# Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology #Resource ## Blowing Up walls Perhaps existing state apparati will gradually be reduced to window-dressing as the substance is pulled out of them from above and below: i.e., both from the growth of international institutions, and from devolution to local and regional forms of self-governance. Perhaps government by media spectacle will devolve into spectacle pure and simple (somewhat along the lines of what Paul Lafargue, Marx’s West Indian 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 social function in the entertainment industry). More likely it will happen in ways we cannot even anticipate. ## Tenets of a Non-existent Science An adequate theory of states would then have to begin by distinguishing in each case between the relevant ideal of rulership (which can be almost anything, a need to enforce military style discipline, the ability to provide perfect theatrical representation of gracious living which will inspire others, the need to provide the gods with endless human hearts to fend off the apocalypse. . .), and the mechanics of rule, without assuming that there is necessarily all that much correspondence between them. (There might be. But this has to be empirically established.) For example: much of the mythology of “the West” goes back to Herodotus’ description of an epochal clash between the Persian Empire, based on an ideal of obedience and absolute power, and the Greek cities of Athens and Sparta, based on ideals of civic autonomy, freedom and equality. It’s not that these ideas—especially their vivid representations in poets like Aeschylus or historians like Herodotus—are not important. One could not possibly understand Western history without them. But their very importance and vividness long blinded historians to what is becoming the increasingly clear reality: that whatever its ideals, the Achmaenid Empire was a pretty light touch when it came to the day-to-day control of its subjects’ lives, particularly in comparison with the degree of control exercised by Athenians over their slaves or Spartans over the overwhelming majority of the Laconian population, who were helots. Whatever the ideals, the reality, for most people involved, was much the other way around. I have myself suggested that one reason the territorial nation-state ended up winning out was because, in this early stage of globalization, Western elites were trying to model themselves on China, the only state in existence at the time which actually seemed to conform to their ideal of a uniform population, who in Confucian terms were the source of sovereignty, creators of a vernacular literature, subject to a uniform code of laws, administered by bureaucrats chosen by merit, trained in that vernacular literature. . . At the very least we need a proper theory of the history of wage labor, and relations like it. Since after all, it is in performing wage labor, not in buying and selling, that most humans now waste away most of their waking hours and it is that which makes them miserable. (Hence the IWW didn’t say they were “anti-capitalist,” much though they were; they got right to the point and said they were “against the wage system.”) The earliest wage labor contracts we have on record appear to be really about the rental of slaves. What about a model of capitalism that sets out from that? Where anthropologists like Jonathan Friedman argue that ancient slavery was really just an older version of capitalism, we could just as easily—actually, a lot more easily—argue that modern capitalism is really just a newer version of slavery. Instead of people selling us or renting us out we rent out ourselves. But it’s basically the same sort of arrangement. Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do not create stupidity. They are ways of managing situations that are already inherently stupid because they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of force. as anthropologists are aware, just about every known human community which has to come to group decisions has employed some variation of what I’m calling “consensus process”—every one, that is, which is not in some way or another drawing on the tradition of ancient Greece. Majoritarian democracy, in the formal, Roberts Rules of Order-type sense rarely emerges of its own accord. It’s curious that almost no one, anthropologists included, ever seems to ask oneself why this should be. The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles—is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over and over, across the world, from Australia to Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred some variation on consensus process. Why? The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision—either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored. #Politics/Democracy --- Once during the protests before the World Economic Forum, a kind of junket of tycoons, corporate flacks and politicians, networking and sharing cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria, pretended to be discussing ways to alleviate global poverty. I was invited to engage in a radio debate with one of their representatives. As it happened the task went to another activist but I did get far enough to prepare a three-point program that I think would have taken care of the problem nicely: • an immediate amnesty on international debt (An amnesty on personal debt might not be a bad idea either but it’s a different issue.) • an immediate cancellation of all patents and other intellectual property rights related to technology more than one year old • the elimination of all restrictions on global freedom of travel or residence The rest would pretty much take care of itself. The moment the average resident of Tanzania, or Laos, was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis or Rotterdam, the government of every rich and powerful country in the world would certainly decide nothing was more important than finding a way to make sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred to stay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come up with something? An hypothesis. Majoritarian democracy was, in its origins, essentially a military institution. Of course it’s the peculiar bias of Western historiography that this is the only sort of democracy that is seen to count as “democracy” at all. We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history—many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that must have existed before 500 BCE—and obviously, they must have had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions for matters of collective importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures, whatever they might have been, could not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.” ## Against consensus voting The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles—is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over and over, across the world, from Australia to Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred some variation on consensus process. Why? The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision—either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored. Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide: 1. a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and 2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions. For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will. It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to make everything into a public contest, from athletics to philosophy or tragic drama or just about anything else. So it might not seem entirely surprising that they made political decision-making into a public contest as well. Even more crucial though was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in arms. Aristotle, in his Politics, remarks that the constitution of a Greek city-state will normally depend on the chief arm of its military: if this is cavalry, it will be an aristocracy, since horses are expensive. If hoplite infantry, it will have an oligarchy, as all could not afford the armor and training. If its power was based in the navy or light infantry, one could expect a democracy, as anyone can row, or use a sling. In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would 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 allowed to enter the city of Rome. And when Machiavelli revived the notion of a democratic republic at the dawn of the “modern” era, he immediately reverted to the notion of a populace in arms. This in turn might help explain the term “democracy” itself, which appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its elitist opponents: it literally means the “force” or even “violence” of the people. Kratos, not archos. The elitists who coined the term always considered democracy not too far from simple rioting or mob rule; though of course their solution was the permanent conquest of the people by someone else. And ironically, when they did manage to suppress democracy for this reason, which was usually, the result was that the only way the general populace’s will was known was precisely through rioting, a practice that became quite institutionalized in, say, imperial Rome or eighteenth-century England. --- Many years ago a French anthropologist named Gerard Althabe wrote a book about Madagascar called Oppression et Liberation dans l’Imaginaire. It’s a catchy phrase. I think it might well be applied to what ends up happening in a lot of anthropological writing. For the most part, what we call “identities” here, in what Paul Gilroy likes to call the “over-developed world,” are forced on people. Also available from Prickly Paradigm Press: Paradigm 1 Waiting for Foucault, Still Marshall Sahlins Paradigm 2 War of the Worlds: What about Peace? Bruno Latour Paradigm 3 Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty Richard Rorty, Derek Nystrom, and Kent Puckett Paradigm 4 The Secret Sins of Economics Deirdre McCloskey Paradigm 5 New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right Thomas Frank Paradigm 6 Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to “W” Michael Silverstein Paradigm 7 Revolt of the Masscult Chris Lehmann Paradigm 8 The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness Donna Haraway Paradigm 9 9/12: New York After Eliot Weinberger Paradigm 10 On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews) James Clifford Paradigm 11 The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy’s Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo Magnus Fiskesjö Paradigm 12 The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got its Start Richard Price and Sally Price Paradigm 13 What Happened to Art Criticism? James Elkins Paradigm 14 Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology David Graeber Paradigm 15 Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship Lindsay Waters Paradigm 16 The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained Harry Harootunian Paradigm 17 Intellectual Complicity: The State and Its Destructions Bruce Kapferer Paradigm 18 The Hitman’s Dilemma: Or, Business, Personal and Impersonal Keith Hart Paradigm 19 The Law in Shambles Thomas Geoghegan Paradigm 20 The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How The Democrats Can Once Again Become America’s Dominant Political Party Rick Perlstein Paradigm 21 Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World Paul Werner Paradigm 22 Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology Susan McKinnon Paradigm 23 Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA Grant Farred Paradigm 24 The Turn of the Native Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Flávio Gordon, and Francisco Araújo Paradigm 25 The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination, and Baseball John D. Kelly Paradigm 26 “Culture” and Culture: Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights Manuela Carneiro da Cunha Paradigm 27 Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism Danny Postel Paradigm 28 Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe Matti Bunzl Paradigm 29 Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror Bruce Holsinger Paradigm 30 Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy Dominic Boyer