Pour une anthropologie anarchiste

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Catégorie:En traduction Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology est l'un des pamphlets d'une série publiée par Prickly Paradigm Press à Chicago. Avec cet essaie, l'anthropologiste David Graeber a essayé de déterminer les zones de recherche que les intellectuels pourraient explorer dans la création du corps d'une théorie sociale anarchiste.

Graeber affirme que l'anthropologie est "particulièrement bien positionnée" en tant que communité académique qui peut voir l'ensemble des sociétés et organisations humaines, pour étudier, analyser et cataloguer les structures sociales et économiques alternatives partout dans le monde, et, le plus important, présenter ces alternatives au monde.

La révolution par la non-confrontation

Une des suggestions les plus frappantes dans le pamphlet défie la notion anarchiste traditionnelle de confrontation aggressive avec l'État. Graeber a fait des travaux post-gradués avec les cultures tribales du Madagascar, incluant un avec les Tsimihety, dans le nord-ouest du pays. Les Tsimihety, rejetant toute autorité gouvernementale et organisant leur société avec des lignes très égalitaire, furent capable de continuer leur autonomie et leur culture pour des décades vers la fin, jusqu'à ce jour, non en confrontant le gouvernement, mais en se retirant. Graeber writes,

"To this day they have maintained a reputation as masters of evasion: under the French, administrators would complain that they could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms with apparently cooperative elders, and return with the equipment a week later only to discover the village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant had moved in with some relative in another part of the country." (p. 55)

Aspects d'une anthropologie anarchiste

In particular, Graeber suggests several areas a hypothetical anarchist anthropology would need to tackle, and in the book elaborates on each point briefly:

1. A theory of the state
2. A theory of political entities that are not states
3. Yet another theory of capitalism
4. Power/ignorance, or power/stupidity (Graeber explores a possible theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. "Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance." (p. 72))
5. An ecology of voluntary associations
6. A theory of political happiness
7. Hierarchy
8. Suffering an pleasure: on the privatization of desire
9. One or several theories of alienation

Raisons pour la non-existance de l'anthropologie anarchiste

He also offers several possibilities why anthropologists are reluctant to come out and make normative judgments and proposals: "In many ways, anthropology seems a discipline terrified of its own potential. It is, for example, the only discipline in a position to make generalizations about humanity as a whole—since it is the only discipline that actually takes all of humanity into account, and is familiar with all the anomalous cases." (p. 96) Anthropologists, Graeber writes, may be also simply afraid of being dismissed as "utopian."

Part of the problem, Graeber admits, is that traditionally, academics on the radical left have gravitated toward the more "High Theory"-oriented Marxism (Karl Marx himself was a Ph.D) rather than the more practice-oriented anarchism. Graeber sums up: "1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. 2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice." (p. 6)

The anarchist insistence of putting revolutionary ideals into practice is on some level incompatible with a career in a university. Academia, with its rigid and calcified hierarchies largely originating centuries ago, cannot meet with an anarchist's approval, and indeed to call oneself an anarchist by definition must mean taking action against such unjust power structures.

Le texte complet du paphlet est téléchargeable en un fichier .PDF. [1]

Liens externes

• full PDF version of "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology"

• Largely positive review of "Fragments"

• Largely critical review of "Fragments"

• Prickly Paradigm Press

1. REDIRECT Modèle:Wikipedia (traduit de l'anglais au français)