Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
DOI 10.1007/s10624-016-9445-2
John Clammer1
It is the widespread consensus in many circles that the current world system, defined
by the near hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the forms of development that it
has inspired, is now untenable. Its outcomes, while certainly producing an
abundance of consumer goods for those able to access them and generating
enormous riches for a small minority, have proven to be socially and environmen-
tally highly destructive. The patterns of globalization that it has engendered have led
to widening social inequalities, displacement of peoples, the destruction of natural
economies and the societies and cultures with which they were integrated, and its
resource-extracting and waste-producing nature has generated pollution, destruction
of natural habitats and of the species that inhabit them, and ultimately climate
change on a scale unprecedented in human history. These effects, once thought by
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Narotzky does not use these insights to extend economic anthropology into a critical
engagement with capitalism, but falls back on the rather lame argument that the way
forward is to think both locally and globally, and also historically (Narotzky 1997,
p. 7). A detailed exemplar of this approach can be found in Daniel Miller’s book of
the same year: Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (Miller 1997), which in
practice is almost totally devoted to an analysis of advertising, branding, retailing
and shopping in Trinidad, with just one chapter devoted to attempting to delineate
the distinction between ‘‘pure’’ capitalism and the local example of ‘‘organic’’
capitalism allegedly captured by the ethnography.
Secondly, the emergence of the anthropology of development (e.g., de Sardin
2005) has de facto provided a forum in which the elucidation and critique of
capitalist economic and social relations and the whole nature of the ‘‘development’’
process subject to close examination, especially as it has impacted the smaller scale
societies in which anthropologists have for the most part specialized. The line
between development anthropology and the examination of capitalism as a specific
subject of anthropological analysis is consequently a fine one. This can be seen in
the trajectory of anthropologies of capitalism as totalities or as aspects of
globalization, or which have taken an aspect of capitalism or quasi-capitalist or
transitional economies as their focus: peasant economies encountering monetization
and market and the notion of the importance of ‘‘people without history’’ (Eric
Wolf), systems of barter and the penetration of imported goods and the ways in
which local marketing networks have adjusted to this (Benjamin Orlove), peasant
resistance (James Scott), examinations of the effects of capitalist-generated
economic crises on the ‘‘Global South’’ and attempts to learn from this to create
more ‘‘human’’ economies (Hart and Sharp 2015; Hart et al. 2010), food and food
security (Sidney Mintz), the analysis of the emergence of capitalist relations in
societies where they were formerly absent (Tania Li), commodities, value creation
economic rationality (Scott Cook), or the work of David Graeber and among other
things, his notion of ‘‘everyday communism’’ as a basis of social solidarity, a notion
very close, as we will shortly see, to emerging ideas in the area of Solidarity
Economy.
Such approaches can be thought of as collectively creating an anthropology of
the political economy of world systems, an attempt which might itself be divided
into two streams—that emerging from Marxist approaches, and that which
attempted to build a bridge between political economy and the emerging
‘‘interpretative’’ approach of the 1980s. The former represented the remarkable
flourishing of a Marxist-inspired economic anthropology in France, much of it
inspired by the then highly popular work of Louis Althusser and embodied in the
work of such Francophone anthropologists as C. Meillassoux, E. Terray, G. Dupre
and P.-P. Rey as well as in the more eclectic approach of Maurice Godelier,
particularly in his major book Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (1972).
(For a discussion in English of this literature, see Clammer 1978). However, much
of this work, despite its Marxist derivation or inspiration, was not directly concerned
with the issue of the anthropological analysis of capitalism, as with the problems of
the application of Marxism to pre-capitalist societies and to whether this was
actually possible. So while paradoxically Marxism was losing its critical edge,
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still be taken seriously in a world of almost total ‘‘capitalist penetrations.’’ But the
weakness of this is immediately apparent since the remainder of the chapter in
which they purport to address issues of political economy is actually taken up with
an examination of further ethnographies that deal primarily with what Marcus and
Fischer call ‘‘historicizing the ethnographic present’’ (history in other words) and
political economy as such disappears from their text, either because they could find
no other suitable ethnographies, or because of the implicit recognition that an
‘‘interpretative approach’’ was inadequate to the creation of an anthropology of
neoliberal capitalism and the development strategies that it has given rise to.
Underlying this general position are two unacknowledged problems. One is that
the default position of many economic anthropologists emerging from the Firth like
paradigm of the late 1960s—to fall back on a discussion of the relationship between
anthropology and economics—simply does not work when it is realized that if
neoclassical economics is what is meant here. For then, the real need is rather for an
anthropology of economics—the application of anthropological tools of analysis to
economics itself. The other is the overly modest conception of what anthropology
itself can do. In a paper published in 1990, Marcus, while rightly noting that
economics has to a great extent colonized our social imaginations, goes on to assert
that, however, culture ‘‘complicates’’ things and resists any project (economics
especially) based on reductionist thinking. His modest goal is then to ask ‘‘how far
cultural analysis can invade the territory of system modelers from the relatively
marginal roles that economic anthropology has played in the past [or to use less
martial language, how the contributions of ethnography can renegotiate new levels
of collaboration with hegemonic forms of theoretical discourse about major Western
economic institutions’’ (Marcus 1990, p. 333)]. A modest goal indeed (and note the
word ‘‘collaboration’’) and one that does successfully relegate economic anthro-
pology to the margins if all it can really do, as Marcus specifically suggests on an
earlier page, meekly represent the ‘‘natives’ point of view.’’ But does this exhaust
the scope of economic anthropology? I think rather that we can suggest a much
more expanded answer.
The notion of ‘‘cultural analysis’’ is of course on the surface an attractive one. But in
the contemporary situation, it is not unreasonable to suggest that ‘‘culture’’ is now
largely an epiphenomenon of the neoliberal system, and not some autonomous arena
available for anthropological study apart from that system. If this is so, then any
future anthropology has to be in a sense the anthropology of capitalism. As much
was basically suggested as long ago as 1986 by Stephen Gudeman in his book
Economics as Culture (Gudeman 1986), an idea that needs filling out in a number of
ways. These are potentially many—the building on the analyses of the anthropo-
logical literature cited above, engagement with the work of those who are not
simply critiquing neoliberal forms of economy and development but attempting to
create actual alternatives (a literature and set of practices that has not yet received
systematic anthropological attention) and, as I will now attempt, a reappraisal of the
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subjectivities that there is little left ‘‘outside’’ (even or especially leisure, sports
and the arts) un-colonized by the mind set and practices of capitalism. Growth
rather than happiness, social solidarity, ecological appreciation and balance or
the creation of sustainable relationships has become the goal of economies that
have abandoned the principles embodied in many of the societies known to
anthropologists. The result has been the planetary scale destruction that we now
see all around us. (On all of the above, see Clammer 2016b).
4. Fundamental assumptions about human economic behavior cannot be derived
from one form of imposed economic system alone. Indeed, as the ‘‘virtualism’’
theory cited above notes, neoclassical economic theory does not so much
describe as create the very categories that it assumes to be universal
characteristics of human behavior and nature. Notions of ‘‘profit,’’ ‘‘efficiency,’’
‘‘productivity’’ and so on are highly cultural ideas, and while the words
themselves may have a dictionary definition, their actual content is a matter of
values and cultural preferences. This should be evident from the classical
anthropological record—the notion of the Potlatch, the Kula and other systems
of exchange and distribution which, while they may have a competitive
element, are essentially systems of long-term reciprocity, as is the case with
societies in which the gift is central to economic transactions (Godelier 1996) or
in which giving is a key element in the socioeconomy (Berking 1999). Absent
from neoclassical economics is any developed theory of the psychology and
sociology of things—why people desire material objects and certain kinds of
services, including those of a symbolic nature—and of the many functions that
seeking or providing those objects or services perform in different kinds of
society (Dittmar 1992). Even concepts central to contemporary capitalism such
as ‘‘consumption’’ prove on examination to be anthropologically complex and
to be related in deep ways to images of the body, to status and to many other
cultural levels and models of being that have little to do with profit or
maximization, as Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood showed as long ago as
1980 (Douglas and Isherwood 1980). Indeed, the fundamental position of that
book still stands today: ‘‘Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed
for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for
making visible and stable the categories of culture. It is standard ethnographic
practice to assume that all material possessions carry social meanings and to
concentrate a main part of cultural analysis upon their use as communicators’’
(Douglas and Isherwoood 1980, p. 59).
The result is not only the possibility of critique of the outcomes (the practices) of
neoliberal-led development, but of the very theoretical base from which those
practices emerge. The possibility of such an ‘‘alternative’’ socioeconomic theory
lies in economic anthropology. If the ‘‘universal’’ assumptions about human
economic behavior that fuel neoclassical economics can be shown to be false or
culturally specific rather than universal, then the enterprise fails. This suggests for
anthropology not only the role of critique, but also of collaboration with alternative
visions of the future, not only because of possible parallels, but even more so
because anthropology has the possibility of contributing to the creation of more
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realistic versions of post-capitalist society and economy precisely because of its (in
principle) holistic approach that recognizes from the beginning the integration of
economy, society and culture.
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rooted in any ethnographic reality, and so in that sense are ‘‘utopian’’ in the
negative sense of the term (Clammer 2012, pp. 130–137).
2. While the first group of alternative thinkers makes no explicit use of
anthropology, a second group does, even if in oblique ways. Here, we might
cite the work of Thom Hartmann whose book The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late
(Hartmann 2004), while largely about climate change and, as its title suggests,
about the depletion and exhaustion of the fossil fuels on which our civilization
has built itself, posits a post-oil future based on the values and practices of tribal
communities, some actual examples of which Hartmann cites. Such societies, in
his view, have retained the values of community, ecological responsibility and
the embeddedness of their economies in their wider social organization, the loss
of which is both a symptom and a cause of our current planetary malaise. A
very similar position is taken by Wm. H. Kotke in his book The Final Empire:
The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future (1993) in which the
future of civilization is seen as a return to the organizational principles and
sustainable environmental practices of many of the societies studied by classical
anthropology, which is also the basis of the argument of Daniel Quinn who sees
the future of civilization requiring a rediscovery of the virtues of tribal cultures
(Quinn 1999). Also very much in this group should be placed the ethnograph-
ically informed work of Helena Norberg-Hodge whose best-selling book (a rare
achievement for what is basically a monograph in applied anthropology)
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh for a Globalizing World (2009)
describes both the traditional culture and ecology of that Himalayan world and
the destructive impact of the abrupt arrival of the ‘‘outside’’ world on that
culture. Also in this category might be placed examples of the ‘‘localism’’ and
bio-region movements (Shuman 2000), and most certainly the ‘‘subsistence’’
movement originating in Germany which sees traditional peasant agriculture as
the paradigm of sustainability and draws on anthropological and historical
material to support that conclusion (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1999).
3. Many of the most significant alternatives concern themselves with the critique
and deconstruction of classical economics (as in the pioneering work of
Henderson 1978, 1988), with promoting a serious alternative to expansion-
obsessed contemporary capitalism (Latouche 1993, 2010), or to doing both, as
in the anthropologically informed work of Keith Hart and colleagues (Hart et al.
2010). This latter example dovetails with emerging work in what is now being
called ‘‘Solidarity Economy’’ (Utting 2015), an important initiative that both
provide the basis for a potential post-capitalist economy, and, without
acknowledging it, has many parallels with economic anthropology and sets
about unwittingly re-creating many of the features of a range of societies
described from that perspective. Closely linked to such an approach are the
initiatives concerned with transition to a post-oil society (Hopkins 2008; Urry
2013), with the anthropology of sustainability (Clammer 2016b) and with the
ethics, politics and sociology of post-capitalist alternatives (Gibson-Graham,
Cameron and Healy 2013).
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This is inevitably only a partial list. There are numerous practical experiments
around the world in creating sustainable and convivial settlements, in various forms
of applied and development anthropology, in ‘‘bio-dynamic’’ and organic agricul-
ture, deriving from the various strands of the environmental movement, and such
like, and a substantial literature, much of it ‘‘below the radar’’ of conventional and
academic anthropology proposing alternative, futuristic, utopian or science fiction
versions of possible or desirable futures on this planet or on others. Far from being
outside of the realm of academic anthropology, such initiatives and such literature
should be as much a part of scholarly interest as now is the field of popular culture,
once a fringe area of concern, but now central to cultural studies and sociologies of
everyday life. But it does help to identify those that have been informed by
economic anthropology, are close to it in spirit or which implicitly parallel many of
its central concerns and ethnographic interest.
This suggests at least two levels of analysis. The first is the anthropology of
capitalism, regarded as a subject of ethnographic interest on a par with other
economic systems. Studies of consumption behavior for example, as represented by
the work cited earlier of Douglas and Isherwood and Daniel Miller, would fall into
this category, as would anthropological studies of work (e.g., Wallman 1979). The
other is the critical examination of the impact of capitalism on previously non-
monetized socioeconomic systems, much of which work, as noted above, falls into
the area usually called the anthropology of development (e.g., Escobar 1995). This
points to the possibility of a non-Marxist theory of both capitalism and
‘‘development,’’ the two, as should be apparent, being inextricably mixed. In the
1980s, at the same time as new initiatives in economic anthropology were being
announced, and as the possibility of a range of alternatives was becoming visible
(Schumacher’s seminal Small in Beautiful being published in 1979 at about the
same time as the work of Hazel Henderson and the ‘‘steady state’’ economics of
Daly (1973) and collaborators), neo-Marxist development theory (at the time the
only obvious contender to mainstream capitalist-led development obsessed with
growth, the expansion of the free market and the erosion of cultures that stood in the
way of mainstream IMF and World Bank styles) was announced as having reached
an ‘‘impasse.’’ It appeared in other words to be theoretically exhausted, with unclear
impact on the juggernaut of mainstream development, and with no obvious
successor in sight (Booth 1985). What that moment really suggests however is the
myopia of academic development discourse. Even as the impasse was announced, a
Marxist-inspired economic anthropology was flourishing in the Francophone world
and a large range of non-Marxist models were appearing (but never referenced in
neo-Marxist development theory), and while in anthropology, a variety of new
critical studies were appearing, this was in isolation from those very alternatives,
including the ones that rooted themselves to 1 or another in ethnography. Possibly
even more significant is that this period of the loss of confidence in the neo-Marxist
approach to development and the parallel flourishing of multiple alternative models
coincided with and was no doubt linked to the general cultural ferment of the
1970s–1980s—in music, fashion, the emergence of New Age ideas and the growing
popularity of ‘‘alternative’’ forms of medicine, anti-war movements (this being the
era of Vietnam), the attraction of Asian religions, especially Buddhism, the
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It is interesting that among new social and economic movements concerned with
the present state of the world is one basing itself on the ideas of one of the founding
fathers of economic anthropology—notably Marcel Mauss. This movement, based
on a book by Caille (2000) and with its key ideas enshrined in a ‘‘Convivialist
Manifesto’’ (2014), draws on some key ideas inspired by Mauss’s seminal work The
Gift. These include a critical approach to growth economics, the need to define new
ways of conceiving of wealth and the good life, the idea of a society of ‘‘frugal
abundance,’’ ‘‘de-growth’’ as associated with the work of Serge Latouche and linked
to ideas of reduction in working time, consumption and consumer desires, and the
creation of a journal and movement to support these ideas, known indeed as
MAUSS—the ‘‘Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales’’ and which
revives the notion of the gift and Mauss’s concern with ‘‘solidarity as a form of
mutual recognition secured by the exchange of gifts and founded on social ties and
mutual indebtedness’’ (Adloff in the introduction to the 2014, p. 11). Sharing many
features with Solidarity Economy, mutual aid systems and cooperatives, and many
other associative projects scattered through civil society, the convivialist movement
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also recognizes that unlike conventional socialism, change cannot come through the
state alone: it must be rooted in new forms of social self-organization, building in
many cases on older and tested examples of these principles. While it is not clear
that convivialism in itself can provide the basis for a systematic critique of and
transcending of capitalism, the movement does indicate the vitality that still exists
in economic anthropology and that in forming a new social movement to combat the
destructive qualities of existing neoliberal capitalism, such anthropology speaks
clearly to and with such movements. In that direction may lay its renewal and
relevance for the coming crisis-loaded years and decades.
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