Enduring Whims and Public Anthropology

In this review essay, I explore today’s protest anthropology, the high-stakes domain of professional and political practice in which anthropologists are not just aligned with protest movements, revolts, and uprisings but are also fullfledged participants in them. Focusing on examples from the Occupy Movement, I discuss the promises and perils of taking a protest stance. I argue that, despite the risks, protest Public Anthropology 127 anthropology has the power to unsettle many of the currentday knowledge-producing practices in the discipline. [engaged anthropology, protest movements, Occupy Wall Street] B numerous anthropologists have become enthralled by the global cycle of protest and revolt that began in 2011, it may be useful to consider, once again, what role anthropologists might play in protest movements. This is not a new issue, of course. Scores of anthropologists have been involved in historic and contemporary protest movements, including anticolonial struggles, civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, global justice, and AIDS activism, and some have even been at the forefront of these movements. For example, Marshall Sahlins famously invented campus “teach-ins” against the Vietnam War, and Eric Wolf was one of the first to hold them on U.S. college campuses (Jorgensen and Wolf 1970). Today’s anthropologists who are visibly active in protest movements, revolts, and uprisings seek not just to raise their public voices in support of protestors or to repackage disciplinary knowledge to make it more useful for grassroots activists. They seek also to participate directly as activists themselves. In what ways do these activities push the boundaries of what it means to be an anthropologist? What challenges do “protest anthropologists” face professionally and politically? In this review essay, I explore today’s protest anthropology, the high-stakes domain of professional and political practice in which anthropologists are not just aligned with protest movements, revolts, and uprisings but are also fullfledged participants in them. By full-fledged, I mean they play a central role in movement building—by organizing and planning actions and by devising new modes of protest and ways to challenge the status quo. And their commitment to their political work is at least as strong, if not stronger, than their commitment to their professional work as anthropologists. Protest anthropology is especially important today in this context of global unrest. As we face a prolonged global economic crisis, imminent environmental catastrophe, and widespread political instability and civil strife, it is crucial to recognize the limited capacities of mainstream political, governmental, and civil society organizations such as NGOs, philanthropic foundations, political parties, think tanks, labor organizations, community oversight panels, and civil rights groups. In the United States, the neoliberalization of the academy, right-wing populism, and cultural warfare have weakened the public position of the academic left just at the moment when it is needed most. Under these circumstances, the work of protest anthropologists is vitally important. They are taking enormous professional and political risks by involving themselves in movements whose power, influence, and endpoints are still very much unclear. And their work has the power to unsettle many of the currentday knowledge-producing practices in the discipline, much like the reinvented and decolonizing anthropologies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s changed the discipline in their time. I focus here only on the contributions of a few anthropologists who participated in the Occupy Movement in 2011 to open up a conversation about the promises and perils of taking a protest stance. Obviously a comprehensive account of the participation by anthropologists in recent uprisings across the globe would move the discipline forward in important ways. For now, my aims are more modest, and I apologize for the omissions I make. Inspired in part by uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, and Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement famously took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, and quickly spread to other cities in the United States and across the world. The movement stands out for its unique (if not altogether unprecedented) political strategies and tactics, which combine mass nonviolent occupations of urban public spaces, snazzy political slogans protesting wealth inequality (the 1 vs. 99 percent), and radical “direct democracy,” a leaderless mode of decision making via group-consensus building. As a nonhierarchical mass movement that expresses concern for jobs, equality, and economic fairness, the Occupy Movement (hereafter, “Occupy”) provides a powerful Left alternative to the right-wing populism and austerity policies that have gripped the United States and Europe since the global economic crisis of 2008. Unsurprisingly, Occupy draws on many sources for inspiration, from radical parts of the Civil Rights Movement to AIDS activism and the global justice movement. (For early anthropological takes on Occupy as an emerging protest movement, see Juris and Razsa [2012].) One aspect of Occupy on which anthropologists have left a powerful imprint is the mode of democratic practice that has become its hallmark and that has, accordingly, generated a great deal of controversy. For example, David Graeber is perhaps the quintessential Occupy protest anthropologist. Mainstream media outlets such as Rolling Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Atlantic acknowledge Graeber as a leading instigator of the movement and give him credit, in particular, for encouraging the movement’s horizontal, leaderless mode of decision making at an early, critical moment in its formation. Graeber explicitly conjoins anthropology and anarchy in both his political and academic work as evidenced in his timely book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011a) and in Direct Action: An Ethnography (Graeber 2009). His views in this regard are also perhaps most explicitly articulated in a pamphlet-sized book published in 2004, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004). In it, he draws on a broad range of intellectual sources—from Marcel Mauss to Piaroa, Tiv, and Malagasy societies—to inspire an anarchist anthropology that forsakes an alliance with the global elite and instead commits itself to the radical reimagining of a more equal and democratic world. Graeber’s anarchist anthropological perspective is in tune with, and has in fact become a cornerstone of, Occupy’s emerging form of democratic practice. There is nothing coincidental about 128 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 1 • March 2013 this. Obviously he is a seasoned and talented activist—or, as one pundit put it, an “anti-leader” (Sharlet 2011). And his on-the-ground efforts and numerous online publications on popular websites such as the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and Naked Capitalism have inspired many young rebels. Whether or not one agrees with his views, Graeber’s willingness to link anarchism so explicitly to the anthropological project is brave and noteworthy. This is particularly so given recent trends in U.S. anthropology. In response to growing concern about the insufficiencies of anthropology’s public voice, scholars have pursued several strategies—activist anthropology, public anthropology, engaged anthropology, and militant anthropology, to name a few—to repackage disciplinary knowledge in more media-savvy, morally righteous, publicly consumable, and grassroots-oriented directions. Yet as Catherine Lutz points out, “The concept of engagement can easily lose its critical edge and simply become synonymous with ‘relating to’ or with ‘working for’ anyone or any institution” (Lutz 2010:216). Moreover, engaged scholars sometimes avoid naming explicitly the political ideologies or philosophies that influence them. Graeber’s unabashed promotion of an anarchist anthropology rubric is more in line, in fact, with the ways that proponents of Marxist, feminist, antiracist, and queer anthropology established their political and intellectual bona fides. And, like these approaches, anarchist anthropology is uniquely capable of advancing political debates inside and outside of the discipline and of pushing anthropologists to elaborate more clearly what they think the ideal relationship between scholarship and politics should be. Graeber also stands out for bringing his particular brand of public intellectualism to the movement. Few responses to mainstream—and even some left-wing—contempt for Occupy’s purported “disorganization” and for its failure to issue demands were more persuasive and more widely disseminated than Graeber’s. For example, in an opinion piece published by the Guardian newspaper, in November of 2011, Graeber describes Occupy’s democratic civil disobedience as an exercise in “true democracy” that gained popular support because of widespread recognition of “the enormous gap between what those ruling America mean by ‘democracy,’ and what that word means to almost anyone else” (Graeber 2011b). He also argues persuasively in this piece and in numerous print and video interviews that the refusal to issue demands and to elect leaders were strengths, not weaknesses; they were refusals, essential to Occupy’s political positioning, that questioned the legitimacy of the existing political and legal authorities and that challenged the corrupting influence of hierarchical political organizations and actually existing representative democracy in the United States. Other anthropologists have also made important interventions into Occupy’s practice of direct democracy. A few have taken on the delicate yet essential task of thinking and writing about how Occupy deals with internal inequalities and uneven power relationships within the movement itself. For example, CUNY graduate student Manissa McCleave Maharawal is a committed Occupy participant