace assumptions about whatwould happen in the absence of a state (“but peoplewould just kill each other!”) are factually untrue.

Why, then?Well, there are any number of reasons. Some

are understandable enough. If anarchism is, essentially,an ethics of practice, then meditating on anthropolog-ical practice tends to kick up a lot of unpleasantthings. Particularly if one concentrates on the experi-ence of anthropological fieldwork—which is whatanthropologists invariably tend to do when they

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flowed one way. It became a means for regimesoutside Europe and its settler colonies to learnWestern styles of organization: party structures,plenaries, purges, bureaucratic hierarchies, secretpolice... This time—the second wave of internation-alism one could call it, or just, anarchist globaliza-tion—the movement of organizational forms haslargely gone the other way. It’s not just consensusprocess: the idea of mass non-violent direct action firstdeveloped in South Africa and India; the currentnetwork model was first proposed by rebels inChiapas; even the notion of the affinity group cameout of Spain and Latin America. The fruits of ethnog-raphy—and the techniques of ethnography—could beenormously helpful here if anthropologists can getpast their—however understandable—hesitancy, owingto their own often squalid colonial history, and cometo see what they are sitting on not as some guiltysecret (which is nonetheless their guilty secret, and noone else’s) but as the common property of humankind.

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There’s more to it though. In many ways,anthropology seems a discipline terrified of its ownpotential. It is, for example, the only discipline in aposition to make generalizations about humanity as awhole—since it is the only discipline that actuallytakes all of humanity into account, and is familiar withall the anomalous cases. (“All societies practicemarriage, you say? Well that depends on how youdefine ‘marriage.’ Among the Nayar...”) Yet itresolutely refuses to do so. I don’t think this is to beaccounted for solely as an understandable reaction tothe right-wing proclivity to make grand argumentsabout human nature to justify very particular, andusually, particularly nasty social institutions (rape, war,free market capitalism)—though certainly that is a bigpart of it. Partly it’s just the vastness of the subjectmatter. Who really has the means, in discussing, say,conceptions of desire, or imagination, or the self, orsovereignty, to consider everything Chinese or Indianor Islamic thinkers have had to say on the matter inaddition to the Western canon, let alone folk concep-tions prevalent in hundreds of Oceanic or NativeAmerican societies as well? It’s just too daunting. As aresult, anthropologists no longer produce many broadtheoretical generalizations at all—instead, turningover the work to European philosophers who usuallyhave absolutely no problem discussing desire, or theimagination, or the self, or sovereignty, as if suchconcepts had been invented by Plato or Aristotle,developed by Kant or DeSade, and never meaningfullydiscussed by anyone outside of elite literary traditionsin Western Europe or North America. Where once

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become reflexive. The discipline we know today wasmade possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colo-nization, and mass murder—much like most modernacademic disciplines, actually, including geography,and botany, not even to mention ones like mathe-matics, linguistics or robotics, which still are, butanthropologists, since their work tends to involvegetting to know the victims personally, have ended upagonizing over this in ways that the proponents ofother disciplines have almost never done. The resulthas been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflec-tions on their own culpability has mainly had theeffect of providing non-anthropologists who do notwant to be bothered having to learn about 90% ofhuman experience with a handy two or three sentencedismissal (you know: all about projecting one’s sense ofOtherness into the colonized) by which they can feelmorally superior to those who do.

For the anthropologists themselves, the resultshave been strangely paradoxical as well. While anthro-pologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive ofhuman experience, of social and political experimentsno one else really knows about, that very body ofcomparative ethnography is seen as somethingshameful. As I mentioned, it is treated not as thecommon heritage of humankind, but as our dirty littlesecret. Which is actually convenient, at least insofar asacademic power is largely about establishing ownershiprights over a certain form of knowledge and ensuringthat others don’t really have much access to it. Becauseas I also mentioned, our dirty little secret is still ours.It’s not something one needs to share with others.

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with the UN—positions within the very apparatus ofglobal rule—what this really comes down to is a kindof constant, ritualized declaration of disloyalty to thatvery global elite of which we ourselves, as academics,clearly form one (admittedly somewhat marginal) frac-tion.

Now, what form does this populism take inpractice? Mainly, it means that you must demonstratethat the people you are studying, the little guys, aresuccessfully resisting some form of power or global-izing influence imposed on them from above. This is,anyway, what most anthropologists talk about whenthe subject turns to globalization—which it usuallydoes almost immediately, nowadays, whatever it is youstudy. Whether it is advertising, or soap operas, orforms of labor discipline, or state-imposed legalsystems, or anything else that might seem to becrushing or homogenizing or manipulating one’speople, one demonstrates that they are not fooled, notcrushed, not homogenized; indeed they are creativelyappropriating or reinterpreting what is being thrownat them in ways that its authors would never haveanticipated. Of course, to some extent all this is true. Iwould certainly not wish to deny it is important tocombat the—still remarkably widespread—popularassumption that the moment people in Bhutan orIrian Jaya are exposed to MTV, their civilization isbasically over. What’s disturbing, at least to me, is thedegree to which this logic comes to echo that of globalcapitalism. Advertising agencies, after all, do not claimto be imposing anything on the public either.Particularly in this era of market segmentation, they

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anthropologists’ key theoretical terms were words likemana, totem, or taboo, the new buzzwords are invari-ably derived from Latin or Greek, usually via French,occasionally German.

So while anthropology might seem perfectlypositioned to provide an intellectual forum for all sortsof planetary conversations, political and otherwise,there is a certain built-in reluctance to do so.

Then there’s the question of politics. Mostanthropologists write as if their work has obviouspolitical significance, in a tone which suggests theyconsider what they are doing quite radical, andcertainly left of center. But what does this politicsactually consist of? It’s increasingly hard to say. Doanthropologists tend to be anti-capitalist? Certainly it’shard to think of one who has much good to say aboutcapitalism. Many are in the habit of describing thecurrent age as one of “late capitalism,” as if bydeclaring it is about to end, they can by the very act ofdoing so hasten its demise. But it’s hard to think of ananthropologist who has, recently, made any sort ofsuggestion of what an alternative to capitalism mightbe like. So are they liberals? Many can’t pronouncethe word without a snort of contempt. What then? Asfar as I can make out the only real fundamental polit-ical commitment running through the entire field is akind of broad populism. If nothing else, we are defi-nitely not on the side of whoever, in a given situation,is or fancies themselves to be the elite. We’re for thelittle guys. Since in practice, most anthropologists areattached to (increasingly global) universities, or if not,end up in jobs like marketing consultancies or jobs

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risk, if they are not careful, becoming yet another cogin a global “identity machine,” a planet-wide apparatusof institutions and assumptions that has, over the lastdecade or so, effectively informed the earth’s inhabi-tants (or at least, all but the very most elite) that, sinceall debates about the nature of political or economicpossibilities are now over, the only way one can nowmake a political claim is by asserting some group iden-tity, with all the assumptions about what identity is(i.e., that group identities are not ways of comparingone group to each other but constituted by the way agroup relates to its own history, that there is no essen-tial difference in this regard between individuals andgroups...) established in advance. Things have come tosuch a pass that in countries like Nepal evenTheravada Buddhists are forced to play identity poli-tics, a particularly bizarre spectacle since they areessentially basing their identity claims on adherence toa universalistic philosophy that insists identity is anillusion.

Many years ago a French anthropologistnamed Gerard Althabe wrote a book aboutMadagascar called Oppression et Liberation dansl’Imaginaire. It’s a catchy phrase. I think it might wellbe applied to what ends up happening in a lot ofanthropological writing. For the most part, what wecall “identities” here, in what Paul Gilroy likes to callthe “over-developed world,” are forced on people. Inthe United States, most are the products of ongoingoppression and inequality: someone who is defined asBlack is not allowed to forget that during a singlemoment of their existence; his or her own self-defini-

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claim to be providing material for members of thepublic to appropriate and make their own in unpre-dictable and idiosyncratic ways. The rhetoric of“creative consumption” in particular could be consid-ered the very ideology of the new global market: aworld in which all human behavior can be classified aseither production, exchange, or consumption; inwhich exchange is assumed to be driven by basichuman proclivities for rational pursuit of profit whichare the same everywhere, and consumption becomes away to establish one’s particular identity (and produc-tion is not discussed at all if one can possibly avoid it).We’re all the same on the trading floor; it’s what wedo with the stuff when we get home that makes usdifferent. This market logic has become so deeplyinternalized that, if, say, a woman in Trinidad putstogether some outrageous get-up and goes outdancing, anthropologists will automatically assumethat what she’s doing can be defined as “consumption”(as opposed to, say, showing off or having a goodtime), as if what’s really important about her evening isthe fact that she buys a couple drinks, or maybe,because the anthropologist considers wearing clothesitself to be somehow like drinking, or maybe, becausethey just don’t think about it at all and assume thatwhatever one does that isn’t working is “consumption”because what’s really important about it is that manu-factured products are involved. The perspective of theanthropologist and the global marketing executivehave become almost indistinguishable.

It’s not that different on the political level.Lauren Leve has recently warned that anthropologists

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cate and intractable problems of the degree to whichone’s own work is part of this very identity machine.But it no more makes it true than talking about “latecapitalism” will itself bring about industrial collapse orfurther social revolution.

An illustration:In case it’s not clear what I am saying here, let mereturn for a moment to the Zapatista rebels ofChiapas, whose revolt on New Year’s day, 1994,might be said to have kicked off what came to beknown as the globalization movement. TheZapatistas were overwhelmingly drawn fromTzeltal, Tzotzil and Tojolobal Maya-speakingcommunities that had established themselves in theLacandon rain forest—some of the poorest andmost exploited communities in Mexico. TheZapatistas do not call themselves anarchists, quite,or even, quite autonomists; they represent theirown unique strand within that broader tradition;indeed, they are trying to revolutionize revolu-tionary strategy itself by abandoning any notion ofa vanguard party seizing control of the state, butinstead battling to create free enclaves that couldserve as models for autonomous self-government,allowing a general reorganization of Mexicansociety into a complex overlapping network of self-managing groups that could then begin to discussthe reinvention of political society. There was,apparently, some difference of opinion within theZapatista movement itself over the forms of demo-cratic practice they wished to promulgate. TheMaya-speaking base pushed strongly for a form ofconsensus process adopted from their own

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tion is of no significance to the banker who will denyhim credit, or the policeman who will arrest him forbeing in the wrong neighborhood, or the doctor who,in the case of a damaged limb, will be more likely torecommend amputation. All attempts at individual orcollective self-fashioning or self-invention have to takeplace entirely within those extremely violent sets ofconstraints. (The only real way that could changewould be to transform the attitudes of those who havethe privilege of being defined as “White”—ultimately,probably, by destroying the category of Whitenessitself.) The fact is though that nobody has any ideahow most people in North America would chose todefine themselves if institutional racism were to actu-ally vanish—if everyone really were left free to definethemselves however they wished. Neither is theremuch point in speculating about it. The question ishow to create a situation where we could find out.

This is what I mean by “liberation in theimaginary.” To think about what it would take to livein a world in which everyone really did have thepower to decide for themselves, individually andcollectively, what sort of communities they wished tobelong to and what sort of identities they wanted totake on—that’s really difficult. To bring about such aworld would be almost unimaginably difficult. Itwould require changing almost everything. It alsowould meet with stubborn, and ultimately violent,opposition from those who benefit the most fromexisting arrangements. To instead write as if theseidentities are already freely created—or largely so—iseasy, and it lets one entirely off the hook for the intri-

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work that, I pointed out, so much of the rhetoricabout “identity” effectively ignores: trying to workout what forms of organization, what forms ofprocess and deliberation, would be required tocreate a world in which people and communitiesare actually free to determine for themselves whatsort of people and communities they wish to be.And what were they told? Effectively, they wereinformed that, since they were Maya, they couldnot possibly have anything to say to the worldabout the processes through which identity isconstructed; or about the nature of political possi-bilities. As Mayas, the only possible political state-ment they could make to non-Mayas would beabout their Maya identity itself. They could assertthe right to continue to be Mayan. They coulddemand recognition as Mayan. But for a Maya tosay something to the world that was not simply acomment on their own Maya-ness would be incon-ceivable.

And who was listening to what they really hadto say?

Largely, it seems, a collection of teenage anar-chists in Europe and North America, who soon beganbesieging the summits of the very global elite towhom anthropologists maintain such an uneasy,uncomfortable, alliance.

But the anarchists were right. I think anthro-pologists should make common cause with them. Wehave tools at our fingertips that could be of enormousimportance for human freedom. Let’s start takingsome responsibility for it. �

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communal traditions, but reformulated to be moreradically egalitarian; some of the Spanish-speakingmilitary leadership of the rebellion were highlyskeptical of whether this could really be applied onthe national level. Ultimately, though, they had todefer to the vision of those they “led by obeying,”as the Zapatista saying went. But the remarkablething was what happened when news of this rebel-lion spread to the rest of the world. It’s here we canreally see the workings of Leve’s “identitymachine.” Rather than a band of rebels with avision of radical democratic transformation, theywere immediately redefined as a band of MayanIndians demanding indigenous autonomy. This ishow the international media portrayed them; this iswhat was considered important about them fromeveryone from humanitarian organizations toMexican bureaucrats to human rights monitors atthe UN. As time went on, the Zapatistas—whosestrategy has from the beginning been dependent ongaining allies in the international community—were increasingly forced to play the indigenouscard as well, except when dealing with their mostcommitted allies.

This strategy has not been entirely ineffective.Ten years later, the Zapatista Army of NationalLiberation is still there, without having hardly hadto fire a shot, if only because they have beenwilling, for the time being, to downplay the“National” part in their name. All I want to empha-size is exactly how patronizing—or, maybe let’s notpull punches here, how completely racist—theinternational reaction to the Zapatista rebellion hasreally been. Because what the Zapatistas wereproposing to do was exactly to begin that difficult

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