Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. Some would be quite local, others global. That they would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine and possibly many that we can’t. There is a way out, which is to accept that anarchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state-that would be a contradiction in terms-what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Discussing the problem of being asked to produce an example of real-life, functional anarchy, he comes to one of his best passages. I think he does a particularly good job at this. Graeber opens the essay by defining anarchism-sort of-and by defending utopianism and also defusing typical reactions to the idea of statelessness. His experience of living in and studying actual stateless communities is certainly fascinating in itself.
Of the two general questions in the book, “What does anarchism have to offer anthropology?” and “What does anthropology have to offer anarchism?” the latter is of much more interest to me. But as he says, the radical theory he has in mind does not yet exist.
#FRAGMENTS OF AN ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGY SERIES#
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology was for me.ĭavid Graeber presents in this essay “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos-all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future.” This means that over the course of 105 small pages he presents idea after idea, most of them very interesting, without so much time spent fleshing them out. I cannot deny that I am a bit of a sucker for attractive matching books- bonus points if they are small-so this weekend when I found myself wandering among the essays published by Prickly Paradigm Press a couple of them followed me home.
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