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Title: Beyond Power/Knowledge
Author: David Graeber
Date: 25th May 2006
Language: en
Topics: power, anthropology, social anarchism, bureaucracy
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/beyond-powerknowledge-exploration-power-ignorance-stupidity

David Graeber

Beyond Power/Knowledge

Let me begin with a brief story about bureaucracy.

Over the last year my mother had a series of strokes. It soon became

obvious that she would eventually be incapable of living at home without

assistance; since her insurance would not cover home care, a series of

social workers advised us to put in for Medicaid. To qualify for

Medicaid however, one’s total worth can only amount to six thousand

dollars. We arranged to transfer her savings—this was, I suppose,

technically a scam, though it’s a peculiar sort of scam since the

government employs thousands of social workers whose main work seems to

be telling citizens how to do it—but shortly thereafter, she had

another, very serious stroke, and found herself in a nursing home

undergoing long-term rehabilitation. When she emerged from there she

would definitely need home care, but there was a problem: her social

security check was being deposited directly, she was barely able to sign

her name, so unless I acquired power of attorney over her account and

was thus able to pay her monthly rent bills for her, the money would

immediately build up and disqualify her, even after I filled out the

enormous raft of Medicaid documents I needed to file to qualify her for

pending status.

I went to her bank, picked up the requisite forms, and brought them to

the nursing home. The documents needed to be notarized. The nurse on the

floor informed me there was an in-house notary, but I needed to make an

appointment; she picked up the phone and put me through to a disembodied

voice, who then transferred me to the notary. The notary proceeded to

inform me I first had to get authorization from the head of social work,

and hung up. So I acquired his name and room number and duly took the

elevator downstairs, appeared at his office—only to discover he was, in

fact, the disembodied voice on the phone. The head of social work picked

up the phone, said “Marjorie, that was me, you’re driving this man crazy

with this nonsense and you’re driving me crazy too”, and proceeded to

secure me an appointment for early the next week.

The next week the notary duly appeared, accompanied me upstairs, made

sure I’d filled out my side of the form (as had been repeatedly

emphasized to me), and then, in my mother’s presence, proceeded to fill

out her own. I was a little puzzled that she didn’t ask my mother to

sign anything, only me, but I figured she must know what she was doing.

The next day I took it to the bank, where the woman at the desk took one

look, asked why my mother hadn’t signed it, and showed it to her

manager, who told me to take it back and do it right. Apparently the

notary had no idea what she was doing. So I got new forms, filled out my

side of each, and made a new appointment. On the appointed day the

notary duly appeared, and after some awkward remarks about the

difficulties caused by each bank having its own, completely different

power of attorney form, we proceeded upstairs. I signed, my mother

signed—with some difficulty—and the next day I returned to the bank.

Another woman at a different desk examined the forms and asked why I had

signed the line where it said to write my name and printed my name on

the line where it said to sign.

“I did? Well, I just did exactly what the notary told me to do.”

“But it says clearly ‘signature’ here.”

“Oh, yes, it does, doesn’t it? I guess she told me wrong. Again. Well…

all the information is still there, isn’t it? It’s just those two bits

that are reversed. So is it really a problem? It’s kind of pressing and

I’d really rather not have to wait to make another appointment.”

“Well, normally we don’t even accept these forms without all the

signatories being here in person.”

“My mother had a stroke. She’s bedridden. That’s why I need power of

attorney in the first place.”

She said she’d check with the manager, and after ten minutes returned,

saying the bank could not accept the forms in their present state, and

in addition, even if they were filled out correctly, I would still need

a letter from my mother’s doctor certifying that she was mentally

competent to sign such a document. I pointed out that no one had

mentioned any such letter previously.

“What?” asked the manager, who was listening in. “Who gave you those

forms and didn’t tell you about the letter?”

Since the apparent culprit was actually one of the nicer bank employees,

I changed the subject, noting that in the bankbook it was printed, quite

clearly, “in trust for David Graeber”. He of course replied that would

only matter if she was dead.

As it happened, the whole problem soon became academic: my mother did

indeed die a few weeks later.

At the time, I found this experience extremely disconcerting. Having led

an existence comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found

myself continually asking my friends: is this what ordinary life, for

most people, is really like? Most were inclined to suspect it was.

Obviously, the notary was unusually incompetent. Still, I had to spend

over a month not long after dealing with the consequences of some

anonymous clerk in the New York Department of Motor Vehicles who decided

my given name was

“Daid”, not to mention the Verizon clerk who spelled my surname

“Grueber”.

Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical

reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant

proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as

expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of the defining

feature of a utopian form of practice, in that, on discovering this,

those maintaining the system conclude that the problem is not with the

system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved.

As an intellectual, probably the most disturbing thing was how dealing

with these forms somehow rendered me stupid too. How could I not have

noticed that I was printing my name on the line that said “signature”?

This despite the fact that I had been investing a great deal of mental

and emotional energy in the whole affair. The problem, I think, was that

most of this energy was going into a continual attempt to try to

understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some

kind of bureaucratic power over me—when what was required was the

correct interpretation of one or two Latin words, and correct

performance of purely mechanical functions. Spending so much of my time

worrying about how not to seem like I was rubbing the notary’s face in

her incompetence, or imagining what might make me seem sympathetic to

various bank officials, made me less inclined to notice when they told

me to do something foolish. It was an obviously misplaced strategy,

since insofar as anyone had the power to bend the rules they were

usually not the people I was talking to; moreover, if I did encounter

them, I was constantly being reminded that if I did complain, even about

a purely structural absurdity, the only possible result would be to get

some junior functionary in trouble.

As an anthropologist, probably the most curious thing for me was how

little trace any of this tends to leave in the ethnographic literature.

After all, we anthropologists have made something of a specialty out of

dealing with the ritual surrounding birth, marriage, death, and similar

rites of passage. We are particularly concerned with ritual gestures

that are socially efficacious: where the mere act of saying or doing

something makes it socially true. Yet in most existing societies at this

point, it is precisely paperwork, not other forms of ritual, that is

socially efficacious. My mother, for example, wished to be cremated

without ceremony; my main memory of the funeral home though was of the

plump, good-natured clerk who walked me through a 14-page document he

had to file in order to obtain a death certificate, written in ballpoint

on carbon paper so it came out in triplicate. “How many hours a day do

you spend filling out forms like that?” I asked. He sighed. “It’s all I

do,” holding up a hand bandaged from some kind of incipient carpal

tunnel syndrome. Without those forms, my mother would not be,

legally—socially—dead.

Why, then, are there not vast ethnographic tomes about American or

British rites of passage, with long chapters about forms and paperwork?

The obvious answer is that paperwork is boring. There really aren’t many

interesting things one can say about it.

Anthropologists are drawn to areas of density. The interpretative tools

we have at our disposal are best suited to unpack complex webs of

meaning or signification: intricate ritual symbolism, social dramas,

poetic forms, kinship networks… What all these have in common is that

they tend to be both infinitely rich, and at the same time, open-ended;

if one’s intention was to exhaust every meaning, motives, or association

packed in to a single Ncwala ritual, Balinese cockfight, witchcraft

accusation, or family saga, one could potentially go on forever: all the

more of so if one also wished to trace its relations with other elements

in the larger social or symbolic fields they invariably open up. Forms

in contrast are designed to be maximally simple and self-contained.

There just isn’t much there to interpret. Literature, of course, has the

same problem with bureaucracy. At best it can become the object of some

kind of bleak Kafkaesque comedy. But even here there, it’s probably

significant that Kafka has remained pretty much the only author to have

made great literature of any sort out of bureaucracy: there’s so little

there that once you’ve done it, there’s nothing left for anyone to add.

Still, social theory abhors a vacuum. Nowhere is this more obvious than

in the literature on bureaucracy itself. Insofar as ethnographies of

bureaucracy exist—the paradigm here is Herzfeld’s “The Social Production

of Indifference” (1992)—the

“bureaucracy as idiocy” perspective tends to be represented at best as

the naïve folk model whose existence any sophisticated, cultural

understanding of the phenomenon must start by being able to explain.

This is not to say such works necessarily deny that immersion in

bureaucratic codes and regulations does, in fact, regularly cause people

to act in ways that in any other context would be considered idiotic.

Just about anyone is aware from personal experiences that they do. Yet

for purposes of cultural analysis, truth is rarely considered an

adequate explanation. At best one can expect a “yes, but…”—with the

assumption that the “but” introduces everything that’s really important.

When we pass to the more rarified domains of theory, even that “yes,

but” usually disappears. Consider the hegemonic role, in US social

theory, of Max Weber in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and of Michel Foucault ever

since. Their popularity, no doubt, had much to do with the ease with

which each could be adopted as a kind of anti-Marx, their theories put

forth (usually in crudely simplified form) to argue that power is not

simply or primarily a matter of the control of production but rather a

pervasive, multifaceted, and unavoidable feature of any social life. I

also think it’s no coincidence that these sometimes appear to be the

only two intelligent people in human history who honestly believed that

bureaucracies work. Weber saw bureaucratic forms of organization as the

very embodiment of rationality, so obviously superior to any alternative

that they threatened to lock humanity in a joyless “iron cage”, bereft

of spirit and charisma. Foucault was far more subversive, but in a way

that made bureaucratic power more effective, not less.

Bodies, subjects, truth itself, all become the products of

administrative discourses; through concepts like governmentality and

biopower, state bureaucracies end up shaping the terms of human

existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber would have

possibly imagined.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in either case, their popularity

owed much to the fact that the American university system during this

period had itself become increasingly an institution dedicated to

producing functionaries for an imperial administrative apparatus on a

global scale. The current ascendancy of Foucault seems trace back to

‘60s radicals’ rejection of Talcott Parson’s version of Weber for

precisely this reason; the ultimate result however was a kind of

division of labor, with the optimistic side of Weber reinvented in even

more simplified form for the actual training of bureaucrats under the

name of “rational choice theory”, while of the pessimistic side was

relegated to the Foucauldians. Foucault’s ascendancy in turn was

precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the

haven for former radicals, but that were themselves most completely

divorced from any access to political power, or increasingly, even to

real social movements—which gave Foucault’s emphasis on the

“power/knowledge” nexus, the assertion that forms of knowledge are

always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of

social power, a particular appeal.

No doubt any such historical argument is a bit caricaturish and unfair;

but I think there is a profound truth here. It is not just that we are

drawn to areas of density, where our skills at interpretation are best

deployed. We also have an increasing tendency to identify what’s

interesting and what’s important, to assume places of density are also

places of power. The power of bureaucracy shows just how much this is

often not the case.

This essay is not, however, primarily about bureaucracy—or even about

the reasons for its neglect in anthropology and related disciplines. It

is really about violence.

What I would like to argue is that situations created by

violence—particularly structural violence, by which I mean forms of

pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat

of physical harm—invariably tend to create the kinds of willful

blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it

crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently

stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves

define as stupid, but rather, that are invariably ways of managing

social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on

structural violence. I think this approach allows potential insights

into matters that are, in fact, both interesting and important: for

instance, the actual relationship between those forms of simplification

typical of social theory, and those typical of administrative

procedures.

II

We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as

violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and

metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not

epistemic. It’s quite concrete. All of these are institutions involved

in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights

regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately

rests on the threat of force. “Force” in turn is just a euphemistic way

to refer to violence.

All of this is obvious enough. What’s of ethnographic interest, perhaps,

is how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about

this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount its importance. This

is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able

to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over

theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a

factor in modern life, without ever reflecting on that fact that, had

they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a

properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to

physically remove them. It’s almost as the more we allow aspects of our

everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic

regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact

(perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it

ultimately depends on the threat of violence.

In many of the rural communities that anthropologists are most familiar

with, where modern administrative techniques are explicitly seen as

alien impositions, many of these connections are much easier to see. In

the part of rural Madagascar where I did my fieldwork, for example, that

governments operate primarily by inspiring fear was seen as obvious. At

the same time, in the absence of any significant government interference

in the minutiae of daily life (via building codes, open container laws,

the mandatory insuring of vehicles and so on), it became all the more

apparent that the main business of government bureaucracy was the

registration of taxable property. One curious result was that it was

precisely the sort of information that was available from the Malagasy

archives for the 19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries for the community I

was studying—precise figures about the size of each family and its

holdings in land and cattle (and in the earlier period, slaves)—that I

was least able to attain for the time I was there, simply because that

was precisely what most people assumed an outsider coming from the

capital would be likely to be asking about, and therefore, which they

were least inclined to tell them.

What’s more, one result of the colonial experience was that what might

be called relations of command—basically, any ongoing relationship in

which one adult renders another an extension of his or her will—had

become identified with slavery, and slavery, with the essential nature

of the state. In the community I studied, such associations were most

likely to come to the fore when people were talking about the great

slave-holding families of the 19^(th) century whose children went on to

become the core of the colonial-era administration, largely (it was

always remarked) by dint of their devotion to education and skill with

paperwork. In other contexts, relations of command, particularly in

bureaucratic contexts, were linguistically coded: they were firmly

identified with French; Malagasy, in contrast, was seen as the language

appropriate to deliberation, explanation, and consensus decision-making.

Minor functionaries, when they wished to impose arbitrary dictates,

would almost invariably switch to French. I particularly remember one

occasion when an official who had had many conversations with me in

Malagasy, and had no idea I even understood French, was flustered one

day to discover me dropping by at exactly the moment everyone had

decided to go home early. “The office is closed,” he announced, in

French, “if you have any business you must return tomorrow at 8AM.” When

I pretended confusion and claimed, in Malagasy, not to understand

French, he proved utterly incapable of repeating the sentence in the

vernacular, but just kept repeating the French over and over. Others

later confirmed what I suspected: that if he had switched to Malagasy,

he would at the very least have had to explain why the office had closed

at such an unusual time. French is actually referred to in Malagasy as

“the language of command”; it was characteristic of contexts where

explanations, deliberation, ultimately, consent, was not really

required, since they were ultimately premised on the threat of violence.

In Madagascar, bureaucratic power was somewhat redeemed in most people’s

minds by its tie to education. Comparative analysis suggests there is a

direct relation however between the level of violence employed in a

bureaucratic system, and the level of absurdity it is seen to produce.

Keith Breckenridge, for example, has documented at some length the

regimes of “power without knowledge” typical of colonial South Africa

(2003), where coercion and paperwork largely substituted for the need

for understanding African subjects. The actual installation of apartheid

beginning in the 1950s, for example, was heralded by a new pass system

that was designed to simplify earlier rules that obliged African workers

to carry extensive documentation of labor contracts, substituting a

single identity booklet, marked with their “names, locale, fingerprints,

tax status, and their officially prescribed ‘rights’ to live and work in

the towns and cities” (2005:84), and nothing else. Government

functionaries appreciated it for streamlining administration, police for

relieving them of the responsibility of having to actually talk to

African workers; the latter universally referred to as the “dompas”, or

“stupid pass”, for precisely that reason.

There are traces of the link between coercion and absurdity even in the

way we talk about bureaucracy in English: note for example, how most of

the colloquial terms that specifically refer to bureaucratic

foolishness, SNAFU, Catch-22 and the like—derive from military slang.

More generally, political scientists have long observed a “negative

correlation”, as David Apter put it (1965, 1971) between coercion and

information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be

awash in too much information, the more authoritarian and repressive a

regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything—which is why

such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence

agencies, and secret police.

III

Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the

kind of debate, clarification and renegotiation typical of more

egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to

see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or

unreasonable. One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not

obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally

speaking, do not.

This is not an aspect of violence that has received much attention in

the anthropological literature on the subject The latter has tended

instead to emphasize the ways that acts of violence are meaningful and

communicative. It seems to me this is an area where we are particularly

prone to fall victim to the confusion of interpretive depth and social

significance: that is, to assume that the most interesting aspect of

violence is also the most important. This is not to say that acts of

violence are not, generally speaking, also acts of communication.

Clearly they are. But this is true of any other form of human action as

well. It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that

it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the

possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be

more precise: violence may well be the only form of human action by

which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the

actions of a person about whom you understand nothing. Pretty much any

other way one might try to influence another’s actions, one at least has

to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what

they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities,

and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, all of this becomes

irrelevant.

It is true that the effects one can have by disabling or killing someone

are very limited, but they are real enough, and critically, they are

predictable. Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of

appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable

effects at all. What’s more, while attempts to influence others by the

threat of violence do require some level of shared understandings, these

can be pretty minimal. It’s important to bear in mind that most human

relations—particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding

friends or longstanding enemies—are extremely complicated, dense with

experience and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often

subtle work of interpretation, of endlessly imagining others’ points of

view.

Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting

through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more schematic

kind (i.e., ‘cross this line and I will shoot you’). This is of course

why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid: indeed, one

might say it is one of the tragedies of human existence that this is the

one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an

intelligent response.

I do need to introduce one crucial qualification here. If two parties

engaged in a contest of violence—say, generals commanding opposing

armies—they have good reason to try to get inside each other’s heads. It

is really only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their

capacity to cause physical harm that they no longer need to do so. But

this has very profound effects, because it means that the most

characteristic effect of violence—its ability to obviate the need for

interpretive labor—becomes most salient when the violence itself is

least visible, in fact, where acts of spectacular physical violence are

least likely to occur. These are situations of what I’ve referred to as

structural violence, on the assumption that systematic inequalities

backed up by the threat of force can be treated as forms of violence in

themselves. For this reason, situations of structural violence

invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative

identification.

These effects are often most visible when the structures of inequality

take the most deeply internalized forms. A constant staple of 1950s

American situation comedies, for example, was jokes about the

impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (always of course told

by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and

incomprehensible. One never had the impression the women in question had

any trouble understanding men. The reasons are obvious: women had no

choice but to understand men; this was the heyday of a certain image of

the patriarchal family, and women with no access to their own income or

resources had little choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy

understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.

Patriarchal families of this sort are, as generations of feminists have

emphasized, most certainly forms of structural violence; their norms are

indeed sanctioned by threat of physical harm in endless subtle and

not-so-subtle ways. And this kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of

womankind appears to be a perennial feature of them. Generations of

women novelists—Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind—have also

documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts

women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining, and adjusting

the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving an continual

work of imaginative identification or what I’ve called interpretive

labor. This carries over on every level. Women are always expected to

imagine what things look like from a male point of view. Men are almost

never expected to reciprocate. So deeply internalized is this pattern of

behavior that many men react to the suggestion that they might do

otherwise as if it were an act of violence in itself. A popular exercise

among High School creative writing teachers in America, for example, is

to ask students to imagining they have been transformed, for a day, into

someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like.

The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long

and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of

time thinking about the subject. Half of the boys usually refuse to

write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the

slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply

resent having to think about it.

There are two critical elements here that, while linked, should probably

be formally distinguished. The first is the process of imaginative

identification as a form of knowledge, the fact that within relations of

domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively

relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question

really work. Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant kitchen, for

example, knows that if something goes terribly wrong and an angry boss

appears to size things up, he is unlikely to carry out a detailed

investigation, or even, to pay serious attention to the workers all

scrambling to explain their version of what happened. He is much more

likely to tell them all to shut up and arbitrarily impose a story that

allows instant judgment: i.e., “you’re the new guy, you messed up—if you

do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to hire

and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go

wrong so as to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The same thing usually

happens with ongoing relations: everyone knows that servants tend to

know a great deal about their employers’ families, but the opposite

almost never occurs. The second element is that of sympathetic

identification. Interestingly, it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral

Sentiments (XXX), who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as

“compassion fatigue”. Human beings, he proposed, are normally inclined

not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but as a result,

to spontaneously feel one another’s joys and sorrows. The poor, however,

are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers face

a tacit choice between being entirely overwhelmed, or simply blotting

out their existence. The result is that while those on the bottom of a

social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of,

and actually caring about, those on the top, it almost never happens the

other way around.

Whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women,

employers and employees, rich and poor, structural inequality—what I’ve

been calling structural violence—invariably creates highly lopsided

structures of the imagination. Since I think Smith was right to observe

that imagination tends to bring with it sympathy: the result is that

victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries far

more than those beneficiaries care about them. This might well be, after

the violence itself, the single most powerful force preserving such

relations.

IV

All this I think has some interesting theoretical implications.

Now, in contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate

administration of violence is turned over to what is euphemistically

referred to as “law enforcement”—particularly, to police officers, whose

real role, as police sociologists have repeatedly demonstrated, has much

less to do with enforcing criminal law than with the scientific

application of physical force to aid in the resolution of administrative

problems. Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons. At the same

time, they have, significantly, over the last fifty years or so become

the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular

culture. It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a

citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several

hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that

invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to

vicariously participate in their exploits. If nothing else, all this

throws an odd wrinkle in Weber’s dire prophecies about the iron cage: as

it turns out, faceless bureaucracies do seem inclined to throw up

charismatic heroes of a sort, in the form of an endless assortment of

mythic detectives, spies, and police officers—all, significantly,

figures whose job is to operate precisely where the bureaucratic

structures for ordering information encounter, and appeal to, genuine

physical violence.

Even more striking, it seems to me, are the implications for the status

of theory itself.

Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization. In practice,

bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of

real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical

or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules,

statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification.

Usually it’s not so different than the boss who walks into the kitchen

to make arbitrary snap decisions as to what went wrong: in either case

it is a matter of applying very simple pre-existing templates to complex

and often ambiguous situations. The result often leaves those forced to

deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are

dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on

a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2% of what’s in front

of them. Admittedly, something very similar happens in social theory. An

ethnographic description, even a very good one, captures at best 2% of

what’s happening in any particular Nuer feud or Balinese cockfight. A

theoretical work will normally focus on only a tiny part of that,

plucking perhaps one or two strands out of an endlessly complex tissue

of human circumstance, and using it as the basis on which to make

generalizations: say, about the nature of social conflict or about the

nature of performance. I am certainly not trying to say there’s anything

wrong in this kind of theoretical reduction (I’m arguably doing it right

now).

Actually, I suspect some such process is necessary if one wishes to say

something dramatically new about the world.

Consider the role of structural analysis, so famously endorsed by Edmund

Leach in the first Malinowski Memorial Lecture almost half a century ago

(1959). Nowadays structural analysis is considered definitively passé;

Claude Levi-Strauss’ theoretical corpus, vaguely ridiculous. It seems to

me this is unfortunate. The great merit of structural analysis is that

it provides an well-nigh foolproof technique for doing what any good

theory should do: simplifying and schematizing complex material in such

a way as to be able to say something unexpected. This is incidentally

how I actually came up with the point about Weber just above:

I prefer to see someone like Levi-Strauss as a heroic figure, a man with

the sheer intellectual courage to pursue his model as far as it would

go, no matter how obviously absurd the results could sometimes be—or, if

you prefer, how much violence he thus did to reality.

As long as one remains within the domain of theory, then, I would argue

that simplification can be a form of intelligence. The problems arise

when the violence is no longer metaphorical. Here let me turn from

imaginary cops to real ones. A former LAPD officer turned sociologist

(Cooper 1991) observed that the overwhelming majority of those beaten by

police turn out not to be guilty of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up

burglars”, he observed. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one

thing most guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to

challenge their right to “define the situation.” If what I’ve been

saying is true this is just what we’d expect. The police truncheon is

precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for

imposing simple administrative schema, and its monopoly of coercive

force, come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic

violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who

insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if

one accepts Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the

ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible

perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at

the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile

stupidity.

If I had more time I would suggest why I feel this approach could

suggest new ways to consider old problems. From a Marxian perspective,

for example, one might note that my notion of “interpretive labor” that

keeps social life running smoothly implies a fundamental distinction

between the domain of social production (the production of persons and

social relations) where the imaginative labor is relegated to those on

the bottom, and a domain of commodity production where the imaginative

aspects of work are relegated to those on the top. In either case,

though, structures of inequality produce lopsided structures of the

imagination. I would also propose that what we are used to calling

“alienation” is largely the subjective experience of living inside such

lopsided structures. This in turn has implications for any liberatory

politics. For present purposes, though, let me just draw attention to

some of the implications for anthropology.

One is that many of the interpretive techniques we employ have,

historically, served as weapons of the weak far more often than as

instruments of power. Renato Rosaldo (1986) made a famous argument that

when Evans-Pritchard, annoyed that no one would speak to him, ended up

gazing at a Nuer camp of Muot Dit “from the door of his tent”, he

rendered it equivalent to a Foucauldian panopticon. The logic seems to

be that any knowledge gathered under unequal conditions serves a

disciplinary function. To me, this is absurd. The panopticon was a

prison. Prisoners endured the gaze, and internalized its dictates,

because if they tried to escape, or resist, they could be killed. Absent

the apparatus of coercion, such an observer is reduced to the equivalent

of a neighborhood gossip, deprived even of the sanction of public

opinion.

Underlying the analogy, I think, is the assumption that comprehensive

knowledge of this sort is an inherent part of any imperial project. Even

the briefest examination of the historical record though makes clear

that empires tend to have little or no interest in documenting

ethnographic material. They tend to be interested instead in questions

of law and administration. For information on exotic marriage customs or

mortuary ritual, one almost invariably has to fall back on travelers

accounts—on the likes of Herodotus, Ibn Battuta, or Zhang Qian—that is,

on descriptions of those lands which fell outside the jurisdiction of

whatever state the traveler belonged to.

Historical research reveals that the inhabitants of Muot Dit were, in

fact, largely former follows of a prophet named Gwek who had been

victims of RAF bombing and forced displacement the year before (Johnson

1979, 1982, 1994), the whole affair being occasioned by fairly typical

bureaucratic foolishness (basic misunderstandings about the nature of

power in Nuer society, attempts to separate Nuer and Dinka populations

that had been entangled for generations). When Evans-Pritchard was there

they were still subject to punitive raids from the British authorities.

Evans-Pritchard was asked to go to Nuerland basically as a spy, at first

refused, then finally agreed, he later said because he

“felt sorry for them”. He appears to have carefully avoided gathering

the specific information the authorities really wanted, while, at the

same time, doing his best to use his more general insights into the

workings of Nuer society to discourage some of their more idiotic

abuses, as he put it, to “humanize” the authorities (Johnson 1982:245).

As an ethnographer, then, he ended up doing something very much like

traditional women’s work: keeping the system from disaster by tactful

interventions meant to protect the oblivious and self-important men in

charge from the consequences of their own blindness.

Would it have been better to have kept one’s hands clean? These strike

me as questions of personal conscience. I suspect the greater moral

dangers lie on an entirely different level. The question for me is

whether our theoretical work is ultimately directed at undoing,

dismantling, some of the effects of these lopsided structures of

imagination, or whether—as can so easily happen when even our best ideas

come to be backed up by bureaucratically administered violence—we end up

reinforcing them.

I’d like to thank David Apter, Keith Breckenridge, Kryzstina Fevervary,

Andrej Grubacic, Matthew Hull, Lauren Leve, Christina Moon, Stuart

Rockefeller, Marina Sitrin, Steve Cupid Theodore, and Hylton White for

advice and suggestions and encouragement on this project. The essay is

dedicated to my mother, in honor of her moral political commitment,

irreverence, and common sense.

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XXX Theory of Moral Sentiments