conquest abroad and repression home

8/8/2019 Conquest Abroad and Repression Home

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INSURGENT ANTHROPOLOGIES: CONQUEST ABROAD ANDREPRESSION AT HOME

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Christopher Carrico

Conquest Abroad and Repression at Home

On http://ccarrico.wordpress.comand http://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com

Civilization began, Stanley Diamond tells us, with conquest abroad and repression athome. Diamond himself had seen both firsthand. Stanley was a WWII veteran whoserved in North Africa, and, like many American men of his generation, went toUniversity on the G.I. Bill. He completed his PhD in cultural anthropology at ColumbiaUniversity in 1951. His dissertation, Dahomey: A Proto-State in West Africa, was basedmainly on historical research, and dealt with aspects of state-formation in West Africaduring the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Along with Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz,Diamond was part of a left-wing student cohort at Columbia who had studied underJulian Steward and Ruth Benedict, and who later came to be among the principalarchitects of North American Marxist anthropology during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

While his dissertation earned him an immediate reputation for being one of the brightestrising stars on the scene in American anthropology, the quality of his work and hisreputation were not enough to earn him a secure place in American academia duringthe 1950s. Because of his well known left-wing political commitments he was dismissedfrom his teaching position at UCLA during the McCarthy Era purges and black listings.Unable to find academic work in the US for three years, Diamond spent part of this timein Israel doing ethnographic research in an Israeli kibbutzand in a nearby Bedouinmountain village.


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Diamonds best known teaching gig was at the New School for Social Research, wherehe began working in 1966, and where he founded and chaired the Department of

Anthropology. His best known work, In Search of the Primitive: a Critique of Civilization(1974), was a collection of essays that had been written in the turbulent politicalatmosphere of late 1960s and early 1970s. These essays developed a general theory

of state formation, and used anthropology in the service of the critique of theexploitation of capitalist and tributary states, and of their imperialist wars of the presentand the past.

Well known for his contributions to humanist anthropology, Stanley Diamond was alsothe founder of the prestigious journal Dialectical Anthropology, and was anaccomplished poet publishing poetry chapbooks Totems (1982, Barrytown, Ltd.) andGoing West(1986, Hermes House Press). The poet Gary Snyder said of him: StanleyDiamondis an upper-upper Paleolithic intellectual-hunter on the track of the biggestgame of allthe State.

Of the entire post-WWII generation of North American Marxist anthropologists, perhapsonly Eleanor Leacocks work was more ground breaking. Both Diamond and Leacockwere incredibly influential on the theories of state formation emanating from theresearch of American Marxists such as archaeologist Thomas Patterson andanthropologist Christine Gailey, and the work on primitive communist societies like thatof Canadian Marxist anthropologist Richard Lee. I recite the lineage of this littletradition, written against the grain of the dominant traditions of positivist scientism andpost-structuralist obscurantism, not only as a way of honoring my ancestors and myelders to whom I am grateful, but also, to call attention to the nature of intellectualcommitment in academia, and its inseparability from commitment to ones concretepolitics within the societies and communities where we teach and write, and within the

societies and communitiesw

herew

e conduct our research.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anthropology was still widely thought of as the studyofprimitive societies. Indeed, among many laypersons and academics worldwide, thisis still how the field is generally understood. The contrast is of course, is with thecivilized societies in which sociologists and other social scientists historically worked.Diamonds purpose when he wrote In Search of the Primitive: a Critique of Civilizationwas to use the modes of production and reproduction that Marx and Engels had calledprimitive communist as sources of critique of the so-called civilized societies.Diamond found in anthropology what Marx found in Hegel, the world presented standingon its head, and Diamonds project was to try to show us the world right-side up.

Diamonds primitive was much like Rousseaus, whose ideas Diamond believed Marxand Engels carried to their right philosophical and political conclusions.

On any occasion that I have to talk orwrite about the pre-state societies, about societieswithout economic classes, about societies that are kin-based and egalitarian, it is thework like that of Leacocks and Diamonds, and all of the anthropologists who stood withthe party of humanity, that have enabled me to be able to talk more clearly about the


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inhumanity and oppression of state-base, class-stratified societies that like to think ofthemselves as being civilized.

Civilization, indeed, began with conquest abroad and repression at home. And, ofcourse, its ongoing reproduction is still impossible without imperialist wars and domestic

exploitation, repression and discipline.

Civilization began, with conquest abroad and repression at home

I sat and reflected on these words from Stanley Diamond on the day of March 13, 2010,

as the Black is Back Coalition marched on Washington to demand an end to U.S.imperialist wars. Anthropological studies such as Stanley Diamonds dissertation, TomPattersons Inca Empire and Christine Gaileys Kinship to Kingship help us tounderstand that the processes of class exploitation at home, and aggressive wars ofconquest have been characteristics of state based and class stratified societies sincetheir origin. These are not separable processes, but rather, interrelated aspects of acontinuum of the violent and coercive process of the extraction of surplus value in bothtributary and capitalist state-based societies. Patterson does an excellent job ofemphasizing the fact that, since their inception, class stratified societies have usedconquest and imperial expansion as one the main ways of attempting to resolve thecontradictions that are inherent in the reproduction of all class stratified societies. When

the crises inherent in state-based societies reach their more advanced stages, theintensification of exploitation at home, the escalation of repression of dissent andresistance at home, and the escalation ofwars of conquest that bring everwider areasof territory under a regime of tribute taking or of capitalist exploitation under the controlof imperial elites, are part of a single inseparable process. As the U.S. Civil Rightsmovement progressed from the demands for reform in the 1950s, to the more radicaldemands of the 1960s, one of the characteristics of this movement that made it such athreat to the American status quo, was increasing recognition that the fight against


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exploitation of poor people and people of color in the United States was the samestruggle and the same fightas that of the movement against the war in Vietnam, and itssubsequent regional expansion into a war in Laos and Cambodia. Leaders like MartinLuther King, whose original goals were reform-oriented and moderate, came to be evermore conscious that Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It is for this

reason that the violent suppression of domestic dissent embodied in programs such asthe FBIs COUNTERINTELPRO, aimed particularly at the destruction of the AfricanAmerican Civil Rights movement and at the American Indian Movement, intensified asthese movements more strongly aligned themselves with the movement against theVietnam War. Movements today, such as the Black is Back movement in the U.S. areat the vanguard of the movement to resist attempts to co-opt Black America, and

American liberals and leftists, into unconditional support for the Americas first BlackPresident (however exploitative, violent, aggressive, and repressive the domestic andforeign policies of the Obama administration have turned out to be.)

Neo-liberalism, Chemical Warfare, and the Rape of the World by Finance Capital

In some ways, as vile as the programs of repression and assassination of the 1960swere, they by no means reached the scale and intensity of the destruction that has beeninflicted upon the Third World and on poor and working class peoples of the U.S. andother advanced capitalist nations during the years since roughly 1980. While an elite

comprador class has thrived in parts of the Third World, this capitalist success hascome at the price of the immiseration of millions of poor and working class people, anda regime of thinly disguised genocide by economic and by military means.Simultaneously, the United States has experienced over three decades of stagnatingand declining wages of its working class, and the mass incarceration of its underclass.The U.S., supposedly the worlds protector of freedom and equality, has now long had,by far, the highest incarceration rate per capita of any country in the world. Theoverwhelming majority of these prisoners are non-violent drug offenders, from


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communities that were deliberately flooded with heroin and crack cocaine by the CIA,the DEA, who worked in collusion with international drug cartels as a way to fund right-wing paramilitary forces and dictatorships in the Third World, as well as a way ofdestroying historically oppressed peoples living in the internal colonies of the capitalistmetropole. The defeat of national liberation movements, and anti-imperialist insurgency

in thew

orlds poorest countriesw

as intimately connected to the everydayw

arfare thatwas taking place on the streets of Americas poor communities. The warfare at hometook the form of systematic police brutality, mass incarceration, and mass murder bymeans of the deliberate spread of drug addiction and gun violence, and the deliberatefailure to take any rational measures to prevent the factors involved in the spread ofHIV/AIDS in America most vulnerable communities.

These processes are well known in Americas Black and other oppressed minoritycommunities, even while middle class America lives in deep denial and willfulignorance.

The New Danger

Shortly before 911, and the Bush administrations subsequent wars of aggression inAfghanistan and Iraq, rapper Mos Defwrote a song that seems prophetic in retrospect.The song, entitled War, would later appear on his studio album The New Danger. The

ideas expressed in this song show

a clear and conscious aw

areness of the intimateconnection between repression at home and conquest abroad, that Stanley Diamond, ina very different way but in the same spirit, was trying to express since the time of hisnow obscure and relatively forgotten dissertation defended at Columbia University in1951. Here is what Mos Def had to say about repression at home and conquestabroad:


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Palestine, Kosovo, KashmirIts no different than the avenue thats right here

An increase in the murder rate each yearParamilitary unit keep the streets clearCurtains up on the theater ofwarfare

Dramatic politics nightly performed hereWorldwide from Colombia to ColumbineGun holders keep the dollar signs on the line

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTA1jwlIYC0&feature=share

About Christopher Carrico

Lecturer II in the Anthropology Programme, Department of Language and CulturalStudies, School of Education and Humanities, University of Guyana. His doctoraldissertation, from Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, was entitled "Changing Forms of

Identity and Political Leadership Among the Akaw

aio Kapon", and focused on thehistory of the Akawaio people of the Upper Mazaruni, Guyana. His recent work includesongoing field research in Guyana, and addresses the implications of ecological anddevelopment policies, political participation, and the paradoxes inherent incontemporary ideologies of liberal democracy and human rights.

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