WHAT IS ETHNOGENESIS?

And why are the Maya so often described as "culturally anarchist"?

WALKING AWAY FROM CAHOKIA

NOTE: The following is a slightly abbreviated version of an article by Crow Qu’appelle discussing “ethnogenesis”—that is, the formation of a new culture and people by those who abandon a way of life they can no longer accept.

-Tobin Owl

WALKING AWAY FROM CAHOKIA

The essay highlights the abandonment of an advanced precolonial civilization on the banks of the Mississippi called Cahokia, the possible origins of the Hodenosaunee or Iroquois culture, and introduces an excerpt from David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

Those Who Walk Away from Cahokia

by Crow Qu’appelle

I first became aware of the term ethnogenesis through a very good essay entitled Against Identity Politics, which is an individualist anarchist polemic against what came to be known as wokeness.

(Yep! Post left anarchists were against wokeness since before the term woke even existed!)

That essay (which is well worth reading in its entirety), argues that:

[A]narchy should be seen as a form of ethnogenesis: the emergence of a subculture or counterculture which, if able to continue on its line of flight (or détournement ), would become a different culture entirely (New Travellers and, historically, Irish Travellers are good examples).

The emergence of new cultures through ethnogenesis is well-documented, and often stems from flight from state power (Scott), a process which begins with a choice to differ from the majority of an existing group.

It turns out that the idea of ethnogenesis comes from anthropology, and is associated with James Scott, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and David Graeber, as well as post-left Italian Autonomists.

Basically, the idea is that revolutionaries must come together and BECOME A PEOPLE.

As someone who was raised Mennonite, this made instant sense to me. Anabaptism, which emerged from the Radical Reformation, was a revolutionary peasant movement of the 16th century which aimed to free itself from the power of the ruling class.

In other words, anabaptism began as a political project. It began as a counterculture based on the rejection of the legitimacy of the feudal system.

Today, there are around two million Mennonites living around the world, and Mennonites are generally considered an ethnic group as well as a religion.

Basically, ethnogenesis refers to efforts to create counter-cultures which are permanent. Mennonites, therefore, are a perfect example of ethnogenesis.

How many cultures began as conscious political projects? That’s an interesting question, and one that I am particularly interested in due to my fascination with Mayan culture.

The Maya are often described as “culturally anarchist”, and I have spent enough time among them to confirm that this is definitely true. It is no coincidence that the Zapatistas, the most successful revolutionary movement of the past half-century, emerged amongst the Maya.

A bit more than a year ago, I went on a motorcycle adventure through Chiapas and Guatemala where I visited a lot of Mayan archaeological sites, and I was particularly struck by an idea that occurred to me after visiting the ancient city of Po (better known as Tonina), which boasts one of the largest pyramids in the world.

I wrote a piece about it, which you can read here:

In that piece, I speculate about whether the abandonment of Tonina was due to a peasant revolt.

As everyone is aware, the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization remains mysterious to this day, despite the hilariously unconvincing claim that it was because of “drought and income inequality”.

When I visited Tonina, I was struck by an idea - perhaps the reason that the Maya today are culturally anarchist is because they are descended from slaves who succeeded in overthrowing an extremely oppressive regime.

Could the Mayan cultural values of today be traced back to a revolutionary movement in which the working class became ungovernable and abandoned the cities? Could the Zapatistas of today be descended from anarchist revolutionaries who overthrew the rulers of Tonina?

Whereas today the brutality of the system is hidden, obscured, and disguised, it seems that the rulers of Tonina took pleasure in advertising their dominance. I’ve visited many sites before and don’t remember seeing such a vulgar display of power. In Tonina, there was no velvet glove over the iron fist. It’s worth nothing the fall of Tonina was also the ened Classic Mayan civilization. The last ever Long Count date inscription was recorded here, in 909 A.D. I’ve visited a bunch of different Mayan sites, and this one feels more sinister. Perhaps the Mayan ruling class became more and more depraved over time, and somehow brought ruin upon themselves. Maybe they over-consumed resources and exhausted their land base. Maybe they got hooked on weird drugs and went crazy. Or maybe there was a revolution.

Maybe the people finally had enough of building monuments to their oppressors, and overthrew them. Maybe, centuries earlier, they declared their own version of the Zapatista cry of Ya Basta! Despite what you may have heard, the Mayan people didn’t disappear. There are millions upon millions of them throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. What happened is that they abandoned the cities. Maybe they wanted to leave. Maybe the reason they left was because they could. Maybe they preferred working their own land in harmony with nature to lugging rocks around in the hot sun.

According to one source, “The wave of mysterious abandonment that swept through Classic Maya cities ends at this remote city in Chiapas, Mexico. The wave seems to have begun along the Usumacinta River. The last recorded date at Bonampak is 792, at Piedras Negras 795, at Palenque 799, and at Yaxchilán 808. The wave then moved east into the heart of Maya civilization in the Petén region of what is today modern Guatemala and south into Honduras. Quiriguá fell silent in 810, Copán in 822, Caracol in 859, and Tikal in 889. The very last Classic Maya date—909—appears at Toniná. Strangely, no record of impending doom appears anywhere in Maya iconography. Scholars have advanced many possible causes of the collapse—among them plague, famine, earthquake, invasion, and peasant revolt—but the enigma remains.”

That’s right. Peasant revolt.

Maybe the anarchists won.

After writing these words, I did some research and discovered that peasant revolt is actually one possibility archaeologists are considering. I probably will study the fall of Tonina more at some point in the future, because I have a feeling that I’m onto something.

If any archaeology buffs reading this have any tips for me, please hit me up!

Anyway, I was recently very gratified to find out that I am not alone in thinking along these lines.

In the following video, for instance, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber explains how many indigenous nations that exist today began as countercultures who rejected some aspect of the culture that they were previously a part of.

This makes sense. If you find your parents tyrannical, you’re probably going to move out on your own once you’re in a position to do so, aren’t you?

Well, it turns out that it is recurring pattern throughout time that cultures are forever breaking apart and rejoining in various ways.

I really highly recommend watching this talk if you’re interested in ethnogenesis, or in the related concepts of cultural inversion and exodus.

In this talk, David Graeber explains that to a large extent, what we tend to think of as cultures are actually patterns of systematic refusal which emerged in response to political conditions deemed unacceptable to some people within a given society. Those people then separate themselves in some way from that society, becoming culturally distinct in the process. Several generations later, they are an ethnic group.

It turns out that many indigenous nations began in such a way. Of particular interest in the case of Cahokia, the largest ancient metropolis in what is now the U.S.

Now, I’m guessing that most of my readers won’t know much about Cahokia, so here’s a quick backgrounder from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything:

From roughly AD 1050 to 1350 there was, in what’s now East St Louis, a city whose real name has been forgotten, but which is known to history as Cahokia.9 It appears to have been the capital of what James Scott would term a classic budding ‘grain state’, rising magnificently and seemingly from nowhere, around the time that the Song Dynasty ruled in China and the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq. Cahokia’s population peaked at something in the order of 15,000 people; then it abruptly dissolved. Whatever Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its sway, it seems to have ended up being overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of its people. For centuries after its demise the site where the city once stood, and hundreds of miles of river valleys around it, lay entirely devoid of human habitation: a ‘vacant quarter’ (rather like the Forbidden Zone in Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes), a place of ruins and bitter memories.

Successor kingdoms to Cahokia sprang up to the south but then likewise crumbled. By the time Europeans arrived on the eastern seaboard of North America, ‘Mississippian civilization’ – as it has come to be known – was but a distant memory and the descendants of Cahokia’s subjects and neighbours appear to have reorganized themselves into polis-sized tribal republics, in careful ecological balance with their natural environment. What had happened? Were the rulers of Cahokia and other Mississippian cities overthrown by popular uprisings, undermined by mass defection, victims of ecological catastrophe, or (more likely) some intricate mix of all three?

Archaeology may one day supply more definitive answers. Until such time, what we can say with some confidence is that the societies encountered by European invaders from the sixteenth century onwards were the product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate.

Graeber and Wengrow go on to explore the possibility that the Iroquoian people, who are also often described as “culturally anarchist”, began as a conscious rejection of the values represented by Cahokia.

It turns out that Peter Lamborn Wilson (also known as Hakim Bey), has also studied the possibility that the widespread anarchism of indigenous Turtle Islanders at the time of contact with Europeans was an example of cultural inversion.

In any case, what you are about to read is an excerpt from David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, in which the late, great anthropologist explains the idea of ethnogenesis in a way no one else could.

If you haven’t read Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by the way, you’re missing out.

It’s available for free on The Anarchist Library, and you can also find an audio version on YouTube. You can also download it on Anna’s Archive, which is a great place to get free books.

I think ethnogenesis is one of the important ideas to emerge in the past few decades, and I think it should be a more widely known concept.

Honestly, one of the problems with revolutionary theory these days is that we seem to have a kind of naive notion of what revolution even is.

Is revolution a matter of storming the 20th century equivalent of the Winter Palace or the Bastille? How? Where? What happens afterwards? And how would that be different than the “insurrection” of January 6th, 2020?

Really, I think that the goal of anarchists in the 21st century shouldn’t be to directly oppose state power, but to create a counterculture which is eventually able to one day extricate itself from state control. This project should be conceived of as an intergenerational one, and the goal should be to create a culture built to last.

Ethnogenesis. I believe that this should be the goal of revolutionaries today. I believe energy is generally better spent creating the reality one desires rather than seeking conflict with the forces which one opposes.

We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift, and the silhouette of the new paradigm is coming into view. It’s a pretty exciting time to be a radical philosopher!

And with that out of the way, I present:

WHAT IS ETHNOGENESIS?

by David Graeber, taken from Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

At least in the United States, the anarchists who do take anthropology the most seriously are the Primitivists, a small but very vocal faction who argue that the only way to get humanity back on track is to shuck off modernity entirely. Inspired by Marshall Sahlins’ essay “The Original Affluent Society,” they propose that there was a time when alienation and inequality did not exist, when everyone was a huntergathering anarchist, and that therefore real liberation can only come if we abandon “civilization” and return to the Upper Paleolithic, or at least the early Iron Age. In fact we know almost nothing about life in the Paleolithic, other than the sort of thing that can be gleaned from studying very old skulls (i.e., in the Paleolithic people had much better teeth; they also died much more frequently from traumatic head wounds). But what we see in the more recent ethnographic record is endless variety. There were huntergatherer societies with nobles and slaves, there are agrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian. Even in Clastres’ favored stomping grounds in Amazonia, one finds some groups who can justly be described as anarchists, like the Piaroa, living alongside others (say, the warlike Sherente) who are clearly anything but. And “societies” are constantly reforming, skipping back and forth between what we think of as different evolutionary stages.

I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that humans never really lived in the garden of Eden. Knocking the walls down can allow us to see this history as a resource to us in much more interesting ways. Because it works both ways. Not only do we, in industrial societies, still have kinship (and cosmologies); other societies have social movements and revolutions. Which means, among other things, that radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the west coast of Madagascar was divided into a series of related kingdoms under the Maroansetra dynasty. Their subjects were collectively known as the Sakalava. In northwest Madagascar there is now an “ethnic group” ensconced in a somewhat difficult, hilly back country referred to as the Tsimihety. The 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 their hair as a sign of mourning. The Tsimihety were those who refused, and hence rejected the authority of the Sakalava monarchy; to this day they are marked by resolutely egalitarian social organization and practices. They are, in other words, the anarchists of northwest Madagascar. To this day they have maintained a reputation as masters of evasion: under the French, administrators would complain that they could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms with apparently cooperative elders, and return with the equipment a week later only to discover the village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant had moved in with some relative in another part of the country.

What especially interests me here is the principle of “ethnogenesis,” as it’s called nowadays. The Tsimihety are now considered a foko—a people or ethnic group— but their identity emerged as a political project. The desire to live free of Sakalava domination was translated into a desire—one which came to suffuse all social institutions from village assemblies to mortuary ritual—to live in a society free of markers of hierarchy. This then became institutionalized as a way of life of a community living together, which then in turn came to be thought of as a particular “kind” of people, an ethnic group—people who also, since they tend to intermarry, come to be seen as united by common ancestry. It is easier to see this happening in Madagascar where everyone pretty much speaks the same language. But I doubt it is that unusual. The ethnogenesis literature is a fairly new one, but it is becoming increasingly clear that most of human history was characterized by continual social change. Rather than timeless groups living for thousands of years in their ancestral territories, new groups were being created, and old ones dissolving, all the time. Many of what we have come to think of as tribes, or nations, or ethnic groups were originally collective projects of some sort. In the Tsimihety case we are talking about a revolutionary project, at least revolutionary in that sense I have been developing here: a conscious rejection of certain forms of overarching political power which also causes people to rethink and reorganize the way they deal with one another on an everyday basis. Most are not. Some are egalitarian, others are about promoting a certain vision of authority or hierarchy. Still, one is dealing with something very much along the lines of what we’d think of as a social movement; it is just that, in the absence of broadsides, rallies and manifestos, the media through which one can create and demand new forms of (what we’d call) social, economic or political life, to pursue different forms of value, were different: one had to work through literally or figuratively sculpting flesh, through music and ritual, food and clothing, and ways of disposing of the dead. But in part as a result, over time, what were once projects become identities, even ones continuous with nature. They ossify and harden into self-evident truths or collective properties.

A whole discipline could no doubt be invented to understand precisely how this happens: a process in only some ways analogous to Weber’s “routinization of charisma,” full of strategies, reversals, diversions of energy... Social fields which are, in their essence, arenas for the recognition of certain forms of value can become borders to be defended; representations or media of value become numinous powers in themselves; creation slips into commemoration; the ossified remains of liberatory movements can end up, under the grip of states, transformed into what we call “nationalisms” which are either mobilized to rally support for the state machinery or become the basis for new social movements opposed to them.

The critical thing here, it seems to me, is that this petrification does not only apply to social projects. It can also happen to the states themselves. This is a phenomenon theorists of social struggle have rarely fully appreciated.

When the French colonial administration established itself in Madagascar it duly began dividing the population up into a series of “tribes”: Merina, Betsileo, Bara, Sakalava, Vezo, Tsimihety, etc. Since there are few clear distinctions of language, it is easier here, than in most places, to discern some of the principles by which these divisions came about. Some are political. The Sakalava are noted subjects of the Maroantsetra dynasty (which created at least three kingdoms along the West coast). The Tsimihety are those who refused allegiance. Those called the “Merina” are those highland people originally united by allegiance to a king named Andrianampoinimerina; subjects of other highland kingdoms to the south, who the Merina conquered almost immediately thereafter, are referred to collectively as Betsileo.

Some names have to do with where people live or how they make a living: the Tanala are “forest people” on the east coast; on the west coast, the Mikea are hunters and foragers and the Vezo, fisherfolk. But even here there are usually political elements: the Vezo lived alongside the Sakalava monarchies but like the Tsimihety, they managed to remain independent of them because, as legend has it, whenever they learned royal representatives were on the way to visit them, they would all get in their canoes and wait offshore until they went away. Those fishing villages that did succumb became Sakalava, not Vezo.

The Merina, Sakalava, and Betsileo are by far the most numerous however. So most Malagasy, then, are defined, not exactly by their political loyalties, but by the loyalties their ancestors had sometime around 1775 or 1800. The interesting thing is what happened to these identities once the kings were no longer around. Here the Merina and Betsileo seem to represent two opposite possibilities.

Many of these ancient kingdoms were little more than institutionalized extortion systems; insofar as ordinary folk actually participated in royal politics, it was through ritual labor: building royal palaces and tombs, for example, in which each clan was usually assigned some very specific honorific role. Within the Merina kingdom this system ended up being so thoroughly abused that by the time the French arrived, it had been almost entirely discredited and royal rule became, as I mentioned, identified with slavery and forced labor; as a result, the “Merina” now mainly exist on paper. One never hears anyone in the countryside referring to themselves that way except perhaps in essays they have to write in school. The Sakalava are quite another story. Sakalava is still very much a living identity on the West coast, and it continues to mean, followers of the Maroantsetra dynasty. But for the last hundred and fifty years or so, the primary loyalties of most Sakalava have been to the members of this dynasty who are dead. While living royalty are largely ignored, the ancient kings’ tombs are still continually rebuilt and redecorated in vast communal projects and this is what being Sakalava is seen largely to be about. And dead kings still make their wishes known—through spirit mediums who are usually elderly women of commoner descent.

In many other parts of Madagascar as well, it often seems that no one really takes on their full authority until they are dead. So perhaps the Sakalava case is not that extraordinary. But it reveals one very common way of avoiding the direct effects of power: if one cannot simply step out of its path, like the Vezo or Tsimihety, one can, as it were, try to fossilize it. In the Sakalava case the ossification of the state is quite literal: the kings who are still worshipped take the physical form of royal relics, they are literally teeth and bones. But this approach is probably far more commonplace than we would be given to suspect.

Kajsia Eckholm for example has recently made the intriguing suggestion that the kind of divine kingship Sir James Frazer wrote about in The Golden Bough, in which kings were hedged about with endless ritual and taboo (not to touch the earth, not to see the sun...), was not, as we normally assume, an archaic form of kingship, but in most cases, a very late one.

She gives the example of the Kongo monarchy, which when the Portugese first showed up in the late fifteenth century doesn’t seem to have been particularly more ritualized than the monarchy in Portugal or Spain at the same time. There was a certain amount of court ceremonial, but nothing that got in the way of governing. It was only later, as the kingdom collapsed into civil war and broke into tinier and tinier fragments, that its rulers became increasingly sacred beings. Elaborate rituals were created, restrictions multiplied, until by the end we read about “kings” who were confined to small buildings, or literally castrated on ascending the throne. As a result they ruled very little; most BaKongo had in fact passed to a largely self-governing system, though also a very tumultuous one, caught in the throes of the slavetrade.

Is any of this relevant to contemporary concerns? Very much so, it seems to me. Autonomist thinkers in Italy have, over the last couple decades, developed a theory of what they call revolutionary “exodus.” It is inspired in part by particularly Italian conditions—the broad refusal of factory work among young people, the flourishing of squats and occupied “social centers” in so many Italian cities... But in all this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory for future social movements, anticipating trends that are now beginning to happen on a global scale.

The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called “engaged withdrawal,” mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community. One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular 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 the very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.

One Autonomist historian, Yann Moulier Boutang, has even argued that the history of capitalism has been a series of attempts to solve the problem of worker mobility—hence the endless elaboration of institutions like indenture, slavery, coolie systems, contract workers, guest workers, innumerable forms of border control—since, if the system ever really came close to its own fantasy version of itself, in which workers were free to hire on and quit their work wherever and whenever they wanted, the entire system would collapse. It’s for precisely this reason that the one most consistent demand put forward by the radical elements in the globalization movement—from the Italian Autonomists to North American anarchists—has always been global freedom of movement, “real globalization,” the destruction of borders, a general tearing down of walls.

The kind of tearing down of conceptual walls I’ve been proposing here makes it possible for us not only to confirm the importance of defection, it promises an infinitely richer conception of how alternative forms of revolutionary action might work. This is a history which has largely yet to be written, but there are glimmerings.

Peter Lamborn Wilson has produced the brightest of these, in a series of essays which include reflections, on, among other things, the collapse of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures through much of eastern North America. These were societies apparently dominated by priestly elites, castebased social structures, and human sacrifice—which mysteriously disappeared, being replaced by far more egalitarian hunter/gathering or horticultural societies. He suggests, interestingly enough, that the famous Native American identification with nature might not really have been a reaction to European values, but to a dialectical possibility within their own societies from which they had quite consciously run away. The story continues through the defection of the Jamestown settlers, a collection of servants abandoned in the first North American colony in Virginia by their gentleman patrons, who apparently ended up becoming Indians, to an endless series of “pirate utopias,” in which British renegades teamed up with Muslim corsairs, or joined native communities from Hispaniola to Madagascar, hidden “triracial” republics founded by escaped slaves at the margins of European settlements, Antinomians, and other little-known libertarian enclaves that riddled the continent even before the Shakers and Fourierists and all the betterknown nineteenth-century “intentional communities.”

Most of these little utopias were even more marginal than the Vezo or Tsimihety were in Madagascar; all of them were eventually gobbled up. Which leads to the question of how to neutralize the state apparatus itself, in the absence of a politics of direct confrontation. No doubt some states and corporate elites will collapse of their own dead weight; a few already have; but it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which they all will. Here, the Sakalava and BaKongo might be able to provide us some useful suggestions. What cannot be destroyed can, nonetheless, be diverted, frozen, transformed, and gradually deprived of its substance—which in the case of states, is ultimately their capacity to inspire terror. What would this mean under contemporary conditions? It’s not entirely clear. 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. But no doubt there are ways in which it is happening already. As Neoliberal states move towards new forms of feudalism, concentrating their guns increasingly around gated communities, insurrectionary spaces open up that we don’t even know about. The Merina rice farmers described in the last section understand what many would-be revolutionaries do not: that there are times when the stupidest thing one could possibly do is raise a red or black flag and issue defiant declarations. Sometimes the sensible thing is just to pretend nothing has changed, allow official state representatives to keep their dignity, even show up at their offices and fill out a form now and then, but otherwise, ignore them.

Thanks for reading To The Root! All articles are available free in view of the desperate need of humanity to awaken to the perils of global corporatocracy and deception and to seek out a better way of living based on transparency, mutual aid and simplicity.

Tobin Owl is an independent researcher/writer. Over the past three years he’s conducted in-depth investigation focusing on the history of modern medicine, medical science, geopolitical conspiracy and the environment. Articles written prior to his move to Substack are found on his website Cry For The Earth

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