magical battles and spiritual jujitsu

http://souldish.com/node/331

David Graeber, intrepid anthropologist and anarchist, talks
about the magical battles and spiritual jujitsu of
Madagascar, the trials of being a political dissident, and
the emerging "Anarchist Century."

Monday, May 8, 2006
By Rebecca White
David Graeber: Anarchist and More

It's not often that we get to sneak a peak into the minds
that will no doubt be remembered. David Graeber is one such
mind. But more than a mind, he is a man whose work has been
met with varying opinion in the past few years due to the
threatening nature of his anarchist beliefs.

When I met him, I was faced with a slew of discussion topics
to choose from. In the scholarly world he's known for his
research on Madagascar. In the world of gossip, he's known
for being the anthropology professor at Yale who was fired
without due cause.

Either way you look at it, David is an anthropological
scholar, an anarachist, and an all around witty guy with a
wry sense of humor one wouldn't expect from someone so
feared by the "ruling class".

Are you an anthropologist that's an anarchist or an
anarchist that happens to be an anthropologist?

I guess it depends on what kind of day it is. In a way,
both. I guess I considered myself an anarchist for most of
my life, but then I've been interested in anthropology for
most of my life, too. I imagine they came from the same
impulse which was this sort of belief that there's got to be
something better than this. An interest in human possibilities.

Much of your anthropological work was done in Madagascar.
Why did you choose Madagascar for your doctoral thesis?

That's an interesting question. I wasn't originally thinking
of studying Madagascar when I went to graduate school. I was
sort of vaguely thinking somewhere in Indonesia. There
seemed to be various practical reasons that that wasn't such
a good idea. Polynesia was also an option but I decided not
to go there because I didn't want to eat yams everyday. I
don't really like yams.

Then my advisor mentioned I should take a look at
Madagascar, so I started reading about it. I started reading
folk tales, actually. I wanted to get an idea of what people
were like there. What I found was they're incredibly
subversive. There's all these stories about people playing
tricks on God. It just seemed like these were people whose
attitude I would appreciate.

What does that mean that they were playing tricks on God?

I could tell you a Malagasy folktale but it would take awhile!

Well, actually the Malagasy are quite fascinating! Their
focus on the afterlife as opposed to focusing on the present
life. What did you encounter in terms of that belief? Did
you see it really infiltrating their daily lives?

It's everywhere. It's omnipresent. Wherever you are, and
where I was, there were tombs everywhere. In fact, people's
houses were made of mud brick. Only houses of the dead could
be made of stone. They had these stone tombs and some were
beautiful and shiny and some were old and broken down.
Almost nowhere where you go in the countryside was there not
a tomb in sight somewhere. So you're just surrounded by
memories wherever you go all the time. History is sort of in
the ground, in the landscape. It's interesting though,
because in a way it's very oppressive. Ancestors are
constantly trying to hold you down.

Tell me about famadihana.

Famadihana are rituals where you remove your ancestor's
bodies from the stone tombs in which they are buried and
wrap them in new cloth. It's unique to highland Madagascar:
I'm not sure there's anyplace else in the world where people
take all the bodies out of tombs every five or seven years
like that. The curious thing I found though was that while
everyone spoke of these rituals as memorials, as ways of
honoring and remembering the ancestral dead, they were at
the same time ways of escaping and even destroying them.
Because the bodies are very dry, mummified almost, but when
you dance with them, tie on their new silk mantles (with
cords, and you pull very hard!) you basically pulverize them
and ultimately start merging them together and consolidating
them so that some at least can be forgotten. You are
reinventing and re-editing and reworking your history in the
most tangible, physical way. And at the same time, it's also
a celebration, at the end you lock them in their tombs
again, and have a huge feast, play music, celebrate your
freedom as it were from memory. Even though without those
memories, you would be nothing.

I read that you're main study was on the descendents of
noble families versus the descendents of their slaves.

I was in this community called Betafo, pronounced
(Bey-ta-fu). It's about half divided between those whose
descendents were noble, and half of them were descendents of
their former slaves. Any noble village is always surrounded
by a series of moats and at the center of the moats there's
the tomb of the noble ancestor. If the descendents of slaves
so much as touch it, guns go off inside, they say.

Oh my, guns!

However, overlooking to the northeast they have the tomb of
this ancestor who's sort of the most important ancestor of
the slaves. They claim he actually wasn't a slave, he was a
wandering astrologer and magician whom they tried to enslave
and they ended up locked in this seven year magical battle
involving each other's rice crops. Essentially he won
because of the weather.

Who controls the weather?

The descendents of slaves. They are all mediums and so
forth. Now, all of this is happening at a time when the
state has largely abandoned them. Nobody is governing them.
The people are governing themselves. So, they had a little
problem with that. Somebody ran off with an entire storage
kit full of rice belonging to a prominent elder. The elder
decided, enough is enough. We need to have a collective ordeal.

What are collective ordeals?

The way you have collective ordeal is you take some water
and you take an object made of gold and you take a little
dust from outside the ancestral tomb and you mix it all
together and everybody takes a sip. They line up everybody
in the community and they say, "If I were the one who did
this, may the ancestors strike me dead." And then whoever
the next person who dies is the one who did it.

So they did this, but then there was a problem. The needed
dust. Well, dust from what ancestral tomb? There's lots of
tombs, there's different groups here. So, the astrologer,
who's the guy who controls the medicine and controls the
weather, decided, 'Well, we'll just take a little from
both.' And they did this, this was what I was told, this was
a year before I got there, so I didn't see this. But, it was
the rainy season, so everyday it's nice in the morning and
then clouds roll up, and then usually it rains at night. So,
they did the ceremony in the morning and that evening, so
everybody tells me, there was a freak hail storm that
destroyed only the rice of those people who had organized
the ceremony since both ancestors were mad about being mixed
together. And that was the point. The people realized that
they had profound problems of getting along, here.

So it's really an essay, or the book is really about
symbolic work there and people fighting over the meaning of
history, and the long, deeply-rooted historical grievances,
through every means except physical violence. But every type
of symbolic violence possible. Nobody was actually hitting
each other or doing anything physical, but through every
other means they could be at war, they were.

In your bio, I read that in your dissertation Disastrous
Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar . . .

Soon to be a book!

.. . . Soon to be a book! But your bio states that your
dissertation is about 'magic, history, and the political
role of narratives'. I was intrigued by the magic. What type
of magic did you experience there?

Oh, any type conceivable. I often like to make distinctions
between theological and humanistic cosmologies. Cosmology is
where people assume the great powers that control the world
are distant and divine Another way I like to think of it is
that there's a time of mythical origins where people have
powers that we don't have now. Powers of creativity -- their
ability to act on the world was profoundly different in its
nature. So that things that were done in that time, whether
it's the mythological age, the epic age, the heroic age,
that cannot now be repeated.

The interesting thing about magical cosmologies is that
almost anything that anyone could ever do you can do now if
you figure out how. So the assumption was that all of these
powers are actually available if you know who knows how to
do it and you can pay for it.

Really? So there are people that are in touch with the
magical powers?

Yeah, it's just a matter of technical knowledge, it's a
matter of having the right connections through various
ancestral spirits. But the descendents of slaves are the
only ones who know how to do this kind of thing and are
considered to be good at it.

I find that the people who aren't the royalty, even in our
American classes, are the people who do all the work, and
would know how to do all of those things.

Yeah, and there's a very common thing that you see all over
the world when it comes to mediums I like to refer to as
spiritual jujitsu. That is when you take your weakness and
turn it into a positive.

Spiritual jujitsu. I like that a lot. That's a great term.

It's really common. For example, with people who are
subordinates of others by their status. Slaves exist so as
to be the agents of the will of someone else, of important
people. They're just following orders, they're an extension
of someone else's will. And when you're possessed by a
spirit, you become the extension of someone else's will
completely. You are essentially them. But if you're that
subordinated, in fact you become very powerful because you
are the king. So it's turning your weakness into one of the
greatest strengths possible.

And there are large parts of Madagascar, not the part I was
in specifically, where, for example, the west coast, when
the French colonized Madagascar, the big thing is to try to
co-opt the leadership. So they found the royal family and
tried to win them over, when, in fact, the royal family are
the junior branches of the tree, the ancestors being more
important, the older the royal ancestor, the more senior.
And very quickly it became clear that the people really
running things were all dead and they only appeared through
mediums who almost always were old women of common or slave
descent. And it's not like a French colonial is going to go
and visit with an entranced woman in a séance. So it was a
way of putting power into a place where your oppressors
can't get at it.

This brings up some questions pertaining to your other side,
David Graeber the Anarchist. In your article entitled,
Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-first
Century, you begin by talking about the "movement of
movements." What is this movement referring to?

It's what is usually referred to in the press as the
"anti-globalization" movement. This seems a silly name,
since almost no one involved actually considers themselves
opposed to globalization -- in the sense of the effacement
of borders, free movement of people, possessions, and ideas
.. . . Some people call it the "global justice movement",
some people the "alternative globalization movement", some
people call it the "movement of movements" because there are
so many diverse movements within it and no single
overarching vanguard or leadership.

The word globalization has been passed around a lot
recently. Can you talk about the difference between imperial
vs. genuine globalization?

I always use the example of NAFTA. Since the US and Mexico
signed NAFTA, the size of the American border guard has more
than tripled. They put up walls and call it globalization.
We have to bear in mind that just a few hundred years ago,
international borders didn't exist at all. And even in the
1890s, things like passports were considered antiquated
barbarisms. In a lot of ways we've moved backwards. Real
globalization for me would mean a genuine effacement of
borders, moving towards some notion of global citizenship --
not in the sense of subordination to a single global state,
that would be a disaster, but rather, in the sense of
recognizing that everyone on this planet is ultimately part
of the same community and beginning to think about what we
all owe to one another as a result, of creating forms of
movement and solidarity that ignore the apparatuses of
nation-states entirely.

What are your opinions on Thomas Friedman's The World is
Flat vs. John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman?
Which view of globalization is more accurate?

Don't get me started on Friedman.

Why do you call the 21st c the anarchist century?

Maybe I'm an optimist. But if you look at the world from a
long-term historical perspective, it just seems obvious to
me that current arrangements cannot last. Capitalism
particularly by the way. Everybody has a different
definition but the one thing everyone agrees is that
capitalism is based on an imperative of infinite growth: if
a firm doesn't grow, it fails; if your GDP doesn't grow,
you're a failed country. . . . Don't get me wrong: if you
want the economic system that will produce the maximum
number of consumer goods, capitalism is definitely the
thing. But infinite growth is simply not sustainable -- it
wasn't when you only had twenty or thirty percent of the
world's population in consumer economies, and certainly
isn't once you have countries like India and China as equal
players in the game. So something's going to give, and it
probably won't take all that long, because history in
general seems to have accelerated lately.

Of course, we have no idea whether what comes afterwards
will be better, or even worse. This is why I think it's so
important we at least start talking and thinking about what
might be better. But the moment you start looking at
revolutionary paradigms as inherently legitimate, it becomes
obvious that most of those that were popular in the 20th
century are entirely discredited, and mostly for good
reasons: anarchism is one of the few that stands intact. And
in fact that's where all the creative energy is really
coming out of.

What has your life been like since all of the media
attention? I've read you've been getting chummy with the IRS?

Yes, that's a common pitfall of being a dissident in the
United States. Suddenly they develop a profound interest in
your taxes. Other than that, however, I seem to have gotten
off pretty easy. I remember during the Republican
Convention, Nightline put out a list of the fifty most
dangerous anarchists in the US supposedly coming into town.
Half of them were friends of mine. What exactly was
dangerous about them, I'm not sure -- but I was actually
rather hurt that I didn't make the list.

Which anarchist organizations do you belong to?

At the moment I'm a member of the IWW -- which New York is
engaged in a series of increasingly successful campaigns to
organize Starbucks workers (we have three declared shops and
several more pending) and mostly Spanish-speaking workers in
restaurant supply shops in Brooklyn, a campaign that's
moving along very quickly. I'm part of the broader PGA
networks -- that's the global network initiated by the
Zapatistas, along with rural direct action groups in places
Brazil and India, indigenous organizations, anarchist groups
in Europe, and so on -- and taking part in discussions about
recreating something along the lines of the old Direct
Action Network in North America. But we're really just
starting to think about what we're going to do with that.

Do you think your activism has distracted you from your
anthropological work, or has it inspired it?

Oh, I think there's been an enormous confluence. When I
first got involved in the Direct Action Network in New York,
I certainly never imagined I was there as anything but an
activist. The movement that I'd always wanted to exist, it
seemed, suddenly did exist, so I just wanted to jump aboard.

What are your plans for the future? What books are you
working on/movements are you involved with?

I'm not sure. Obviously I need a new job. I have the year
off next year to do that -- and I've got all sorts of
feelers and possibilities from the UK, France, and even from
China, actually, but the US academy. . . . well, let's just
say the academy here is much more conservative than they
like to think. I'll see what happens. I was thinking of
going back to Madagascar for a while, and maybe even to
Nepal. I have invitations from grad students to give
seminars on value theory everywhere from Kyoto to Michoacan.
So I guess I'll be traveling a lot. It's kind of ironic --
one reason I got into anthropology was because I don't come
from a very wealthy background, but always wanted to travel.
As it turns out, or the last twenty years or so, I've mostly
been too broke, or too busy, to do much of that. Now finally
I have a chance.

I also have a whole bunch of books about to come out, -- or
at least I hope they are. The Madagascar book should finally
be coming out next year. Also a book of essays on
theoretical ideas coming out of new social movements that I
coedited with Stevphen Shukaitis. Finally, I finished a very
long ethnography of direct action which I just sent off to
Verso, but I'm not sure how long that'll take to appear
since it would come out maybe 600 pages and it's almost
impossible nowadays to get a book that long published. I'm
working on a whole series of other projects: something about
the Medieval Indian Ocean, something about the concept of
debt, something about divine kings in East Africa and the
notion of the state as a constituent war between sovereign
and people, a theoretical piece about the relation of power
and stupidity. If nothing else I keep myself busy.



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