I will proceed in two steps, firstly I will take a look at the relations anthropology and anarchism have had so far, secondly I will sketch a tentative hypothesis for anarchic societies (those studied by anthropologists). Such communities have a strong psychological dimension and are, by nature, extremely volatile; their composition is in a constant state of flux. It provides a valuable critique of western political theory which identifies power with coercive authority; and it suggests looking at history less in terms of typologies than as a process in which human activities have maintained their own autonomy and resisted the centralizing intrusions and exploitation inherent in the state. It serves only to give ideological justification to power holders in a society that is fundamentally hierarchical and undemocratic. My aim in this talk is to present a few ideas regarding anarchy in human organization and to look at what an anarchist anthropology is or could be. Barclay, H. People without Government (London: Kahn & Averill, 1982). University of Tennessee Press. Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 3. 1992. The band society displays great instability in its composition, bands being in a constant process of fission and fusion. This is exemplified by the ubiquitous lichen, one of the most basic forms of life and found practically everywhere. On the other hand anarchism may be seen as a historical movement and political theory that had its beginnings at the end of the 18th century. See more. The Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science are versions of talks given at the School’s weekly Thursday Seminar. “Recent Studies on Violence: What’s In and What’s Out?” Reviews in Concrete historical studies by John Hart on anarchism and the Mexican working class (1978) and by Jerome Mintz on the anarchists of Casas Viejas in Spain (1982) have more than adequately refuted some of the distortions about anarchism. Neighborhoods are made of an aggregation of nuclei and vary in composition through time, but at any point in time have an identity which rests on the place (geographically defined) and/or on the presence of a senior person of authority. In essence, anarchists oppose all power which the French describe as “puissance”—“power over” (rather than “pouvoir,” the power to do something), and believe—like Lord Acton—that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The founding fathers of anarchism, Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, sought to propose a recipe for a just and free society and their successors proposed many different views on how to promote a just society or what a just society exactly looks like. Or, to put it in another way, is anarchism an anthropology of anarchy? In other words, society results from a statistical and, above all, random arrangement of its constitutive elements. It has also a lot to do with sharing in the sense I will give to this word. It may surprise some to discover that Noam Chomsky is a self-described anarchist. He bewails the fact that western political philosophy is unable to see power except in terms of “hierarchized and authoritarian relations of command and obedience,” (p.9) and thus equates power with coercive power. Later, Ingold explains that “Together, the principles of immediacy, autonomy, and sharing add up to a form of sociality utterly incompatible with the concept of society, whether by society is meant the interlocking interests of “civil society”, the imagined community of the ethnic group or nation, or the regulative structures of the state” (id : 408). Howell, Signe, and Roy Willis, eds. 1970. [3] This field has yielded a number of important studies in recent years (Howell and Willis 1989, Sponsel and Gregor 1994, Kemp and Fry 2004), the latest and most comprehensive to date being Fry’s The Human Potential for Peace, 2006 (see also Dentan 2008 a) and b). London, New York: Tavistock. Zerzan, J. But being a geographer as well as an anarchist, and having travelled widely … Pepper, D. Modem Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 1996). The process of consensus-building through long discussions is also very much of the essence. It is the notion of anti-structure, which is a state observed by folklorists and anthropologists at crucial moments of social cycles: what Gluckman called rituals of rebellion (Douglas 1954:96), and liminal situations characterized by a symbolic subversion of hierarchy and role reversals, such as those found in medieval carnivals that were so brilliantly interpreted by Bakhtin (1970). But anarchy, as understood by most anarchists, means the exact opposite of this. Murray Bookchin is a controversial figure. Whether a complex technological society is possible without centralized authority is not a question easily answered; neither is it one that can be lightly dismissed. Historians, political scientists, and philosophers have clearly shown a much greater interest for anarchy and anarchism than social anthropologists, and this is surprising since the latter have been looking at societies without government right from the start of modern descriptions of hunters-gatherers in the Arctic, in Australia, in South America and elsewhere. It is necessary that a majority, but not all, members of a community hold such values and act accordingly. J. Silverberg and J.P. Gray, eds. La Servitude Volontaire I. Norms were not enforced, or at least not negatively enforced by punishment. Another landmark in the emergence of the “hunting-gathering type of sociality” applied to non-hunting-gathering people, was T. Gibson’s study of the Buid or Taobuid, a culture from southern Mindoro in the Philippines (Gibson 1986). Some two decades later Snyder gave a talk in which he emphasized that the environmental movement in the United States had become split into two distinct and opposing factions. Still less, that we should try to emulate them. Anarchism. Kemp, Graham, and Douglas P. Fry, eds. [10] See Macdonald 2008 a) for a full development of this argument. Paris: Gallimard. This is, in essence, an unequal relation: A, the creditor, is superior to B, the agent incurring the debt. “The Pursuit of Human Nature in Socio-biology and Evolutionary Most anarchists tend to think humans have both good and bad tendencies. The Sources of Social Power. Equally amazing is that one Marxist text, specifically on Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (Hindness and Hirst, 1975), not only suggested that the “objects” of theoretical discourses did not exist—and so rejected history as a worthwhile subject of study, but completely bypassed anthropological knowledge. But being a geographer as well as an anarchist, and having travelled widely in Asia, Kropotkin had wide ethnographic interests. Actually, before reading Ingold’s contribution, I had reached the same conclusion myself, namely that the group I had studied, the Palawan people, could hardly be called a “society,” in the sense of having a “social structure.” It looked to me more like a collection of individuals and domestic families in perpetual motion. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthopology. But as a perusal of the anarchist movement will indicate, many anarchists or people with anarchist sympathies have been among the finest intellects of their generations, truly creative people. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 28(2):153–168. Egalitarianists do not just abstain from inequality, like they would from consuming alcohol or wearing T-shirts; they produce and actively maintain equality. It is to society what an engine is to an automobile. As for anarchism, the word refers to social theories and political philosophies with no unified doctrine or single program, but one central concern, the rejection of authoritarian government and its manifestation in the state together with free agreement as a guiding principle. [1] Such as this quote: “to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten anyone who breaks it” (72–3). The complexity of this arrangement is a result of two different aspects of its operation. Until recently, the concept of private property of land was either unknown or consciously rejected. Gibson, Thomas. In France, the name of Pierre Clastres is the one most associated with an anarchist theory in anthropology (Clastres 1989). California Press, 1986). 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