Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Ethics & Morality

Energy

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 01:22:10 +0000

Picture of a solar panel engineer in Tinginaput, India. Picture by Abbie Trayler-Smith, 2009.

Merseburg University for Applied Sciences

Initially published 5 Nov 2024

Abstract:

Energy is central to everyday life and industrial production, and is a major concern and focus of public policy. Its production from different sources, its use, and the societal and climatic consequences of energy systems have increased the attention paid to energy in recent years. Energy anthropology provides an in-depth understanding of the social, cultural, and ecological implications of extractivism for energy consumption and of the introduction or transformation of energy systems. Energy anthropology considers resource materialities, infrastructure, institutions, ethics, political power, beliefs, habits, and truth claims involved in energy production, distribution, and consumption. Concepts such as ‘energopower’, energy ethics, and cultures of energy allow us to make sense of the lived realities and cultural understandings involved in energy transition efforts. They recognise that energy is simultaneously personal, collective, and political. They also emphasise that energy transitions are both a climate-political imperative and essentially socio-cultural processes.

Introduction

Energy is what enables life on earth. We all depend on the energy the sun is providing, enabling photosynthesis and therefore plant growth, which animals and human beings feed upon. The intake of energy by animals and humans, measured in joules or in calories, determines the work they can carry out, and hence influences all forms of production, from agricultural to cultural. This omnipotence and importance of energy led, in the middle of the twentieth century, to an argument for a cultural anthropological analysis of energy:

Everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy. Galaxies, stars, molecules and atoms may be regarded as organizations of energy. Living organisms may be looked upon as engines which operate by means of energy derived directly or indirectly from the sun. The civilizations, or cultures of mankind, also, may be regarded as a form or organization of energy […] Cultural anthropology is that branch of natural science which deals with matter-and-motion, i.e., energy, phenomena in cultural form, as biology deals with them in cellular, and physics in atomic, form. (White 1943, 335)

This thinking laid the foundation for anthropology as a discipline to engage with energy. Anthropology has been analysing energy in relation to societies and culture, norms and values, changes and transitions. Anthropologists often think of energy systems as socio-technical intertwinements of resource extractivism, electricity and fuel, infrastructure, institutions, as well as ethics, political power, and beliefs, all of which are situated in the environment and the planetary condition. In physics, energy transformed into applied force equals work; energy can neither be produced nor destroyed, only transformed from one form into another. However, in everyday life (as well as in economics and anthropology), we use the term ‘energy’ with regards to something that can be used and used up: empty batteries are a common phenomenon and so are power cuts, fuel price hikes, empty gas stations, heat poverty, or oil wars. Anthropologists have addressed this experienced reality of energy along all parts of its life cycle, examining, for example, fuel and electricity in regards to their production, transmission, and consumption.

Power and politics

The lived realities of energy systems show that ‘energy is, at once, personal, collective and political, an experienced reality and a total social fact’ (Coleman 2021, 181). Electricity and fuel have become relevant to individual well-being and progress, social arrangements, and industrial and economic development. Electricity’s invisibility allows for its flow to be taken for granted, yet the establishment, maintenance, and transformation of energy systems are highly politicised issues, where the word ‘power’ can be deployed in two senses. One concept used to politically frame energy systems—across production, transmission, and consumption—is that of ‘energopower’ (Boyer 2014). This term refers to both the political and energetic dimensions of a phenomenon and implies rethinking political power through the analysis of electricity and fuel (Boyer 2014, 325; Loloum, Abram and Ortar 2021). Energopower is related to Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘biopower’, in that it is a mode of controlling and subjugating large numbers of bodies and populations in various aspects of their lives (1981). Conversely, anthropologists have also examined how control over energy becomes an essential part of, if not a precondition for, control over people.

The coal miners’ strikes that occurred in Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are an historic example. Mining companies, with the help of state police, tried to subdue coal miners’ fights for better working conditions, but the miners continued the strike and challenged the state’s authoritarian control over energy supply. In effect, the strikes became an essential contributing factor for the formation of worker’s unions in Europe and Northern America and for democratic participation in state formations (Mitchell 2011). This energy workforce co-determined labour conditions, ideas of the welfare state, notions of private and public ownership, economic systems, and political formations, among other things. Oil drilling, as a contrasting example, did not have the same political effects. Its decentralised infrastructure and a minimised workforce with little ability to organise, along with the fluidity and flexibility involved in bypassing and detouring oil tankers, proved less suitable in helping to form democracies. We can hence talk of ‘carbon democracies’ as ones that are influenced or even formed by the way carbon, in its physical structure and materiality, has been drilled, mined, transported, sold, or used. Thus, the concept of energopower allows us to see the various energy-related materialities, transformation processes, discourses, and truth claims as socio-political phenomena, where the power to influence or control events or people serves as a critical factor for the formation of both energy and political systems.

A second, closely related concept to make sense of the political nature of energy is ‘energopolitics’, denoting the various ways in which this power is applied and operates. Thinking of energy systems as energopolitics allows us to re-politicise energy systems, rather than taking for granted their historically evolved material infrastructure and physico-chemical aspects. Turning attention to energopolitics sheds light not only on critical issues of energy systems, but also on its rough edges and sometimes highly violent forms: energy systems can lead to the murder of activists and system opponents or to the creation of ‘sacrifice zones’ that make life unbearable or impossible (Kaur 2021). Politicisation in the form of increased attention and control over energy has occurred whenever energy provision or energy prices were in turmoil. The global oil price crises in the 1970s have led to an increased investigation into energy systems, with a strong stance in anthropology for the voices of Indigenous and other communities affected by energy production to be included (see Rogers 2015, 366). The nuclear armament and reactor dismantling of the 1980s and 1990s, the US war for oil in Iraq, and more recent climate change discourse have contributed to a re-politicisation of energy systems, as did the Russian war on Ukraine and the subsequent rise in European energy prices in 2022.

These energy price crises demonstrate distinctly that there is a nexus between state, energy, and economics. Oil is a prime example: The capital accumulation based on extraction, distribution, and consumption of petroleum, called ‘petrocapitalism’, has been shaping economies as well as political institutions. In the US, for example, big oil companies like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company used money made from oil to monopolise industrial organisation. Here, petrocapitalism comprises corporate economic power, intertwined with political power, as well as their impact on the patterns of ordinary life: gasoline and plastic are common products for mobility, consumption, and comfort, and their ubiquity shape understandings of freedom, security, and national pride (Huber 2013). Like petroleum, other forms of fossil fuels also co-shape capitalist logics. Extractive capitalism, which accumulates fossil capital and uses it for political ends (Malm 2016), relies on ‘nature’s free gifts’, which are commoditised and used as cheap energy. Extractive capitalism focuses on creating surplus value based on exploiting natural resources and human labour. In the process, it pays less attention to (often externalised) costs such as deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, workforce exploitation, or environmental degradation (Moore 2015; Degani et al. 2020). The accumulated fossil capital is one basis for today’s financial markets that have an extraordinary power of their own. The oil market, for example, is increasingly detached from the actual circulation of oil. Rather, it has turned into a financial instrument for investments and profits (Labban 2010), with its own financial narratives to determine future extraction of fossil fuel deposits (Field 2022). Renewable energy has become enveloped into this market. Examples are fossil capital, or ‘petrodollars’, used for building complete ‘green’ cities like Masdar in the desert of Abu Dhabi (Günel 2019; Koch 2022), green bonds (Bracking et al. 2023), or fossil fuel divestment (Langley et al. 2021).

Energy transitions and conflict

Paying attention to the financial aspects of renewable energy production is not least a consequence of climatisation, i.e. the spillover process of climate issues and concerns into international negotiations as well as into wider society (Aykut et al. 2019; Müller et al. 2024). Protecting the climate and trying to keep global warming well below 2°C^[1]requires transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy. These new energy frontiers necessitate new fields of investment, but they also bring energy conflicts. Energy transitions from fossil fuels to renewable resources are but the latest example of how societies scrutinise the socio-technical, cultural, and politico-economical aspects of energy systems. The consequences and impacts of energy transitions have been subject to debate and contestation: What social and cultural impact does an innovation in or exit from an energy industry have? What will be the results of energy transitions for individuals, communities, and societies at large, including their political systems and financial dependencies? Are new energy frontiers and energy transitions predestined for energy conflicts between their beneficiaries and negatively affected parties (see Abram et al. 2023)? Energy conflicts may be driven by fundamental questions over the use or rejection of particular sources of energy. Yet, they can also comprise distributional conflicts, such as the question of who benefits from the financial rewards of energy projects. They may raise procedural questions, involving planning and decision-making processes, access to information, and opportunities for participation and transparency. Or they may raise locational and territorial issues around the use of land for energy projects, as well as questions of identity and belonging (Becker and Naumann 2018).

One widely used typology for the assessment of energy projects is the distinction between different principles of energy justice, which are often lacking in one or multiple forms (see e.g. Abram et al. 2023; Bickerstaff, Walker and Bulkeley 2013; Degani 2022). These principles include: energy availability, or having sufficient energy resources when needed; affordability, encompassing stable and equitable prices for energy use; due process, including stakeholder participation in energy policymaking and fair and informed consent; good governance, including transparency and accountability. Energy justice also comprises the principles of ecological sustainability; inter- and intra-generational equity in accessing energy; and the responsibility of nations towards societies and the natural environment, to minimise their energy systems’ negative impacts (Sovacool and Dworkin 2015). Normative assumptions and European canons of value—Western philosophical ideas of virtue, reason, or equality—form the basis of this justice concept (Sovacool and Dworkin 2015).

Anthropologists have formulated energy ethics as an alternative conceptual framework to assess how just and equitable energy systems, and parts thereof, are (Smith and High 2017). Combining moral questions regarding justice and fairness with an anthropological tradition of taking emic perspectives seriously, energy ethics take into account the heterogeneity of energy as different people experience and conceptualise it. Energy ethics stress the way people judge energy’s place in their lives, working with a bottom-up approach rather than a predefined moral canon. Energy ethics then aim to identify how people themselves evaluate the role energy plays for what they understand as the good life. This can comprise notions of justice, fairness, and equity but it can also go beyond them (Smith and High 2017). Renewable energy technology, for example, can involve different concepts of ‘nature’ that is to be protected, and a highly specific understanding of natural elements such as wind. Take the isthmus of Mexico as an example, where large-scale wind parks are being installed, transforming landscapes and income structures, providing benefits for landowners and often non-local wind park operators. Wind became a valuable energy resource in this stretch of land. The introduction of wind energy to the isthmus is consequently welcomed and highly regarded by some who see wind as an exchange of air due to heat differentials, and wind as a salvational object or a promissory force (Howe 2019, 25ff.). Yet, for others in the isthmus, wind is part of the local Zapotec cosmology and of the Indigenous traditions of communal land use. They see contemporary wind parks as problematic energy projects. Renewable energies have the potential to provide what is frequently ethically required and demanded in a climate-affected life: distributed models of social control of renewables as a public good (Goodman et al. forthcoming). But the practice of energy transitions also can spur displacement, disenfranchisement, and disenchantment, which lead people to contest renewables, thereby delaying energy transitions and further locking in fossil fuels (Goodman et al. forthcoming). Studying people’s energy ethics, therefore, considers energy with the diverging values, paradigms, and expectations that people have in mind, as well as of the consequences of these systems (see e.g. Franquesa 2018; Boyer and Howe 2019).

Energy’s meanings and materialities

Just as anthropology highlights the multiple meanings and evaluations of energy systems through an energy ethics framework, by focusing on cultures of energy, anthropology similarly looks into how energy is variously imagined, understood, used, and contested as a cultural entity (Strauss, Rupp and Love 2013). Acknowledging cultures of energy necessitates being open to different notions of what energy can actually mean, allowing an understanding of energy as a cultural artefact rather than a given universal truth. Energy and its various forms can be framed mythically and cosmologically, and they can be imagined as something political, magical, spiritual, social, or technical (Rupp 2013; Chapman 2013). People use energy in many ways, from animistic worship of sun, wind, and other energy sources, to fetishising commodities or machines (Strauss, Rupp and Love 2013, 12). Nuclear energy and its use as weapons, for example, are seen by peace-groups as anti-humanistic and mad, while engineers with a more technocratic view experience nuclear testing as professional rites of passage (Gusterson 1996). In hydropower and electric infrastructure, by contrast, we find heroism and sacrifice as cultural conceptions. Jahawarlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, considered hydropower dams to be akin to the temples of modern India and inaugurated a vast canal irrigation system in 1954.^[2] They can also be seen as a necessity, and the subsequent relocation they may demand as a sacrifice—as for people in Portugal, who understood large-scale dam projects in the second half of the twentieth century by drawing on Catholic norms of sacrifice (Küpers and Batel 2023). Another example of culturally-specific understandings of energy is embodied by the smokestack of an electric power plant in Vinh City, Vietnam, which turned into a mythical, heroic symbol for perseverance against US aggression (Schwenkel 2018, 103). After 1954, the reconstruction and development of Vietnam’s electrical energy generation had turned into a post-colonial project. It signified emancipation from both colonial enslavement and assumed lack of enlightened thinking among the local population by colonisers. Unlike under colonial rule, electricity was to now be produced and provided for everyone, not only for colonial rulers—aligning with socialist ideas of social justice and freedom. The electric power plant with its smokestack in Vinh City came to symbolise both these ideas and a sense of technological advancement. Consequently, when the US war on Vietnam between 1964 and 1973 targeted the power plant and other critical infrastructure, workers repeatedly defended and repaired it.

The postcolonial power plant that had signalled the nation’s advance toward global socialism, now under the threat of imperialism, came to stand as a symbol of the resilience of the Vietnamese nation. (Schwenkel 2018)

Being but one example of what energy and its materialised infrastructure entails, there is, in consequence, no universal or stable concept for its meanings. Energy’s meaning is, rather, subject to individual and collective understandings, framed by society, politics, and history.

Understanding energy as a more open concept, a vessel to be filled with meaning—see this entry’s opening statement, that everything may be described in terms of energy—also allows for analyses that shift focus onto the concept of ‘resource materialities’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). The resource materialities approach stresses that resources come into being through human thought as well as human action involved in production, drilling, mining, and technical invention. Resource materialities are also held to be of a distributed and relational nature, co-constituted by people’s ontologies and their knowledge about them, as well as by their infrastructure, and the ways people experience them (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). For example, uranium is ‘provided’ by nature and geology, but its chemical and physical structure alone do not make it an energy resource. It needs to be identified as a resource to become part of a technical process for energy production. It needs to be named, mined, scientifically analysed, and desired for exchange and use. Given that electricity and fuel are produced from energy sources, resource materialities as an approach amplifies energy’s various forms and material transformations. It conceives of energy as an assemblage of resources, infrastructure, electrons, petrochemical compounds, human and non-human agency, concepts, and ideas. It thereby shows that human thought and action in interrelation with the physicality of resources co-determine the form that energy takes across space and time.

The consequences of energy’s materialities can be severe, affecting human beings, flora, fauna, and geology. Objectifying and exploiting ecological, geological, and sociocultural worlds often go hand in hand (Bollig and Krause 2023), and environmental approaches to energy speak to the impact that resource extraction and further energy infrastructures have on their immediate surroundings. Industrial extraction projects can cause pollution and environmental degradation, and affect landscapes (Powell 2018). Coal mining causes pulmonary diseases and acidic rain; nuclear power production bears the risk of nuclear accidents and radiation contamination (Parkhill 2010; Powell 2018; Fortun and Morgan 2016). Upstream and downstream aspects of energy production heavily impact the environment too, albeit often in other regions and hence other immediate surroundings. For example, before generating wind energy, the copper, nickel, and rare earth metals mined for wind turbines are often tied in with the long history of vices and violence in mining (Jacka 2018). On the other end, the debris from dismantled power plants and infrastructure can remain on site or very close to it, as when radioactive waste is kept in former nuclear power plants and hence in the vicinity of former workers (Liubimau 2019) and thus continues to impact humans and non-humans alike.

In addition to energy-related accidents, devastation of regions, and pollution of air and rivers, energy’s environmental impact is now also geo-environmental, threatening all species including the future of humanity (Howe 2019). We have come to call the planetary consequences of energy systems and human consumption in the current age ‘the Anthropocene’, or, when referring to the atmospheric impacts, ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’.

Forms and materialisations

The concepts and analytical lenses presented so far have evolved from detailed anthropological research on energy production, transmission, and consumption and on the ruptures and contestations that electricity and fuel have brought about. The sources of electricity and fuel have guided energy research for several decades. One example is oil, because ‘for the better part of a century, petroleum has been the energy source of industrial capitalism’ (Appel, Mason and Watts 2015, 9). Oil is tightly linked to global finance, but oil drilling is also a very localised, concentrated, and highly profitable form of extractivism. It raises hopes for prosperity and a better future (Weszkalnys 2016), but when it is drilled for, it often comes with conflicts over oil rents, i.e. culturally and politically determined struggles over profits and benefits (Reyna and Behrends 2008). Oil is a prime example of the ‘resource curse’, holding that countries rich in resources show less economic growth, get exploited, and tend to suffer from more corruption and political instability than those countries with few resources. Unpacking the resource curse in the context of oil, anthropologists have pointed out that prevailing modes of domination within a nation-state play a determining role in whether oil is experienced as a boon or a bane in countries such as Venezuela, Chad, Sudan, Norway, or the US (Behrends, Reyna and Schlee 2011). These comparisons of different countries and their use of violent and non-violent forms of allocating profit from oil show that there is no ‘resource curse’ or ‘oil curse’ per se.

Anthropology has also attended to the contestations around energy sources. In the 1940s and 1970s, these were predominantly economically and energy-security induced concerns. Contemporary arguments around oil and other fossil fuels have been emanating particularly with increased awareness about their impact on the climate. The potential end of oil drilling and the combustion of petroleum might be publicly demanded or contested, but is hard to execute. Norway, for example, could take a lead in a responsible exit from oil, but it produces arguably the ‘cleanest oil’, i.e. with less environmental impact, which remains a blessing to the state rather than a curse (Lautrup 2022). Oil drilling is the basis of the Norwegian welfare state. Hence, climate activists in Norway, who demand an exit from oil, contest local jobs and living standards as well as national values of prosperity and oil-as-welfare. Goodness for the nation might no longer be enough, given the global effects of burning fossil fuels (Lautrup 2022; see also Schöneich 2022). Historic trajectories continue to impact localised social structures as well as modes of trade and global economies, while at the same time new frontiers, such as fracking, are crossed (Rogers 2014).

Coal mining and combustion have been central to the Industrial Revolution and for regionalised mining communities for over more than one and a half centuries in several countries, laying the foundation for fossil capital (Malm 2016; Mitchell 2011). As part of a coal-development nexus, governments have wanted the resource extracted and combusted to ‘develop’ nations and their industries (Goodman et al. 2020). Coal mining induces incisions into the earth’s surface as well as into social systems: it spurs the devastation of villages, the creation of new mining towns, dust, and the material pollution of the surroundings, and emits greenhouse gases as the single-largest source (Lewin 2017; Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Goodman et al. 2020). Yet, coal mining has also provided for a strong sense of community and coalition among workers, especially when done underground. With the comparatively large, but little-supervised, workforce required to mine it, and a place-based, easy-to-sabotage infrastructure, coal mining has historically contributed to union building and democratisation (Mitchell 2011). At the same time, the economisation of this resource extraction, i.e. the exploitation of nature and workforce at the lowest economic costs, has led to threats or actual abandonment of former mining communities and towns, while coal miners as a workforce continue to be exploited, often with little concern for their dignity, health, and life (Smith 2019; Lewin 2017; Ringel 2018). Coal and coal mines have turned out to variously be colonial death pits, creators of working classes, and symbols of nationalism, fostering militarisation, love for landscape, or a sense of belonging (e.g. Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Kikon 2019; Powell 2018; Morton and Müller 2016).

The lived realities of coal mining resemble those of mining minerals or stones, in that they are simultaneously highly exploitative and life-threatening, and engender conceptualisations of community and identity. As several countries are planning for and executing coal-mining phase outs, especially in Europe and Southeast Asia, they foster demands for just transitions as a form of energy justice. Coal exits provoke identity politics because coal has been providing employment and economic potential as well as shaping people’s lives and cultural understandings. In the former German Democratic Republic, for example, brown coal was the prime energy source and in the 1980s the country was the world’s leading brown coal producer. Mining engineers and mineworkers received the highest recognition; their work was essential for the country’s economy. The state’s establishment of a ‘Day of the Miner and Energy’ is but one expression of this appreciation (Müller 2017). However, the mineworkers’ massive layoffs in the 1990s and the more contemporary coal exit invalidates this. These transitions consequently require individual and regional ethical, economic, and political realignments.

Mining minerals such as rare earths, iron, or copper is an important part of the construction of wind turbines and solar panels. Due to the location of mineral deposits and due to cost efficiency considerations (with companies aiming for low wages and low environmental standards), materials used in constructing wind turbines and solar panels are often mined in countries of the Global South. For example, Brazil is a major exporter for iron ore, as is China for rare earths, while Peru, Chile, and Brazil lead copper exports. Central contributions to energy anthropology, however, investigate predominantly the sites of installing and operating wind turbines and solar farms. Wind turbines in general have the advantage of co-existing with human activity. With rotor blades turning several metres above the ground, people can make use of fields, forests, or meadows underneath (Müller and Morton 2021). There are, however, two major sources of conflict over wind energy: concentration of capital and conflicts over land. The former connects renewable energy production to an extractivist capitalism from fossil fuels. The installation and operation of wind parks marks the area as wasteland, which becomes productive of value in an economic logic. Wind parks in Spain’s Southern Catalonia, for example, are being installed as large investments of centralised, international Spanish corporations. The produced electricity is transported to and used elsewhere in Spain and abroad (Franquesa 2018). Such extractivism can become a site for contestation. The local population supported the first wind parks, but the corporations’ attitudes and their questioning of local understandings of a dignified, self-determined way of living in this rural region led to disputes (Franquesa 2018). Anthropologists have noted similar developments in Mexico, Greece, and elsewhere, where investors see wind energy as export opportunities and wind parks as safe returns on their investments. Meanwhile, local populations often underscore the costs of wind energy production, which is borne by local communities and fauna, in the form of noise, exclusion from surrounding lands, and disturbing gregarious animals and avifauna (Boyer and Howe 2019; Siamanta 2019). The concentration of wind parks in particular areas or regions is a result of trying to govern wind energy production: to prevent rank growth, to regulate investments, to foster technical development, or to optimise infrastructure use. But the concentrating of wind turbines significantly contributes to locals’ feelings of being surrounded, impaired, and used: concentrated capital and wind turbines reinforce centralised patterns of exploitation with both the electricity and the profits consumed elsewhere.

Photovoltaics tend to entail similar conflicts, especially when concentrated, i.e. installed as green-field solar parks rather than rooftop solar arrays, and when seen as investments for internationally operating investors. The Pavagada Solar park in India is but one example, where an allegedly arid area has been turned into a mega-project for energy production. As the world’s largest solar park at the time of its construction in 2019, the Pavagada solar park covers 53 km² with an installed capacity of 2000 MW_p. While the government brokered the solar park, drawing on the trust of local landowners in state government officials rather than private companies, resulting changes to the local social system were massive (Ghosh, Bryant and Pillai 2022). With a prevailing system of landowners and dependent landless labourers tilling the land, rents produced through energy production went solely to landowners, while the landless labourers were completely deprived of their means of existence. Adding to the unbearable situation for some was the absence of promised ‘development’, as jobs in the solar (as well as wind) energy production sector are very limited aside from installation (Ghosh, Bryant and Pillai 2022). The mutually exclusive use of land for solar parks, often underscored with fences around the parks, can take neo-colonial form, and renew or reinforce existing domains of governance. They often become ‘green grabs’, i.e. a form of land grabbing that comes with an ecological or climatic benefit and associated moral heft (Stock 2023; Cantoni and Rignall 2019).

Each of the fuels, used resources, and the produced electricity require an infrastructure, which again has the potential for becoming a contested site. Energy infrastructure can be invisible, apparent only at times of dysfunctionality: we may take for granted that electricity comes from the plug socket, that we can turn the heat or the air conditioning on, and that switches will work (Star 1999; Müller 2021). Yet, the set-up of energy transport systems—think of coal on rails and ships, oil and gas in tanks, steam and hot water for heat or hydrogen in pipelines—has seen its own glitches and histories. The same goes for the secondary infrastructure needed for energy systems, such as coal mining towns, supply systems for workers, financial portfolios and investments, policies, rules, and regulations. Electrical grids and fuel transport infrastructure with their technical setups facilitate an inclusion of parts of society and co-constitute people’s feeling as part of it: flying trained coal miners in and out of mining towns in central Australia (Askland and Bunn 2018) will not contribute to democratisation in the same way as did, historically, coal miners’ joint work underground in Europe (Mitchell 2011). The informal sector of collecting coal that falls off lorries, prevailing in India’s coal mining areas, again creates different communities of energy workers (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The electric grid, as another example, epitomises energy’s potential for social inclusion and social construction once again: living off the grid can be a deliberate choice for some, but much more frequently, people perceive brown-outs or black-outs as a form of mismanagement and failure of maintaining the grid (Bakke 2016). Furthermore, when energy infrastructure is entangled with citizenship claims, people often prefer the electrification of remote rural areas through the grid rather than through solar lamps. In these instances the grid can be seen as citizenship materialising in wires (Cross 2019).

Electrifying villages or areas that have not yet been connected to the grid, and the resulting energy consumption, have the potential to change individual lives and interpersonal relationships. People understand electricity as a marker of modernity, signifying citizenship, and rearranging social status. Electrifying a village in Zanzibar in 1990, for example, meant that people got access to mass media and communication, reclaimed outdoor spaces at night, or could meet for watching television in the evenings (Winther 2008; Winther and Wilhite 2015). The fact that electrification can speed up the pace of life, with new cultural practices and a dissolving limitation of activities due to sunlight, makes it a biopolitical project that potentially brings liberation as well as surveillance and control (Gupta 2015). The effects of energy consumption also show in transitions from one energy source to another, i.e. when wood is substituted for low pressure gas cylinders, when solar cookers are introduced, or when biogas plants replace heating systems based on fossil fuels. Such transitions can bring individual advantages when shifting from consuming one fuel to another, such as less smoke pollution and fewer health hazards when used in cooking. They may also serve the interests of constituent energy communities requiring improvements in energy access (Campbell, Cloke and Brown 2016).

Individual choices in energy consumption also figure in the mobility sector, but they are framed by infrastructure. The choice of transport—a car or shared car, electric or diesel train, tram or bus, cycles, scooters, etc—is shaped by people’s socioeconomic conditions and aspirations, by available infrastructure as well as considerations of energy consumption. Each individual decision becomes part of the energy system and hence contributes to an ambivalent relationship between prevailing energy systems’ will to persist and the transformative capacity of (un)conscious changes in energy consumption. Ambivalence also marks many of the conscious and unconscious changes in energy consumption that accompany digitised energy consumption, via smart metre rollouts, for example. Digitisation potentially allows for reduced and optimised energy consumption, e.g. when people have digital metres that monitor and reduce their in-house heating. This works well in idealised industry scenarios, but these ideals do not necessarily prove to be true in reality: prople could use energy and digital appliances in ways rational or economical but, in fact, lifestyles and household preferences tend to be more dominant than energy tariff awareness and response (Kaviani et al. 2023; Strengers et al. 2021). Habits and conventions, daily behaviour, and social practices bear multiple possibilities of rebound effects, leading energy consumption to remain constant or even increase in times of digital energy control (e.g. Morley, Widdicks and Hazas 2018; Røpke 2012). Digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions make for a complicated twin transition (Sareen and Müller 2023).

Conclusion

This entry has only mentioned a handful of sources and material forms that energy can take. Much more can be said about heat pipelines, nuclear fission, batteries, petroleum gas, oil shale, peat, or hydrogen, for example. They feed on similar promises of energy availability and security, of being beneficial for the state, its citizens, the economy, and development. As anthropologists studying energy have pointed out, it is not only systemic availability, political regulations, and price that determine energy use, but also our social and cultural understandings. Furthermore, energy forms and sources often require someone to make a sacrifice, devastating villages, infringing on people’s rights, and violating cultural understandings. People find themselves forced to accept radiation or environmental degradation, living with the risk of accidents and calamity, rearranging social structures, or facing death when fighting against it (see e.g. Perrin 2005; Kelly 2019; Fortun and Morgan 2016; Ortiz 2024).

In the Anthropocene, we tend to group energy sources according to their CO₂ emissions, leading us to distinguish between renewable and non-renewable energy sources, or fossil and non-fossil fuels. This logic, however, has not been the same across space and time (Malm 2016, 38ff.). Energy sources comprise more than chemical and geo-environmental aspects. They can be evaluated according to their ethical, financial, political, environmental, social, and cultural aspects. Transitions from one energy source to another may seem economically and ecologically reasonable as well as technically feasible. We might overcome lock-in effects, be able to balance stranded assets, or convince ourselves of the planetary necessity of energy transitions. Yet, energy also remains subject to individual and communal understandings, experiences, and conceptions.

How we take the human and more-than-human stakeholders and their comprehension of energy into account will determine the future of energy systems. There is a threatening energy future scenario, where growing energy demand is not decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Weakening climate change mitigation efforts and shifting from mitigation to adaptation seems to be in line with forecasts of continuously increasing energy demand and a tardy decarbonisation. More optimistic energy futures expect technology-led transitions, where digitisation and new technology, ideally combined with changing consumer behaviour and social consent, have positive outcomes. They might lead to ‘exnovation’, i.e. terminating the use of an energy source in a just form. Or they may bring about creative destruction, simply making some of our current energy uses obsolete. Optimists thus hold on to the idea that energy systems can bring about greater prosperity and social benefits (see e.g. World Economic Forum 2023). Anthropological studies dampen some of these hopes, as they foreground the neo-colonial tendencies and problematic rebound effects of digitised energy consumption (Sareen and Müller 2023). They also show the great risk of failure of any energy transition that ignores how people handle energy and technology (Pink et al. 2023, 4). Being able to imagine various different energy futures (Watts 2024, 2019) will require collaboration and mutual human recognition. It will also require radically new forms of work. Transitioning from one energy system to another will likely be marked by ruptures, new infrastructural politics, and new extractivist frontiers.

References

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Note on contributor

Katja Müller is a social anthropologist conducting research into energy systems and digitalisation, as well as material and visual culture. She is Heisenberg-Professor for Technology, Ethics and Society at Merseburg University for Applied Sciences. Her latest books include Digitisation and low carbon energy transitions (2023, Palgrave), Digital archives and collections (2021, Berghahn), and Beyond the coal rush (2020, Cambridge University Press), analysing digital technology's impact on energy systems, online access to heritage material in India and Europe, and the coal rush in Germany, Australia, and India, respectively.

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United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2024. Process and meetings: The Rio Conventions. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-rio-conventions. Accessed 29 May 2024.

[2] HT Correspondent. 2023. “From HT Archives: ‘Temple of modern India’ thrown open.” Hindustan Times, July 8. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/jawaharlal-nehru-inaugurates-bhakra-nangal-canal-system-symbolizing-india-s-progress-and-selfreliance-101688755029139.html.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Egalitarianism

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 19:05:43 +0000

Megan Laws

London School of Economics

Initially published 29 Apr 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22egalitarianism

Abstract:

Anthropology makes a unique contribution to the study of egalitarianism. While ‘egalitarianism’ has long been the purview of moral philosophy, anthropology is unique in that it is the only discipline that claims to know, empirically, what it is like to live in an egalitarian society. This entry summarises some of the numerous ways that anthropologists, working with a broad variety of people from hunter-gatherers to state bureaucrats, have used the term ‘egalitarianism’ to describe forms of social and political organisation concerned with ‘equality’. What it means to be ‘equal’, however, is widely debated not only among anthropologists, but among the people they study. As is true for moral philosophy, there are numerous approaches to the question—with some that emphasise equal rights or freedoms, and others that emphasise equal wealth or opportunities. Engaging critically with debates concerning the meaning of ‘equality’, and with ethnographic evidence of efforts to achieve it, this entry provides insights not only into what ‘egalitarianism’ is and is not, but also into the contextual factors that threaten egalitarianism and the situations that might allow it to flourish.

Introduction

Egalitarianism, the view that all people are equal and should be treated as such, is a well-developed area of study in moral philosophy. There are numerous traditions, from those that emphasise equal rights or freedoms and are known as ‘liberal’ traditions, to those that emphasise equal wealth or opportunities and are at times referred to as ‘socialist’ traditions (see Sen 1980). These traditions are diverse, but they tend to converge on the basic point that egalitarianism describes a form of social and economic organisation that ensures people are free from tyranny, i.e. free from seeing their freedoms or opportunities oppressed by others, and free from hierarchy in that their rights to wealth or to opportunities, for example, are not determined by rank or status.

One of the ways in which these traditions differ, however, is in their assessments of how we might achieve such relative equality and what role property should play. Where classically ‘liberal’ traditions stress that egalitarianism depends on people having personal property rights to what they produce or accumulate, classically ‘socialist’ traditions stress that the wealth people generate should be redistributed—if not to everyone, then to those who are most in need.

These forms of egalitarianism are obviously at odds with one another, and much discussion has been had on how to reconcile them (Arneson 2013). Anthropology has long made a contribution to this discussion by looking, empirically, at what it is like to live in an egalitarian society, i.e. a society that, on the face of it, values both personal autonomy and material equality. Anthropological research shows that such societies keep mechanisms in place to reconcile problems of freedom and problems of redistribution—maintaining not only certain ideas about persons (be they human or non-human), but certain practices of sharing or ways of relating to one another. Anthropology also studies ethnographically how people attempt to bring egalitarian societies about—revealing where these efforts fall short and where they succeed. Taken together, the discipline does not only tell us about the values that people associate with egalitarianism or equality, but about what happens when people try to live by them. It shows that lived egalitarianism is much more than simply a set of either ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ values and that a greater degree of equality is achievable almost everywhere.

Early writing on freedom and equality

Early writing on egalitarianism can be divided into texts that emphasise equality of rights and opportunities (in other words, freedom of choice and equality of rights under the law), and those that emphasise equality of outcome, often assumed to be equality of wealth. These are not mutually exclusive, but they have developed into distinct schools of thought. Though there are numerous early contributions to this area of study, the most widely cited social theorists are John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx.

The popularity of these European authors may give the impression that egalitarian thought originated from insurrections against the tyrannies or hierarchies of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Europe, but increasingly the archive suggests otherwise. These were also periods of European empire, and with that came resistance and rebellion from those people that Europeans were colonising or enslaving. Their dissidence, as Priyamvada Gopal (2019) writes, shaped the way people in Europe thought about freedom and emancipation. In Spain, the atrocities suffered by colonised indigenous peoples led Bartolomé de las Casas to develop a Christian form of egalitarianism. In France, the egalitarian thinking that was central to the French Revolution followed from discussions with indigenous theorists such as the chief of the Huron people, Kondiaronk (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). In the United States, Frederick Douglass became a leading abolitionist writer who made the case for human equality, and in the Caribbean C.L.R. James’ (1938) account of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture illustrates the persecution that people of colour experienced then, and still experience disproportionately today. All these writings indicate that egalitarian thinking is not the privilege of one region, but may resonate with people around the world who have been subdued by tyrannical rule, colonisation, and slavery.

Writing in the late seventeenth century, English philosopher John Locke emphasised that people have ‘natural rights’ to do as they please so long as the ‘natural rights’ of others are not violated in the process. His writing was revolutionary within a context where philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes supported absolute monarchy, and in the lead up to England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that saw the partial separation of Parliament from the Crown. Locke’s central claim was that people have inalienable rights to what they produce, and should be free from coercion, either in the form of enforced redistribution or in the form of forced labour—quite unorthodox ideas at the time.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was similarly concerned with freedom, but his writing is more sensitive to the problems posed by the pursuit of self-interest and by systems of private property. Since people depend upon one another, both materially and psychologically, Rousseau argued, it does not make sense to speak as if this were not the case—as if they are not obligated or compelled to care for one another or part with their wealth. In Discourse on inequality (1755), Rousseau argued that it was in establishing systems of private property that inequality was able to develop. Yet, Rousseau did not go so far as to advocate for private property to be abolished. Where inequality was natural for Locke, for Rousseau it could be overcome through the development of laws based on the ‘general will’ of the people—in other words, laws that would ensure the common good.

Like Rousseau, Karl Marx was concerned with the way private property could develop into systems of oppression. His analysis, however, was much more sophisticated in its account of how this happens under capitalism. Like Locke and Rousseau, Marx emphasised that people have rights over what they produce. He recognised, however, that this would necessarily exacerbate inequalities where people’s natural abilities were beyond their control or where the economic system was structured in such a way to privilege some over others. Marx claimed, contrary to the Lockean definition of equality effectively as ‘liberty’, that measures must be put in place to redistribute wealth to those who deserve it—not only those who are less able or less fortunate, but those who had produced the wealth in the first place.

Stated differently, where Lockean notions of ‘property’ focus primarily on the wealth one can produce or accumulate, Marxists expand this notion of ‘property’ to include not only the wealth one is able to produce but one’s abilities or opportunities as ‘properties’ as well. This distinction is key because where differences in abilities or opportunities are largely ‘natural’ to Locke (the property, like wealth, of individuals), they are largely the product of political and economic processes for Marx, and therefore the property of more than simply those who ‘own’ or ‘possess’ them. This forms the basis for Marx’s critique of capitalism, but Marx’s recognition of political and social context also serves as the basis for his own formulation of what an ‘egalitarian society’ might look like.

Drawing upon Lewis Henry Morgan’s ethnographic writing on the Iroquois, Marx wrote with Friedrich Engels ([1884] 1972) of ‘primitive communism’. This was a form of social and economic organisation that supported neither the accumulation of wealth nor the development of hierarchy. Only with the development of pervasive forms of capital accumulation would these earlier forms of egalitarianism give way to present day forms of inequality. The thrust of the argument surrounding primitive communism was that capitalism (and by extension, inequality) was not the inevitable consequence of granting people freedom, but rather historically specific and changeable. For contemporary followers of Marxist thought, it is in fact Lockean notions of assumedly ‘natural’ rights that are at the root of contemporary problems of inequality. Political systems privileging natural rights, they argue, lead to a sort of ‘possessive individualism’, where the individual is conceived of ‘as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them’ (Macpherson 1962, 3). For liberal and neoliberal thinkers, these principles are central to their own formulations of a fair, well-functioning society (see Morningstar 2020).

While anthropologists have generally opposed the notion that neoliberalism, i.e. the expansion of market logics, practices, and institutions, is a solution to problems of inequality, they have not escaped some of the promises and problems neoliberalism brings about. Most notably, they have not escaped the issue of how to value freedom or autonomy (in the sense of people being free from the claims of others or from coercive political and economic processes), without fostering inequalities of wealth or opportunity. Similarly, anthropologists grapple with the question of how to value that people make claims upon and care for one another (something at times called ‘communalism’), without supporting social hierarchies or socially destructive forms of dependency.

The following section presents some key ethnographies of hunting and gathering populations, who are renowned not only for their traditions of sharing but also for their respect of personal autonomy. This body of ethnographic work provides significant insights into the way that certain groups of people reconcile the tensions that arise between conflicting sets of values and into the contextual factors that shape such values in the first place.

The entry then looks at contributions to the study of egalitarianism that emerge in contexts where we might not expect it, such as in the Indian caste system or in the Sicilian mafia, and returns to the problem of what we understand ‘equality’ to be. Does ‘equality’ stand for sameness or equivalence when it comes to personal rights or abilities, or does it refer to wealth or opportunities?

Subsequently, the entry turns to ethnographic writing on animism and ‘vitality’ which shows that equality of rights or abilities as well as wealth or opportunities condition one another. In these instances, wealth or opportunity make the exercise of rights or abilities possible. It raises the question of what we owe to one another as humans but also what we owe to other sorts of beings that give us vitality and make life possible, pointing out that an ‘egalitarian society’ may have to include non-humans as well.

The final section then turns to people’s frequently messy attempts of trying to work out what they owe to one another. It asks how people pursue egalitarian values when they are not sure that they can trust others to do the same, or when other forms of uncertainty make it hard to do so. This section plays to anthropology’s strength, in that it shows how the tension between different forms of ‘equality’ play out in its practical pursuit. Ethnography is a crucial resource here—providing insights not only into the contextual factors that threaten egalitarianism, but the situations that might allow it to flourish.

Hunter-gatherers and ‘egalitarianism’

For many classically liberal thinkers, the absence of systems of rights and forms of governance that protect private property and individual freedoms would entail a steady descent into war (the most violent form that claim-making can take). Responding to this claim, anthropologists writing in the post-war period turned to ethnography and to some of the last so-called ‘primitive societies’. They sought to better understand hunting and gathering as a mode of subsistence, and in turn were able to challenge the claim that the absence of systems of private property was synonymous with tyranny or poverty. Drawing upon early ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers who lived with a minimal amount of private property (notably Lee and DeVore 1968, see Solway 2006), Marshall Sahlins famously argued that hunter-gatherers enjoyed not only ‘a kind of material plenty’ (1972, 9), but greater degrees of personal autonomy. Later studies argued in a similar vein that greater equalities of wealth, power, and prestige are ensured in hunter-gatherer societies than in any other (Woodburn 1982).

Something interesting was certainly going on here. These societies were not only said to value sharing and shun the accumulation of wealth, in line with Marx and Engels’ writing on ‘primitive communism’, but also to value personal autonomy of the sort cherished by liberal thinkers (see Widlok 2020). Rather than have the value of sharing develop into forms of hierarchy or oppression, where one has no choice but to give up one’s wealth, these were societies that valued sharing without thereby sacrificing personal autonomy. The form of sharing valued here is not based on a primacy of private property, which many readers may associate with philanthropy or systems of taxation. Instead, it is a type of sharing that gives anyone the right to claim, or ‘demand’, an equal share of whatever is produced or gathered. One can make such a claim, so long as the outcome of sharing is equality.

How does such ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993; Widlok 2004, 2013, 2017), however, square with the value of personal autonomy? While there is certainly an obligation, or a compulsion to share within these societies, sharing is not strictly enforced. It is not only possible to refuse the demands that people make, but to avoid those demands being made in the first place. This is important because demand sharing does not automatically ensure equality. Not only is it not always obvious when someone has accumulated more than others (due to the fact that wealth can be concealed or simply out of sight), but it is not always possible to know who can be trusted to be transparent about their wealth when they have. Refusing the demands that people make or preventing them from making them in the first place are, therefore, not simply indicative of the breakdown of egalitarianism. To the contrary, they play an important role in its realisation and to the realisation of personal autonomy. Personal autonomy, however, carries its own risks; the risk, no less, of making it possible for people to conceal their wealth or keep it in the hands of only those they prefer.

Faced with this eventuality, people who value egalitarianism typically develop measures that either maintain a certain amount of transparency or that remind people of their commitments to one another. Among !Kung (or ‘Ju|’hoansi’) for example (Wiessner 1977, also Laws 2019b), there have long been gift-exchange relationships (called xaro or hxaro) that limit accumulation and the development of hierarchy between ‘clans’ or ‘bands’ who live apart from one another and whose wealth at any one time is unknown. Gift-giving thus establishes a pattern of visiting that not only ensures the circulation of certain goods but creates opportunities for demand sharing between those whose wealth is out of sight. Other means of orienting people towards egalitarian behaviour include deriding those who seek to gain greater wealth, power, or prestige (or who are suspected of doing so) or managing the claims that others can make by choosing when to make one’s wealth visible or accessible to those who hope to make demands (see Laws 2019a, also see Lee 1984, 48 on ‘insulting the meat’ for a popular example of a levelling mechanism against the development of prestige).

Egalitarianism then, much like hierarchy, is not natural; rather it is maintained through a series of social levelling mechanisms (Woodburn 1982, also see Clastres 1972), practices that encourage the redistribution of wealth and regulate personal autonomy. They attune people to the value of egalitarianism and to the various ways it may be threatened. We see such efforts to attune people to the values of egalitarianism not only in the hunter-gatherer literature, but in numerous contexts where the benefits of sharing or maintaining autonomy outweigh the benefits of accumulating wealth, power, or prestige. These levelling dynamics play out on the streets of Addis Ababa (Di Nunzio 2012, 2017), Johannesburg (Dawson 2021), Nairobi (Thieme 2013, 2017), or the Zimbabwe-South Africa border (Mate 2021), where getting by means not only accumulating relationships with others (at times referred to as having ‘wealth in people’ [Guyer 2009]) but hustling to get whatever material forms of wealth one is due. We also see this in the many print and digital forums set up to provide a space for political commentaries against dictators (Bernal 2013), governments (Coleman 2014), or other sources of oppression (see Kapferer 2015), where achieving or maintaining autonomy means, at times, tricking or deriding others. These all provide further evidence of the surprising ways in which people go about trying to achieve equality, and of the contextual factors that shape whether, or how successfully, they do so.

The study of mostly egalitarian societies raises the question of whether these are people who simply share certain values, or whether they are in fact compelled towards them by states of mutual vulnerability. Put differently, the question is: can egalitarianism flourish irrespective of the circumstances people find themselves in, or do certain conditions need to be met for egalitarianism to develop or be maintained? Within writing on hunter-gatherers, there has been a tendency to argue both ways. On the one hand, egalitarianism is said to have developed over thousands of years of living under very specific conditions, often in some of the most challenging environments in the world, and to be sensitive to those conditions. On the other hand, egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers appears to be remarkably resilient to changes in circumstances—precisely because, as Thomas Widlok (2020) puts it, the resilience and reappearance of egalitarianism ‘relies to a large extent on these levelling practices being kept in place across generations’.

This has, as Stan Frankland (2016, 561) shows, often given the impression that hunter-gatherers are ‘stuck in a cosmological loop of “hunter-gatherer situations”’ that compels them to remain the way they are. This fits with a tendency to turn to hunter-gatherers as exemplary of a non-Western, non-modern kind of utopia (c.f. Trouillot 2003, 17; Gable 2011, 2). This tendency has not only had the effect of distorting their lives, pitting egalitarian ‘societies’ against non-egalitarian ones when both pursue egalitarianism but in ways that are shaped by the different circumstances they face. To minimise this risk, some anthropologists have decided not to analyse societies as a whole, but instead look more closely at the broader contextual factors that shape how, and whether, people (in general, not just hunter-gatherers) pursue egalitarianism (see Gulbrandsen 1991).

The analysis of egalitarian circumstances and situations allows anthropologists to recognise egalitarianism in places where we would not have expected it, beyond hunter-gatherer contexts, including in large social groups (see Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 276-327). Research into egalitarianism can therefore take place even in highly hierarchical societies. This broadening of research contexts, however, has led some analysts to use the term ‘egalitarianism’ somewhat indiscriminately. Recalling the central distinction between freedom and autonomy on the one hand, and sharing and redistributive equality on the other, it often becomes hard to know what exactly the term egalitarianism means (also see Buitron and Steinmüller 2020). The next section addresses this with respect to a key determining factor: how people approach differences in property, and what we take ‘property’ to be.

Property, personhood, ‘equality’, and ‘equivalence

Outside of hunter-gatherer studies, the term ‘egalitarianism’ was perhaps most famously used by Louis Dumont (1980) in his structural analysis of the Indian case system. Comparing India with ‘the West’, from the perspective of both the society ‘as a whole’ and the individual within it, Dumont begins by equating the Indian caste system with ‘hierarchy’ as individuals are organised legally and in their everyday lives in relation to their rank, and the West with ‘equality’ or ‘egalitarianism’ because here individuals are equal before the law. However, Dumont goes on to challenge this standard formulation, arguing that rather than equate egalitarianism with the sort of equality exhibited by the Western legal system, it should be seen in the Indian caste system. Where the Indian caste system sees persons defined in relation to one another, the Western legal system sees persons defined in relation to themselves—whether, in other words, they are ‘equivalent’ to one another. Where the Indian caste system is an instance of ‘holism’ and inclusivity, the Western legal system is an instance of individualism and exclusivity.

Dumont’s ‘egalitarianism’, however, is one that focuses almost exclusively on identity—in other words, on how persons are defined. According to the Western legal system, persons are equivalent to one another to the extent that they share the same rights. According to the Indian caste system, persons are equivalent to one another insofar as they are similarly defined in relation to one another. The move that Dumont makes, as Joel Robbins (1994, 21) points out, is to ensure that ‘the mere existence of inegalitarian elements in a society does not prevent us from studying it as an egalitarian one’. While this comparison is insightful and allows us to consider egalitarianism from more than one vantage point, it is also limited. As David Graeber (2007, 47) has argued, it misses the basic point that ‘from the perspective of those on the bottom’ (Graeber 2007, 26), either of the formal hierarchy in India or from a standpoint of material deprivation in the West, both systems are highly exclusive, either restricting peoples rights and opportunities or limiting their access to wealth (see Beteille 1986, also see Leacock 1978 or Finnegan 2013 for an analysis of how this plays out in relation to gender). The relationship between how one is defined and one’s material equality or rights and opportunities is not fully explored. It is possible, in other words, to be equivalent in some way but not to have equality.

Naomi Haynes and Jason Hickel (2016) offer a complementary, albeit different, perspective on the relationship between equality and equivalence when proposing the term ‘egalitarian hierarchy’. This, they argue, is not a contradiction in terms but rather an analytical descriptor for situations where positions within a hierarchy are open to anyone. One’s position within the hierarchy, in other words, can shift—meaning that those at the bottom can take positions at the top—addressing, to an extent, the issue raised by David Graeber. This is not ‘egalitarianism’ as described by Dumont, but it is ‘egalitarianism’ insofar as the opportunity to occupy certain subject positions is equally shared. We see this in Haynes’ (2015) ethnography of Pentecostal Christianity in Zambia’s Copperbelt where, among the Pentecostal congregations she studies, we find a clear separation between leaders and laypeople. However, both kinds of positions can be held by anybody, and neither position can be held permanently. The Holy Spirit is ‘poured out on “all flesh”’ (Haynes and Hickel 2016, 9). It may be the case, in other words, that there are differences between people and their access to opportunities or to wealth, but these differences are not stable, nor do they necessarily result in unequal access to wealth—in this case, the Holy Spirit.

Studies such as these, that challenge any neat distinction between hierarchy and egalitarianism, or that draw attention to the differences between equality and equivalence, are significant because they challenge the claim that natural or social differences in abilities necessarily give way to inequality. By extension they also challenge the claim that equivalence or ‘sameness’ must entail equality or egalitarianism (Walker 2020). An early analysis of gender relations among Hagen people living in Papua New Guinea’s Mount Hagen region had already picked up on this issue (Strathern 1988, 138-58). In this area, during the late 1960s, numerous ‘inequalities’ existed between men and women in terms of their division of labour—in the raising of pigs by women, or the hosting of public ceremonies by men. However, these differences were not indicators of inequality proper because ownership over the resources that come from labour does not discriminate between them. Pigs raised by women may help men further their political interests, but the prestige they gain from the labour of ceremonial exchange may be the benefit of women (148). What makes this ‘egalitarian’ is the fact that what people accrue from their labour is not their property alone. This must be so because people are not regarded as the sole authors of their own actions. This applies not only to the products of their labour, be that pigs or yams, but to working bodies too as the outcome of social relations. One observes a similar recognition across much of the Amazon, where the language of ‘masters’ and ‘owners’ suggests that all capacities to act are themselves seen as the outcome of the acts of others (Rival 1998; Fausto 1999, 2008). What follows from this is that egalitarian societies rely on commonly accepted understandings of the debts we owe to one another, both with respect to wealth and with respect to status or ability.

Some writers have recently taken a more critical stance towards the idea that ‘egalitarianism’ can exist in a context of hierarchy. Within Australia, for example, ‘egalitarianism’ has been used to describe the view after World War II that people are ‘a society of equals who possessed as inner qualities the capacity to govern themselves’ (Kapferer and Morris 2003, 91). This view has also been used as the basis of populist rejections of efforts to address existing inequalities in Australia, typically between majority and minority populations, on the grounds that providing minorities with exclusive welfare programs could be considered ‘inegalitarian’ (Kapferer and Morris 2003, 91). Similarly, in Switzerland, ‘egalitarianism’ is used to describe the Swiss system of direct democracy which aims to ensure consensus between different political groups (Gold 2019). Yet this same system facilitates exclusionary practices if the will of the majority dictates it. An equivalence between voters, or between party members, may entail equality in other words, but it does not in itself ensure it. In Sicily, the ‘popular metaphor associating the Mafia with power, exercised through power’ (Rakopoulos 2017, 113) would suggest that the relationship between members within a Mafia cooperative is necessarily one of coercion. By contrast, Rakopoulos explains, relationships between Mafioso and those who form the political economy in the region, such as winemakers, are egalitarian in the sense that they are frequently based not on coercion but on consent. The question, then, is how to keep it this way? Or how to challenge and transform hierarchies of power if they develop? The following section addresses these questions in more depth, focusing not only on how humans redistribute or balance inequalities of power, but also how this extends to non-humans.

Vitality and uncertainty

It may be possible to bring together ‘egalitarianism’ as freedom or autonomy and ‘egalitarianism’ as sharing and redistribution. Terms like ‘sharing’ and ‘redistribution’ do not just refer to what we do with objects or goods. They also describe our abilities or capacities to act, i.e. the ‘properties’ of us as living beings. We often produce these properties in much the same way as we produce objects or goods: through labour, or by attending to or caring for one another, for example. Such a renewed focus on the qualities or properties of persons may help us appreciate that egalitarianism entails not only the sharing or redistribution of objects but of vitality itself. On the one hand, this highlights the important question: ‘to whom do we owe our existence?’ (Graeber 2011, 67). The social processes that enable us to live, of course, are not always equalising; however, investigating them is one good way to not just reflect upon our debts towards others but also on what others may owe to us. Here, a focus on vitality foregrounds that the ‘products’ of people’s actions are not only goods but people themselves. It shifts the question of how unequal distributions of wealth, power, or prestige are ‘levelled’ to how such desirable aspects of life are brought about in the first place

On the other hand, a focus on vitality foregrounds that many people survive by harvesting, hunting, or consuming beings they regard as having a vitality of their own. All social life, whether between humans, or between humans and non-humans, entails a degree of violence, and egalitarian societies are no exception. As David Graeber writes, with reference to anarchic sociopolitical formations, this ‘spectral violence seems to emerge from the very tensions inherent in the project of maintaining an egalitarian society’ (2004, 31). What is important in bringing about egalitarian situations is not preventing violence entirely, but rather to prevent these forms of violence from becoming excessive or overly exploitative. Language may play an important role here. Among Ju|’hoansi in northeastern Namibia, for example (Laws 2019b, 219), there are ‘owners’ and ‘masters’ not of goods or objects but of actions. Such ‘owners’ or ‘masters’ (indicated by the suffix –kxao) perform a particular action either especially well or excessively. A ‘master thief’ (dcàákxao), for example, is only ever referred to as such if they do so excessively. This suggests a certain tolerance for wrongdoing but also provides a language that marks excessive negative behaviour. The tolerance that this language communicates is borne not simply of the view that some theft is fine, but the reality that distinguishing theft from permitted acts of taking requires an understanding of intentions—something that is difficult and takes time.

Investigating the creation and distribution of vitality has also allowed anthropologists to highlight how important non-humans are in bringing about egalitarian situations. Non-humans feature prominently in efforts to rebalance all kinds of distribution. Within animist contexts, spirits who are often all seeing and all powerful regulate vitality both among humans (Laws 2021) and among humans and non-humans. Among the Yukaghir people of North Siberia, we see how this principle operates between hunters and their prey (Willerslev 2012). All prey are said to have spirit-masters. These spirit-masters regulate hunting among the Yukaghir by threatening to strike them with sickness or death if they hunt too much. The implication is that if the balance of vitality shifts from the forest to the Yukaghir, there must be mechanisms in place to restore it through comparable acts of violence. Similarly, in Amazonia, most things are described as having an ‘owner’—a ‘mediator between this resource and the collective to which he or she belongs’ (Fausto 2008, 330; also Walker 2012). What matters is not that people refrain from hunting or from getting into debt, but that they refrain from doing this too much. Their actions should be directed towards the right ends. People may of course attempt to resist these efforts, for example by ‘playing tricks’ to avoid being struck with sickness or death (Willerslev 2012) or to avoid sharing (Laws 2019a), but they do this not because they wish to exploit one another or the environment but because they fear they themselves are being exploited.

This line of analysis builds on scholarly insights in anthropology that non-humans are often deeply embedded in social relationships and processes. They are not simply the ‘products’ of labour that get shared among humans, but agents that make demands of their own. In her analysis of egalitarianism among Nayaka hunter-gatherers of South India, Nurit Bird-David (1990) illustrates how Nayaka root metaphors of the forest as a ‘giving parent’ are embedded in broader processes of ascribing agency (or rather, social sentience) not only to humans but also to the environment more broadly. Just as people, in the spirit of demand sharing, construct their needs in terms of their desire for an equal share (Bird-David et al. 1992), so too do the plants, animals, or environments they demand from. Similarly, when the balance of wealth shifts—in other words, when people take more from the environment than they give, or when their activities become unsustainable—the environment demands a share of the life-force that early acts of giving made possible. They are embedded within a ‘cosmic economy of sharing’ (also see Lewis 2008) that extends well beyond human interpersonal relations.

This raises a critical question: how should we go about balancing vitality? Writing on resistance and revolution in anthropology (see Wright 2016, Wilson 2019) demonstrates a variety of responses to this question, or rather a variety of approaches to efforts of societal transformation (see Cherstich et al. 2020), within both state and non-state contexts. We see everything from highly visible forms of political action in the form of revolutions or protests (see Rasza 2015; Graeber 2008; Sitrin 2012), to more ‘unobtrusive’ forms of political struggle (Scott 1990, 183; Maeckelbergh 2011, 2016). Writ large, what this literature suggests is that balancing vitality takes two primary forms: one which involves resisting oppression or overcoming marginalisation, and one that involves embodying the forms of political and social life that ought to take their place.

A key problem that emerges in the literature on egalitarianism is to do with the problem of uncertainty. To bring about an egalitarian society, one must know where wealth or power reside and whom to trust. We find that people are often concerned not simply with whether a given interaction is fair, but with whether actions or processes that seem putatively fair may, in fact, allow inequalities to develop over time. It is also in situations of scarcity and marginality, where uncertainty is rife and where people depend upon one another greatly, that concerns of this kind seem to become all the more pressing. In these situations, egalitarianism appears not simply as a possibility for social organisation but as a necessity or an inevitability (Gulbrandsen 1991, Laws 2019b).

At the same time, the anthropological literature warns us against teleological arguments about the nature of egalitarianism (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). A close analysis of archaeological and historical records finds that the relationship between modes of production and forms of social organisation are not straightforward, and that societies depending on agriculture may remain mostly egalitarian while hunter-gatherers may not. Whether human groups began as egalitarian or hierarchical ones is still up for debate. David Graeber and David Wengrow have recently argued that ‘we do not have to choose…between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story’ (2021, 118) as we should not underestimate human capacities for creativity when living under and responding to different material conditions. The authors draw upon archaeological and historical evidence from Çatalhöyük or early cities from Egypt to China to Central America to argue not only that egalitarianism appears within a wide variety of contexts, but that people develop ingenious ways of responding to the different challenges that these contexts pose for pursuing egalitarianism. We can start by agreeing that it is not simply the case that egalitarianism entails the rejection, under any circumstances, of relations of property. It is certainly the case that egalitarianism tends to mean holding the products of people’s labour as common property and, by extension, the abilities or qualities that people possess. But any ‘genuinely egalitarian system’ (Graeber 2007, 48)—one, in other words, that values autonomy—has embedded within it hierarchical possibilities and unequal potential that must be actively guarded against, often with recourse to relations of property.

This brings attention to at least one recurring challenge that people face when they pursue egalitarianism—the challenge of not knowing, on the one hand, where wealth or power resides and, on the other, whom we should trust to share wealth or power when they have it. ‘Assertive egalitarianism’, with this in mind, is less about performing sharing or acting autonomously and more about attuning oneself, and others, to these broader problems of knowledge that may allow inequalities to develop over time. We see this in ‘Melanesian egalitarianism’, where ceremonial processes of giving and receiving appear to be more about denying the ‘new manifestations of power’ that may emerge from the accumulation of resources, than they are about day-to-day processes of redistribution that circumscribe such forms of accumulation (Rio 2014).

One way that people go about addressing problems of uncertainty that arise is through developing moral arguments that remind people that they need each other, and that they owe their vitality and the products of their labour to each other. There are many ways that people do this and ensure that people refrain from the kinds of actions that lead to hierarchy or inequality in its most enduring forms, but one common way is through the development of universal systems of kin classification (see Barnard 1978, 2016; Leacock and Lee 1982; Bird-David 2017). These systems take ‘kin’ to be those who act in particular ways (most notably, those who share with one another), not those who are related by blood or residence. What this does, coupled with broader narratives of what it means to be ‘good’ and to be a ‘person’, is sustain a moral argument about the relationship between equality as an outcome and different ways of behaving or treating others.

These approaches to achieving equality, and the moral arguments that accompany them, can take a wide variety of forms. What unites them, however, is a subjunctive mood—a mood, in other words, that is attuned to doubts and suspicions (see Laws 2021, also see Stasch 2015). These doubts and suspicions concern not only people's commitments to the principles of egalitarianism but the way contingencies of scale and time shape people’s ability to recognise inequalities developing over time or prevent people from acting upon them. The study of egalitarianism suddenly looks quite different. It is not simply the study of values of freedom or sharing, but the study of the way people address uncertainty and the impact it has on efforts to achieve equality. This highlights the importance not only of redistribution or freedom but of concomitant practices of tracing inequalities of wealth, power, and prestige over time and finding ways to address these as they develop. When we take these practices seriously, we start to see egalitarianism at work in unexpected places—in political commentaries that use dark humour and satire to call out coercive or self-seeking behaviour, among programmers seeking to develop alternatives to centralised banking systems, among hackers seeking to expose or disrupt hierarchies, or in ordinary acts of mutual aid. How successful these are depends not only on the values people have, but on the availability of knowledge and the ability to address inequality when it does become apparent.

Conclusion

The study of egalitarianism makes clear that there is a tension between ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, or ‘autonomy’ and ‘communalism’, with one ‘running as a strong counter-current’ to the other (Guenther 1999, 42)—a ‘paradox’, even, at the heart of egalitarianism (see Kapferer 2015). Anthropological engagements with the topic suggest, however, that any model of equality that does not take sharing seriously fails to recognise the enabling conditions of individual freedom and autonomy. Anthropological scholarship of egalitarianism focuses as much on the creation of wealth, power, and prestige as on its redistribution. It broadens the object of inquiry to include the study of vitality and links the creation and maintenance of egalitarian relationships to notions of ‘property’ and personhood and to certain understandings of the non-human.

By analysing lived egalitarianism, it shows that distinguishing between the performance of egalitarian values and their enactment is a fundamental problem. It also shows that in contexts of high uncertainty, when people are compelled not only to share but to respect one another’s autonomy in the interests of social cohesion, equality appears almost inevitable. In many other contexts, however, equality must be actively pursued—not only as a value or set of values, but as a material reality that depends upon being both open about one's relative wealth and committed to achieving equality as an outcome (and not simply to pursuing a particular set of values).

By exploring how people actually go about pursuing the values associated with egalitarianism and how they navigate the many challenges that they face along the way, ethnography gives us a sense of what it might be like to live in an egalitarian society. More importantly, it teaches us under what conditions performing the actions or processes associated with egalitarianism might actually help us to bring equality about.

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Note on contributor

Megan Laws is a fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa, with research interests in the way that doubt and trust shape egalitarian values and redistributive practices.

Dr Megan Laws, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. m.laws1@lse.ac.uk

Prefigurative politics

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:51:10 +0000

Guilherme Fians

University of St Andrews

Initially published 18 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22prefigpolitics

Abstract:

‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal globalisation, prefigurative politics involve deploying political practices that are in line with the activists’ envisaged goals. These, in turn, tend to encompass the construction of a democratic and horizontal society, which must be enacted through egalitarian relationships between activists who refrain from resorting to authoritarian, sexist, and exclusionary means to reach political goals. Yet, what are the origins of this concept? What kind of politics are referred to as prefigurative? Since the concept’s consolidation, anthropologists have been at the forefront of answering these questions, as both researchers and activists. They look at how prefigurative politics intersect with themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, social change, community-building, and everyday ways of inhabiting the world. This entry explores how prefigurative politics as a concept and as a series of practices have become relevant among those who build horizontal political and social relations, oppose representative democracy, and embody alternative lifestyles. Exploring prefigurative politics leads scholars to question the seemingly straightforward divide between the New Left and ‘old lefts’. Additionally, asking whether right-wing movements can also engage in prefigurative politics helps us better understand the pervasive practices that transform non-institutionalised activism into laboratories from where people foster change and experiment with new socialities.

Introduction

Prefigurative politics—and its cognate, prefiguration—is one of those concepts that appear to be rather abstruse, but whose meaning actually indicates something ordinary. It refers to the strategies and practices employed by political activists to build alternative futures in the present and to effect political change by not reproducing the social structures that activists oppose. Prefiguration has been widely associated with the modus operandi of the social movements that blossomed after the 1960s, drawing on anarchist-inspired principles, such as participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Via the motto ‘another world is possible’, prefiguration is often part of activist-led social experiments that, rather than serving clearly established goals, create open-ended ways of reimagining society and contesting the entanglements of representative democracy, neoliberalism, social inequality, and globalisation.

Yet, before prefiguration gained prominence with the last decades’ protests against neoliberal globalisation, how did this concept come into being? First used centuries ago to betoken a form of Christian salvation, how did prefiguration acquire a different meaning among political activists? What kind of politics is referred to as prefigurative?

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘new social movements’ and the ‘New Left’. These constituted movements that amplified causes which spoke not only to economic and class-related goals, but also to civil rights, ethics, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Such causes include feminism, environmentalism, the movements for gay rights, animal rights, the American civil rights and other anti-racism movements worldwide, students’ movements and, since the 1990s, alterglobalisation movements (against neoliberal globalisation). Questioning Marxist and social-democratic forms of political action, the prefigurative forms of activism at the heart of these movements do not necessarily seek to mobilise every means available to achieve a pre-established, future-oriented goal. Instead, they aim to create a more egalitarian and inclusive society by equalling a movement’s means with a movement’s ends: reaching a horizontal society requires building horizontal relationships between activists in the present, which will, in turn, prefigure the envisaged end.

Such movements and tactics were labelled ‘new’ when measured against the paradigmatic ‘old’ of institutionalised activism carried out by political parties and trade unions since at least the Industrial Revolution. Thinking about political activism from the perspective of grand narratives and ideologies—as well as of communist theories of comprehensive social change—has stimulated social scientists to regard the success of a given mobilisation as dependent upon the attainment of certain predetermined goals (Maeckelbergh 2011), such as a revolution that will dismantle capitalism and implement a new mode of production. Yet, seeking a revolution as the ultimate goal often assumes that any means are valid to reach a more egalitarian and classless society. Unlike this paradigm, prefigurative politics refrain, for instance, from using authoritarianism to build a democratic society.

Anthropology has shown a long-standing interest in prefigurative politics since this concept’s first links with social movements. Mostly through the work of anthropologists-cum-activists, prefiguration has been approached alongside themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, inequality, social change, community-building, and the ways in which everyday lives are lived. While political scientists and sociologists have mostly concentrated on political strategies by drawing parallels between several cognate social movements, anthropologists have employed participant observation to explore particular movements, collectives, and networks. In such manner, they have produced a nuanced understanding of how prefiguration takes place on the ground—without losing sight of its shortcomings.

Due to ethnographers’ particular attention to prefigurative politics in Europe and the United States, the existing body of literature may convey the idea that prefiguration thrives particularly in the Global North. Existing analyses have also tended to focus on disruptive, contentious politics. By contrast, fewer studies stress the pertinence of prefigurative practices in the everyday lives of people in the Global South, and of those who are not full-time protesters. Even fewer have considered how right-wing activists also mobilise prefiguration. While scholars generally agree on what constitutes prefigurative politics, some highlight an apparent paradox when the anarchist-inspired principles underlying prefiguration are mobilised by activists who are, content-wise, anything but anarchists. Other scholars, in turn, accentuate prefiguration as a political strategy that can be similarly deployed by activists advancing progressive as much as conservative content. Lastly, as I will discuss, several researchers have used prefiguration as a rather problematic umbrella term to label which movements and forms of activism have a prefigurative character and which ones have not.

To explore the historical and current significance of prefigurative politics, as well as its limitations, this entry analyses how this concept and the practices it designates have come to bear relevance among those who oppose representative democracy, build small-scale politically organised entities as horizontal micropolities, and embody alternative lifestyles. Questioning the seeming straightforwardness of the divide between the new and old lefts and bringing right-wing movements to the discussion, this entry provides anthropologists and non-academics with a gateway to better understand the pervasive practices that aim to turn activism into laboratories from where people foster change by experimenting with new socialities.

Revolutions that dismiss the revolution

The concept of prefiguration is often credited to Carl Boggs (1977) to describe the logics and practices of left-wing movements that, mostly since the 1960s, opposed Leninism and the working-class politics aimed at structural reform. Yet, little did Boggs know that the term had been previously used by Augustine in the 4^th century BCE to explain a key tenet of Christianity. Examining the fall of lust-laden Rome, Augustine ([1470] 1998) pointed out that, to enjoy spiritual salvation and avoid collective perishing, people should resign their paganism and commit to charity and moral integrity. Only by prefiguring a divine beatitude could one near a state of holiness to be partially enjoyed in the present and fully realised in the future (Scholl 2016, 321; Buts 2019, 17).

Whereas Augustine heralded spiritual salvation via the earthly enactment of God’s conduct, centuries later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([1848] 2015) would call for political salvation via overthrowing the bourgeoisie and bringing an end to class struggle. Moving away from prefiguration, the Communist manifesto (1848) urged proletarians to fight the monopoly of the means of production held by the few, in a form of political salvation that ousts reformisms and entails revolutionary macropolitical changes. Toppling all existing social conditions, according to Marx and Engels, makes the revolution the means to reach the ultimate end of inaugurating a communist, classless society. Yet, means and ends frequently clashed here: major streams of Marxism ended up reproducing the authoritarian state power and highly bureaucratic hierarchies characteristic of bourgeois society (Boggs 1977, 5). Thus, Marx’s anti-statist theories often gained materiality via statist practices.

Contrasting with such statist orientations, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a new wave of radical politics. With the May 1968 uprisings in France and the civil rights movements in the US as their core symbols, the new social movements and New Left (Epstein 1991; Polletta 2002) reinforced the centrality of collective identity, civil rights, and lifestyles in activist agendas. In the French case, the emergence of youth mobilisations—initially associated with the fight against university funding policies—promptly gained the support of broader society. Via street barricades, occupation of universities, and France’s largest wildcat strikes, protesters—factory workers, students, and feminists, among others—built a communal agenda without having much in common. This implied replacing each group’s specific claims with broader demands, thus turning May 1968 into an open-ended experiment of society-building. Through grassroots practices collectively decided and enacted on the go, May 1968 had a long-lasting effect, enabling environmentalist, anti-fascist, and feminist perspectives to enter into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Italian autonomism was gaining ground since the 1950s. Starting on factories’ shop floors, the worker’s autonomy movement (Autonomia Operaia) in Italy came to involve university students, women, artists, migrants, and other subaltern groups not traditionally conceived as ‘proletarian’ (Katsiaficas 2006). While occupying factories, universities, and abandoned buildings, autonomists sought to enact self-management and carry out everyday, small-scale revolutions by circumventing representative decision-making bodies (such as corporate boards, trade unions, governmental ministries, and political parties). On the other side of the Atlantic, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the US succeeded in connecting students and workers, Black Panthers and pacifists, upper-middle-class white people, feminists, church organisations, anti-nuclear activists, and war veterans. Initially an uprising against warmongering, this coalition orchestrated a display of generalised political dissatisfaction despite not having a single, unifying agenda.

Operating outside the institutional frameworks of the state, political parties, and trade unions, these new social movements took shape through autonomous activists who organised in a mostly non-hierarchical, network-like manner. They sought to break with hierarchical and institutionalised politics in two main ways. Firstly, they expanded the scope of politics by bringing to the table previously marginalised political agendas. Mobilising prefiguration as an activist strategy, the New Left underscored issues from feminism and structural racism to drug policy reforms and environmental issues. Conservative activists equally deployed prefiguration to increase the relevance of anti-abortion and anti-drug advocacy. Secondly, the new social movements gave visibility to principles according to which the political means to achieve an end had to be consistent with that end. To build a more democratic and egalitarian society, one had to deploy democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots activism. Likewise, building a white supremacist society means enacting ‘racially pure’ small-scale communities (Futrell and Simi 2004). Such uses of the concept have brought prefiguration to the core of post-1960s social movements’ political repertoire (Boggs 1977; Calhoun 1993).

Despite the diversity of prefigurative practices and the fact that the movements analysed here do not constitute a homogeneous whole, these practices tend to have in common ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practise of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs 1977, 6-7). Hence, prefiguration is a way for activists to anticipate the changes they seek. And while everyday micropolitical action may not trigger a revolution or herald political salvation, it may progressively transform our ways of thinking, behaving, and imagining what society should be like.

An activist and anthropological field of action take shape

After its surge in the 1960s, prefigurative politics gained new momentum in the 1990s. With the dissolution of the USSR, social movements had to reinvent themselves beyond statism and rethink the capitalism versus communism divide. The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico, for instance, gathered peasants, indigenous peoples, and marginalised urban groups in protest against the neoliberalism imposed by the Mexican state’s land reforms and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, the Zapatistas did not address the government or political parties in their political demands: they fought for autonomy to implement by themselves the local-level changes they envisaged (Stahler-Stolk 2010). Ultimately, the Zapatistas managed to establish autonomous zones in the Mexican state of Chiapas, with local communities having more say in shaping state policies and school curricula. Twenty-four years on, in 2018, the Zapatistas put forward Marichuy, an indigenous woman, to run for the presidency of Mexico. Aware of the unlikelihood of her victory, the Zapatistas aimed to use the presidential elections to highlight to the subalterns at the margins of Mexican society that their reality can be changed for the better, especially outside the framework of institutionalised, representative politics (Ansotegui 2018). Prefiguring alternatives to market-controlled globalisation and state politics since 1994, the Zapatista uprising inspired movements that would increasingly tackle global issues.

Prefigurative politics gained even wider visibility with a movement that placed neoliberal globalisation as its nemesis: the 1999 protests in Seattle against the austerity, deregulation, and large-scale privatisation measures laid down by the Washington Consensus and advanced by international bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Following months of planning, the activists and collectives loosely gathered under the Direct Action Network formed a human barricade around the venue hosting the WTO ministerial conference. Contrasting with the WTO’s hierarchies and formalities, protesters wore costumes, danced, carried placards, and chanted anti-capitalist slogans, followed by marching bands performing in the blocked streets. Violence was also present, coming from police repression and from some protesters’ tactics of fighting neoliberalism by damaging institutional buildings, banks, and multinational corporations. Such lack of a consensus between partisans of violent and non-violent forms of direct action evinces the inherent diversity of activist tactics subsumed under the label ‘prefiguration’.

While the protesters prevented the WTO delegates from reaching the conference venue, activist crowds turned into a commons—a free space where people developed, at least for a limited number of days, an alternative sphere of social (re)production involving care, education, food, and housing (Varvarousis, Asara and Akbulut 2021). Through general assemblies, workshops, and encampments, they sought to prefigure locally the kind of relationships they envisaged for the world. In bonding with each other through solidarity, informality, horizontality, and inclusiveness, the activists sought to oppose, through their practices, the formality, authoritarianism, and exclusionary character of neoliberal organisations. The commons also created opportunities for radical learning: in a dialogical process of horizontal education (Backer et al. 2017), activists co-produced knowledge, learned from each other’s prior political experiences, and materialised alternative socialities. Keeping the movement constantly open to dialogue was their way to give justice to and make real their motto ‘another world is possible’.

Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) aptly illustrate the significance of open-endedness for prefigurative politics. Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), the authors argue that capitalism operates through apparatuses of capture by creating boundaries to autonomous thinking and paralysing collective action. In remaining open to multiple ways of imagining and rebuilding society, the Seattle protests had a ‘rhizomatic’ character: for being non-institutionalised, spontaneous, and made up of activists supporting diverse causes, viewpoints, and activist strategies, these kinds of protests are meant to be more resistant to capture by institutional politics. An open letter, petition, or even a march against the WTO conference would have constituted a more easily recognisable repertoire for politicians and the police. It would have enabled them to enact standard protocols to either repress or ignore such expressions of dissatisfaction. A carnivalesque demonstration, on the other hand, shows how resistance can also be aestheticised, making it difficult for politicians, business people, and the police to curb the protest.

In this fashion, Seattle sought to depict neoliberal globalisation not as an abstract, unstoppable process, but as a set of concrete austerity and deregulation measures that can be challenged and mocked by ordinary people. This power of the crowds was later underscored by the motto ‘we are the 99%’, made famous by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, via the argument according to which the majority of the world’s population cannot pay for the mistakes of the upper-class minority.

The Seattle protests also consolidated prefigurative politics not as an ‘anything goes’ way of showing dissatisfaction, but as a strategy in itself (Maeckelbergh 2011). In opposing summits of the G8, NATO, and the World Bank (Graeber 2009), the New Left draws its political action on grassroots democracy, direct action, and the creation of alternative micropolitical relations of power (Yates 2015a). Holding voluntary working groups to set up tents in occupied squares, serving food to participants, protecting them from police action, and keeping spaces of protest clean work to turn hierarchical power relations into inclusive and participatory practices.

In anthropology, the prefiguration debate gained popularity mostly through the work of David Graeber. Actively participating in alterglobalisation movements and demonstrations mainly in the US, Graeber (2002; 2009, xvii) asserts that political activism in the twenty-first century will be increasingly influenced by anarchist imperatives and practices. What Graeber refers to as ‘anarchism’ emerges directly from the left-libertarian tradition that fosters social equality alongside individual freedom. Expressed via direct action, this conception of anarchism is grounded on prefigurative practices that turn activist settings into concrete examples of what ‘real democracy is like’ and how society can take alternative forms—even though such forms do not necessarily reflect left-wing contents. Social scientists who document how such strategies unfold in real life placed prefiguration at the heart of their analyses of mobilisations such as the Occupy movement (Graeber 2009; Razsa and Kurnik 2012), feminist movements (Polletta 2002; Ishkanian and Saavedra 2019; Carmo 2019), France’s Nuit debout protests (Kokoreff 2016), the 15M movement in Spain (Flesher Fominaya 2020), and the World Social Forums held mostly in the Global South (Juris 2005; Teivainen 2016). Going beyond Western urban spaces, some authors have brought anti-state forms of activism for self-determination among Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Amazonian indigenous peoples to this discussion (Petray and Gertz 2018).

Materialising participatory democracy

Prefigurative politics does not just refer to specific forms of protests in which the very process of planning, carrying out, and embodying political action becomes part of the message activists aim to convey (Flesher Fominaya 2014). It also denotes direct ways of living democracy. One of the most closely examined enactments of prefigurative politics are therefore the general assemblies, which are consensual decision-making spaces within occupied squares. As part of a ‘generalised revolt against representation’ (Tormey 2012, 136), participatory democracy carried out by the activists/individuals themselves has become a mechanism to counter representative democracy, which is epitomised by political parties and elections. In general assemblies, participants are placed in a circle to hear those at the centre. No one must block the view of others, so that those who are hard of hearing or far away can understand the speaker through lip reading and body language. When the circle is too wide, participants employ a technique known as ‘the people’s microphone’: people gathered immediately around the speaker repeat everything they say in unison, to make the speaker’s voice reach those at the edges without the need for amplification devices (Deseriis 2014).

General assemblies are expected to give voice to potentially everyone: once joining the speaking queue, participants should speak for themselves, not as spokespersons of any collective or institution (Teivanen 2016; Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Interestingly, giving voice to the 99% starts with empowering activists individually, by placing autonomy at the core of ideal-typical prefigurative politics. General assemblies and decentralised workshops make room for direct action and convergence of thought and action. For instance, middle-class environmentalists may ask manual labourers for guidance on preparing posters on veganism that could find broader appeal, and feminists may advise anarchist students on how to convey their agendas in neutral language. Workshops also propose self-reflection on the commons, raising awareness of issues like racism or ableism among activists, as in this 2011 Occupy Boston workshop:

The facilitator, a white male, began the activity by asking for 20 diverse volunteers to line up side by side at the front of the crowd assembled at the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square. He then issued a series of declarations: ‘If your ancestors lost land by the conquest of the U.S. government, step back; Step forward if your ancestors gained assets through the slave trade; Step back if your ancestors were brought here in chains to be slaves; Step back if you or your ancestors arrived as immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean’. These and other statements produced a visible line of stratification, with mostly white participants at the front and people of color toward the back (Juris et al. 2012, 434-5).

Opening the microphone and refusing fixed leadership invite activists to enact horizontality and to develop a do-it-yourself attitude. In not belonging to any institutionalised group or political party, such activist spaces are meant to become potentially everyone’s. Joining these spaces involves showing a willingness to leave aside a world driven by discrimination, authoritarianism, and neoliberal practices and setting a ‘frame’ (Bateson 1972, 177–93) wherein hierarchies are temporarily suspended. This frame encourages each participant to act and express oneself not as a representative of given political agendas, social status, or cultural backgrounds, but as individuals who autonomously question, for instance, oppressive, sexist, and colonialist regimes of truth.

Yet, building a new society from the ashes of the old entails carrying with it some of the vicissitudes that activists try to purge from their settings—which evinces the shortcomings of prefigurative politics. Firstly, however globally-oriented and inclusive such movements attempt to be, at times they reproduce gender, racial, and class segregation, as white, richer, better-connected, and male citizens from the Global North (Tarrow 2006: 44; Juris et al. 2012) tend to have more resources and possibilities to afford the time to activism. Regarding horizontality, the assemblies’ open microphone is counterbalanced by how more experienced and articulate activists often dominate these spaces. Sometimes this may entail that marginalised and less educated people will be less prone to talk—and, as open as the microphone might be, less often heard (Beeman et al. 2009; Wengronowitz 2013). Ultimately, horizontal forms of activism may thus lean towards authoritarianism, especially on occasions when more charismatic activists become seen as quasi-‘leaders’ or spokespersons of entire movements.

In addition, while the assembly format implies participatory democracy and gives everybody a say, it means ideas will often be repeated, frequently slowing down the pace of decisions and actions. Paradoxically, processes aimed at consensual decision-making often result neither in decisions nor in consensus, which either hampers the political action or leaves the final decision to the most active and influential activists, thus reproducing the centralised power that prefigurative politics oppose. In a number of movements, the open-endedness and inclusiveness that prevail in prefigurative politics also result in the absence of a coherent overall agenda (Chomsky 2012; Graeber 2013). Although being a feature, rather than a flaw, of these movements, this is read by some as activists being clueless about how to reach their goals (Lipset and Altbach 1966), resulting in movements that may be more expressive than instrumental, privileging spectacle over substance (Polletta 2002: 1-2).

These critiques and seeming flaws stress that creating a democratic culture and experimenting politics differently are forcefully long-term processes. Yet as the commons offer people solidarity and mutual support, they may well emerge as the first steps for people to collectively challenge the mainstream while prefiguring the new.

Rebuilding communication and the media

As the previous discussion on the open microphone suggests, communication technologies and the media play a crucial role in gathering people around political agendas. Just as the screening of the Vietnam War boosted pacifist movements worldwide in the late 1960s (Mandelbaum 1982), recent years have seen the rise of digital media as major networking arenas triggering contentious politics.

Several ethnographies have analysed the emergence of activism on digital media, particularly revolving around hashtags (mostly on Twitter) such as #Ferguson (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), #MeToo (Pipyrou 2018), and #BlackLivesMatter (Yang 2016). While indexing information online, hashtags also create mediatised spaces of peer support and solidarity when people share about their struggles with racism, sexism, and state violence. Due to the heightened temporality in digital media, hashtags mimic the dynamics of face-to-face activism, enabling users to engage almost in real-time with what happens in in-person protests. Thus, the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Athens’ Syntagma Square, Paris’ Place de la République, and Cairo’s Tahrir Square have been supplemented by the ‘occupation’ of Facebook timelines, YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds with global calls for action and constant updates from the streets (Postill 2014; Castells 2015).

The Arab Spring (2010-2012, beginning in Tunisia) and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution offer a prime illustration of how digital media enable the prefiguration of a more egalitarian society. Bringing together Christians who used to socialise primarily in church and Muslims who tended to gather in and around mosques, the internet helped these groups find commonalities and recognise their shared dissatisfaction with state violence and the Egyptian government. Learning via digital media about protests taking place in neighbouring countries in North Africa and the Middle East, a great number of Egyptians saw their outrage matched by the hope conveyed by activists abroad (Castells 2015). Thus, territorial activism in city squares fed and was fed by deterritorialised activism online, amplifying activists’ voices and the reach of their support. While digital media may usually serve mainstream purposes, they emerge in prefigurative politics as platforms to both build activist networks and critically rebuild communication. In this sense, digital media empower anyone to communicate their own narratives and challenge mainstream regimes of truth by sidestepping the mediation of journalists and the one-to-many functioning of mass media (Castells 2008, 90).

Thinking of the arts and citizen media as prime examples of what John Downing (2001) calls ‘radical media’ enables us to highlight the media’s potential to report state violence in protests and violation of human rights in war-laden countries, as well as to give voice to those who are systematically excluded from mainstream sources of news. In this vein, the 1999-born Independent Media Center (IMC) was a landmark in covering the Seattle protests in real time (Downing 2003). Through its call for arms—‘Don't hate the media, become the media!’—the IMC became the forerunner of analogous grassroots initiatives producing content online without links to corporate news outlets.

Bypassing mainstream mass media does, of course, not always correspond to left-wing forms of prefigurative politics. Aside from bolstering the Arab Spring, digital media also provided the mechanisms that granted the electoral victory to far-right presidential candidates such as the US’s Donald Trump in 2016 (Tufekci 2018) and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 (Cesarino 2020). The same can be said about the COVID-19 anti-vaccine campaigns. On the one hand, presidential campaigns do not concern prefigurative politics entirely as they resort to institutionalised politics and the state in people’s quest for change. On the other hand, online campaigning does retain some of the core traits of prefiguration: it empowers the individual as a key campaigner, who is outside the scope of mass media and is capable of being heard upon producing and sharing content on digital media with relatively little mediation. Campaigners supporting political candidates also enact alternative communities—taking the shape of an online commons—whose members feel safe and welcome to share their political agendas, be they left-leaning or conservative, in line or out of step with a scientific consensus.

Just as media is deconstructed and rebuilt, languages are equally repoliticised in attempts to foster horizontal and inclusive communicative practices. Across the world, translators-activists gather in transnational collectives such as Translator Brigades and Tlaxcala to translate politically engaged articles and subtitle activists’ videos. Translating from hegemonic languages (such as English and French) into non-hegemonic and minority languages, such collectives make multilingual content available online and update activists on the fringe on what is happening elsewhere. Similarly, translating from non-hegemonic languages ensures that language minorities can be heard in activist spaces (Baker 2013, 2016). Relatedly, to fight linguistic discrimination in a different manner, an international collective of left-wing activists resorts to Esperanto—a non-national, easy-to-learn language—to materialise anti-national and anti-imperialist activist spaces. Through face-to-face meetings, mailing lists, and zines, this collective raises people’s awareness of how activism can only be effectively horizontal if everyone has the linguistic and technological means to be equally included in consensual decision-making processes (Fians 2021). Hence, prefigurative politics involve the creation of non-hegemonic communicative and media practices, giving voice and ears to potential participants.

Beyond occupied squares: communities, lifestyles, and the old left

As the aforementioned scholarship illustrates, social scientists have systematically associated prefigurative politics with the ‘movement of the squares’. This invites us to address David Snow’s call to ‘broaden our conceptualisation of social movements beyond contentious politics’ (2004, 19). One way to do so is by exploring prefigurative aspects of community-building, alternative lifestyles, and forms of activism that do not quite fit the New Left label.

First of all, the results of social experiments become more long-lasting when prefiguration meets community-building. This is the case, for instance, of eco-villages, whose participants prefigure their sought-after ecological imaginaries on a daily basis. Eco-villages enable their participants to bridge a consumerist wider society and more eco-friendly forms of sociality by collectively enacting sustainable lifestyles through organic farming and self-sufficiency (Casey et al. 2020). Along analogous lines, other forms of intentional communities—such as ashrams in India and Catholic communities in the UK (Firth 2019, 497)—gather people willing to live according to their spiritual and religious beliefs. This is largely in line with the aforementioned use of prefiguration by Augustine ([1470] 1998), as prefiguring links between spirituality and social justice relates to enacting a spiritually exemplary behaviour that would bring people closer to God and desired forms of spirituality.

A further remarkable illustration of prefiguration in community-building is the celebratory arts community Burning Man. Taking place once a year in the Black Rock Desert, in the US, Burning Man advertises itself as an ‘invitation to the future’. Starting in 1986, it progressively came to gather more than 60,000 participants who spend a week per year living in tents, joining concerts, and co-organising arts projects. While working together to prepare this festival with community-building ambitions, participants fight the perception of labour as alienating. By partly replacing commodification with ‘communification’ through their community-building practice, they infuse mundane labour with a meaning that emphasises one’s connection with the larger Burning Man collective of participants. This altered approach to labour bears long-lasting significance: after having experienced human relations otherwise, participants return to wider society with a renewed perception of how things can work, which eventually encourages them to try and reproduce some aspects of this short-lived experience over their year-long everyday lives (Chen 2016).

While eco-villages, ashrams, arts communities, and even kibbutzim (Simons and Ingram 2003) may be read as escapism, the building of intentional communities does not necessarily mean evading mainstream society. Even within urban settings, community forms such as cooperatives, social centres (Yates 2015b), free schools (Swidler 1979), and communes (Kanter 1972) provide people with the opportunity to temporarily step out of their hierarchical surroundings and join in more horizontal and participatory spaces. These, in turn, do not need to be face-to-face: on the internet, hackers jointly develop free and open-source software as a way of opposing proprietary intellectual property. Through online communities, like-minded activist-developers prefigure the ownership relations, work ethics, and creative aesthetics they envisage by exchanging programming expertise and the source codes they develop (Coleman 2013; Kelty 2008).

Apart from building communities, prefigurative practices can also aim at personal change as the primary means to foster social change. This is the case in lifestyle movements, made up of individuals who seek change by cultivating everyday behaviour in line with their political agendas. These include being vegetarian, reducing one’s carbon footprint, practising ethical consumption (Haenfler et al. 2012), or embracing alternative therapies. Popular psychology, self-help, new-age spiritualities, and mindfulness are recurrently regarded as depoliticising forces that promote conformism. Nevertheless, embodying values that make life meaningful otherwise can also be a political act; one that gives its practitioners a sense of agency amidst disillusionment with collective and institutional ways of fostering social change (Salmenniemi 2019).

Lastly, even though social movement scholarship often associates prefiguration with the post-1960s New Left, prefigurative practices are also present in left-wing parties, trade unions, and hierarchical pre-1960 labour movements. Seeking to explore how anarchist-inspired prefigurative practices have been adopted by a wide range of activists, Graeber (2002, 72; 2010) outlines what he calls ‘capital-A’ and ‘small-a’ anarchists. While the former tend to act within anarchist groups, the latter mobilise characteristically prefigurative practices despite not conceiving of themselves as anarchists—or even as activists.

Despite such practices not being limited to strictly anarchist groups and New Left movements, prefiguration continues being largely conceived of as a marker dividing the New Left from other forms of activism. Why, instead, do not we approach prefiguration as a perspective that highlights the self-exemplification and horizontality inherent in several social movements and forms of activism?

Partly addressing this point, Craig Calhoun (1993) argues that the novelty researchers often associate with the new social movements is analytically misleading, since the issues, strategies, and constituencies that distinguish the New Left and the ‘old lefts’ have been in place for at least two centuries. Ultimately, this leads to a critique of the concept of ‘new social movements’ itself. Cooperativism and the 1871 Paris Commune, for instance, involved activists that, when fighting for their causes, also prioritised the establishment of non-hierarchical relationships. Similarly, issues related to sexuality, lifestyles, women’s rights, and child labour may have become increasingly visible after 1968, but have run alongside class-based demands for centuries. Lastly, exceeding the left versus right divide, conservative movements also deploy prefiguration as a core strategy. This is the case of anti-abortion and white power activists in the US, many of whom are involved in the establishment of Aryan settlements whose residents and visitors receive paramilitary training and cherish white supremacist music and books (Futrell and Simi 2004).

These three forms of prefigurative politics—as a feature of intentional communities, a means to shift individual behaviour, and a building block of New Left, old left, and right-wing movements alike—foreground how pervasive such practices can be, and, therefore, how important it is to understand them.

Coming to a close—but not to conclude

Prefigurative politics—as well as anthropological approaches to it—invite us to rethink social life and its foundations. In placing participation, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action at the heart of the social values and practices to be addressed, prefiguration works by changing the world on a small scale. While revolutions foster macropolitical changes, prefigurative politics dwell on micropolitics. Reimagining society locally may not bring about immediate large-scale changes, but it models the society one seeks to build, thus informing its participants’ practices and ways of thinking beyond local activist settings. This work of imagination is not to be underestimated: as climate change, structural racism, and a global pandemic require shifts of mentality and behaviour, practices involving open dialogue, solidarity, and mutual support can provide us with alternative answers to issues that appear not to be sufficiently addressed by institutional politics.

Since most scholars exploring prefigurative politics seem sympathetic to it, there is a lack of studies on prefiguration’s antagonists, such as the police and mass media who frequently link anarchism with chaos and direct action with violence detached from clear political agendas. For similar reasons, few studies analyse prefiguration among old left and right-wing activists, which culminates in the aforementioned misapprehension of prefiguration as a strictly New Left strategy. Aside from helping us to better understand the present-oriented efforts to build alternative societies, learning about prefigurative politics also provides us with tools to experiment with grassroots initiatives in our everyday lives and in our academic discipline. Ultimately, would not action anthropology (Smith 2010) be in line with such horizontal and inclusive practices? Remaining true to prefiguration, it is better to just leave this and other questions open.

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Note on contributor

Guilherme Fians is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (Netherlands/USA). Guilherme’s current research project—on social movements, language politics, and digital media, with a focus on France—is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Esperantic Studies Foundation. In line with his commitment to multilingualism in academia, he has published and presented his research outcomes in English, Portuguese, French, German, and Esperanto.

Dr Guilherme Fians, Institute for Transnational and Spatial History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, KY16 9BA, St Andrews, United Kingdom, gmf7@st-andrews.ac.uk

Postsocialism

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 20:02:06 +0000

Dominic Martin

University of Oxford

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21postsocialism

Abstract:

The collapse of the socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union drastically changed the lives of millions of people and offered a new and exciting field of research possibilities. ‘Postsocialism’ emerged as an interim term to describe the lives of people who had formerly lived under socialism. Some scholars of postsocialism assumed a quick transition for these societies to neoliberal forms of government and economy. However, postsocialism did not simply follow on from socialism, and socialism did not simply go away. Key postsocialist works indicate that postsocialist forms of being were established well before socialism’s political demise. Similarly, some of socialism’s material forms and social norms continued and have proved to have a resilient afterlife. The confident assertion that socialism’s fall signals the ‘end of history’ has been challenged by philosophy and by events. This entry surveys the roots of postsocialism as an anthropological concept, and interrogates the concerns as to its long-term viability as an organising category for the study of societies becoming more diverse as they distance themselves from their socialist pasts. However, the former socialist societies have provided a range of rich anthropological research opportunities for scholars and continue to afford unique insights into key areas of ethnographic and theoretical interest. One possible future for what is still called postsocialism might be its amalgamation with postcolonialism, as a new hybrid area of scholarship, focused upon societies whose histories and ideologies challenge the hegemonic narrative of neoliberal modernity.

Introduction

The crisis and collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the last decades of the twentieth century unraveled the political, economic and social structure that governed the lives of more than a quarter of a billion people. A whole civilization and ideology was laid prostrate for dissection and enquiry (Benjamin 2003: 391). For Western scholars, this offered a cornucopia of new fieldwork openings and access to hitherto unavailable, sometimes unimaginable, sources, as well as the chance to collaborate with institutions and scholars from behind what had been termed the ‘Iron Curtain’. For social anthropology, the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe signalled a potential period of ethnographic innovation and theoretical renewal through tapping a relatively unexplored geographic area, comparable to the Amazonian and Melanesian heyday of the previous two decades and of Africanist anthropology before that. In the absence of any more apposite consensual designation, postsocialism emerged as the default descriptor that gathered together what has come to comprise an extensive and significant body of writing and research. Postsocialism reflected the unmaking of a whole world system and the refashioning of ordinary life in the teeth of global modernity, across a geographic and sociological landscape stretching from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan, from the Arctic Circle to the border of Afghanistan, and encompassing a diversity of social identities from nuclear engineers to nomadic hunters.

Anthropologists working in this field seized the rare, perhaps unique, opportunity, exploring the then-current and developing theories and fields of anthropological interest: ontology and time (Buck-Morss 2000, Bernstein 2019); personhood and identity (Yurchak 2006, Kharkhordin 1999); environmental precarity (Brown 2013, Petryna 2013); economy, exchange, and property (Humphrey 2002, Verdery 2003, Hann 2002, Morris 2016); ethics, power, and sovereignty (Hemment 2015, Ledeneva 2006, Glaeser 2011, Dunn 2004, Zigon 2010); modernity and globalisation (Pomerantsev 2014, Collier 2011, Shevchenko 2009); religion and spirituality (Rodgers 2009, Lindquist 2005, Luehrmann 2011, Caldwell 2004, Wanner 2007, Pedersen 2011); borders and migration (Reeves 2014, Pelkmans 2017, Bloch 2017); race and gender (Dzenovska 2018, Ghodsee 2018); and emotion and affect (Oushakine 2009, Pesmen 2000, Lemon 2018); that is, most of the topics and theoretical ‘turns’ that have exercised the discipline since the 1990s.

However, from its very inception, postsocialism was regarded as a flawed, albeit necessary, yet always temporary resort for scholars. It provided a category home for a range of scholarship across a very wide field of research that was dynamic and, although united by some degree of common ideological and political history, ephemeral and fissile almost by definition from the moment of socialism’s collapse. Thirty years on from that commencement, the assumptions and aporias that attended postsocialism’s conceptual initiation have long been overtaken by time and history. A generation has passed, and the rising generation has no experience, and little memory, of actually existing socialism. The binary oppositions of the Cold War have been replaced by a polymorphous, fragmented relationship between the West and the former socialist societies and polities, whose postsocialist complexions range from the actually or aspirationally neoliberal (Latvia, Croatia) to so called ‘illiberal democratic’ (Poland, Hungary) to the still resolutely Brezhnevite; that is, tied to ossified late Communist political forms (Belarus, Turkmenistan).

‘The end of history’ (see below) has come and gone. Socialism still persists in various incarnations as a powerful political and economic challenge to late capitalism and liberalism. The span of this entry does not encompass the vigorous or moribund socialisms that remain: China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the strident Neo-Leninism of North Korea, the various hybrids that flourish or fail in what used to be called the ‘Third World’: Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba. Despite its deficiencies, postsocialism as a concept continues to have purchase and meaning for anthropology, albeit as an increasingly retrospective, historical category, which refers to an interim period that is passing—and may indeed have passed—but which has borne witness to and analysed momentous changes. Postsocialism provides a context that increasingly interdigitates with other ‘post’ epistemologies, including post-industrialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, and, perhaps particularly, post-colonialism. From wars in the Balkans, in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, in South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh in the Southern Caucasus, to the emergence of revived Russian nationalism under Putin, the anticipated transition from ‘stagnant’ (Bacon & Sandle 2002: 2) collectivism to a neoliberal dawn has yet to come to fruition for many in the former Soviet space. Premised theoretically on an assumption of a quick and easy transition to the freedom and prosperity of the market economy, postsocialist transformations in actuality happen within ongoing conflicts, both collective and individual. They often set the advocates of economic and political neoliberalism against a reluctant population whose security (both economic and social), imaginaries, and very identities remained inextricably linked to the previously existing socialist order. Postsocialist anthropological work has, over the past thirty years, provided ethnographical and theoretical substance to the argument that the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in the Western modernising tradition that its supposed defeat at the same time calls into question the whole Western narrative of triumphant liberal capitalism (Fukuyama 1992: 48). In order to analyse or even simply to characterise postsocialism within the restrictions of an encyclopaedia entry, this entry focuses primarily upon subjectivity within the former Soviet space, for two reasons. First, subjectivity can be considered the paramount concern of socialism. Karl Marx, at the very outset, emphasised the priority of social being over consciousness (1978: 4). Boris Groys dismisses the suggestion that economics or politics were the essence of socialism (2009: xx); rather, he asserts that ‘The Soviet Union understood itself literally as a state governed by philosophy alone’ (33). Hence, second: the focus on the Soviet Union and its successors. The Soviet Union was the source and origin of the socialist project, and as it moved through its Cold War high point towards its decline, after perestroika (the Soviet political and economic restructuring of the 1980s), it is arguable that it had taken the project of making socialism further than any other society before or since (Groys 2009: xviii).

Surveying postsocialist anthropological thought as it has developed, this entry will first discuss the emergence of particular forms of postsocialist subjecthood within an epoch often periodised as ‘late socialism’, and the spectres that persisted beyond communism’s widely proclaimed demise. Next, this emergent postsocialism will be analysed by considering some of the issues and ideologies that were contested in the ‘end of history’ debate. Finally, details of four case studies of the postsocialist self will be examined. In summary, this entry will claim that although socialism as a hegemonic political system may have ceased in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the socialist project continues and the socialist present remains. In this sense, the countries of the former Soviet Union remain postsocialist until today; the socialist project remains as a palimpsest upon which is scripted contemporary political and social orders (Martin 2008). Socialism persists as the penumbra under which particular subjectivities and forms of being-in-the-world continue to emerge and develop. The anthropology of postsocialism has excavated this landscape, which is simultaneously a site of mourning, haunted by the spectres of communism, and a vibrant post-hybrid engendering new perspectives, challenges, and solutions within the narrative(s) of modernity. Derrida’s neologistic concept of ‘hauntology’ is useful to deploy as a tool to frame and analyse these phenomena (1994: 63). Hauntology means that ghostly presence by means of which the past returns or persists. Hauntology captures how the time(s) of postsocialism are a heterogeneous multiplicity, a ‘heterochrony’ that cannot be adequately described with reference to dualisms like presence/absence or before/after (see Ssorin-Chaikov 2006 & 2017).

Spectres of the (post)socialist subject

The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union happened, to some degree, like Ernest Hemingway once famously described the process of going bankrupt: ‘Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly’ (1954: 136). There is an uncanny echo of this sense in the title of Alexei Yurchak’s ethnography of the sensibilities of Leningrad’s young communist activists (so-called komsomoltsy) and of its avant-garde on the threshold of the collapse. In Everything was forever, until it was no more (2005), Yurchak describes a rolling crisis of language and knowledge that came about in the last days of the Soviet Union which indicated that the epistemic conditions of socialism were progressively running aground. He argued that the ossified, hyper-normalised, and highly citational nature of late Soviet culture caused its participants to focus, following J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, on the performative dimension of language rather than on its constative dimension. Life under late Soviet communism was marked by a decoupling of language and reality. Yurchak calls this, in Austin’s terms, a ‘performative shift’ which applies to the years that followed the death of Stalin, the time of Khrushchev’s so-called ‘Thaw’ (ottepel’), and the ‘Stagnation’ (zastoi) of the Brezhnev period, when the teleological imperative of the development of socialism was undermined, and effectively sidelined, by a focus upon the achievements of the present and the struggle against its binary capitalist nemesis. From then on, it was more important ideologically to match the consumer economies of the West than to pursue the ultimate goal of true communism. Here begins the ironic self-referential and essentially postsocialist posture adopted by the intelligentsia which Yurchak identifies as vnye (simultaneously inside and outside of the epistemic regime of state socialism). He also highlights the habitus of obshchenie, a self-reflexive group solidarity, a determined coming-together that produced a common inter-subjective sociality. This narcissistic condition is even more explicitly demonstrated and excavated in the case of East Germany by Andreas Glaeser (2011) who argues that as the 1980s went on, socialism’s claims to superior insight lost their credibility at an accelerating pace. The unfulfilled promise to know better than its Cold War adversary played a significant role in socialism's demise.

Although there had been a small but significant body of Western ethnographic research undertaken in actual socialist societies prior to 1989 (Caroline Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective [1983] and Katherine Verdery's National ideology under socialism [1991] are two notable examples), in the first wave of postsocialist scholarship, the construction of a specific socialist subjectivity became an early important, indeed necessary, theme that was taken up principally by historians. Stephen Kotkin (1995) Yuri Slezkine (2000), Igal Halfin (2007), Katerina Clark (2011), and Vladislav Zubok (2009), all reflect on aspects of the creation of a particular form of subjectivity and social consciousness. Kotkin in particular, in Magnetic mountain, his magisterial micro-history of the crucible of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan—the trans-Ural steel city of Magnitogorsk—emphasises the emergence of the Komsomol, a consciousness-creating Soviet youth movement, custodian of the ideals of Leninism, within whose ranks zealots would learn to think and to ‘speak Bolshevik’ (1996: 236). Sheila Fitzpatrick designates this new social identity as ‘Homo Sovieticus’ (2000: 32).

This exemplary personage, whilst indicating the ethical task of [self-]creating a heroic class-conscious subject fit to forge and inhabit the communist utopia, also later acquired a parodic dimension that it gained in the Brezhnev era from Soviet satirist Alexander Zinoviev (1986). Zinoviev uses the epithet from the perspective of the metropolitan intelligentsia to poke fun at the so-called sovok, the once idealistic but by then somewhat lumpen, somewhat credulous, former ‘shock worker’ who had constituted the vanguard of the proletariat and peasantry in the period of High Stalinism. Sovok becomes during late socialism a slang term for a slavish kind of Soviet philistinism, emblematic of the low-brow, plebeian values of the ‘working class’, often used alongside a term for rude and uncultured collective bydlo, a herd of cattle. This stereotype was forever immortalised by another satirist, George Orwell (1951) in the character of Boxer, the honest, honourable, but stolid and gullible shire horse that labours for no reward in Animal farm. Like the debasement over time of the revolutionary ideal in Orwell’s parable, so by the time of the so-called ‘stagnation’ under Brezhnev — which according to Yurchak is when the ‘performative shift’ begins to hollow out the discourse of socialism — the symbolism of the Soviet New Man has become ironic while sovok has become the self-deprecating signifier for these stereotypically pejorative traits of Soviet personhood and already threadbare, discredited Soviet values (it is a play on words: sovok also means ‘dustpan’).

A powerful ethnographically informed perspective on the Stalinist ideal of Homo Sovieticus is presented by Jochen Hellbeck (2006) who reads the diary of a zealous young Komsomol activist, labouring under the guilty secret of his bourgeois origins in late 1930’s Moscow, to illustrate the self-transformative and self-awakening power of Soviet revolutionary ideology. The rigour with which the young zealot approaches the task of fashioning a Stalinist self reflects the ‘dream’ of socialism:

…a Soviet dream, the contours of which the party ideologist Nikolai Bukharin delineated in implicit rivalry with the individualist American dream. In [this] Soviet dream, socialism turned soulless workers, oppressed by capitalist exploitation, “into collective creators and organizers, into people who work on themselves, into conscious producers of their own fate”, into real architects of their own future. (Hellbeck 2006: 6)

This maximalist Soviet prometheanism gives rise to a fundamental anthropological problem, as a result of which anthropologists of postsocialism have been necessarily as interested in the histories of high Stalinist ideology as they have in the ethnographic details of everyday existence in Siberia or Silesia. Until Soviet socialism, humans had arguably never engaged in such a self-reflexive, self-conscious, and theoretically informed attempt to make themselves anew on such a scale. Scholars of postsocialism have thereby been constantly haunted by the question: to what extent did such an experiment in all-embracing collective self-making succeed, and what were its unintended consequences and legacies? Andreas Glaeser has provided an acute analysis of this process of subject formation as it applied under the East German experience of socialism:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the party’s understanding boiled down to the hope that if only everyone would internalize the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, while sincerely acting in accordance with them, socialism would realize itself in an ever more perfect way (2011: 61).

Given the headlong quality of the momentous events of 1989 and the period immediately after, it is unsurprising that the earliest phase of wider postsocialist scholarship reflected an element of what has come to be called ‘transitology’ (Hann 2002, Sachs 1990) – an assumption that former socialist societies would progress towards forms of liberal capitalism without exception or regard for the social cost. This approach and indeed this phase of scholarship has been criticised by later scholars for projecting its Western-oriented assumptions, its Manichean perspective upon the shortcomings of a ‘defeated’ ideology, and its supposed deviations from ‘human nature’. Transitology has been justifiably accused of suffering from the same kinds of teleological assumptions which it levelled at socialism (Hann 2002, Dunlop 1993, Derrida 1994). By contrast, the first wave of postsocialist anthropological writing (Hann 2002, Humphrey 2002, Verdery 2003) held a focus on what late socialism was, and how individuals, communities, and institutions reacted and evolved in the khaos (chaos) of its deconstruction and refashioning. Indeed it is with some justification that Chris Hann (2002) claimed that ‘…anthropology provide[s] the necessary corrective to the deficits of ‘transitology’. (Hann 2002: 1) This critical integrity has continued as postsocialist scholarship in its more mature phase has excavated the mundane building blocks with which the total anthropological project of forging a new human type in Soviet modernity was assembled.

Stephen Collier, in one of the most important works of postsocialist anthropology, Post-Soviet social (2011), has shown how the continuities and ruptures in the (post)socialist subject, including its various incarnations mentioned here (Homo Sovieticus/sovok/vnye), are imbricated within the infrastructures that were built to realise the socialist utopia. He details the policy of structural adjustment (‘shock therapy’), which had profound implications for postsocialist countries’ economies, including the effective abolition of the mechanisms of planned production, controlled prices, and collective property, all of which seemed easily dismantled—at least to some Western observers (Verdery 2003). But Collier’s analysis focuses on the different schools of neoliberalism and shows how the shock therapists’ initial attempt to deconstruct socialist institutions of industrial coordination, social welfare, and urban planning was thwarted in part by the obdurate material legacies of socialism. Leading architect of the shock approach, American economist Jeffrey Sachs, argued for the ‘reallocation….of resources in the economy’ (Collier 2011: xii). These so-called ‘resources’ effectively comprised the communities, social institutions, industrial and financial processes, factories, and human networks that made up the fabric of collective life across nascent postsocialist society. Collier’s focus upon the Soviet-era communal heating system that sustains the industrial city of Belaya Kalitva, which stubbornly resisted desocialisation, provides an example of a postsocialist assemblage that persists from the socialist past and impels socialist values and material structures into the period of assumed transition and beyond. Collier asserts that the ‘surprising’ (2011: 22) persistence of the systems and the material infrastructure of socialism require them to be questioned or analysed, in order to parse the ‘social’ that inhabits the heart of postsocialism. He concludes that later neoliberal reforms in the 2000s (inspired by the work of another US economist, James Buchanan) did not reject the basic value-orientations of Soviet social modernity. Rather, they aimed to find a new balance between economic efficiency and social welfare, between the mechanisms of enterprise and choice and the substantive constraints imposed by socialism’s continuing legacy of social norms and material forms.

We see how the legacies of the sovok/Homo Sovieticus and Soviet social modernity converge (often to tragic effect) in the collapse of the highly structured collectivism of socialism that is the direct fall-out from ‘shock therapy’. This crisis has been documented in a rich seam of ethnographies that examine homelessness and destitution (Höjdestrand 2009); despair and loss among veterans of the Afghan War and their families (Oushakine 2009); premature mortality and the crisis of masculinity (Parsons 2014). The crisis of masculinity exposes a gendered postsocialist afterlife of the Soviet ideal: the Stakhanovite masculine toilers, glorying in their physicality and embodying the ideals of collective solidarity, found themselves without a role in the fast-moving, fluid 1990’s, other than as so-called sportsmeny, providing hired muscle for the burgeoning mafia (Humphrey 2002). Premature mortality amongst men of working age reached epidemic proportions: much of the attrition was down to abuse of alcohol. What had been valued in the sovok foundered in an atmosphere where anything goes (bespredel). This Russian word is generally linked with the climate of khaos in the early 1990s. It literally means ‘without boundaries’, and designates the spirit of abandon and lawlessness that prevailed in those days.

As Michelle Parsons describes in her ethnography Dying unneeded, men’s risk-taking was not sufficiently counterbalanced by any order. When the Soviet state fell, men turned to drink to experience a lost sense of social belonging, as well as a sense of power to push against what bound them. Unfortunately, not much bound them. Responsibilities that ordinarily served to limit excessive drinking were diminished. Men pushed further and further before finding limits. Working class men suddenly rendered unneeded by the state were most at risk, especially if they were also unneeded at home. Women fared better, according to Parsons, since their sense of neededness was more diffuse and included, importantly, being able to hold their families together in times of hardship. This very quality of resilience re-emerges in Alexia Bloch’s (2017) later postsocialist ethnography of female migrant entrepreneurs discussed below. More broadly, Jeremy Morris (2016) has documented the ways in which working class individuals of both sexes, their families, and communities, through a process of bricolage and a continuing memory of the social ‘dowry’ of collectivism—what Morris memorably describes as ‘…their own social resources held in common and emerging from a shared (and proud) past’ (2016: 11)—confronted this unpredictability and insecurity of daily life. They found ways to make postsocialist existence if not ‘comfortable’, then ‘habitable’. Similarly, Elizabeth Dunn (2004) has chronicled how factory workers in postsocialist Poland, manufacturing baby food for a US-based global conglomerate, found strategies to resist being ‘privatised’ in their subjectivities as well as economically. These Polish workers were denied coeval status by their new neoliberal colonisers much in the same way that previous anthropological hegemons imposed the ‘ethnographic present’ (Fabian 1984: 81) on assumed ‘others’.

The end of which history?

In the late summer of 1989, in the tumultuous months leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published his celebrated article ‘The end of history?’, later expanded into the volume The end of history and the last man (1992). He argued that a consensus across the world now agreed upon the supremacy of liberal democracy as a system of government. It had overcome rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently and pointedly, communism. In addition, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy embodied the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government, and as such constituted the ‘end of history’. That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was free from such fundamental internal contradictions. Notwithstanding current injustices or social problems present in Western democracies like the United States, these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. Underpinning his argument, Fukuyama drew extensively upon the emigré Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s exegesis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of history, in particular his ‘dialectic of the master and the slave’ set out in the Phenomenology of spirit (1977). Fukuyama further invoked Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘last man’, the inheritor of the world beyond the end of history who embodies but cannot realise Hegel’s master’s urge to dominate and achieve recognition and renown. Again reflecting his reading of Kojève, Fukuyama asserts that this ‘last man’ is none other than the neoliberal subject, living in the boring but prosperous liberal democratic societies that have seen off Marxist tyranny, whose epigones will occasionally lapse into religious and nationalist retrogressions and fundamentalisms, only to find out again that, indeed, ‘there is no alternative’ to liberal democracy.

In Specters of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida delivered a spirited rebuttal of Fukuyama’s ‘neo-evangelistic’ theorising, and the ‘obscene euphoria’ with which it was lionised by neoliberal capitalist politicians, media, and academia (74). Derrida critiques Fukuyama’s sleight-of-hand wherein he conflates the empirical actuality of history with the ideal assumptions that construct the telos of economic and political neoliberalism, granting to himself, as it were, the dialectical best of both worlds. Derrida continues that the whole problem with the Fukuyama/Kojève ‘simplified – and highly Christianized’ (1994: 77) version of the ‘end of history’ is the way it thinks of time/history, namely in a positivist sense as a succession of present moments, counted one after the other on the rosary of ‘homogenous empty time’ (Benjamin 2003: 397). This made for bad metaphysics as it leaves no room for ‘the event’, for those unsettling intimations of the future that are woven into the present.

The liberal democratic triumph of the ‘end of history’, which, according to Derrida, dismisses the possibility of the ‘event’, already has had its effective comeuppance since Fukuyama delivered his ‘secretly worried’ polemic, both from outside shocks (9/11, the ‘War on Terror’, global climate crisis, COVID-19), and from internal earthquakes (the financial crash of 2008, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter); a ‘triumph that has never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic, and in sum bereaved’ (Derrida 1993: 85). An equally suitable or even better candidate for Kojève’s ‘last man’ might rather be the postsocialist subject himself, whose overlapping incarnations were outlined in the first section; he who is heir to the ‘dowry’ of socialism, who, depending on perspective, could be both sovok (a self-satisfied philistine consumer) and live vnye (an intellectual creating niches of freedom in a eternally fixed system).

Alexei Yurchak observed (along with others, such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia) the emergence of an aberrant postsocialist subjectivity in the last Soviet generation, a postsocialist subject who took form within and lived under the socialist regime, the postsocialism within socialism, so to speak:

During late socialism, especially in the 1970's and early 1980's, it became increasingly common among some groups of the last Soviet generation, especially children from intelligentsia families, but also some from working class backgrounds, to give up more sophisticated professional careers for occupations that offered more free time. The more extreme and telling examples of such jobs included boiler room technician (kochegar), warehouse watchman (storozh), freight train loader (gruzchik), and street sweeper (dvornik). These jobs kept them busy for only two or three night shifts a week, leaving them plenty of free time for obshchenie and for pursuing other interests. One's obligations were minimised because the work was undemanding, because it was organised in long shifts with breaks in between, and because one was spared the need to attend meetings, parades, and other public events (since only people with stronger institutional affiliations were, required to attend such events through their jobs). (2005: 151-153)

Yurchak’s postsocialist subject, for whom ‘Everything was forever’ and who could express individuality whilst having sloughed off economic necessity, seems more faithfully to resemble the posthistorical figure foreseen by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kojève than Fukuyama’s impostor. It is this antiheroic figure that is given the task of forging the postsocialist future, always already secretly preparing and prepared for the event ‘Until it was no more’. That future is not simply a future that is a version of the here and now, but rather a future that develops the forces active in the here and now to conclusion; not a mere future present, but rather a future modality of the living present. It is for this reason that it is impossible to dissociate socialism from postsocialism: they cannot be conceptualised simply as ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Four exemplars of the postsocialist subject

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fieldwork in the former socialist societies remains a vibrant and popular option for a new generation of anthropologists, and a more authentically future-oriented form of postsocialist ethnography is beginning to emerge. Rather than rehearsing the triumphalist teleological vision of defeated, subaltern societies expected to ape and aim at catching up with Western neoliberal capitalism, these works provide views into the rear-view mirror of subjects and societies either confidently accelerating away from their experience of socialism, or, more likely, shifting in the direction of a distinctive version of modernity. In the first wave of postsocialist anthropological excitement, all of the themes and interests listed at the start of this entry have been addressed in ethnographic monographs. All of this work reflects a particular perspective, which is filtered through the prism of socialist experience, identity, and history. This final section will focus on four recent anthropological works that continue to accrete meaning into and give flesh to the concept of postsocialism as history goes forward. These texts highlight social phenomena that have distinctively postsocialist contours; either absent in other social contexts or more visible or more progressed in postsocialist societies. The key index of this postsocialist substance in each case is that the solution paving the road forward to modernity is stalked by the ghostly presence of an ideology that refuses to die.

Several anthropologists of postsocialism have undertaken work in areas related to the ethical formation of postsocialist subjectivity. Working under the broad influence of Michel Foucault’s theorising of neoliberal governmentality, they have pursued the basic thesis that with the collapse of socialism and the retreat of its welfare state, individuals have been forced, incited, and invited to govern themselves in new ways. Often, these biopolitical technologies or discourses come from the West, but not always. One example of this approach is Tomas Matza’s (2018) exploration of the rise of psychotherapeutic practices in Russia in contradistinction to the previously established psychological and ethical framing of Soviet upbringing. This development straddles the collapse of socialism. It dates back to the time of perestroika when economic stagnation prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to call for educators and institutions to attend to the ‘human factor of production’ (Matza 2018: 78). In response, reformers promoted a shift from ‘averaged’ to ‘personality-oriented’ education, and a ‘more democratic and child-centred approach’. Emotions became a relevant area of educational concern, initiating the psychologisation of upbringing, which had previously been conceived of in moral terms under the tutelage of Anton Makarenko, the father of Stalinist pedagogy who developed the disciplinary techniques that promoted the formation of Homo Sovieticus (Kharkhordin 1998). This change was not essentially about individual children achieving success or wellbeing; the late-socialist reformers had in mind a form of success that was ultimately to be measured in collective terms. The acknowledgement of an individual interior life that ought to be nurtured for its own sake had always been contested under socialism, just as had the notion of ‘private’ life. A generation later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Matza found during his fieldwork in Putin-era St. Petersburg that a distinction had emerged between two different psychotherapeutic approaches: one oriented towards adolescent dysfunction and pathology, another much more targeted upon wellbeing. He established that depathologising forms of care that focused on well-being were generally much more available to the better-off. Rather than pathology, these forms of psychotherapy promoted highly market-oriented and gendered concepts of personal success and advancement. Matza observes that biopolitics (techniques used to govern populations as living beings) often relies on moralising and draws subjects into state aims by constituting them as caring subjects. This observation reinforces the notion that ethical projects are not antithetical to neoliberalism; on the contrary, they are central to it.

The physical environment that socialism created and inhabited played a significant role in the formation of subjecthood on both sides of the fracture and collapse of socialist societies. This was particularly pertinent in Hungary, long regarded as the most Western-oriented and prosperous of the so-called ‘satellites’ of the Soviet Union in the period of late socialism. Here, as elsewhere across that social landscape, planners understood that materiality and political ideologies were linked, and that transformative powers might inhere in material forms. The aesthetics of domestic environments, the shape, texture, and ambience of their materiality, provide the locus for Krisztina Fehéreváry’s (2013) exploration of the reciprocal relationships between ideology (of the state, market, or particular groups), things (residential housing, furnishings, and aesthetic styles), and people (especially people’s embodied experience). She elucidates how radical changes to people’s lived environments and their experience of those environments transforms or challenges the sociopolitical ideologies with which they are aligned. She particularly highlights how, in the sphere of interior design and domestic aesthetics in Hungary but also more widely across both the East and West, the trend towards using ‘natural’ materials—of, effectively, bringing ’nature’ inside—gained powerful affective appeal with the end of the Cold War and its corollary, the demise of the socialist welfare state. She observes that the superiority ascribed to ‘natural’ materials—granite countertops, rich hardwoods, stone-like tile backsplashes, and leather furnishings—aids in discrediting modernist projects and generates the cosmologies that have replaced them. These cosmologies valorise the moral project of being in harmony with the natural world and at the same time allow for the naturalisation of the free market as arbiter of human value. The search for ‘quality’ in material goods that are more healthy and durable, i.e., more ‘natural’, is inextricably linked to the production of inequality. Drawing upon the Peircean concept of ‘qualisigns’, she traces the decline of the Cold War style of ‘socialist modern’, characterised by angular, modernist design, lightweight furnishings, light colours, and man-made materials, once emblematic of the triumphantly modernist communist future and defined by qualisigns of ‘lightness’ and ‘cleanness’, into a debased parody she defines as ‘socialist generic’. In Hungary, this style’s defining products—shoddy, factory-made, and mass-produced apartments and furnishings—became aligned with and reinforced the affective experience of alienation from an impersonal and oppressive bureaucratic state, whose physical identifiers echoed the same tropes of stagnation that permeated the socialist space. Man-made materials that had once exemplified the promise of abundance for all came to exemplify the regime’s hubristic attempts to dominate nature. Egalitarianism became discredited in part because it had become conflated in everyday practice with standardisation and uniformity. Likewise, rational and efficient became synonymous with cheap and austere. People sensed that the contempt for nature reflected in the communist domestic aesthetic presaged some deeper malaise. According to Fehéreváry, the cataclysm of Chernobyl is affectively anticipated in this domestic parable (Fehéreváry 2012: 627).

Dace Dzenovska’s ethnography (2018) of postsocialist Latvia lights up the dark underside of what neoliberal acceptance might mean for former socialist populations. The country at the edge of the European Union remained haunted by the afterlife of the Soviet Union’s internal borders and nationalities policies, yet it reluctantly ingested public tolerance and liberal political values. Learning to navigate the paradox of Europeanness imposes the imperative to profess and institutionalise the values of inclusion and openness while at the same time practicing—and also institutionalising—exclusion and closure. Having become a European Union frontier state, Latvia is required to reorient its border vision from protecting its national territory to protecting all of Europe. This responsibility includes being concerned not only with border control and geopolitics, but also with migration control, which had barely registered on Latvian public and political agendas prior to Europeanisation. Latvia’s history as a former Soviet state with a sizeable and contested ethnic Russian population, migrants from Soviet times, easily outranks in popular affective and institutional priority the imperative to police the posthistorical perimeter of the longed-for European homeland. Latvians experienced the condition of being ‘not quite European’. In order to meet the normative attitudinal standards that will permit them to take their place among the liberal subjects of the European project, Latvians need to purge their racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic inclinations, supported and scrutinised by ‘tolerance’ workers, employed by the state.

So far, so liberal. Yet the migration officials and border guards who are Dzenovska’s interlocutors are better at learning the repressive elements of Europe’s migration regime; that is, securing the border, and keeping ‘barbarians’ (Dzenovska 2018: 206) at the gate, rather than embracing the redemptive elements like tolerance and compassion. History hasn’t ended in Latvia. Caught between its Soviet past and its European future, the tension between openness and closure is not to be simply mapped onto a discursive juxtaposition between liberalism and illiberalism and, subsequently, spatially onto Western and Eastern Europe. Latvians experience a deferred, disappointed, and elusive present: aspiring to be Europeans, longing to shed their hated socialist past, as they see it, as vassals of their gigantic next door neighbour to the East, yet haunted by postsocialist instincts and reflexes.

Alexia Bloch’s account (2017) of the entrepreneurial, familial, and intimate lives of migrant women who navigate the physical, emotional, and financial routes running from the former Soviet borderlands of Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and Southern Russia into Turkey, illustrates the formation of a powerfully gendered but specifically postsocialist prototype of neoliberal subjecthood. These women, often the primary breadwinners of their extended families, support remittance economic relations with their home communities, often leaving children to be cared for by older family members in ‘other mother’ arrangements, reminiscent of similar economic migrant women in Third World settings. Their relations with husbands at home are often characterised by role-reversal, with women in the active, dominant role, with dependent stay-at-home husbands whose absence of status and sometimes of any significant role provides a ghostly echo of the marginalised men, washed up on the shores of the socialist ideal in the time of khaos, described by Parsons and others. Bloch analyses practices and postures that complicate liberal narratives that assume a trajectory from an ‘oppressive’ state socialism to the ‘opportunities’ offered by global capitalism. Socialist paradigms and forms of governance are not immediately or evenly displaced, and people who lived under state socialism continue to reflect on a sense of a derailed socialist modernity. Some of Bloch’s older interlocutors lament being inserted into a global service economy where ideals of socialist labour have no meaning, and they no longer have any social protections in the form of pensions, overtime, sick leave, or mechanisms for gender equity. Often, whilst successful, even thriving, businesswomen, they harbour a residual shame at their involvement in tainted ‘bourgeois’ buying and selling, frowned upon in socialist morality. One such troubled respondent confessed that to be a trader was to be a fallen socialist of sorts (Bloch 2017: 71). In contrast, some younger women consider their work and life in Turkey as exciting, urbane, and an escape from the confining socialist structures and gender ideals of the past. This latter group exemplify ideals of glamour, romance, and sexuality made available through the freedom offered by mobility. This freedom affords new structures of feeling, including new forms of romance, courtship, and ‘companionate’ marriage. These structures include so-called ‘modern’ forms of intimacy, including concubinage and the online sex industry. These women speak of having more power from the position of an illicit relationship than they would in a ‘real marriage’. Bloch ruefully reflects back on the prevalence in the early postsocialist years of women turning to international marriage services to look for husbands because they had struggled in their home communities of Belarus and Russia to find husbands who would be financially stable, sober, and not abusive, but also to find husbands who would provide for them both materially and emotionally. The practices and new structures of feeling observed by Bloch run counter to the commonly held view of the traffic of women as victims across borders. They confound the growing concern for ‘security’ at borders and afford more nuanced understandings of the links between global capitalism and women's (and men's) migration.

Conclusion

Postsocialism did not simply follow on from socialism, and socialism did not simply go away. Key postsocialist works indicate that postsocialist forms of being were established well before socialism’s political demise. Similarly, some of socialism’s material forms and social norms continued and have proved to have a resilient afterlife. The span of recent postsocialist anthropological scholarship described above does not indicate a concept in decline or even in retreat as yet. To shoehorn postsocialism into the narrow rubric of area studies would test the category’s limits on simple geographic grounds alone. The ethnographic fields detailed here have been located in Europe, but might easily have included Central Asia (Pelkmans 2017, Reeves 2014) or Mongolia (Empson 2011, Pedersen 2011). In any event, notwithstanding their physical locus, all of these sites are traversed by global forces, for example, the European Union funding that stipulates Latvian ‘tolerance’; the self-improvement therapies and wellbeing philosophy imported from the US to the adolescent psychology clinics of St. Petersburg; the global assemblages of Dunn’s Polish baby food standards; Buchanan’s public fiscal theory that restructures Belaya Kalitva’s social infrastructure; Bloch’s young women’s ideals of ‘plastic sexuality without complexes’. It is clear that diverse theoretical concerns, gathered under the postsocialist moniker, such as ontology, knowledge formation, personhood, materiality, sovereignty, borders, migration, gender, globalism and modernity, are not exclusive to former socialist societies. Connections, not simply legitimising but also enriching, could and should be made to other organising ‘post-’ categories in anthropology. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery (2009) have proposed the conflation of postsocialism with postcolonial studies to create a single overarching category: the post-Cold War (see also Kwon 2010). They suggest that just as postcoloniality has become a critical perspective on the colonial present, so postsocialism could become a similarly critical standpoint on the continuing social and spatial effects of Cold War power and knowledge (such as in the remaking of markets, property rights, democratic institutions, workplaces, consumption, families, gender/sexual relations, or communities).

Yet if there is one defining comparative ethnographic feature of postsocialism that this entry has highlighted, it is the looping temporality of the postsocialist subject. If the postcolonial/Third World societies were once placed in the evolutionary chronotropes of backwardness, in stereotyped stages of society and the teleologies of modernisation theory which in turn interpolated postcolonial subjects as without history and without agency (Chakrabarty 2000), then it can be argued that the postsocialist subject demonstrates something different but parallel vis-a-vis the times of modernity. When Yurchak describes the disaffected youth of Leningrad as ‘being vnye’ (outside-inside) he is showing them to be postsocialist subjects, not late-socialist subjects. They are postsocialist but live in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e., in positivist political science terms, they lived in ‘developed socialism’). They were already being postsocialist but still during ‘socialism’. How is that possible? It isn’t, if you understand postsocialism and socialism as related to each other as ‘after’ relates to ‘before’. The nested temporality of postsocialism within socialism, which hatched when the socialist state eventually withered away, exemplifies concretely how people orient towards and, over decades if not centuries, silently prepare the groundwork for futures beyond immediate conceptual comprehension. Familiarity with this phenomenon has left scholars of postsocialism well placed to spot analogies between these events and the possible signs of the emergence of postliberal societies and subjectivities (see Boyer & Yurchak 2010, Dzenovska & Kurtović 2018)

What was unique about socialist societies was that they were founded upon ideology that took human nature and anthropology itself as a problem. That reflexive ideology proposed an answer to this problem, which percolated down through Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin from Hegel, to insist that human behaviour and subjectivity were and are plastic and mutable, albeit framed within a historical dialectic. Beyond socialism’s demise, real or simply alleged, the tension created by that dialectic persists within the current neoliberal world order. Notwithstanding its questionable adequacy as an organising trope, innovative anthropology focussed upon lives led under the shrinking shadow of socialist organisation, ideology, and experience, and societies still haunted by communism’s ghosts, continues to be written under the name of postsocialism.

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Note on contributor

Dominic Martin is an anthropologist of Russia and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. His work concerns the relationship between postsocialist life and the transformations of economy, society, and sovereignty that followed the end of the Cold War in Russia’s Asia-Pacific borderlands.

Dominic Martin, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography 51/53 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE Dominic.martin@compas.ox.ac.uk

Care

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 19:34:23 +0000

Patrick McKearney Megha Amrith

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21care

Abstract:

There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in particular, how it is organised by contemporary states and global markets. Second, the entry provides an overview of how, in everyday relationships of support, the political, economic, and moral dimensions of care become entangled in one another. This demonstrates how ethnography offers a different way to approach ethical and practical questions about what makes care good or effective in different cultural contexts and in different settings—such as in medical institutions or in the relationships between carers and those for whom they care. Finally, the entry shows how the different ways that care works in families and in communities challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about what care ought to look like and where it should take place. Overall, the entry illustrates that care varies greatly across social contexts. Anthropology distinctively illuminates how deeply these variations change the experience and consequences of care in ways that require our detailed attention.

Introduction

Humans sustain each other’s lives through giving and receiving care. We often think of acts of care—such as a primary caregiver looking after a child—as central to what it means to be human. Such relationships of dependence, support, and sustenance are, indeed, universal—something we necessarily find in all societies. But precisely because care is a relationship, rather than a biological quality of individuals, this universal varies along with other forms of social variation. Societies imagine, structure, and practise caring relationships so differently as to create significant differences at the level of who has responsibility to provide care, who is seen to need and to deserve it, and what care aspires to do and be.

Policies, philosophies, and practices are often founded on universal assumptions about what care is and ought to be. States may cut welfare on the basis that it can and ought to be provided by families. Clinicians can care for patients with the idea that the best, even only, thing they can do for them is to cure them. Families may give women the responsibility to care on the basis that they are supposedly ‘naturally’ inclined to do so. Paying for care can be regarded suspiciously when people hold that care ought to emanate from personal and sentimental concerns, rather than instrumental ones. Informal care might be judged as inadequate on the basis that it lacks the expertise and rigour of professional forms of it. We have a panoply of ideas about what, where, how, and by whom care is to be provided—ideas that we often take to be natural, universal, and immovable.

This entry explores care in its different guises, in order to see more expansively what care means around the world, to illuminate its diversity and to question our assumptions. Anthropological work on care demonstrates how many dominant assumptions about care arise from specific ways that care is structured in contemporary Euro-American capitalist states. It shows that such assumptions do not help us understand how care appears in other societies, and risk blinding us to the complexity of caring relationships within Euro-American societies themselves. Anthropological studies of care thus illustrate that to understand the actual role of care in human life, we must expand our imagination about what, where, and how it is given.

Structures of care

Nation states and economic markets play a central role in distributing and regulating care in contemporary societies. They function to define who is worthy of care, who should be responsible for giving it, and the contexts in which it is given. Attending to these diverse ways of structuring care reveals how different they are from one another—and thus the significant effect they can have on the kind of care people receive and, in some cases, on the possibility of receiving care at all.

Capitalist economies typically connect care work and dependence with the private sphere as opposed to the public sphere of the market and politics. Relatedly, care is often held in these contexts to be a natural feminine activity while the independent ‘breadwinner’ is regarded as traditionally male (Ferguson 2015; Fineman 2005; Held 2006). A large amount of care work is thus performed by female kin within households and receives no fiscal compensation or legal recognition (Fraser & Gordon 2003). When care work is performed by non-kin in exchange for money, it is typically poorly compensated in contrast to jobs more closely associated with the centres of economic and political power (Folbre & Nelson 2000; Constable 2009; Zelizer 2009). Professional care receives little of the social status of other professions and those who perform informal care often occupy even lower statuses – their work receiving stigma and moral scrutiny for its conflation of the sentimental realm of care with economic modes of exchange (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004; Glenn 2012).

The structuring of societies according to the values of rationality, independence, individualism, and productive work thus shapes caring relationships in distinctive ways. It often obscures the time, expertise, effort, and costs of ‘women’s work’ and of ‘emotional labour’ in the home and beyond (Hochschild 1983; Abel & Nelson 1990). It also creates the impression that care work is only necessary for specific classes of ‘dependents’ and that it can be confined to specific social contexts (Ferguson 2015; Siebers 2007; Kittay 1999; Fineman 2005; Rivas 2004). Anthropological approaches to care challenge these assumptions by examining how it is actually practised and distributed in people’s daily lives. They also demonstrate that such socio-cultural and gendered assumptions about care nevertheless continue to determine how care is distributed in different societies (Zelizer 2009).

States and markets

No nation state has ever fully taken on the responsibility and fiscally compensated for all forms of care. Kinship, charity, community-based and privately financed care continue to play a vital role. Contemporary European welfare states, especially those in Scandinavia, have taken on probably the most responsibility for care within human history in their provision of expansive welfare payments for parental leave, child support, disability care, and elderly care as well as free healthcare. In such countries, kin are less often expected to provide care without state compensation, while the state also offers extensive alternatives for people to be professionally cared for by non-kin (Altermark 2018). This kind of expansive welfare government is accompanied by active intervention into the care of citizens through medical, psychiatric, and public health institutions (Foucault 2009b; 2009a; 1975). Such state intervention in turn generates classifications of certain classes of citizens as more ‘vulnerable’ than others.

Among developed capitalist countries, the US offers a stark contrast to Scandinavian states. The American state takes on far less responsibility for the care of its citizens, most notably in relation to healthcare and long-term nursing care. Organisations that provide long-term care for the elderly are typically owned and run privately, and are thus often beholden to logics of profit-making (Diamond 1995). Meanwhile, healthcare is largely funded through payments to private health insurance companies, who have ample legal room to evade the responsibility to actually provide care to many of those who would seem to need it. For example, when clinicians and potential patients claim to need support for eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia, insurance companies can justify their refusal by reclassifying the very diagnostic symptoms such people initially use to make their claim to dependence as, instead, a wilful refusal of self-care (Lester 2019). Clinicians, operating within this mode of financing healthcare, can only obtain care for their patients by framing their conditions in the categories that insurance companies recognise as legitimate. Their clinical evaluations of patients thus become infused with insurance logics (Lester 2009; Brodwin 2013; see also Davis 2012; Biehl 2005).

In spite of this largely market-based approach to care, the American state is no less involved in its citizens’ lives. It makes ‘caring’ interventions through other institutions such as the military, justice, and carceral systems. War veterans, for instance, are entitled to kinds of healthcare assistance comparable to a comprehensive European welfare state (Wool 2015; Zogas 2021). Once someone with a mental-health disorder has committed a criminal offence, US courts can authorise otherwise-prohibited interventions in their lives to wean people off addiction or provide them with access to housing (Brodwin 2013; see also Cooper 2018). Prisons play a similarly unexpected role in providing healthcare to incarcerated pregnant mothers, making medical and emotional care simultaneously more available to some lower-income women of colour at the same time as entangling it with logics of incarceration (Sufrin 2017; see also Foucault 1995).

The opposite of this situation can also occur. States may attempt to maintain the idea that they are intervening to protect their citizens while, in reality, unburdening themselves of any responsibility to do so—often by bureaucratically distinguishing between supposedly legitimate and illegitimate forms of dependence (Foucault 2008). As Ukraine reeled from the Chernobyl explosion, the socialist and then post-socialist government was faced with unprecedented claims upon state assistance. It used biomedical institutions in order to reclassify people’s radiation damage as the result of an alternative condition that entitled citizens to nothing (Petryna 2013; see also Phillips 2011). When China introduced expansive new legislation to provide economic support to those with disabilities, the bureaucratic means for becoming certified as disabled turned out to be so complicated that few were able to claim it (Kohrman 2005).

A neoliberal logic, where governments redistribute responsibility to citizens by actively encouraging them to care for themselves (Foucault 2008), is present across many kinds of state intervention. This logic can make it easier for state institutions, and even families, to classify those who depend extensively on others, such as chronically ill or ‘unwanted’ populations, as ‘abnormal’—with the consequence that they may end up neglected in ‘zones of social abandonment’ (Biehl 2005; see also Marrow & Luhrmann 2012). Even the most well-meaning and charitable attempts to help those abandoned to these settings can unwittingly replicate the demands of neoliberal forms of government for citizens to take on more responsibility for their own care—rather than criticising the state for not providing it (Zigon 2010).

Humanitarianism and migrant care labour

Care is not confined to the borders of nation states, as humanitarian aid distributes it across regions in light of sharp global economic inequalities. States, together with non-profit organisations, make decisions about which populations in other parts of the world need, or are deserving of, humanitarian care. Much state-sponsored humanitarianism is shaped by ideals of a shared universal humanity that requires intervention to rescue and care for suffering victims. This logic can depoliticise the inequalities that produce such suffering in the first place (Beckett 2019; Feldman & Ticktin 2013; Ferguson 1994), creating unintended similarities between contemporary efforts and ideologies of benevolence underpinning colonial ‘civilising missions’ to reform those deemed vulnerable, deficient, suffering, or sick (Englund 2006). Lisa Malkki (1996) highlights how the category of ‘the refugee’ in programmes of humanitarian care for Hutus in East Africa reduces the complex identities and political subjectivities of those being ‘helped’ into a static, homogenous category of de-historicised victimhood. Similarly, children in conflict settings may come to be represented as fundamentally innocent and ‘needy’ through infantilising and at times futile ‘gifts of care’, such as hand-knitted toys (Malkki 2015).

A similar logic plays out when it comes to migrants and refugees at European state borders. The contemporary French state’s rhetoric of humanitarian care plays a role in categorising only certain undocumented migrants (sans-papiers) as vulnerable and ‘morally legitimate’ care-recipients—for instance, those who are sick or victims of sexual violence. This distinguishes them from migrants who might have been disenfranchised in other ways (Ticktin 2011). Such selective compassion by the state to care for specific bodies is a distinct political logic, one that may render issues of care apolitical and forecloses the possibility of contestation (see also Fassin 2011).

Global inequalities also shape, and are reinforced by, the international distribution of migrant care labour. Such labour is disproportionately performed by immigrant women from lower-income countries who move to engage in low-wage employment in the domestic and care work sectors of higher-income economies (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004; Glenn 2012; R. S. Parreñas 2015), such as from the Philippines to Hong Kong, Mexico and Central American countries to the US, and South Asia to the Gulf states. Precarious livelihoods in migrants’ countries of origin and aspirations to care for family futures often motivate these journeys abroad, while households in wealthier countries outsource care work to migrant women as sources of cheap labour.

Migrants may lack the legal rights of citizens in ways that are entangled with the marginalisation of care workers and care labour more widely. When migrant women enter into these already precarious and vulnerable forms of labour, their experience of this gendered devaluation of care intersects with their discrimination along the lines of class, race, and citizenship (Constable 1997; Rosenbaum 2017; Muehlebach 2012). This ‘global care chain’ has knock-on effects on women’s families in their country of origin, requiring them to find other kin or paid carers to take over caring responsibilities in their absence (Hochschild 2001).

The ethics of care

Political and economic logics distribute responsibility for care in such a way as to produce its presence or absence in different settings. How do people relate to one another within caring relationships themselves? What does care look like and involve in practice?

Ethics of care in professional settings

Many forms of health and social care now place a high value on autonomy, consent, and patient choice as they move away from paternalistic models. This ‘logic of choice’ (Mol 2008) limits many forms of caring intervention based on the authority of professional expertise. Social workers in the US bound by these values of autonomy cannot intervene in the lives of those with drug addictions and mental health problems, even when they find people sleeping in the snow without a blanket (Brodwin 2013). The logic of choice creates particular problems for those who need care when their mental capacity to choose is affected by conditions such as dementia, intellectual disability, or mental health problems (Driessen 2018b; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017). Many forms of care exist precisely because people are judged to be incapable of choosing for themselves—but strict adherence to a logic of choice leaves no room for this kind of intervention (Pols, Althoff & Bransen 2017).

Actual caring relationships tend to work in far more complex ways than the logic of choice, and its binary division of paternalism from autonomy, allows. In practice, many caring relationships work through constant intervention in the life of the care-recipient—some of which are paternalistic, and some of which can less easily be classified in this way (Mol, Moser & Pols 2010; see also Kittay 2007, 2019). Chinese parents, for instance, ‘tinker’ (Mol 2008) behind the scenes to create conditions that will be conducive to their children succeeding in a highly competitive economy, in order to avoid directly commanding their already stressed children (Kuan 2015). And many contemporary Euro-American forms of care try to combine intervention with freedom through different forms of pedagogy or persuasion (Pols 2006; Ochs & Izquierdo 2009; Driessen, van der Klift & Krause 2017; McKearney 2021).

Logics of care contrast, also, with another important standard within medical institutions: the goal-oriented focus of curing (Kleinman 2015; 2013). The role of such care comes into focus in settings where curing is not possible—such as in end-of life care (Kaufman 2014; Pols, Pasveer & Willems 2018; Shield 1988). Julie Livingston shows how, when doctors in resource-deprived hospitals in Botswana have little hope of curing their patients, they carefully attend to dressing wounds, managing pain, and providing emotional support (see also Kleinman 2009; Street 2014). They practise medicine as a form of solidarity with the sick—a care that exceeds standard biomedical forms of evaluation (Chambliss 1995). Medicine’s funding and regulation with the ideal of curing leads many in medical professions to miss the centrality of care to their own work, and to other people’s moral projects—as, for instance, when clinicians in the US misrecognise how parents pursue meaningful lives for their critically-ill children despite the improbability of curing them (Mattingly 2010; 2014).

The relational and hard-to-measure qualities of care often make it hard to justify in quantitative or economic terms. Interventions that work through the solidary logic of caring– such as long-term psychotherapy—often receive less funding (Lester 2019; Luhrmann 2001; Davis 2012). The impossibility of economically justifying long-term support for those with those mental disorders that incline them to reject care can lead clinicians to identify such patients as ‘incurable’—even when there is no strictly clinical reason to do so (Davis 2012; Lester 2009). A focus on such impersonal quantitative outcomes in the Canadian government’s response to a crisis of Inuit suicides ignored the sources of and the solutions to the crisis among the Inuit themselves, who see life as inherently bound up with relations of care with ancestors and relatives (Stevenson 2014).

Relations of care produce outcomes that the logics of choice and cure miss. A focus on autonomy can have the effect of wearing our relations thin, to the point that changes in cognitive capacity end up spelling social death (Biehl 2005; Cohen 2000; Marrow & Luhrmann 2012). Instead, a focus on relations of care can build sustaining ties between us as social beings (Taylor 2010). Athena McClean (2015) demonstrates the concrete effects of taking such hard-to-measure logics of care seriously by contrasting two long-term dementia care homes in the US: one which primarily treats care as an instrumental task, and the other as a relational form of solidarity. She demonstrates that the latter maintains not only the dignity but also the cognitive capacities of those in receipt of care—producing also far fewer incidents of conflict or distress.

It is for this reason that feminist scholars writing about the ‘ethics of care’ have long advocated for placing concerns about care at the centre of our moral imaginations and as integral to public and political life. They take care to be a relational practice that refers to all that people do to maintain, continue, and repair the world in which they live (Tronto & Fisher 1990; Tronto 2009).

Challenging moralities

Caring relationships that operate outside of the logics of cure, choice, and the market do not all look the same. Around the world, care takes many forms that challenge our moral intuitions about what it should look like—disrupting, in particular, the dichotomies we hold between good care and its opposites (Duclos & Criado 2020; McKearney 2020).

Professionalism, instrumentalism, and commodification are often set against the moral and emotional qualities we typically associate with care—of sentiment, connection, and warmth (see H. Brown 2010: 129). But, in practice, contractual relationships of care are frequently sites for human intimacy, connection, and flourishing. In the context of paid eldercare work in the US, precariously employed immigrant women who perform this work develop meaningful, if ambivalent, relationships with the older people they care for. Care is thus generative both of inequalities and of new forms of personhood, interdependence, and relatedness (Buch 2018) and thereby of moral engagement. Rather than telling a story about love or intimacy versus money, anthropologists have demonstrated how different ways of relating emerge in and through their very intersection. This has led them to question the assumption that a capitalist world is necessarily marked by a ‘lack’ of care (Constable 2009; Gutierrez Garza 2019; Zelizer 2009).

Some professional logics of care try to restrict these possibilities of intimacy. But other organisations deliberately use these possibilities to enable closer forms of personal connection for those whose dependence can deprive them of it (McKearney 2017; 2018; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017; Nakamura 2013; Kulick & Rydström 2015; Haeusermann 2018). These possibilities for human connection can also be important to care-givers, especially when their work is stigmatised and reproduces their social exclusion more widely (Muehlebach 2012; Rivas 2004). In Singapore, Filipino migrant nurses who might initially be rejected by their Chinese patients for being of ‘different skin’ can later find ways to connect with these patients through personal connections such as a shared religious orientations (Amrith 2017). Such everyday affective, intimate, and material exchanges within care work can constitute a form of political belonging for migrant carers, especially in the absence of formal citizenship rights (Coe 2019; see also T. M. Brown 2011).

The idea that care must take a particularly involved form of empathetic engagement does not hold everywhere (Otto & Keller 2018; Mezzenzana 2020). The warm and sentimental relationality we often associate with caring for another may be taken to get in the way of ‘good’ care. In Thailand, care is a matter of practical work, bodily ritual, and karmic morality. Here, care as the concrete, habituated, and mundane act of providing for others decentres more abstract, sentimentalised and morally loaded notions of care that have long dominated in Europe and America (Aulino 2016). Don Kulick and Jens Rydstrom (2015) demonstrate this in their study of carers in Denmark who support people with disabilities to have sexual encounters. These carers do not try, themselves, to be visible and involved. Instead, they aim to turn themselves into mere background influences—as do many carers supporting those who rely on extensive care throughout their daily lives (Rivas 2004; Stacey 2016; Buch 2018). At the other end of the spectrum, ‘warmth’ can arise in elderly care even when it is mediated by ‘cold’ objects like robots, as is the case in the Netherlands (Pols & Moser 2009; Mol, Moser & Pols 2010). Intimacy may similarly arise even in the apparent absence of human care relationships. Against the grain of popular discourses in Japan, which presume that elderly people living alone are socially abandoned, older adults can find their own ethical practices for living meaningfully in later life through daily rituals making offerings to departed ancestors (Danely 2015).

Control, confinement, and aggression are often imagined to stand in direct contrast to care. Anthropologists, by contrast, show how they can be central to the form that care takes in reality (Foucault 2009a; Johnson and Lindquist 2020; Mulla 2016). In many contexts, violence and deception do not compromise the purity of a more sentimental care but are instead central to how people imagine and practise good care (Brown 2010; Garcia 2015; Livingston 2012). In India, clinicians care for those with schizophrenia by hiding information about the diagnosis from these individuals, and enlisting the support of the family to regulate and control the care-recipient (Marrow & Luhrmann 2017; see also Luhrmann 2007). These paternalistic dynamics within and beyond the family may well be a key of part of the explanation as to why schizophrenia takes a far less severe form in this context. The line between abusive and affirming forms of care is thus much less clear, in practice, than our ideals of care may suggest (Garcia 2010; 2014). In these studies of alternative forms of professional care, hierarchy, paternalism, control, or detachment are not such grave dangers to the person as we often imagine. Rather, they are part of different ways of understanding what it means to be a person, to be cared for, and to be respected. These alternative caring ethics can have remarkably positive outcomes for conditions that mainstream Euro-American care struggles to handle, such as mental illness, dementia, intellectual disability, and addiction.

Care, kinship and communities

The majority of care around the world is still provided outside the direct purview and funding of the state and its institutions, within families and in communities. During the latter part of the twentieth century, many states closed long-stay institutions and shifted away from centralised hospitals on the idea that care is best provided in the ‘community’ (Horden Smith 2013). But this modernising narrative glosses over the fact that families and ‘communities’ rarely fit the imaginations of policy-makers and vary considerably in the way they distribute care.

Families are a primary site through which caring obligations are distributed—kinship roles themselves often being defined, in part, through one’s obligations to or entitlements to care at different life-stages (Goody 1971). But there are profound differences in normative cultural patterns about what families should look like, how care should be distributed within and beyond them, and what ought to constitute proper care. Children, in some contexts, may not have a single dedicated caregiver, nor any dedicated caregiver at all (Otto & Keller 2018), nor are they always regarded as the responsibility of parents in a concrete way, in no small part because they may not be defined as vulnerable to begin with (Lancy 2014). Children as young as five among the Runa of the Pastuza region in the Ecuadorian Amazon are left to look after themselves in very practical ways through building shelter and acquiring food on their own (Mezzenzana 2020). The Runa consider leaving children to their own devices as the best way to let them learn self-reliance, concern for others, and a capacity to manage themselves. This is connected to the self-reliant ‘obstinate individualism’ of the region, in which each person is their own responsibility and no one else’s (Mezzenzana 2020). Such alternative forms of childcare do not just challenge how childhood can be imagined; they also affect the extent to which adults are required to provide care and to which children can care for themselves (Ochs & Izquierdo 2009).

Kinship-care goes far beyond the nuclear family. There are many configurations of kinship that involve a different set of characters in providing care: grandparents, changing romantic partners (Zelizer 2009), or non-genetic close connections who may be described as kin (Edwards & Strathern 2000; Pande 2015). Domestic work by non-kin, more or less assumed into a family structure, has a long and continuous history (Delap 2011; Ray & Qayum 2009) as does the adoption of non-kin. In some societies, the very definition of a partner, parent, or child may not be a permanent genetic or legal bond (Sahlins 2013; Conklin & Morgan 1996). Kinship can also be created through acts of care; for instance, the day-to-day sharing of cooked meals in Langkawi in Malaysia (Carsten 1997; see also Parkes 2005). In these cases, kinship is often not defined at birth but rather is built between people through repeated transfers of care and exchanges of substances such as food or bodily fluids (Carsten 1989; 2000; Stasch 2009).

Kinship roles can also follow a more prescribed and structured set of normative expectations that concretely shape caring responsibilities. In rural Uganda, patrilineal family structures shape the different kinds of grandparental care that sons and daughters’ children receive (Whyte & Whyte 2004). In many South Asian families, one’s status as a child of one’s parents continues to define the care one receives and gives throughout the life course. Parents frequently refer to their adult children who have not yet married as bacche, ‘children’ in Hindi (Mody 2020a). Parental intervention in the sphere of marriage may also be seen as legitimate well into adulthood. The forms of pressure that it may take to make children conform to a parent’s decisions on suitable marriage partners are often expressed and justified through a language of care. Marriage-decisions gain part of their importance from the role that daughters-in-law play in providing care to their parents-in-law (Lamb 2000; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017).

These forms of kinship can give a stability, givenness, and intimacy to the kinship bond that makes the transfer of care obligatory and uncalculated. But that does not mean that care’s role in kinship is stable even in these contexts. One’s role shifts across the course of the lifetime with gendered transitions through childhood, adulthood, and elderhood (Goody 1971; Faubion 2001). The expectations of care that such transitions bring are negotiated and contested extensively. When kinship takes the burden of care, it is typically a weighty, complex, and fraught affair (Mody 2020b; Pinto 2014; Trawick 1990; Reece 2020).

Social and political changes brought about through processes of urbanisation and globalisation can also re-configure the role of kinship in caring relationships. Popular narratives in India lament the demise of the ‘Indian joint family’ to stress the importance of what they see as the legitimate way to look after elders: by caring for them within that familial context (Cohen 1992). But international migration from India has led to the growth of novel care arrangements: privatised eldercare homes and local care services as an alternative, or complement, to kinship care for elders who stay in India while their kin live abroad. A closer look at the lives of people living in these communities demonstrates that care homes are not merely impositions of Euro-American models but are culturally legitimate spaces for middle-class diasporic Indian families (Lamb 2009). In low-income settings in Sub-Saharan Africa, while the care of children, elders, and those with chronic health problems is often undertaken by family members, migration, urbanisation, and increasing inequalities constrain the capacities of households to care. Family care then becomes a dynamic space within which people do not only act according to emotional or moral obligations, but according to the resources available (Reece 2020; Read & van der Geest 2019; see also Han 2012 for an example from Chile). In Ghana, when family care becomes less viable on its own, other spaces such as church become important to providing health and social care, as well as acting as a form of ‘fictive’ family (Coe 2019b). Meanwhile, those living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, may find new ‘(quasi) relatives’ among health workers, volunteers, and strangers who are seen to be more trustworthy than family members (van der Geest, Dapaah & Kwansa 2019).

Among families rendered transnational through global care chains, creative care arrangements challenge normative understandings of what a family should look like. Care amidst family separation can be mobilised as an intergenerational resource and form of solidarity. Nicaraguan transnational family life draws extensively on extended kinship networks, while grandmothers and grandchildren who care for each other in these contexts challenge constructions of those ‘left behind’ by migrants as passive care recipients (Yarris 2017). Care at a distance is increasingly mediated by digital technologies and expressed through remittances, gifts, and goods, while the ‘family’ itself may involve multiple actors, including paid care workers, distant relatives, and neighbours (Hromadžić & Palmberger 2018; Ahlin 2020; Baldassar and Wilding 2020). Transnational care challenges the distinctions between family, paid, informal, professional, communal, and state-based care, demonstrating the interconnection between all these categories.

The expectations within policy about where care is to be performed, and by whom, are influenced by and reproduce the legal recognition of only certain types of relatedness as legitimate. But care often exceeds these classifications. The narrow confines of kinship categories deployed by the state and the law are frequently rooted in biological or heteronormative assumptions and thus often exclude other forms of partnership, intimacy, and mutual care (Weston 1997; Dave 2012; see also Strathern 2005). Gay and lesbian relationships, for example, may not fit into many legal definitions of kinship precisely because they are founded upon the very idea of ‘caring and being cared for’ (Borneman 1997).

In other contexts, kinship’s importance can be exaggerated. Migrant care workers’ absences from their families are often framed by state and public discourses as having damaging impacts on heterosexual family structures (Manalansan 2008). However, this narrative overlooks the novel caring relationships based on love, intimacy, and friendship that migrants develop in communities abroad that go beyond kinship categories yet remain deeply significant to their experiences and identities (Johnson & Werbner 2010; Liebelt 2011).

Religious, political, and ethical movements also decentre kinship by structuring distributions of care beyond the family. Religious groups can create relationships of care and compassion between previously unrelated social groups and social concerns (Copeman 2009; Evans 2016; Kertzer 1980; Mair & Evans 2015). Christianity, for instance, created new forms of spiritual kinship within the church—most strikingly in monastic communities where people renounced existing relations and future marital prospects to form new kinds of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ (Brown 1988; Banner 2014). These alternative moral imaginations created new categories of dependents worthy of care (such as children and the ‘poor’) as well as social practices and institutions to distribute care to them—many of which have decisively influenced the shape of contemporary forms of charity, healthcare, and education (Bakke 2005; Brown 1980, 2002; Scherz 2014).

Contemporary small-scale intentional communities can distribute responsibility for care within more limited and controlled environments—whether that be for those with dementia, intellectual disabilities, or the environment (Haeusermann 2018; McKearney 2017; Schiffer 2018). There is also increasing interest in how caring communities extend beyond the boundaries of humanity, both historically and in this age of climate change. One example is the relationship between orangutans, their local human caretakers, and the wider environment in rehabilitation centres in Sarawak (J. Parreñas 2018). Contrary to (post)colonial practices of conservation that are based on establishing control over other species and the environment, orangutans and their caretakers are embedded in a relationship of interdependence and shared vulnerability (through, for instance, land dispossession).

Volunteering can also be an important space for providing care and creating communities. In Greece, as people struggle to access national healthcare in times of economic crisis, networks of community-based clinics/pharmacies have emerged to redistribute donated medicines and provide care through networks of volunteers. These forms of care as social solidarity reanimate Greek citizenship, since it becomes a key location for caring relationships, instead of the family or the state (Cabot 2016). Similar kinds of solidarity can be found in Northern Italy in the context of austerity and diminishing state support. Here it is pensioners who take on the voluntary work of caring for each other, helping those more vulnerable in their neighbourhoods with their shopping, medical appointments and providing them with companionship. This unexpectedly correlates with a denigration of other forms of care, so that when migrant domestic workers in these regions provide similar kinds of care for little pay, their labours are ignored or stigmatised as profit-seeking (Muehlebach 2012). Such community-based caring solidarities are then bound up with questions around what kind of care is visible, and who or what is excluded from the moral framings of these movements.

Conclusion

Social relationships offer the possibility of sustaining another’s life, and of being sustained beyond what one is capable of. If these relationships are necessary for individuals and societies to survive, they are also as variable and open-ended as human life itself. When we attend to the vast diversity of meanings and practices of care around the world, many of our assumptions about it crumble. When care manifests as connection, asymmetric dependence, coercion, refusal, belonging, affirmation, desire, and neglect, all at the same time, we are forced to question what constitutes good care, and how clearly we can separate it from what we assume bad care to be. When we explore how care is structured by different social mechanisms, from kinship to the welfare state, we must take a much wider view about who provides care and in what settings. Within a globalised world of different economic regimes, we see how care is unequally distributed within and across societies, producing ambivalent and uncertain forms of intimacy and relatedness. In its everyday expressions, what care looks like in practice does not always fit in with the rigid pre-established normative ideals about how it ought to be. A detailed look at how care takes place outside of state and market overturns any easy or simple ideas about what care in the ‘community’ looks like and about how caring roles are taken on and negotiated. Care is a human universal. But humans universally structure, practise, and imagine it differently, creating vital differences to people’s lives.

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Note on contributors

Patrick McKearney is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He is editor of two special issues on cognitive disability in Medical Anthropology (2021) and The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2018), and writes, researches, and teaches on care, ethics, religion, disability, psychology, and personhood.

Dr. Patrick McKearney, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB23RF. pm419@cam.ac.uk

Megha Amrith leads the ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is the author of Caring for strangers: Filipino medical workers in Asia (2017, NIAS Press) and has research interests in migration and care work.

Dr. Megha Amrith, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. amrith@mmg.mpg.de

Phenomenology

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 13:05:18 +0000

Jarrett Zigon Jason Throop

University of California, Los Angeles, University of Virginia

Initially published 25 Aug 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21phenomenology

Abstract:

Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the development of anthropology as a discipline increasingly concerned with the relational interconnection between humans, nonhumans, and the worlds they variously share. This is done by focusing on phenomenology’s emphasis on ‘conditions of experience’, and how such conditions shape what and how it is to be human in any situated context. In particular, the entry emphasises the conditions of being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness, and shows how each of these have been utilised by phenomenological anthropologists in their analyses of socio-cultural life. Furthermore, the entry stresses that phenomenology has always been a critical endeavour. Historically, this was so in terms of the rethinking of some of the most fundamental concepts of the so-called 'Western tradition'. More recently, this critical aspect has focused on the ways in which such conditions of experience as race, class, and gender, among others, significantly shape the range of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.

Introduction

Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century. Founded at the turn of the century by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology developed over the course of the century in ways that both adhered to and diverted significantly from this foundation. Perhaps most significantly, phenomenology has critically engaged the radical distinction between human subjects and nonhuman objects, which used to constitute a dominant mode of thinking within the so-called Western tradition. In doing so, phenomenology set the stage for rethinking the very foundation of human existence as one that is above all relational, temporal, embodied, and situated. That much of this is now taken for granted within anthropology and social theory shows just how influential the phenomenological tradition has been in this critical endeavour.

Indeed, phenomenology’s impact on contemporary anthropology has been substantial. Several theoretical approaches that have shaped contemporary anthropology have been built on—sometimes critically but always productively—many of the central philosophical and conceptual foundations of phenomenology. From post-structuralism (and most especially the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze) to practice theory, critical feminism to queer theory, from affect to actor-network theory: each of these are indebted to the work of classical phenomenology. Anthropological theory, in other words, would likely not exist as it does today without the foundational influence of phenomenology (see Desjarlais & Throop 2011; Zigon 2018).

Phenomenology has contributed to anthropological theory by providing anthropologists with conceptual resources to think and write about the ways in which humans are always relationally intertwined—with one another, with various entities that make up their worlds, and with their worlds as such. A shorthand for phenomenology’s focus or study and for this range of conceptual resources is ‘experience’. Phenomenology offers multiple generative resources for analysing and coming to understand the complexity of human and, some would argue, even non-human experience. Thereby, phenomenology complements other theoretical and methodological approaches within sociocultural anthropology.

Some anthropologists, have been critical of phenomenology for having, so they argue, a singular focus on individuals capable of narrating their experience, and for having little concern for how such social facts as culture or power shape experience (e.g, Holbraad; Pedersen 2017; cf. Pedersen 2020). Others argue that experience inherently exceeds such a narrow conceptual framing and that it does in fact account for culture or power (see Mattingly 1998; Throop 2003; Willen & Seeman 2012; Zigon 2011). For example, the phenomenological anthropologist Robert Desjarlais has been critical of social scientists naively using experience in a common sense and ordinary manner to indicate something like the coherent and narrativised flow of one’s life trajectory. To better articulate the lives of homeless persons in Boston, he has instead offered the culturally and historically specific concept he calls ‘struggling along’. For the residents of a Boston homeless shelter with whom Desjarlais spent time during the 1990s, ‘struggling along’ implied daily strenuous efforts against an often-hostile world, with little opportunity for inward reflection or for planning the future (Desjarlais 1997). Similarly, the study of moral experience, i.e. experience qualified, delimited, demarcated, and organised in moral terms, shows that such experience only emerges at the situated and relational intertwining of persons and their worlds, which necessarily entails that such experiences are always saturated with socio-historic meaning and differentiation (Zigon & Throop 2014). For example, Cheryl Mattingly has written extensively of the moral experience of African-American mothers caring for their children at the relational intertwining of race, class, and the American healthcare system (e.g., Mattingly 2014).

What, then, do phenomenologists mean by experience, and how has it been taken up by phenomenological anthropologists? When phenomenologists and phenomenological anthropologists write about experience, they are primarily concerned with describing the essential conditions of experience. Therefore, rather than simply providing a description of a series of events and activities that accumulate over time and shape a person’s life, phenomenologists investigate and describe the potentialities and relationships that make experience possible in the first place. Rather than merely describing that a homeless person in Boston may be ‘struggling along’, phenomenological anthropologists will also investigate which conditions led to this predicament in the first place and offer a way for understanding how these conditions shape lives. As this entry hopes to show, these conditions of experience constitute what it is to be human in all of its vast socio-historic diversity. In other words, in contrast to a notion of human nature that might emphasise, for example, that humans are rational animals or animals with language, phenomenologists write about conditions of experience that above all indicate that humans are essentially relational beings that become who they are because of the relations with which they are always intertwined (Zigon 2014).

Experience

There is no doubt many reasons why it is that phenomenological anthropology has come to be so closely connected to the personal, subjective, and individual. As noted above, one of the most notable culprits is arguably the prevalent reliance upon the concept of experience (see Desjarlais 1997; Mattingly 1998; Throop 2003; Willen & Seeman 2012; Zigon 2009). What has been stressed by several anthropologists, however, is that while experience in a radically expanded rendering is central to all forms of phenomenological philosophy, a narrower view of experience as an exclusively personalised, isolated, and individuated phenomena is not. Still, this narrower view of experience should not be dismissed. For by focusing upon experience’s dynamic and varying aspectual, partial, perspectival, situated, affective, and embodied modes, anthropologists gain much understanding of what it is like to live any particular kind of human life (Crapanzano 2004). Experience understood in this narrower way marks our singular, irreplaceable, and unique vantage point onto our worlds. It highlights our fragility, precarity, vulnerability, and finitude. It delimits regions of possibility and constraint, of acting and suffering, that coalesce, transform, and dissipate in the shifting moments that are undergone in the arc of any given particular life. One classic example of this approach to phenomenological anthropology is the work of Michael Jackson (e.g., 1977; 1982), whose work with Kuranko communities in Sierra Leone shows the singular power of phenomenology for articulating the complex dynamics—the limits and possibilities—of living any particular life. Following phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jackson aimed to join the study of lived experience and that of objective analysis by presenting an anthropological account that starts with Kuranko conceptions of the world and relates those to the rules and activities of their society. Similarly, Cheryl Mattingly’s ethnographies of African-American families’ struggles with the American healthcare system (2010; 2014) and Paul Stoller’s career-long engagement with Sonhay communities in West Africa and the broader diaspora (2008) are exceptional examples of phenomenological anthropology’s focus on experience in this narrower understanding.

In phenomenology, much like in William James’ (1996 [1912]) radical empirical philosophy, however, experience is taken in a much more expansive way than simply lived or subjective. Experience is, in this view, much closer to what James termed a ‘bare relation of withness’. Experience from a phenomenological stance is thus neither exclusively of the self nor of the world, of subject nor object. As we will clarify below, this is the great contribution of Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-the-world’, and particularly what he called Mitsein, or ‘being-with’. By this, Heidegger simply meant that to be human is always and without exception to be with others (human and non-human alike), such that the very idea of an individuated human being is impossible. Experience may then include the existential ‘betweenness’ that arises between subjects, and between those subjects, their worlds, and the various non-human entities that populate these worlds (see also Nancy 2000; Zigon 2021).

To this extent, Edmund Husserl’s famous call to return ‘back to the things themselves!’ (zurück zu den Sachen selbst!) was a commitment to examine any and all phenomena as they show themselves. Indeed, what so many of his contemporaries found so powerful about Husserl’s call was its rejection of the subjectivism of the neo-Kantian philosophy that was dominant at the time—a philosophy, it should be mentioned, that was central to the founding of the discipline of anthropology and remains so still today. Neo-Kantians such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm Von Humboldt sought to rethink Kant’s a priori categories of understanding as constituted by a given community’s localised linguistic and cultural forms—a line of thinking that anthropologists Franz Boas and Emile Durkheim, as well as their many students, took as a taken-for-granted starting point for their analysis of social and cultural realities. With fundamental categories of thought (causation, time, space, identity, number, etc.) constituted by linguistic structures and cultural assumptions, worldly events and happenings were reduced to culturally mediated forms of subjective experience. Husserl’s phenomenology, in contrast, offered a philosophical method for considering worldly phenomena from the way that such phenomena disclose themselves through intentionality. Intentionality, as an orientation toward object(s) and world, thus radically opened and destabilised a self-sufficing view of subjectivity. Accordingly, Husserl viewed phenomenology as a worldly philosophy that could inform ethically grounded forms of social critique and renewal (Gubser 2014).

Phenomenology is thus, Husserl maintained, not a philosophy of individual subjectivity but an eidetic philosophy, a philosophy that reveals essential structures of experience in its myriad forms, fluctuations, and dynamics. Importantly, these essential structures of experience are revealed through the close analysis of the relation between—or the withness of—particular humans and other existents of the world, human and nonhuman alike. That our embodied mode of being reveals both a physical and existentially lived body, that there is a background horizon encircling whatever may be foregrounded in experience, that a thing gives itself in an indeterminate fashion only ever revealing itself partially through time in varying sides, profiles, and aspects and ‘never giving itself absolutely’ (Husserl 1931: 138), are all essential aspects of experience in Husserl’s analysis.

In perhaps the foundational text of classic phenomenology, Logical investigations (1970), Husserl wrote that phenomenology ‘has, as its exclusive concern, experiences intuitively seizable and analyzable in their pure essential generality, not experiences empirically perceived and treated as real facts’ (249). By this Husserl meant that phenomenology’s concern is with the essences of experience, and not this or that particular and empirically describable experience (see Moran 2000: 108). At first pass this may seem anathema to anthropology. But some anthropologists contend that the description of such essences are precisely what anthropology has always been interested in exploring (e.g. Csordas 1994). From culture to kinship to ritual, from political economy to biopower to affect, all of these concepts can be considered shorthands for positing the essential conditions for any particular experience. Therefore, when phenomenologists write of, for example, intersubjectivity or being-in-the-world, they can be understood as using these concepts in a manner resonate with the ways in which anthropologist have always utilised those listed above. A critical difference, however, lies in phenomenology’s foundational stress on potentiality, possibility, and indeterminacy as necessary aspects of essences of experience. The work of Jarrett Zigon, for example, has emphasised how phenomenological analysis stresses potentiality and possibility; from showing how ethical life is a matter of situated and responsive interpretation that gives way to new ways of living a life, to his analysis of drug user political activism as an example of how marginalised persons can offer potential new ways of organising social life in a more caring and inclusive manner (Zigon 2007; 2018; 2019). What phenomenology offers is thus a way to conceptualise a non-essentialised essence; an essence that is dynamically generative of possibility and not ossified into an unchanging stabilised form. That is, essence understood phenomenologically describes the essential conditions of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.

Conditions of experience

Human existence is, as Hannah Arendt famously argued, ‘conditioned existence’ (1958: 9). Human beings are beings whose mode of existence is necessarily tethered to our worldliness. In having and being open to a world—responsive and susceptible to it—our mode of human being is one that is also conditioned by exposure to those various others who inhabit the same world. We derive our language, interpersonal skills, notions of morality, clothing, and food from others, for example. Indeed, as worldly beings, we find ourselves always-already living with, among, and alongside a plurality of others; others who preceded us, are our contemporaries and consociates, and are, as successors, still yet to be (see Schutz 1967). And yet to say, as Arendt does, that the modes of being that characterise human existence are conditioned by finitude, plurality, and worldliness is not to say that we are simply defined by such conditions without remainder. Arendt observes:

the conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely (1958: 11).

To suggest that the ‘conditions of human existence. . . never condition absolutely’ is, thus, to recognise the always incomplete, excessive, and uneven ways that we are attuned to each other and the worlds we inhabit with one another. For this reason, such conditions not only ‘enable or hinder or provide limits for possible ways of being, becoming, acting, doing, thinking, saying, and so on’, but also always entail potentialities to become transfigured and made otherwise (Zigon 2018: 8). In the next few subsections, this entry will consider three conditions of experience, which were originally described by phenomenologists, and have been central to the development of phenomenological anthropology.

Being-in-the-world

One of the most influential ways this phenomenological concern with the conditions of experience has been taken up in phenomenological anthropology is through Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1996). As part of his rethinking of basic philosophical concepts, Heidegger rarely used the word ‘human’ but instead used the word ‘Dasein’, which is the German word for ‘existence’ but is literally translated as ‘there-being’ (Da-sein), or perhaps better as ‘being-there’. He did this in order to differentiate his view of the human—as Dasein—as an always-situated and relational being from the then-dominant approach in philosophy that considered the human as a being that is fundamentally separated from any specific context and, as such, defined a priori by such things as rationality or will.

In contrast, Heidegger conceived the human as fundamentally constituted by its there-ness: as always already relationally situated in a context—or what he called a world—in a mode of being-with. To exist as a human—to be Dasein—is always to be in relation with others (both human and non-human). To many anthropologists today, this sounds extremely familiar. But when Heidegger first developed and wrote about being-in-the-world, being-with, and Dasein in the 1920s, this was a conception of the human that was still unique. Indeed, few other intellectuals beyond phenomenology, including those in anthropology who still considered the human as a neo-Kantian subject, were thinking and writing about people in such a way.

The way in which Heidegger was particularly distinctive—and different from his anthropological contemporaries—is in his articulation of Dasein as an essentially relational being. The hyphenation of being-in-the-world is significant, for it indicates the relational inseparability of Dasein and world. The world is not a container that holds different content, one of which is the being we call human. Rather, the ‘in’ of being-in-the-world indicates an essential relational intertwining, a being-with, such that humans as a form of existence—Dasein—cannot be without the world, just as the world cannot exist without Dasein. Importantly, a world is also constituted by any number of other beings, such as non-human animals, tools, other humans, trees, buildings, spirits, gods, and so forth, and, therefore, is always unfolding in a process of the arising and receding of the presence and absence of these diverse beings as they relationally intertwine with one another.

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world has been central to the development of phenomenological anthropology. From Jackson’s earliest texts on existential anthropology (1977, 1982, 1983) to James Weiner’s Heideggerian intervention in Melanesian anthropology (1992, 1993, 2003) to Tim Ingold’s work on perception, dwelling, and enskilment (1993a, 1993b), straight through to almost all contemporary works, phenomenological anthropology simply would not be what it is today without having taken up and developed the concept of being-in-the-world (Desjarlais & Throop 2011).

Arguably one of the better-known examples of this would be the work of Jarrett Zigon in the anthropology of ethics (e.g. 2007, 2014, 2018, 2021). Through an engagement with his fieldwork in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere, and most particularly in considering moments of what he calls moral breakdown, betweenness, dwelling, and attunement, Zigon has attempted to rethink the very idea of ethics in terms of relationality and situatedness, as opposed to dominant moral theories that begin with individual humans endowed with some a priori capacities such as the moral law or will. For example, in his work on drug addiction and the ‘War on Drugs’, Zigon has shown how the ethical concept of ‘attunement’, or the situational response to the unique and singular person here now, better describes the kind of care offered by drug user activists than does a notion of responsibility or humanitarian care that is already defined prior to any particular situation (Zigon 2019).

Similarly, being-in-the-world in one way or another has been central to various other phenomenological anthropological approaches to the anthropology of ethics, for example, those of Jackson (1982, 1998, 2013) and Mattingly (2014, 2017, 2019), as well as Jason Throop (2009, 2017, 2018), and Sarah Willen (2014, 2019). In each case, what is stressed in these works are the excessive ways in which lives are intertwined with others, events, objects, and worlds such that it is never simply an individual’s experience simplistically rendered as a series of events that is examined, but the various modes of betweenness, relationality, and connection that are.

Embodiment

Building directly upon Edmund Husserl’s pioneering work on intersubjectivity and embodiment, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed further the relationality of being-in-the-world with his emphasis on the body. In one of his clearest articulations of the relational body as the essential condition of being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty wrote:

Insofar as I have “sense organs,” a “body,” and “psychical functions” comparable to those of others, each moment of my experience ceases to be an integrated or rigorously unique totality . . . and I become the place where a multitude of “causalities” intertwine. Insofar as I inhabit a “physical world,” where consistent “stimuli” and typical situations are discovered . . . my life is made up of rhythms that do not have their reason in what I have chosen to be, but rather have their condition in the banal milieu that surrounds me (2014: 86, italics in original).

Because, for Merleau-Ponty, the very condition of experience is the intertwining of our relational body with our world, experience is, therefore, essentially embodied and habituated.

The influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body throughout anthropology is likely most prevalent through the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of habitus (1977; Throop & Murphy 2002). Situating social theory in the concrete day-to-day embodied practices of individuals and communities, Bourdieu’s social theory understood social life as generatively arising from sedimented habitual dispositions to perceive, appreciate, judge, will, feel, and desire in particular ways—what he termed ‘habitus’. A close comparative reading, along with an understanding of mid-twentieth century French intellectual history, strongly indicates that practice theory, and particularly the notion of habitus, is a sociological rendering of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

Thomas Csordas has explicitly taken up Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and developed a notion of embodiment that has been widely influential within anthropology at large. Importantly, he argued that the body should not be first and foremost an object to be studied in relation to culture, but that it is the existential ground, or subject for culture (Csordas 1990, see also 1994a, 1994b, 2002). This notion of embodiment has, to a great extent, come to be one of the foundational concepts for understanding experience among anthropologists engaged with phenomenological work. This can be seen in anthropological explorations of a wide range of human experiences, from religious practices (e.g., Corwin 2012; Csordas 1994b, 2008; Desjarlais 2003, 2016; Stephan 2015; Stoller 1994, 1997; Throop 2015) to the experience of pain, suffering, illness, and disability (e.g., Aciksoz 2019; Engelke 2013; Flaherty; Throop 2018a; McCoy 2018; Scheper-Hughes 1993; Seale-Feldman 2019; Throop 2010), from morality and ethics (e.g., Mattingly 2014; Throop 2010, 2014; Willen 2019; Zigon 2007, 2010, 2019) to socialisation, play, skillful coping, and perception (e.g., Desjarlais 2011; Duranti 2009, 2010; Humphrey 2016; Ingold 2000). What phenomenological anthropologists have tended to foreground in their writings are the ways that bodily experiences are differentially responsive to the experiences of other embodied beings and the worlds that they mutually inhabit.

As a case in point, Csordas has developed the analytic of ‘somatic mode of attention’ as a means to underscore the multiple ‘culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others’ (1993: 138). In the context of his early work with Charismatic Christians, particular sensations of weakness, dizziness, or pain are taken up as embodied evidence of a spirit’s presence. Such somatic modes of attention arise spontaneously from previous culturally and personally sedimented attunements to, with, and through the body to a world in which spirits and humans have complex and varied modes of relationality. In such a view, the body is not a fleshy container within which experience is held but instead is always already in a world, ecstatically pitched toward and entangled in events, situations, objects, and others (including spirits). It is, in other words, the dynamics of intercorporeality and seldom simply individuated (and isolated) forms of corporeality that defines this body of work.

Radical Otherness

Anthropology has always been interested in radical otherness; so too has phenomenology. But unlike anthropologists, who travel far and wide to discover such otherness as a collective otherness most commonly articulated as another culture, many phenomenologists posit that each human is radically singular in their being. For Husserl, this is manifest in his view that the other is always inaccessible to us, and yet directly disclosed to us as forever excessively beyond our grasp (see Throop & Zahavi 2020). The other is ‘Other’, as Emmanuel Levinas (1969) puts it (the inaccessible excessiveness of the Other is indicated here with the capitalisation). You are radically other to me, as I am to you. This is a commonly argued ‘principle’ of phenomenology articulated by any number of phenomenologists as a way to understand the condition of our experiences. Hannah Arendt (1958), for example, described this in terms of the uniqueness of each of us, the consequence of natality; and Bernhard Waldenfels (2011) has described this condition of experience in terms of how alien we are to one another, as well as to ourselves. Radical otherness being one of the conditions of human experience, an important question asked by many phenomenological anthropologists has been: how is it that sociality is possible?

In his phenomenological explorations of ethics, Zigon has, for example, explored what he calls ‘situations’ as the conditions that create the possibilities for sharedness and similarity among otherwise singular beings (Zigon 2015, 2018, 2019), and has articulated the concept of attunement to describe how it is that these singular beings adjust their relationality to that which is radically other (Zigon 2014, 2019, 2021). Furthermore, Zigon (2018) has also shown how this concept of attunement is useful for understanding how, for example, political activists design and rebuild a neighborhood to respond to the singularly unique concern of drug addiction that situationally characterises it. Similarly, Jason Throop has written extensively on existential asymmetries in the dynamics of empathic attunement (Throop 2010a, 2010b, 2017, forthcoming; see also Hollan & Throop 2008; Throop &Zahavi 2020; Mack & Throop forthcoming). Building off of Husserl and Edith Stein’s work on empathy as the essential relationality between humans (Husserl 1989; Stein 1989), Throop has explored the dynamics of empathic attunement in terms of pain, ethics, and climate change. For example, Throop has examined how local manipulative medical and bonesetting practices on Yap, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia, practices which are founded upon tactile modes of empathic access to a sufferer’s experience of pain, also always pathically discloses the asymmetrical excessiveness of the patient’s pain to the healer (Throop 2017). The concept of pathic ‘responsivity’ first developed by Bernhard Waldenfels, furthermore, has recently become central to the work of several anthropologists who are interested in the relationality of difference in the context of, for example, ethics, care, and historical consciousness (Dyring 2018; Grøn 2017; Leistle 2015, 2016; Mattingly 2018; Stewart 2012; Wentzer 2018). A central concern in much of this work is to challenge simplistic views of empathy as a form of shared experience or mutual understanding. Instead, what is foregrounded are the myriad ways in which on-going asymmetrical intersubjective experiences can occur. Focusing upon the phenomenon of ‘contagion' in the context of what has been termed the ‘obesity epidemic’, Lone Grøn (2017) has, for instance, shown how what on the surface may appear to be shared intergenerational experiences of obesity, weight gain, and weight loss in Danish families also disclose significant moments of alienness and difference that are never simply reducible to mutually shared experiences in even the most intimate forms of kinship connection.

The conditions of experience that we have focused upon here—being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness—do not exhaust the ways in which phenomenological anthropology has contributed to the understanding of such conditions. Thus, for example, phenomenological anthropologists have also done important studies on emotion, affect, and mood (e.g., Desjarlais 1992; Dyring 2015; Ram 2015; Throop 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018b; Zigon 2013) temporality, and most particularly, anticipation, hope, and memory (e.g., Hage 2009; Lucht 2011; Mattingly 2012; Tidey 2019; Vigh 2009; Zigon 2009c), intentionality, gesture, language, and narrative (e.g., Duranti 2009, 2010; Goodwin 2017; Mattingly & Garro 2000; Ochs 2012; Throop 2010; Zigon 2012), and more recently, climate change (e.g., Dyring 2020; Throop 2020, Zigon 2018). Accordingly, phenomenological anthropologists have set out to examine the worldly conditions that shape, limit, and open the dynamics of lived experience because of the very fact that we are always being-in-the-world, inextricably intertwined with these conditions.

Critical phenomenology

As we have seen thus far, phenomenology from its very beginning has always been critical, in the sense of reconceiving the foundational concepts of the Western philosophical tradition for thinking human existence. Recently, however, contemporary phenomenology has taken an even more critical turn. Thus, critical phenomenologists have come to recognise that human experience is not only conditioned by those conditions of experience shared by all humans across time and space (e.g., being-in-the-world, relationality, wordliness, responsivity, embodiment, etc), but also by contingent historical and social structures, many of which are quite familiar to anthropologists. For example, Guenther (2014) has explored the ways in which solitary confinement – structured by a history of incarceration that is both classed and racialised – unhinges subjectivity. Prisoners kept in solitary confinement do not just suffer from boredom and isolation, but they also lose the capacity to make sense of the world and of their body, they become incapable of following a train of thought and lose the ability to distinguish between reality and illusion. Similarly, Gayle Salomon (2010) has explored transgender violence, Alia Al-Saji (2014) has considered the affects and effects of racialised perception, and Jill Stauffer (2015) has taken up the very possibility of whether or not victims of violence can be heard by others. This work and others would resonate with the sensibilities of many anthropological readers who seek a critical engagement with the inequalities and violence of our contemporary worlds (e.g., Martinez 2000; Ortega 2016).

To the best of our knowledge, however, it was anthropologists who first articulated the necessity of, and then actually did, a critical phenomenology. Byron Good, for one, first began developing an anthropologically-based critical phenomenology in the late-1980s and early 1990s in his critical studies of biomedicine (Good 1994), in which he deconstructs the universal pretensions of biomedical knowledge and shows that the latter is primarily grounded in the lifeworlds of practioners. Furthermore, Robert Desjarlais argued that ‘we need a critical phenomenology that can help us not only to describe what people feel, think, or experience but also to grasp how the processes of feeling or experiencing come about through multiple, interlocking interactions’ (Desjarlais 1997: 25, emphasis in original). He goes on to argue that this critical phenomenology will allow us ‘to inquire, for instance, into what we mean by feeling, how it comes about, what it implies, and what broader cultural and political forces are involved’ (Desjarlais 1997: 25). Critical phenomenology, in other words, allows us to account for the link—or the intertwining—between the cultural, social, and political, on the one hand, and the embodied, unequal, and sometimes violent and unjust experience of living in worlds partially conditioned by these.

For example, Sarah Willen (2007; 2019) has been engaged in a long-term critical phenomenological project on violence and undocumented workers in Israel. Cheryl Mattingly (2014; 2019) has written on the moral experiments of African-American women in response to the racialised conditions of their children’s health and suffering. And the work of Jarrett Zigon has been focused on the intertwining of ethics and politics with experiences of addiction and the violence of the war on drugs (2010; 2018; 2019). Each of these works has sought to show the ways in which power, and economic, gendered, and racialised inequality not only condition experience, but shape and limit the very possibilities for being human.

Conclusion

Phenomenology and phenomenological anthropology offer a conceptual apparatus and analytic approach that can critically address a number of central concerns of social scientists today. Phenomenology goes beyond empirically describing narrativised subjectivity. Instead, it has been grounded in an analysis of the conditions that make experience itself possible; that is: the essential modes of being that constitute the ways in which we and the world variously attune and gather.

Furthermore, both anthropology and phenomenology share an essential methodological strategy—the holding in abeyance of the researcher’s own situated knowledge, beliefs, norms, and expectations when describing the lives of others. In anthropology this is what we might simply call ‘ethnographic analysis’; in phenomenology this is called ‘bracketing’ or ‘utilizing the epoché’ (Throop 2010, 2012, 2018). Our hope is that a recognition and acknowledgment of the expanse of phenomenological concern will encourage social scientists at large to rethink the significance of phenomenology for their work. They might benefit greatly from it.

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Note on contributors

Jarrett Zigon is the Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His research interests include the anthropology of ethics, problematics of being human, the political, ontological relationality, and thinking anthropology with philosophy. These interests are taken up from a perspective strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, and are explored in his most recent books Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding and A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community.

Jarrett Zigon, Department of Anthropology, Brooks Hall, P.O. Box 400120, Charlottesville, VA 22904, jz8h@virginia.edu

Jason Throop is Professor and Chair at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles where he specializes in the fields of medical, psychological, and phenomenological anthropology. Having written extensively on the topics of ethics, mood, empathy, pain, and suffering, his published works include his book Suffering and Sentiment (2010, UC Press), as well as two co-edited volumes, Toward an Anthropology of the Will (2010, Stanford University Press) and The Anthropology of Empathy (2011, Berghahn Books).

Jason Throop, Department of Anthropology, 388 Haines Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095, jthroop@ucla.edu

Freedom of speech

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:35:47 +0000

Matei Candea Fiona Wright Paolo Heywood Taras Fedirko

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21speech

Abstract:

Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has extensive tools for bringing free speech into view beyond its quality as an abstract ideal or legal category. This entry borrows theoretical perspectives, as well as ethnographic examples produced by anthropologists, to shed light on free speech within a broader comparative frame. It begins by focusing on free speech as a dynamic value or virtue, asking: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? Secondly, the entry casts critical light on the idea of an individual as the universal ‘free speaker’, demonstrating how collective or disaggregated subjects can also practice free speech. Thirdly, it explores the material settings, contexts, or technologies through which free speech is curtailed or realised. Finally, the entry considers the idea of ‘voice’ as signalling modes of embodiment, and auditory phenomena such as noise, sound, and silence, which are not spoken language but can inform and expand our understanding of free speech.

Introduction

Freedom of speech is a core tenet of liberal political philosophy, and a criterion frequently invoked to distinguish liberal democracies from their political others. In recent years, it has become a focus of extensive and embittered debates within the US and Europe. Some fear the rise of a ‘cancel culture’, and accuse proponents of ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and ‘no-platforming’ of challenging freedom of speech. The latter in turn accuse their critics of invoking freedom of speech disingenuously in order to protect established interests. These debates invoke the notion of freedom of speech to apportion blame and responsibility for political injuries, but rarely involve a sustained analysis of the notion of freedom of speech itself. However they might disagree about the rights and wrongs of specific cases, the debating parties tend—with few exceptions—to subscribe to a familiar liberal vision in which freedom of speech, within certain limits, is broadly speaking good for individuals and polities, while silencing, except in certain carefully delimited cases, is broadly speaking bad. Despite appearances, these public debates are therefore still disagreements within, rather than about, a liberal consensus. Legal scholarship and classical political philosophy have given us more formal representations of this liberal space of disagreement over free speech and its limits.

Anthropologists can make a useful intervention by putting these familiar debates about freedom of speech into a broader comparative frame. This allows us to pick out, by contrast, some of the distinctive assumptions embedded in these familiar debates—assumptions about the nature of language, about speaking subjects and the polities they inhabit. These comparative explorations tend to challenge the idea that speech can ever be ‘free’ in any simple sense. Anthropologists have demonstrated extensive determinations—from grammar to sociolinguistics—that are entailed in any speech act; they have pointed to the pervasive and sometimes productive nature of silencing in social life; and they have shown the multiple ways in which authoritative speech is entangled in and produced by controls and limitations of other kinds of expression.

Nonetheless, it remains a persistent fact that many of the people anthropologists work with value, desire, or imagine something like freedom of speech as a particular goal, and mourn, fear, or protest its absence. Anthropologists have the resources to examine the varied ways in which free speech is imagined, valued, and practiced as a lived ideal in necessarily compromised and imperfect conditions.

Semiotic ideologies, religious and secular

The most sustained anthropological explorations of the question of freedom of speech have been in relation to recent debates around religious and secular representation. The case of the ‘Danish cartoon controversy’, in which satirical representations of the prophet Mohammed sparked outrage and violence, has been paradigmatic (Asad et al. 2013; Keane 2009, Favret-Saada 2015). This controversy was a natural entry-point into the subject of freedom of speech for anthropologists because of the wealth of material in the anthropology of religion focusing on comparable disputes about the morality and politics of speaking, silencing others or staying silent oneself, or of representing and stopping others from representing. Such ‘moral questions about semiotic form’ (Keane 2007: 6), arose, for instance, in the struggles of seventeenth century Quakers in England to separate out the word of God from everyday language as a ‘thing of the flesh’ (Baumann 1984). The Quakers’ project included a wholesale repudiation of accepted forms of politeness and honorific titles as insincere words that glorify the earthly person—a practice that exposed them to violence from offended interlocutors. The moral and political stakes of speech were similarly high in missionary encounters in non-Western contexts. For instance, Webb Keane details the struggles between Calvinist missionaries and followers of marapu (Sumbanese ancestral ritual) in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) about how to address spiritual entities. The Calvinists condemned the marapu followers’ uses of traditional ritual formulae as a violation of the ‘proper’ norm of speaking sincerely to God in one’s own words. Conversely marapu followers decried a form of hubris in Calvinist prayer aimed directly from the individual to the godhead without the mediation of ancestral formulae (Keane 2007: 176-96).

Considering liberal debates and concerns over freedom of speech alongside these cases points to the deep cultural assumptions about the nature and effects of language and representation that inform all of these moral struggles over semiotic form. Such assumptions about language and meaning have been described by anthropologists as ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard & Schieffelin 1994), or more broadly ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane 2007). By situating liberal concerns with freedom of speech within a particular (Western, modern, liberal, secular) semiotic ideology, anthropologists have thus opened up alternative angles on recent high-profile debates, such as the Danish cartoons controversy. Keane, for instance, argues that

[t]he classic [liberal] defence of freedom of expression draws, in part, on a semiotic ideology that takes words and pictures to be vehicles for the transmission of opinion or information among otherwise autonomous and unengaged parties and the information they bear to be itself so much inert content more or less independent of the activity of representation (2009: 58).

From this perspective, Muslims offended by cartoons of the Prophet are sometimes dismissed by liberal commentators as committing a category error, and one furthermore that designates them as insufficiently ‘modern’ in their continued attachment to the transcendent power of mere images (Asad et al. 2013: xiii). But as anthropologists such as Talal Asad have been at pains to point out, liberal freedom of speech also has well-defined limits, for instance in respect of patents, copyright, or pornography. These ‘liberal’ limits point to the extent to which liberal freedom of speech is premised on and limited by notions of property and ownership—ownership of one’s texts, ideas, or body (Asad et al. 2013). One might add that hate speech laws show that modern liberals do seem quite concerned with the capacity of words to do harm, at least in some contexts (Butler 1997; Heywood 2019). Or that contemporary laws of libel or insult in places like France or Germany have a genealogy that links them to honour codes, which many sociologists imagined to be extinct in ‘modernity’ (Candea 2019, Whitman 2000). While such comparisons may occasionally sound as if they are trying to score points by showing that liberals are not as liberal as they think, at its best this work provides a more subtle understanding, rather than a mere deconstruction, of aspirations to freedom of speech, liberal or otherwise. The point, as Asad puts it, is that ‘[t]he shape that free speech takes at different times and in different places [reflects] different structures of power and subjectivity’ (2013: 29).^[1]

Virtues: courage, truth, and risk

Another related way that anthropologists can contribute to our understanding of free speech is by examining its status as a value or a virtue. In a range of ethnographic contexts—perhaps most obviously but not exclusively those labelled as ‘liberal’—people understand ‘speaking freely’ to be a virtuous practice, and view the right to be able to do so to be an important value. Anthropology has an extensive conceptual apparatus with which to analyse and compare the ways in which people think about values and virtues in work on ethics (e.g. Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Robbins 2007, 2016; Lambek 2010; Keane 2015). In fact, one of the key conceptual sources for anthropological work on ethics, Michel Foucault, also had quite a lot to say about the genealogy of ‘free speech’ as a virtue.

Foucault’s late work on classical self-cultivation investigates how people work to make themselves into particular kinds of virtuous subjects. Despite its individualist overtones, self-cultivation does not occur in isolation. It is something done in a particular cultural and historical context, and in relation to others. In his final two lecture series at the Collège de France, Foucault sought to clarify this relationship between subject and context by turning to a very specific aspect of self-cultivation in the ancient world (2010; 2011). He believed that then—as now—there was a ‘necessary other person’ involved in work on the self. These are types of people whose role it is to help us decipher and establish the ‘truth’ of our selves (teachers, doctors, psychoanalysts, jurists, policemen). In the classical world, unlike ours, however, Foucault thought that this ‘necessary other’ was not an institutionally defined position. Rather, it was predicated on the possession of a particular virtue, namely parrhêsia, translated in the title of one of the lecture series as ‘the courage of truth’. To be the right sort of person to help others to work upon themselves, one had to possess the ability to speak freely and frankly, regardless of risk or consequence.

The history of this particular virtue in the ancient world is varied. For instance, there is what we might think of as ‘political’ parrhêsia, characteristic of pre-Socratic Athens. This is ‘free speech’ in which what is at stake are questions of the government of others. Later, and exemplified most obviously in Socrates, we find a virtuous ‘free speech’ that is much more concerned with ‘ethics’, and with the government of the self. Socrates eschews the political field to focus instead on the conduct of individuals, and to measure the gap between the way they think they ought to live and the way they actually do. Later still we find these modalities combined in the philosophy of the Cynics, who sought both to live their own lives as bare truth (naked and in the open) and to missionise this life to those around them, to make their lives speak as examples to others (Foucault 2011).

Like any concept, parrhêsia is situated in a particular context. Not all that is true about free speech in the ancient world applies to our own. While Foucault’s own account ends broadly speaking in the classical period, tracing the later history of parrhêsia gives us some insights into the origin of contemporary liberal notions of freedom of speech. Historian David Colclough argues, for instance, that classical parrhêsia served as one of the sources for imagining freedom of speech in seventeenth century England—the period which also gave us some of the classic sources of liberal defences of freedom of speech, such as Milton’s Areopagitica, or the works of John Locke. Somewhat ironically, however, Colclough notes that parrhêsia at that point was primarily a figure of rhetoric. Rhetorical manuals drew on examples from speeches by classical Greek and Roman orators, which consisted of prefacing one’s speech by warning that one’s position was controversial, daring, and likely to offend. For seventeenth century English commentators, ‘parrhêsia’ as a rhetorical figure therefore posed an inherent problem of sincerity. It could be a genuine warning and apology for speech that was necessary, but might offend. Equally, it could be merely a cynical way to flatter an audience by delivering, as if they were surprising or extreme, views which the speaker knew were perfectly conventional and likely to gain broad assent in any case.

Colclough notes that the debates around parrhêsia were only one amongst the cultural sources of seventeenth century English discussions of the value of free speech. Others included stories from the lives of Christian martyrs who had continued to speak the truth of their faith in the face of torture and death, or the legal prerogatives of unrestricted speech that applied (in principle at least) to parliamentary discussions. Colclough’s and Foucault's accounts point to the complex, diverse, and contested genealogy of liberal visions of freedom of speech.

Anthropologists have used Foucault's discussion of parrhêsia to ask comparative questions about the ways in which freedom of speech is understood and valued in various contexts today. Pascal Boyer, for instance, has suggested that some contemporary political movements based on satire, such as Iceland’s iconoclastic ‘Best Party’—a joke political party that eventually achieved electoral success—may resemble aspects of ancient parrhêsia (2013). On the other hand, Harri Englund has pointed to the dangers of assuming that parrhêsia is portable beyond its own specific context (2018). In Finnish talk radio, he argues, what might look like ‘parrhesiastic’ speech on the part of individual callers is in fact a process carefully cultivated by the show’s hosts, an arrangement of multiple voices, rather than any individual ‘speaking truth to power’ (see below for a fuller discussion). As with many concepts, there is probably little to be gained by arguing over exactly how transposable the precise details of classical parrhêsia are or are not. The point is rather that one can ask of any context similar questions to those Foucault was asking about Ancient Greece, or Colclough about early Stuart England: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? To what ends is it directed? What role does it play in relation to the broader system of ethics in which it exists? How is speaking freely supposed to affect one’s relationship to oneself, and to others? These questions already move us in a much more anthropological direction than the classic juridical and political arguments over the extent of free speech rights, or the balance between freedom of speech and other legal protections.

Subjects: whose speech, and whose freedom?

Building on the above discussion, one might look more closely at who or what, in any given setting, counts as the free-speaking subject. If free speech is in some cultural contexts considered to be a virtue, we could ask: whose virtue is it? More generally, the ethnographic record compels us to move beyond a virtue-based understanding of ethics, and reconsider familiar assumptions about the individuality of speaking subjects, and the forms of freedom that characterise them.

Liberal freedom of speech could be understood as involving a specific ‘production format’ of speech (Goffman 1981), in which the speaker is simultaneously the utterer, the author, and the responsible agent of speech. Erving Goffman (1981) proposed the notion of production format to disentangle the complexity of conversation roles in communicative situations, arguing that the figure of the speaker should be differentiated into several analytical roles: the animator, i.e. the ‘sounding box’ physically pronouncing the words; the author, i.e. ‘someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded’; and the principal, ‘that is, someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to what the words say’ (Goffman 1981: 144). Separating the different conversational roles entailed in speaking and hearing, Goffman demonstrates that they might converge in the same social roles, and indeed the same person, as when we think of an autonomous, sincere speaker of liberal language ideologies; or equally, they might be distributed across several persons. One example of the latter might be the Wolof griots in Senegal—low-ranking poets hired to perform ritual insults on behalf of noblemen (e.g. Irvine 1989). Here, the roles of the animator and author converge on the individual speaker, while the principal is thought to be the collective whole to which the speaker belongs.

Building on Goffman’s work, anthropologists (e.g. Hill & Irvine 1992; Merlan & Rumsey 1991) have further explored the relation between complex, dynamic speaking roles, and the autonomy of speakers. For instance, in his ethnography of royal orators, or akeyame, in the Akan-speaking areas of Ghana in the 1980s and ‘90s, Kwesi Yankah describes them as ‘social mediators of speech’ and ‘specialists in the artistic reporting or representation of speech’ (1995: 8) as they act as ‘surrogate speakers’ for their chiefs. Yankah argues that the hierarchical subordination of the ‘surrogate speaker’—the orator—to their chief does not preclude autonomy in speech acts, for without the orator’s voice ‘a royal communicative act is incomplete’ (1995: 8). The duties of the orator ‘range from strict reporting to discretionary interpretation’, which means that relations of subordination that formally characterise surrogate speech might here entail ‘mutual reliance and dependency’ (Yankah 1995: 9). Akeyame are indispensable to royal speech, and, for instance in court judgments, ‘a greater part of akeyame’s contribution during prosecution is not structurally linked to a patron’s; it is independent’ (Yankah 1995: 163). Nevertheless, ‘in spite of its autonomy, the akeyame’s contribution is still made on behalf of the royal realm, to which they make occasional reference’. Yankah’s ethnography prompts us to question the autonomy of action inherent to the different speaking roles, and the way such autonomy is shaped by the social relations among persons performing these roles.

A similar reconfiguration of roles can be seen in the historical Soviet practice of self-criticism (samokritika), a form of speaking truth to power in which the author and addressee of speech are understood to be collective subjects, even when the speech act itself is performed by an individual person (Kharkhordin 1999; also Glaeser 2011). State socialist regimes that curtailed individual freedom of speech through explicit forms of official censorship were one of the key counterpoints against which liberal visions of freedom of speech were articulated throughout the twentieth century (cf. Boyer 2003, see below for a fuller discussion). Yet state socialism was not without its own imaginaries and practical repertories of free speech. Oleg Kharkhordin describes samokritika in Soviet Russia as a key element of socialist ethics and a means to achieving the revolutionary consciousness of the masses in the nascent Soviet state. Samokritika meant ‘an open statement by the working masses of their opinions on the weaknesses in Soviet … administrative apparatus and life’ (Viktorsky 1929: 266). Crucially, in samokritika within particular Communist Party cells or workers collectives, contemporary commentators saw not acts of individual confession or complaint but ‘the working class that upholds the proletarian dictatorship … criticiz[ing] and correct[ing] its own mistakes and failures by itself’ (Ingulov 1930: 97, in Kharkhordin 1999: 146). In theory, this notion of collective critical speech reflected the understanding of the Soviet state as an expression of class will; the ‘self’ of self-criticism referred to the working class as the sovereign of the ‘proletarian dictatorship’. In practice, however, bringing this collective subject into being through particular acts of speaking was no small feat.

In the Communist Party discourse in the 1920s and early 30s, self-criticism ‘normally meant collective criticism by Party members of the weaknesses of the Party’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 146). Thus in the 1920s, ‘The Party continuously solicited self-criticism, which in practice meant urging rank-and-file members to criticize top leaders, in order to make the body of the Party homogenous’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 149). Party theorists who promoted samokritika as a form of accountability were aware that the imperative of collective speech gave rank-and-file workers an opportunity for political manoeuvring. When in 1928, self-criticism from below led to a wave of denunciations that evidently sought to settle personal scores, Party commentators had to remind Soviet workers to criticise collective, not individual, weaknesses.^[2] At a central Communist Party committee meeting in August 1928, for example, one high-ranking speaker proposed ‘a particular psychological technique’: ‘A worker was advised to imagine, before saying something critical of a manager, that the body he was kicking was not somebody else’s but his own, since in the Party view he was assaulting a corporate body of which he was a part’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 153).

Such critical truth-telling must be understood against the background of early Soviet techniques of the self and operations of power that aimed at creating socialist unity by orchestrating forms of action and speech that transcended individual subjects. Many Bolshevik revolutionaries wanted ‘to organize their experience and energy around an ideology that would help them lose their sense of self and acquire the sense of the collective’ (Williams 1980: 393). By submitting the self to the collective, revolutionaries aimed to achieve immortality through the lasting social effects of personal sacrifice. The notion of kollektiv—a collective of people united and transformed by the common experience of working on a particular task—is key to understanding samokritika. A kollektiv, typically a workplace collective, was imagined to act and think as one, and to exert group sovereignty that subsumed individual action under the imperative of a common goal. Regular, often ritualised acts of self-criticism revealed and analysed perceived flaws in the organisation of work, relations among workmates, or even between workers and their families, as seen in the light of communist ideals. But these acts of samokritika also objectified kollektiv before itself, helped it correct itself on its path to communism, and promoted its unity by strengthening horizontal surveillance of their members over one another. Unlike critical introspection or individual confession in Western Christianity, which Foucault sees as one of the historical forces underpinning modern individuation, samokritika was expected to be performed by workers and party members before—and on behalf of—their kollektiv. One was free to speak up as long as critique was directed at the self as part of the corporate whole of kollektiv, and in so far as it promoted the ‘fusion’ (spaika) of kollektiv into one. The subject and the object of samokritika was emphatically a ‘we’: a nested corporate subject, where a kollektiv of workers stood for and became aligned with both the proletarian class they represented, and the Communist Party leading that class. In the Party’s opinion at the time, ‘[T]hrough a certain person speaking up, the whole Party criticised itself’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 146).

These comparative cases remind us that the liberal framing of free speech as performed by individual persons is only one of many cultural possibilities. Yet comparisons of this kind shouldn’t lead us to assume that liberal visions of free speech are, by contrast, simply or uniformly individualist. Consider for instance the ‘speech’ of capitalist corporations. ‘Pronounced’ by corporate spokespeople, authored by PR and press offices, and attributed to the fictive legal person of the corporation, corporate speech rarely raises the question of freedom. Yet, in a recent landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission, which enshrined the status of corporations as legal persons enjoying the same rights as human persons, the US Supreme Court granted First Amendment protections to corporations’ and unions’ direct spending on political election campaigns. The court had designated election spending as a form of protected free speech. Susan Gal and Judith Irvine explain that the consequences of speech mattered in this instance, rather than the identity of the speakers: ‘making speech available as a source of information for the public’ so as to ensure the political ideal of a well-informed citizenry (2019: 9). The Court’s majority opinion that ‘prohibition on corporate … expenditures is a ban on speech’ rested on an equation of money, a resource necessary for corporate persons to orchestrate political speech, to speech itself (Gal & Irvine 2019: 9). The opposition to the ruling predominantly focused on dismantling this analogy, and demonstrating the false equality between natural (human) and fictitious (corporate) persons. In sum, the Citizens United decision revealed competing understandings of speech in the contemporary United States: on the one hand, a view that ‘takes speech to be a material thing, equivalent to money, and independent of speakers’, and on the other, one that ‘takes speech to be different from material objects, and freedom of speech to be embodied only in natural persons’ (Gal & Irvine 2019: 10).

These and other ethnographies help us understand that the model of a self-owning, rights-bearing individual subject of free speech is only one of multiple possible ways in which human societies have thought about and organised the relation between speech and freedom.

Platforms: censorship, materiality, and mediation

The question of who is the subject of free speech leads, in turn, to a focus on the material devices, spaces, and media they engage in their communicative practices. The question of who gets to speak doesn’t exhaust debates over freedom of speech—just as important is the question of who gets to be heard, and how. This issue has gained particular visibility in contemporary debates in the US and UK over ‘no-platforming’ on university campuses and beyond. No-platforming includes practices of boycotting or uninviting a speaker, blocking their access to a forum or debate, be it online or offline, because particular views they hold are deemed offensive or harmful. A ‘platform’ in this sense refers to a literal or metaphorical stage from which to address an audience. Critics of no-platforming cast it as a new form of censorship, part of a broader ‘cancel culture’ emanating from a progressive left which is increasingly unwilling to allow views it disagrees with to be publicly expressed. Proponents of no-platforming by contrast argue that they are not censoring anyone, but simply refusing to ‘amplify’ the voices of speakers deemed not only offensive or dangerous but also—crucially—privileged in their access to other high-profile platforms for being heard. Simultaneously, some proponents argue that the public media debates occasioned by no-platforming such high-profile speakers are themselves an occasion to give more ‘platform’ to marginalised voices. From this perspective, no-platforming can be cast as a form of epistemic justice, a righting of the scales in a world in which access to platforms for expression is unequal to begin with.

Whatever one makes of these arguments, these cases usefully focus attention on the important distinction between the formal right to speak and the substantive means for being heard by others. Both sides in arguments about no-platforming appeal in various ways to a difference between what one might call, following Isaiah Berlin (1969), a ‘negative’ freedom of speech (the freedom from, for instance, legal impediments to speech) and a ‘positive’ freedom of speech (freedom to speak, which includes the means of accessing a platform from which to do so).

It is precisely because such a distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ is so difficult to make in practice that debates and concerns over freedom of speech are so often also arguments over material settings, devices, and media, in the broadest sense: objects, spaces, and techniques that mediate communication. Thus, while freedom of speech is often imagined as a single abstract principle relating to intangible contents and messages (political opinions, artistic expression, scientific knowledge), the history of changing understandings of freedom of speech is inseparable from the rise and transformation of a host of technologies of mediation: mass-circulation newspapers (Keane 2009), radio stations (Englund 2018), the cinema industry (Mazzarella 2013), television, or the internet (Coleman 2009, Gershon 2014). These material devices, spaces, and media may seem like mere background when talk is of principles. And yet they profoundly shape what ‘freedom of speech’ can concretely mean in any given situation, in ways that are historically and culturally variable. Matters of principle take multiple forms through very concrete questions of access and presence: who can speak where and who can hear them? How long can people speak for and must they take turns? What kinds of expression, beyond the spoken or written word, can be made available and under what modalities? What does it cost? How far does it reach?

Thus, on the one hand, new media have frequently been linked with new possibilities for freed and challenging expression—the heavily internet-mediated uprisings in Arabic-speaking countries in 2011 being a classic case in point. On the other hand, the mediation of expression is often the most obvious means through which it can be impeded, filtered, and censored—from the explicit work of film censorship boards, for instance, to the subtle pre-publication pressures of in-house legal advisors in publishing houses (cf. Candea 2019). Mediation in this sense is not merely a matter of technology but of the particular social relations, forms of intervention, and expertise that different technologies enable and require. For instance, in his above-mentioned work on a vox populi phone-in radio show in Finland, Englund (2018) notes how radio hosts in practice manage conversations with callers whose anti-immigration views they find unpalatable. Rather than cut them off, or even directly challenge them, the hosts steer the conversation in subtle ways in order to ‘strive for harmony’, while making space for their callers’ ‘need to be heard’ (Englund 2018: 108). It is interesting to put this example alongside Dominic Boyer’s archival exploration of the practices of state censors in East Germany (2002). Boyer shows that the classic vision of censors as mere administrative agents of deletion—erasing offending passages or cancelling entire texts—underplays censors’ view of themselves as involved in an intellectual, even productive, enterprise akin to the work of editing. Censors intervened not merely in ideological matters, but also concerned themselves with questions of style and quality; they often worked in a back-and-forth (albeit unequal) dialogue with the authors of the work. Boyer argues provocatively that state censorship was thus not always that different from the practices of editorial intervention, review, and selection practiced by academic journals. Whatever one makes of the latter comparison (see Candea 2019) these two cases are useful to think of side by side because they highlight the extent to which concerns with freedom of expression in any particular case are inseparable from the particularity of the medium through which that expression occurs. Live airtime and peer-review, for instance, both bear on the shaping, allowing, and curtailing of expression, but they do so in profoundly different ways.

While material mediation poses the question of access, it is therefore not sufficient to think of freedom of expression merely as a singular good of which one can have more or less. Changes in media also involve changes in the nature of what is expressed. In his ethnography of film censorship in colonial and postcolonial India, William Mazzarella (2013) explores the distinctive affective power of cinema as a form of mass mediation. The moving image, in its sociocultural setting of production and reception, does things to people in embodied ways, things that cannot be reduced to or deduced from an analysis of its contents, meanings, or the ideas it ‘encodes’. This in part explains the permanence and broad acceptability of film censorship even in settings in which other forms of censorship—such as official censorship of the press—have been abandoned. But more broadly, as Mazzarella notes, a history of censorship shows the extent to which the attention of censors—and, one might add, the experimentation of producers of 'content'—recurrently focuses on new media and their new ways of generating affects, just as it moves away from media which have grown familiar and old: newspapers, the radio, film, television, the internet. Anthropologists studying censorship in practice have thus contributed to the chorus of challenges brought by social theorists (Bourdieu 1991; Fish 1994; Butler 1997; cf. Bunn 2005 for an overview) against arguments for freedom of expression in which expression is set apart as a special form of conduct which is essentially about conveying contents. Attending to the materiality of media reminds us not only of the material constraints on expression, but also of its material effects.

But the materiality of media also reveals how imaginaries of freedom of expression are transformed together with the appearance of new forms and visions of the public. Thus Ilana Gershon (2014) argues that the rise of social media has contributed to the emergence of a new conception of the public, in terms of access, reachability, and responsiveness. By contrast to the classic liberal visions of a public defined as a collection of anonymous strangers (Warner 2005), publics defined by accessibility—epitomised on platforms like Facebook—are experienced by their participants as collectives structured by links extending from close friends to distant acquaintances. In these kinds of publics named relations entail accountability, a responsible and graduated use of the information that is exchanged.

Gershon analyses the tensions between this ‘new’ vision of the public as a network of knowable persons enmeshed in relations with one another and the older vision of the public as a collective of strangers, from the perspective of young social media users whose comfort zone is broadly situated in the former. These younger informants, Gershon argues, ‘often believe that members of a public will experience certain obligations in managing information, and as a result will act responsibly. At the same time, they imagine that they can anticipate who might read their material’ (Gershon 2014:80). Yet these new online publics are also the home of internet ‘trolls’—anonymous users who post inflammatory comments or target and harry other users with pranks and attacks which seem designed to puncture this feeling of online safety. Gershon follows Gabriella Coleman (2011) in characterising trolls as self-appointed crusaders for a return to an older vision of the public as a collective of strangers who do not take things personally. It is thus unsurprising, perhaps, that Gershon’s informants feel that the public sphere beyond their own familiar and accountable networks is a space of risk, and ‘anonymity a cover for antagonism’ (Gershon 2014: 84).

In sum, Gershon’s argument shows how these new online public/private borderlands are the scene of struggles and accommodations between radically different ethics and politics of communication. These contested spaces increasingly overspill the porous boundaries between online and offline communication. Shifting struggles are illustrated in the rise of a bevy of neologisms—‘echo chambers’, ‘safe spaces’, ‘snowflakes’, ‘haters’, ‘trigger warnings’—which purport to diagnose communicational pathologies or, on the contrary, hoped-for solutions to the risks of expression through shifting and ambiguous media. Returning to the opening problematic of this section, one might say that attending to the materiality of media suggests that being heard is not simply a right, but can also be a vector of risk.

Voice: embodiment, affect and sound

Apart from being shaped by the materiality of their settings, practices of free speech are also constituted by what they look, feel, and sound like. Anthropologists have studied linguistic and vocal practices that do not involve the kinds of reasoned, articulate forms of speech ideally associated with democratic participation, but rather emphasise the embodied and affective nature of communication. Theories of free speech and political engagement have typically been premised on the idea of citizens having a ‘voice’ within the polis, with that voice understood as a transparent representation of the conscious, self-interested, individual self (Kunreuther 2014, 2018; Weidman 2014).^[3] In recent explorations of how voice manifests as part of the production and transformation of publics and political movements in various cultural contexts, though, where voice is often still used as a metaphor for political participation, actual practices of voicing involve bodies, sounds, and collectives of people in ways that do not map neatly on to traditional liberal notions of political and free speech. The notion of voice has been helpful as a way to consider political speech, as it can shift our attention away from the linguistic and semiotic content of the speech at hand, and focus instead on the actual sounds being produced and circulated, which in turn brings to light the various bodies and materialities at play in the making of free speech.

In her study of the sounds of protest events in Kathmandu, Laura Kunreuther (2018) shows how artists’ and demonstrators’ use of various kinds of noise—produced by cars moving through the city, protestors banging on pots and pans, and the radio broadcast of recordings of human crying—transform what is generally thought of as unruly, unproductive sound into political engagement. Kunreuther describes a 107-day demonstration in front of the Prime Minister’s residence protesting violence against women, in which everyday noises were repurposed to indicate popular support for the movement and a challenge to civic life as usual that, yet, was expressed through its very own auditory forms. The use of domestic items such as pots, pans, and plates, for example, served to bring the home and domestic sphere into the public and political realm, and in particular evoked the status of women as those who generally perform household labour and whose experiences of being subject to violence often remain hidden. Beyond these immediate resonances, the noise of the banging acted to reveal popular anger and discontent, as Kunreuther suggests, ‘signifying through noise a breakdown in communication between ruler and ruled’ (2018: 23). In this way, noise becomes a form of political 'speech' and a way in which protestors can shape the forms of their expression without necessarily having to use words at all.

Similarly, Kunreuther shows how sounds produced by humans, but that are not made up of words, can speak volumes as part of the non-linguistic, affective realm of politics. In a performance piece by a Nepali artist, staged during the Maoist insurgency and in the context of regular state violence against protesters, recordings of mothers and babies crying were compiled and broadcast both at the site of the street performance and on all national FM stations (2018: 14-15). The sound of the wailing was effective in calling forth a national, secular public given the anonymity of the voices heard, who, although clearly women and children, were not identifiable through accent, social class or caste, ethnicity or religion. Combined with the imagery evoked of the women, heard as mothers of the nation, and of a genre of sound mostly heard in funerary and wedding rituals, the broadcast had the effect of sidestepping the government/Maoist divide, with both sides claiming the piece was condemning the other. There was a sense, then, that a purer, more human voice was made possible through the use of the immediacy of the cry, devoid of language but able to express meanings otherwise hampered in the context of civil conflict. This interpretation stands in contrast to those theorists of liberalism who have framed the bodily and collective energy of the crowd as a threat to the measured, reasonable publics of deliberative democracy (see Cody 2011, 2015; Mazzarella 2015), and draws instead on theories of popular assembly that reframe how the gathering of publics and collectivities can be a central and transformative part of democratic and other political processes (Butler 2015, Butler & Athanasiou 2013).

Finally, even silence can be thought of as a form of free speech. The absence of words, sound, or noise is a tool that protesters in diverse contexts have employed to communicate opposition to government practices of censorship, war, and oppression. As an easily translatable technology of protest, silence symbolises popular dispossession or a government’s lack of listening to what is being said out loud in the public sphere. Through the intensity of the silence of a large crowd gathered in a normally noisy public space, it has a solemn emotional character while also emphasising popular cohesion in support of a political position. As Kunreuther (2018) explains, in its use both by the performance artist who employed silence in parallel with the broadcast crying described above, and by journalists and media personnel at other moments in Nepali history to highlight government censorship, silence recalls the modern liberal subject. It implies silent concentration and rational, reflective engagement with the political, but does so without concealing the bodily and collective instantiation of these democratic subjects, given the centrality of embodied presence to the protest. As Athena Athanasiou also observes about the use of silent vigils by activists in post-conflict Serbia, silence can be a powerful, subversive force precisely because it can express forms of mourning and of protesting injustice that, when people attempt to voice them through language, become tied up in the limits and politically exclusionary nature of speech and representation (Athanasiou 2005, 2017).

Free speech, therefore, may take the form of non-linguistic noise and sound, bodily presence, and symbolic resonance, as much as it can involve verbal forms of expression. By focusing ethnographically on the material, embodied, and affective forms through which political voice actually takes shape, we see that free speech is in practice a much wider and more diverse phenomenon than its abstraction as a category of liberal thought implies.

Conclusion

While anthropologists have not as yet written much on the subject of freedom of speech, this entry points to anthropological studies of language, voice, ethics, subjectivity, and media that can help to complement, critique, and contextualise political, scientific, legal, and philosophical accounts of the subject. One upshot of these studies is to put canonical liberal visions of freedom of speech in comparative and historical perspective, as one amongst a range of ways of imagining the proper relationship between subjects, speech, and freedom. Another effect of these studies is to highlight the ways in which visions of free speech—whatever cultural form they espouse—take shape within and against specific material and embodied possibilities and constraints. In these ways, anthropology can enrich our understandings of free speech as a multiple, contested, and frequently unattainable horizon of desire and action.

Note

The writing of this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 683033).

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Note on contributors

Matei Candea is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2013-2016). He is the author of Corsican fragments: difference, knowledge and fieldwork (2010, Indiana), and editor of The social after Gabriel Tarde (2010, Routledge) and Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (2015, Manchester University Press) with Jo Cook, Catherine Trundle and Tom Yarrow. He has published a number of articles on politics, identity, hospitality, human-animal relations, behavioural science, and anthropological comparison.

Matei Candea, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, mc288@cam.ac.uk

Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After difference: queer activism in anthropological theory (2018, Berghahn).

Paolo Heywood, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Dawson Building, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, paolo.heywood@durham.ac.uk

Fiona Wright is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She works on care, activism, dissent, and ethics, and how they are linked to sovereignty and violence. She is the author of The Israeli radical left: an ethics of complicity (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press).

Fiona Wright, Advanced Care Research Centre, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, 9 Little France Road, Edinburgh BioQuarter, Edinburgh, EH16 4UX, fcw28@cam.ac.uk

Taras Fedirko is a British Academy Research Fellow in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He is the editor of Grammars of liberalism, a special collection in Social Anthropology with Farhan Samanani and Hugh Williamson. His research focuses on middle-class professionals involved in promoting political liberalism at the core (Britain) and semi-periphery (Ukraine) of global capitalism.

Taras Fedirko, Department of Social Anthropology, 71 North St, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, tf68@st-andrews.ac.uk

[1] It is also worth noting that stark contrasts between ‘Western/liberal’ and ‘Muslim’ language ideologies or perspectives on the Danish cartoon controversy overwrite the diversity of understandings within each of these ensembles, which are hardly mutually exclusive—as these anthropologists themselves acknowledge (Keane 2009: 57; Asad et al. 2013: viii). For a different anthropological reading of the case, which puts the emphasis on how specific actors worked to produce a global sense of a singular ‘Muslim reaction to the cartoons’, see Favret-Saada (2015).

[2] An instrument of socialist reflexivity and resistance, the notion of samokritika became a tool of punitive power towards the end of the 1930s, when it shaped the stakes and form of (forced) confessions of defendants during the infamous Stalinist show trials.

[3] This and other anthropological work on voice is explored by Marlene Schäfers (this volume).

Cannibalism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 02:06:17 +0000

Shirley Lindenbaum

Graduate Center, City University of New York

Initially published 5 Jun 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21cannibalism

Abstract:

Cannibalism, the eating of one’s own kind, is a practice that occurs in both humans and non-humans. Some people consumed their own kin to ensure that their spirits joined those of their ancestors; others ate their enemies in anger in the context of warfare, in some cases to acquire the powers of those they had defeated; and others ate sorcerers who they thought brought them disease and death. Archaeologists provided evidence of prehistoric cannibalism among different peoples as well as among many of our ancestors. In the twentieth century, anthropologists published well-documented accounts of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa. Resisting the image of primitive people as cannibals, anthropologists often wrote about cannibalism as a metaphor, in the form of human alligators, zombies, and witches. In the 1970s cannibalism was at the centre of three widely-publicised debates. The first two featured a small number of distinguished scholars who held different views about who had the right to speak about and to evaluate conflicting claims about other people’s pasts. The third was provoked by one anthropologist’s argument that, except in the case of cannibalism in the context of survival, the cannibals described by anthropologists were mythical creatures. This gave rise to a passionate response by anthropologists who viewed the critique as an attack on their discipline in general, and on their research methods. Contemporary descriptions of cannibalism, seeming to echo the archaeological accounts, now argue that in one form or another, we are all cannibals.

Introduction

The term 'cannibal', defined as eating one’s own kind, is a legacy of Columbus’ encounter in 1492 with the Caribs of the Antilles, said to have been consumers of human flesh. Studies documenting the practice of cannibalism among non-humans, identified in more than 1,500 species (Polis 1981: 225), have led to the distinction between human and non-human cannibalism. The term anthropophagy, from the Greek anthropophagia (‘the eating of men’), is retained to refer to the eating of humans by other humans. Cannibalism is used to describe both the human and non-human practice.

Cannibalism represents the ultimate forbidden behaviour for many Western societies, something to relegate to other cultures, other times, and other places. New archaeological research has provided evidence that long before the invention of metals, before Egypt’s pyramids were built, before the origins of agriculture, and before the explosion of Paleolithic cave art, cannibalism could already be found among many different people, as well as among many of our ancestors (White 2001: 88).

As this entry illustrates, the cannibal was also an object of fascination in the ancient literature recorded by historians, theologians, and philosophers, and then in the accounts of explorers, merchants, and ambassadors during Europe’s Age of Exploration. Distant people were often portrayed as cannibals: that is, as strange, animal-like creatures. In the twentieth century, anthropologists depicted cannibalism as another example of the many ways of being human, answering the question of what the practice meant for those who consumed the dead. Some people ate the bodies of enemies killed during warfare, and some killed and ate sorcerers who they believed had brought them death and misfortune. Others consumed the bodies of deceased relatives in mortuary ceremonies, expressing love and grief for those they had lost, a sentiment that unites us as human beings. The diversity of cannibalism as practice, and of the contexts in which it occurred, is evident in the three regions in the world where the practice has received the most attention, namely Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa. In the 1970s, cannibalism was at the centre of three anthropological debates, which raised methodological issues about how we know ‘others’. A new approach to cannibalism (Nyamnjoh 2018) extended the meaning of the term from ingesting others to considering others as food for the body, the mind, and the soul. This broader notion of cannibalism conveys a more ethically sensitive understanding of the nature of human relationships. The entry ends with a reflection on the future of the cannibal in anthropology.

Historical reports of cannibalism

Early reports of cannibals can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman times, where they were often part of stories about mythical creatures in unexplored reaches of the world. They include fabulous and bizarre tribes of men, such as the man-eating Cynocephali, dog-headed people held to be living in Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Homer, the presumed author of the epic poem The Odyssey, composed between 800 and 750 BC, depicts a tribe of giant cannibals living on an island native to the Laestrygonians, who pelt Odysseus’s ships with boulders, sinking all ships but his own. In Histories, a book published between 426 and 415 BC, Herodotus wrote about cannibal nations that inhabited the margins of the world. Pliny the Elder’s Natural history, drew on Herodotus’ broad mix of myths, legends, and facts to recount rumours of strange peoples on the edges of the world. This inspired medieval bestiaries and the illustrations of old maps (Sandys 1911). The European catalogues of other peoples and marvellous creatures, Liber monstrorum and Tractatus monstrorum, thought to have been written in the eighth century, stressed the threatening nature of their material. One list of creatures that provoked the greatest terror included harpies, crocodiles, boa constrictors, enormous ants, and cannibals. From the 1240s through the late fourteenth century, Europeans set out for Asia in increasing numbers as missionaries, ambassadors, explorers, and entrepreneurs, recording their experiences for a growing audience at home. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who made two extended Asian voyages in the second half of the thirteenth century, described cannibals as cruel beings who liked to eat strangers raw and highly spiced (Daston & Park 1998: 24-6).

The discovery by Columbus of cannibals in the Americas did not just lead European observers to recycle ancient theories around cannibalism. It also raised questions on the appropriate nature of funerary rights and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, for example. When one man ate another, in what body would the eaten person be resurrected? Would the owner’s flesh be restored to him, or would it remain part of the cannibal? These questions also arose in the case of shipwrecks when fish ate the body of a drowned man and the fish were then eaten by other humans. The rise of modern science and discourses, notably those of physics and chemistry as the scientific study of substance and particles, led to the disappearance of many of the theories and styles of philosophical language that cannibalism inspired. As a result, a world of arguments, values, and sensibilities has been lost (Avramescu 2009).

The literal ingestion of human flesh, not surprisingly, had also evoked the Eucharist, its sublimated variant, and the ritual commemoration of the Last Supper. Debate over the Eucharist, fraught with cannibal associations since the earliest days of the Christian Church, became a major point of polemic contest in Reformation Europe (Rawson 1997: 4). Following his encounter in Rouen with the Tupinamba people of South America, who said that they ate the bodies of their dead as a matter of honour, Michel de Montaigne denounced the cruelty displayed by Christians during the religious wars in France:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our fellow-citizens and neighbours – and, what is worse, in the name of duty and religion) than in roasting him and eating him after death (1991: 235-6).

Montaigne’s essay On cannibals, first published in 1580, is viewed now as an early statement of cultural relativism, which calls attention to the importance of local context in understanding the meaning of particular beliefs and activities, without thereby asserting that all value systems are equally valid.

Papua New Guinea

Francis Edgar Williams, a government anthropologist in Papua from 1922 to 1943, was among the first to publish ethnographic material about cannibalism in New Guinea (Williams 1930), a Trust Territory at the time administered by Australia. Williams suggested that his accounts of the practice provided a long and perhaps ill-assorted menu from which the anthropological diner was invited to take what tempted him (1936: x). He reported that the Orokaiva had once been a high-spirited and warlike people, who frequently raided, killed, and ate one another. Their reason for cannibalism was said to be the simple desire for good food (Williams 1930: 170-1). War-parties by the Keraki included raiding their neighbours, clubbing, and beheading them. Back home, a period of rejoicing and feasting followed, which Williams describes as ‘not cannibalism’, except for morsels, such as eyeballs or snippets from the cheek. After this, they resumed ordinary life until they were raided in turn and lost some of their own heads. A brief outbreak of head-hunting in the Moorhead district in 1928 was judged to be the last (Williams 1936: 26).

In the early 1930s, nearly one million previously-unknown people were discovered living in the New Guinea Highlands. Following a hiatus during WWII, as the number of anthropologists increased, New Guinea provided an opportunity to undertake research in the unexplored regions of the world. Well-documented cases of cannibalism were described for a number of populations in the Eastern Highlands. Charles Julius, another government anthropologist, sent his survey of the beliefs and practices of the South Fore peoples, living in today’s Eastern Highlands Province to the Department of Public Health, and observed that in most areas women and uninitiated men had both the right and duty to eat dead relatives (Julius 1981 [1957]). Based on data collected in 1951 and 1952, Ronald Berndt’s ethnography Excess and constraint: social control among a New Guinea mountain people (1962) provided information about the intra- and inter-district manifestations of cannibalism. It showed that the North Fore ate their own dead (endocannibalism) as well as the bodies of enemies killed in warfare (exocannibalism). Berndt offered his work as a contribution to the sociology of conflict, but he also said that ‘Dead human flesh, to these people, is food, or potential food’, and ‘the diet of the region is apparently deficient in protein’ (1962: 270-1). In 1961, Robert and Shirley Glasse (later Lindenbaum) arrived in the South Fore region with a charge to provide cultural information which might support the hypothesis that genetics could explain the epidemic of kuru, the neurological disease afflicting the Fore people (Bennet et al. 1959). Their data did not support this premise, and they proposed instead that the epidemic was related to the consumption of deceased relatives by women and children of both sexes. Robert published an account of the hypothesis in 1967. In 1976, Carleton Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for confirming that kuru was infectious. Gajdusek did not doubt that the Fore were cannibals, but he initially dismissed the hypothesis that cannibalism was the mode of transmission. Instead, he proposed a variety of non-oral routes of transmission (Sorenson & Gajdusek 1969; Gajdusek 1970; Gajdusek 1971).

A new chapter in the history of kuru and cannibalism began in 1996 when an interdisciplinary team of investigators composed of neurologists and an anthropologist, later known as the MRC Prion Unit, began to study the disease. Their studies were informed by Gajdusek’s research, and by Stanley Pruziner’s discovery of prions, the infectious agent responsible for fatal neurodegenerative disorders in humans and animals, for which he had received the Nobel Prize in 1997. Jerome Whitfield, the anthropologist who was located in the South Fore, working with a group of Fore research assistants sent bloods collected from women as well as cultural information about mortuary practices to the rest of the group (Whitfield et al. 2008; Whitfield 2015). The MRC Prion Unit published three important findings. In the first, elderly women known to have consumed deceased kin, but who had not developed kuru, were shown to have a distinct type of prion protein gene, protecting them from the disease (Mead et al. 2003). A second study, using a larger sample, identified the epicentre of the epidemic in the South Fore Purosa Valley (Mead et al. 2009), and a third showed that a naturally occurring variant of the human prion gene completely prevents prion disease (Asante et al. 2015). Asante noted that the collapse of the Fore population had been prevented by the cessation of cannibalism in the late 1950s, which had interrupted the route of transmission and led to a gradual decline in incidence. However, if transmission had continued at the epicentre of the affected region, the area might have been repopulated with kuru-resistant individuals.^[1]

Some studies in the region explored the links between cannibalism and peoples’ beliefs and cosmologies. Drawing on Freud, Gillian Gillison’s ethnography Between culture and fantasy (1993) revealed the complex ideas held by the Gimi of Papua New Guinea about sexuality and conception and the rights of cannibalism performed in Oedipal dramas. The Gimi, like their neighbours, the South Fore, only practiced endocannibalism, as part of mourning rituals governed by convention and filled with emotion. A more recent ethnography of the Ankave people living in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Gulf Province described invisible cannibal creatures called ombo’, held responsible for bringing fatal illness to humans with the goal of feasting on human flesh of Ankave corpses (Lemonnier 2005). The ombo’ represent the transformed spirit of a long-deceased person that members of the Ankave hold within themselves and that they can direct towards a victim. Pierre Lemonnier suggests that comparing the ombo’ with the image of cannibal characters by other groups reveals the ways in which the human mind imagines death, evil, and misfortune.

A number of anthropologists wrote about cannibalism in the context of warfare. In his ethnography The making of great men, Maurice Godelier (1986) described Baruya great leaders meeting in single combat. When one felled an enemy, he carried the body back home where he severed the right ‘fighting’ hand and daubed his body with the victim’s blood. He sometimes cut off the arms and legs, which he cooked and ate to appropriate the powers of the vanquished enemy. Elsewhere on the island of New Guinea, Gerard Zegwaard (1959) described cannibalism in the context of warfare among the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea. K.F. Koch (1970) said it was a component of cannibalistic revenge among the Jale in the province of Irian Jaya. And among the Baktaman, a group of 183 people occupying a tract of mountain rain forest in West Sepik Province, cannibalism was said to be an escalation of warfare, done in anger and a lust for revenge (Barth 1975).

Cannibalism could also be a form of punishment for people considered to be malefactors. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, a number of linguistically and culturally related peoples in the Strickland-Bosavi region in inland South Papua gained a degree of notoriety for their reputed anthropophagic practices. Almost all deaths among the Kaluli (Schieffelin 1976), the Etoro (Kelly 1993), the Samo (Shaw 1990), the Gebusi (Knauft 1985), and the Onabasulu (Ernst 1999), were attributed to witches and sometimes sorcerers, who were executed and often consumed (Ernst 1999: 144-7).

The Korowai people of southern West Papua were said to be preoccupied by the threat to their lives posed by a category of ‘witches’, pathologically deviant men who lived amidst the human population and caused death by eating people’s bodies. Outraged mourners could seize the accused men and transfer them to people living several miles away, who shot, butchered, and consumed the witches. At some future time, the consumers might send a witch in return, a balancing of negative transactions that ameliorated the outrage felt in the initial exchange. An execution also often led to the transfer of a woman to the witch’s relatives in anticipation of her bearing children as a form of regenerative long-distance social interaction. Cannibalistic belief thereby contributed to the Korowai’s previously high homicide rates (Stasch 2001).

Among the Daribi who occupy the volcanic plateaus south of Simbu province, only adults and aged persons were eaten and were permitted to eat the dead. Members of nuclear families did not normally eat one another. Daribi clan membership was based on sharing wealth, symbolised by sharing or giving meat. Consuming the flesh of clan members was seen as akin to sharing ‘vital wealth’. Members of a clan were held to ‘eat meat together’, while those of other clans ‘give meat’ or ‘are given meat’. Meat also served as currency, in that a man could marry the sister or daughter of someone with whom he shares meat, for example. In this and many other instances, the study of cannibalistic beliefs and practices shows that Indigenous social structures included symbolic systems that are usually relegated to the areas of religion or myth (Wagner 1967).

Cannibalism disappeared rapidly in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s following contact with missionaries and colonial officers who tended to abhor the practice. However, many of the cosmological perspectives in terms of which cannibalism made sense locally have persisted in mortuary rituals, which are now the largest and most expensive ceremonial events in the Pacific.

South America

Hans Staden’s The true history of his captivity (2008 [1557]) is considered to be a foundational text in the history of the European discovery of Brazil, and a work of ethnographic significance. While serving as a gunner in a Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast in 1550, Staden was captured by Tupi Indians. He took notes on their skill in shooting wild animals and catching fish, the nature of their government by chiefs, and many other aspects of daily life. He also witnessed cannibalism, and recorded occasions when he feared he was about to be killed and eaten. This was the earliest European account of the ritual execution and consumption of war captives among Tupi people who would become a quintessential case of cannibalism in native South America. In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries sent reports and letters to headquarters about the customs and practices of cannibalism among the Tupian-speaking Indians. Their accounts proved to be valuable, because these coastal groups had disappeared as a result of disease, warfare, enslavement, and assimilation by the time serious anthropological research began (Forsyth 1983). The relationships of the Tupi with enemy groups were not always negative. When the work of explorer Jean de Lery (1536-1613), was examined closely, it was apparent that warfare also provided the means for establishing reciprocal relations among warring groups that were essential to the maintenance of culture (Levi-Strauss 1976).

In contrast to endocannibalism in Melanesia, which aimed to preserve, perpetuate, and redistribute elements of the deceased, endocannibalism in South America more often had the objective of eradicating the corpse in order to sever relations between the dead person’s body and spirit, and between living people and the spirits of the dead. Endocannibalism, as part of funerary or mortuary ritual, is thought to have been more widely practiced in lowland South America than anywhere else in the world. It usually took place in one of two forms: people consumed the ground, roasted bones or bone ash, the more common practice, or they consumed cooked flesh. Bone-eating was especially concentrated in northern Brazil, the Upper Orinoco regions of southern Venezuela, and western and northern Amazonia (Conklin 2001: xxiv-xxv). A poignant account of bone ash cannibalism among the Amahuaca in southeastern Peru portrayed a mother wailing while she prepared her deceased daughter’s body for cremation, grinding the bones into a powder, mixing them with a maize beverage ready to drink, and then throwing the remaining ashes into the river. The ritual had taken almost two weeks (Dole 1974).

Flesh-eating was less common in South America, but it was reported in several areas, including in Paraguay by the French ethnographers Pierre and Helene Clastres, who attended a Guayaki funeral in 1963 at which the participants said they ate almost an entire corpse (Clastres, P. 1974). A case in which the secondary father^[2]ate a child, thinking that this could cure his illness, was reported by Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag (1964). Once the child’s meat had been consumed, the bones of the corpse were broken, sucked, and thrown into the fire. The skull was also crushed and burned, the smoke rising from the fire allowing the child’s soul to ascend to its heavenly abode.

Some South American ethnic groups practiced both endo- and exocannibalism. The Wari’ of Rondonia in Brazil ate their enemies killed during warfare as well as the corpses of fellow Wari’ at funerals (Conklin 2001: xxiii)). A southern Amazonian group of the Wari’ are also said to have eaten their dead and their enemies until at least the beginning of the 1960s (Vilaca 2000). A curious case blurring both categories of cannibalism took place among the Tupinamba, a Tupi ethnic group who regularly consumed their prisoners of war. According to analyses by Helen Clastres (1972), a number of rites first integrated a prisoner into the community. Fattened up and given to a woman in marriage, he changed his status from enemy to that of an ally. He was then killed by the woman's brother ^[FS1], a process that is driven by desires for revenge as well as attempts at suppressing social differences.

Much has been written about the Uitoto people who live on the lands between the Putumayo and Caqueta rivers in Southeastern Colombia and Northeastern Peru. Eugene Robuchon, a French explorer, was the first to write about the Uitoto practice of exocannibalism (1907, 2010 [1907]) a practice that fascinated him greatly but that he never got to witness. Konrad Preuss (1984) provided additional recordings, transcription in the native language, and translations of the cannibalistic bai ritual, in which only men ate the flesh of their opponents, to appease the souls of those who were devoured, to protect the souls of the devourers, endowing them with supernatural powers useful in warfare.

The Uitoto had suffered greatly during the Rubber Boom from the late 1890s to the late 1920s, with the arrival of the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British-Peruvian venture devoted entirely to the extraction and sale of wild rubber from the Putumayo area. The opulence of the Rubber Barons was exceeded only by their brutality. They hired their own armies to defend their claims, to acquire new land, and to capture native labourers. The first accusations of rubber violence were compiled in texts by Walter Hardenburg (1913) and G. Sidney Paternoster (1913). First-hand reports on the atrocities can be found also in a book by Carlos Valcarel (1915), and in the report and diary of the British consul, Roger Casement (1912, 1998 [1912]). Based on these reports, the anthropologist Michael Taussig argued that the Rubber Boom violence was due to a ‘synergistic relation of savagery and business, cannibalism and capitalism’ (Taussig 1984: 482). Fear of Indigenous cannibalism drove the colonists’ imagination, and was used to justify the torture, enslavement, and mass murder of Indigenous people. It is said that at least 100,000 Indigenous people had died during the Rubber Boom.

Cannibalism was also a prominent theme for many native South Americans whose images of cannibals appeared in their myths, cosmologies, and eschatologies (the component of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the ultimate destiny of the soul and of humankind). One theme is that death itself is a form of cannibalism. The Yanomami, for example, think of every death as an act of cannibalism in which the human soul is devoured by a spirit or an enemy. The Araweté Tupian speakers of Para, Brazil, believe that at death, human spirits are cannibalised by the gods, then rejuvenated and transformed into gods themselves. The Kulina, Arawakan speakers of Acre in Brazil, hold that when a human spirit journeys to the underworld, it is ritually welcomed and devoured by Kulina ancestors, who have become white-lipped peccaries, a pig-like hoofed mammal (Conklin: xxvi).

Such cannibalistic beliefs and practices from South America have advanced anthropological theory. The publication of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s From the enemy’s point of view (1992) presented a new way of looking at the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Viveiros de Castro analyses the belief held by the Araweté people that the souls of their dead will be devoured by the gods, an act by which their souls become immortal. To explain this assertion, he presents Araweté society as composed of gods and men, in which human destiny is to remain in a process of constantly becoming other beings. In this society, cannibalism is an important practice that enables them to change from one entity to another. These insights were fundamental to question what it means to be human. According to Viveiros de Castro, intentionality and reflexive consciousness might no longer be attributes of humanity, but potentially available to all beings in the cosmos. Animals, plants, gods, and spirits were also potentially persons, and could occupy a subject position in their dealings with humans (Fausto 2007: 497). The adoption of such ‘perspectivism’, led to an ‘ontological turn’ in anthropological theory, suggesting that difference could be understood not in terms of different world views, but different worlds, and that all of these worlds were of equal validity. Viveiros de Castro’s publication had also provided a framework for the comparative analysis of predation as a key process and metaphor for socio-cultural analysis and practice (McCallum 1999: 445).

Africa

Early accounts of cannibalism in Africa refer to the Azande, especially the ‘Niam-Niam’, racist stereotypes of Central African people who were depicted in medieval Arab sources as naked creatures with filed teeth and dog’s heads, living at the end of the known world. Stereotypical accounts of cannibals came also from west-central Africa in the sixteenth century (Heinze 2003). With the exception of the German, Ewald Volhard, who in 1939 published a 500-page study on the worldwide practices of cannibalism, classical social anthropologists are said to have been extremely hesitant to take up the subject (Behrend 2011: 8). In his legendary account, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1937) mentioned the topic of cannibalism only once, noting that it was interesting to hear well-travelled Azande speak about the pygmies of the forests and of the artificially deformed heads of the Mangbetu, their curious crafts, and the cannibalism of the Abarambo who shouted at them ‘nombi! nombi!’: ‘flesh! flesh!’ (1937: 278).

In a later review of a study of Azande Cannibalism (1955), Evans-Pritchard agreed with the study’s author Renzo Carmignani that some of the Azande had practiced cannibalism, but he doubted that it could anywhere have been a regular occurrence. His inquiries on the subject had led him to believe that there was no other reason for eating human flesh than the desire for meat. In 1956 he published ‘Cannibalism: a Zande text’, an account of the practice written by his Zande clerk, which had a detailed description of dissecting a corpse, the process of cooking and eating it, and the assertion that in the past almost all Azande ate people, including that the author himself had done so. Evans-Pritchard refuted the latter claim a few years later when he concluded that Azande cannibalism had not in fact been widespread, and that if it occurred, it did not bear cultural meaning but was driven by hunger and a taste for meat (Evans-Pritchard 1960).

In the 1970s, information about cannibalism in Africa was sometimes arrived at indirectly while the anthropologist was investigating other topics, such as witchcraft. Peter Geschiere reported that he often heard the term ‘In such and such a village we couldn’t eat’ to be a prohibition against eating together, but the real meaning the interlocutors wished to make was that they could not eat its inhabitants (1997: 33). Restrictions on cannibalism, it seemed, constituted a sort of map of the region, permitting one to distinguish between kin-linked villages (potential allies) and others (Geschiere 1997: 33). The stereotype of the Africans as cannibals had featured in the texts of traders, explorers, and missionaries ever since the sixteenth century. In Cameroon, the Germans were obsessed with cannibalism, so anthropologists tried to keep their distance. Another complicating factor was that African elites spoke strongly against the stereotype of Africans as cannibals (Gingrich pers. com. 10.1.2021 - 3.2.2021). This might throw light on Evans-Pritchard’s cautious approach to the topic.^[3]

In varying degrees, discussions of cannibalism are part of grappling with the question of how to represent Africa, and how to translate experience there to the rest of the world (White 2003: 632). The topic of cannibalism was discussed in the literature on modernity and the occult in postcolonial states experiencing economic distress. Contemporary images of the occult were said to be mediated by colonial memory. In some parts of Africa, experiences of colonialism were themselves configured by traumatic memories of earlier trans-regional processes of the slave trade. The postcolonial condition might be the most recent historical predicament in which commodification and rupture were experienced and made sense of through images of occult beings, such as cannibals (Shaw 2001). Cannibalism, presented in accounts of propaganda describing ‘man eaters’ in west-central Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, was shown to be a colonial-imperialist stereotype, said to coexist with an internal African version (Heinze 2003). An anthropological account of cannibalism among the Sherbro of Sierra Leone combined historical and ethnographic material, with an analysis of the symbolic and political implications of cannibalistic belief (MacCormack 1983). Here, allegation of cannibalism was a strong political weapon used to menace people, and a technique for controlling a rival political faction. It was also used against chiefs, government officials, and allegedly even a prime minister, said to have been brought down by the accusation. It was a way of saying, ‘This person is a willful, selfish seeker after antisocial personal power and not fit to rule’ (MacCormack 1983: 59-60).

Different African and European images of the cannibals may often intersect and influence each other. Cannibalism, food, eating, and being eaten in its many variations were explored in Resurrecting cannibals, a book about Tooro, a small kingdom in Western Uganda (Behrend 2011). Behrend wrote about people who felt threatened by cannibals, churches who combatted cannibals, and anthropologists who found themselves suspected of being cannibals. The book shows how the figure of the resurrecting cannibal drew on both pre-Christian ideas and church dogma of the bodily resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion.

In the 1990s, Western journalists wrote about cannibalism in the context of warfare, focusing on rape, torture, and atrocities against civilians. A social and historical analysis of the conflict in Liberia, which lasted from 1989 to 1997, examined how Liberia had descended into conflict and why it took such a violent form. The author suggested that the causes were not only political but could be explained in religious or spiritual terms. Impoverished young men who attacked people, boasting of eating human hearts, were performed in the familiar language of secret society rituals now out of control. Ritual murders were no longer carried out by officers of established cults, such as the Poro society, but by unqualified adolescents, their quest for power fulfilled by the consumption of the vital organs of others (Ellis 1995: 165-6; Ellis 2006).

Debating cannibalism

For several decades, beginning in the late 1970s, the topic of cannibalism was at the centre of three well-publicised anthropological debates. Marvin Harris (1977) proposed that the endless varieties of cultural behaviour can be explained as adaptations to particular ecological conditions, a materialist theory adopted by Harris from the work of Michael Harner (1977). Anthropophagy was thus said to be a rational response to the shortage of protein, which resulted in the slaughter of war captives by Aztecs during times of famine, for example. The statement that cannibalism was a form of meat consumption was a constant theme in the anthropological literature, and the question of whether it had relevant nutritional value was investigated. For tropical people living at low-medium population densities exploiting a diverse range of animal foods, the answer was yes (Dornstreich & Morren 1974). For prehistoric cannibalism, probably not, as the value of human meat compared unfavourably with the nutritional value of huge animals, such as mammoths consumed during Paleolithic times (Cole 2017).

Critics of materialist approaches argued that it left out that ‘the practical function of institutions is never adequate to explain their cultural structure’ (Sahlins 1978: 45). Theories such as the one by Harris were held to be also at fault for reducing human populations to being quantities rather than societies, consisting primarily of organisms with biological requirements rather than people with cultural interests. Utilitarian explanations of cannibalism and of human behaviour more broadly may thus falsely incorporate meanings other people give to their lives within the kind of material rationalisations that we might give to our own (Sahlins 1979: 53). Harris’ approach to cannibalism and human behaviour stood accused of a ‘bourgeois’ conflation of the more or less efficacious ways that people maintain themselves with the optimising or maximising behaviour characteristic of enterprise.

A second debate around cannibalism arose first over the question of how we were to understand the death of Captain Cook at the hands of the Hawaiians in 1779 and, in particular, whether Cook was perceived by some of them to be a manifestation of their god Lono. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1995) argued that upon arrival, Hawaiian priests objectified Cook as the said god of growth, reproduction, and fertility. Thus, Sahlins held that Cook’s violent death just a few weeks after his arrival, when he was trying to abduct the local king, should be understood with reference to local ritual and metaphysics. Sahlins defended the view that there are distinct cultures, each with a total cultural system of human action, and that they are to be understood on their own terms.

This view was challenged by Gananath Obeyesekere (1992a), who argued that Hawaiian natives likely never considered Cook to be a god. Myth might have been at play in his encounter with Hawaiians, but the myth is a European one that propagates ideas of a redoubtable European travelling to ‘savage’ lands as the harbinger of civilisation. Discourses about Cook might thus reveal more about the relations between Europeans and other peoples than about the nature of anthropophagy (Obeyesekere 1992b; Barker, Hulme & Iversen 1998). Obeyesekere’s interpretation of events relied on the wider approach to studying socio-cultural phenomena, in which people’s actions and beliefs are assumed to pursue particular, practical functions in their lives that should be understood along psychological lines.

Sahlins (2003) returned to the debate years later, arguing that cannibalism in the Pacific was a complex phenomenon whose myriad attributes were acquired by its relation to a variety of ‘elements of society’, and that anthropologists had to be as wary of exaggerated accounts of cannibalism that stand in the service of imperialism as they had to be of a baseless denial of cannibalism practice that romanticises the people under study. The Lono story, which depicts the body of Captain Cook dismembered and parts of it possibly eaten, posed a question, fundamental to anthropology, about how to understand non-Western cultures. Cannibalism as a practice or an accusation has the mark of the greatest imaginable cultural difference, and is thus the greatest challenge to our categories of understanding (Hulme 1998: 20-1). Obeyesekere and Sahlins together are said to have posed – in a way they could never have done separately – fundamental theoretical questions and had raised critical methodological issues with respect to the delicate business of ‘other-knowing’ (Geertz 1995).

A third debate began soon after Arens published The man-eating myth (1979), a book that attracted the attention of anthropologists and the popular press. Arens said that, excluding survival conditions, he had been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society. Rumours, suspicions, fears, and accusations abound, but no satisfactory first-hand accounts exist (Arens 1979: 21).

Anthropologists were quick to respond with The ethnography of cannibalism, edited by Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (1983) and The anthropology of cannibalism (1999) edited by Laurence Goldman. Arens’ critique received some support. Michael Pickering’s essay in the Goldman volume, for example, had asserted that there was no evidence to support the claim that Australian aboriginal societies had engaged in cannibalism. The sources relied upon were said to be of poor quality, with a paucity of evidence. The majority of reports were based on innocent misunderstanding and misinterpretation, or on deliberate lies and attempts to belittle, denigrate, and dehumanise Aboriginal people, usually as a prelude to denying them basic human rights and usurping their lands (Pickering 1999: 51-68). Overall, however, Goldman observed that the great number of studies from the region published after WWII provided the tombstone for Arens’ denial of cannibalism.

Arens’ hypothesis also received criticism from scholars working in South America. Neil Whitehead (2008) provided reliable historical evidence of cannibalism among the Caribs and other Indian groups in the ‘New World’. In response to Arens’ assertion that people alleged to be cannibals always deny it, Beth Conklin (2001: 22) argued that the Wari’ told her that they once ate human flesh, and talked about it in detail. She also provided a detailed record of endocannibalism in Lowland South America (Conklin 2001: xxiv-v). Anthropologists working in Africa were also critical of reducing the accounts of anthropophagy to the inventions of missionaries and other Westerners. There was evidence that the Maka in Cameroon had ritual prohibitions that allowed only adult men, elders, and champions of war to eat human flesh (Geschiere 1997: 235). Making the authenticated Western eyewitness the yardstick of the reality of cannibalism risked falling back on a position of Eurocentrism which Arens had originally contested (Behrend 2011). The debate about the existence of cannibalism was also one about the nature of anthropological evidence. Arens held that people’s descriptions of their own practices could not be trusted, a strict definition of evidence that many anthropologists challenged. Several others defended that proving or denying cannibalism should not depend on direct observation as many intimate and forbidden behaviours tended to be conducted in secret (Brady 1982). Contrary to the assertion that no one had ever observed cannibalism, Peggy Sanday (1986: 9-10) cited reliable eyewitness reports of the Jesuits in South America, and a missionary’s description of the practice during a war in the Cook Islands in 1897. Ultimately, Arens presented his ‘somewhat revised thoughts’ on the topic in a book in which the contributors discussed the discourse of cannibalism rather than cannibalism itself (Hulme 1998: 16). The controversy had usefully heightened both scholarly awareness of the ideological potential of ‘cannibalism’ and empirical rigor in studies of cannibalism as a culturally embedded, institutionalised practice (Tuzin 2001: 1454).

Conclusion: The future of the cannibal

This entry has discussed cannibalism in places where the practice was recent, and people who ate the dead could provide detailed information. The reports of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa had presented seemingly boundless accounts of the practice. However, anthropologists were said to have been unsuccessful in disturbing or unsettling Western systems of knowledge, and there was insufficient treatment of cannibalism as a theory-building part of Western science (Ernst 1999: 155). Types of literal cannibalism were also said to vary according to motive and circumstance, the diversity so great that it tended to overwhelm the common feature of ingestion and to confound efforts to understand cannibalism as a unitary phenomenon (Tuzin 2001: 1453).

And yet, a new way to think about cannibalism has recently emerged (Nyamnjoh 2018), expanding the definition of the practice to include both the actual eating of human flesh and fantasies of eating other humans, being eaten by other humans, and being seen to eat other humans. Eating is here understood in its most inclusive and elastic sense to imply consumption in general, directly and indirectly, actually, symbolically, metaphorically, and in fantasy (2018: 73). Incorporating perspectives from the Global South, Francis Nyamnjoh developed the key observation that to feed on someone’s life chances may be tantamount to feeding on someone’s flesh. He considers humans to be fundamentally incomplete and cannibalistic, a condition of the powerful no less than of those they prey upon. Nyamnjoh thereby provides an alternative to the identity-obsessed ethics and politics of the twentieth century (Englund 2018: x), one that leaves room for the possibility of a common humanity and equal access to human dignity. It was cannibalism’s ubiquity and capacity for presence in simultaneous entities and multiplicities that pushed Claude Levi-Strauss (1960) to argue that, in one form or another ‘we are all cannibals’, ‘whether or not the humans we consume are served through our palates, injected, inserted as transplants or grafted onto our bodies’ (Nyamnjoh 2018: 6). As a reflection of our moral sense of self, the concept of the cannibal seems destined to remain with us forever.

Notes

This entry is an extension of topics covered in Lindenbaum (2015a).

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Note on contributor

Shirley Lindenbaum is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was awarded an MA from the University of Sydney in 1971, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Melbourne in 2016. She co-edited The time of AIDS with Gilbert Herdt in 1992, and Knowledge power and practice with Margaret Lock in 1993. An updated version of Kuru sorcery: disease and danger in the New Guinea Highlands was published in 2013.

[1] Later ethnographic research about the handling of contaminated tissue did not support the likelihood of self-inoculation by oral, nasal, and conjunctival routes during mortuary feasts (Whitfield et al. 2008; Whitfield 2015). A detailed account of the sequence of events that led to the cannibalism hypothesis, as well as the different ways in which anthropologists and medical investigators studied the disease, was published by Lindenbaum (2013; 2015a; 2015b).

[2] The father’s brother is often classified as a father in patrilineal kinship systems.

[3] See also Ernst (1999: 156) on the reluctance of anthropologists in Papua New Guinea.

Sharing

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 17:07:51 +0000

Thomas Widlok

University of Cologne

Initially published 28 Apr 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21sharing

Abstract:

Sharing is a particularly versatile and widespread human practice that features in all domains of life, including religion and politics, family life, and economics. It has a long ethnographic record but it is only recently that it has reached centre stage in social theory and in public awareness. However, not everything that is called ‘sharing’ qualifies as such in a comparative and more technical sense. This entry seeks to distinguish sharing from other transfers, such as alms- and gift-giving, resource pooling, and redistribution. Sharing is here defined as ‘allowing others to access what is valued’, an activity that is not necessarily initiated or desired by the person who gives. Sharing can help humans solve problems of resource distribution, but it may also generate problems that require culturally specific answers: What can or should be shared, with whom and under which conditions? What are the social prerequisites and the social implications of sharing? This entry presents some comparative cases of sharing found across the world and looks at how sharing is also a means to level differences and to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power. It equally considers the current inflational use of the label ‘sharing’ and on-going attempts to establish alternative forms of economic transfers in the so-called ‘sharing economy’.

Introduction: the currency of sharing

Not everything that is called ‘sharing’ actually constitutes sharing in practice. When you use a ‘car-sharing’ system, for example, you may in fact be renting a car part-time, as this involves a straightforward rental contract with a company in return for a monthly fee or charges incurred per kilometre driven. This may therefore be a market transaction, akin to buying and selling. The company may want to call it ‘sharing’, as the term has positive connotations in the urban West where it is associated with saving resources and with giving you a sense of being engaged in a morally right activity. However, this may just be part of marketing discourse in what is otherwise a competitive commercial set-up. At the same time, you may have given your colleague or neighbour a lift in that rented car. Was that sharing, even though you may not have thought or talked about it that way? Or was it rather like a gift, if the other person now feels obliged to give you some sort of return at a later stage? And although you have not met the previous person renting this car, driving a car from a ‘car-share company’ may not feel like having a car exclusively to yourself, since you have sat in the same seat, touched the same steering wheel, and breathed more or less the same air as other users. So, was that part of it sharing, or was it something more like ‘pooling’, i.e. using a common property or infrastructure?

Questions such as these illustrate that anthropological analyses of sharing need to go beyond what people may call ‘sharing’ to distinguish different modes of transfers according to the difference they make with regard to the social relationships involved. This is what this entry on sharing focuses on: How can we distinguish sharing from similar but different transfers on the basis of their capacity to change our social relations? And how constitutive are these modes of transfer for our sociality? Many definitions of sharing tend to focus on the objects that are being transferred, so that sharing is seen above all as a means of distribution. This entry, by contrast, focuses on the social implications of sharing by defining sharing technically as practices of ‘extending the circle of people who have access to what is valued’ (see Widlok 2017: xvii). The three elements of this definition will be discussed in turn, firstly the question of ‘what is valued’, secondly the interplay of ‘gaining access’, ‘demanding access’, and ‘granting access’ that constitute sharing as access, and thirdly the question of how exactly and how far the circle can be extended, especially in the growing platform economics.

Given the ubiquity of sharing today, it may be somewhat surprising that it has only recently gained prominence in social theory. This is largely because many other approaches have subsumed sharing under various other labels: Influential has been Marshall Sahlins’ formulation that sharing is a form of ‘reciprocity’ (1988), hence closely related to gift-giving, and fusing sharing with other forms of redistribution (Polanyi 1944) or pooling (Price 1975). Later definitions, by contrast, highlighted that sharing was often ‘uni-directional’ (Hunt 2000) and that it did not have the contest-like quality of gift-giving, which also goes with careful account-keeping that is considered offensive in most sharing contexts (Graeber 2011: 99). While gift-giving can be explained as a strategy for creating dependency, obligation, and status accumulation for the giver, the same explanation does not hold for sharing practices. This intrigued evolutionary scholars who sought to explain sharing with reference to its evolutionary utility even though it seemed to benefit the survival of others rather than of oneself. Evolutionary approaches focus on the function of sharing to create a social resource buffer for lean times, as a risk-reducing strategy (Ichikawa 2005), and on its ‘costly signalling’ function, i.e. signalling to potential partners that we share and therefore care for others.

The growing interest in sharing today is at least partly due to the fact that it is considered a very promising candidate when exploring alternatives to the dominant modes of commercial, extractive, and exploitative economising. This makes sharing an anthropological concern not only for its role in human evolutionary past (see Kelly [2013] for this issue, which is beyond this entry) but also in terms of the transformation of the current and future political and economic order. The currency of sharing, as we shall see, lies not only in its redistributive capacity but also in its social challenges. Anthropologists are adamant in pointing out that much of what today is called ‘sharing’ in the more appropriately named ‘crowd-based’ or ‘platform-based’ economy may not be sharing at all. However, even the misnomers have helped to put sharing, as a practice, back on the research agenda. It took considerable time to understand the change brought about by the rise of capitalism and the extension of markets and commodity logics to all spheres of life in the ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 1944). Today the claim that after the collapse of communism ‘there is no alternative’ to the capitalist market economy has sparked a new interest in exploring the full repertoire of transfer modes that humans have at their disposal.

Sharing and value

The main anthropological problem with sharing is not that it is a rare or somehow ‘exotic’ practice that we are unfamiliar with. Rather, it is ubiquitous and everyone has experienced it. In that, it is different from other human practices that work for some groups but are strange for others. For instance, think of living with several partners, marrying your cousin, moving around nomadically, organising social order without a centralised government, making a living outside capitalist production, and so forth. In these cases, anthropology has had the function of making the seemingly strange familiar, for a long time with a European bias defining what needed ‘de-exoticising’. But not everything cultural is peculiar in this way, and sharing is a case in point. Here, the role of anthropology is to make the mundane intriguing to us so that we can take a fresh comparative look at what seems familiar and unproblematic. With regard to sharing, this means to make sure that we do not mistake the rather peculiar notion of sharing, that we may hold as a result of our own cultural upbringing, with sharing as it emerges across a diversity of human contexts. A common bias that arises from living a particular way of life that we label ‘modern’ is to think of sharing as something that is only done with a few very close relatives, an altruistic exception in an otherwise selfish existence. Moreover, the dominant evaluation of sharing is in many ways disparate: On the one hand, there is a romantic yearning towards sharing as something that should be done, but often is not (or no longer). Alternatively, sharing is despised as something bad or backward that needs to be overcome. In Australia, for example, the government has tried for a long time to organise welfare payments to indigenous Australians in a way that they prevent recipients from sharing ‘too much’. Demand sharing in particular has been targeted as a root problem by state administrators intervening in Aboriginal communities (Altman 2011: 196).

Groups that practice frequent and wide-ranging sharing are subject to this bifurcated preconception, being romanticised and discriminated against. I have encountered this frequently in field research with present-day hunter-gatherers under processes of change (see Widlok 1999, 2020). Nearby farm owners, government officials, and agro-pastoralist neighbours in many of these instances feel that hunter-gatherers have to abandon sharing in order to more effectively accumulate property and adopt a market- and investment-oriented way of economising. Sharing is considered an obstacle in that process. For instance, farm workers in Namibia who used to be hunter-gatherers and who tend to be lumped together under the ethnic label San, have been encouraged by colonial bosses to save up some of their salaries so that they could buy individual property items such as bicycles, cars, or houses (Widlok 1999: 123). The social pressures of sharing their income widely, in this view, prevents the ‘uplifting’ of San to mainstream culture. This has many parallels in the ways in which the landed gentry in Europe looked down on proletarians who lived in permeable domestic units, spending and sharing space and income rather than accumulating and insulating within families. It also has parallels with the concerns of middle-class parents who see the youth as ‘oversharing’ in the social media, by which they mean ‘disclosing too much of oneself in public’ (see Widlok 2017: 165).

In my field research I often encountered doctors and development workers who kept cautioning the San and other hunter-gatherers not to share their tobacco pipes, drinking vessels, and sexual partners since this increases the danger of contracting contagious diseases. In the Covid-19 pandemic, again the dangers of sharing are being invoked, not limited to sharing (bodily) fluids but more generally to sharing the same space, even breathing the same air. The dominant view amongst those who have become unfamiliar with sharing is to delimit it rigidly. By contrast, among skilled and frequent practitioners, sharing tends to operate without rigid adherence to abstract principles of altruism, alms giving, or narrow kin support. It is often more open than that, and can be broadened but also at times narrowed. This raises questions, such as: Under which conditions may it be considered desirable to share? What are the limits and affordances of sharing? And how are these limits and opportunities culturally constructed and socially enforced?

Comparative studies across a variety of societies show that sharing regularly goes beyond individual households, and that repeated food crises lead humans to share more frequently but not automatically more widely (see Ember et al. 2018). When trying to answer the above questions properly, we therefore need to turn to individual cases studies. These are often taken from the ethnography of current and former hunter-gatherers around the world. This is not because the phenomena observed were limited to these societies but rather because theoretically interesting features were observed in these contexts that question recurring cultural preconceptions. For instance, the prevalent romantic but misleading idea that sharing is either a result of pure altruism or pure necessity has been put into question by observations made in Aboriginal Australia. The biased view includes the assumption that if you have at times too much of a certain item, you share it in order not to waste it. However, there is a different lesson that Fred Myers (1988) was taught by a Australian Aboriginal Pintupi man called Jimmy, which is mirrored in many ethnographic contexts: Sharing is not simply the consequence of economic needs and the ecological distribution of resources but rather it is instrumental in producing the underlying social conditions in the first place. It typically does not target what people are happy to give away anyway, but rather what they value and would like to keep. Jimmy asked Fred for cigarettes to be shared even though he did have some himself – which he, in the end, gave to Fred when he found out the anthropologist had given all of his cigarettes away already.

He also taught Fred to make sure to hide some of his resources so that he can dodge the constant demands and requests to share. In Aboriginal Australia, as in many contexts among (former) hunter-gatherers, sharing and demands do not contradict one another. Moreover, demands can take the form of accepted and conventionalised prompts that initiate sharing, but they can also take the problematic form of constant nagging and out-of-proportion asking and pretending to be in need (‘humbugging’ in Aboriginal English). Myers concluded that sharing was often initiated not by those who had something or had too much of something, but rather by those who were asking, an activity that Nicolas Peterson called ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993, see also Altman 2011). In these contexts people are granted the right to ask for things, and they find it morally difficult to reject a demand if one was seen to be able to satisfy it. This suggests that the practices of sharing were not simply a mode of resource allocation but all about dealing with social relationships in a particular way. While this is true for transfers between humans more generally, sharing seems to be characterised by a particular tension between autonomy and dependency (Myers 1988) in contrast to varying evaluations of dependency in societies dominated by market and gift-exchange (see Martin 2021).

Myers’ ethnography also debunked the assumption that sharing was an automatism that followed out of collective ownership or out of a lack of property rights in things. By contrast, the items that Pintupi foragers brought back to camp, such as gathered fruits or small game animals and whatever else their ‘country’ (the land they belong to) was providing, were quite clearly subject to very specific property rights. These rights were partly obtained through labour, when collecting for example, or through kinship and a sense of belonging to a particular country. And there was no automatism that translated these rights into transfers, but rather they were subject to protracted negotiations. Allocations and (re-)distributions of foraged foods, household and ritual items constantly changed. In most societies in which a lot of sharing is being practiced, people do have a choice either to include others in the sharing or to hide items from them. At the same time, they feel that what they part with is not ‘extra’ (like second-hand clothing that well-to-do urbanites in the Global North readily give away) but something that they readily and happily could use themselves. They may therefore only let go of it begrudgingly. The social rules of what constitutes forms of ‘co-ownership’ do vary culturally and so do the actual strategies of asking, taking, and ‘allowing to take’. The occurrence of sharing behaviour cannot be sufficiently explained by the economic and ecological pressures of a resource situation, even though these play a role. The same is true for absence of sharing: Sharing may break down under conditions of extreme shortage and it may thrive when things are abundant, but there is a lot of leeway in between, with culturally specific forms emerging in different contexts. On the one hand, sharing is an adaptive problem-solver for uneven resource distribution, but on the other hand it also involves problems since both nagging requests and inacceptable responses can become divisive. At the same time, the tolerance for open demands but also for attempts to hide and keep have been noted by ethnographers working in societies with a high incidence of sharing.

In other words, if sharing is neither an inevitable product of constant shortage, nor of boundless affluence, it depends critically on dealing successfully with an abundance of requests, on a sense of what constitutes a good response to requests and on what is appropriate access to items of value. It is in this context that being economically in need (or being in the position to provide) becomes relevant for judging which requests are appropriate. Sharing not only redistributes resources but it also recalibrates the social problems of navigating through multiple expectations, entitlements, relationships, and demands. Comparatively speaking sharing depends on what is of value to humans, as humans share more than they need to - and less than they are being asked for.

Sharing and access: gained, granted and demanded

If it is not scarcity or abundance by itself that explains sharing, what are the conditions that enable and encourage, or disable and discourage, sharing? The subject matter of what is being shared is an important factor. Some things are easier and more readily shared than others, and some things lend themselves to be used for other forms of transfer such as gift-exchange or buying and selling. Amongst hunter-gatherers, ‘country food’ items are more readily shared than purchased items, and small items collected while foraging are more readily kept for individual consumption than larger ‘bulky’ items such as big hunted animals, elephants, or whales, for instance (Widlok 2017: 92-8, see also Ready & Power 2018: 76). The latter may invite more specific forms of distributions because they typically involve more of a collaborative effort or investment and more elaborate infrastructure such as boats or traps that need to be maintained.

Many more things can be shared in an economic system than what those who are living in a market economy may think. Researchers working with the Aché people of South America noted that they received more than 80 per cent of all their goods through sharing transfers (Kaplan & Hill 1985). Food collected was more readily shared when out collecting than food bought back to the mission settlement, but it seems that the permeability of domains is again subject to social negotiation as items can move from the domain of buying to that of sharing and vice versa. Even in a capitalist market economy there are many transfers which are not buying and selling. About 60 per cent of the population in post-industrial societies make a living not by buying and selling their labour but rather through ‘other’ transfers (see Ferguson [2015: 20] and Widlok [2017: xiii]). These transfers include state-orchestrated payments of social security, the individual support of dependent family members, and other forms of ‘giving’ like inheritance or neighbourhood assistance, for example.

What is important to keep in mind for those living in a highly materialist society, however, is that sharing is not only and not always primarily about objects that change hands, but at least as much about those involved in the giving and receiving. It is as much about ‘sharing in’ the social relations of givers and receivers as about ‘sharing out’, i.e. the transfer of objects. Among prime objects that can be shared are also immaterial things such as time and visits, knowledge and skills, and experiences more generally. However, what is subject to sharing and what is not cannot always be predicted. Mbendjele central African foragers are happy to share most personal items but they sell songs and rituals (Lewis 2015). San share knowledge about the whereabouts of game animals and not only the meat of hunted animals (Biesele & Barclay 2001). And hobbyists and professionals in industrialised societies may be happy to share their informal insider-knowledge (see Lave & Wenger 1991) without sharing their salaries. In fact, it seems that much sharing takes place under the radar of economic thinking because it often takes immaterial forms and it involves many unmarked and mundane social interactions.

One of the common motivations of sharing is that it prevents accumulation, including the accumulation of power and the creation of dependencies. East African hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania are well-known for their sharing of meat. But even though their situation is one of relative equality, tendencies towards accumulation exist for them as well: Initiated Hadza men are reported to try to reserve some meat for themselves (see Woodburn 1998). Although they do not always succeed in it and although the quantity of meat may actually be limited, this shows a general problem that sharing responds to, namely the potential of turning the allocation of items into a tool for power play and privilege. In some cases, for instance the present-day mixed economy of Canadian Inuit, sharing is tacitly transformed into public and marked acts of generous gift-giving that invokes obligations and supports inequality (see Ready & Power 2018).

James Woodburn, who provided the Hadza ethnography mentioned, insists that sharing has to be distinguished from other forms of transfer, such as gift-giving, because of its social implications: While gift-giving can serve as a tool for gaining status (as a generous and affluent person) and for creating dependencies and obligations, sharing works in the opposite direction. Gift-giving allows people to accumulate status and to create followers through giving and this holds for reciprocal gift-giving with obligatory counter-gifts as well as for gifts that are not returned (Yan 2020). It is well understood as a system for creating mutual obligations, even dependencies, and for marking relationships between giver and receiver as special, also among hunter-gatherers. San foragers of southern Africa are known for cultivating friendships over time and distance through their hxaro exchange systems (Wiessner 1982) and the literature on potlatch in North America and on kula gift giving in Oceania and elsewhere is enormous (see Yan 2020, Widlok 2017). This literature has played such a major role in anthropology’s drive towards pointing at alternatives to the dominant market economy that accounts of sharing were initially often subsumed under forms of ‘reciprocal gift exchange’ (see Mauss 2004). However, sharing as a social practice runs counter to many features of gift-giving, such as public display, strategic dependency, status accumulation, and the creation of obligations, in so that it is now considered a social institution in its own right (Woodburn 1998; Widlok 2017).

It is therefore important to point out that not all reports about giving are instances of sharing – nor are they all about gifts. Gifts are predicated on the obligations of giving, receiving, and returning (Mauss 2004). Sharing, by contrast, can be unidirectional (Hunt 2000). Even if it is mutual, it does not create the same obligations to accept and the same calculated and anticipated returns. Rather, it can effectively decouple giving from receiving; it is not framed as ‘I give so that you will give in return’. This is typically achieved by simply allowing others to take, by not preventing them from taking an object or a share. It is granting a share without necessarily handing over things. This underlines the rightfulness of the share and understates the fact that it was provided by a ‘richer’ party towards a ‘poorer’ party. Leaving things for others to take decouples receiving from returning. It highlights the entitlement of the recipient to what is given rather than the entitlement of the giver on what is to be expected as a return. The mutuality we find in sharing is a far cry from the calculated reciprocity that characterises other transfers, including many forms of gift-giving. Although things often flow both ways in sharing, these flows can be very uneven, they can be delayed and diffused in many ways, and they do not allow for the conversion into accumulated political capital that serves to steer obligations. Hunter-gatherer ethnography does report on various ways of dividing an animal and to allocate specific pieces of meat to specific kinsmen. But this should always be read in the context of two important conditions: firstly, the processual nature of ‘waves of sharing’ and secondly, the levelling power of sharing to undermine lasting obligations.

‘Waves’ and ‘rounds’ of sharing have been observed in many cases (see Ichikawa 2005: 155). Frequently, a hunter is not the person allocating hunted meat and allocation rules may apply in a first wave of sharing that may privilege some (close kin or in-laws of the hunter, for instance). However, this does not prevent meat from being divided further and indiscriminately in subsequent waves. As a result, the resource may ultimately get distributed widely, not only to immediate or specific kin but frequently to anyone who happens to be present. ‘Sharing as levelling’ not only refers to the fact that sharing broadens the circle of people who have access to a good, but also that efforts are typically made to disconnect the act of giving from that of taking. This is most readily achieved by using intermediaries: Children are often sent to carry food from one house to another (Widlok 2017: 7). Others are frequently allowed to take rather than making them wait until they are being given. Thus there are moral rules but also simple practical features that prevent individuals from using sharing as a tool for converting what is given into specific obligations and as a means for ‘investment’ aimed at receiving specific returns. This is very different from prototypical gift-exchange systems (both in pre-colonial Oceania and in bourgeois birthday gift-giving) which is not incompatible with a careful record being kept of what is given, what is received, and what is returned as a gift. Sharing, by contrast, helps to diffuse the attempts to turn, for instance, hunting luck into a tool for dominating others and is therefore an important levelling mechanism to make societies more egalitarian. The combined effect of the waves of sharing and of levelling is that sharing basically continues until there is no more ground for making demands (e.g. when the animal is consumed) while gift-giving continues because it creates the ground of making more gifts in the future.

Drawing a sharp distinction, we could say that the obligation to give, receive, and return gifts is replaced by the opportunity to ask, to respond, and to renounce (Widlok 2017: 79). The opportunity to ask is enabled not only by accepted ways of requests and demands but also by a permeable ordering of space that allows potential recipients to make themselves present to those who have something to share (see Widlok 2021). The opportunity to respond shows in the debates that people have about what is a rightful share or what might be an outrageous demand. And finally, the opportunity to renounce allows people to let go of things that they cannot keep for themselves forever anyway. But this sharp analytic distinction does not preclude that, in practice, people shift and combine different modes of transferring all the time.

Sharing and expansion in online and offline communities

Ethnographers have observed many instances in which people tried to hide and insert into commercial transfers what was expected to be shared with others (see Widlok 2017: 94). ‘Borrowed’ clothes or other personal items often ended up being shared, in that they were never returned even though the givers were for a long time hoping to receive them back. In some contexts reported from Oceania, what missionaries considered ‘stealing’ was called ‘borrowing’ by local boarding school students and could at the same time be categorised as ‘sharing’ by the anthropologist (Strathern 2011). The rules for dividing ‘bulky’ resources such as whales and other big animals that are being distributed among Inuit and other Nordic hunters are another case in point where sharing and other modes of transfer come together. Having contributed to a collective effort such as a whale hunt gives individuals rights in certain parts of the animals. In Alaska, the captain, the harpooner, and the owner of the harpoon all get specific shares, but for the rest of the crew shares are equal independently of whether they participated for a few days or for the whole season - and about a third of the whale are ‘designated as the community share’ at feasts where everyone receives something (Bodenhorn 2005: 84). For smaller animals such as seals, there are elaborate gift-exchange partnerships that people cultivate and which should not be mistaken for sharing (as pointed out above, see Widlok [2017: 53-5]). Inuit examples of sharing from the literature have been important also in other respects. Inuit researchers were the first ones to point out that sharing often does not always ‘even out’. In other words, there may be net receivers and net providers in sharing systems (Pryor & Graburn 1980). Calculated ‘reciprocity’, giving so that one can calculate on a more or less equal return, is not what is motivating these transfers, since they occur without calculation and without things balancing out. Instead, a sense of ‘mutuality’ is indeed involved in that there is a strong expectation that everyone would need to share if they find themselves in the position to do so despite the common experience that some find themselves in that position more regularly than others. In terms of net results and in terms of motivation, strict reciprocity thus seems unnecessary for a sharing system to work, but a degree of mutuality is. This is particularly clear with regard to immaterial sharing, for instance, sharing time or a place to live and work, which requires mutual engagement, attentiveness, and recognition of equal entitlements as social persons despite inequalities. This mutuality that is built into sharing should not be confused with a logic of ‘do-ut-des’ (I give so that I receive). It is not a balancing ‘tit-for-tat’ expectation with balance-keeping (I give as much as I have received). Consequently, Inuit researchers have pointed out the importance of ‘non-material’ forms of sharing, above all sharing time with one another through visiting (Pryor & Graburn 1980). This is echoed by research elsewhere, for instance the importance of sharing a place to sleep in Aboriginal Australia (Musharbash 2008).

It is tempting to continue along these immaterial lines and also include forms of sharing that take place on digital platforms (see below). However, even in digital environments, established and distinctive modes of transfer can be observed. Thus, many transfers among software developers are akin to gift-giving (see Zeitlyn 2003), providing the accumulation of status. The developers of ‘shareware’ software such as Ubuntu also face a situation in which there is a threat of code being appropriated and abused for corporate ‘hoarding’ and accumulation by some while it is defended as freely accessible by others (see Widlok 2017: 159). At the same time, the sharing of content on many internet platforms is accompanied by the accumulation of marketable data by a third party that operates in the background. It seems, therefore, that the interplay of different modes of transfer is as much a bone of contention on large digital platforms as it is in small hunter-gatherer groups. The question that remains is whether sharing as ‘enlarging the circle of those who access what is valued’ is compromised by the size of the group within the circle.

Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), in which participants offer one another goods or services without the exchange of money (Hart 2000), are sometimes considered examples of sharing. That is because these modes of transfers provide members access to goods without participating in the general market or the money economy. Members can sign up to a platform or a noticeboard where they can trade in their particular skills or assets for what they need (e.g, a particular tool or someone to cut the lawn, take the dog out etc.). An internal currency often helps to store in a ‘time bank’ what can then be used in the form of vouchers to receive support from other members (see Widlok 2017: 145). LETS do not constitute sharing in a narrow sense because they are more like barter systems, as detailed records are being kept, often based on alternative currencies or vouchers. It has also been repeatedly reported that these systems only work up to a specific size that guarantees mutual trust (Widlok 2019a: 32). In any case a set membership tends to be a prerequisite for them, ideally supported by local, personal knowledge of each other that prevents free-riding. The primary goal of LETS is often not to extend the circle of participants but, to the contrary, to make sure that it does not extend beyond control and beyond the circle of trusted members. Correspondingly, these systems only provide small niches within the larger market economy. Recently, neighbourhood platforms have emerged which seek to carry the LETS system into the digital domain (Widlok 2019a). This has happened to sharing, too. What is new here is that online platforms are not only the tool for exchanges or transfers in the non-digital world but constitute an arena of sharing in itself, with individuals sharing knowledge in ‘how-to’ videos, as well as sharing ideas and swapping or copying music, pictures, and other forms of digitised messages. This has created the impression that sharing practices have received a boost beyond previous limits, to the extent that parts of the digital economy are sometimes called ‘the sharing economy’. However, it is important to be precise here, as the English term ‘sharing’ glosses over important differences.

Some acts of digital communication effectively concentrate attention instead of distributing anything or granting access to what is valued. In fact, sharing content via social media may be more like a demand on others to share attention, time, or support. It can also serve to accumulate followers and ‘hoard’ support. Just like spam messages, it is part of the often unsolicited and unwanted giving of what is not a value, but rather a burden. Thus, free software, sometimes known as ‘shareware’, frequently turns out to be malicious in that its recipients find it difficult to detect on or de-install from their computers. Moreover, social media publishing often confers value and status to the giver rather than being realised by the receiver who is literally degraded to being a ‘follower’ and not someone with a rightful share in a resource. Digital publishing and distribution can therefore be very unlike sharing, and more like gift-giving, initiated by the giver as an attempt to oblige the recipient to receive and return (see Zeitlyn 2003). Its precedent in the analogue world may be where surplus goods are put on the street for anyone to pick up – in many cases, things not particularly valued or wanted by others. The social implications of such acts of ‘getting rid of things’ are primarily the status creation for morally self-righteous providers who expect the supposedly needy to owe them gratitude (Widlok 2017: 147-51).

The English term ‘sharing’ has undergone a very peculiar development in recent years which confuses these modes of transfer, at least in part purposefully. English language corpora show that the notion of sharing has been widened to include many more objects in recent decades (John 2017: 26). Google analytics shows an increased pairing of ‘sharing’ with ‘caring’, and the sense of ‘sharing your feelings with’ others, which were not much used before but became widespread through the internet and social media (John 2017: 103). Communication scholars like Nicolas John conclude from this that the usage of ‘sharing’ has changed from a distributive sense to a communicative one. Here ‘being on a digital platform together’ is enough to constitute ‘sharing’, exemplified by the notorious ‘share’ button in several online social networks. By contrast, many anthropologists working in social environments in which distributive sharing is very strong noted that there was not one single term that would correspond to the English notion of ‘sharing’. Instead, people would speak about ‘helping out’, ‘supplying’, or ‘lending’ (see Widlok 2017: 19-20). Clearly, to talk about sharing and to practice it are two different things. But the problem we are facing is that talking about sharing is to some extent implicated in sharing practices. For instance, regular complaints about people no longer sharing can be part of a strategy of eliciting a share. In the Arctic case study mentioned above (Pryor & Graburn 1980), it emerged that those who talked most about the importance of sharing were not necessarily those who did the most of it and vice versa. Studying sharing may thus imply establishing technical terms that distinguish it from buying and selling and from gift-giving, rather than simply adopting the labels used by the agents themselves.

We are therefore well-advised not to be too ‘logocentric’, too hung up on labels, but rather to put the practices of sharing and its social implications at the centre of our attention. This includes paying attention to the language strategies that form a part of these practices. People may disagree on what to call a transfer, but their actions usually speak louder than their words. Moreover, given the moral connotations of various labels, they may be part of strategies to re-classify transfers. In the above mentioned cases from the Pacific, locals spoke of ‘lending’ what missionaries classified as ‘stealing’ (Strathern 2011). Similarly, when ‘car sharing’ first entered the market for short-term rentals, there were initially reservations to actually use the term ‘sharing’ as it was feared to carry negative connotations (John 2017: 7). Since then, many enterprises in the platform-based economy have employed the misnomer ‘sharing economy’ because of the positive sentiments that it has accumulated. The ‘disruptive’ economic strategies of UBER, AirBnB, Mechanical Turk, and so forth are primarily commercial and are not examples of sharing in a more technical sense. They make profit by opening up domains of life to market transactions that were previously not: for instance, giving others a lift as in hitchhiking or helping others out with odd jobs. The qualification ‘primarily’ is necessary here, because the combination and articulation between economic interests, moral aspirations, and change is an on-going dynamic (see Widlok 2019b). It is tempting to label everything ‘sharing’ or ‘gift-giving’ that does not look like a typical market exchange. But especially in complex transfers involving givers, takers, providers, revenue-recipients, and onlookers, several modes of transfer may be involved. What is central from an anthropological perspective is that different modes of transfer are interwoven with one another. Sharing may be a particularly old human practice. As a cultural practice, it has not disappeared when markets were introduced but it also does not automatically re-emerge when markets are shaken, disrupted, or expanded onto digital platforms. For sharing to be successfully (re-)instated or combined with other modes of transfer in the future, a number of preconditions will have to be in place.

Conclusion: the future of sharing

Sharing food or pressing a share button on a digital platform are not the same thing, as the latter too often amplifies ‘leader-follower’ and ‘influencer-influenced’ constellations and ultimately aims at generating profit. Actual sharing practices, by contrast, presuppose and reproduce positions of mutuality. So-called ‘peer-to-peer transactions’ on the internet may provide a degree of mutuality as well, but they often remain compromised, not least because platform providers accumulate information and keep knowledge about algorithms that structure digital interaction to themselves. There is typically no mutuality between platform users and those who hoard status or money as part of online publishing. Permeable public space is another prerequisite for sharing, again often compromised by gated communities and by ‘hoarding’, in the double sense of the word as accumulating and as concealing behind a fence (see Widlok 2021). Taxation may thus be a form of sharing when allowing poorer citizens access to collective wealth, but it also runs the danger of the third, redistributing party abusing access to the pooled resources. With respect to sharing, public control of state power may thus be comparable to public access to algorithms in the platform economy.

Some features of the digital environment may open up new space for sharing. After all, sharing has become cheaper, as creating digital copies and providing wider access to digital resources often comes at relatively little additional cost in comparison to creating and sharing material items. It is therefore not surprising that many digital platforms that are vast and allow ‘peer to peer’ exchange set high hopes in developing sharing both online and offline. However, not every initiative that uses the label ‘sharing’ manages to bring about actual social benefits, and several come with social and individual costs. So, the future will tell whether or not the expansion of the digital world will enable transactions that reduce strategic status aggrandising, foster personal autonomy, limit centralised resource control, and value renunciation rather than an economic ideology of endless growth. Such actual forms of sharing would limit boundless accumulation and could allow us to deal productively with inevitable asymmetries. Since sharing allows potential recipients to initiate transfers through requests and to avoid obligations to be used in power plays, it broadens access to material and immaterial items of value. As such, it has the potential to foster sociality between people - and maybe to improve on it, too.

References

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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Dependence

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 18:57:54 +0000

Keir Martin

University of Manchester

Initially published 26 Feb 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21dependence

Abstract:

Dependence is often considered as a primarily negative state of being. It has gone from being described as a threat to individual self-reliance in early modern political theory in Western Europe to being a moral panic in political discourse across the world. Its negative connotation is particularly evident in the spheres of politics and economics, which this entry will focus on. Although anthropological theory has only recently made dependence a topic of explicit theoretical reflection, the idea has underpinned a wide variety of approaches throughout the discipline’s history. Given the tendency of anthropologists to stress the fundamental interdependence of human beings, they have emphasised that dependence is not always a bad thing and can even be desirable. They have also questioned whether or not we can neatly divide the world’s population into those in states of dependence versus independence. Lastly, they have considered the performative effects of ascribing dependence to some and independence to others. Ethnographically sifting through the different performative effects of ascriptions of dependence becomes particularly important today, as assumed states of dependence have become key tools in the management of populations across the world.

Introduction: dependence in context

The spectre of economic dependence haunts our world. In Western Europe and North America, we have long been familiar with attacks on welfare claimants on the basis that benefit payments encourage dependence. These claims are often based on racialised (see Morgen & Maskowsky 2003) or gendered (see Skeggs 2004) stereotypes, as they target particular groups as being somehow inherently prone to slipping into a negatively evaluated state. Accusations of dependence can often appear as the means by which business or political elites seek to delegitimise the claims for assistance of less fortunate members of society (see Martin 2013). This horror of dependence in Western public discourse is consistent with a long-standing similar aversion to dependence in Western political theory. Although we can trace the origins of the attempt to denigrate and police dependence in political theory to seventeenth century writers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, it is at the start of the twenty-first century that moral panics over the extent and effect of people’s dependence have become a global concern (Martin & Yanagisako 2020). Fear that economic dependence may lead to a wider breakdown in community cohesion and individual moral responsibility ranges from North America (Morgen & Maskowsky 2003) through South Africa (Ferguson 2013) to Papua New Guinea (Martin 2013). What sense can we make of such a global phenomenon and what might anthropological theory add to our understanding of it? This entry will show the ways that anthropologists have foregrounded different cultural evaluations of economic dependence in their ethnographic analysis. It thereby challenges the assumption that independence is the highest aspiration for adult humans, which lies at the heart of much political theory and economic discourse globally.

The valorisation of independence and the denigration of dependence are so well established in contemporary political and economic discourse that it might seem hard to imagine a world in which this was not the case. Yet, the central importance given to the idea of economic independence can be seen as a comparatively recent phenomenon, even in Western Europe. Writing in the 1850s, Karl Marx argued that the idea of the isolated and independent individual, who was the starting point of most political and economic analysis of the time, was itself the outcome of the particular organisation of Victorian capitalist society and that,

… the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual… appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole… in the family, and in the family expanded into the clan (1973 [1857-61]: 26).

Marx argues that it is only with the rise of capitalist modernity in the eighteenth century that these dependencies appear less visible and as a consequence that the ‘standpoint… of the isolated individual’ can emerge (1973 [1857-61]: 26).

A similar set of arguments are made by the political theorist C.B. Macpherson, who argued that early proto-liberal theorists such as Hobbes, Locke and James Harrington shared an underlying assumption of the ideal innate individual independence of adult males. This position of independence was at the core of what Macpherson (1962) described as the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’ that marked the birth of a new form of personhood. The possessive individual was held to be born ‘owing nothing to society’ for his capacities and in a state of individual self-ownership (Macpherson 1962: 263-4). However, this valorised independence could be given away by those who acted in a manner that made them dependent on others. Begging and wage labour, for example, were widely seen as relationships that created dependence in seventeenth century England. Variants of this view arguably continue to dominate much political discourse today, such as in debates that focus on the alleged morally negative impacts of ‘welfare dependence’.

Anthropological theory tends to take a different starting point, for a number of reasons. Given their strong focus on how values vary across and within cultures, most anthropologists sympathise with Marx and Macpherson’s caution that dependence may not be universally valued negatively compared to independence just because this has been the case in Western political thought since the 1700s. Secondly, because of their focus on the importance of social relations in shaping our lives, anthropologists most often begin their analysis by stressing interdependence as a fundamental part of human existence. This means that rather than starting from the assumption of independence as much of modern economic and political theory does, anthropologists tend to start from exploring how people are entangled with and mutually dependent upon each other. Rather than assuming that independence is good and dependence is bad, anthropological research has tended to show that whether or not dependence is positively or negatively evaluated, or indeed what kinds of relationships are evaluated as being examples of ‘dependency’ at all, can only be understood in the context of the lived experience and world-views of the communities among which we conduct research.

Importantly, anthropological analyses of ideas, such as ‘dependence’, have long included a focus on two important aspects. On the one hand, they foreground the contextually shifting nature of what such ideas might refer to. On the other hand, they ask how such ideas shape the obligations and relations that they help to categorise. As Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon observe in their discussion of the role of the concept of ‘dependence’ in shaping US politics, it is only by charting the ‘major historical shifts in the usage of this term’, that one might hope to understand its role as a tool of political governance (1994: 310). In the case of US political governance, Fraser and Gordon argue that by the late twentieth century, dependency had come to act as a keyword that, among other effects, was used to accuse single mothers of moral failing and took attention away from wider social structural inequalities. Rather than taking descriptions of ‘dependence’ as descriptive statements whose truth is to be validated or debunked, ethnographic analysis can explore the different contested dynamics by which a state of dependence is ascribed to or rejected by particular groups of people. This changing and performative role of ascriptions of dependence is here taken as a starting point.

Dependence in anthropological theory

Dependence has long been a central concept underpinning a variety of classical anthropological analyses, from accounts of how gift exchange creates leaders in the South Pacific by making others ‘dependent’ upon them (e.g. Malinowski 1922: 161, Sahlins 1963: 292, Epstein 1969: 223, Gregory 1982: 51), through the ascription of ‘dependence’ upon the environment or nature to peoples with ‘simple’ material cultures (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940: 16) to analyses of particular kinds of social systems, such as patron-client relations, with ‘dependency’ at their heart (e.g. Davis 1977: 81). Structures of dependence can sometimes act as fundamental markers for the difference between Western culture and other cultures. Based on ethnographic material collected in Melanesia, Marilyn Strathern argues that the nature of gift exchange transactions makes the parties to the exchange ‘reciprocally dependent upon one another’ (1988: 144). She thereby argues that dependency was actively sought in parts of Melanesia, inverting the modern European association between commodity exchange in the marketplace and the ideal of independence, noted by Marx. Yet despite the centrality of the idea of dependence to the framing of so much anthropological theory, the concept itself has remained largely unexplored as an explicit topic of anthropological theorising, unlike other concepts such as ‘kinship’ or ‘exchange’, both of which could easily be seen as either constituted by or constitutive of relations of dependence.

This is doubly surprising given the concept’s explicit centrality in other fields of enquiry with which anthropology has long had a critical engagement, beyond political theory mentioned above. For example, as Lynn Morgan (1987: 136) notes, many anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s largely accepted uncritically the idea of ‘dependency theory’ imported from development studies as an explanation for global inequalities in fields such as international trade, macroeconomic growth, and health care. Dependency theory was a theory developed by Marxist and radical scholars in the second half of the twentieth century that argued that countries in the global South were kept in a state of permanent and deliberate economic dependence upon powerful Western nations that benefitted by extracting surplus value from them (e.g. Wallerstein 1974). Morgan argues that although dependency theory was useful in drawing attention to global interdependencies and the ways in which they structured enduring socioeconomic inequalities, they often assumed that the development of capitalist markets occurred in fundamentally the same manner across the world (1987: 139-46). This carried the danger of blinding their advocates to the importance of cultural or historical variations in the kinds of relations of dependence that entanglement in the capitalist ‘world system’ created. It also meant that they tended to assume that international dependence always took on a similarly negative form. Some anthropological texts, (e.g. Comarroff 1985: 154-6), did critically engage with the assumption of one-way ‘dependency’ of the global South upon the West that characterised approaches such as ‘world-system(s) theories’, a political economic theory that grew out of ‘dependency theory’ in the 1970s. Jean Comaroff argues that dependency theory presents the world capitalist system as a total, penetrating, and determining force that overlooks the interaction of this particular sociocultural order with other formations (1985: 154). But even such critiques of dependency theory did not address the term ‘dependence’ head on but largely focused on other implicit biases, such as the way in which it tended to assume a singular logic to capitalist ‘penetration’ of local societies regardless of cultural or historical differences.

Anthropologists have also provided critiques of conceptions of dependency that were at the heart of conservative academic approaches to the problems of welfare and social exclusion in Western liberal democracies over the past four decades.^[1] In opposition to these views, anthropologists have attempted to redraw debates around welfare away from a narrow focus on the alleged dependency of particular individuals or households, towards the wider question of growing economic inequality in countries such as the US from the 1990s onwards (Morgen & Maskovsky 2003: 317). Although anthropologists have provided critiques of accusatory uses of the concept of dependence, this critique has tended to be limited. They either rejected that the urban poor are best described as ‘dependent’ in particular contexts, or the showed that dependency did not usually have morally debilitating effects on people (e.g. Morgen & Maskovsky 2003: 325-6, Wacquant 2009: 46-51). Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky, for example, demonstrate the ways in which anthropologists, such as Katherine Newman (1999) have sought to challenge the conception of single mothers on welfare as being dependent due to moral degeneracy or dysfunctional lifestyles. Whilst this work provided a rebuttal of conservative conceptions of ‘dependence’ among poor urban communities, it largely avoided providing a theoretical analysis of the concept’s analytical limitations and political performative effects more generally.

Some of the groundworks for a general theory of dependence have been laid by sociologists. One of the most significant works in the history of British sociology is 1957’s Family and kinship in East London. In this book, Peter Wilmott and Michael Young argued against traditional sociological models, which held that a move from the rural to the urban in ‘advanced’ economies, such as the UK, automatically led to the death of extended kinship systems and communities built upon such networks. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork in Britain’s rapidly decolonising empire, Young and Wilmott conducted long term fieldwork in London’s East End largely based upon repeated semi-structured interviews and on-going participant observation. They discovered that this part of London was informally governed by kinship networks, several generations deep and normally headed by an elderly strong matriarch. This was reminiscent, they argued, of the kind of structure that anthropologists had found in African villages (Young and Wilmott 1957: 57-8). Their insight might seem unsurprising today, but at the time it was something of a revolution.

In Family and kinship, Young praised the community that he saw as emerging from people’s dependence on kinship ties. He feared that the welfare state was loosening those ties and thereby ushering in an age of irresponsible individualism. While dependence on the state allowed the poorest to escape dependence upon their communities that had previously restrained their potentially anti-social behaviour, welfare payments also risked creating an illegitimate and unearned independence with dangerous anti-social consequences. It was dependence on these kinship networks that Wilmott and Young saw as providing the discipline and sanctioning force that stopped young East-Enders from indulging in petty crime, violence, sloth, and so on. This concern was a muted backdrop to Family and kinship but became an increasingly urgently stated concern in Young’s returns to the East End (Gavron, Dench & Young 2005). Here East London’s white working class was portrayed as having lost the community that sustained it half a century earlier. It was now unfavourably compared to Bengali immigrants in the area, who still lived in a community due to their reluctance to rely on state benefits and their persistent dependence on kin.

Young’s pessimist reappraisal was consistent with an emerging fear among politicians and commentators in the UK in the early 2000s that full employment would never return and that sections of the working class had become content with their allegedly illegitimate and unearned independence from community that dependence on the state had bought them. This fear was shared by centrist politicians who espoused the then-prevalent politics of multicultural neoliberalism. What Young’s interventions illustrated was that underpinning these fears was the continued rhetorical importance of a link between labour and independence. In essence, Young argued that if you want independence from your kin (a morally dubious desire in his eyes in the first place) then you should earn it rather than expect it by right. Young’s intervention draws attention to the continuing importance of wage labour as an ideal, if not always a present, reality in shaping the boundaries of dependence and independence. This is a long-established linkage in Western political theory, and debate continued to matter in the early 2000s. It is a linkage that a range of anthropological analyses have sought to problematise.

Wage labour and dependence

In many parts of the world it has become common to think of wage labour as one of the main available prerequisites for full independent personhood, at least for those born without access to inherited wealth. Yet we know that this is a highly context-dependent perspective. In fact, wage labour was originally held in seventeenth century England to be a form of dependency upon an employer little different from vagrancy or begging. At the time, only property ownership was cast as the basis for the non-dependence that enabled full individual participation in politics (e.g. Macpherson 1962: 128). It was only in the early nineteenth century that wage labour had become reconceptualised as the basis for the poor to gain independence. Historical analyses such as that of Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]) in The great transformation have drawn attention to the ways in which dependence became characterised as a moral vice by middle-class social reformers in this period. Polanyi tied this process to the increasing need for the rising power of the market in organising society and the consequent need to encourage the spread of wage labour. His analysis also draws our attention to the ways in which dependence on state authorities, wage labour, and kinship ties are mutually constitutive. Polanyi describes how reductions of relief for the rural poor in the United Kingdom (which can be viewed as the precursor of contemporary welfare programmes) were a central part of dividing a ‘respectable’ and ‘deserving’ working class, labouring to achieve independent self-reliance, from a class of ‘undeserving’ and ‘dependent’ paupers. A key moment in this transition was the abolishment of the so-called ‘Speenhamland’ system of poor relief, in which many local parishes had subsidised the living expenses of the unemployed rural poor. It was replaced with the Poor Law of 1834 that mandated parishes to force the unemployed into workhouses. Such changes in the nature of wage labour and state support are intimately entangled with changes in the nature of kinship interdependencies, as Polanyi observes. He points out that there had never been a public policy more popular than Speenhamland, as it meant that ‘parents were free of the care of their children, and children were no more dependent upon parents’ (Polanyi 1957: 83). Polanyi here foreshadows Young’s anxieties two centuries later, about the ways in which dependency on the state increased the possibility of independence from kin.

Anthropologists have also observed that the emergence of wage labour as a key social relationship in many parts of the world has reconfigured understandings of dependence and independence, challenging the universalising assumptions of liberal political theory. Australian expatriates, studied in Port Moresby between 1970 and 1972, which was the capital of the colonial territory of New Guinea at the time, considered wage labour to potentially lift ‘natives’ out of the morally debilitating state of inefficient dependencies on kin held to hold them back (Strathern 1975). For New Guinea migrants in Port Moresby, however, wage labour was sometimes characterised as a humiliating form of dependence upon employers who were not restrained by such obligations from potentially using their economic power to humiliate or damage their employees.

Ethnographic accounts from Europe also complicate the assumptions that the relationship between wage labour and dependence is clear-cut. Andrea Muehlebach’s account of the outsourcing of care of the elderly in Italy to poorly paid migrant workers from 2003 until 2005 draws our attention to the ways in which wage labour is not a singular category. Relatives of the elderly often demanded a degree of attention and emotional care from paid care workers that went beyond what might be expected in other similarly paid jobs. As one informant put it, it was not a ‘… normal job. You’re not a bricklayer’ (Muehlebach 201: 211). Muehlebach draws attention to the ways in which the perceived ‘dependency’ of the elderly recipients of care led to a situation in which the workers’ activities were viewed as sitting uneasily between an ethos of professional wage labour and affection. Her informants point to a difference between paid workers and care volunteers in this regard. The volunteers are normally Italians who provide care for the elderly out of a sense of vocation. Although they are not kin to the elderly that they assist, they are seen as providing an affective and genuine care that is more similar to the kind of support that kin should ideally be providing. The activity of the immigrant workers, on the other hand, is rendered morally dubious in the eyes of many informants by virtue of being conducted in exchange for wages.

Redrawing ‘dependence’ in the twenty-first century

Modernist teleological hopes that wage labour might expand across the world and provide the basis for universal ‘independence’ have become increasingly hard to sustain in the twenty-first century (Ferguson 2015). The increasing doubt about expanding ‘wage-dependent independence’ marks an epochal shift in how we understand legitimate citizenship and full personhood globally. However, the links between wage labour, idioms of independence, and full citizenship do not change according to singular global logic. In some contexts, such as Southern Africa for example, there can be increasing tolerance for citizenship, even for those who depend on government assistance programmes or universal-national basic income (Ferguson 2015). In others, the response might be an intensification of the rhetorical link between wage labour and legitimate independence, such as in the increasing prevalence of work training schemes in countries like the UK. Such schemes are often described as being largely designed to humiliate participants for their ‘dependence’ upon the state (e.g. Foster 2017: 119).

James Ferguson’s 2013 article ‘Declarations of dependence’ and his subsequent expansion of the article’s main thesis in his 2015 monograph Give a man a fish explicitly deal with the issue of how we might have to reconsider ascriptions of dependence in a time in which more and more people are coming to be ‘surplus’ to the needs of a wage labour economy. Both texts were also major factors in bringing discussion of ‘dependence’ as an analytical category to the forefront of anthropological theory. As noted, the ascription of ‘dependence’ had previously been critiqued by anthropologists who were opposed to the war on welfare that had characterised, in the 1980s, the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan government in the US, and their successors. They explicitly asked if and when ‘dependence’ was to be viewed as a barrier to legitimate adult personhood or citizenship. Building on fieldwork in Southern Africa, Ferguson drew a contrast between Western ‘liberal thought’ that presented dependence as ‘the opposite of freedom’ on the one hand, and a Southern African perspective that ‘has long recognized relations of social dependence as the very foundation of polities and persons alike’ (2013: 223). Ferguson’s work addressed head-on the underlying assumption that dependence led to un-freedom and a lesser form of individual personhood that had been identified by Macpherson as the unstated but implicit assumption underlying classical liberal political theory in the West.

Since their publication, Ferguson’s works have inspired an extensive and broadly supportive body of literature, that illustrate the importance of relations of dependence in enabling types of valued subjectivity that diverge from that of the ideal autonomous individual of Western liberal theory in Southern Africa and beyond. Most of this literature broadly shares Ferguson’s point that relations of dependence continue a long-standing Southern African cultural pattern. They are expressive of a ‘form of a political logic that was broadly characteristic of most precolonial southern African societies’ (Ferguson 2013: 226). Indeed, earlier comparative anthropological works that contrast political power in Europe and Africa describe European power struggles as being largely concerned with control of land. This stands in contrast to Southern Africa, where land was traditionally in abundant supply and leadership amounted to a contest to attract as many followers as possible, a situation famously described by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (1977) as accumulating ‘wealth in people’ (see also Vansina 1990, Guyer 1993). Political power among Ngoni in the early 1950s illustrates this point:

The principal index of power was the number of a man’s dependants. Political struggles were essentially not struggles to control wealth but to enjoy the support of followers (Barnes 1967: 30, cited in Ferguson 2013: 226).

Elements of Ferguson’s framing of dependence have been subject to critical examination by writers otherwise sympathetic to the broad thrust of his argument. One criticism is that his recent argument may lack ethnographic evidence, even if it does raise interesting points. Kathleen Rice, for example, draws attention to the ways in which Ferguson relies primarily on historical accounts rather than contemporary ethnography as his primary means of demonstrating that personhood in contemporary South Africa is deeply relational relative to the West (2015: 60).

Whilst this might seem to be a minor difference of emphasis, Rice’s intervention draws attention to a potentially wider issue. In today’s interconnected world, it may be an overgeneralisation to draw up different geographical and cultural areas and to argue that part of the essential nature of one ‘social system’ such as ‘The West’ has an abhorrence of dependence, while others, such as ‘Southern Africa’ validate and encourage it (Ferguson 2013: 226). Ferguson’s 2013 article contains no less than thirteen instances of the phrase ‘social system’ in a manner that seemed to refer to a fixed bounded sociocultural entity, such as ‘the Ngoni social system’, for example (Ferguson 2013: 225). Such schematic and frequently static models of bounded cultures make it difficult to deal with people who live at the borders of ‘cultures’; they tend to erase important differences within those boundaries; these models often fail to deal with the historical entanglements of colonialism and postcolonial global society; and they fail to deal with histories of interconnection more generally (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 7-8). It may be the fact that Ferguson himself had pioneered criticism of such bounded cultural models twenty years earlier, that his argument around cultural difference based on dependence has found some acceptance today (e.g. Haynes 2017).

This Southern African model of leadership through amassing followers is in some regards similar to the Melanesian pattern of ‘big man’ leadership. In parts of Melanesia, local leaders known as ‘big men’ have been described as amassing dependent followers through the creation of ‘gift-debts’ that followers cannot repay. For example, a ‘big man’ may sponsor the bridewealth payments of young men, thus binding them to him with a lifelong obligation (see Martin 2019). Similar to the Southern African examples, the focus on wealth in people in Melanesia is often considered to be the outcome of an abundance of land (e.g. Martin 2018: 91-2). That said, land claims and the creation of dependent followers can go hand in hand as well. The Tolai people of East New Britain, studied between 2002 and 2004, for example claimed customary rights to land through activity on it, which included clearing and cultivation of crops. For that claim to remain active, activity had to be maintained. This in part explained the desire for big men to amass as many dependent followers as possible. They recruited them even from outside of their immediate kinship networks, as these dependents could be used to maintain land claims. By the end of the twentieth century, this situation appeared to have drastically altered, however, as a result of a population explosion and the emergence of cash cropping for the global market. As a consequence, the political economy among Tolai people today has shifted from leaders trying to maximise their number of dependents to limiting the number of people who can make claims on them (2018: 91).

Another issue raised in current debates around dependence is whether this concept lies at the heart of a cultural misunderstanding between black South Africans who validate it and predominantly white expatriates who are introducing the idea that dependence is a failing to be overcome. We already saw versions of this question in work on New Guinea (Strathern 1975). Considering wage labour to be a mechanism by which expatriates hope to drag locals out of ‘dependence’ has also been documented in Zimbabwe by Erica Bornstein. Here, foreign NGO workers have been shown to painstakingly explain to local villagers that the purpose of development programmes and child sponsorship is to encourage villagers to stand on their own two feet and that they should ‘…not depend on others but should work for themselves’ (Bornstein 2001: 613). Bornstein also describes how NGO workers explained to villagers who sought cash payments that aid-donors wanted to ‘… feel parental delight at seeing their children walking for the first time’ (2001: 613). By focusing on child sponsorship, this work draws attention to the ways in which Western liberal thought does acknowledge childhood as a legitimate stage of dependence that should ideally be transcended on the way to adulthood. The dependence of childhood and the state of dependence are often conflated in ascriptions to people in the global South by a series of powerful actors from colonial authorities in the past to development agencies in the present day. Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2002: 22) observations about how the Australian government acted as the legal guardian for every Aboriginal child in the Northern Territory from 1911 onwards points our attention in a similar direction. Because Aboriginal adults were considered insufficiently independent, they could not be trusted with the care of their own dependents, meaning that the state took it upon itself to step in and take the responsibility. These works all in their different ways frame the situation as one in which an external group or institution of Western origin (expatriates promoting wage labour, NGOs promoting development or the nation-state) step in and attempt to impose a negative understanding of dependence upon local communities. However, my own work with Tolai people in Papua New Guinea draws attention to a different dynamic, in which rapidly emerging socioeconomic inequalities within local communities have led to a situation in which it is the more economically or politically successful local people who begin to adopt the rhetoric of possessive individualism (Martin 2007). Here, local elites denigrate dependence as a means to distance themselves from their own grassroots relatives, whom they castigate for wanting to be ‘spoonfed’ (Martin 2013) or demanding to be ‘fed like children’ (Martin 2020).

Examples such as this might lead us to a wider observation, namely the need to pay attention to the ways in which the kinds of relationships characterised as relations of dependence and the values placed upon them vary far across different groups and across the years. Maxim Bolt agrees that dependence is validated in Southern Africa as a ‘basic enduring model of sociality that has… survived social and economic transformations’ in contrast to the ‘lack of freedom’ that it signals from a liberal perspective’ (2013: 244). However, he goes on to caution that the meaning and experience of relations that might be characterised as ‘dependence’ varies massively depending upon context and power relations within the particular geographic area under examination. Bolt observes, for example, that during the colonial era in Southern Africa ‘personal dependence shaped life far more explicitly on farms than on the mines’, yet mine labour was more highly validated and sought after by black South Africans for a variety of socioeconomic reasons (2013: 244). This leads Bolt to conclude that we require a ‘messier picture’ when we think about dependence (2013: 245). All of this might suggest a starting point for analysis in which anthropologists consider these manifold differences without taking them as being necessarily the outcome of different regional cultural logics. Instead, they may want to focus as much on the changing economic factors that shape how dependence is lived and experienced. In both South Africa and the UK there are on-going political struggles over the extent to which different forms of ‘dependence’ should be accepted in a changing world. In particular, the situation at the start of the twenty-first century in which the previously widely accepted link between productive wage labour and legitimate independence is being reconfigured, often in widely divergent directions (Ferguson 2015). In such times, a comparative ethnographic analysis of the social effects of contested ascriptions of dependence (Bolt 2013: 245) becomes ever more important. Such an approach would not consider ‘dependence’ as the description of a particular state of being to which a particular definition can be fixed. Instead, the task of ethnographers would become to analyse how relations that get characterised under its umbrella become grouped together, and what the wider effects of such ascriptions of dependence are.

Conclusion

The idea of ‘dependence’ has long been a central theme in many anthropological analyses as an underlying analytical assumption. It has been commonly used in the analysis of non-Western societies as a means of stressing an interdependent model of human being that stands in contrast to the assumed autonomous individual actor of Western liberal theory. When anthropologists have discussed ‘dependence’ in Western contexts, it has often been in terms of a critique of accusations of the morally debilitating effects of dependence on particular populations, such as welfare recipients. Despite this, the concept of dependence itself has only recently become a central focus of anthropological theory. In particular, the work of Ferguson has made explicit the contrast between Western liberal associations between dependence and a desired state of autonomous freedom and alternative conceptions of personhood that validate some dependencies as their basis of being. As ever-larger populations across the world are potentially being cast as surplus to the needs of the wage labour economy, a previous cultural association between wage labour and validated forms of independence is becoming increasingly contested and difficult to sustain. Anthropology has a valuable role to play in documenting and analysing the performative effects of such contested and shifting ascriptions of dependence at this pivotal moment in global history.

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Note on contributor

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The death of the big men and the rise of the big shots: custom and conflict in East New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

[1] Notable examples of these conservative attacks on welfare ‘dependence’ include Murray (1984), Besharov (1995), and Mead (2004).