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Title: Reflections on reflections Author: David Graeber Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: anthropology, a response, reflection Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.14318/hau6.2.003 Notes: Published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 6, Number 2 — Autumn 2016.
Abstract: Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its
others: Theory since the eighties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
6 (1): 47–73.
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In many ways Sherry Ortner is the anthropologist’s anthropologist. By
this I mean not just that she’s an exemplary model of the craft (though
she’s obviously that), or even precisely that she analyzes
anthropology’s own myths and rituals, but, rather, that she has an
uncanny ability to do for her own discipline, at any point in its
history, what any good ethnographer should do with a form of cultural
practice: to tease out the unacknowledged—or more often
half-acknowledged—logic underlying it, and to make it clear to those who
were never completely aware of what they were actually doing. To do this
with a group of people who see themselves as nothing if not self-aware
is always something of an exploit. Ortner pulls it off regularly.
And it’s really high time someone did this because the discipline does
often seem unusually adrift.
Allow me to merely jot down a few spontaneous reactions—questions,
mainly, sometimes too suggestions—which I hope might encourage fruitful
debate.
First, the piece seems to be rather differently framed than its most
direct predecessor, “Theory in anthropology theory since the sixties ”
(Ortner 1984). They appear to involve somewhat different modes of
explanation. The earlier essay describes a theoretical divide between
materialists and idealists/culturalists in the 1960s and 1970s, overcome
by the emergence of practice theory in the 1980s. “Dark anthropology and
its others” (Ortner 2016), in contrast, arises as a specific response to
changes in political economy on a global scale (neoliberalism) from at
least the 1990s onwards. This obviously raises the question: How did the
earlier split between idealists and materialists relate to the larger
political economy of the time? How did each relate to the particular
ways the larger political economy was refracted through the structure of
the university, and the broader institutional conditions under which
anthropologists produced their work?
The easy answer would be to say that the materialism/culturalism split
was simply a reflection of the Cold War, with establishment figures like
Geertz or Mead as classic Cold War liberals, even when they were not
receiving direct or indirect assistance from the CIA or the US Defense
Department or defending those who did (Ross 1998; Price 2016), while the
materialists at least saw themselves as acting in solidarity with
movements of national liberation—then largely Marxist—in the global
South. It’s by no means an exact fit (think of figures like Marshall
Sahlins), but certainly the radical materialists did see it that way.
But one could also see the theoretical debate as a struggle over the
role of the university. Randall Collins (2002: 646–86) has pointed out
that everywhere in the world, from Sweden to Japan, the philosophers of
the generation or two involved in creating an autonomous university
system invariably became philosophical idealists—even in countries which
had no real tradition of philosophical idealism before or have not had
one since. Materialists in the 1960s and 1970s tended to question the
university’s claims to be an ivory tower. Since the 1980s, of course,
the very idea of universities as a pure domain of thought divorced from
the world seems a wistful dream: market bureaucratization has swept over
everything we do as scholars. (To the point where even using the word
“scholar” here sounds a bit quaint. We’re not primarily scholars. For
most of us scholarship is something we’re at best allowed to do on the
side, as a reward for the accomplishment of our primary responsibilities
in teaching and administration.)
This tendency to treat academic practice in idealist terms, that is, as
if it takes place in a kind of conceptual bubble separate from economic,
political, or even institutional constraints, is still very much with
us. In histories of the discipline, even the physical realities of
producing and distributing books are often considered too vulgar to
mention. Why is it that anthropologists no longer write long
ethnographies like Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande or
Coral gardens and their magic—that is, books with enough detail that
others can reinterpret the material? Why must all our information now
come to us brief and predigested? If such questions are addressed at
all, it’s almost always described as a change in the geist, and
certainly not because academic publishers can no longer afford to
produce such books (having lost the guaranteed library sales that used
to sustain such projects since Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and other
for-profit publishers began wildly inflating subscription rates for
academic journals.) Even the reflexive anthropologists of the 1980s, who
claimed to want to expose the power relations underlying the creation of
anthropological texts, largely confined their analyses to the politics
of fieldwork—that is, when the ethnographer was clearly in the
advantageous position—rather than the stage when she is actually writing
the texts (when the ethnographer, as powerless grad student, is almost
entirely at the mercy of more powerful forces, ranging from grant
agencies to graduate advisors, even if the latter turn out to be lazy,
temperamental, sexually predatory, or insane).
This suggests that the theory of practice resolved the
idealist/materialist split more in theory than in practice.
It would be interesting to ask: What is it about the practice of
theoretical practice that made this split seem to make sense, back in
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has made it seem to disappear today?
Why have the actual mechanisms and direct effects of capitalism become
visible to anthropologists at the precise moment when organized
working-class opposition to capitalism specifically has largely
dissipated?
This, of course, leads to the question of social movements, with which
Ortner’s essay concludes. Anthropologists, she notes, have begun to
design projects where they are “a full participant as well as an
observer.” There are many questions that could be raised here, including
about the institutional dangers of this sort of research (a case might
be made that I’m myself a poster-boy for these), but I’ll confine myself
to one: Does this apply to all social movements, and if not, what are
our criteria for selection? Because clearly these must exist, whether we
admit they do or not.
Let me give an example of what I mean here. I have occasionally been
taken to task for describing certain stateless societies or radical
social movements that don’t actually call themselves anarchists as
“anarchistic”—the objection being, crudely put, “Who the hell does he
think he is telling people who don’t think they’re anarchists that they
are?” It makes sense to object if you think of this as deploying the
power of the academy to decide who is and is not worthy of a certain
desirable designation (not that many consider the title of “anarchist”
particularly desirable, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). This
seems to violate a basic principle. Surely everyone should have the
right to define themselves. But if we are talking about political
movements, “everyone” never really means literally everyone. Even my
most ardent critics would presumably not object to calling members of
the Aryan Nations or White Power movement “racist,” even if they insist
that they are not. So at the very least, all academic radicals feel they
have a right to decide what is a social movement that should have the
right to decide on its own designation, and what is not. I suppose one
could say, “Who the hell do you think you are deciding who has the right
to define themselves and who doesn’t?”—but really, almost no one would
go this far. It feels intuitively right that we should be able to say
National Socialists aren’t really “socialists,” or that the North Korean
government isn’t really “democratic,” even if we do feel obliged to
respect the Zapatistas when they say they practice democracy, and the
Aymara movement in Bolivia when they say their participatory forms of
decision making must be called something else. But if so, what is the
basis on which to distinguish those who get to name themselves and those
who don’t?
It can only be because of a sense of the presence or absence of shared
values of some kind. Normally, anthropologists keep these values
implicit, and in most circumstances there’s nothing really wrong with
that, but if activist anthropology is to become an important genre, the
question will necessarily come up. Because activists face this kind of
question all the time. And if these values exist, are they simply values
that most anthropologists happen to hold, for various historical and
demographic reasons, or are they in some way intrinsic to the project of
anthropology itself? This is a difficult philosophical question, and of
course raises the question of what the ultimate aims of anthropology
actually are. Does the very project of understanding social and cultural
difference imply certain moral or political commitments?
I am not going to suggest an answer here, but let me give an example at
least of the kind of argument I am thinking of. The philosopher Roy
Bhaskar (2009: 113–21) made a case that the famous Humean distinction
between facts and values is based at least partly on a confusion about
what “facts” are. Facts are not realities. They are statements about
reality, hence part of a discourse. But in any discourse concerned with
establishing “facts,” true statements are by definition valued more
highly than false ones. It follows that anyone engaged in any discourse
trying to establish facts has already accepted that facts are values, at
least in that context. It also follows (via a few intermediary logical
steps which there’s no need to get into here) that any such person would
also prefer a social arrangement that can reproduce itself without
having to misrepresent itself to one that cannot. If one then accepts
the Marxist argument that social systems based on exploitation will
always have to misrepresent themselves, one has to conclude that such
systems are less desirable than a possible more honest alternative.
Now I’m not necessarily putting this particular argument forward for
anthropology, just using it by way of illustration of the sort of
arguments we should be considering. What is the essence of the
anthropological project? And what sort of politics does it imply? One
problem with the critical moment of the 1980s is that the way it was
framed made it difficult for anyone who fully bought into its terms to
see anthropology as having a redemptive core (even using the term
“redemptive” in the most minimal sense of not inherently imperial,
racist, colonial, or otherwise fundamentally flawed). As Ortner so amply
illustrates here, the discipline has been proceeding, ever since, almost
as if to prove to itself it is really on the side of the underdog. This
might be an occasion to ask: Why? Why has it felt compelled to do so? Is
there something inherent in the nature of anthropological inquiry itself
that made this populist turn inevitable? (I should emphasize: I don’t
claim to know the answer to this question.) And if the very practice of
anthropology does imply a certain politics, what exactly might that
politics be?
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References:
Roy Bhaskar. 2009. Scientific realism and human emancipation. London:
Routledge.
Randall Collins. 2002. The sociology of philosophies: A global theory of
intellectual change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Sherry B. Ortner 1984. “Theory in anthropology theory since the
sixties.” Comparative Studies of Society and History 26 (1): 126–66.
Sherry B. Ortner. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since
the eighties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73.
David H. Price 2016. Cold War anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and
the growth of dual use anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Eric Ross. 1998. “Cold Warriors without weapons.” Identities 4 (3–4):
475–506.