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Foreword

2011; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau1.1.001

2575-1433

Giovanni da Col, David Graeber,

Political Theology and Sovereignty

Next article FreeForeword The return of ethnographic theoryGiovanni da Col and David GraeberGiovanni da ColUniversity of Cambridge and David GraeberGoldsmiths, University of LondonUniversity of CambridgeGoldsmiths, University of LondonPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTake an ethnographer. She has spent more than thirty months in the Bocage in Mayenne studying witchcraft. 'How exciting, how thrilling, how extraordinary...! Tell us all about the witches', she is asked again and again when she gets back to the city. Just as one might say: tell us tales about ogres and wolves, about Little Red Riding Hood. Frighten us, but make it clear that it's only a story; or that they are just peasants: credulous, backward and marginal. Or alternatively: confirm that out there there are some people who can bend the laws of causality and morality, who can kill by magic and not be punished; but remember to end by saying that they do not really have that power. . . .Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly words ([1977] 1980)We might say that the Melanesian concept of the person as a 'dividual' (M. Strathern) is just as imaginative as the possessive individualism of Locke; that understanding the 'philosophy of the Indian chieftainship' (P. Clastres) is just as important as commenting on the Hegelian doctrine of the State; that Maori cosmogony is on an equal par with Eleatic paradoxes or Kantian antinomies (G. Schrempp); that Amazonian perspectivism is just as interesting a philosophical challenge as comprehending the system of Leibniz. . . . Indeed, if it is a question of knowing what matters in evaluating a philosophy—its capacity to create new concepts—, then anthropology, without looking to substitute for philosophy, remains a powerful philosophical tool, capable of airing the stuffy ethnocentric corridors of our philosophy, while freeing us in passing from so-called 'philosophical anthropology'.Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, And(2003)Traduttore, Traditore.Italian AdageSome journals are defined by their colors, other by their names. HAU is the green and black one, basking under the flag of its Ouroboros—the vital self-reflexive and self-recreating snake happily eating its own tail. As for the choice of name, HAU stems from what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his generous endorsement of the journal calls "the felicitous equivocation." Since what is Marcel Mauss' reading of the Maori term hau as "Spirit of the Gift" if not the quintessence of everything that is equivocal, everything that is inadequate, but also, everything that is nonetheless endlessly productive and enlightening in the project of translating alien concepts? But take note: when we say "alien" we are speaking of alien concepts, which are by no means limited to those drawn from strange and romantic places; HAU has no intention of limiting itself to the highlands of Papua New Guinea or forests of Amazonia: we actually agree that the exotic is the domain of ethnography, but that's because good ethnography makes everything exotic. HAU is a call to revive the theoretical potential of all ethnographic insight, wherever it is brought to bear, to bring it back to its leading role in generating new knowledge. Above all, we see ethnography as a pragmatic inquiry into conceptual disjunctures. To adopt a provocative phrase from Ardener (1987), HAU is fascinated by "remote areas," but sees such remote areas as those singularities or pockets of any social space-jungle or city—inhabited by "event-richness," conceptual vagueness or even unusual social boredom. Remote areas are not just awaiting stranger-kings: they are full of treacherous stranger-concepts, that need to be invited in, hosted as honored guests before they can be recognized as affines, and eventually, even ancestors.We are not claiming to be saying anything particularly new here.1 Rather, by adopting the term hau as a mark of our enterprise, we are placing ourselves within a particular stream of anthropological scholarship that over the last three decades has addressed such disjunctures, and the moments or events of "speculative wonder" or "positive equivocation" to which they give rise. Concepts like hau, after all, are not simply "floating signifiers" in Lévi-Strauss' sense ([1950] 1987)—capable of accommodating any meaning or the absence of it. They are events, unclassifiable remainders that rearrange preconceived notions and categories by juxtaposing different cultural images and positions (cf. da Col 2007; Humphrey 2008). This is a process which, as Marilyn Strathern suggests, often takes "the form of a negation or an inversion of a relationship between familiar terms" (1990a: 205) or as she also puts it, a "bifurcation" (2010) that can lead the anthropological analysis down unexpected routes. Bifurcations appear everywhere in ethnographic theorization, by working out distinctions, contradictions and caesuras between what we think of as nature and culture, us and them, the human and the non-human, the immanent and the transcendent, the religious and the economic, the moral and the material. They often end with frustrations paralleling the ones suffered by Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar (1985) in his attempt to isolate and analyze a single wave in the sea: born of the realization that it is ultimately impossible to keep that many perspectives in one's mind simultaneously.Starting from here, we could attempt a definition of ethnographic theory: it is a conversion of stranger-concepts that does not entail merely trying to establish a correspondence of meaning between two entities or the construction of heteronymous harmony between different worlds, but rather, the generation of a disjunctive homonimity, that destruction of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative formulation of novel worldviews. In this sense, ethnographic theory does not operate so differently from what Hofstadter (1980) described as the challenge of translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, with its host of portmanteau words, from English into another language. By attempting to establish an equivalence between two "nonsensical" words, one necessarily ends up having to use one's own imagination, inventing terms and concepts, inaugurating new connections from old verbal categories. Needless to say what we are describing here is very different from a mere romantic invocation of cultural incommensurability. Geoffrey Lloyd once noticed that no anthropologist has ever returned from the field announcing that he or she could understand nothing (2004: 4). Or as Umberto Eco (2004) notes, one should not only be preoccupied by the ontological constraints but also with the licenses of dire quasi la stessa cosa— of "almost-saying" the same thing when translating—and accepting that linguistic incommensurability does not entail incomparability but a comparability in becoming. And most of us probably agree that 95% of what we learn in the field (whether Tibet, Madagascar or upper-class London) quickly comes to make intuitive "sense" to us. As for the remaining 5%, it is not so much incomprehensible, utterly alien, as excessive—at least in terms of the efforts required for its conceptualization. HAU is especially interested in hosting "ethnographic translations" of those excessive remainders, remainders or wonders that arise when worlds are (happily, productively) out of joint.The widespread excitement HAU has elicited since its announcement, it seems to us, is a direct result of its ambition to return anthropology to its original and distinctive conceptual wealth—to critical concepts we bring from the field, whether exotic or urban—and thereby, to return ethnography not only to the forefront of theoretical developments in the discipline, but by doing so, making anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders. HAU aims to put all those endlessly productive difficulties that result in the comparison of different forms of life—whether "savage minds" or the creativity of urban movements, science at home or villages afield—back on the intellectual agenda; to put them to work for the benefit of all. The challenge we pose to our fellow anthropologists is therefore to produce ethnographically grounded, theoretically innovative engagements with the broadest possible geographic and thematic range.GenealogiesBut, above all, I had always been grateful to Pascal . . . for his determination, inseparable from that concern, always to seek the 'reason of effects', the raison d'être of the seemingly most illogical or derisory human behaviors—such as 'spending a whole day in chasing a hare'—rather than condemning or mocking them, like the 'half-learned' who are always ready to 'play the philosopher' and to seek to astonish with their uncommon astonishments at the futility of common-sense opinions.Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian meditations(2000)The seed that was to grow into HAU was planted last February, when Giovanni first posed the question of why it was that anthropology did not have a general scope, high-end, open-access, peer-reviewed journal that would replace the demand for copyrights with the liberation of "copy left." True, there were a handful of (mostly shamefully neglected) examples of "gold" open-access journals with an established tradition of reputable scholarship. But they remained mostly inhouse publications, venues for graduate students or even brilliant yet regional or subject-specific journals (e.g., Asian Ethnology, Tipiti, Museum Anthropology Review— thank you Jason Baird Jackson). Some magnificent open-access journals were not geared towards an English language audience (e.g., Mana). Access was also incurring the risk of being wrongly associated with "easier-access" (and less quality control) for authors or even (God forbid) "intellectual accessibility." Another concern he felt was not really being met by existing institutions was speed of publication. Junior scholars are haunted by the anxiety of lengthening their CVs, overwhelmed by fierce competition for academic posts and fellowships. Yet they are still expected to wait two years to get an article into a high-end journal. Consider the overflowing of ideas during PhD writing-up seminars, AAA meetings and EASA workshops. How often do scholars hesitate to share their best ideas, fearing their concepts may be parasitized on the long route towards a printed article or monograph? Would not one solution be a journal capable of publishing peer-reviewed manuscripts within six months of submission and also capable of delivering those original ideas to the largest possible audience?Justin Shaffner soon came on board, bringing with him important editorial experience with presses and printed journals, and also with various digital initiatives such as the Open Anthropology Cooperative and The Melanesian. Next came Morten Nielsen, who helped with the initial steps of the journal's foundation. Then came David Graeber—bemused by his installation in that odd form of divine kingship encompassed within the enigmatic role of Editor-at-Large—and finally, Stéphane Gros, who rapidly became the very backbone of the journal—literally—a relentless yet gentle figure working out of the spotlight, processing manuscripts with Mandarin-like efficiency. If you are reading this piece, please know that Stéphane probably inspected it three times during his breakfast, even after sending it to copyeditors. The "editorial assistants" quickly became vital companions in HAU's venture: Rachel Douglas-Jones (later "promoted" to Associate Editor for her flawless talent in leading the Marketing and the Art departments of the journal), Mylene Hengen (our generous translator), Harriet Boulding and Amiria Salmond with their immaculate copyediting and last but not least Philip Swift, our marvelous jack of all editorial trades.Organizationally, HAU's was conceived out of feeling that the discipline was suffering the domination of commercial publishing and that the pursuit of human knowledge was being severely damaged by the extraction of shamelessly priced subscriptions in a time when most scholars are operating under severe financial constraints. Intellectually, it developed out of a sense of frustration with the lack of original insights arising from the discipline, and the resulting sense that anthropology was, at least in terms of its relation to other fields of scholarship, committing a kind of intellectual suicide.Consider: In 1913, Sigmund Freud published a series of essays under the title Totem and taboo ([1913] 1952) inspired by the works of Frazer (1906–1915) and Robertson Smith ([1889] 1995).In 1931, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a series of reflections that came to be known as Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough ([1967] 1993), in which he mapped out a theory of magic that would ultimately lead him to write his Philosophical investigations (1963).In the late 1940s, Jean-Paul Sartre, determined to write a work on existential ethics, spent months struggling over the problem of the Kwakiutl potlatch— which, he was convinced, ought to have pointed a way out of the dilemma of an Hegelian master-slave dialectic, even if it superficially seemed to present a perfect instance of the very sort of struggle for recognition Hegel described in it (cf. Sartre [1983] 1992: 373-79). Can we imagine something similar happening with concepts drawn from contemporary anthropology?It is actually hard to think of any major European thinker of the first half of the twentieth century who didn't feel the need to come to terms with anthropological concepts of one sort or another. Concepts lifted directly from ethnographic work— words like mana, shamanism, totemism, potlatch, taboo—or those that had emerged from anthropological analysis—like magical thinking, divine kingship, kinship systems, the gift, sacrificial ideologies or cosmogonic myths—were heated topics of intellectual debate; concepts that everyone, philosophers included, had to take seriously.Nowadays the situation is reversed. Anthropologists take their concepts not from ethnography but largely from European philosophy—our terms are deterritorialization or governmentality—and no one outside anthropology really cares what we have to say about them. As a result, we have become a discipline spiraling into parochial irrelevance. Meanwhile, older anthropological debates are treated as if they never happened. Deleuzians and Speculative Realists write about the ontology and the elusiveness of life (cf. Thacker 2010), and their reflections are gravely debated in other disciplines, without anyone even noticing the rich anthropological literature on mana. Lacanians fiercely debate topology without anyone remembering what Leach (1961) or even Lévi-Strauss ([1985] 1988) had to say on the subject.2 Even more weirdly, anthropologists themselves draw on Foucauldian notions of biopower, blandly accepting his premise that sovereign power's concern with the health, fertility, and prosperity of a population is some kind of modernist break with all previous political practice, apparently completely oblivious about the vast anthropological literature on "divine kingship" in their own discipline, which is, precisely, about the concern of sovereign power with the health, fertility, and prosperity of populations.How did it happen? How can one explain such a colossal failure of nerve?One reason might simply be the immensity of the task with which anthropology was faced. Not too long ago, it was still possible to write a history of the idea of love, or truth, or authority, starting in ancient Greece or Rome—or perhaps the Old Testament—and proceeding entirely through European sources. If one wished tobe cosmopolitan, one might compare how such matters are treated in the tradition of "Western philosophy" with those prevalent in "Eastern philosophy," in other words, with a bow to the written traditions of India and China. But in the 1920s and 1930s, even a polymath like Marcel Mauss, when he wished to be comprehensive, had a fairly limited number of ethnographic cases to draw on. It was also still possible to arrange them in crypto-evolutionist order, and therefore, to allow one or two to stand for others. Thus even those who did appeal to anthropology could do so rather briefly.Nowadays that's no longer possible.The result, we might suggest, is an odd kind of dilemma. In a world where North Atlantic powers are growing less dominant and even in the old imperial centers, society grows increasingly diverse, maintaining the old, purely Euro-American centric forms of knowledge seems increasingly untenable. But at the same time, the sheer mass of our accumulated knowledge of different intellectual traditions is simply overwhelming. It's not just our greater access to the world's written intellectual traditions, from Medieval Islamic mysticism to African philosophy. Anthropology has revealed, from Cameroon to Vancouver Island, Yemen to Tibet, an apparently endless array of what can best be called material philosophies,3 often extraordinarily sophisticated reflections on the dilemmas of humanity, sociality, and the cosmos that are simultaneously inextricable from forms of material existence, none with any particularly privileged claim over any other. It was an excess of wonder. How could anyone possibly have command over all this knowledge? One wonders, indeed, if the reaction by scholars of other disciplines was a tacit, but nonetheless very real, sense of panic. There was just too much to know. But neither could all these other traditions simply be ignored: would not that be Eurocentric, even racist? Even to select one over another seemed unwarranted—by what criteria? To include all would be simply impossible.In such a context, the anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s was made to serve a purpose for which it was never intended. In fact, anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today. For outsiders, though, it provided a convenient set of simplified tag lines through which it was possible to simply dismiss all anthropological knowledge as inherently Eurocentric and racist, and therefore, as not real knowledge at all. This allowed those who wished to write histories of love, or truth, or authority to once again begin with Plato or Aristotle, proceed, perhaps, through Descartes or the Marquis de Sade, and end with Heidegger or Derrida, without ever acknowledging the existence of perspectives from outside the tradition of Continental philosophy. Often—more often than not, in fact—this revival of an exclusive focus on the Western philosophical tradition comes framed as a critique—but as a critique that must necessarily be internal to the tradition because it is held that those trained in contemporary universities somehow cannot think outside it. In the end, even anthropologists have come to follow suit, abandoning any attempt to create theoretical terms that arise from their own ethnographic work, but borrowing those developed by thinkers drawing exclusively on the Western philosophical tradition. Finally, the approach has been tacitly acceptable to intellectuals who identify with other non-Western traditions partly because it reinforces structures of authority, since it allows that other "civilizational" traditions should, once acknowledged, also be seen as similarly emerging top-down from a written intellectual tradition rather than bottom-up, from material philosophies, as a more anthropological approach would have suggested.Another reason it has been so easy to parochialize ourselves is the very nature of contemporary Homo Academicus. Ethnographic theory is slowly realizing the necessity of turning its gaze within, towards an ethnography of everyday theory, uncovering how knowledge is produced in micro-daily interactions between students, faculties, departments and funding bodies. There is a wide dissatisfaction with the fragmentation of the discipline in directions serving the passing tastes of funding bodies—clearly, one factor behind the extraordinary outpouring of support that HAU has received since its inception. Ethnographic depth is increasingly superseded by the recourse to a game of concept-of-the-month—the uncanny, the abject, affect, biopolitics—each concept undergoing relentless exegesis and being displayed with pride during PhD writing-up seminars, only to be abandoned for the next term rediscovered in Spinoza, Heidegger, Rorty or Bataille. Reflecting on the brilliance of a work like Malinowski's Coral gardens and their magic never seems to be quite as "cool" as quoting a new and unknown term from a European philosopher, one which can cast an interesting new game of lights and shadows with the dark cave where anthropologists are regarded to be still dwelling, playing meticulously with their rococo ethnographic figurines and primitive paraphernalia. In such a world, name-dropping becomes almost everything. The fact that it usually reduces academics to the embarrassing situation of considering themselves hip for recycling French theorists from the period of roughly 1968 to 1983, in fact, exactly the period of what we now call "Classic Rock" (in other words, for reading to the intellectual equivalents of Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin) seems to go almost completely unnoticed.This process may entail an interesting recursivity: how do student references listed in essays or mentioned during seminars influence the subsequent readings of staff? The Internet and the digital revolution have transformed the very process of the acquisition of knowledge, an activity which now includes extensive access to blogs, e-books, the wide availability and circulation of official and pirate PDFs, and the use of search engines like Google Books. With few exceptions, the most informative humanities blogs are run by Continental philosophers who are doing an outstanding job in developing original movements and currents of thought almost entirely through the employment of digital tools and online relationships (e.g., the outstanding diffusion that "speculative realism" is achieving through blogs, online essays and open-access presses).Today, the quintessential research gesture of an anthropology student is not to wander through library aisles to retrieve old monographs or edited collections but to google a topic or check if a PDF of a book has been uploaded to an internetrepository.4 A lack of funding for book purchases for students and libraries alike compounds the problem. We all love our PDF collections and have our favorite blogs but these tools also have their drawbacks; they have the danger of leading to "fast-food" theory, piecemeal reading, the assemblage of micro-excerpts and fishing for catchy concepts whilst anxiously fast-scrolling through a webpage. Anyone who has marked undergraduate work knows the overwhelming role played today by Wikipedia in general essays on ritual and religion, partially (or totally?) replacing the older and more solid tomes such as Morris' Anthropological studies of religion (1987), the Lessa and Vogt's Reader in comparative religion (1979), or even the various Handbooks of the American Indian.In the late 1970s, Umberto Eco identified a similar process in his reflections on the role that photocopiers were beginning to assume in academia and warned about the dangers of what he termed xeroxcivilizaion and the "intellectual alibi" provided by photocopies. A xerox is an extremely useful tool yet it often constitutes an intellectual alibi: one leaves a library with a pile of copies in his hands, certain that he could never read them all. Eventually he becomes unable to use any of them since they begin to get mixed up and confused. Yet despite this, he still has the feeling that he has gained possession of the content of those books. Before the xeroxcivilization, this man used to handwrite cards in huge reading halls and in the process, something sedimented in his memory. With the anxieties prompted by xerox there is a risk of wasting days in libraries copying books that will never be read ([1977] 2005: 87, da Col's translation) Eco highlights the "vertigo of accumulation" resulting from piling up photocopies and certainly most of his insights could be applied today to the large volume of available PDFs. It might be seen as hypocritical for the editors of an online journal to preach about the dangers of the digital humanities, but all we are really proposing here is vigilance—or, to be more precise, a vigilant inquiry into the social conditions of the production and reproduction of academic knowledge. In this sense, from a xeroxcivilization of academia we may wish to consider the current situation an "Adobization of academic life" which would benefit from ethnographies on the social life of the PDF.Our suspicion of contemporary anthropology's obeisance to Continental philosophy does not mean we are not interested in philosophy; rather, that we are interested in developing a different mode of engaging with it. It is quite intentional, then, that in our inaugural issue, we have chosen to publish an unedited manuscript written by Marilyn Strathern in the early nineties, in which she tickles Derrida, Baudrillard and Lacan in a way that illustrates how there are productive alternatives to a blind worship of (usually rather outmoded) Continental fashion. Instead of "using" Derridean or Deleuzian concepts to show how our "Others" think within that ontological horizon (recently all natives seem to have become Deleuzians), anthropologists could critically engage with the conditions of possibility of conceptual production and eschew (or—with Bartleby—decide they simply "prefer not to" embrace) the vanity of flamboyant effects achieved by deploying philosophical terms, jargon, and fads. We would rather our Mongolianists show that "nomadic machines" are not actually what Deleuze and Guattari thought they were, and instead return to the moment in which philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari themselves turned to ethnography for its conceptual riches (drawing on everything from Bateson's plateau to Clastrean theories of the State). In the words of Pierre Bourdieu, inspired by Pascal, "true philosophy makes light of philosophy" (2000: 2). We are less interested in anthropologists eager to "play the philosopher" and spin another intellectual whirlpool about the state of exception or the multiple bodies of the king (thank you Andrew Shryock) and more concerned with those who, acknowledging the analogies between philosophy and anthropology, are careful enough to think about what makes the two distinctive, and at the same time, bold enough to create their own conceptual repertoire (our thanks here to Martin Holbraad).The engagement between anthropology and history has been just as productive. The methodology of employing historical data as examples of "radical alterity" for profound reflections to challenge Western and/or "natural," "scientific" or modern cosmologies has been employed by social theorists and anthropologists from Weber's Ancient Judaism ([1917] 1952), Robertson-Smith's The religion of the Semites ([1889] 1995), to Boas' Tsimshian mythology ([1916] 1970). More recent examples would be Prytz-Johansen's (1954) magnificent ethno-historical study of Maori religious ontologies, Tambiah's (1977) analysis of the "galactic polity" in Southeast Asia, Burghart's (1978) study of royal gift exchange, caste and ascetic hierarchies in Nepal, Geertz's (1981) study of the Negara system in Bali, and Sahlins' (1998) musings on the anthropology of Western cosmology (our thanks here to Gregory Schrempp and Martin Mills).After our initial conversations on these topics, we quickly realized we were not alone. We quickly realized a desire for a return to ethnographic theory was out there, in almost everyone's mind, but as yet without name. The road to HAU's foundation continued with a few enthusiastic yet forlorn emails sent to senior scholars. We needed to accrue reputation and academic mana to convey the idea effectively and make our vision pervasive. We required the help of those scholars who had nothing to score in terms of publications and journal rankings, those who could afford to adventure in uncharted territory. The response and the enthusiasm that followed our initial exchanges soon became infectious. Marshall Sahlins responded immediately—and what an emotion it was to read his first email—as well as Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Joel Robbins, Bruce Kapferer, Maurice Godelier, Keith Hart and many others. Among them were esteemed and more experienced exponents of the world of digital anthropology who showed great collegiality, such as Mike Wesch, Mark Turin, Chris Kelty, and later Alex Golub (the latter two among the founders of the widely read anthropology blog, Savage Minds). The heirs of Leach, Pitt-Rivers and Evans-Pritchard generously granted permission to reprint neglected classics of ethnographic theory. It was not a butterfly but a snowball effect. The rumbling was unmistakable, there was something rolling and growing on the horizon.Ten months later and wonderful feedback is still flowing in. Some argue that we have started a movement. Whether or not this is the case, we remain awed by the endorsements coming from all over the world, the quality of the manuscriptsreceived and the enthusiasm and brilliance of the authors who have supported our vision with their wonderful work or advice. We also remain grateful to everyone who recognized the importance of a journal with a cosmopolitan vision of a freely-accessible and non-commercial anthropology.Open-Access, Copy left, Peer-reviewed.Open access journals should receive all our support. Especially established academics who do not need to "s