Mixing sociology with anarchist studies on the side?

[gilbertrollins]

I'm in no way arguing for the unassailable merits of anarchy or flat organizations nor against the possible merits of hierarchy. I'm not making any such normative claim. I'm merely arguing (a) that Occupy makes for a good case study for the OP's "anarchist studies" interest because (2) it is distinguished from other mass movements in North American history for its non-hierarchical structure, lack of directive authority, and diffuse responsibilities for the establishment and maintenance of norms and ideas.

In fact, the points you are making are quite valid, though immaterial, I think, to the matter of whether or not Occupy makes for a good object of study for an anarchist sociology.

That's a weakness of forum threads -- I end up (probably irresponsibly) arguing several people's posts at the same time. I think you've made some nice clean points.

To return to the positive case for or against Occupy as anarchy, I have read almost no history of social movements outside economic history (e.g. American slavery, the emergence of firms, panics, and the Industrial Revolution), so I don't know the comparative history of Occupy v. suffrage, say.

I have however anecdotally visited a number of intentional communities which attempt flat organization, and in my experience it never turns out as purported. Organizations sociologists were discovering decades ago that the actual structure of firms hardly followed the flow chart of official titles. Conversley, even though intentional communities like Occupy lack formal titles and formal organization, I am arguing that hierarchy emerges nonetheless. Now I didn't attend any Occupy events, so I can't say on this particular case.

What I've observed in intentional communities before is customary distinctions of authority emerging like age, tenure in the organization, education, meritocratic contribution, and so on. Sadly what I see happen to cooperatives and intentional communities is their constant failure, and I conjecture it's because of their lack of regard for institutional forms in the main stream, which carry efficiencies.

So I may be reaching to extrapolate to Occupy. But I doubt it. I've been intimately associated with the demographic all my life, understand the ideology rather well, and have seen the effort play out many times.

I was arguing alternatively that society is overflowing with examples of anarchy, if we define it in terms of voluntary association, which is I think a more general and accepted definition than organizationally flat. I agree that we need to make a definition of hierarchy precise before we argue about its place in analysis. But OP and the rest of the thread seemed to accept Occupy's definition of anarchy, which encompasses an impossibly broad range of social criticisms mere organizational flatness does not capture. That's what I was responding to.

My hobby horse, which I injected into the thread, is that "non-hierarchical structure, lack of directive authority, and diffuse responsibilities for the establishment and maintenance of norms and ideas" characterizes a majority of social organization.

Edited November 13, 2012 by econosocio

[jacib]

Also -- Mauss' ethnography is wrong, though intuitively appealing to modern scholars who would like to look back on indigenous origins and attach noble savage daydreams to "original" commerce. Malinowski, an equally if not more notable anthropologist than Mauss visited the same Trobriand islanders and showed that there was a decided organization of property, exchange, and division of labor among fishing parties.

I'm not saying reciprocity is not a form of social exchange, and it would be ridiculous to claim its not a centerpiece of the foundation of ethics and trust in social structure -- but an substitute for monied arbitrage it is not.

The Gift isn't an ethnography. Mauss never went to the Trobriand Islands. The Gift is an analysis of data from other people's field work. Anyway, while I think you're right (and Graeber doesn't really acknowledge) that there has always been barter exchange between the inside of the group ("us"--many groups' names literally mean "the people" or "the real people" or "the free people" or "the people who know how to speak") and those outside the group ("those subhumans over there", whose names were often straight up things like "enemy or "mutes" or "the uncivilized people") that could be more efficiently done with money, I think a lot of what Mauss has said has held up for the internal group dynamics. That is, barter is what is done with "them over there"; amongst "ourselves", we gift. Plus, there was also a lot of other non-market transfer of goods to the outgroup such as paying tribute, entertaining visitors (in settled societies), etc. I don't think Mauss is at all arguing against the division of labor, or personal property (how can you give something if don't own it first) because after all, he's relying in part on Malinowski's data. Instead, I think his point is that goods are much more often transfered internally (and in some places externally) through gift exchanges than barter, which goes against the previous assumption people just assumed that everyone bartered for everything "in the good old days". Also, the gift exchange turned goods not into money but into social capital--stuffyou can still spend. One of Graeber's arguments is an internal transfer of goods, barter only happens in places where markets used to exist but has failed, like Soviet Russia right after the Revolution or peripheral regions of an empire, it doesn't predate markets. I don't know how true that part is. Anyway, it's actually pretty cool, and, based on your comments, I think you might actually enjoy it. Even if you don't agree with everything in it (and how could you? We don't fully accept any social science written in 1920's without major revision), it might be (to channel on Levi-Strauss) "good to think with."

If your research looks to your colleagues more like political advocacy than professional research, you're not going to get tenure.

Yo, to my eyes, this is actually kind of common in anthropology departments, where (again it seems like to me) they're constantly "radically reimagining the possibilities of post-neoliberalism" or something along those lines. I think it's awful but I also think it happens more than you even want to know about.

I'm glad we agree though that that a majority of anarchists are under-read extremists with incoherent ideas and no working alternative to current-form institutions other than to camp out in public parks, pick dinner out of a dumpster behind Domino's, and use Starbucks bathrooms without buying anything.

Might be some selection bias in your sample.

Self-identifying anarchists on the radical left wear black to protests, bring lemon juice in spritz bottles to neutralize the tear gas, are the ones who break Nike town windows, and actually fight the cops. They are also the gutter punks you see camping out on the street, wasted, begging for money to feed their dog. They hop trains. They dumpster dive. And a couple few of them have written poorly-conceived rationalizations of social parasitism as "anarchy." See "Evasion" and "Days of War Nights of Love" published by the Crimethinc. collective. I grew up with these people. Most of them have hepatitis infections and are on methadone now.

While most punks I know have mixed feelings about CrimethInc.ers and similar traveler kids (full disclosure: 17 year-old Jacib loved Evasion), my Food not Bombs friends are all doing well and hep free!

Edited November 13, 2012 by jacib

[jacib]

[...] much like some differentiate sociology of culture and cultural sociology.

Do you off hand know what differention they are trying to make?

[RefurbedScientist]

Do you off hand know what differention they are trying to make?

It's only for the inner sanctum at Yale to know I think...

Here's a post on orgtheory about the difference. I've seen Jeff Alexander make the difference somewhere too. Put simply, it's a difference between culture as the object of study (sociology of culture) and culture as the lens (cultural sociology). Gabriel Rossman, for instance, studies culture (music industry) using "structural" terms (i.e. diffusion patterns, networks). Contrast that with, I dunno, Bourdieu, who studied class through the lens of cultural tastes (better examples of cultural sociology are out there). Another example is Francesa Polletta, who has written on storytelling in social movements. Whereas the social movements literature was predominantly structural for a long time (a la Tilly), she talks about movement narratives and emotions. It's a fine distinction, but important when you compare the poles.

EDIT: Here's Alexander's essay on the "strong program in cultural sociology." Skip down to the section on "Fault Lines" and you'll see his take.

Here's a 1996 newsletter from the Culture section in which Alexander advances the argument for cultural sociology.

And here's Penny Edgell's (Minnesota) breakdown of the concept.

Edited November 13, 2012 by SocialGroovements

[gilbertrollins]

It's not clear that market exchanges don't build social capital like trust and shared identity. Reciprocal giving is as I see it inherent in just about any social exchange. You'll like George Lakoff's chapter in Moral Philosophy on ethical exchange. People seem to keep a cognitive balance sheet, and speak this way: "I owe you one." And if I've done something nice for you, even immaterially, you "owe me." In that way people exchange tacit contracts for social deeds. When you run experiments and sit people in front of a computer program where they can "produce" widgets, and no formal rules of the game, they quickly discover the gains to be made from their comparative advantage, and they trade with one another. The most interesting thing about those experiments is the chat dialogues. Subjects frame the market exchanges in terms of "giving."

In any case: there are mesopotamian tablets that are several thousand years old which have long-distance contracts on them. Going even further back, you find precious stones at archeological digs which could only have been mined many thousands of miles away -- those stones didn't get there by walking.

There is absolutely nothing different between a barter and a trade with money, outside the symbolic attachment of exploitation and other ethical nastiness to monies that scholars like Graeber have been claiming since Plato. This is in fact the biggest point of price theory -- what's being traded are goods for goods and services for services. Money is just a scorekeeping system that helps people communicate one another's values to one another, like language or clothing. Money units are entirely arbitrary measures. What makes a pair of socks worth "5" and a pair of shoes worth "60" are the aggregation of zillions of people's relative values for all of the other goods in the economy. I digress. Essentially, the observation that monied trade is brutish and nasty actually descends from the Western aristocratic and religious traditions, ostensibly because merchants always competed with the aristocracy and clergy throughout history for stature, and for two very different systems of getting wealthy: enslaving people, conquering people, taxing people, and taking the things they produce -- or trading with them.

Monied trade builds social capital. Lots of it. Very few business deals go bad, and mostly contribute to long-term bonds which translate into community spillovers. Employees stay at jobs for several years, and build lasting relationships with one another while there. The whole "outsourcing" exemplar of the employment relation is just statistically incorrect. 92% of the country is employed right now, and that is the long run trend. I think people are right to sense some social tension over monied trade -- but that tension is inherent to the scarcity of resources period. And it will have to get mitigated by any system of distribution. Trade happens to be a very good way to resolve that tension. To say that it causes it is to misidentify reverse causation.

[faculty]

There is actually an entire line of research in sociology on social exchange (Richard Emerson, Karen Cook, Ed Lawler, and Linda Molm are some of the key names) and some of the more recent work in the area suggests that it's more than the scarcity of resources that creates tension, inhibits trust, etc.

[gilbertrollins]

My reading of Lakoff and in behavioral economic theory and experiments (ultimatum, dictator, and public goods games) are the only thinking on social exchange I've done. Which is admittedly pretty paltry.

When I said scarcity creates the tension which breaks down social ties, I had in mind iterated exchanges between trading partners eventually breaking down -- two car dealers who help mitigate each other's inventories say, and eventually get into a fight where the friendship dissolves. Social exchange is obviously a much broader taxa than just "long term tacit negotiations."

I suppose I was arguing more against the sort of separate spheres framework Jacib was (only slightly) implying. I think it's just zany to talk about "market and non-market" exchanges. We start to get into Polanyian and Marxian distinctions about instrumental and rational versus intrinsic and altruistic (Compte? shoot me) action that way. As I see it those distinctions pretty well lead to the unproductive split between economics and sociology. So loosely drawn what we have now is one discipline arguing rational action founds all behavior, which the customary normative recommendations fall out of. And the other argues all behavior is social, which the customary normative recommendations fall out of. That analysis pretty well ignores major methodological advances in sociology and economics I understand, but it's not entirely wrong either. So yeah, non-market and market based action are a silly taxonomy I think. Every market transaction is a social transaction, and every social transaction contains "market" elements. People consider their prudential self interest inside the family, as much as their social obligations at the check-out.

Thanks for all the recommendations and discussion.

Edited November 13, 2012 by econosocio

[faculty]

No harm, no foul. I just thought that you'd like to know about the literature, given your interest in switching disciplines for graduate studies.

[gilbertrollins]

Absolutely. Much appreciated. I read through a little of the social exchange lit. It's basically microeconomics applied to consumption and exchange of relationships-as-, and people-as-goods. I really like Coleman's rationalism a lot more, using rational choice as a point of departure to demonstrate the importance of norms and structure, rather than cramming social relations into a utility function. Will read further, cheers.

The behavior of blades of grass fit an optimization model. They act as if they're optimizing. So do the foraging distances of lizards, sociobiologists have discovered. And of course economists have shown the plethora of conditions under which people's decisions will fit that model too.

That says nothing about the agent-level decision heuristics agents are actually using to make choices. Nobody is doing calculus subconsciously. It has been shown computationally that even if it takes a person, say .005 seconds to rank a preference for apples over oranges, and you assume a relatively small population of things one can attach preferences to (an actually enormous set), you easily get a time requirement that's longer than a human life. That's just specifying your utility function. Then you have to go out and get information on the opportunity costs of everything around you, another gigantic set of information. And then subconsciously run the calculus to find globally optimal maxima on your utility function.

So at the system level, maybe because of evolutionary complexity or some such, systems establish equilibria. But as I see it we make decisions with a range of heuristics, socially derived, path dependent, and so on -- doing so without a lot of deliberate thinking.

I really need to spend less time on the internet.

Edited November 14, 2012 by econosocio

[herbertmarcuse]

Graeber's economic history is wrong. We have evidence of trade going back to about the beginning of language, millennia before anything even resembling a state pops up. The settled agriculture --> states --> trade --> hierarchy and social decay idea is a myth. Money was made to facilitate exchange. That's not an economics textbook fantasy -- its an empirically verified phenomenon. Natural monopolies accrue to units of account and stores of value (money) because they load onto networks. Microsoft Office becomes a standard, and national languages for the same reason -- the utility of using such a good increases in the number of people adopting the technology. Such a monopoly lends itself to State control (as do other goods accruing network externalities), but there is a gigantic difference between states capturing a monopoly and abusing it, like say debasing coin to pay for arrows to fight wars with, which causes inflations which disrupt commerce and make everyone poorer (and is why central banks are now independent -- not because of a monetary conspiracy), and the State creating money, or highways in the first place (also originally privately, and locally owned and taken care of well into the late 19th century).

OP: If you're interested in anarchy I'd suggest some work by Elinor Ostrom on stateless coordination of market failures, and an intermediate microeconomics textbook. Occupy is not anarchism. Squatting is not anarchism. Dumpster diving is not anarchism. It's confused teenage rebellion. Getting along with people without central authority and violent enforcement is anarchism -- and the remarkable thing about prosocial mores is just how much anarchy we witness in societies with enormous states.

I would agree with you that the Occupy movement is more like a marxist/labor movement than a anarchist movement. Still, I'm confused why you don't think squatting is not part of anarchism? As far as I can remember back in Europe many squatters often spread slogans like "Property is Theft" which sounds like left-wing anarchism to me. Help me.

HM

[ohgoodness]

I would agree with you that the Occupy movement is more like a marxist/labor movement than a anarchist movement. Still, I'm confused why you don't think squatting is not part of anarchism? As far as I can remember back in Europe many squatters often spread slogans like "Property is Theft" which sounds like left-wing anarchism to me. Help me.

HM

Think you answered your own question. Slogans like "Property is Theft". Just like yr not a libertarian simply because you say "tax is theft" 1000x on national television.

[herbertmarcuse]

It is an interesting idea but to my ears - radicalizing sociology and making it more accessible to the public would be opposite in a graduate program where the focus is on research. I see such work either becoming increasingly theoretical within the fields of elites, power, organization etc to a point where you would attend conference simply to debate the meaning of x in the context of y. Or you would end up studying "grass roots" in action.

Either way - as someone who finds Albert Jay Nock to be an daily inspiration - if our paths ever cross and you confuse anarchism for occupy then jostling shall commence.

Finally to answer your real question - I doubt anyone find this to be offensive or unworthy of scholarly pursuit. Being accepted to change sociology, however, might need a very fine statement of purpose...

Everything that you discussed in your reply has merit. I may need some future help with framing my SOP so I don't sound like some uneducated anarchist trying to avoid doing any research!!!

[jacib]

Think you answered your own question. Slogans like "Property is Theft". Just like yr not a libertarian simply because you say "tax is theft" 1000x on national television.

Just to clarify, the slogan "property is theft" (la propriété, c'est le vol) wasn't coined by some dreadlocked traveler kid with scabbies--it's from Proudhon's What is Property?

[ohgoodness]

Just to clarify, the slogan "property is theft" (la propriété, c'est le vol) wasn't coined by some dreadlocked traveler kid with scabbies--it's from Proudhon's What is Property?

Where it's from and how it's used - two widely different things. Noble roots..

[gilbertrollins]

Hmm. Didn't Proudhon start one or two communes that eventually failed? Or was that one of his contemporaries.

Anyone who believes property is theft is going to have to answer to why possessive pronouns like MY and YOUR have emerged in languages across culture and geography. Owning things also goes much deeper than the contracted transacting of material goods. I own and identify with my tastes, my ideas, my emotional tendencies, and so on.

Keep an eye out for David Graeber's next daisy-chain world history, where he shows that the State imposed egoistic psychology on people, through linguistic decree: "thou shalt refer to objects with possessive pronouns." He's going to prove that both money and language are not emergent phenomena as described by a categorical consensus of the scholars who have studied them for 200 years, but rather artificial Statist constructions, developed in order to trick people into believing in the false consciousness of property, so that their labor could be expropriated from them through market exchange and taxation.

With a little bit of work, we'll be able to launch radical new social forms by abandoning units of account and stores of value, and the use of possessive pronouns. Dissenters will be shot.

It's worth noting that Thomas Moore's manuscript Utopia prescribed the violent enforcement on his paradise island. Turns out he underestimated the genocide that would eventually result from such a scheme.

Edited November 20, 2012 by econosocio

[jacib]

FWIW, probably the most relevant part of What is Property?:

If I were asked to answer the following question:

What is slavery?

and I should answer in one word,

It is murder!

, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required . . . Why, then, to this other question:

What is property?

may I not likewise answer,

It is robbery!

, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

I'm not saying that's right, I'm saying that's what Proudhon says. Also Proudhon (if I remember correctly) differentiates property from possessions. Possessions aren't theft, and having exclusive use of a house isn't theft (I forget the category of this), but rents on property or even just the abstract idea of a right to property is theft. I wouldn't be surprised if Proudhon started two failed communes, but I don't think that really has much to do with anything.

[gilbertrollins]

My experience living in housing cooperatives, visiting intentional communities, and watching artist and other cooperatives consistently fail is most of my reason for thinking Occupy is silly. Well that and the level of economic reasoning involved. So I thought Proudhon's misadventures were germane.

I don't know what comes in between the ellipses in that quote, but the whole thing is a non sequitur. Slavery is not murder. Slavery is slavery. Murder is murder. And property certainly is not theft. Theft is by definition the violation of property -- it's involuntary exchange of possession. Trade is the voluntary exchange of property.

If we allow these sorts of philosophical sophisms, then we can proffer that "books are stupidity," or "women are men." And express our dismay that we're being misunderstood when we say that "the television is the dog."

Proudhon, like Marx, and Locke before either of them, tried to distinguish and exalt labor value from exchange value. Locke thought there was 1) inviolable value in the land itself and then that 2) the laborer gains right to the value in the land when his labor is "mix'd with it."

Turns out value is a psychological and social construct, that labor theories of value can't predict a price if they tried because they divorce human desires (demand) from human productive capacities (supply). Also turns out that the point of exchange, where those forces have to find some agreement, is precisely what guys like Proudhon and Marx tried and failed to philosophically incise from society -- possibly because their history was so atrocious they thought exchange and paid employment was something new -- they weren't.

Proudhon and Marx also thought, as was common among every 19th century intellectual, that Thomas Robert Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population was correct -- which it wasn't. So they envisioned an exploding population with greater and greater exploitation and conflict, rising value of land (because of its increasing scarcity) creating a rentier class. Etc.

Turns out none of that came true. Population growth rates are at about 0 in the developed world, and approaching 0 everywhere but Africa. The value of land has in fact dropped dramatically, so one gets rich by inventing iPads instead of renting farm land. In fact there is no empirical evidence to show that the value of land and real estate continuously rise in the long run -- yet everyone's hair was blown back when housing prices crashed in 2008. Per capita violence rates are on balance lower in the world than they've ever been. Urban violence in the United States has been on the decline since the 1990s.

Turns out that the the proliferation of exchange, and exchange values, has accompanies precisely the opposite circumstances Proudhon and Marx envisioned.

Edited November 21, 2012 by econosocio

[gilbertrollins]

I couldn't help it. This is too funny:

[herbertmarcuse]

Or how about trying squatting in London?

 

[herbertmarcuse]

FWIW, probably the most relevant part of What is Property?:

 

If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required . . . Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

I'm not saying that's right, I'm saying that's what Proudhon says. Also Proudhon (if I remember correctly) differentiates property from possessions. Possessions aren't theft, and having exclusive use of a house isn't theft (I forget the category of this), but rents on property or even just the abstract idea of a right to property is theft. I wouldn't be surprised if Proudhon started two failed communes, but I don't think that really has much to do with anything.

I felt like jumping in here because the topic does interest me in my own discipline. Honestly.I think we make a huge mistake by just going back to writings by Proudhon or other anarchist writers to find out what they really meant by property and theft question makes it all too philosophical.  Rather, we need to take these old ideas and put them into the contexts of present day issues of  over basic affordable housing and concern over gentrification.Granted, these two areas may be two different topics but they are appearing in news stories that makes this issue not go away.For those that are still interested, I recommend reading the Spiegel article below which talks about a number of protests happening across Germany on the issue of Skyrocketing Rents across major German cities.  What do you think?

 

 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-renters-pinched-by-rising-costs-and-decreasing-supply-a-875224.html

Edited January 4, 2013 by herbertmarcuse

[gilbertrollins]

Rent controls have a documented history of increasing non-pecuniary discrimination, and housing projects were by most measures no less a manifestation of institutional racism and the corralling of the poor like cattle, than the war on drugs is.   If you want to help the poor, write them checks, and tie the gifts to their wages by matching income privately earned.  That incentivizes work, and lets poor people, whom are smart enough to figure out how to bring themselves out of poverty, decide what to spend their money on.  

 

Housing, food, and other directed subsidies in combination with the war on drugs do nothing but exacerbate the degradation of property and the economic climate in poor neighborhoods.  The solution to the problems of the developed world's poor is not even more government paternalism and fumbling around, trying to litigate the ethics and decisions of these people.  

 

Gentrification, that is, improving property, is a good thing.  The neighborhood I live in was recently ranked the most dangerous neighborhood in the country.  Fifty years ago it was an affluent Jewish neighborhood.  Neighborhoods change rapidly in cities.  It's not a simple matter of affluent neighborhoods spreading-from-center, pushing minorities further and further toward the edges of the city and eventually off the edge of the world.  

 

Anti-gentrification sentiments inspire protectionist economic policies -- or rather I should say local alderman in my neighborhood not letting Arabs and Whites open businesses because doing so "keeps money in the Puerto Rican community."  No -- preventing people from trading one another, like say whites or arabs setting up businesses and offering Puerto Rican consumers competitively priced goods so that they can invest those dollars saved into more productive margins like, say, their children's education -- is how you make everyone rich, Puerto Ricans and Arabs and Whites alike.  

Edited January 5, 2013 by econosocio

[jacib]

Honestly.I think we make a huge mistake by just going back to writings by Proudhon or other anarchist writers to find out what they really meant by property and theft question makes it all too philosophical.  Rather, we need to take these old ideas and put them into the contexts of present day issues of  over basic affordable housing and concern over gentrification.

Graeber has a section in Fragments about this, pages 3-7.  Start from "It does seem that Marxism holds an affinity with academia that anarchism never will" and read through "and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write".    Link to a PDF of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

[gilbertrollins]

I find Graeber's style disturbing and at the same time really interesting.  Here's a guy who unashamedly thinks social science ought to serve and form a political agenda, without a single nod to positivism.  And that, to me, is scary.  But at the same time, he attempts to infiltrate an institution built largely on the pretenses of positivism, in order to preach theoretically about how anarchism is a-theoretical.  I've got to read more of this guy. 

 

He says: "In the end, though, Marcel Mauss has probably had more influence on anarchists than all the other ones combined. This is because he was interested in alternative moralities, which opened the way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they were because they actively wished to live that way."

 

As I understand it, Noble Savage sentiments emerged from the origins of social science in the 18th century.  These guys were fascinated with the discovery of North and South American Indians, and the argument was largely over whether or not these "original state of nature" people actually represented a Hobbesian "warre of all against all" or not.  The first anthropologists didn't need a ton of encouragement to take 18th and 19th century socialism and go paint it on their ethnography (and to their credit, calling Savages noble at the time was a radical, contrarian, and insightful question rather than received dogma as it is today).  Sahlins was the Original Affluent Society guy who really nailed it home.  

 

I think it's incredible that he doesn't discuss market anarchism in fifty pages of opining about anarchism - that just doesn't seem scholarly.  Yet he's totally content to tell these stories about how indigenous people "consciously rejected most of what we would consider the basic principles of economics" without verifying it on any empirical criterion other than his second-hand reading of cherry-picked ethnographies.  

 

I mean, I could write a nice long essay about how most of the interactions within a modern firm look like "gift economies," and that these are "not based on calculation, but on a refusal to calculate" because of the incredible cooperation, sacrifice, reciprocal giving, and so on that takes place.  But I wouldn't have done any science at all unless I backed up statements like: "They would have found the very premise that the point of an economic transaction . . . was to seek the greatest profit deeply offensive," with at the very least a question put to the workers in the firm "do you find X offensive?"  I have a hard time believing anyone here is as offended as Graeber.

 

Edit: and I read more of the essay.  Graeber's reading of reciprocal giving is just incredible.  I mean, i learned in a 100-level cultural anthropology course I took at a community college that reciprocal giving is often propagated between groups by ceremonial Big Men.  Incredibly Graeber still continues to claim that these systems necessarily delimit and undermine hierarchy and power.  Per capita death rates due to extraordinary inter-group violence are enormous among most indigenous populations, and are verified in the archeological record.  That, to me, does not strike me as an anarchic world blissfully and purposefully removed from power and "symbolic violence."  

Edited January 7, 2013 by econosocio

[jacib]

I find Graeber's style disturbing and at the same time really interesting. 

Ditto.

 

Edit: and I read more of the essay.  Graeber's reading of reciprocal giving is just incredible.  I mean, i learned in a 100-level cultural anthropology course I took at a community college that reciprocal giving is often propagated between groups by ceremonial Big Men.  Incredibly Graeber still continues to claim that these systems necessarily delimit and undermine hierarchy and power.  Per capita death rates due to extraordinary inter-group violence are enormous among most indigenous populations, and are verified in the archeological record.  That, to me, does not strike me as an anarchic world blissfully and purposefully removed from power and "symbolic violence."  

It's partly the style of the press--like McCloskey's book for them on economics doesn't mention the "secret sins" until the end.  That's why these books are so engaging--they're really essays, not academic articles.  He has done empirical, ethnographic work in Madagascar and that's where some of the insights come from.  But the press specifically does not really let you footnote.  I kept Fragments in my bathroom for months in college because it made great bathroom reading (and I mean that as a compliment).  But there's another part of the essay where he talks about that people insist on equality because they know inequality (towards women, for instance, or they know about slavery) and I think it's not just about complete equality but checks on power.  For instance, if you are able to take a rock and bash in the big man's head while he's sleeping, that's a pretty effective check on power (if I recall, Graeber mentions that elsewhere).  Anyway, it's not a perfect argument, but it is a great essay (it unfolds information gradually in an engaging way of unpeeling), in that, while I didn't agree with it 100%, it opened me up to different ways of thinking.  Definitely worth reading in full in the bathroom.

[gilbertrollins]

I've never read any other Prickly Paradigm other than Secret Sins, and I do think it is vital that scholars feel free to make some mistakes publicly, some unsupported conjecture, and vent about the conditions of their discipline.  

 

Graeber is a wicked smart guy, though.  He's not naive about the bad name anthropology has gotten for Noble Savage myths, for doing straight up political advocacy, and for carrying the banner of the French Structuralists even more than the English department at times.  His solution to those problems?  Give those people the middle finger, by just ignoring those complaints.  Well you can do that if it makes you feel like a revolutionary and reifies your sense of intellectual integrity, but it's not a particularly persuasive way to confront your interlocutors.  

 

I agree with herbertmarcuse and Graeber in that social science ought to be relevant, and that we should watch out for Arm Chair Ism.  Understanding history of thought,  though, is incredibly important to any Science that takes for granted that frameworks of thought compel a great deal of action.  And I did not find Graeber's blurb on anarchist scholarship being about action and politics in process (how to organize a direct action meeting), versus Marxism being all talk and no walk, very compelling.  I have not been convinced (obviously) that his, Mauss', and other anthropological work doesn't constitute hunt-and-peck Marxist scholarship, in the same way that a majority of 20th century history was done.

 

A major difference between McCloskey's essay and Graeber's, is that McCloskey says "Here are the reasons most people think economics is bullshit -- and the economists are right that those are bullshit reasons to think economics is bullshit.  Here's the real reason you should be skeptical."  Graeber says, "Here are the reasons most people think Anthropology is bullshit.  Fuck you; I'm a revolutionary, better even than all the other scholastic revolutionaries, and here is more Anthropological opining in the traditional mode to prove it."