Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire

423 Pages·2007·5.07 MB·English

by  David Graeber

POSSIBILITIES
Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire

POSSIBILITIES
Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
David Graeber
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
by David Graeber
ISBN 978-1904859-66-6
Library of Congress Number: 2007928387
©2007 David Graeber
This edition ©2007 AK Press
Cover Design: John Yates
Layout: C. Weigl & Z. Blue
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction.......................................................................................................................1
PART I: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ORIGINS
OF OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT
1 Manners, Deference, and Private Property: Or, Elements for a General
Theory of Hierarchy................................................................................................... 13
2 The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of
Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present...............................................57
3 Turning Modes of Production Inside-Out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a
Transformation of Slavery (short version)..........................................................85
4 Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of
Construction.................................................................................................................113
PART II: PROVISIONAL AUTONOMOUS ZONE:
DILEMMAS OF AUTHORITY IN RURAL MADAGASCAR
5 Provisional Autonomous Zone: Or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar.......157
6 Dancing with Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (in
Arivonimamo, Madagascar)................................................................................181
7 Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 1875-1990 ... 223
8 Oppression.................................................................................................................255
PART III: DIRECT ACTION, DIRECT DEMOCRACY,
AND SOCIAL THEORY
9 The Twilight of Vanguardism...............................................................................301
10 Social Theory as Science and Utopia: Or, Does the Prospect of a General
Sociological Theory Still Mean Anything in an Age of Globalization? ...313
11 There Never Was a West: Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces in
Between....................................................................................................................329
12 On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars
of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture. 375
Index.................................................................................................................................419

INTRODUCTION
I decided to call this collection Possibilities because the word encom­
passes much of what originally inspired me to become an anthropologist.
I was drawn to the discipline because it opens windows on other possible
forms of human social existence; because it served as a constant reminder
that most of what we assume to be immutable has been, in other times and
places, arranged quite differently, and therefore, that human possibilities are
in almost every way greater than we ordinarily imagine. Anthropology also
affords us new possible perspectives on familiar problems: ways of thinking
about the rise of capitalism from the perspective of West Africa, European
manners from the perspective of Amazonia, or, for that matter, West African
or Amazonian masquerades from the perspective of Chinese festivals or
Medieval European carnival.
One common feature of the essays collected in this book is that they are
meant to keep possibilities open. They are not, in any sense, an attempt to
create a single grand theory of anything—let alone, a single grand theory of
everything. Think of them instead as an attempt to put some of the plural­
ism I espouse in the later essays into practice.
I often make the argument that (at least as a theoretical problem) in­
commensurability is greatly overrated. Take any two people, even in the
same family or community, and you are likely to find half a dozen incom­
mensurable perspectives, None of us completely understand each other. In
practice, the fact that we don’t rarely gets in the way of our living together,
working together, or loving one another, and it is often an actual advantage
when people, say, come together to solve a common, practical problem. It’s
only when we start imagining that the world is somehow generated by the
descriptions we make of it that incommensurability becomes a well-nigh ex­
istential dilemma. Of course, the world is not really generated by the descrip­
tions we make of it, as most of us are, occasionally, forced to recognize when
2 POSSIBILITIES
some aspect of the world we had not included in our descriptions suddenly
contrives to hit us on the head (sometimes figuratively, sometimes not). This
book, then, is meant to assemble a series of different and sometimes even
incommensurable perspectives on a very real world. They are unified, above
all, by a commitment to the idea that that world could possibly look very dif­
ferent than it does—but just as much, perhaps, by the belief that, ultimately,
the very combination of anger and curiosity, of intellectual play and creative
pleasure that goes into crafting any worthwhile piece of critical social theory
also itself partakes of something of the powers that could transform that
world into something better. What unites them, then, is a utopian ideal
The 3-part organization of the volume is broadly autobiographical. Part
I, entitled “Some Thoughts on the Origins of Our Current Predicament,”
represents the kind of work I was doing in the 1980s in graduate school at
the University of Chicago. Much of it emerges from research into the origins
of capitalism. However, since as my old mentor Marshall Sahlins has never
ceased to point out, capitalism has by now played such a fundamental role
in shaping our fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings,
human desires, and the very possibilities for human social relations, all of
these essays are by necessity reflections on such larger questions at the same
time. I first began trying to puzzle out some of these issues in my Masters
paper, submitted in 1987—a much shorter, and updated, version of which
appears as Chapter 1. This essay, ostensibly about the history of manners, has
a curious history in its own right. Shortly after I finished it, the French soci­
ologist Pierre Bourdieu was visiting the University of Chicago anthropology
department. Bourdieu was then at the height of his popularity, and everyone
wanted to meet him, but he was much more interested in talking to students
than with faculty—since, as he later remarked to a group of us, “with stu­
dents, you can actually discuss ideas. Your colleagues, all they want to do
is kill you.” He announced office hours, and for several days beforehand
there was a sign-up sheet on the door. I myself was far too timid to actually
put my name on it. As it turned out, so was most everyone else. Late on the
afternoon of Bourdieu’s visit, my friend Becky came down to the student
lounge after spending an hour talking to him and assured me that—no, re­
ally—Bourdieu was extremely friendly and easy to talk to, and that, in fact,
there was still an empty slot at the end of his schedule. I went up, wrote down
my name, and ultimately ended up walking him to his hotel, talking about
manners. He was, he explained, quite fascinated by the subject. Bourdieu
asked for a copy of my paper, and the next day called me back to announce
that he found the argument extremely original and urged me to produce a
shorter version for publication in France.
Introduction 3
The problem, it soon turned out, was that it proved very difficult to
shorten (it was an intricate and tangled argument), and while we both agreed
the best thing was for us to sit down together and go over it, I never managed
to raise the money to get myself to Paris to do so. Actually, it was an excellent
example of the sort of mechanisms of social class reproduction in academia
that Bourdieu himself spent so much of his time exposing: it seemed no co­
incidence that I, one of the few students in the department from a working
class background, always seemed to be the one who—despite endless formal
honors—never seemed to be able to get my hands on any of the university
or outside funding that magically seemed to appear for those whose parents
were doctors, lawyers, or themselves academics. (True, Bourdieu himself did
once suggest he could find money for me once I got to Paris, but this turned
out to be an example of another of his principles: that intellectual prestige by
no means guarantees academic power. Insiders assured me that he was in no
position to guarantee the money would actually appear.)
I eventually published a truncated version of the Manners essay in
Comparative Studies in Society and History, more than a decade later. Few
seem to have noticed it—largely, I think, since it fell between the cracks,
being neither quite anthropology nor history. I had by then fallen out of
contact with Bourdieu. But then, four years later, in the heyday of the global
justice movement, we suddenly came very close to establishing contact once
again.
Bourdieu had by this time become involved in a project called Raisons
d’Agir, aimed at creating alliances between scholars, activists, and radical
labor unions. Apparently, Bourdieu had been for some time trying to lo­
cate scholars in the US engaged in analogous projects, without much suc­
cess, and had just got word about my work with the New York City Direct
Action Network. I had received a message from an intermediary that I was
to prepare for a phone call from Bordieu on September 11th. Unfortunately,
that was September 11th 2001. I was living in Manhattan at the time, and,
of course, owing to the destruction of the Towers, phone lines were down. I
was a little confused as to why Bourdieu never ended up calling later on, but
eventually learned that he was already quite ill. He died of cancer not long
thereafter.
But here I jump ahead.
I have always felt the Manners paper contained important arguments. It
is not only a paper about manners and what Bourdieu would no doubt call
the “habitus” of possessive individualism—those deeply internalized habits
of thinking and feeling about the world that develop when people who be­
come accustomed, even without realizing it, to viewing everything around
them primarily as actual or potential commercial property. It is also a reflec­
4 POSSIBILITIES
tion on the very nature of hierarchy, its most elementary building-blocks,
and about how forms of resistance as subtle as foul language, merrymaking,
and apparently dubious personal hygiene habits simultaneously challenge
and reinforce it. While I did not write it with an explicitly political inten­
tion, it always seemed to me that the political implications were clear enough
(though also complex and endlessly debatable) and I have tried to highlight
them a bit more in the current version.
The other three essays in Part I were written later, but they pursue many
of the same themes, with the political implications, usually, far more explicit.
The essay on consumption is new, but it was conceived during the lonely days
when I was writing my dissertation in the early 1990s. University of Chicago
does not provide any support for those at the writing stage, so for several
years I was spending much of my daylight hours working for interlibrary
loan and at various odd jobs, trying to do my own work at night, and to
ignore the fact that my teeth were falling out due to lack of dental care as my
faculty advisors (mostly) carefully avoided me. One of the great saving graces
of my library job (aside from generally delightful coworkers: Gail and Willie
I will always especially remember) was that my supervisor was in a different
building, so I managed, periodically, to hide out in the Regenstein stacks
and snatch a half hour here and there to absorb unusual books I might never
have otherwise encountered. It was there I first discovered Colin Campbell’s
The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, certainly the most
creative and interesting of the generally rather tiresome literature of former
counter-culture types turned prosperous middle-class professors trying to
demonstrate why, despite their consumption-oriented existence, they had
not, in fact, sold out. The book was brilliant, but somehow obviously wrong.
This bothered me. I felt there was something important to be said about it,
but didn’t know what.
It was around the same time, when returning from my library job to
my office at the anthropology department in Haskell Hall, that I passed a
collection of ambulances and police cars, to learn that Iouan Couliano, a
Romanian historian of religions, had been assassinated on the third floor of
Swift, the building next to ours. (A man with a silenced pistol had shot him
from the adjoining stall in the men’s bathroom on the third floor. The next
day, I heard at my job that the library, on hearing the news, had immedi­
ately leapt into action, sending someone to gather all the library books from
his office before they were sequestered by the police as possible evidence.)
That was a bad couple years for Romanian-born historians of religion at
the U of C: Mircea Eliade had died the year before, after which his library
mysteriously caught on fire. At any rate, I decided, as a kind of tribute, to
read Couliano’s last book, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance—and quickly