OCTOBER 2006

Floating Epigraphs

One thing that I've learned in academia is no one much cares what your politics are as long as you don't do anything about them. You can espouse the most radical positions imaginable, as long as you're willing to be a hypocrite about them. The moment you give any signs that you might not be a hypocrite, that you might be capable of standing on principle even when it's not politically convenient, then everything's different. And of course anarchism isn't about high theory: it's precisely the willingness to try to live by your principles.

- David Graeber

There have also been anthropologists—among them, some of the founding figures of the discipline— who have themselves dabbled with anarchist, or anar-chistic, politics.

Peter Kropotkin

It was by mere accident that Elie Reclus, who had kept to his post until the last moment, escaped being shot by the Versailles troops ; and a sentence of deportation having been pronounced upon him - for having dared to accept so necessary a service under the Commune (re. Napoleon III, 1880s) - he went with his family into exile. Now on his return to Paris, he had resumed the work of his life, ethnology. What this work is my be judged from a few, a very few chapters of it, published in book form under the title of Primitive Folk, and The Australians as well as from the hitory of the origin of religions, which formed the substance of his lectures at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes, at Brussels, - a foundation of his brother. In the whole range of ethnological literature there are not many works imbued to the same extent with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the true nature of primitive man. As to his history of religions... undoubtedly superior to erbert Spencer's attempt in the same direction because Spencer, with all his immense intellect does not possess that understanding of the artless and simple nature of the primitive man which Eli Reclus possesses to a rare perfection, an to which he has added an exremely wide knowledge of the rather neglected branch of folk psychology, - the evolution and transformation of beliefs..... In a society less fond of patented tuition and of piecemeal instruction, and more appreciative of the development of wide humanitarian concepts, he would be surrounded by flocks of pupils, like one of his Greek prototypes. - by Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. "Primitive Folk" - by Elie Reclus - a republican in the political sphere, a socialist in the economic sphere, and an anarchist in the sphere of individuality THROUGHOUT winter the Aleutians are not always hunting the bear and the fox, or surprising the poor seal when he puts his nose out of his hole to breathe; they cannot be always constructing boats and making sledges or snow-shoes. Life would be unendurable if they did not give themselves some little rest. The hovel being poor and miserable, there is all the more reason for being gay. The Esquimaux laughs at everything: laughs at the white man with his hundred tools and his thousand knick-knacks; he laughs while thawing his nose and hands, which are in danger of gangrene; he laughs while letting oil run down his throat, while greasing his skin, and while lubricating his garments within and without; he laughs, and asks nothing but laughter. The Inoits have few pleasures but those of society, and of these they do not deprive themselves. The climate being hostile, the earth a harsh step-mother, they feel the need of keeping close together, of helping one another, of loving one another. What the outer world refuses them they ask from the inner. After all, there is for man no better companion than man; it is in consorting with his fellows that he developes his original qualities and his highest faculties. Were it not that the Esquimaux tribes are great families, closely united, were there not communism thorough and deep rooted, their little republics would have speedily perished....

The most notorious case was that of a turn of the century student named Al Brown, known to his college friends as “Anarchy Brown.” Brown was an admirer of the famous anarchist Prince (he of course renounced his title), Peter Kropotkin, arctic explorer and naturalist, who had thrown social Darwinism into a tumult from which it still has never quite recovered by documenting how the most successful species tend to be those which cooperate the most effectively.

Perhaps the most intriguing case though is that of Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown’s contemporary, and the inventor of French anthropology. Mauss was a child of Orthodox Jewish parents who had the mixed blessing of also being the nephew of Emile Durkheim, the founder of French sociology. Mauss was also a revolutionary socialist. For much of his life, he managed a consumer co-op in Paris, and was constantly writing screeds for socialist newspapers, carrying out projects of research on co-ops in other countries, and trying to create links between co-ops in order to build an alternative, anti-capitalist, economy. His most famous work was written in response to the crisis of socialism he saw in Lenin’s reintroduction of the market in the Soviet Union in the ‘20s: If it was impossible to simply legislate the money economy away, even in Russia, the least monetarized society in Europe, then perhaps revolutionaries needed to start looking at the ethnographic record to see what sort of creature the market really was, and what viable alter-natives to capitalism might look like. Hence his “Essay on the Gift,” written in 1925, which argued (among other things) that the origin of all contracts lies in communism, an unconditional commitment to another’s needs, and that despite endless economic textbooks to the contrary, there has never been an economy based on barter: that actually-existing soci-eties which do not employ money have instead been gift economies in which the distinctions we now make between interest and altruism, person and property, freedom and obligation, simply did not exist.

Mauss believed socialism could never be built by state fiat but only gradually, from below, that it was possible to begin building a new society based on mutual aid and self-organization “in the shell of the old”; he felt that existing popular practices provided the basis both for a moral critique of capitalism and possible glimpses of what that future society would be like. All of these are classic anarchist positions. Still, he did not consider himself an anarchist. In fact, he never had anything good to say about them.
- David Graeber, Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology



The Anarchist Luis Buñuel........

The Idea about making a film about Christian heresies first came to me just after my arrival in Mexico hen I read Menendez Pelayo's Historia de lost Heterodoxos Españoles. Its accounts of Martyred heretics fascinated me - those men were as convinced of their truths as the orthodox Christiona were of theirs. In fact, what always intrigued me about the behaviour of heretics is not only their strange inventiveness, but their certainty that they possess the absolute truth. As Andre Breton once wrote, despite his aversion to religion, the surrealists had "certain points of contact" with the heretics. Everything in The Milky Way is based on authentic historical documents. The archbishop whose corpse is exhumed and publicly burned (when personal papers tinged with heretical ideas was found after his death, was infact a real Archbishop Carranza of Toledo.Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff played the two pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostella who meet, on their way, a series of characters from all ages and places representing heresies of our culture..... And for the second last time I also put Christ himself, played by Bernard Verley, on camera. I wanted to show him as an ordinary man, laughing, running, mistaking his way, preparing to shave - to show, in other words, all those aspectrs so completely alien to our traditional iconography. It seemed to me that in the evolution of contemporary religion, Christ occupies a disproportionately privileged place in relation to the two other figures in the Holy Trinity. God the Father still exists, ofcourse, but he's become vague and distant ; and as for the unfortunate Holy Ghost, no one bothers with him atall anymore. He must be begging at roadsides by now.

Carlos Fuentes saw it as an anti-religious war movie, while Julio Cortazar went so far as to suggest that the Vatican must have put up the money for it. these arguments over intention leave me finally indifferent, since in my opinion The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything atall. Besides the situation itself and the authentic doctrinal dispute it evokes, the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or to die for it. the road travelled by the trwo pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology.

Just after the movie opened in Copenhagen, a caravan of gypsies - men, women and children - who spoke neither Dutch nor French drove up to the theatre, and everyone piled out and bought tickets. they returned several days in a row to see the movie, until finally, beside himself with curiosity, the owner of the theatre did his best to find out why they kept coming back. He tried several times to ask them, but since he didn't speak their language, they couldn't communicate. In the end he let them in free.