Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Structuralism

Revolution

Felix Stein — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:26:19 +0000

University of Sussex

Initially published 16 Oct 2019

Abstract:

Revolutions encompass political mobilizations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Although early anthropology rarely addressed such movements or programmes for change directly, in recent years longstanding anthropological insights have helped shape an emerging field of the anthropology of revolution. Ethnographers’ non state-centric approaches to studying political life have generated distinctive, and wide-ranging, insights into revolutionary movements and their attempts at social transformation. In-depth, long-term fieldwork highlights how revolutions involve not just transformations, but also continuities, contradictions, and slowly-unfolding legacies. Social life during revolution, even while experienced as exceptional and liminal, relates to political, economic, religious, and social phenomena before and after revolution. Ethnographic studies have also foregrounded contradictions and paradoxes surrounding official narratives of revolution as ordered teleology and emancipation from class-based, gendered, and racial marginalization. Finally, recent studies have foregrounded long-term legacies arising from divergent revolutionary outcomes.

Introduction

Whilst there are different ways of defining the term, revolutions as understood here encompass political mobilisations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Activist and scholarly discussions of revolution address both movements of revolutionary activists, and outcomes such as the achievement (or not) of rapid transformations for which militants mobilise (see Bayat 2017: 15). The anthropological study of revolution in both these senses has begun to coalesce as a field of research relatively recently. Early generations of anthropologists had usually focused on social stability, rather than revolution. As the discipline changed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, anthropologists developed distinctive insights into revolutionary contexts. In doing so, at times anthropologists drew explicitly on longstanding insights into social life. Thus, the anthropology of revolution is both new and, in a sense, has deep roots.

For reasons of space, the present discussion does not extend to a review of related topics such as organised political violence, guerrilla fighters, insurgencies, and the responses of non-combatants to them (e.g. Hoffman 2011, Coulter 2009, Nordstrom 1997, Burnyeat 2018). Rather, the focus of this entry is a review of ethnographic and similarly rich qualitative studies (e.g. Shayne 2004, Vince 2010) which show how anthropologically-minded, non-state-centric analyses illuminate lived experiences of revolution. Historical and political science approaches have often focused on the conditions which lead to revolution, and the causes and scope of revolutionary outcomes (e.g. Tilly 1978: 189-222). This scholarship acknowledges that seizing state power does not necessarily lead to the revolutionary transformation of society (Tilly 1978: 220). Anthropologists have also challenged the idea that revolutions entail the rapid transformation of social structures, in particular by highlighting their continuities, contradictions, and slowly-unfolding legacies.

This entry first addresses definitions of revolution. It then describes how longstanding anthropological accounts of ritual and kinship, and in particular the liminal stage of rites of passage (Turner 1967), provided for distinctive anthropological insight into revolution. The entry then identifies three areas of discussion which have emerged as a result of the way that anthropologists place revolution in wider social contexts. First, anthropologists have explored how social life during revolutions, even while experienced as exceptional and liminal, relates to political, economic, and religious life before and after they occur. Second, anthropologists have foregrounded contradictions and paradoxes surrounding official narratives of revolution as ordered teleology and emancipation from class-based, gendered, racial, and other forms of marginalisation. Third, ethnographic studies have highlighted long-term legacies arising from divergent revolutionary outcomes.

Defining revolution

‘Revolution’ has two, apparently quite different, meanings in English (see Donham 1999: 1-2). The older meaning of revolution, prevalent until the Enlightenment, refers to ‘re-volution’, in the sense of the restoration of things to their original place. Such an interpretation corresponds to an understanding of time as cyclical. Time, in such an account, functions like planets revolving around the sun and returning eventually to their original place. Another pre-Enlightenment understanding of re-volution is the notion of the ‘wheel of fortune’: the metaphorical wheel revolves, causing people’s fortunes to rise and eventually fall back to an earlier position.^[1]Prior to the Enlightenment, political events described as a revolution similarly referred to the restoration of a previous state of affairs. For example, in late sixteenth century France, Henri, King of Navarre (1553-1610 CE) was baptised a Catholic but raised by his mother in the Protestant faith. Nevertheless, when he became King of France in 1593, he converted to Catholicism in order to appease those opposed to a Protestant taking the French throne. Observers commented on his return to the Catholic faith as a ‘revolution’ (Donham 1999: 1-2).

A contrasting meaning of revolution came to the fore with the Enlightenment, however. This sense, which has become the predominant contemporary meaning, implies a reversal of social, political, and economic order. Thinking of revolution as reversal corresponds in turn to a notion of time as linear, not cyclical. From the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment values of belief in human rationality as a source of progress implied teleological understandings of time, and the assumption that humans could transform their political, economic, and social life for the better. Since the Enlightenment, the toppling of monarchical and imperial regimes are known as the American, French, Haitian, Mexican and Russian Revolutions etc., reflecting teleological notions of time, the human capacity for progress, and an understanding of revolution as reversal. One of the most influential theories of revolution, Marxism, similarly takes revolution to be a reversal and a means of achieving progress towards the end point of socialism.

In accordance with this second meaning, narratives of revolutionaries since the Enlightenment depict revolutions as bringing about a reversal of existing orders – political, social, and economic – and the establishment of an alternative order. Definitions of revolution within the social sciences have sought to capture this sense of achieving not only political change, but also wider social change. One approach for doing so distinguishes ‘social revolutions’ from both ‘political revolutions’ and ‘economic revolutions’ (Skocpol 1979: 4-5). In this account, political revolutions might take the form of a coup d’état, and produce a change in those occupying government; economic revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution, bring about a change in the organisation of production and distribution and, we might add, consumption. In theory, political revolution in this sense could take place without economic revolution, and vice versa. When two kinds of programmes for change combine, however, bringing together both change in the way that political authority (such as the state) is structured, and change in the way that social relations are ordered and inequalities legitimated (such as class, or gendered and generational relations), then this would amount to more than a political or economic revolution, but rather ‘social revolution’ (Skocpol 1979: 4-5).

The long-term, in-depth empirical inquiries of anthropologists and related scholars are well-placed to grant insight into those revolutions combining ambitions for political, economic, and social change. Revolutions thus defined entail

a fundamental and irreversible change in the organization of a society; the destruction, often rapid and violent, of a previous form of social and political organization, together with myths which sustained it and the ruling groups which it sustained, and their replacement by a new institutional order, sustained by new myths and sustaining new rulers (Clapham 1988: 1).

The scope of change extends to ‘a rapid, basic transformation of a society’s political structures’ and ‘an effort to transform not just the political institutions but also the justifications for political authority in society, thus reformulating the ideas/values that underpin political legitimacy’ (Thomassen 2012: 683). Importantly, anthropological studies draw attention to ways in which transformations take place as changes in everyday lives as ‘micro-processes’: that is, ‘a countlessly repeated uprooting of social relations, in thousands of local communities, in millions of lives’ (Donham 1999: 35).

The scope of revolutions necessarily varies across different contexts, as does the meaning of local terms used to mean ‘revolution’. Amongst the various terms used in other languages, several emphasise change moving in a singular direction. For instance, the Arabic term is thawra, from the root ‘to rise up’. The Chinese fanshen means ‘to turn the body’, used in the sense of standing up to oppression (Hinton 1966). The Quechua/Aymara term pachakuti, though, is more ambiguous: it combines ‘upheaval’ (kuti) and a term spanning both ‘world balance’ and ‘space-time’ (pacha). Pachakuti has been used since the sixteenth century to describe the catastrophe of Spain’s invasion, but also since then to describe rebellions seeking to overcome colonial and neo-colonial rule and to restore indigenous world balance (Silva Rivera 1991, Swinehart 2019). Despite the emphasis on rupture/transformation across a range of terms as well as in definitions of revolution, echoes of the pre-Enlightenment understanding of revolution as a process of restoration nevertheless continue to haunt revolutionary movements and events in the post-Enlightenment period. Revolutions may re-establish the kinds of hierarchies that revolutionaries originally attempted to question – a sense of ‘revolution as restoration’ to which anthropological approaches have pointed.

A field takes shape

Early to mid-twentieth century anthropology focused on colonised peoples on the margins of capitalist economies. The early years of the discipline thus at first seem unpromising terrain for assessing revolutions. Nevertheless, one of anthropology’s founding figures, Marcel Mauss, analysed Russia’s Bolshevik revolutionary government as it unfolded in the years following the October 1917 revolution (Mauss 1984 [1924-5]). It was Mauss’ work on gifts, though, rather than on Bolshevism, which became foundational in anthropology. Arguing that gifts can create strong and lasting bonds between givers and recipients, Mauss stressed – crucially for his own and subsequent work on revolution – that some fields of social life, such as gift giving, interconnect with so many other aspects, such as politics, law, economics, religion, kinship, etc., that they are a ‘total social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1990 [1923-4]). Mauss recognised that revolutions – like gifts – connect many areas of social life: he saw the Russian Revolution as ‘of special interest to the sociologist’ because it was ‘a gigantic social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1984 [1924-5]: 336). Subsequent ethnographic accounts of revolution similarly embed the analysis of revolution in wide-ranging areas of social life.

Despite Mauss’ interest in Bolshevism, early to mid-twentieth century anthropology neglected revolutionary movements. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the dominant theoretical school in British social anthropology was structural-functionalism. It assumed that persons and social institutions ultimately served the function of reproducing and maintaining the prevailing social order, and that society functioned as an isolated whole. Consequently, structural-functionalist studies sought to explain social stability and the reproduction of hierarchy in apparently unchanging societies. For instance, in the context of richer agriculturalists’ dominance of poorer cattle herders among the Kpelle of central Liberia, a mid-twentieth century anthropological study analysed social rituals (Gibbs 1963; Gibbs, Breitrose & Silverman 1970). From a structural-functionalist perspective, Kpelle rituals – such as public dispute resolution councils and the accompanying slaughtering of a calf for wide distribution of the meat – dissipated social tension whilst legitimising, reproducing, and entrenching existing hierarchies. To the extent that this kind of anthropological inquiry engaged with revolution, it did so indirectly by explaining why and how societies managed to avoid it.

Similarly, theoretical predisposition to see certain societies as static and unchanging prevented some anthropologists from recognising how revolutionary conditions emerge. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a flourishing field of Andeanist studies. Andeanismo, or Andeanism, as a theoretical perspective assumed that Andean societies were largely pristine, unchanging cultures (Starn 1991). Andeanism was one of the factors which meant that most scholars during this period failed to acknowledge that in Peru there were growing connections between rural and urban communities, and that many Andean Peruvians desired to fight against conditions of poverty. Andeanism left ‘hundreds’ (Starn 1991: 63) of anthropologists surprised by, and struggling to explain, the outbreak in 1980 of Peru’s Maoist armed guerrillas, the Shining Path.

Although andeanismo clung to notions of social conservatism, in the 1960s and 1970s the problematic assumptions underpinning structural-functionalism became clearer. Anthropologists were increasingly critical of static notions of culture and social order (Geertz 1975, Clifford 1988), and of complicity with colonial domination of non-Western peoples (Asad 1973). Yet during this period, some earlier anthropological work on the reproduction of social structures emerged as the background for insight into revolution as a social process entailing – like other forms of ritual – rupture with, temporary suspension of, and then restoration of social order.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1950s with the Ndembu of then Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia), Victor Turner studied the role of ritual in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Turner took inspiration from the work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage from one stage of the life course to another. Van Gennep (1960 [1909]) had suggested three stages in the rites of passage through the life course: separation, liminality, and re-aggregation. Turner (1967) suggested that four stages were at stake in ritual for transitioning to a new stage in the life course: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. He emphasised that during the phase of crisis (van Gennep’s liminal phase), there was a particular quality of social experience. Those involved experienced a temporary suspension of ordinary forms of hierarchy. During this crisis/liminal phase, persons acquired intense feelings of camaraderie for one another, which Turner called communitas. These feelings of communitas continued to underpin strong bonds between members of the same age set. These bonds lasted even after the phase of liminality ended, and ordinary social hierarchies were restored with each person taking up his or her place within those hierarchies.

Later, Turner (1988) applied his ideas about liminality and communitas to contemporary political contexts of revolution (see Thomassen 2012: 688). He suggested that movements seeking to reverse social order, such as revolutions, created spaces of liminality and communitas. From the anthropology of ritual, then, emerged one of anthropology’s most distinctive contributions to the analysis of revolutions: revolutionaries often experience their mobilisation as times and spaces of liminality or as the temporary cancellation of ordinary hierarchies. As is the case for the liminality of rites of passage (Turner 1967), revolutionaries may experience communitas, the intense solidarity amongst those who have shared extraordinary liminal circumstances. For instance, in the early 2000s, feelings of communitas bolstered young Iranians who engaged in rebellious acts that defied the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic (Mahdavi 2009). These young people considered themselves to be taking part in what they called a ‘sexual revolution’ (enghelāb-e-jensi) by dancing, party-going, wearing attention-grabbing styles of clothing, and engaging in extra-marital sexual relations – activities all forbidden by the Islamic Republic. They were convinced that cumulatively these small acts of resistance questioned the legitimacy of the state. In the words of one young woman,

If any member of the morality police tries to touch me, I will scream at him, and everyone will support me. I can wear my nail polish, and my lipstick too! That means something. That means that we are getting to them, that we do have power (Mahdavi 2009: 122).

Anthropology’s turn away from the static to the dynamic, and its increasing attempts to interrogate global and local power structures, saw late twentieth and early twenty-first century analyses of revolutions blossom in their thematic, temporal, and geographic coverage. To mention but a few studies, anthropologists have examined revolutionary life in: socialist societies and movements in Eastern Europe (Verdery 1996, Ledeneva 1998); Latin America (Rosdendahl 1997, Montoya 2012, Härkönen 2016); Asia (Humphrey 1983, Luong 1992, Yan 2003) and Africa (Lan 1985, Davis 1987, Donham 1999); the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran (Haeri 1989); the 1994 Zapatista guerrilla uprising against Mexico’s neoliberal policies (Nash 2001, Speed 2008); and the Arab Spring revolutions (Bayat 2017). This scholarship takes inspiration from Turner’s and Mauss’ insights into the ways in which revolutions – even when participants experience them as liminal – connect with wider social, political, and economic structures and values.

Placing revolutions in wider social contexts

We might expect that, as movements aspiring to achieve social and political transformations, revolutions rework political and economic life. But it is worth stressing the multiple ways in which revolutions draw upon religious life. Some religious orientations have famously inspired revolutionaries. Liberation theologists in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s took inspiration from Christian faith to encourage political action to counter socioeconomic inequities (Gutiérrez 1974 [1971]). Connections between religious life and revolutionary action also exist for revolutionary movements which directly challenge institutionalised religion.

Turner’s work established that revolution shares characteristics of religious ritual. Revolutions also connect with other aspects of religious and moral life. Their discourse can assume the qualities of demand for self-sacrifice. In socialist Cuba, revolutionary subjects experience, talk about, and at times put into practice a commitment of self-sacrifice for the revolution, even to the point of expressing the righteousness of being willing to die for it (Holbraad 2014). Cubans distinguish between the revolutionary principles to which they feel loyal, and disappointment with everyday living conditions in revolutionary Cuba. Their views that the revolution deserves self-sacrifice withstand their complaints about everyday shortcomings (Holbraad 2014: 6).

Another parallel between religious and revolutionary social life concerns injunctions to preserve ‘purity’. Just as some devotees are meant to keep themselves ‘pure’ from threats such as sin and pollution, revolutionary cadres may face pressure to keep themselves ‘pure’ by distinguishing themselves from the masses who have not yet acquired sufficient revolutionary credentials. This was the case in Sri Lanka in the 1980s for cadres serving with the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the areas under the movement’s control (Thiranagama 2011: 212). Overtly, the LTTE sought to distance itself from Hinduism and its taboos about specific categories of people maintaining their social purity through the avoidance of contact with polluting persons and matter. Nevertheless, the movement itself engaged in ‘constant purification’ to reinforce cadres as a special category distinct from the wider population – with this separation ultimately constraining the movement’s ability to transform Tamil society (Thiranagama 2011: 212).

Revolutionaries can also echo devotees in their concerns to respect a higher moral order. In the northwest Sahara, from the 1970s to the present day, Sahrawi revolutionaries hailing from the Polisario Front, the liberation movement which seeks to liberate the disputed Western Sahara from Moroccan annexation, have sought to transform Sahrawi society. These revolutionaries live in exile in autonomously run refugee camps in southwest Algeria. On the one hand, the refugees and their government experience their revolution as a new social contract introducing a new governing authority – their (partially recognised) Sahrawi state authority – which replaces tribal authority (Wilson 2016b).^[2]On the other hand, though, Sahrawi refugees also experience their revolution as a new moral contract between governing authorities and governed constituencies (Wilson 2016b: 238-43). This moral contract emphasises that each party expects the other to put the interests of national liberation and the revolution above narrower interests of personal or familial gain. This moral contract determines whether or not refugees consider the government’s discretionary distribution of resources, such as extra rations and travel opportunities, as corruption or not, and whether officials consider refugees to have deserving claims on them. This notion of revolution as a moral contract has proved enduring in exile. Over time, tribes have partially re-emerged amongst Sahrawi refugees as influential in areas of governance such as dispute resolution and elections, suggesting that the revolution as social contract has modified. But the sense of revolution as a moral contract, entailing injunctions for parties to live up to moral norms, has persisted.

Another link between religion and revolution is that religious dispositions can provide pathways for joining a revolutionary movement. In India in the 1970s, a Maoist guerrilla movement, the Naxalites, emerged to oppose the Indian state. With the Indian state fighting back against them, by the 2000s Maoist militants were operating under cover in terrains such as the jungles of Jharkhand. The marginalisation of Jharkhand’s tribal populations also motivated locals to support, and sometimes join, insurgents who were intent upon challenging that marginalisation (Shah 2014). The guerrillas were expected to give up personal ties; but before becoming revolutionaries, many senior guerrilla leaders had in their youth been religious renouncers who had already abandoned personal possessions and ties. Religious orientation can thus prepare the way for revolutionary commitment.

To explain the endurance of the Naxalite movement, Shah (2014) nevertheless stresses both cultural factors (such as religious practice) and political and economic factors (such as the exploitation and marginalisation of India’s tribal communities in Jharkhand). She echoes Mauss’ emphasis on the interconnection in revolutions of cultural, religious, political, and economic life. In addition to the many ways in which revolutions can resemble religious life, they also draw on longstanding political and economic forms.

The revolutionary reworking of existing political forms can be seen in a Shiraz village during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 (Hegland 2013). Villagers perceived political life as a set of potential conflicts between taifeh (tribal) groups. Villagers understood these groups to be dynamic coalitions of persons with shared interests that brought together and surpassed kinship groups. When conflicts arose, belligerents mobilised taifeh connections until one group prevailed and the conflict was resolved. In the build-up to 1979, the Shah’s increased political repression had disposed most villagers towards revolt; nevertheless, the specific way in which male and female villagers took the decision to join in protests derived from their understanding of taifeh conflicts. A villager associated with the Shah’s supporters assaulted another villager opposed to the Shah. This incident led other villagers to mobilise, just as they would have for a conflict between taifeh groups, and join anti-Shah protests. Pre-existing political values and structures, here entailing tribal conflict, shaped participation in the revolution, even though the latter came to present itself as a form of rupture with the past. Interestingly, longstanding political values both facilitated, and at the same time were transformed through, revolutionary participation. Where villagers had not previously recognised women’s contributions to village political networks, they acknowledged women’s contributions to revolutionary action (Hegland 2013: 189).

Previous economic forms influenced the shape of revolutionary structures amongst Western Sahara’s revolutionaries in exile in Algeria (Wilson 2016b: 136-40). From the formation of the refugee camps in 1976 into the 2000s, the refugee government and liberation movement, Polisario Front, recruited unwaged labour from refugees to staff social services and ministries. By the 2000s, however, refugees expected to earn money to compensate for decreasing rations. By the mid 2000s, Polisario Front was having to pay teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats (low and irregular) wages. Yet amid expectations of wages, one form of unwaged labour survived: ‘work party’ events known as a ḥamla (campaign). These work parties were a reworking-cum-transformation of local labour-pooling known as twiza. Ḥamla and twiza shared characteristics such as sex-segregation, a light-hearted atmosphere, and an expectation that organisers provide some drink/food as hospitality. The transformation was that where twiza had relied on tribal networks, the revolutionary government recruited ḥamla participants (and also provided the hospitality). In sum, the creation of revolutionary forms of state power can rely on recycling pre-existing economic, political, and social forms.

Paradoxes and contradictions within revolutions

Revolutionary activists and leaders typically stress their intentions to achieve social, political, and economic change – and anthropological work often challenges this by showing how revolutions rework existing social forms. This combination of rupture and continuity constitutes a contradiction among the many paradoxes within revolutions. Anthropologists are not alone in observing these contradictions. Many revolutions – the American (1765-1783), French (1789), Russian (1917), amongst others – have claimed to promote emancipation but have nevertheless preserved or established forms of subjugation. It is also well known that revolutionaries who in theory support, for example, women’s emancipation may expect women to put gender-specific demands ‘on hold’ whilst the ‘higher’ goals of capturing state power are achieved, as was the case amongst Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s (Molyneux 1985). Revolutionary vanguards also tend to mobilise mass supporters less well-versed in revolutionary discourse than cadres. These supporters may have rebelled for the ‘wrong’ reasons, leading to the paradox that vanguards who seize power expunge revolutionaries deemed ideologically deficient from historical narratives (Scott 1979). Further revolutionary paradoxes and contradictions come to light through ethnographic studies.

There have been many paradoxes concerning the revolutionary promotion of gendered forms of emancipation. Socialist revolutionary societies have focused on increasing women’s labour force participation, assuming that achieving (more) equal rights for men and women as workers will achieve broader gender parity. Nevertheless, women are usually still left with the main responsibilities of homemaking, in addition to being political activists. This leaves women in revolutionary societies with a ‘triple burden’ of waged labour, domestic duties, and political activism (Verdery 1996: 65). In socialist Cuba, another paradox is that the state’s provision for women’s practical needs, such as labour force participation and childcare, has, in some Cubans’ eyes, diminished the possibilities for the development of autonomous feminist activism (Shayne 2004: 152). Revolutionary agendas to promote gendered emancipation can be fraught with contradiction.

It is far from guaranteed that women who participated in revolutionary action, including by taking up arms, feel recognised for their efforts either by a revolutionary government or by peers. Women revolutionaries may afterwards be treated by peers as if they are polluted, as was the case for some Algerian female revolutionaries whose moral propriety male peers questioned (Vince 2016: 140-1). Former members of Mozambique’s elite female Frelimo detachment similarly bemoaned that male co-fighters were unwilling to choose female combatants as spouses, preferring instead to marry women whom they perceived would be more compliant (West 2000). Egalitarian values do not always travel smoothly from slogans to everyday lived experience.

Just as promises of revolutionary gendered emancipation meet contradictions in practice, official narratives of revolutionary origins and outcomes can face competing personal experiences. The 1974 Ethiopian revolution established a Marxist-Leninist state. After the coup, Amharic-speaking members of the revolutionary vanguard set out to bring the revolution and its promise of modernisation to remote regions, including that of the Maale people in the South (Donham 1999). Maale subjective experiences, however, disrupted the narrative that the revolution brought modernisation. The Maale had already experienced a ‘pre-revolution’ of rupture to their traditional social order during Protestant missionary activity (Donham 1999: 82-101). Furthermore, Amharic conquest in the late nineteenth century had already so transformed Maale traditional kingship that when revolutionary students destroyed symbols of Maale kingship, some locals interpreted this as the restoration of earlier (pre Amharic-conquest) tradition (Donham 1999: 59-81). The Maale case also contradicted theoretical expectations that the relatively affluent ‘middle’ level of peasants would be more likely to embrace revolution than their more indigent, oppressed peers. Eric Wolf (1969) theorised that the poorest peasants would be too downtrodden to rebel. In fact, those Maale who most readily mobilised as revolutionaries hailed from the poorer converts to Christianity rather than middle-ranking Maale traditionalists (Donham 1999: 46). Popular experience of revolution can contradict officially promoted intentions and expectations.

One consequence of the origins and results of revolutions playing out quite differently from participants’ expectations is that many revolutionaries end up feeling disillusioned. They feel disappointed with the outcomes after their extraordinary and painful efforts and sacrifices. Revolutionary disappointment stretches from former female fighters in Mozambique (West 2000) to mid-level cadres and rank-and-file activists in El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí liberation front turned peacetime political party (Sprenkels 2018). In a Mexican town that was one of the first to join the country’s 1910 revolution, locals in the 1980s felt like ‘spent cartridges of revolution’ because they found themselves still fighting the same struggles over land and labour (Nugent 1993). The emotional experience characteristic of revolution can shift over time from communitas to disillusion.

Yet paradoxes can emerge even in cases of revolutionary disappointment: those who are disenchanted with socialism in Cuba still feel loyalty to the revolution (Holbraad 2014). In Egypt, many who mobilied in 2011 to depose President Mubarak felt, once the military deposed democratically elected President Morsi in 2013, that the revolution had failed to transform state power and social life. But many still experienced enormous change in their personal lives – as if there was a lasting, intimate effect of communitas as people questioned old bonds and forged new ones. One Egyptian activist noted,

[S]o much was revealed about people around us... irreconcilable differences in values were revealed. When a group of people are killed and one person reacts by celebrating and the other by mourning… what happens next? There were divorces, estrangement, other big rifts within families (Fernández-Savater et al. 2017: 146-7).

Personal and national experiences of revolutionary rupture and continuity intersect and can indeed contradict one another.

A further, and profound, revolutionary paradox lies in the merging of the two meanings of revolution as transformation and restoration. Revolutionary movements which seek to undo old hierarchies frequently end up creating new kinds of hierarchies, such as between vanguards and to-be-enlightened masses (Donham 1999, Thiranagama 2011) or between those given priority for accessing resources and those excluded (Wilson 2016b: 233-4). In diverse ways, revolutions can end up establishing at least in part a re-aggregation or reintegration of social and political hierarchy.

Legacies of revolution

Anthropologists have studied revolutions as participants and activists (Cabarrús 1983, Speed 2008), as concerned locally employed researchers (Bourdieu & Sayad 1964), and as fieldworkers who happened to be there when revolution erupts (Donham 1999, Hegland 2013). Being in situ during a revolution can nevertheless mean being one of the ‘hidden majority’ excluded from accessing iconic demonstration spaces – such as Cairo’s Tahrir square during the 2011anti-Mubarak protests – and who instead encounter promises of political transformation whilst confined to safer domestic spaces (Winegar 2012). But even when anthropologists cannot conduct fieldwork during revolution, their long-term engagements with interlocutors lead to rich understandings of the legacies of revolutionary movements across varied outcomes not limited to self-proclaimed revolutionary states.

Revolutionary legacies play out in contexts of ambiguity in revolutionary outcomes. The end of revolutionary insurgency and its control over state power does not necessarily mean the end of revolutionary influence. In Nicaragua during the 1990s, a neoliberal government proposed policies that would undo many forms of social protection and progressivism achieved during Sandinista revolutionary rule in the 1980s. Nevertheless, new social movements emerged through which people mobilised to resist neoliberal policies and preserve revolutionary social achievements (Babb 2001). Thus ‘it may be precisely after the revolution that the long struggle for democratisation and economic justice will be waged’ (Babb 2001: 15-6). In El Salvador in 2009, the Farabundo Martí liberation front became the first revolutionary movement in Latin America which, having failed to achieve power through insurgency, took power instead through elections. The ties between erstwhile combatants and revolutionary activists lent themselves to being recycled into ties of electoral clientelism which contributed to the party’s success – despite the fact that many El Salvadorans at the same time felt disillusioned with the recognition they received from their movement-turned-party (Sprenkels 2018). Just as revolutions rework existing social relations, people rework revolutionary social forms and ties as they build post-revolutionary lives and projects.

Close attention to the everyday lives of former revolutionaries opens up the question of when and how revolutions end. In Algeria, official historical narratives focus on the National Liberation Front’s successful achievement of independence and takeover of the government. Life histories of female revolutionary activists from independence in 1962 to the 1990s nevertheless show the many challenges that these women faced in gaining recognition for their contributions and in participating in political and economic life. Yet the women concerned did not necessarily experience this as a sign that the revolution failed, but rather that it had not ended (Vince 2016: 174).

The everyday sociality of defeated revolutionaries who live in conditions of political marginalisation and repression can also call into question the ending of defeated revolutions. In Dhufar, southern Oman, four decades after the 1975 defeat of Dhufar’s erstwhile revolutionary liberation movement, former members socialised in mixed-race, mixed-tribal gatherings that reproduced social egalitarian values associated with the revolution (Wilson 2019). Bonds of communitas between those who experienced revolutionary liminality can outlive the revolutionary liminal period itself. Furthermore, Dhufar continues to produce new platforms for progressive politics in elections and during Oman’s Arab Spring protests (Wilson 2016a). The defeat of a revolution, then, does not preclude later mobilisation echoing earlier demands for social, political, and economic inclusion and participation. Meanwhile in India, former Maoist Naxalite militants demonstrate lasting social consequences of their militancy. When they were Naxalite revolutionaries in their youth in the 1970s, these men questioned conservative norms of masculinity. Decades later, aged in their fifties to eighties, these men continued to question conservative gender norms even after political defeat. They avoided conforming to dominant models of South Asian masculinity of renouncers (those who renounce personal possessions and attachments) or householders (those who take on the responsibilities of heading a household) (Donner 2009). Defeated revolution can have a ‘social afterlife’ (Wilson 2019) whereby networks, values, subjectivities, and identities produced through it ‘cannot just be resolved or cast away’ but ‘have to be negotiated anew’ (Thiranagama 2011: 12).

The long-term legacies of the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the revolutions-turned-civil-wars in Syria and Yemen, are still in the making. Egyptian workers set up revolutionary institutions to organise labour after the 2011 anti-Mubarak revolution. President Sisi’s counterrevolution repressed workers’ organisation – but younger workers’ adoption during their revolutionary organisation of new values of egalitarianism created a legacy of novel values with the potential to outlast more transient institutions (Makram-Ebeid 2014). In Tunisia, the world watched the dramatic events of the Jasmine revolution in 2010-2011, which deposed President Ben Ali. Media stories subsequently moved on, but years of work lie ahead in creating the political aperture for which protesters mobilised. Youth activists who seek to support their country’s transition to democracy through participation in democracy-promotion workshops must strike a balance between making their efforts legible for international funders whilst maintaining locally meaningful forms of engagement (Boutieri 2015). Whatever revolutions’ successes and failures in the eyes of their participants and opponents, legacies of movements and militants’ plans for social change unfold over years.

Anthropologies of revolutions

From having been a discipline which mostly overlooked the possibility for revolution, anthropology has produced distinctive insights into the social, political, economic, and moral lives of revolutionaries. A sub-field of an anthropology of revolution – or rather anthropologies of revolutions, given the range of approaches therein – is emerging in anthropologists’ teaching and writing for audiences in the academy (e.g. Thomassen 2012, Holbraad et al. forthcoming) and beyond (Shah 2018, Starn & La Serna 2019). Anthropological accounts of revolution both underscore the tension between revolutionary liminality and connections with wider social life, and foreground ambivalent experiences of revolution: rupture and continuity intersect, transformation overlaps with restoration of hierarchical social order, and lived experiences contest clear beginnings and endings. Ongoing studies of revolution in anthropology, and beyond, are strengthened by placing the experiences of those living through, with, and after revolution in wider social and temporal contexts.

References

Asad, T. (ed.) 1973. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. London: Ithaca Press.

Babb, F.E. 2001. After revolution: mapping gender and cultural politics in neoliberal Nicaragua. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bayat, A. 2017. Revolution without revolutionaries: making sense of the Arab Spring. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1964. Le déracinement: la crise de l’agriculture traditionelle en Algérie. Paris: Minuit.

Boutieri, C. 2015. Jihadists and activists: Tunisian youth five years later. Open Democracy, 29 July (available on-line: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/jihadists-and-activists-tunisian-youth-five-years-later/). Accessed 10 Oct 2019.

Burnyeat, G. 2018. Chocolate, politics and peace-building: an ethnography of the peace community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cabarrús, C.R. 1983. Génesis de una revolución: análisis del surgimiento y desarrollo de la organización campesina en El Salvador. México DF: Ediciones de la Casa Chata.

Clapham, C. 1988. Transformation and continuity in revolutionary Ethiopia. Cambridge: University Press.

Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Coulter, C. 2009. Bush wives and girl soldiers: women's lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Davis, J. 1987. Libyan politics: tribe and revolution: an account of the Zuwaya and their government. London: Tauris.

Donham, D.L. 1999. Marxist modern: an ethnographic history of the Ethiopian revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Donner, H. 2009. Radical masculinity: morality, sociality and relationships through recollections of Naxalite activists. Dialectical Anthropology 33(3), 327-343 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9139-0).

Fernández-Savater, A. et al. 2017. Life after the squares: reflections on the consequences of the Occupy movements. Social Movement Studies 16(1), 119-51 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2016.1244478).

Geertz, C. 1975. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. London: Hutchinson.

van Gennep, A. 1960 [1909]. The rites of passage. London: Routledge.

Gibbs, J.L. 1963. The Kpelle moot: a therapeutic model for the informal settlement of disputes. Africa 33(1), 1-11 (available on-line : https://doi.org/10.2307/1157793).

———, H.S. Breitrose & M. Silverman 1970. The cows of Dolo Ken Paye: resolving conflict among the Kpelle. Phoenix Learning Group (available on-line: https://archive.org/details/thecowsofdolokenpayeresolvingconflictamongthekpelle). Accessed 10 Oct 2019.

Gutiérrez, G. 1974 [1971]. A theology of liberation: history, politics and salvation. London: S.C.M. Press.

Haeri, S. 1989. Law of desire: temporary marriage in Iran. London: Tauris.

Härkönen, H. 2016. Kinship, love, and life cycle in contemporary Havana, Cuba: to not die alone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hegland, M.E. 2013. Days of revolution: political unrest in an Iranian village. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Hinton, W. 1966. Fanshen: a documentary of revolution in a Chinese village. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hoffman, D. 2011. The war machines: young men and violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Holbraad, M. 2014. Revolución o muerte: self-sacrifice and the ontology of Cuban Revolution. Ethnos 79(3), 365-87 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2013.794149).

———, I. Cherstich & N. Tassi forthcoming. Anthropologies of revolution: forging time, people and worlds. Oakland: University of California Press.

Humphrey, C. 1983. Karl Marx collective: economy, society and religion in a Siberian collective farm. Cambridge: University Press.

Lan, D. 1985. Guns and rain: guerrillas and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Currey.

Ledevena, A. 1998. Russia’s economy of favours: blat, networking and informal exchanges. Cambridge: University Press.

Luong, H.V. 1992. Revolution in the village: tradition and transformation in North Vietnam, 1925-1988. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Mahdavi, P. 2009. Passionate uprisings: Iran's sexual revolution. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Makram-Ebeid, D. 2014. ‘Old people are not revolutionaries’: labor struggles and the politics of value and stability ('istiqrar) in a factory occupation in Egypt. Focaal Blog (available on-line: https://www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/14/dina-makram-ebeid-labor-struggles-and-the-politics-of-value-and-stability-in-a-factory-occupation-in-egypt/). Accessed 10 Oct 2019.

Mauss, M. 1984 [1924-5]. A sociological assessment of Bolshevism (1924-5). International Journal of Human Resource Management 13(3), 331-74.

——— 2001 [1923-4]. The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Molyneux, M. 1985. Mobilization without emancipation? Women's interests, the state, and revolution in Nicaragua. Feminist Studies 11(2), 227-54 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.2307/3177922).

Montoya, R. 2012. Gendered scenarios of revolution: making new men and new women in Nicaragua, 1975-2000. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Nash, J. 2001. Mayan visions: the quest for autonomy in an age of globalization. London: Routledge.

Nordstrom, C. 1997. A different kind of war story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. 1991. Aymara past, Aymara future.Report on the Americas 25(3), 18-45 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.1991.11723133).

Rosendahl, M. 1997. Inside the revolution: everyday life in socialist Cuba. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Scott, J.C. 1979. Revolution in the revolution: peasants and commissars. Theory and Society 7(1/2), 97-134 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.2307/657000).

Shah, A. 2014. ‘The muck of the past’: revolution, social transformation, and the Maoists in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 337-56.

——— 2018. Nightmarch: among India's revolutionary guerrillas. London: Hurst.

Shayne, J.D. 2004. The revolution question: feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Skocpol, T. 1979. States and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge: University Press.

Speed, S. 2008. Rights in rebellion: indigenous struggle and human rights in Chiapas. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Sprenkels, R. 2018. After insurgency: revolution and electoral politics in El Salvador. Notre Dame: University Press.

Sneath, D. 2016. Tribe. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. (eds) F. Stein, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, S. Lazar, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch. http://doi.org/10.29164/16tribe.

Starn, O. 1991. Missing the revolution: anthropologists and the war in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6(1), 63-91.

——— & M. La Serna 2019. The shining path: love, madness, and revolution in the Andes. New York: Norton.

Swinehart, K. 2019. Decolonial time in Bolivia’s Pachakuti. Signs and Society 7(1), 96-114 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1086/701117).

Thiranagama, S. 2011. In my mother's house: civil war in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Thomassen, B. 2012. Notes towards an anthropology of political revolutions. Comparative Studies in Society and History 54(3), 679-706.

Turner, V. 1967. Betwixt and between: the liminal period in Rites de passage. In The forest of symbols (ed.) V. Turner, 93-111. Cornell: University Press.

———1988. The anthropology of performance. New York: PAJ Publications.

Verdery, K. 1996. What was socialism, and what comes next? Princeton: University Press.

Vince, N. 2016. Our fighting sisters: nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954-2012. Manchester: University Press.

West, H.G. 2000. Girls with guns: narrating the experience of war of FRELIMO's "Female Detachment". Anthropological Quarterly 73(4), 180-94.

Wilson, A. 2016a. Oman's consultative council elections: shaking up tribal hierarchies in Dhufar. Middle East Report 281(Winter), 41-3.

——— 2016b. Sovereignty in exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

——— forthcoming 2019. Invisible veterans: defeated militants and enduring revolutionary social values in Dhufar, Oman. Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 5, 132-49.

Winegar, J. 2012. The privilege of revolution: gender, class, space, and affect in Egypt. American Ethnologist 39(1), 67-70.

Wolf, E.R. 1969. Peasant wars of the twentieth century. New York: Harper & Row.

Yan, Y. 2003. Private life under socialism: love, intimacy, and family change in a Chinese village, 1949-1999. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Note on contributor

Alice Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research examines legacies of radical projects for social change in revolutions and liberation movements in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Sovereignty in exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs (University of Pennsylvania, 2016).

Dr Alice Wilson, Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, United Kingdom. alice.wilson@sussex.ac.uk.

[1] British Library 2012. The wheel of fortune. Medieval Manuscripts Blog (available on-line: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/02/the-wheel-of-fortune.html).

[2] The English term ‘tribe’ and its derivatives have problematic connotations when it comes to translating and theorising indigenous social forms, such as Sahrawis’ qabīla or Iranians’ taifeh. See Sneath, D. 2016. Tribe. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/tribe).

Relations

Felix Stein — Wed, 30 May 2018 12:07:48 +0000

Marilyn Strathern

Initially published 30 May 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18relations

Abstract:

To make a topic from one of anthropology’s principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry is not confined to anthropological works, touching briefly on certain philosophical dimensions and drawing in writers from other fields. However, it is organised around the way anthropologists have refined and expanded the application of relations through their diverse usages. Emphasis is thus on showing how the concept is used, rather than on prescribing particular versions. Attention is paid equally to the relations through which arguments and analysis are pursued and to the subject matter of anthropological investigation as the relational life of persons and things. The entry also notes a long-standing debate between English-speaking and continental European thinkers in the priority they give to terms (the ‘terms’ of a relation: what a relation holds together) or to the relation as an encompassing totality (of which the terms are a part). This one concept thus embraces whole different sets of assumptions about the nature of social life. Its own relations to other concepts are also relevant, as are changing emphases on what it might purport in a changing world.

Introduction

The English-language concept of relation is so ubiquitous, is entailed in such a range of applications, there might seem a good case for leaving it to commonsense to sort out what is meant on this or that occasion. But many anthropologists would also claim it as a signature concept for their discipline, and their usages have taken its potential forward in some very specific ways. Although there is no special anthropological definition, there is broad agreement about the privileged place it has both in structures of argumentation and in what are understood as social anthropology’s principal objects of study, and about the way it is often introduced into discussion to signal a critical (in the sense of probing and questioning) move. There is much to be learnt from its role in the framing of anthropological accounts.

Anthropological notions of description, analysis, and theory, above all in the distinctive terrain it has marked out as cross-cultural comparison, take for granted that one’s job is to show relations between phenomena. Thus one may demonstrate the extent to which religious precepts uphold or challenge values promulgated by the state or hypothesise correlations between new technologies and changing senses of the self. That taken for granted status is built into the way scholarly narratives are organised. Most of the time it is indistinguishable from the perception that relations inhere in the object of enquiry, and the observer is drawing them out. The commitment of twentieth century anthropology to the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ presented the world with what were above all bundles of relations. People’s actions and behaviour were to be described (analysed, theorised) in the context of the diverse relations in which they were enmeshed. Anthropologists continue to show the logical or functional relations between entities they abstract, such as religion or the state, and create new fields of enquiry by emphasising the relational nexus of phenomena, a notable case being that of personhood and the entanglements imagined between self and other, individual and collective. But at the same time, they take it as self-evident that everywhere people too are drawn into relations with the things, beings, and entities that form their environment. Above all, the specific capacity of persons to relate to one another is taken as a fundamental truth of human existence. Social life is what goes on between them.

Relations between and within

However, the Latin term relatio, from which ‘relation’ came into English, did not connote that state of ‘betweenness’, and there lies a history about what gets to be articulated. Classically, relatio referred to what was carried back (to someone) as in a reply or report; indeed, it was a substantive for a ‘motion’ (as in a proposal) or narration (producing a narrative). Medieval philosophers used relatio as an alternative for ad aliquid, an inclination ‘towards something’, a disposition, directionality, order (Brower 2015). They drew from Aristotle’s disquisition on categories (for an anthropological comment, see Allen 2000): the idea that such an inclination was a property (‘accident’) inherent in one entity in the way it pointed towards another.^[1] Their reflections addressed common linguistic differences, as in the differentiation of absolute and relative terms, the latter arising from the comparison of things. An attendant concern about the way things bore on one another, through (say) correspondence or resemblance, with respect to the role of their own intellectual activity, through (say) comparison, continued to bother European thinkers into early modern times. As for an articulation of how entities, such as intervals, might lie between other entities, it would seem that philosophical discourse lagged behind ordinary usage. It was in terms of how relations could be formally represented that ‘betweenness’ was a relative late-comer. That this might have anything to do with the scientific revolution is a matter of speculation (Strathern 2005: 33-49). But possibly an emerging worldview that rested on explaining discrete phenomena by reference to the forces, logics, or structures that held them together had found in an old term a new one – relations – for that holding together.

This worldview was not uncontested. If this is a development traceable in English, there were early modern continental thinkers who took relations in a different direction. Descombes (2014) rehearses Gottfried Leibniz’s specific objections to the definition of relations proposed in 1690 by the English philosopher, John Locke: the referring or comparing of two things to one another. The German thinker’s famous dictum,

there is no term which is so absolute or so detached that it does not involve relations and is not such that a complete analysis of it would lead to other things and indeed to all other things. Consequently we can say that “relative terms” explicitly indicate the relationship which they contain (from Leibniz, written in 1704; Descombes’ [2014: 204] emphasis)^[2]

suggests that everything participates in a turning towards another. Caught up in a debate about the real and the unreal – or mental – status of phenomena as these thinkers were, Descombes spells out the implications of their arguments for the empiricist view that social relations are exterior to individual entities and the idealist view that social relations are constitutive of individuals. The part of Locke’s thesis relevant here – the suggestion that, as a mental exercise of comparison, relations are external to phenomena – diverges from that of his German critic, which denies that there is any wholly extrinsic denomination because of the ‘real [in the above sense] connections amongst all things’ (quoted by Descombes [2014: 204]); everything combines extrinsic and intrinsic relations.

Although the distinction between external and internal relations was to have a very mixed future in philosophy, it has sometimes been taken in anthropology to reflect a truth about the priority to be given to the already existing and thus discrete nature of entities, not in essence affected by their relations, as against the view that it is only through relations that entities are constituted. These tenets become visible, for instance, in the way anthropologists organise the frameworks of their accounts and thus decide what they think needs explaining. From the perspective of modern anthropology, both positions may stimulate a stance of criticality.

First, ‘some descriptions of a thing by its [external] relations with its surrounding milieu have a real scope, [in] that they allow us to know the reality of that thing’ (Descombes 2014: 204-5). Putting things into context – seeing the larger picture, showing the implications, effects and outfalls (‘unintended consequences’) between actions, events, structures, assumptions, and so forth – was always the aim of the traditional ethnographic monograph. Thus the reality of Zande witchcraft divination was to be grasped through a relational nexus that included princely politics, how kin are connected, and the logic of cause and effect (Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]). Here too lies the force of imagining ‘merographic connections’ (Strathern 1992), a phrase that formalises what is commonplace in English usage: the fact that nothing is simply part of a whole insofar as another view or perspective may redescribe it as part of something else. Religion and state, for example, may be shown to relate to each other in this or that respect, while the analytical discreteness of each is retained by the fact that either may also be related to quite other segments of social life, as when mystical beliefs (or population statistics) are regarded as part of the one but not of the other.

Second, assuming relations are always and already everywhere has furnished anthropological discourse with a vocabulary that challenges the kinds of essentialist categorizations that rest precisely on the discreteness of phenomena. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participationhas drawn Sahlins’ (2013) attention: we take it for granted ‘that beings are given beforehand and afterwards participate in this or that relation; whereas, for Lévy-Bruhl, participations are already necessary for beings to be given and exist’ (33-4). Kinship connections are Sahlins’s prime example, in which the difference between kin positions are internalised by or resolved into the mutuality of their being: a mother’s brother exists as such through the existence of his sister’s son (for an ethnographic example, see Bonnemère 2018). A distinctive theory of ‘internal relations’ has been attributed to Karl Marx: the political scientist, Ollman (1976), points to Marx’s notion that things function because of their spatio-temporal ties with other things, and to conceive of things as relations interiorises this interdependence.^[3]

Descombes (2014: 197) summarises his own view of the problematizations here by observing that a theory of external relations supposes that every change something has in its relations with other things is a change in its world, and not a change in what that thing intrinsically is, while in the case of internal relations every such change is a change that affects the thing itself. It goes without saying that sensitivity to these conceptual usages underlines the interest anthropologists have shown, though all too rarely, in other vernacular concepts of or counterparts to relations (e.g. Corsín Jiménez & Willerslev 2007).

Relations … and terms; relations … and connections

As they are articulated for analytical purposes, relations evidently occupy a conceptual field along with other substantives. This section enlarges on certain indicative usages. Perhaps it is the juncture to emphasise that I am reporting on various anthropological usages, for example between epistemic and interpersonal relations, and not filtering everything through one lens or another.

Both the apprehension of already-identifiable phenomena being brought into (external) relations with one another and that of phenomena (internally) constituted by relations may be built into the very definition of relation. Thus a relation-between may be imagined as itself composed of terms and relations (the relation only works with reference to something other, the ‘terms’ it links). Either the term or the relation can then be internally differentiated. Within the term, the conception of an entity’s self-referential ‘identity’ becomes modified when that entity is thought of ‘in respect to’ another, some degree of interdependence implied. This happens in the course of specification, for instance whether the magic one is thinking about refers to witchcraft or to oracles (all three are in the title of Evans-Pritchard’s monograph). Within the relation, there may be reason to distinguish relation from relationship, or relation from connection, as we shall see in a moment.

These manoeuvres, including imagining alternatives to the terms-plus-relation model, may be deployed with critical intent. Recently translated works of Descola (2013) and Viveiros de Castro (2014) are exemplary here. Considering identification and relationship as fundamental axes of individual and collective behaviour, Descola develops an intriguing theoretical possibility latent in the interplay between terms and relations: the very manner in which specific cosmologies privilege the one over the other. He thus offers a wide-ranging, ‘combinatory analysis of the modes of relations between existing entities’, which is how he introduces his emphasis on external relations between beings and things as opposed to the internal links that pertain between abstract concepts; his criticism of earlier models remains largely implicit. On the other hand, Viveiros de Castro deliberately writes against a formula that depends exclusively on ‘a connection or conjunction of terms’.^[4] Adopting Gilles Deleuze’s vocabulary, he states ‘that the future of the master concept of anthropology – relation – depends on how much attention the discipline will end up lending to the concepts of difference and multiplicity, becoming and disjunctive synthesis’ (2014: 170). These alternative coordinates for thinking about relations explicitly challenge the presumption that the primary values to which relations lead are those of binding ties or attachments.

So let us return to some of the ways in which relation has been differentiated. A case has been argued for distinguishing relations from ‘relationships’. Moutu (2012) wishes to get away from an obsession with epistemological understandings of relations, insofar as, in the case of persons, they occlude the ontological character of ‘relationships’. A thinker’s relational practices, such as connection, association, resemblance, comparison, do not touch on the necessity and transcendence that, in his words, give relationships the character of an infinite being.^[5] This is the lesson of his Iatmul ethnography. There is nothing contingent about how Iatmul elder brother and younger brother are related as a pair, hence the necessity of their connection; insofar as each is also the other in another form, it is their relationship that transcends both the externality of their relating (if one wants to put it that way) and their identification as self-similar beings. Such relationships never cease; this is partly because of their processual nature.^[6]

In other hands, it may seem equally crucial to split relation from ‘connection’ (here, differentiating epistemic [relations] from interpersonal [relationships] drops from view). Although, following eighteenth century English usage, anthropologists (this author included, and in this text) often use connection as a synonym for relation, the distinction yields further critical purchase. Feldman (2011) argues for a difference between relations and connections as methodological constructs in the study of global processes. Unconnected actors (not in direct communication with one another) may nonetheless be related though ‘indirect social relations’, mediated through apparatuses or some ‘variety of abstract mechanism’, such as the surveillance systems, detention centres, and statistical operations that track a migrant’s path. In other words, relations have an effect on – and pose problems for – actors far beyond the scope of their connections. Imagining an extra-terrestrial perspective on the world, one that invokes the potential of cross-world communication, may invite enquiry into a different discrimination between connection and relation. Pondering instead how people can mistake connection for relation, Battaglia (2005) draws a comparison with the envisioning of information networks so dense that they cover for the ‘work of relationality’ – singular acts of connection fantasised as instances of social exchange. In her rendering, social relations and the work they entail are set in apposition to otherwise uninflected contact or encounter, and refer to a specific order of reality.

Social relations

This phrase (social relations) is found frequently in twentieth century British social anthropology. Sometimes it is used to distinguish relations of sociability (the tenor of interactions, transactions, obligations between persons) from relations of an institutional or systemic kind: economic, political, gender relations, as when Douglas (1970) talks of ‘relating’ beliefs to dominant aspects of social structure. On other occasions it summons the totality of social life, whether it is encompassed by the concept of society or, shorn of certain connotations of society, rendered as sociality. Such relations may be imagined as in the first place relations between persons, human implied. A seminal text is Radcliffe-Brown’s homonymous 1940 address on social structure.

Radcliffe-Brown (1952: [1940]: 188-204) famously defined social structure as a network of actually existing relations. Thus he was at pains to differentiate a non-social entity, such as the ‘individual’, from the entity that could be (analytically speaking) a node in this network, the ‘person’. His reference point was the concrete human being; as a person such a being was ‘a complex of social relationships’. The person was thereby a unit of social structure. A structural point of view, he said, requires studying how social phenomena such as religion or government have direct and indirect relations to social structure, here understood as ‘relations between persons and groups of persons’.^[7]Pointing to kinship, an area anthropologists most readily cite as exemplifying internal relations,^[8]Radcliffe-Brown asserted that kinship structures consist of numbers of dyadic relations ‘as between a father and son, or a mother’s brother and his sister’s son’. These were the building blocks of society. His emphasis on the dyad, through which he focused on an interplay between two genealogical positions, was to puzzle later anthropologists precisely for its privileging of genealogical thinking, but we can see it as an attempt to clarify just how one might construct persons as the terms (here equivocally external) to a relation.

Now Radcliffe-Brown’s specification of social relations had critical purchase against what in retrospect seemed the random reporting of diverse customs, as exemplified in early twentieth century accounts. Particular instances of behaviour or practices could be put into wider contexts, such contexts invariably consisting of the way relations were organised, a procedure that had long accompanied the analysis of kin terminologies. This assumption about organization (‘structure’) fed the ability to correlate, quite explicitly, numerous dimensions of social life. Goody (1962) offered an extended example from West Africa with respect to descent group formation, inheritance, and funeral practices. West African mortuary institutions were concerned with the reallocation of rights and duties, after death, precisely insofar as a ‘social person’ is defined through the mutual expectations that constitute his or her relationships.

Finding correlations between social institutions within a society was accompanied by cross-cultural comparison between societies. Under the rubric of the latter, it was possible to compare institutions such as matriliny or witchcraft in terms of their local social configurations. Here, the notion of ‘relations between’ at once facilitated the comparison of discrete phenomena, invariably along the axes of their similarities and dissimilarities (‘differences’ in this sense), and produced as objects of study ‘societies’ and ‘cultures’ in this mould, to be criticised in turn for the presumption of discreteness. Comparison across discrete contexts – disjunctive comparison (Lazar 2012) – emerged as an anthropological practice. We may see critical purchase here being levered against arbitrary evaluations of what was or was not significant as an object of study.^[9] However, there is also a sense in which any comparative move creates the potential of a critical outcome, insofar as social or cultural phenomena being brought into conjunction with one another shifts the observer’s perspective. Comparison was elemental in Locke’s definition of a relation; for the medieval philosophers comparatio had been almost more or less synonymous with relatio.

Needless to say, a re-formulation of relations came to Lévi-Strauss’s assistance in his notable quarrel with Radcliffe-Brown, beginning in 1945 (Lévi-Strauss 1963), and its consequences for British social anthropology. Take, for example, the reversal in the visualization of descent groups. What to the latter (Radcliffe-Brownian social anthropology) may have appeared the interdependency of genealogically discrete kin groups upon one another, through marriage alliance and other relations, from a Lévi-Straussian perspective would have appeared like a description of external relations (not his term). Lévi-Strauss’s own folding of affinity within the fundamental atom of kinship was instead a way of showing how such alliances were also presupposed (internally) by the total organization of relations. ‘[A]nalysis can never consider the terms only but must, beyond the terms, apprehend their interrelations’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 83). The whole is given before the parts, so one must begin with the whole, that is, with the relations among the parts.^[10]

It is entirely possible to insist on linkages and the associational quality of the lives of collectives without explicit attention to the concept of relations (see Latour 2005). Indeed the ethnographic record affords numerous other ways of imagining the entailments or enrollments of all kinds of entities in one another’s circumstances. Of course the observer may gather these up as species of relations even when there is no vernacular counterpart, just as an anthropologist might use the terms ‘culture’ or ‘system’ to describe social configurations that actors conceive otherwise or do not conceive at all. It then becomes a theoretical choice, with every shade along the way, to decide whether relations are articulated in all but name or are being named because of the anthropologist’s discerning apparatus. For where anthropologists do take it as a master concept – as in those English contexts where the invocation of relations is an invocation of the facility to ‘bring together’ entities of any order – demonstrating relations is seen as probing beyond what is immediately accessible.^[11] To reveal the relational dimension of this or that can also be empirical criticism of those worldviews that cannot comprehend or else devalue the way phenomena entail one another.

The compulsion of relations

Emphasised by some present-day anthropologists more than others, the uncovering of relationality – in whatever system or circumstance – may be understood as confronting a positivism that focuses on the intrinsic nature (self-identity) of things. A critical stance is particularly obvious here. It is no surprise that scholars in general, whose business is in the narrational art of relating, deliberately pursue epistemological relations; it is not trivial to add that, for anthropologists who are also ethnographers, this is consonant with a value placed on social relations in particular, not forgetting their engagement with persons as interlocuters. A disciplinary disposition to uncover the significance of relations is thereby broader than the controversial use of cross-cultural ethnography to point up the identitarian bias built into the (Anglophone) anthropologist’s native language.^[12]

When anthropologists talk about relations, it is persons who most often come first to mind; that is, beings inevitably enmeshed in a relational world. This holds regardless of whether, in any specific social configuration, people take relations as already there or as endlessly needing to be created.^[13]In whatever manner people assume they are parts of the lives of others, they also put in relational work to support, deny, reconfigure, or transform their relations with one another. It is the transformative, or transcendental, nature of interpersonal relations that leads Pina-Cabral (2017) to suggest that they are a bad analogy for the more general condition of being-in-relation or relationality.^[14]Rather, interpersonal (‘social’) relations are a special case to the extent that they are inevitably constituted through interaction and recognition, by contrast with relations that are mere affordances.^[15] This offers, in effect, a perspective on vernacular usage.

In English ‘relation’ and its pair ‘relative’ are also colloquial terms for kin. This is an idiomatic support or crutch for the tendency of ‘relation’ to connote connection and attachment before it also embraces disconnection or detachment, just as familial ties are normatively embued with positive rather than negative affect.^[16] We have already seen that such values bear on the anthropologist’s work practices, notably strong in the positive sense of accomplishment with which relations, ‘between’ or ‘within’ phenomena, are uncovered; to accumulate relations – as in putting entities and beings of all kinds into larger contexts – is interpreted as an incremental activity. This is simply a cultural comment. We may also underscore the tendency of the English phrase ‘kin relations’, so prevalent in anthropological discourse, to elide the analytical conceptualization of relations (close to Pina-Cabra’s general relationality) with the reciprocals or reflexivity implied in interaction between kinspersons. Inevitably, different argumentative positions emphasise relations as lying between kinsfolk as discrete persons, or as pointing to their mutual self-definition, or as some mix of the two. That said, such theoretical heterogeneity may strengthen rather than weaken the force of relations as a general concept.

One argument for holding on to the anthropologists’ strong vocabulary of relations is that it joins the few languages we have, from the life sciences and elsewhere, for dealing with the present ecological mess. A new sense of the fragility of the world, as a bio-physical-social entity, accompanies a new necessity to apprehend the interdependence of entities and beings of all kinds.^[17] An appeal to ‘relations’ is crisp and all-embracing. Indeed, it is relations all the way down. And in every quarter: dispensing with the internal-external axis in which much of this account is couched, Barad (2007) argues that no phenomenon exists apart from the ‘intra-action’ of phenomena. An anthropologist might add there are still too many imagined worlds that ignore such realities, and there is much work of criticism still to be done. For, among other things, what such an appeal to relations does not do is dispatch the spectre of an underlying presumption of similarity (between terms) entailed in imagining terms to a relation. This is relevant to activist dimensions of remedial politics, anthropogenically-speaking (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2017). Relations so conceived fail to challenge prevailing Anglophone requirements of political action, namely that it proceed through demonstrating similarity or convergence of interests (‘connections’ in this sense) when parties are brought together. Such requirements cannot deal with those social encounters to which, of all disciplines, anthropology has specialist access, namely those based on the collective work of difference and division.^[18]The relation, observes Haraway (2003), is about significant otherness at every scale. Her conception of what relating entails is implicitly political in tenor.

Non-relations and post-relations?

This entry has indicated some of the ways anthropologists have used ‘relations’ in the course of their practice, now taken for granted, now explicitly differentiated for this or that purpose. Those ways both cross other currents in social thought and are given prominence in the discipline’s traditional concern with the collective or associational dimension of people’s lives. Attention has been paid to divergences between views, and the manner in which they recur. One thread through these usages is the critical edge that being explicit about relations has brought to debate.

A remark attributed to the twentieth century anthropologist and ecologist, Gregory Bateson, is that one cannot not relate.^[19]Interesting, therefore, is recent critical writing that challenges how relationality, in a social or interpersonal sense, appears to suffuse anthropological accounts. Two examples must serve.^[20]Candea et al. (2015) take up the positive affect attributed to relations as inevitably implying the desirability of close ties between people or the mutuality of engagement. These essays seek to re-evaluate detachment and disconnection in social life, analyzing strategies of separation and distancing – relations from another point of view – for their political and ethical interest. In different vein, Holbraad and Pederson (2017: 242-81) ask what comes after the relation. They suggest that by intensifying it beyond recognition one can develop examples of apparently ‘non-relational’ ethnographic moments to sketch what a ‘post-relational’ shift might look like. In the course of this they uncover a renewed vernacular or indigenous (in their examples, Christian) interest in the individual, a connection-cutting entity, which holds out the critical potential of modifying the concept of the relation itself, such that it is no longer ‘owned by’ or ceases ‘to be about’ social relations. As these narratives imply, there is more still to relate.

References

Allen, N.J. 2000. Categories and classifications: Maussian reflections on the social. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe half-way: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Battaglia, D. 2005. Insiders’ voices in outer spaces. In E.T. culture: anthropology in outerspaces (ed.) D. Battaglia, 1-37. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bonnemère, P. 2018. Acting for others: relational transformations in Papua New Guinea. Chicago: HAU Books.

Brower, J. 2015. Medieval theories of relations [revised]. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (ed.) E.N. Zalta (available on-line: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relations-medieval). Accessed 4 February 2016.

Candea, M., J. Cook, C. Trundle & T. Yarrow (eds) 2015. Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking. Manchester: University Press.

Carsten, J. (ed.) 2000. Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge: University Press.

Corsín Jiménez, A. Willerslev, & R. Willerslev 2007. ‘An anthropological concept of the concept’: reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 527-44.

Danowski, D. & E. Viveiros de Castro 2017 [2014]. The ends of the world (trans. R. Nunes). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Descola, P. 2013 [2005]. Beyond nature and culture (trans. J. Lloyd). Chicago: University Press.

Descombes, V. 2014 [1996]. The institutions of meaning: a defense of anthropological holism (trans. S.A. Schwartz). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Douglas, M. 1970. Introduction. In Witchcraft confessions and accusations (ed.) M. Douglas, xiii-xxxviii. London: Tavistock Publications.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1950 [1937]. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frankenberg, R. 1957. Village on the border: a social study of religion, politics and football in a North Wales community. London: Cohen & West.

Frankenberg, R. 1982. A social anthropology for Britain. In Custom and conflict in British society (ed.) R. Frankenberg, 1-35. Manchester: University Press.

Faubion, J.D. (ed.) 2001. The ethics of kinship: ethnographic enquiries. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefeld.

Feldman, G. 2011. If ethnography is more than participant observation, then relations are more than connections: the case for non-local ethnography in a world of apparatuses. Anthropological Theory 11(4), 375-95.

Goody, J. 1962. Death, property and the ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa. London: Tavistock Publications.

Haraway, D. 2003. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Holbraad, M. & M.A. Pederson 2017. The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition. Cambridge: University Press.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-network theory. Oxford: University Press.

Lazar, S. 2012. Disjunctive comparison: citizenship and trade unionism in Bolivia and Argentina. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18(2), 349-68.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963 [1945]. Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. In Structural anthropology, vol. 1, (trans. C. Jacobson & B.G. Schoepf), 31-54. New York: Basic Books.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1978 [1973]. Reflections on the atom of kinship. In Structural anthropology, volume 2, (trans. M. Layton), 82-112. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Moutu, A. 2013. Names are thicker than blood: kinship and ownership amongst the Iatmul. Oxford: OUP for The British Academy.

Ollman, B. 1976 [1971] Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge: University Press.

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2017. World: an anthropological examination. Chicago: HAU Books.

Rabinow, P. 2011. The accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. Chicago: University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952 [1940]. On social structure. In Structure and function in primitive society, 188-204. London: Cohen & West.

Sahlins, M. 2013. What kinship is – and is not. Chicago: University Press.

Strathern, M. 1992. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2005. Embedded science. In Kinship, law and the unexpected: relatives are always a surprise, 33-49. Cambridge: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2017. Persons and partible persons. In Schools and styles of anthropological theory (ed.) M. Candea, 236-46. London: Routledge.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2014 [2009]. Cannibal metaphysics for a post-structural anthropology (trans. & ed. P. Skafish). Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal Publishing.

Wagner, R.1975.The invention of culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Note on contributor

Marilyn Strathern is a former William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, and currently Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her ethnographic forays are divided between Papua New Guinea and Britain. Apart from gender and kinship, she has written on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property, and audit culture.

Prof. Marilyn Strathern, ms10026@cam.ac.uk.

[1] It took time before the Aristotlean conviction that one property cannot belong to more than one subject was left to the side.

[2] All terms lead to other terms, but relative terms show this explicitly: ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ are relatives terms, as are ‘parent’ and ‘child’, each implying the other. Leibniz’s overall argument was consonant with his objection to Isaac Newton’s idea of space as something in itself, within which other objects move; for Leibniz, space was simply the ‘order’ (another word for ‘relation’), in which celestial bodies move in respect of each other.

[3] Thus, ‘the relation between capital and labor is treated ... as a function of capital itself’ – capital is a (social) relation (Ollman 1976: 13).

[4] The full passage reads: ‘Multiplicity is a system defined by a modality of relational synthesis different from a connection or conjunction of terms. Deleuze calls it a disjunctive synthesis or inclusive disjunction, a relational mode that does not have similarity or identity as its (formal or final) cause, but divergence or distance; another name for this relational mode is “becoming”’ (2014: 112, emphasis ignored). Disjunctive synthesis is a difference understood as positive rather than oppositive. Deleuze’s specific debt to Leibniz is mentioned.

[5] With reference to his field material from Melanesia. Moutu’s (2012: 202) observation extends from the proposition that Melanesians take relationships as the implicit ground of being, by contrast with the Euro-American impetus to see ‘making relations / relationships’ as a matter of social agency.

[6] In some senses, this anticipates an observation from Pina-Cabral (below).

[7] Elsewhere in this address he takes ‘relations of person to person’ as simply a part of social structure, the other part being the differentiation of individuals and classes by their social role.

[8] For example, ‘[T]he terms of kinship are inherently linking terms; … they render the self in and through its relation to certain others’ (Faubion 2001: 3). (Self and other is an axis often taken as fundamental to people’s conceptualization of relations.) However, Radcliffe-Brown seems to have something more like external relations in mind (social structure as ‘actually existing relations’ that ‘link together certain human beings’ [1952: 192]).

[9] To offer just one example, Frankenberg’s (1957) focus on the politics of a Welsh village sprang from then-burgeoning interests in African village politics, a comparative agenda carried through in his posing a social anthropology for Britain (1982).

[10] As Descombes in his discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s work puts it. ‘Structural holism asks us to practice structural analysis as a form of holistic analysis, i.e., as a search for the relations that ground the system’ (Descombes 2014: 157). His own account develops the proposition that no social interaction takes place without a third term, that is, the taken for granted, instituted meanings of collective life. Thus in gift exchange between persons, the whole is given before its parts in that a ‘gift’ is already following the conventions of ‘gift giving’.

[11] Whether or not causation is involved.

[12] Controversy lies in the way that last usage is criticised in turn for the implication, from a ‘western’ perspective, that relations flourish in other, invariably ‘non-western’, places more heartily than at home.

[13] Whether of whole cultural orientations or within the dynamics of specific interactions. On the extent to which people do or do not take a relational world as having to be ‘made’, see Wagner (1975); Note v., above.

[14] Contrast the purpose Carsten (2000) has for the general term ‘relatedness’, an analytical placeholder to avoid pre-empting assumptions about the nature of kinship.

[15] Because of the ontogenetic – ever developing– character of persons. Per contra, Rabinow (2011) sees a transcendental quality in the relational interactions of ‘assemblages’, insofar as any kind of entity has the capacity to be open to another.

[16] The oppositional mode of connection / disconnection is not the same as the disjunctive synthesis noted above (Note iv.).

[17] This very phrasing is positivist, but there is some (political) advantage in it being one of the positions accommodated by a portmanteau appeal to relations. Within anthropology, it should be added, there is much present interest, from a ‘human’ perspective, on (variously) human and animal, human and nonhuman, or human and other-than-human, relations.

[18] The case is argued apropos concepts of personhood in, for example, Strathern 2017.

[19] Explicitness about present or absent relations can be evidence of relational thinking; however, an enacted relation (anthropologist speaking) emptied of engagement or attachment may be rendered as a ‘non-relation’ in the English vernacular.

[20] Both volumes point to a wave of twenty-first century arguments, stimulated by diverse theoretical perspectives, about the limits of the relation as an anthropological analytic. As the connotations of relation shifts, so do the terms around it. Thus the individual person, as a logical concept always relationally constructed with respect to other concepts, may be identified as a relational configuration socially speaking, in which individualism is a knowing strategy.

Deleuze

Felix Stein — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 08:38:52 +0000

Jon Bialecki

University of Edinburgh

Initially published 11 Jan 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18deleuze

Abstract:

This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s work has subsequently exerted on anthropology. In Deleuze’s encounter with anthropology, he ended up seeing anthropological structuralism as a limit to thought. However, he saw Anglo-American anthropology, and some later French anthropology, as powerful tools for conceiving different arrangements of the world, and he ended up relying heavily on these materials when he constructed his own Nietzschian longue durée speculative anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology has had little interest in Deleuze’s speculative anthropology; however, it has seen both Deleuze’s overall aesthetics and many of his concepts as theoretical engines that could be used piecemeal at will, with little concern for the role they played in Deleuze’s overall thought, or for how having these ideas reterritorialised in anthropology might affect them. In the end, this entry suggests that despite the outsized reception of Deleuze in anthropology, a real encounter with Deleuze’s thoughts have yet to occur; despite this lack of a true, sustained engagement, anthropological use of Deleuzian concepts has still been incredibly productive in the discipline.

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-1995) reception in anthropology has had multiple, and often incommensurable, dimensions. That may not be a problem, however. It certainly wouldn’t have been a slur for this thinker who has been treated in so many different and disjunctive ways, because if there ever were a figure that would be happy being a multiplicity, it would be Gilles Deleuze. This entry will present what anthropology was for Deleuze, and also what Deleuze would be for the subsequent anthropologists that would read him. In the end, it will argue that despite a high degree of mutual interest between the thinker and the discipline, there has not been a real encounter between anthropological thought and the thought of Deleuze; this entry will also suggest that this may be just as Deleuze would have wanted it.

Deleuze was a twentieth century philosopher, known both for his own works as well as for a series of collaborations with the psychiatrist and political activist Félix Guattari.^{^[1]} To reduce this thought to a few rough intellectual axioms, it could be said that the center of Deleuze’s project was prizing difference over identity, privileging immanence over transcendence, the pre-subjective over the subjective; an attention to intensity as the other side of seemingly extensive objects and processes; an interest in the promise of novelty that could be found both in combinatory logic of different objects, processes, and thought; and in underdetermined potentiality that these objects, processes, and thought contained. Deleuze is often presented, especially in an American academic context, as being ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructural’ or as a part of ‘French Theory’, even though these categories are an artifact of Anglophone reception instead of an expression of any common value or signification in the so-designated works (see, for example, Cusset 2008). Even if these categories were intelligible, however, there would be good reason for setting Deleuze and his oeuvre apart from the rest of the mid-twentieth century thinkers that he is often lumped in with. The reason that Deleuze should be set apart is that his work is singular when held up not just against post-war French thinking, but arguably when held up against the history of modern philosophy as a whole. The British analytic philosopher W.B. Moore has stated that Deleuze was a ‘remarkable … polymath’ who achieved a break with previous philosophical tradition that is on the order of the ‘Copernican turn’ effectuated by Immanuel Kant (2013: 542). That Deleuze, of all people, could be credited with such a break could be considered surprising, especially since it would be easy to see him as an intellectually (as opposed to politically) conservative thinker. He spent a large part of his career working in the history of philosophy, and even after he became established as a philosopher in his own right, he continued to write what were essentially pedagogical précis on the works of canonical philosophers such as Hume, Leibnitz, Kant, and Nietzsche. Furthermore, his own original work is self-presented not as a break with western metaphysics, but as a continuation of it, even if he understands himself as expressing a particular ‘minor’ philosophical tradition, one that runs (in his telling) from Spinoza to Heidegger, that he considers to be at odds with the more established modes of philosophy. Deleuze likened his work to that of picking up the arrows of ‘great thinkers’ so that he could ‘try to send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical, but quite small’ (1993: xv).^{^[2]}

However, there is no consensus on what direction he was shooting these metaphorical arrows, or how true his aim. He has been seen as both a continuation of traditional philosophy and a break with it, a subjectivist and a realist, a champion of postmodernity and a critic of postmodernity, an ontologist and an enemy of ontological thinking, a thinker of pure difference and a monotonous thinker of ‘the one,’ a Leninist enemy of capitalism and a proponent of an unfettered hypercapitalism.^[3]

If we want to operate in the very ‘un-Deleuzian’ register of blame (Deleuze felt that blame was supersaturated in the toxic Nietzschian affect called ressentiment), then it should be acknowledged that some of the responsibility for this wide variation in the reception of Deleuze’s work lies with Deleuze himself. Deleuze’s writing style and technical vocabulary does not invite any easy understanding. Part of it was his interest in variation, change, and in ‘multiplicities,’ which meant that he was more interested in exploring all the various forks in a line of thought rather than in didactically tracing a thought’s borders.^{^[4]} Further, he has produced a dizzying array of neologisms, and he often purposefully uses already-extant technical terms in idiosyncratic and sometimes perverse ways. His work is full of odd terms such as ‘rhizomes’, ‘arborescent’, ‘smooth and stratiated space’, ‘desiring machines’, ‘the body without organs’. But perhaps the chief reason for Deleuze to receive such a varied and vertiginous reception lies in his critique of what he called the ‘dogmatic imagine of thought’, which he understood to be the grounding assumptions behind almost the entirety of western philosophy. This ‘dogmatic image’ includes a suspicion of the primacy of representation, skepticism that ‘good will’ is all that is needed to reach the truth, and even doubt about the primacy of truth. It was not that he did not believe in truth; he did not deny truth as a mode of thought or measure of validation across the board. Rather, Deleuze observed that most true statements are banal statements, and that relevance, importance, or novelty were often more vital measures of evaluation.

While Deleuze claimed that he was an empiricist in the style of Hume, his work seems distant from the sort of empiricism that constitutes most of ethnographic writing and thought (but, see Rutherford 2012). Therefore, his concern with both nose-bleed level metaphysics and with radical critiques of the history of western philosophy would seem to suggest that any anthropological hybridization with Deleuze would be stillborn. But this is not the case. Not only has there been substantial anthropological interest in Deleuze, but Deleuze himself was also a close reader of anthropology. Deleuze even produced what might be called an ‘anthropology’ of his own, not in the sense of a philosophical theory of man, but more along the line of Kant’s anthropology, a large-scale rubric to think through the forms and histories of various human collectivities. The rest of this entry will consist of rehearsing this anthropology, and of discussing how anthropologists have repurposed Deleuze for their own intellectual project. The reader should be prepared for multiple infelicities in these discussions. Despite Deleuze’s familiarity with the then-current state of the discipline, his anthropology has features that make it indigestible to most contemporary anthropological sensibilities. And while there are some important exceptions, the contemporary anthropological engagement with Deleuze suggests a lack of command of his system of thought. This feature does not invalidate these anthropological works, of course; Deleuze would most likely applaud having his work deployed in different intellectual environments; having it mutated so that it works to new ends; having it vivisected and sutured to other theoretical systems. But this does mean that these theoretical hopeful monsters may in the end not be very Deleuzian, despite their apparent intellectual paternity. In the opening passage of A thousand plateaus, which Deleuze co-wrote with Guattari, the authors invoke the imagine of a wasp and an orchid to illustrate the way two heterogeneous systems could engage in a ‘double capture’, each repurposing the other to their own ends without at the same time assimilating the other or erasing the fundamental differences between them. The wasp treats the orchid as a sexual partner or rival, and the orchid treats the wasp as a pollen vector. The attentive reader, however, will note that there is some ambivalence in French between when one should use the term ‘guêpe’ (or wasp) and when one should use the term ‘abeille’ (or bee), and that while both bees and wasps pollinate orchids, there are few orchids that are pollinated by both species. There is always, therefore, the possibility of confusion and misuse; and we should also remember that for one of the two parties, such a mating is always sterile. What is true for bees and orchids may be true in some cases for Deleuze and anthropology as well; but whether either is necessarily the wasp or the orchid will remain an open question.

What anthropology was for Gilles Deleuze

Engagement with structuralism

Any discussion of Deleuze and anthropology has to begin by addressing the former’s relation to structuralism. Structuralism is a topic too complex to completely rehearse here; it can perhaps be best summarised as the claim that sense is not inherent in any one sign, but is produced by systems of reciprocal differences between two signs, or sets of signs (Stasch 2006). While structuralism as a theoretical framework has its roots in the linguistic work of authors such as Jacobson and de Saussure (Percival 2011), and there were also ‘structuralisms’ in fields as diverse as literary criticism (Barthes 1974), political philosophy (Althusser 1971), and psychoanalysis (Lacan 2007), it seems fair to say that the most influential formulation of structuralism at the period that Deleuze was intellectually active was the anthropological one promulgated by Lévi-Strauss. Like many other Francophone intellectuals of that time, Deleuze had an ambivalent relation with structuralism. As can be seen in his 1967 essay,^{^[5]} ‘How do we recognize structuralism’, there seems to be moments where Deleuze takes this approach up without hesitation or qualification (Deleuze 2004). Deleuze’s essay is expressly written as a dispatch from a particular moment. It is careful to situate where it sits in intellectual history: this essay starts out with the statement ‘This is 1967’. It goes to great care to mark itself as being written in an early moment, and several times marks important elements of structuralism as having still open, though possibly determinable, questions (for example, when discussing the symbolic order, it states that ‘We do not yet know what this symbolic element consists of’) (Deleuze 2004: 173). While not endorsing structuralism outright, he presents a meticulous re-articulation of it using language almost identical to that found in his first two ‘non-history-of-philosophy’ books, Difference and repetition (1993) and Logic of sense (1990a). But this also means that Deleuze’s structuralism, even as it acknowledged its debt to Lévi-Strauss, was very much his own. What interests Deleuze is seeing structure as a net of potentiality, nodes of which are only transitorily inhabited by particular actualised figures. What is more, Deleuze’s structuralism is one that is very concerned with the tempo and rhythm of the time and events that are the expressions of structure: while the architectonic aspects of structuralism are not absent, they are secondary to the variation that occurs in different iterations of a set of structural relations (see Alliez 2005: 92-93). Because of this, is it possible to read Deleuze and Guattari’s later rejection of structuralism in A thousand plateaus not as a retrenchment or reposition, but rather as emphasising that any reading of structuralism must take temporal unfolding into being. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari complain that Lévi-Strauss presents myths where humans transform into animals (and where animals engage in their own strange transformations) as ‘a correspondence between two relations’. Such a framing, Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘impoverishes the phenomenon’, and that myth as Lévi-Strauss presents it is ‘a framework of classification [that] is quite incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments than tales’: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism has no role for either ‘graduating resembles’, or ‘resemblances in a series’, instead inevitably producing an ‘order of differences’. Worst of all, structuralism ‘denounced the prestige accorded to the imagination’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 236-7). It is not the poles in structural oppositions that interests Deleuze, but rather the extended continuum between them.

This later stance should not be taken as an across-the-board rejection of Lévi-Strauss, or as indicating an actual fundamental incapability between these thinkers. Understanding Deleuze and Guattari as presenting a total critique of Lévi-Strauss might be going too far. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2015), a close reader of both Deleuze and Lévi-Strauss, has stated that the latter’s four volume Mythologique series is more Deleuzian than perhaps Deleuze himself appreciated. The endless variations expressed in Lévi-Strauss’s kaleidoscopic recounting of the imagination of the indigenous Americas suggests not just a controlling logic of difference and differentiation, of translation and transformation. Further, the refusal of any transcending code or horizon that apparently characterises Mythologique by the project’s end is read by Viveiros de Castro as an instance of pure immanence of thought, a mode of thinking that Deleuze prized over transcendence. Of course, one could be skeptical of this reading: others have seen Lévi-Strauss as too caught up in the concrete to throw themselves into a Deleuzian play of pure difference; under this reading, the senior anthropologists unable to make the leap into iterative abstraction (Kaufman 2007) (though again, to some anthropological sensibilities, such a limitation is not necessarily a fault). However, even if one is skeptical of Viveiros de Castro’s reading, it is obvious that, regardless of his attitude towards structuralism as a totality, certain anthropological claims made by Lévi-Strauss were accepted by Deleuze. While some of Lévi-Strauss’ claims were rejected as being too centralised, too interested in locking down transformations in the service of a rationalising logic, others, such as the social organization outlined in ‘Do dual organizations exist’ are ratified (Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 209-10). Likewise, Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking work on kinship is acknowledged, albeit as one that only addresses ‘extension’, which is only one face of a common Deleuzian extensive/intensive diptych (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 157).

Deleuze as a reader of anthropology

Of course, even granting his importance during the time that Deleuze was active, Lévi-Strauss did not exhaust all of anthropology; Deleuze both read widely and borrowed freely from other contemporary anthropologists. ‘Flux’ and the ‘war machine’, important categories in Deleuze and Guattari’s jointly authored works, are both credited to French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (Deleuze & Guattari 1983; Guattari 2008; Biehlo 2013: 584). Likewise, Gregory Bateson’s (2010) concept of plateaus as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ were important enough for Deleuze and Guattari that they used it as the framing conceit in their second major work (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 22). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is in in Capitalism and schizophrenia (1983), Deleuze’s first collaboration with Guattari, where we see Deleuze engaging in depth with anthropology as a body of literature and as a discipline. In this work, we have substantive references to what almost amounts to a mid-century ‘who’s who’ of the field. In presenting his argument, Deleuze and Guattari invoke: Paul and Laura Bohannan’s work with the Tiv on spheres of exchange and the way that they react to the introduction of cash (176, 248); Victor Turner’s work on healing and symbolism among the Ndembu (167, 350); George Deveroux’s conjecture on social structure and sexuality (33, 165); Jeanne Favret on segmentary organization (152); Myer Fortes on filiation, including an off the cuff reference to the classic Oedipus and Job in West African religion (142, 146); Malinowski’s work on Kula exchange, but also his consideration of the (lack of a) Trobriands’ Oedipal concept (53, 159, 171-2); Edmund Leach on possible (again) filiation, on critiques of Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of presentation and counter-presentation, as well as on the relevance of possible psychological origins of social symbols (146, 150, 164, 172, 179); Marcel Mauss on the Gift (150, 185); and so on. This pattern is repeated in A thousand plateaus, where, in addition to many of the aforementioned authors, the list is expanded to include figures such as Marshall Sahlins and Robert Lowie.

This engagement with anthropology and ethnography was something that Deleuze deeply desired to get right. When writing on this subject, he broke form and did something he rarely did: he consulted with actual experts in a different discipline (Dosse 2010: 201). But this engagement should not be taken to mean that the joint project he and Guattari were engaged in was itself an instance of conventional anthropological thought, or in harmony with the mainline form of the discipline. For all its breadth, their reading of the literature has been strongly criticised for being superficial, for having numerous factual errors, for being blind to some of the complicity with colonialism that characterised some of the anthropology of the period, and for being quick to catapult from particular ethnographic depictions, such as leopard cults in the Belgian Congo or Kachin witchcraft, to ungrounded generalities (‘the sorcerer’ or ‘becoming animal’ in ‘Black Africa’), making concrete populations into philosophical metaphors (Miller 1993; see Holland 2003 in defense of Deleuze and Guattari on many of these points). It should also be noted that anthropologists who went to the field familiar with Deleuzian conceptions abstracted from specific collectivities have found it hard to use those concepts to describe the very social practices that Deleuze and Guattari relied upon, and have often had to modify them substantially in order to make them fit (see, e.g., Pedersen 2007).

Deleuze’s speculative anthropology

Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in anthropology should not be taken to mean that they were interested in repeating the form of the anthropological essay or the ethnographic monograph. This is indicated by what they present as the ultimate template for their anthropological project: ‘[t]he great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss’s The gift as Nietzsche’s Genealogy of morals’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 190).^{^[6]} This engagement with anthropology was in service of a longue durée historical anthropology, the sort of stratigraphic, teleological projects as such nineteenth century authors as Lewis Morgan (1907) or E.B. Tylor (1871a, 1871b). The specific history that they want to trace out is that of production, both in the specific Marxist sense, but also as a general rubric which would encompass the creation of other material, with the most central material being libido.

This interest in seeing both capitalist production and the production of desire could make their project seem to be just another example of the sort of Freudo-Marxism that characterised so much of critical thought during the immediate post-war years of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Marcuse 1974). But it is in the details that Deleuze and Guattari’s project separates itself from others of its kind. Rather than seeing Marx’s process as, in essence, an epiphenomenon of Freudian forces, or as reversing the process and privileging Marx as base and seeing Freud as superstructure, Deleuze and Guattari see both Marxist production and Freudian libido as different instances of the same abstract ‘universal primary process’. This is corrosive not only of these two separate theoretical framings, but also of the actors that Freud and Marx saw as central to their respective projects; it also undoes the ‘modern constitution’ of the Nature-Culture split (Latour 2012) in as much as socio-cultural production and psycho-biological drives are subsumed under the same mechanism. In Anti-Oedipus, there is no subject, whether that subject be conscious, unconscious, or a labor-producing class acting in accordance with its species-being. Rather, everything is just an endless concatenation of semi-autonomous units that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘machines’. These machines (rechristened in later works of theirs as ‘assemblages’) include the various biological bodily features that would be considered ‘part objects’ under more mainline psychoanalytic thinking (examples include an ‘anal machine, a talking-machine, [and] a breaking machine’) (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 2) But also actual biological processes, human or otherwise, are machines as well. The category of machines is more capacious than the category of physiology or biology. Machinery in the more traditional sense in included as ‘machines’ in the Deleuzian sense of the word, as are various institutions, social arrangements, and psychological and biological systems. In the understanding of Deleuze and Guattari, the function of all these machines can be grasped as either connective, disjunctive, or conjunctive, and the synthesis of these operations allows for broader operations such as production in the common sense, recording, and enjoying.

The reason that the mechanic nature of things is invisible to us is that these operations are situated on what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘socius’. The socius organises production by being the site where all these disparate machines are woven together, but the socius is also misrecognised as the source of all this production as well.^{^[7]} The socius is an abstract or cognitive space, and as such the kinds of regions where it is ‘located’ can and have changed over time (or at least can and have changed in their account). This brings us to the crux of Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropology. It is shifts in the location of socius, and in the way that the flows on it are organised, which give structure to Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropologic ‘big history’, and demarcates objects of ‘traditional’ anthropological inquiry from the sort of large-scale societies that anthropology only turned to as it matured.

What are these shifts in the socius, and what effects fall from them? In a way that is again not dissimilar to Lewis Morgan’s (1907) Savagery/Barbarism/Civilization triad, Deleuze and Guattari divide humanity’s periods into tribal, empire, and capitalist dispensations. In the tribal period, the socius is understood as being the body of the earth, and flows are situated or ‘territorialized’ on it. In periods of ‘tribal’ organization, both territorialization and the (re)organization and situating of flows on the socius are done through what they call ‘inscription’, which might best be understood as including all forms of ‘leaving one’s mark’ on social life. Inscription is done directly, whether as a mark or as a social action, and because of its unmediated nature it therefore cannot be held to be signification; this means that ‘tribal’ societies are ecologies of effects and not systems of meaning. For Deleuze and Guattari, the business of making kin is the premier form of inscription. It is the creation of kin which organises bodies in relation to one another and to the ground that is worked upon, ‘coding’ the earth. In their eyes, this is the most important mode through which the flows of intensive filiation are made into the code of alliance and affiliation.

In the following period of ‘empire’, the socius shifts from the surface of the earth to the body of the despot, with the body of the despot discussed in a sense not dissimilar to that found in Kantorowicz (1985). Various agents and subjects of the despot take up the role of his ‘eyes’ or ‘hands’ (or whatever other body part that mapped onto the function that was at issue), thus constituting a sort of leviathan where the focus is more on the outline of the total body than of the composite bodies that constitute the subsumed parts. This means not just a reorganization of the socius, and a concomitant ‘deterritorialization’ of the various already-situated machines, but also an ‘overcoding’ of the already-extant mechanic systems from the previous dispensation as they are utilised by and thought of in relation to the primitive tyrant. The stage is eventually supplanted by capitalism. In this stage, capital itself is the socius, and codes are replaced by axioms. Axoims are half imperative, half algorithm, at once demanding, instructing, and measuring the maximization of flows, accelerating them as surplus value is ‘skimmed off’ of these streams. The speed causes ‘everything solid to melt into air,’ (Marx & Engels 1970: 35) and create a torrent of deterritorialization as flows are decoded, mathematised, and mapped onto the individual bodies of workers and consumers that have been assimilated into the socius. This last mapping is to create the minimum territoriality needed to keep capitalism from running off the wheels, and is also the point of entry to the Oedipal complex, a mode of control that is treated as much as an institutional dispositif as a psychoanalytic reality.

It would be a mistake to see this system as being foundational to either Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration, or to Deleuze’s own conception of the order of things. In later works by these authors, machines are replaced by assemblages, and the tribal transforms into the nomadic, a dispensation constituted by disciplined itinerants whose rootlessness operates as a Clastres-like (2007) self-inoculation against the formation of the State. Nor should this be seen as exhausting Deleuze’s concerns. Very little of this material or terminology is referenced in Deleuze’s own work. However, it was in articulating this systemitization of the world that Deleuze had his greatest and most prolonged encounter with ethnography and anthropology.

What Deleuze is for anthropology

Reception of Deleuze’s speculative anthropology

That deep engagement does not mean that this system caters to anthropological tastes. Even the anthropologists that Deleuze was in conversation with as he crafted his system expressed to him anxieties about his epoch-spanning periodization (Dosse 2010: 201). And as has been pointed out by Ian Lowrie, while Deleuze and Guattari’s picture of ‘tribal’ societies does seem to resonate with some classical cybernetically-informed ethnographies of small-scale societies (such as Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the ancestors [2000]), Deleuze’s vision of capitalism as a space and time where mathematics has replaced semiotics seems unlikely to agree with the anthropological palate, and Deleuze and Guattari’s teleological periodization would not be that welcome, either (Lowrie 2017). The social-evolutionary element of the argument is also a bone that many anthropologists would choke on, even though Deleuze and Guattari deny that their schema could be described as social evolution. Finally, their reading of flows and circulation in tribal economies seems more informed by Nietzsche’s concept of debt (which has not received much ethnographic confirmation) than by Mauss’s vision of the Gift (which has) (Graeber 2011: 402).

Depth and breadth of Deleuze’s influence in anthropology

It is not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari’s account has been given very little time by anthropologists. But that should not be taken to mean that anthropologists have accorded the same low level of respect to Deleuze himself. And while Deleuze does not have as deep a gravity well in the discipline as ‘Planet Foucault’ (Boyer 2002), many anthropologists have turned to Deleuze to hash out their ethnography, or to provide the ligaments for their theoretical constructs.

However, any attempt to pinpoint the influence of Deleuze immediately runs up against one difficulty: the fact that Deleuze’s thinking not only has been dispersed to the degree of being almost atmospheric in the present age, but also the fact that his thinking seems, in many ways, to have presaged the present age as well. Foucault infamously once stated that perhaps the present period would be remembered by historians as ‘Deleuzean’ (Foucault 1998: 343). And while Deleuze brushed this off as ‘a joke meant to make people like us laugh, and make everyone else livid’ (Deleuze 1995: 4), it seems that his work in some ways anticipated much of our zeitgeist. The difficulty is that anticipating the zeitgeist, and being an intellectual influence on thinkers who express it, are two different things (and this is putting to the side the possibility – and to be honest, the high likelihood – that the current era is informing our reading of Deleuze in such a way that other readings of Deleuze, including readings that Deleuze himself might have endorsed, are either foreclosed to us or unrecognizable.) There is also the question of what counts as influence, and what simply counts as being a part of an intellectual genealogy. To take one example, the sociologist of science and self-proclaimed philosopher Bruno Latour has not been shy about the influence that Deleuze’s works have had on him; but does this mean that those who have in turn been influenced by Latour should ‘count’ as being influenced by Deleuze at one remove?

We will put to the side a discussion of ‘accidental’ Deleuzians,^[8] and focus on those who have explicitly acknowledged Deleuze as being an important plank in their thoughts. Most anthropologists have declined to take on Deleuze’s thought whole hog (Jensen & Rödje 2010, Markus & Saka 2006), and generally tend to take a single concept and conjoin it to concepts or framings that originate elsewhere. A loose map of anthropologically-repurposed Deleuzian part-concepts would have to include Deleuze’s vision of modern society as he presented it in his essay ‘Postscript on the society of control’, the ‘rhizome’ and ‘the assemblage’ (two ideas of which are given the greatest elaboration in Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari), Deleuze’s understanding of affect, Deleuze’s concept of temporality, and finally his use of virtuality.

The anthropological assemblage

Some of these terms have also been adopted with greater degrees of fidelity than others: the assemblage is likely the instance where use differs most from the original sense (see Marcus & Saka 2006). Assemblage is a term taken from A thousand plateaus. The various translators represented the word agencement as ‘assemblage’, but the more common English translation of this term in other contexts would be ‘layout’ instead (on this point, see also Phillips 2006). This was a bit of a “traduttore traditore” moment. For Deleuze and Guattari, agencement was their term to describe cognitive/linguistic or physical arrangements where each element in the set was in a determinate relation to the others, and which acted in concert. In their minds, assemblages did very specific things, and operated in a particular manner. Assemblages both territorialised some space or material, but also deterritorialised others as it undid whatever organising or emergent logic preexisted it. Further, not only did all assemblages have content (the material organised in a determinate pattern) but all assemblages also had expressions, which could be either physical or communicative. And most of all, each assemblage was specific to a particular ‘strata’, which might be thought of as a particular domain, space, or classification (see Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 503-5). Finally, assemblages can be thought of as particular instantiations of purely abstract relations (or ‘diagrams’: see Bialecki 2016, 2017b; Zdenbik 2012) that can also be found in other assemblages located in different strata. Given all this structuration, one can see why ‘layout’ may have been more on point than ‘assemblage’. Anthropology, by comparison, has taken the assemblage as something different. For anthropology, assemblages are not determinate relations, but conglomerations of contingent, heterogeneous material that by chance or design (mostly the former) have congealed together to form the ephemeral assemblage (Collier & Ong 2004; Marcus & Saka 2006; Rabinow 2003; Rudnyckyj 2010; Zigon 2010, 2011, 2015). Rather than serving as expressions of an iterable, abstract relationship, each anthropological assemblage is an underdetermined, random, and possibly unique, collage.^[9] As Marcus and Saka phrased it, ‘none of the derivations of assemblage theory…is based on a technical and formal analysis of how this concept functions in [Deleuze and Guattari’s] writing’ (2006: 103).

This does not render the anthropological repurposing (reterritorialization?) of the original Deleuzian concept of agencement ethnographically deficient, or their anthropological conclusions manqué. But it is probably a symptom of what divides Deleuze from contemporary Anglo-American anthropology (apart from, of course, discipline, language, subject matter, and history). While both Deleuze and contemporary anthropology share an interest in novelty, they have differing senses for the frequency and ease with which novelty is brought about. Anthropology often sees its objects as ‘haecceities’: as unique and therefore valuable expressions of human imagination, capacity, and resistance. Even when they are treated as tokens of a more general type, they are presented as if they are not just representative, but exemplary: this retains their novelty while still making them of particular interest for those investigating a more general phenomenon. Deleuze was interested in haecceities as well, but he also held that novelty, and particularly novelty in the form of thought, is relatively rare. For him, it was not subjects agentively producing novelty, but rather passive subjects who were forced to produce novelty by the press of events, when all other existing conceptual or material tools were exhausted.

Becoming

Anthropological discussions of ‘becoming’, another Deleuzian trope, can be juxtaposed productively with the anthropological assemblage. In Deleuzian parlance, becoming is about a process of continual transformation without a complete transition into some other form or mode; it is used to characterise an asymptotic movement towards a particular local telos. Unlike assemblages, which seem to litter the landscape, in anthropology many ‘becomings’ are hard won. In an article by Biehl and Locke that is probably the most cited discussion of Deleuzian ‘becoming’ in anthropology, there is no claim to be taking up Deleuze’s thought as ‘a theoretical system of or set of practices to be applied normatively to anthropology’ (2010: 317). Rather, they merely wish to take up aspects of Deleuze’s conception of desire and of a socially-informed but still-specific capacity for transformation as a corrective to Foucauldian conceptions of biopower and governmentality. But the two ethnographic circumstances presented (destitution and psychic disintegration in Brazil, and the collective continuing aftermath of conflict in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina) underline the claim that the sort of transformations that Deleuze is interested in are often the result of a press of circumstances beyond the ordinary. It is of course possible to see these two case studies as a further post-culture-concept anthropological interest in what Joel Robbins (2013) has called ‘the suffering subject’. But it would also be possible to see this not as a focus on abjection and trauma as a human universal, but rather as an impetus to experimentation.^{^[10]} Biehl and Locke do not exhaust the anthropological use of Deleuzian becoming; like the Biehl and Locke essay, becoming is invoked thematically rather than technically, to communicate an interest in variation in and through the repetition of acts and forms, as opposed to some other more totalising approach that would be blind to internal gradations and mutations (see, e.g., Khan 2012, Ahmad 2017). Often these works do not share Deleuze’s arid anti-humanism: they often favor explorations of subjectivity over Deleuze’s interest in the pre-individual and the pre-subjective. But because these works foreground a thematic interest in Deleuze, as opposed to an interest in his technical concepts, to judge them for this seems wrong (putting to the side the fact that judging authors in this way, instead of merely contrasting works as intellectual mechanisms, seems a particularly un-Deleuzian exercise).

Rhizome

Differences between the anthropological assemblage and the Deleuze-Guattarian agencement can also be better understood by contrasting it with anthropological discussions of the ‘rhizome’. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes are decentralised networks. In rhizomes, individual nodes in the network can have quite different expressions from one another; the network itself is capable of qualitative variation; its internal multiplicity and variety means that it cannot be reduced to any dualisms or structural oppositions; and, because of its decentralised nature, the rhizome is resistant to being broken apart. The term rhizome is taken from botany (again via anthropologist Gregory Bateson), but it is not limited to the vegetative. Examples of the rhizome include: pack animals, hive insects, human-virus relations, and at one point, the music of Glenn Gould.

Anthropologists have used the rhizome in ways not dissimilar to the ways that they have invoked the assemblage: as emergent systems of pure difference that are characterised by lateral, as opposed to hierarchical, relations. The rhizome is frequently invoked in discussions of globalization, particularly as it interacts with other complex systems such as biology, ecology, and demographic representational regimes (see, e.g., Mauer 2000, Muehlmann 2012, Rosengren 2003). In contrast to most anthropological discussions of the assemblage, though, many authors working on rhizomic arrangements have noted that it has a relationship with other organizational modes that exceed mere opposition. Deleuze and Guattari state that the rhizomes at times become arboreal: if sufficient pressures are placed upon a rhizome, or sufficient cuts administered to it, rhizomes will in effect become trees, with an internal hierarchy controlling the way the rhizome can spread, and the internal organizational logic of its constituent nodes. As it appears in anthropology, various bureaucratic or top-down processes are quite deft in this sort of pruning. Political moves to present a dispersed and open population as a discrete political actor, or to identify, and thus demarcate and bind, ‘at risk’ groups, are shown as repeatedly creating arboreal systems out of dispersed rhizomes (Muehlmann 2012, Rosengren 2003).

Affect

Other anthropological uptakes of Deleuze differ from Deleuze’s prior concept not because of different interests and priorities in the anthropologists engaging with his thought, but rather because of what might be called an ‘interference pattern’ from other conceptual homonyms. An example of this is the almost cosmic-inflation level of growth in discussions of affects in anthropology. Interest in affect, particularly as a force that has a special relation with late-capitalist and neoliberal forms of social organization, has been increasingly common (see, e.g., Mazarrella 2009, Muehlebach 2012, Navaro-Yashin 2012, O’Neil 2013, Richards & Rudnyckyj 2009, Rudnyckyj 2011, Stewart 2007). Influenced either by Deleuze’s account of affects, or more commonly, influenced at one remove by Brian Massumi’s (2002) account of Deleuze’s accounts of affects, they understand affects as a pre-linguistic, embodied intensity.

There is some confusion in discussions of affects: for instance, there is the representational problem in using language to narrate a pre-linguistic, pre-subjective phenomenon (see Bialecki forthcoming). But even more confusing is the simultaneous influence in anthropology of the concept of ‘affect’ as understood by the psychologist Silvan Tompkins, who understood affect as a limited number series of cognitive modules that, in various combinatory constellations, could co-produce the entire run of human emotion (see Tompkins et al. 1995). This second understanding, in which affect is heavily psychologised, as opposed to the Spinoza-influenced Deleuzian reading of affect as a force that either dilates or contracts human capacities at any single moment, has muddied the conceptual waters, as these are actually quite different phenomena (see Schaefer 2015). Most anthropological authors have not been careful to both specify whether they are dealing with affect as a pre-linguistic mix of a Spinozian illocutionary force (affectus) and perlocutionary capacity to be affected (affectio), or whether they are dealing instead with cognitive/psychological modules. This failure to specify has meant that elements of a very American psychological subjectivity can be found in many discussions of what purports to be a pre-subjective, pre-linguistic affective register.

Societies of control

Other discussions, though, have tended to hue closer to Deleuze’s self-presentation of the issues. These tended to either address minor works in Deleuze’s oeuvre, or (interestingly enough) some of his most demanding technical exercises. Let’s take an example of the former first. In a short essay entitled ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, Deleuze (1992b) presented the thesis that the advancement of networking and information technologies in the twentieth century has allowed a shift away from the sort of societies organised around disciplinary enclosures described in the middle period of Foucault; rather than creating standard, generic subjects through individually targeted disciplinary means, the society of control allows for decentralised monitoring and shaping of continually-evolving aspects of the person through processes that are not confined to any one space such as the factory, the barracks, or the schoolroom. As Deleuze says, this is a society of ‘passwords’ and ‘surfing’, where persons are grasped as data and not subjects. This 1992 piece, which seems to have grasped presciently much of the first-world present, has been well received, particularly by anthropologists interested in deploying Foucauldian concepts of discipline and biopower to contemporary neoliberal societies (see, e.g., O’Neill 2015: 230-1).

Temporality and the virtual

As for the more technical concepts that have been taken up with greater degrees of fidelity, we have Deleuze’s presentation of both time and of virtuality. Deleuze’s temporality is marked by its disjunctive logic, where numerous different autonomous modalities of time co-exist, operating at different scales and with different degrees of intensity, and hence creating emergent effects. Deleuze’s Henri-Bergson-informed concept of time as duration, a kind of qualitative flow, has been taken up with success, where the experience of time’s unfolding is seen as a vital part of any process. These discussions, which often also invoke the language of becoming, have been particularly fruitful when addressing creative endeavors (see Pandian 2012). Others have highlighted the clashing constituent elements of Deleuzian temporality, with cyclic temporalities of habit, a temporality of continual fissure with the present already yet continually being sundered into the past and future (or, to put it differently, the present always consisting entirety and only of the past and of the future), and a disruptive temporality of the event which consists of series of breaks with extant states of affairs (see Williams 2012; see also Bialecki 2017: 22-47). Matthew Hodges (2008, 2014) has relied on this polychronic aspect of Deleuze’s account of time to suggest ways in which now-dominant narratives of temporality such as ‘process’ and ‘flux’, which he associates with late capitalism, might actually be challenged, rather than ratified, by Deleuze’s thoughts.

Like temporality, virtuality is another Deleuzian conceptual tool that has received more rigorous amounts of attention. This should not be understood in the sense of ‘virtual worlds’, digital milieus that aim to wholly or partially create creditable simulations of, or rift on, aspects of the larger analogue universe (see, e.g., Boellstorff 2008). For Deleuze, the virtual is a concept that is meant to replace the possible. The problem with the possible is that it seems to be indicating states of affairs that were already complete, but simply lacking reality. This makes the possible, in essence, a static lack. Instead, Deleuze wanted to underscore the virtual as something that is real, albeit in way different from more conventional modes of existence. Rather than lacking existence, the virtual is an extant, open set of potentials that are always ready to be actualised. But the actualization of some virtual form may look quite different in different places and different times. This is not only because the actualizations may happen in different places and different times, and thus be part of different ecologies of sense. It is also because the virtual can be actualised in different manners, through using different material. For that reason, Deleuze stresses that the virtual and the actual do not ‘resemble’ one another; the virtual is not a platonic ideal. Rather, the virtual could be thought of as a series of variables set in a determinate relation to one another, or, as Deleuze put it, a series of multiplicities that are effectively topological, and thus capable of quite different instantiations, in the same way that a donut and a coffee cup are both actualizations of a torus, a purely mathematical entity.^{^[11]} This means, in a sense, that every entity or phenomenon is double faced; on one hand, there is a virtual aspect, a set of relations implicit in an object that can be repeated with or without distention, depending on the state of forces, and then on the other hand, there is the actual object, which in turn gives rise to the set of virtual relations that will be the ‘quasi-cause’ of the next instantiation.

Again, there are several ways to understand what Deleuze meant by this discussion of virtuality. It is clear that the virtual included the conceptual, or at least involves it. Deleuze’s conception of philosophy was as a retrospective mapping of the virtual, a way to trace back the virtual from what falls from an event, and thus identify other possible ways in which that virtuality could have been made actual; this practice of working from the actual to the virtual is called “counter-effectuation” in Deleuze’s parlance (Deleuze & Guattari 1994). To some, this makes the virtual in effect ideational, or at least a prelude to the experience of thinking particular thoughts. For others, though, this suggests that virtuality is a way to speak not merely of human ideational processes, but of all phenomenon (Delanda 2002).

The open nature of the concept of the virtual has again catalyzed different anthropological uses of it as a core idea. For some, the idea of the concept as a way of mapping possibilities has become their understanding of what it is that anthropology works towards, with these new concepts either being framed as creations of the anthropologists that are sufficient to think through ethnographic phenomena in a way that is adequate to the description given by those people they speak to, or by granting the thought of the informants themselves with the same kind of stature and formal qualities that are credited to western philosophy (Holbraad & Pedersen 2017, Viveiros de Castro 2014; see similarly Willerslev 2011). Virtuality and the virtual is also being used by anthropologists to account for variation and difference without having to adopt pure nominalism (that is, a mode of thought characterised by the rejection of universalisms and abstractions; see Bialecki 2012 ). This includes using virtuality to think of the sort of variation and potential inherent in either a particular practice or a mode of religiosity (Bialecki 2012), or variation that results when similar abstract forms or operations are expressed in different material (Bialecki 2016). Suzanne Kuchler (1999), for instance, has argued that the various senses of the word ‘Malanggan’, as used in New Ireland, which includes a memorial right, a carved object used in such rites, and for a larger system of ideas and practices that seems to envelope the rite and the object, are not three separate objects or categories, but instead are all expressions of the same virtual topological form.

Another use of virtuality is to account for the effectiveness of religious and ritual practice. The claim here is that much of ritual and religious activity can be understood as an attempt to work back to the virtual through practice or sensual experience instead of thought, and thus open up ethical, social, or even ontological possibilities that are currently blocked by the arrangement of the current state of affairs (see, e.g., Kapferer 2004, 2007; Viveiros de Castro 2007). It has also been proposed that the engine of religion, if we can speak of such a thing, lies in a virtual pliability found in modes of religiosity that allows for it to take on an infinite number of expressions, all with different material entailments and therefore different effects as they combine with other assemblages (Bialecki 2016b, 2017).

Conclusion

This conversation does not exhaust discussions of Deleuze in anthropology.^[12] But despite the partial nature of this discussion, a pattern should be apparent. The first aspect of the pattern concerns Deleuze’s thought. While shot through with a host of self-invented or repurposed terminology, the logic of each of these terms resonates with each other. The diagrammatic logic of the assemblage and particular instances of the assemblage shares aspects with the virtual/actual distinction, aspects of Deleuzian becoming and Deleuzian temporality seem to parallel one another, and Deleuzian discussions of the society of control seems to be a particularised and historically-situated exemplar of the play of rhizomic and arboreal modes of organising. It would be wrong to consider Deleuze a monolithic thinker, since each of these concepts have their own utility and targets, but one can see how together they seem to be themselves examples of Deleuze’s interest in the intimate relationship between repetition and difference.

The second aspect of the pattern is that anthropology has, for the most part, had a cafeteria approach to Deleuze, taking just an element or two that is to their liking, rather than the whole set of mechanisms. This has created an interesting phenomenon. At what was (at least in terms of the temporality of academic publishing) the same time, two assessments were presented of Deleuze’s reception of anthropology. One assessment was that ‘relatively few anthropologists had made use’ of Deleuze (Jensen & Rödge 2010: 1). The other assessment was the claim that in American anthropology, 2010 was the year of Deleuze (Hamilton & Places 2011). Both assessments may be right. While we are no longer at the point where we can say, as Marcus and Saka once did, that we are lacking ‘technical and formal’ encounters with Deleuze (2006: 103), it is also true that rather than dedicate themselves to the intellectual mechanisms that Deleuze constructed, many anthropologists have decided not to, in João Biehlo’s (2013) words, let theory get in the way of ethnography. This may be for the best: Deleuze, interested in creativity, would honor sly theft over dutiful exegesis. But while such redeployments may be fruitful, they also run the risk of being glib, or of not even understanding how the pilfered tools work at all. It remains to be seen which anthropological borrowings of Deleuze are the pollinated flower, which uses some alien presence to perpetuate its own being, and which borrowings are the wasp, pointlessly copulating with an alien other due to an act of complete misrecognition.

Notes

The author would like to both thank and lay blameless Ian Lowrie and Razvan Amironesei for their contributions on some technical matters. The author, of course, owns all breaks from the image of thought.

References

Ahmad, A. 2017. Everyday conversions: Islam, domestic work, and South Asian migrant women in Kuwait. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Alliez, É. 2005. The signature of the world or, what is Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy? New York: Continuum.

Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Ansell-Pearson, K. 2012. Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge.

Badiou, A. 2000. Saint Paul: the foundations of universalism (trans. R. Brassier). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Barthes, R. 1974. S/z (trans. R. Miller). New York: Hill & Wang.

Bateson, G. 2010. Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University Press.

Baxstrom, R. 2008. Houses in motion: the experience of place and the problem of belief in urban Malaysia. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

——— & T. Meyers 2016. Realizing the witch: science, cinema, and the mastery of the invisible. New York: Fordham University Press.

Bialecki, J. 2012. Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology. Anthropological Theory 12(3), 295-319.

——— 2014. Review of Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the naming of God: post-secularism and the future of immanence and F. LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic theology: Gilles Deleuze and the secretion of atheism. Religion in Society: Advances in Research 5, 261-7.

——— 2015. Affect: intensities and energies in the charismatic language, embodiment, and genre of a North American movement. In The anthropology of global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (eds) S. Coleman & R. Hackett, 95-108. New York: University Press.

——— & J. Bielo 2016a. The ancient-future time crystal: on the temporality of emerging Christianity. In Crossing boundaries, redefining faith: interdisciplinary perspective on the emerging church (eds) A. Stace & M. Clawson, 71-91. Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock.

——— 2016b. Diagramming the will: ethics and prayer, text and politics. Ethnos 81(4), 712-32.

——— 2016c. Protestant language, Christian problems, and religious realism. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 40(4), 37-42.

——— 2016d. The genealogy of ethical life, a review of Webb Keane, Ethical life: its natural and social histories. In Marginalia Review of Books (available on-line: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/genealogy-ethical-life-jon-bialecki/).

——— & R. Amironesei 2017a. Assemblages: (pre)political, ethical, and ontological perspectives. SubStance 46(1), 3-20.

——— 2017b. A diagram for fire: miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement. Oakland: University of California Press.

——— forthcoming. “The Lord says you speak as harlots”: affect, affectus, and affectio. In Language and religion (eds) R. Yelle, C. Lerich & C. Handman. Berlin: De Gruyters

Biehlo, J. 2013. Ethnography in the way of theory. Cultural Anthropology 28(4), 573-97.

——— & P. Locke 2010. Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming. Current Anthropology 51(3), 317-37.

Boellstroff, T. 2008. Coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: University Press

Boyer, D. 2002. The medium of Foucault in anthropology. Minnesota Review 58(1), 265-72.

Clastres, P. 2007. Society against the state: essays in political anthropology. New York: Zone Books.

Cusset, F. 2008. French theory: how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Delanda, M. 2002. Intensive science and virtual philosophy. New York: Continuum.

Deleuze, G. 1990a. The logic of sense. New York: Columbia University Press.

——— 1990b. Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books.

——— 1992. Ethnology: Spinoza and us. In Incorporations (ed.) S. Lotringer. New York: Zone.

——— 1992b. Postscript on the societies of control. October 59, 3-7.

——— 1993. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

——— 1995. Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press. 

——— 2004. Desert islands and other texts, 1953-1974. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

——— & F. Guattari 1983. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— & F. Guattari 1994. What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. 

——— & F. Guattari 1999. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Dosse, F. 2010. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: intersecting lives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, M. 1998. Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (ed.) J. Faubion. New York: The New Press.

Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.

Hallward, P. 2006. Out of this world: Deleuze and the philosophy of creation. London: Verso.

Hamilton, J.A. & A.J. Placas 2011. Anthropology becoming…? The 2010 sociocultural anthropology year in review. American Anthropologist 113(2), 246-61.

Hodges, M. 2008. Rethinking time's arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the anthropology of time. Anthropological Theory 8(4), 399-429.

——— 2014. Immanent anthropology: a comparative study of ‘process’ in contemporary France. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(S1), 33-51.

Holbraad, M. & M.A. Pedersen 2017. The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition. Cambridge: University Press.

Holland, E. 2003. Representation and misrepresentation in postcolonial literature and theory. Research in African Literatures 34(1), 159-73

Hughes, J. 2008. Deleuze and the genesis of representation. New York: Continuum.

Jensen, C.B. & K. Rödje 2010. Introduction. In Deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology (eds) C.B. Jensen & K. Rödje, 3-35. New York: Berghahn.

Kantorowicz, E. 1997. The king’s two bodies. Princeton: University Press.

Kapferer, B. 2004. Ritual dynamics and virtual practice: beyond representation and meaning. Social Analysis 48(2), 35-54.

——— 2007. Virtuality. In Theorizing rituals: issues, topics, approaches, concepts (eds) J. Kreinath, J. Snoek, M. Stausberg, 671-84. Leiden: Brill.

——— 2013. Montage and time: Deleuze, cinema, and a Buddhist sorcery rite. In Transcultural montage (eds) C. Suhr & R. Willerslev, 20-39. New York: Berghan.

Kaufman, E. 2007. Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, and the joy of abstraction. Criticism 49(4), 447-58.

Keane, W. 2003. Christian moderns: freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kuchler, S. 1999. Binding in the Pacific: the case of Malanggan. Oceania 69(3), 145-57

Lacan, J. 2007. Ecrits: the first complete edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Laidlaw, J. 2002. For an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2), 311-32.

Latour, B. 2012. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Lowe, C. 2010. Viral clouds: becoming H5N1 in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 625-49.

Lowrie, I. 2017. What sort of thing is the social? Or, Durkheim and Deleuze on organization and infrastructure. In The new politics of materialism: history, philosophy, science (eds) S. Ellenzweig & J.H. Zammito, 154-77. London: Routledge.

Mackay, R. & A. Avanessian 2014. Introduction. In #Accelerate#: [the accelerationist reader] (ed.) R. Mackay, 3-46. Falmouth, Cornwall: Urbanomic Media Ltd.

Marcus, G.E. & E. Saka 2006. Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society 23(2-3), 101-6.

Marcuse, H. 1974. Eros and civilization: a philosophical inquiry into Freud with a new preface by the author. Boston: Beacon Press.

Marx, K. & F. Engels. 1970. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Peking: Foreign Language Press.

Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mauer, B. 2000. A fish story: rethinking globalization. American Ethnologist 27(3), 670-701.

Mazzarella, W. 2009. Affect: what is it good for? In Enchantments of modernity: Empire, nation, globalization (ed.) S. Dube, 291-309. London: Routledge.

Meillassoux, Q. 2011. After finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency. New York: Continuum.

Mengue, P. 2013. Faire l’idiot: la politique de Deleuze. Paris: Germina.

Miller, C. 1993. The postidentitarian predicament in the footnotes of A thousand plateaus: nomadology, anthropology, and authority. Diacritics 23(3), 6-35.

Moore, A. W. 2013. The evolution of modern metaphysics: making sense of things. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Morgan, L. 1907 [1877]. Ancient society, or researchers in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization. New York: Henry, Holt, & Co.

Muehlebach, A. 2012. The moral neoliberal: welfare and citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University Press.

Muehlmann, S. 2012. Rhizomes and other uncountable: the malaise of enumeration in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. American Ethnographer 39(2), 339-53.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2012. The make-believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

O’Neill, K. L. 2013. Beyond broken: affective spaces and the study of American religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81(4), 1093-116.

——— 2015. Secure the soul: Christian piety and gang prevention in Guatemala. Oakland: University of California Press.

O’Sullivan, S. & S. Zepke 2008. Deleuze, Guattari and the production of the new. London: Continuum.

Pandian, A. 2012. The time of anthropology: notes from a field of contemporary experience. Cultural Anthropology 27(4), 547-71.

——— 2015. Reel world: an anthropology of creation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Pedersen, M.A. 2007. Multiplicity minus myth: theorizing Darhad perspectivism. Inner Asia 9(2), 311-28.

Percival, W.K. 2011. Roman Jacobson and the birth of linguistic structuralism. Sign System Studies 39(1), 236-62.

Phillips, J. 2006. Agencement/Assemblage. Theory Culture Society 23(2-3), 108-9.

Plotnitsky, A. 2009. Bernhard Riemann. In Deleuze’s philosophical lineage (eds) G. Jones & J. Roffe, 190-208. Edinburgh: University Press.

Rabinow, P. 2003. Anthropos today: reflections on modern equipment. Princeton: University Press.

Rappaport, R. 2000. Pigs for the ancestors: ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland.

Richards, A. & D. Rudnyckyj 2009. Economies of affect. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1), 57-77.

Robbins, J. 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: towards an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3), 447-62

Rosengren, D. 2003. The collective self and the ethnopolitical movement: ‘rhizomes’ and ‘taproots’ in the Amazon. Identitie 10(2): 221-40

Rudnyckyj, D. 2011. Circulating tears and managing hearts: governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory. Anthropological Theory 11(1), 63-87.

Rutherford, D. 2012. Kinky empiricism. Cultural Anthropology 27(3), 465-79.

Shaefer, D. 2015. Religious affects: animality, evolution, and power. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Silverstein, M. 2004. ‘Cultural’ concepts and the language-culture nexus. Current Anthropology 45(5), 621-52.

Smith, Daniel W. 2012. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.

Stasch, R. 2006. Structuralism in anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics vol. 2: 167-70.

Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary affects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Tampio, N. 2009. Assemblages and the multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the postmodern left. European Journal of Political Theory 8(3), 383-400.

Tompkins, S., E.K. Sedgwick & A. Frank 1995. Shame and its sisters: a Silvan Tomkins reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Toymentsev, S. 2015. Review of Phillipe Mengue, Faire l’idiot: la politique de Deleuze. French Studies: A Quarterly Review 69(2), 263-65.

Tylor, E. 1871a. Primitive cultures: researchers into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom vol. 1. London: John Murry.

——— 1871b. Primitive cultures: researchers into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom vol. 2. London: John Murry.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2007. The forest of mirrors: a few notes on the ontology of Amazonian spirits. Inner Asia 9(2), 153-72.

——— 2015. Cannibal metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Voss, D. 2013. Conditions of thought: Deleuze and transcendental ideas. Edinburgh: University Press.

Wagner, R. 1975. The invention of culture. Chicago: University Press.

Willerslev, R. 2011. Frazer strikes back from the armchair: a new search for the animist soul. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(3), 504-26.

Williams, J. 2012. Gilles Delezue’s philosophy of time: a critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh: University Press.

Zdenbik, J. 2012. Deleuze and the diagram: aesthetic threads in visual organization. London: Continuum.

Zigon, J. 2015. What is a situation?: An assemblic ethnography of the drug war. Cultural Anthropology 30(3), 501-24.

Žižek, S. 2004. Organs without bodies: Deleuze and consequences. New York: Routledge.

Zourabichvili, F. 2012. Deleuze: a philosophy of the event: together with, the vocabulary of Deleuze. Edinburgh: University Press.

Note on contributor

Jon Bialecki is an honorary fellow with the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, A diagram for fire: miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement, is a study of the miraculous and differentiation in American religion, with a focus on ethics, politics, language, and economic practices. He is currently working on his second manuscript, A machine for making gods: Mormonism, transhumanism, and speculative thought.

Dr Jon Bialecki, The Lihosit Research Institute, 8434 via Sonoma #65, La Jolla, California, 92037-2722, United States. Jon.Bialecki@ed.ac.uk

[1] Following a convention that has arisen in the secondary literature regarding Deleuze (despite the fact that even those who inaugurated it feels that it is a grotesquely unfair distribution of credit), in this essay Deleuze’s co-authored works will be treated as if they were an extension of ‘his’ thought, even as we will try to acknowledge when we are referring to collaborative material.

[2] This modesty should not be mistaken for unwavering respect: he referred to his work in the history of philosophy as a ‘sort of buggery’ where he takes the philosopher he is writing on ‘from behind…giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (Deleuze 1995: 6).

[3] The claim that there are multiple, incommensurable readings of Deleuze may be to understate the argument. For instance, he has been described as continuing Kant’s transcendental project (Voss 2013) even though he has claimed that he treated Kant like ‘an enemy’ (N: 6). At the same time, Deleuze’s work has been described as ‘essentially phenomenological’, and deeply indebted to Husserl (Hughes 2008: ix). But before we see him as rejecting any knowledge of the noumenon, or as centering himself on the subject and on subjectivity, we should also note that he has also been called a ‘realist philosopher’ who broke with idealist ‘postmodernity’ by affirming an anti-idealist, anti-subjectivist ‘mind-independent reality.’^{^[3]} (Delanda: 2). His project has been cited as centered on creating an ontology that purposeful erases the human/nature opposition (Ansell-Pearson 2012), and, conversely, he has been described as writing against ontology, and instead presenting an ethics of immanence and the ‘event’ (Zourabichvili 2012). He has been called a philosopher concerned with the production of difference and the new (Smith 2008). However, his detractors argue that he was actually a ‘monotonous’ thinker, obsessed with a philosophy of the one (Badiou 2000), a gnostic who rejects the actual and the political to favor aesthetics and a realm of never-materializable phantasmic possibilities (Hallward 2006, Žižek 2003). Because of this, many critics claim that Deleuze offers no political project, though at this point the reader will be little surprised to hear that there are differing opinions on this front, too. He has been depicted as someone taking up a democratic, emancipatory Foucauldian micropolitics of short-term tactical action by collectives of disparate parties (Bialecki 2017), as someone whose ascetics and ethics drives him to reject democracy (Mengue 2013, see also Toymentsev 2015), as someone whose politics are essentially Leninist, and as someone who has inoculated himself against any Leninist appropriation (Tampio 2009), as a staunch anti-capitalist, and as a wild-eyed precursor of the accelerationist desire to chase the dragon of late capitalism all the way to its likely ugly, possibly inhuman, end (Mckay and Avanessian 2014).

[4] These ‘multiplicities’ are taken in part from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, but also from the work of the nineteenth century mathematician Bernard Reinmann; Reinmann’s mathematical concept of space, not as a totalized Euclidian grid, but rather as a series or collectivity of local spaces, each of which may be characterized by different dimensions, and thus escape any global determination; in the standard English translation of Riemann’s work the concept of the constituent elements of a topological space is translated as manifolds, while Anglophone scholars of Deleuze translated the term as multiplicities, following the French translation of Reinmann’s work, multiplicitê. See Plotinksy 2009.

[5] It should be noted that this was a piece that was not published until 1973.

[6] To an extent, this emphasis on Nietzsche could be seen not only as an attempt to address the whole expanse of the history of the species, but also as Deleuze presaging a later anthropological interest in ethics, which has acknowledged the importance of Nietzsche (Laidlaw 2002), though perhaps not fully embracing what a Nietzschian psychology would entail (Bialecki 2016c).

[7] Despite its fictive location, the socius is actually located ‘on’ the body without organs, the term Deleuze and Guattari use for the entirety of production before any ordering or ranking is visited upon it.

[8] Among the anthropologists and anthropological sub-fields that constitute ‘accidental Deleuzians’, one of the most surprising may be mainline American linguistic anthropology; while this does not prove kinship, both Deleuze and linguistic anthropology share an antipathy for structural linguistics and Chomskian linguistic formalism, an enthusiasm for Labov’s sociolinguistics, a high regard for Austin’s speech-act theory, and a facility with the Peircian semiotic triad of icon, index, and sign. This is also almost certainly completely accidental, as suggested by the divergent approaches taken towards other core issues. Take, for example, materiality and language. Linguistic anthropology tends to deal with issues of ‘semiotic ideology’ (Keane 2003), which can be glossed as metapragmatic concerns for the communicative potential and ethical valence of not just speech, but of material culture as well. In contrast, Deleuze handles material aspects of communication through ‘collective assemblages’, a term for ecologies or arrangements which include both material objects and speech acts or writing (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 7). Even greater distance can be found in the respective treatment for affect. Affect, as will be discussed shortly, is a foundational concept for Deleuze, which he takes in the Spinozan sense of a force measured by its intensity and not by way of any extension (Deleuze 1990b, 1992a), while linguistic anthropology (Silverstein 2004) tends to see any differentiation between speech and affect as an idiosyncratic western understanding (see Bialecki 2015, in press).

Another accidental – or perhaps crypto- – Deleuzian field in anthropology is the line of thought that is referred to as the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern, the two most exemplary thinkers in this movement, display certain tendencies in their thought that are strongly Deleuzian, though in different ways. Roy Wagner’s concept of culture as invention, with both the achieved elements and the elements that are understood as fixed and conventionalized requiring continual creation though both effort and through being thrust into new contexts, echoes Deleuze’s concerns for fluid and emergent forms, and for the way that thoughts, practices, and material are at times decontextualized and deconstructed to allow for novelty (‘deterritorialized’) or are at other times set in determinate relation with one another (‘territorialization’, which maps onto Wagner’s counter-invention) (Wagner 1975). Marilyn Strathern’s interest in privileging relation over identity also has a Deleuzian cast, as for Deleuze it is the web of connections, rather than the essence of a thing itself, that often controls how some person, process, or object is expressed; this in part could be an expression of Strathern’s and Deleuze’s common interest in the nineteenth century sociologist Gabriel Tarde. The commonality between these three thinkers has been noted by many of the later authors that they have influenced, with the ‘ontological turn’ often articulating their thought, and justifying their project, through explicit references to Deleuze (see, e.g., Holbraad & Pedersen 2017). But Wagner has never cited Deleuze, and while Strathern has at times acknowledged Deleuze’s work, it has been more along the lines of noting a commonality than acknowledging intellectual descent.

[9] When I make this claim, I am sometimes met with protestations that Paul Rabinow has a more nuanced concept of the assemblage that is closer to that of Deleuze’s own understanding; particularly, Rabinow’s assemblage is presented as a more enduring form. However, as Rabinow himself asserts, his assemblages are ‘comparatively effervescent’, operating on a time scale of ‘years or decades’ which is much shorter than the other conceptual objects Rabinow relates them to (2003: 56). The comparative life spans of social objects can be seen by tracing what appears to be a Rabinowian great chain of social-ontological being, in which ‘problematizations’ (which are thematic, open ended, and sometimes millennia-old running grand challenges, such as ‘discipline’ or ‘sexuality’) trigger the emergence of assemblages, which will in turn either ‘disaggregate’ or mature in an ‘apparatus’. Sandwiched between human conundrums and long running social formations, the assemblage is, like most other anthropological assemblages, again just a short-lived, emergent form.

[10] This should not be read as a critique of Robbins take on Biehl’s 2005 book Vita, nor as an endorsement of it; rather, it is an observation that an anthropology of suffering and an anthropology of the good may have a more intimate connection with one another than appears on the surface (see Bialecki 2014).

[11] See footnote four, infra.

[12] This already overly long entry does not have space to discuss Deleuze’s extensive writings on cinema, which have been used not just to think through the production of film as a creative enterprise (see, e.g., Baxstrom & Meyers 2016; Pandian 2015) but also analogically to think through other social phenomena (see, e.g., Baxstrom 2008; Bialecki & Bielo 2016; Kapferer 2013). We have also not addressed the role of Deleuze in ethnographies of science, multi-species relations, or infectious disease, which have their own engagement with Deleuzian concepts such as assemblage, becoming, or rhizomes (see., e.g., Lowe 2010). Nor have we addressed what a Deleuzian politically engaged and applied anthropology look like.

Values

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Joel Robbins Julian Sommerschuh

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16values

Abstract:

The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review the different anthropological approaches that come together under the label of ‘value theory’. At present, these can be sorted into structuralist and action-oriented camps. The former treats values as objective phenomena embedded in cultural structures; the latter conceives of value as something that must be continually produced by human activity. After reviewing classical and more recent statements of these two positions, we discuss a third approach that tries to link both structure and action perspectives.

Introduction

The concept of values occupied a central place in philosophy and the social sciences during the first half of the twentieth century. After having faded out of view for some decades, it has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. An initial definition might state that ‘values’ have to do with the good and the important. But even this would suggest greater agreement about the nature of this concept than has so far been reached among anthropologists. The aim of this entry, therefore, is not to state authoritatively what value ‘is’, but to review the different anthropological approaches that come together under the label of ‘value theory’.

At present, these approaches can be sorted into structuralist or action-oriented camps. The former treats value as an objective phenomenon embedded in cultural structures; the latter conceives of value as something that must be continually produced by human activity. Proponents of both camps agree, however, that an anthropological theory of value should ultimately be able to transcend this division. As one key contemporary value theorist puts it, value is

a term that suggests the possibility of resolving ongoing theoretical dilemmas; particularly of overcoming the difference between what one might call top-down and bottom-up perspectives: between theories that start from a certain notion of social structure, or social order, or some other totalizing notion, and theories that start from individual motivation (Graeber 2001: 20).

Foundations of value theory

The concept of value originated in eighteenth century economics and was taken up in late nineteenth century German philosophy from where it entered the twentieth century social sciences (Schnädelbach 1984: 161-91; Joas 2000: 20; Robbins 2015a). The emergence of a philosophical discourse on value known as axiology needs to be seen in the context of the rise of the modern scientific worldview (Schroeder 2012). Earlier ways of thinking, largely derived from Aristotelian thought, had assumed that how things ought to be could be deduced from the way things are. The scientific worldview, by contrast, advocated a strict separation between facts and what now came to be called ‘values’ (Robbins 2015a). For our purposes, two things are worth noting here. Firstly, in taking the position formerly occupied by the concept of the good, the notion of value assumed its meaning as something people want or should want to attain, as opposed to the right, which refers to those things people feel obliged to carry out (Venkatesan 2015: 442-43). It is this meaning that has remained most closely associated with the term ever since. Secondly, the distinction between facts and values raises the question of whether values are subjective or objective phenomena. On the one hand, it appears that understandings of the good, if not rooted in nature, could only depend on the whim of valuing subjects. On the other, reacting to the relativism implied by this position, early value philosophers, such as the neo-Kantians Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, sought to re-establish an objective basis for value by trying to find ‘in the subjectivity of valuation the conditions for its universal validity’ (Joas 2000: 22). Early phenomenologists such as Max Scheler (1973) likewise argued for the objective existence of values as things in the world. The issue of whether and in what sense values exist independently of subjects has remained a topic of debate to this day and will reappear throughout this entry.

Through the work of Max Weber in particular (1949: 50-112; 1946: 323-61), himself deeply influenced by German philosophical debates, the concept of value entered the North American social sciences, where it gained a prominent place in the decade following World War II. A key protagonist of this movement was the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. According to Kluckhohn's influential definition, a value is a ‘conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action’ (1951: 395). The key term in this definition is ‘desirable’, which indicates that values are not simply desires but desires which people consider justified. It is such conceptions of the desirable, when shared by people, that Kluckhohn thought account for the uniqueness of cultures. Hence, the comparative analysis of cultures – anthropology – had to take the form, above all, of a comparison of values. As a way to investigate empirically the difference values make, Kluckhohn designed the ‘Harvard Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures’. Conducted from 1949 to 1955, this large-scale research project aimed at comparing the values of five cultures – Navaho, Zuni, Spanish-America, Mormons, and Texan – that existed under similar ecological conditions in the Rimrock area of western New Mexico. Although resulting in a number of sophisticated descriptions of each of these cultures' values (see Albert 1956; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck 1961; Vogt & Albert 1966), the project is commonly remembered as a failure because it did not achieve its core aim of finding a way of drawing comparisons between these value systems. Its lack of success in this regard has been laid at the feet of its failure to develop of a notion of the structures that relate values to one another (Graeber 2001: 4-5), or attributed to the difficulty from within the project’s framework of determining how many values might be relevant to the analysis of a given culture or the comparison of two or more of them (D'Andrade 2008: 4). Perhaps as importantly, for various reasons – some of them personal rather than intellectual – the most prominent publication of the project, People of Rimrock (Vogt and Albert 1966), was not published until ten years after the project itself ended, by which time general interest in the topic of values had passed its peak (Powers 2000).

Louis Dumont, who commented on the Harvard project some twenty years later, was one of those scholars who attributed its failure largely to the absence of a notion of structure (1986: 240 ff.). Dumont’s own work (1980, 1986, 1994) directly addressed that absence, and contributed significantly to the anthropological study of values. Dumont's starting point was the observation that whereas classical structuralism considered cultures to be made up of binary oppositions in which each element is as important as the one to which it is opposed, such oppositions in reality mostly take a hierarchical form. That is, not only do cultures draw distinctions of the type male/female, raw/cooked, hot/cold, but they also routinely accord a higher value to one of the poles of each opposition. Furthermore, Dumont suggests that in cases of hierarchal opposition, the higher ranked element can in some contexts ‘encompass’ the lower ranked one, coming to stand for the whole domain to which the two elements refer. Thus, for example, in the English language, the lexeme ‘man’ can in some contexts stand for both ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the idea of ‘mankind’, even as in others it stands for male individuals.

Cultural meaning systems – ‘ideologies’ as Dumont called them (though here he was drawing on a sense of the word that has significant overlap with the English 'culture' and is not tied to Marxist definitions of the term that link it to notions such as class interest or false consciousness) – can be described as orders of such hierarchically arranged values and ideas. The overall hierarchical ordering of the various ‘value-ideas’ of an ideology is, in Dumont's view, an effect of certain overarching or ‘paramount’ values – things or states of affairs considered better and more worthwhile than anything else. All other values in an ideology are attributed a specific rank based on the extent of their contribution to the realization of its paramount value. In the ideology of the Indian caste system, for instance, ‘purity’ figures as the paramount value, and all things and social groups are ranked according to their relative degree of purity, ranging from the highly pure Brahmans to the impure ‘Untouchables’. However, Dumont also emphasised that ideologies do not present one unbroken chain of decreasing value (1980: 239). Rather, on his account, ideologies also contain several ‘levels’^[1], which are themselves ranked in relation to each other by virtue of their own relative contributions to the realization of highly ranked values. In moving between levels, ‘reversals’ occur: a thing highly valued in one context may in another context be subordinate to and differentiated from what it previously encompassed. Thus, in India, the king is overall ranked below the Brahman, for power is less important than purity. But in certain worldly contexts defined as political this relation is reversed and the Brahman is represented as inferior to the king. The concept of reversal is important because it highlights that Dumont's notion of ideological structures of values is less neat and totalising than alleged by his critics (see Appadurai 1988; Dirks 2001). At the same time, it suggests that what appears as contradictory to an outside observer unacquainted with emic distinctions between levels may in reality conform to an overarching logic. All in all, then, Dumont proposes to think of value as embedded in the structure of culture. He thus takes a decidedly objectivist position according to which values exist independently from human subjects, though their existence as part of ideological structures also means that no values are necessarily universal across all cultures.

Parallel to Dumont, a second school of anthropological value theory developed across the Atlantic at the University of Chicago among scholars such as Nancy Munn and Terence Turner. Rather than focus on ideational orders, as Dumont did, the Chicago School directed attention to the role of human practice in the creation of value. For Munn, the impulse for this focus came from her work on Gawa, an island in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea well known to anthropologists as the area in which the Kula ring^[2] is an important institution. Gawans' primary concern, Munn found, was to extend their ‘fame’ in the inter-island world by attaching their name to prestigious kula shells (1986). To do so required a long chain of exchanges (or ‘value transformations’), in the course of which lower level valuables such as garden produce were exchanged against more valuable ones, such as canoes, which in turn could be exchanged against low-level kula shells and so on. If value in Gawa is generated by human acts of value transformation, then ‘value is signified through specific qualities that characterise such components of practice as the body’ or kula-shells (Munn 1986: 16, emphasis added). For example, heaviness and motionlessness are qualities of bodies that signify negative value because they index that a person has consumed food herself rather than using it in exchange for something more valuable. Lightness, by contrast, indexes positive value. Drawing on the philosopher C. S. Peirce, Munn refers to such qualities that signify value as ‘qualisigns’ – a second key concept, along with chains of value transformation, in her theoretical program.

Turner’s (1979; 2003; 2008) theory of value similarly focused on practice or action more than structure, but he took greater pains to phrase his contribution in Marxist terms than did Munn (though she too was influenced by Marx). ‘Value’, in the Marxist tradition, first of all refers to the value of commodities and is understood to result from the labour invested in their production. This labour theory of value differs from the neoclassical view according to which a thing's value is rooted in the utility that it has for someone. On Turner’s (2008: 46) account, contrary to other labour theories of value, such as David Ricardo's (2006 [1817]), the Marxist version of this theory moreover holds that the value of a product is not determined by the absolute amount of labour that went into its making but by the proportion of the total social labour power of a system invested in it. Turner argued that this perspective has its merits even in non-capitalist contexts, where people are primarily concerned not with the production of commodities but with that of social persons. Thus, among the Amazonian Kayapo, with whom Turner did fieldwork, the people into the ‘making’ of whom the greatest fraction of labour had been invested – elders – appeared as imbued with the greatest value. Harkening back to Marx, Turner notes that value usually becomes embodied in and represented through some kind of material “value-form” (2008: 49). In capitalist societies, money is the primary value-form. Among the Kayapo, by contrast, certain types of ritual chanting and oratory take this position. The supreme value of elders is indicated by the fact that they are the only ones to have the right to engage with these forms of oratory and chanting (2003: 3). Turner went much further than this in his application of Marxist theory to non-capitalist societies, arguing that here too processes of fetishization and exploitation occur. For our purposes, however, the basic point to take away is the Marxist notion of value being an effect of human productive activity.

Contemporary developments in value theory

As mentioned earlier, recent years have witnessed renewed anthropological interest in the concept of value (see Otto & Willerslev 2013a, 2013b; Iteanu & Moya 2015; Haynes & Hickel forthcoming). While we do not have the space to discuss the reasons for this development, it is worth noting that it coincides with a more general ‘ethical turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Value theory is potentially well placed to contribute to this broader field of inquiry into the evaluative dimension of social life (see Robbins 2012; 2015b). The ability to do so, however, is likely to depend on resolving internal difficulties first. At this point, the two basic positions outlined in the previous section – the structuralist and the action-oriented - continue to oppose each other. Yet, there have been developments on both sides. We review these here before moving on to discuss a third approach to value that might be able to remedy a gap left unfilled by both the structuralist and the action-oriented approaches.

On the structuralist side, work has continued along Dumontian lines, with Dumont's followers defending his approach against a range of criticisms. The most widespread of these criticisms maintains, in many respects unfairly, that Dumont's notion of ideology relies on assumptions about its bounded, integrated, and unchanging nature that have been widely criticised as features of theoretical notions of culture more generally (for a review of these criticisms, and a discussion of some of the problems that beset them, see Brightman 1995; for examples of pieces that suggest that in fact they do not apply to Dumont, see Kapferer 2010; Ortner [1984] 1994). One promising response to such claims is Rio and Smedal's conceptual pair of ‘totalization’/‘detotalization’, which introduces a procedural perspective that sees totality not as a fait accompli but as an ongoing movement (2008). From this point of view, ‘[h]ierarchy is an ideology in motion that constantly melts down categories and substances, things, ideas and people that come under its totalizing sway and transforms them and gives them value according to its own social universe’ (Rio & Smedal 2008: 237). In other words, value systems here are not conceptualised as existing in a fixed form but instead as being constantly (re)produced through the tendency of core values to attach value to the things around them. As an example of this process, one might consider the way economic values related to market freedom and the maximization of profit often move to influence spheres other than the economic one in social formations currently defined as neo-liberal.

A second way of addressing the criticism directed at Dumont’s model – that it tends to represent value relations as static – is to be found in Joel Robbins' (2007) proposal to incorporate Weber's ideas about value spheres into Dumont’s model. According to Weber, social life is divided into several spheres of activity. Weber himself distinguished six such spheres (political, economic, religious, aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual) (1946: 331), but Robbins notes that the number and shape of value spheres may differ across societies (2007: 298-99). In Weber's account, the different spheres promote different ultimate ends and therefore, like ‘warring gods’, stand in irreconcilable conflict with one another. Hence, where Dumont is often read as proposing that the different levels of an ideology are neatly integrated under one paramount value, Weber allows for the possibility that levels or spheres may also confront each other as equals. Robbins' suggestion is not that one of these views is more adequate than the other. Rather, he suggests that anthropologists should treat the question of whether value systems are ‘monist’ (with various values exhaustively ranked vis-à-vis one another and thus working together harmoniously) or ‘pluralist’ (with values standing in conflict to each other) as the object of empirical inquiry, and should be attentive to the tension between unifying and pluralising movements that often mark cultural process (Robbins 2013).

As important as this work has been in updating Dumont’s approach, it has not addressed one of the basic problems associated with his approach, namely the lack of a theory of motivation. While Dumont’s model excels at analyzing values on the cultural level, his theory does not attend to how values influence people's lives and what motivates actors to pursue them. As long as we do not assume that cultural systems reproduce themselves independently of human subjects, this neglect of the subjective dimension of value makes it difficult to understand cultural reproduction, or, for that matter, change.

Here, a return to the action-oriented camp is necessary, for its main contemporary proponent, David Graeber, explicitly states that theories in this camp ‘start from individual motivation’ (2001: 20). Graeber' approach strongly builds on Munn and Turner. He derives from their work the basic understanding that value ‘is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves’ (2001: 45). The underlying assumption here is that people invest their energies into the things that they consider most important. Hence, if ‘Americans spend 7 percent of their creative energies in a given year producing automobiles, this is the ultimate measure of how important it is to us to have cars’, and ‘if Americans have spent, say, .000000000007 percent or some similarly infinitesimal proportion of their creative energies in a given year on this car, then that represents its value’ (Graeber 2001: 55). Like Turner, Graeber assumes that value inevitably comes to be represented in value-forms, such as money, kula-shells, or chiefly chanting. The crucial point is that such value-forms are not simply representations of value but elicit people's desire and thus actually bring into being the very thing that they represent. This had already been noted by Turner (2008: 51), and is further emphasised by Graeber. Money, for instance, appears as ‘an object of desire, the pursuit of which motivates workers to actually carry out the very creative actions whose value it represents—since, after all, this is the reason one goes to work to begin with: in order to get paid’ (Graeber 2013: 225).

This argument certainly goes some way toward formulating a theory of motivation. Yet it only pushes the problem one step further back, because it does not explain how value-forms become desirable in the first place. This appears as a question particularly worth posing for cases (take contemporary Western societies as an example) where different people pursue different forms of value (e.g. money or academic standing). The traditional answer to this sort of question would point to the influence of social structures in making certain things rather than others appear as desirable to people (see Bourdieu 1984). But this response does not appear possible within Graeber's framework, because he is at pains to reject the notion of structure as something that precedes and guides human action, putting in its place his understanding that structures are ‘really just patterns of action’ that are constantly subject to change (2001: 59). This position makes it as difficult to bridge the gap between structure and motivation from within his theoretical perspective as it is from within the structuralist paradigm.

A third approach to value

So far, we have encountered values as existing as elements of cultural or ideological structures and as products of human action. One might speak, then, of cultural values, construed as collective representations of what is good and important in life, and personal values understood as that which persons feel is worth striving for. The question that has emerged from the preceding sections is how these two levels are linked. As Claudia Strauss once put it,

knowing the dominant ideologies, discourses, and symbols of a society is only the beginning – there remains the hard work of understanding why some of those ideologies, discourses, and symbols become compelling to social actors, while others are only the hollow shell of a morality that may be repeated in official pronouncements but is ignored in private lives. Our key questions thus becomes: How do cultural messages get under people's skin […]? (1992: 1).

Here, a third lineage of value theory deriving from Durkheim (1974) is worth considering. The basic idea of this approach is that a commitment to values arises out of certain types of collective experiences. Values, Durkheim says, arise when people participate in rituals that lead them to feel a kind of heightened state he calls ‘collective effervescence’. This feeling, he says, leads people to the experience of being in the presence of something greater, more important, and we might say more desirable than themselves and the things to which their own individual desires are attached (Durkheim 1974). They come to associate this feeling with the objects, ideas, states of affairs and goals that the ritual promotes, and in this way these things becomes values for them (see Turner 1967). As Robbins, who has recently (2015a) argued along these lines, suggests, it is not only through ritual that values become represented to and lodged in subjects, but also through the influence of exemplary persons (see Humphrey 1997; Scheler 1987; Wolf 1982) or through people’s encounters with myths and other types of value-laden narratives.

With this approach, one gets some sense as to how values that exist on the cultural level become subjectively attractive. To be sure, this perspective raises its own questions. For instance, it does not solve the question of intersubjective variation in values. Why do people of a given social formation, if exposed to the same rituals, narratives, etc. not always value the same things with the same intensity? Robbins (forthcoming) has recently argued that the supposition that values on the subjective and the objective level should look alike depends on a flawed ‘fax-model of socialization’ (cf. Strauss 1992: 9). Because all cultures contain more than one value, people come to internalise several values which can be difficult to pursue all at once. It thus becomes necessary to work out their relation and accommodate them to the requirements of everyday life – a process which leads to the kind of variation in personal values to be observed in many societies.

Clearly further questions pose themselves. For instance, would the Dumontian model not suggest that the more important values get communicated more frequently and/or with greater intensity, so that the cultural value hierarchy becomes reproduced within individuals, rather than different values coming to exist as equals within people? Nonetheless, a focus on the interrelation between objective and subjective forms of value, between value as structure and value as a motive for action, might well proceed along Durkheimian lines and would certainly help to advance contemporary anthropological engagements with the concept of value.

Conclusion

Having built this entry around the cleavages that mark the contemporary debate about value, we would like to close by noting three points of convergence. Firstly, there appears to be agreement that the study of value requires a holist style of analysis. This follows from the nature of value: like meaning, value derives from reference to sets of relations and often to larger wholes and can therefore only be understood with regard to these. Secondly, scholars of value seem to converge in rejecting the ‘flat’ ontologies of the social that have proliferated in recent years in approaches such as actor-network theory. To look at value inevitably brings hierarchy to light: even the most egalitarian social formations contain at their heart a hierarchy of value, namely the subordination of inequality to equality (Robbins 1994). Finally, and most importantly, there is agreement that greater attention to value would return to anthropology a perspective that was foundational to it but has increasingly gone missing over the years: the interest in what really matters to people around the world and in how cultures differ not simply as systems of power, production, or meaning, but as schemes that help to define what is ultimately good and desirable in life.

References

Albert, E. M. 1956. The classification of values: a method and illustration. American Anthropologist 58(2), 221-48.

Appadurai, A. 1988. Putting hierarchy in its place. Cultural Anthropology 3(1), 36-49.

Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Brightman, R. 1995. Forget culture: replacement, transcendence, relexification. Cultural Anthropology 10(4), 509-46.

D'Andrade, R. G. 2008. A study of personal and cultural values: American, Japanese, and Vietnamese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dirks, N. B. 2001. Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton: University Press.

Dumont, L. 1980. Homo hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications. (trans. M. Sainsbury, L. Dumont & B. Gulati). Chicago: University Press.

——— 1986. Essays on individualism: modern ideology in anthropological perspective. Chicago: University Press.

——— 1994. German ideology: from France to Germany and back. Chicago: University Press.

Durkheim, É. 1974. Sociology and philosophy. New York: Free Press.

Graeber, D. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

——— 2013. It is value that brings universes into being. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2), 219-43.

Haynes, N. & J. Hickel forthcoming. Introduction: hierarchy, value, and the value of hierarchy. Social Analysis 60(4).

Humphrey, C. 1997. Exemplars and rules: aspects of the discourse of moralities in Mongolia. In The ethnography of moralities (ed.) S. Howell, 25-47. New York: Routledge.

Iteanu, A. & I. Moya 2015. Introduction: Mister D. Radical comparison, values, and ethnographic theory. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1), 113.

Joas, H. 2000. The genesis of values. Cambridge: Polity.

Kapferer, B. 2010. Louis Dumont and a holist anthropology. In Experiments in holism: theory and practice in contemporary anthropology (eds) T. Otto & N. Bubandt, 187-208. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kluckhohn, C. 1951. Values and value-orientation in the theory of action: an exploration in definition and classification. In Toward a general theory of action (eds) T. Parsons & E. A. Shils, 388-433. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Kluckhohn, F. R. & F. L. Strodtbeck 1961.Variations in value orientations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Sons.

Munn, N. D. 1986. The fame of Gawa: a symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. Paper presented at Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures Series, University of Rochester, N.Y., 1976. Cambridge: University Press.

Ortner, S. B. 1994 [1984]. Theory in anthropology since the sixties. In Culture/Power/History: a reader in contemporary social theory (eds) N. B. Dirks, G. Eley & S. B. Ortner, 372-411. Princeton: University Press.

Otto, T. & R. Willerslev 2013a. Introduction: 'value as theory': comparison, cultural critique, and guerilla ethnographic theory. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(1), 1-20.

——— 2013b. Prologue: value as theory: value, action, and critique. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2), 1-10.

Powers, W. R. 2000. The Harvard study of values: mirror for postwar. Anthropology Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36(1), 15-29.

Ricardo, D. 2006 [1817]. Principles of political economy and taxation. New York: Cosimo Classics.

Rio, K. M. & O. H. Smedal 2008. Totalization and detotalization: alternatives to hierarchy and individualism. Anthropological Theory 8(3), 233-54.

Robbins, J. 1994. Equality as a value: ideology in Dumont, Melanesia, and the west. Social Analysis 36, 21-70.

——— 2012. Cultural Values. In A companion to moral anthropology (ed.) D. Fassin, 117-32. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— 2013. Monism, pluralism, and the structure of value relations: a Dumontian contribution to the contemporary study of value. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(1), 99-115.

——— 2015a. Ritual, value, and example: on the perfection of cultural representations. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(S1), 18-29.

——— 2015b. On happiness, values, and time: The long and the short of it. HAU: Journal of Anthropological Theory 5(3), 215-33.

——— forthcoming. Where is the good in the world. Unpublished manuscript.

Scheler, M. 1973. Formalism in ethics and a non-formal ethics of values: a new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personalism. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

——— 1987. Person and self-value: three essays (trans. M.S. Frings) Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.

Schnädelbach, H. 1984. German philosophy, 1831-1933. Cambridge: University Press.

Schroeder, M. 2012. Value Theory. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available on-line: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/).

Strauss, C. 1992. Models and Motives. In Human motives and cultural models (eds) R.G. D'Andrade & C. Strauss, 1-20. Cambridge: University Press.

Turner, T. 1979. The Gê and Bororo societies as dialectical systems: a general model. In Dialectical Societies (ed.) D. Maybury-Lewis, 147-78. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——— 2003. The beautiful and the common: inequalities of value and revolving hierarchy among the Kayapó. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 1(1) (available on-line: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol1/iss1/2).

——— 2008. Marxian value theory: an anthropological perspective. Anthropological Theory 8(1), 43-56.

Turner, V. W. 1967. The forest of symbols: aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Venkatesan, S. et al. 2015. 'There is no such thing as the good: The 2013 meeting of the group for debates in anthropological theory.' Critique of Anthropology 35(4), 430-80.

Vogt, E.Z. & E.M. Albert 1966. People of Rimrock: a study of values in five cultures: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Weber, M. 1949. The methodology of the social sciences. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.

Weber, M., H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills 1946. From Max Weber: essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, S. 1982. Moral saints. Journal of Philosophy 79(8), 419-39.

Note on contributors

Joel Robbins is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the anthropology of religion, values, ethics, and cultural change. He is the author of Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society.

Dr Joel Robbins, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. jr626@cam.ac.uk

Julian Sommerschuh is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His research explores changes in values associated with the advent of Protestantism in a southwestern Ethiopian community.

Julian Sommerschuh, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. julian.sommerschuh@posteo.de

[1] The notion of level roughly corresponds to such better-known concepts as ‘fields’ or ‘domains’, e.g. the political, the religious, and so on.

[2] An inter-island trading system based on the movement of valuables made from shells first made famous in anthropology by the work of Malinowski (1922).