Why I'm on Team Human.
Why I'm on Team Human.
And why Anarchists should study Anthropology
Hey Gang,
Lately, I have been on a big anthropology kick.
Why, you ask? Well, Nevermore is basically all about rethinking things. Back in 2020, we realized that there was a major need for anarchists to engage in a project of political reorientation.
There was the immediate issue of COVID, and the obsession of the woke left with race and gender had become ridiculous, but the problem went far beyond that.
Basically, postmodernism had destroyed the Left. Many people no longer seemed committed to the idea that moral principles should be applied universally, or even that universal moral principles existed in the first place.
This is a problem if your goal happens to be political organizing, which is largely a matter of building consensus through discussion, debate, and persuasion. If people can’t even agree on basic notions of right and wrong, they’re not likely to accomplish much.
We felt called, therefore, to audit our own belief systems, and this led us to political anthropology. This led us in some very interesting directions.
If you think about it, politics begins with certain assumptions about human beings. Some types of social organization are presumed to be viable because they are well-suited to human nature, whereas others will not.
Many people today have quite bleak views of human nature, and I find that I am more optimistic than a lot of people are. I guess I just have more faith in humanity than some people do.
I get that some humans are evil, and do horrible things to each other, but I see human beings in general as pretty amazing creatures, and life itself as a mind-blowing, incredible gift.
I’m continually amazed by the miracle that we even exist at all. It’s truly, incomprehensibly awe-inspiring that the universe exists, and that we get to be apart of it.
I’ve also become very critical of the horribly anti-human attitudes promoted by fake-green globalists, and it kind of makes me want to stand up for humanity, you know?
Why are some humans are so anti-human that they want to eliminate the majority of the Earth’s population?
I’m a big believer in being on your own side, and guess what? I’m human, and so are you. Are we going to let Yuval fucking Harari tell us that we’re nothing but “hackable animals”?
I don’t know about you, but I’m on Team Human.
What you are about to read is a review of an excellent book by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who died mysteriously in 2020.
Enjoy!
For the Wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
A REVIEW OF DAVID GRAEBER’S FRAGMENTS OF AN ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGY
by Crow Qu’appelle
What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos—all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future.
Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn’t—or, for that matter, why an anarchist sociology doesn’t exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political science.
So begins the classic pamphlet Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which David Graeber published in 2004.
In the opening chapter, Graeber raises the question of why there are so few anarchists in the academy, wondering whether anarchism would, at some point, create a body of theory that would replace outdated Marxist critiques.
He then points out that if anarchists actually want to create stateless societies, they should study anthropology, saying:
Anthropologists are after all the only group of scholars who know anything about actually-existing stateless societies; many have actually lived in corners of the world where states have ceased to function or at least temporarily pulled up stakes and left, and people are managing their own affairs autonomously; if nothing else, they are keenly aware that the most commonplace assumptions about what would happen in the absence of a state (“but people would just kill each other!”) are factually untrue.
It’s worth noting that David Graeber earned his PhD by conducting ethnographic fieldwork in highland Madagascar, so he did know what he was talking about.
Graeber goes to talk about how some early twentieth-century anthropologists, such as Robert Graves, Al Brown, and Marcel Mauss, were politically radical, but that the affinity between anarchism and anthropology seemed to evaporate over time.
He finds this odd, noting that:
[Anthropology is] the only discipline in a position to make generalizations about humanity as a whole—since it is the only discipline that actually takes all of humanity into account, and is familiar with all the anomalous cases… Yet it resolutely refuses to do so.
In search of an explanation, he mentions the dark history of anthropology, which often play key roles in the process of colonization and conquest. The ugly truth is that many of the societies anthropologists described no longer exist, and that in many cases anthropologists were plagued by guilt, feeling that they had played some role in destroying the societies they studied.
The discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder—much like most modern academic disciplines, actually, including geography, and botany, not even to mention ones like mathematics, linguistics or robotics, which still are, but anthropologists, since their work tends to involve getting to know the victims personally, have ended up agonizing over this in ways that the proponents of other disciplines have almost never done.
He goes, however, to point out the value of the anthropological record, saying:
While anthropologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about, that very body of comparative ethnography is seen as something shameful. As I mentioned, it is treated not as the common heritage of humankind, but as our dirty little secret.
Rather than a manifesto, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is really just David Graeber thinking aloud about a much paradigm shift in contemporary political theory. He is clearly convinced that anthropology provides certain important insights which could then be applied to political organizing.
Indeed, the book contains many interesting ideas that I won’t be able to cover them all.
I encourage people to read it. It is available for free on The Anarchist Library here, and can also be downloaded from Anna’s Archive, which is a great place to download free books.
There’s also a free audio version available on YouTube.
THE MYTH OF BARTER
One of the biggest achievements of David Graeber’s career was to disprove certain assumptions about economics.
Specifically, he debunked the Myth of Barter.
Until recently, it was received wisdom amongst economists that before the widespread adoption of money as a medium of exchange, human economies were based on barter.
This is known as the Myth of Barter, and originated with Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, the founding text of modern economics.
According to the Myth of Barter, if I have chickens and you have carrots, the only way to conduct trade is by deciding how many chickens are equivalent to how many carrots, then exchanging them.
As you can imagine, this would be cumbersome, because trade would only be possible between two people who each have something that the other wanted.
If you want a fun illustration of the problem with the Myth of Barter, I refer to this video:
Economists have been telling and retelling the Myth of Barter since Smith because it allows them to frame the invention of money as a huge technological breakthrough.
There’s only one problem - anthropologists have never found any society anywhere in the world which is based on a barter economy.
It turns out that the basic unit of exchange in traditional societies was not the transaction, but the gift. This is what anarchists are talking about when they use the term “Gift Economy”.
Anthropologists have known this for a long time. Graeber was a great admirer of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, pointing out that the Frenchman had proven in his 1925 Essay on the Gift that:
[T]here has never been an economy based on barter: that actually-existing societies which do not employ money have instead been gift economies in which the distinctions we now make between interest and altruism, person and property, freedom and obligation, simply did not exist.
Wrap your mind around that one. Apparently, throughout most of the time that human beings have existed, we’ve just operated on the basis of “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”.
This is one of the main claims that anarchists like to make - that politics need not be conceived of as a zero-sum game, and that everyone would be better off if we all helped each other out instead of trying to step all over them trying to get our way.
Basically, anarchists believe that human beings, left to our own devices, are perfectly capable of working together so as to ensure that everyone has everything they need.
If this wasn’t true, the human species wouldn’t have lasted until now. Human nature predisposes human beings towards cooperation because working together improves our odds of survival. It’s that simple.
No one of this is to say that human beings don’t exchange in trade - they definitely do. Typically, however, this occurs between members of different tribes or bands, and trade meetings are often highly ritualized and bound up in cultural mechanisms that can be quite mystifying.
Basically, trade between neighbouring tribes inherently contains a risk of violence, thus certain cultural mechanisms are developed to foster a spirit of friendship. Food, music, dance, sports, games, and speeches are typical features of trading ceremonies.
This is all very fascinating because it suggests that human beings have innate instincts towards sharing.
Anarchists claim that human nature predisposes us towards cooperation, as do Marxists.
One thing that anarchists and Marxists can agree about is that human societies should function on the basis of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
Karl Marx described this as “primitive communism”, which I would accept as a rough synonym for anarchism were it not for the negative connotations of both words.
Although the word “communist” has been tainted for a long time, anarchists basically believe that humans are hard wired for egalitarianism. Basically, we’re pack animals and our mammalian instincts lead us to conceive of survival as a collective project.
This view, by the way, is endorsed by leading anthropologists today.
If someone like Jared Diamond, Jordan Peterson, Yuval Harari, Stephen Pinker, or Francis Fukuyama tries to tell you that modern science has proven that human beings are nasty, brutish creatures engaged in a war of all against all, don’t believe them.
The claim that human beings can self-organize in the absence of coercive institutions is one that anarchists have been making for centuries.
One of the most important books ever written by an anarchist was Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid - A Factor in Evolution.
That book, which was written to refute social darwinists who had a very bleak view of human nature, establishes how strong human instincts towards cooperation are.
More recent research has confirmed Kropotkin’s view, by the way.
If you happen to be interested in what psychology has to say about human nature, I would suggest looking into the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini, who identified the concept of reciprocity as one of six universal principles of influence.
Personally, I think reciprocity is just another word for mutual aid, and I think it’s important to remember that although we do have competitive urges, we have cooperative ones too. We aren’t nearly so cursed by our mammalian instincts as some people tend to think.
MAJORITARIAN DEMOCRACY IS A SHAM
In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber also points out that majoritarian democracy is rarely, if ever, practiced by egalitarian societies.
In fact, 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.
This is a profound question, and not one that I can ever recall hearing anyone ask. Even more impressive is that Graeber then manages answer his own question brilliantly!
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.” […]
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:
a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and
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.
In other words, majoritarian democracy is a scam. Don’t forget it!
TOWARDS THE LIBERATION OF THE IMAGINARY
For all its flashes of brilliance, Graeber is quite humble in Fragments. He is clearly very daunted by the task of at hand, because really what he is talking about is the founding of a whole new academic discipline.
Who really has the means, in discussing, say, conceptions of desire, or imagination, or the self, or sovereignty, to consider everything Chinese or Indian or Islamic thinkers have had to say on the matter in addition to the Western canon, let alone folk conceptions prevalent in hundreds of Oceanic or Native American societies as well? It’s just too daunting.
As a result, anthropologists no longer produce many broad theoretical generalizations at all…
Graeber goes on to conclude that what is holding us back as a society is our own inability to imagine something better, and that anthropology is full of examples of things that we could learn from, proposing that what is needed is a “liberation of the imaginary” - in other words, a revolution in our minds about what the possibilities are.
In other words, in other to change the world, we must first change ourselves.
Hmm, where have I heard that one before?
This is what I mean by “liberation in the imaginary.” To think about what it would take to live in a world in which everyone really did have the power to decide for themselves, individually and collectively, what sort of communities they wished to belong to and what sort of identities they wanted to take on—that’s really difficult.
To bring about such a world would be almost unimaginably difficult. It would require changing almost everything. It also would meet with stubborn, and ultimately violent, opposition from those who benefit the most from existing arrangements.
Another point that Graeber makes is that culture is inseparable from politics. Indeed, over the course of his career he seems to have become increasingly convinced that the problem with academia was that it is was too compartmentalized.
For instance, he eventually wrote an essay entitled Against Economics, in which he pointed out that that economics did not exist prior to Adam Smith, and that because both politics and economics describe the same thing, the two should be studied in a more holistic way.
If one studies anthropology, one comes to see how indigenous cultures develop in response to material conditions.
It seem to me that indigenous cultures, which are by definition adapted to their environments, that people figure out what works and what doesn’t, and over time a certain consensus emerges about how things are to be done.
A culture, over time, becomes a sort of operating system for a given group of people, determining what duties and responsibilities members of that culture should have.
In other words, a sufficiently sophisticated culture does away entirely with the need for a state. Cultural mechanisms exist for decision-making, conflict resolution, and so on.
This is important, because it means that the goal of creating a free society is a question of creating a whole new culture. In reality, politics, economics, religion, art, language, sexuality, and mythology are all part of culture. The project of creating a free society is a matter of creating a healthy culture.
I find this extremely profound, and feel that David Graeber gave us a great gift by writing Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, though the book raises more questions than it answers.
Actually developing a political program based on Graeber’s ideas seems a little tricky, given that he is rejecting the idea that human activity can be separated into rational and irrational spheres.
The holistic analysis Graeber seems to be searching for would involve bridging the gap between left-brain rationalism, the domain of politics, and right-brain creativity, which is the domain of art.
Indigenous cultures might have ritualized gift-giving ceremonies that work very well for them, but could we create new customs today that meet both practical and spiritual needs? How?
What would bringing together art and politics look like? Could a mythology be consciously created which would encode certain cultural values?
The conclusion that David Graeber seems to have reached is that in order to actually have a revolution, which is to say to successfully transform society, a lot more is necessary than a little tweaking here and there.
Like it or not, every culture is a reflection of the collective unconscious of its members, and the reverse is also true.
What exists out there in the world exists within us, and vice-versa.
The goal, then, is TO CHANGE EVERYTHING - to create a new culture and to become a new people.
TO BE CONTINUED…
P.S. In this review, I didn’t even get around to explaining the most important idea in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which Graeber called “the Theory of Imaginary Counterpower”.
Now, this really is a very brilliant idea, and I am not exaggerating when I say that if people really took this idea to heart, it would revolutionize the entire discipline of political science.
Before getting into imaginary counter-power, however, I think it makes sense to first understand the concepts of counter-power and counter-dominance.
So I have decided to write something about counter-dominance first.