As members of a plenary round table for the Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies track of the 2012 SFAA meetings, we were asked to draw from our own experience and scholarship to provide some conceptual framing for an event dedicated to actualizing alternatives to capitalist political ecologies. We both emphasized that anthropology and anthropologists are involved in making new worlds and therefore need to ask what kinds of worlds we want to make and how might we go about making them? Fortunately we are not starting from scratch. We can draw from a deep tradition of cultural critique in our own discipline, as well as marginalized epistemologies of people around the world. We are also positioned to highlight overlooked practices and material realities of non-capitalism in a diversity of interconnected scales and locales.
The political work of anthropologists, to borrow a concept from JK Gibson-Graham, can begin to fracture an imagined capitalist hegemony that pervades our lives and illuminate a diverse array of already existing non-capitalist economic practices, as a basis for alternative thought and action. We have identified two key areas for this work, corresponding to our respective talks at the SFAA meetings. The first area (from West’s talk) concerns the intellectual contribution, and pragmatic transformative potential of engaged and collaborative ethnographic research. Closely related to this is the practice of building knowledge from a broader range of epistemologies and scholarship. The second area (from Igoe’s talk) concerns the actions we can take as anthropologists to embody non-capitalist values. This entails paying close attention to the way we ourselves have been conditioned by capitalist culture, and building relationships based on cooperation and trust, rather than more familiar ones based on individualized competition and mistrust.
Effective theoretical engagements with capitalist culture and the possibility of non-capitalist alternatives are already grounded in practical realities, and thus eschew putative dichotomies such as theory-practice, insider-outsider, and expert-non-expert, and the like. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval proposes a convergence of experience between a group of activists she calls US Third World Feminists and western theorists such as Derrida and Foucault. Both groups, she argued, were grappling with the paradoxical uncertainty of decentralized power and authority in post-industrial capitalist societies. Both were also pointing to the need of cultivating multiple (indeed apparently contradictory) perspectives, while staying grounded in “an ethic of democracy.” Italian activist Antonio Gramsci dedicated his life to theorizing the role of strategically situated intellectuals in transforming an authoritarian culture under which he was imprisoned. It is notable that Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak has taken up many of Gramsci’s ideas, including in her practical work to extend quality primary education to marginalized areas of India, in the process “promoting rituals of democratic practice” (“The Education of Gayatri,” Chronicle of Higher Education). In Decolonizing Methodology Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that indigenous peoples have had a fraught relationship with both western social theory and capitalism. However, she does not advocate atheoretical research or writing. Rather, she sees the reading of and understanding of Euro-American social theory as a crucial part of decolonizing research methods and writing but not the end point. For Smith, the development of theory both by indigenous scholars and by all scholars based on indigenous epistemologies and ontologies is the only path for a truly decolonized anthropology and for a just social world. She advocates the interweaving of multiple theoretical traditions in ways that do justice to the complexity of people’s global lives and as a basis for political practice.
Of course anthropology in the US is rooted in a tradition of this kind of engaged scholarship. Franz Boas and Margaret Mead were both insider-outsiders who used their position and anthropological ideas to raise public awareness about race and gender. Jim Igoe noted the influence of these scholars on the work of Esther Newton, and her dedication to a collaborative anthropology that is critical even of itself. Newton has challenged the boundaries of our discipline by becoming an intellectual interlocutor for an LGBT subculture, honestly reflecting her own relationships to that subculture, and allowing members of that subculture to speak for themselves through her lucidly-written ethnography. As a founding member of the Ruth Benedict Collective, she pragmatically challenged the hierarchical culture of mainstream academic anthropology, while invoking its feminist roots and helping to build positive and lasting institutional alternatives.
Paige West stressed the importance of going further, to make the kinds of theories we use accessible and useful to the people with whom we work in the field. She described her collaborative efforts to present the theoretical ideas of Rosa Luxemburg, Henri Lefebvre, Anna Tsing and Tania Li in ways that make them accessible, relevant, and amenable to revision by community activists with whom she works in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. West has also shown that such education works both ways. People around the world have their own theories and critiques of capitalism, often empirically grounded, of which anthropologists have barely scratched the surface.
These examples provide us a great deal to emulate in building a world of non-capitalist alternatives. In particular they highlight the central importance of education, of better understanding the world in order to build positive alternatives. We do this everyday in the classroom, public engagement, and our conversations with one another. Much work still remains to be done, particularly in bringing together anthropologists and people from the communities where they work to collaborate on non-capitalist alternatives.
It is important not to romanticize these efforts or see them as some sort of panacea. They do, however, point to some exciting possibilities. The AAA Race Project, for instance, is a poignant example of what could be done to educate ourselves and others about the culture of capitalism and non-capitalist alternatives. This project uses interactive multi-media displays to denaturalize and destabilize the concept of race as part of a political project to advance equity and justice. This is a project that is obviously rooted in the Boasian tradition and the institutional formation of our discipline in North America. The Race Project offers a fantastic starting point for thinking about a similar project on capitalism and non-capitalist alternatives. Such a project could use similar techniques to demystify capitalist culture, fracturing capitalist hegemony to shed light on actually existing non-capitalist possibilities. It could also be built on meaningful collaborations that highlight non-capitalist epistemologies and practices from communities around the world. Like the Race Project, it would also draw from strong intellectual traditions in our discipline.
The Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies track of the 2012 meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology can be seen as a small, but wonderfully tangible, step in this direction. It opened space at an existing event to not only teach and learn about non-capitalist alternatives, but also to practice interacting with one another in ways that were collaborative rather than competitive, equitable rather than hierarchical, and continuous rather than based on a series of discontinuous sound bytes. In the process we practiced pooling resources, building relationships of mutual trust, and thinking collectively about carrying forward the momentum we helped build together (this special series of Anthropology News is in fact an outcome of that discussion). This initiative, and others like it, provide spaces in which we can learn to be more horizontal, collaborative, and work outside market forces in imagining and actualizing an anthropology of non-capitalist possibilities.
James J Igoe is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College. His interests are in political ecology, environmental justice, and conservation, as well as in globalization and indigenous people.
Paige West is associate professor of anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. She researches the relationship between society and the environment.
via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/01/10/imagining-and-actualizing-an-anthropology-of-non-capitalist-possibilities/
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