James C. Scott, the Ambivalent Anarchist

September 5, 2024

The radical anthropologist offered not only incisive studies of the state but also a vision of what life looked like beyond it.

Ben Mauk

With little charity but unerring accuracy, the anthropologist Eric Wolf once described his discipline’s original sin. Anthropologists, he wrote, “look for pristine replicas of the precapitalist, preindustrial past in the sinks and margins of the capitalist, industrial world.” But the search did not take place in a vacuum:

Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents. Thus, it has been rightly said that anthropology is an offspring of imperialism.

The same could be said of most fields of scientific inquiry, few of which escaped the bloody cartography of European conquest. But anthropology is different. It is part of a cohort of disciplines (mineral and petroleum sciences also come to mind) not only predicated on the existence of a strong expansive state but descended directly from efforts to increase state power over unconquered peoples and exploitable territory. This fact is the irresolvable tension at the heart of the subject. As the comparative study of cultures, anthropology can increase our understanding of the world. It might help counter prejudice or preserve intangible heritages. But much of its knowledge has come to “us” —those of us in the state cores of the “capitalist, industrial world”—on the backs of colonialism and empire.

In the middle of the 20th century, a new generation of scholars, influenced by Marxism, began to question the hierarchical assumptions about race and civilization that were intrinsic to the field’s myth of the pristine primitive. Although still mostly white and male, anthropology became, not for the first time, a site of imagined emancipatory potential. One of Wolf’s peers at Columbia, Stanley Diamond, argued that anthropologists— even if they often appear to their informants as spies, and even if they are spies, in a manner of speaking—are also “double agents”:

That is, they are marginal to the commercial-industrial society that created them, but they eagerly explore the areas opened up to them by colonialism. Anthropology is an academic discipline, but it also implies revolt, a search for human possibilities.

More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/james-c-scott-the-ambivalent-anarchist/