Fragment's of an Anarchist Anthropology

From: Dan Clore (clore_at_columbia-center.org)
Date: 08/28/04 

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 22:24:32 -0700

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Title: Jason Adams, "David Graeber's Anarchist Anthropology"
Date: Wednesday August 04 2004, @08:40AM
Author: jim
Topic: Book Reviews
from the contesting-all-forms dept.
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/08/04/1651239

"On the Inseparability of High Theory and Low Theory:
A Critical Review of David Graeber's Fragments of an
Anarchist Anthropology"

reviewed by Jason Adams

While it is somewhat surprising, it certainly is fitting
that a book series edited by Marsall Sahlins should produce
a book such as David Graeber's recent offering, which
attempts to lay the groundwork for what he hopes will
develop into an 'anarchist anthropology'. Indeed, in the
last three decades of the twentieth century, it was the work
of Sahlins and other critical anthropologists such as
Richard Lee and Pierre Clastres that produced some of the
most outstanding changes within anarchist theory.

In this time of new social movements (ranging from
environmentalism to indigenism to feminism and beyond), the
academic authority of critical anthropological theory was
one of the most important factors that allowed the former
predominance of 'class struggle' anarchism to move into its
current position as but one of many other forms of
legitimate political contestation, thus eternally
pluralizing the terrain on which all forms of domination
might be challenged.

This diversification of anarchist political theory is easily
discovered for instance, in such important developments as
the social-ecological thought of Murray Bookchin, the
ontological anarchism of Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson),
and the anarchist-primitivism of John Zerzan, each of which
made their highly influential arguments through reference to
these anthropologists, as well as Frankfurt School figures
like Horkheimer and Adorno, and at times, poststructuralist
theorists like Foucault, Deleuze and Irigaray.

The critical turn within anthropology that inadvertently
brought this change about within anarchism was one that
initially sought to counter earlier chauvinist
interpretations of non-Western societies, which tended to
assume as "common-sense" the racist Hobbesian fable which
holds that those political communities which are not the
product of modern territorial states necessarily revert to a
violent, tyrannical war of "all against all".

In opposition to such fantastic yet nonetheless pervasive
ideas, these critical anthropologists demonstrated to the
contrary that while they did not have SUVs, computers or
cell phones, such "primitive" societies actually tended to
work far fewer hours per week than we do today, whilst
easily meeting the daily food, clothing and shelter needs of
the entire population, a feat paradoxically unheard of in
our overdeveloped technological societies of today (which,
of course, are supposed to be the 'affluent' societies).

So this is why Graeber's book is so important at this
particular moment, an unparalleled time in which anarchism
has suddenly attained a status within academia comparable to
that of Marxism several generations earlier. It "completes
the circle", so that rather than critical anthropology
always being the driving force transforming the outer limits
of anarchist discourse, anarchism itself can help to
transform the discipline of of anthropology as well (as well
as political science, sociology and so on).

Because he pursues this line from a perspective that is
rooted in the anarchistic practice of the antigloblization
movement, his framework seems to hold far more potentiality
than the increasingly worn approaches of either Bookchin or
Zerzan, though not perhaps, of Hakim Bey. Neither
romanticizing nor condemning tribal societies, Graeber
argues that "what we see in the more recent ethnographic
record is endless variety. There were hunter-gatherer
societies with nobles and slaves, there are agrarian
societies that are fiercely egalitarian", with the
implication that "other societies have social movements and
revolutions" as well, which means that the long history from
which contemporary radicals can draw for examples of
anarchism in practice is actually much more expansive than
previously assumed.

To this end, he shows how in a process commonly referred to
as "ethnogenesis", many of the more egalitarian tribes were
founded as the result of a radical political rebellion
within already-established tribes (as was the case for
instance, in the Tsimihety people who refused to follow the
customs of the authoritarian Sakalava monarchy in 16th
century Madagascar).

This surprisingly common occurrence is then compared to that
which Italian autonomists such of Paolo Virno have described
as revolutionary 'exodus', an example of which is the mass
defection of working class youth from official society
through the refusal of factory labor and the creation of a
drop-out culture of squats, social centers, and other
autonomous institutions in the Seventies.

Yet despite the many positive aspects of this essay, Graeber
makes his biggest mistake when he assumes that what he calls
'low theory' (movement-based theory that supposedly recieves
no influence from the likes of elitist academic thinkers) is
necessarily superior in terms of its antiauthoritarian
potentiality to that of 'high theory' (academia-based theory
that pays no attention to social movements and functions
only within a closed circuit).

Ironically this may be due not so much to an anarchist
concern with dislodging all forms of domination and
authority, as it is to the self-avowed importance of Marxist
"materialism" in the backdrop of his intellectual pedigree.
This form of thought is one that argues that ideas are
always the products of material conditions and that
therefore, to ever dare to suggest that the opposite might
also be true (that ideas are also important in the bringing
about of new material realities), is inherently "idealist"
and thus elitist in orientation since ideas are typically
monopolized by academics.

While his intentions ar admirable, Graeber thereby sets up a
binary opposition between 'theory' and 'practice' where the
former is made to reek of an increasingly stale Marxism,
while the latter is made to exude the freshness of an
increasingly popular anarchism, even though ironically the
very basis for this claim is a fundamentally Marxist one.

But in fact it is not hard to see that both theory and
practice are of equal importance and that they are actually
so thoroughly interwoven that they are totally inseperable
from one another. Really, is it any better to fetishize
action as more important than theory if that action is based
on outdated or irrelevant theory, which results in actions
that waste our time and undermine our collective potentialities?

Certainly the rethinking and reframing of identities that
was the major focus of the new social movements that emerged
in the wake of the Sixties was based on this idea: if the
experience of being "gay" (a term that is always negatively
defined by its "straight" opposite) could be reframed under
the reappropriated and radicalized label "queer", as is
suggested in the work of Foucault, sexuality for instance,
could thus become not merely a space for pleasure, but for
radical political resistance as well.

This process of reframing how reality is understood is
really what so-called "High Theory" is all about (we will
get to this shortly), and therefore it should be of
considerable importance to anyone who wishes to challenge
not only capitalism and statism but also all other forms of
domination and coersion as well.

To be fair, Graeber does at one point say that what is
needed is a "diversity of high theoretical perspectives",
and that his concept of "low theory" would be "a way of
grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge
from a transformative project", but the route through which
he arrives at this conclusion is only made possible by way
of some quite ironically non-consensus-seeking "smackdowns"
of those contemporary radical perspectives with which he
apparently disagrees, such as those of poststructuralists.

While academics like Radcliffe-Brown, Mauss and Sorel are
deemed worthy of his respect, for some reason Foucault,
Baudrillard and Virilo and the like are not, despite the
fact that they are all equally privileged in terms of status
and all equally engaged in actually existing social movements.

Perhaps the strangest part of the dialogue which he
generates in this book is the point where he argues that in
order to create an anarchist social theory we would have to
get rid of any trace of vanguardism, which is fair enough in
and of itself, but is then very akwardly followed by the
phrase, "this is one area where I think anthopology is
particularly well-positioned to help". How would this 'help'
not be vanguardist when the 'help' of thinkers like Foucault
is portrayed in such a way that it would be? Rather than
look at those who are creating viable alternatives and
trying to lead them in authoritarian fashion by issuing off
'prescriptions' (which most of his intellectual targets have
never done), Graeber argues that radical intellectuals
instead should "try to figure out what might be the larger
implications of what they are (already) doing, and then
offer those ideas back . . . as gifts" (which, without
explaining how, he insists would be a directly democratic
process).

However, while most of those who are influenced by
poststructuralist thought are summarily dismissed by such
passages as "academics love Michel Foucault's argument that
identifies knowledge and power, and insist that brute force
is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it
because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who
like to think of themselves as radicals even though all they
do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other
people in an institutional environment", he does give credit
to the likes of Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), whose
writings he says demonstrate that rebellion does indeed
occur within tribal societies (such as the Hopewell and the
Mississippian) and that often hierarchical structures were
swept away by civil unrest so that more egalitarian
hunter-gatherer societies could take over in their place.

Likewise, Graeber draws attention to Wilson's work on the
hundreds of mixed-race 'maroon' communities (comprised of
runaway European servants, African slaves and their
sympathetic American Indian counterparts) such as the
Melungeons, the Brass-Ankles and the Wee-Sorts that once
populated large swaths of the American East Coast, all of
which of course give further credence to his preferred
autonomist theory of exodus as a viable method of
resistance. But here we must ask, is this to assert that
Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown and company were somehow not
academics, or alternatively, that Foucault was somehow not
also engaged in radical social movements, such as for
instance prison abolition, queer liberation and the very
Italian Autonomia movement Graeber champions? Especially
since he later concedes that "all social orders are in some
sense at war with themselves. Those unwilling to establish
an apparatus of violence for enforcing decisions necessarily
have to develop an apparatus for creating and maintaining
social consensus, at least in the minimal sense of ensuring
malcontents can still feel they have freely chosen to go
along with bad decisions", the critical reader of this book
is forced to ask such questions about the contradictions
that lie within.

While Graeber says that the dismissal non-anthropologists
often give him and his colleagues is largely due to the
critical reflection of its practitioners on their collective
culpability in imperial power, and that this merely serves
to justify their continuing ignorance about 90% of human
history, this criticism could even more gracefully be
applied to his dismissive remarks about poststructuralist
academics, who make points about knowledge and power that
quite frankly are NOT AT ALL flattering to academics, since
their beloved 'disciplines' are unveiled as the bureaucratic
machines of power reproduction that they were created to be
in the first place. When he says that the information
anthropologists have could be very useful if it were not
seen as 'shameful' knowledge, (i.e., drenched in the blood
of millions of indigenous peoples, which it is), and rather
as the universal and common heritage of humanity that should
be opened up to all, the very same thing could be said of
'high theory', which as I have written elsewhere, is not the
product only of a few intelligent heads but is actually the
result of the social and political specificities of a
particular time and place: the rebellion of May 1968
throughout France and much of the rest of Europe as well.
Thus a more productive way to think of 'low theory' would be
to open both the (justifiably) hated disciplines of
anthropology and philosophy to radical reflection and
participation from the broader community, and drawing on a
range of sources: indeed this is why the more
interdisciplinary tradition of Cultural Studies is so
important, because it draws not only on the work of
'European philosophers' (as suggested), but also, and
ironically so, on the ethnography, history and culture of
non-Western peoples all over the world (which is essentially
what he proposes to do with anthropology, except minus the
European philosophers). Yet Graeber denies this possibility
as well, arguing that by positing that people are always
engaged in acts of resistance at every moment, the logic
propping up Cultural Studies "comes to echo that of global
capitalism", because he assumes, erroneously, that the only
thing that matters to them is the politics of identity and
not of other forms of domination such as statism or capitalism.

Early on in the book, Graeber suggests that in addition to
anarchist anthropology, the cultivation of an anarchist
sociology, economics, literary theory and political science
might also be worthwhile projects, the latter of which is
something I personally am particularly interested in
promoting since that is the 'discipline' that I have chosen
for my graduate school work. But as interesting as that
sounds, would it not be more exciting to begin to undermine
the artificial separation of these disciplines in the first
place, since it is precisely through this separation that
the possibility of intellectual vanguards (i.e.,
disciplinary experts and specialists) comes about in the
first place? Instead of an anarchist anthropology then,
perhaps what we would be working towards would be an
anarchist cultural studies, one which would of course draw
on anthropology, but which would not allow itself to be
captured within the limits of that framework. Graeber grasps
at this possibility when he acknowledges the strangeness
that 'exotic societies' are deemed the exclusive subject of
anthropology, while our own societies are the subject of the
other remaining human sciences, but he does not continue
with this thread to its possible liberatory conclusion.

After all, if anarchism is about anything, it is about the
abolition of coercion, and certainly academic disciplines
are nothing if not coercive, they are 'forced intellectual
labor camps', and thus if we wish to create an anarchist
space within academia, we will inevitably be drawn toward
some form of interdisciplinary inquiry that would undermine
the current division of labor with which the current
relations of knowledge, violence and power are constituted
(Foucault never claims that knowledge completely replaced
violence, as Graeber implies, only that the relationship had
shifted and that they all coexist at once). Such an
anarchist approach to interdisciplinarity would not be one
based on the universalizing illusion of consensus, but one
that would accept the theory of exodus as its primary
structure, one in which BOTH voluntary association and
dissociation would be accepted and promoted alike.

Dissensus is no less important than consensus and this is so
precisely because of the relationship between power and
knowledge that Graeber dismisses as unimportant; if the
rules of consensus are understood well by one person in the
group and not by the others, that individual automatically
has more power than the others and he or she can manipulate
it at will (as he admits, "one could go on at length about
the elaborate and surprisingly sophisticated methods that
have been developed").

Graeber's book is important for many reasons and will
undoubtedly be widely read, but it will not accomplish its
stated goal of developing an anarchist anthropology unless
it contests all forms of domination, including those enacted
by the artificial division of disciplines themselves, which
would of course mean that the category 'anthropology' would
cease to be a relevant distinction. 

-- 
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
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