ed note: as part of our on-going initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process
ed note: as part of our on-going initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Gregory Feldman, about his article “Hannah Arendt, an anthropologist's ally? Relational subjects, political action, and anti-racism in the twenty-first century” (2024), is the fourteenth of these interviews. See here for others.
1. What drove you to write this specific article?
As a long-time student of Arendt’s work, I’m convinced that it has many substantial contributions to make to anthropology precisely because she shares with the discipline a skepticism of the ability of Western political philosophy to guide us in the “modern” world. It follows that she, like anthropology, was committed to reimagining political life outside the nation-state form and in more equal and pluralistic ways. The historical circumstances that led Arendt to rethink political life complement the historical circumstances that has led anthropology to do the same. For Arendt, these were the unprecedented horrors of totalitarianism on European soil in the 1930s and 1940s (though the historical antecedents are earlier, of course); for anthropology, it was the centuries-long destruction of colonized peoples throughout the world. Totalitarianism and colonialism, together, signify a modernist inclination to undermine human pluralism and creativity for the sake of economy, efficiency, and control. Historically, colonialism abroad was a necessary condition for totalitarianism at home, as Arendt argued in detail and as such luminaries of decolonial thought as Césaire, Fanon, and Memmi confirmed in their own analyses. Thus, our contemporary struggles against the return of fascism and the ongoing struggles for decolonialization should be united, both as a historical matter and as a matter of imagining non-liberal political alternatives (rather than illiberal). Arendt’s insights on these maters are simply too illuminating to ignore.
There is a caveat, however. Arendt’s own understanding of Black struggles was poor in many respects and lazily racist in others. I address those cases that bear directly upon my argument, specifically her Conradian analysis of late nineteenth century European imperialism in Africa. The proverbial baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Hence, Achille Mbembe draws favorably on that same analysis in his own investigation of the rise of racism in Critique of Black Reason. He can do so because Arendt’s critical focus – despite its inexcusable representations of Africans – remains squarely on how racism degrades Europeans themselves.
2. In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions your article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?
There are two sets of theoretical discussions in anthropology that I attempt to advance and to unify by means of Arendt’s work. The first are debates about selfhood that appear in the anthropology of religion, touched off by Strathern’s book The Gender of the Gift, and in existential-phenomenological anthropology. Drawing a variety of ethnographic contexts, these subfields move toward a “relational” understanding of subjectivity: on the one hand, we experience and makes sense of the world individually, uniquely, and discretely, while, on the other, our subjectivity is inherently tied to and conditioned (not determined) by the historical field of relations into which we are born. Relational subjectivity allows us to think past “modern” ideas on personhood premised upon either radical individualism (liberalism) or undifferentiated collectivism (nationalism or socialism), on the other. Each of these modern choices posits a discrete, coherent, knowable, and thus theoretically predictable entity: the individual, the nation/race, or the class. In contrast, relational subjectivity is open-ended and constantly prompted by others, so the actors cannot, by definition, be fixed entities. They are always changing, and even recreating themselves, accordingly to how they engage other such subjects to whom they are inherently tied. The anthropological subfields mentioned above fully understand this point, but they tend to view its significance in terms of ethics, understood as small-scale interactions, rather than a basis for transformative politics within larger public spaces. Arendt not only provides a fuller articulation of relational subjectivity by adding in “thinking” and “judging” as the sinews linking relational subjects together. She also links relational subjectivity to revolutionary politics – if one reads across her oeuvre. Thus, her work helps us bridge developments in the anthropology of selfhood to theoretical debates occurring in political anthropology.
This second set of debates are built around examples of political action that have emerged since the 1990s many of which were inspired by Chiapas. These movements are generally regarded as anarchist in the vein that David Graeber described. They showcase different styles of direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. It is striking how the examples cited in political anthropology mirror the council style politics that Arendt advocates in her writing and describes in several Western examples between the French and American Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century and the 1956 Hungarian uprising. These movements all began by avoiding the centralizing tendencies of nation-state sovereignty, even if they didn’t necessarily end up that way. The significance of these different examples – both Arendt’s and anthropology’s – is that they show how a certain form of institutionalized political action both rejuvenates the actors involved and the unique public space that they constitute between themselves. The point here is that a renewal of the self depends upon our abilities to engage in political action with others as equal but different persons so that we simultaneously renew our public spaces. Political anthropologists increasingly highlight this transformative dimension of political action for the actors involved, but they have yet to consider how those actors’ interiority connects them to each other to make it all happen. Arendt helps build this bridge from political anthropology back to anthropological studies of personhood.
Thus, two major subdisciplines – anthropology of personhood and political anthropology – need only tie their insights together, with a lift from Arendt, to show how political action among equal but different people is the means through which we reconstitute ourselves and our worlds. The thrill of human being is precisely this sovereign possibility. If not, then what else is left except hobbies, sports, and personal indulgences?
3. How do you make anthropological theory?
I’m not sure I make theory that is particularly anthropological. Anthropologists distinguish themselves by drawing their broader conclusions from extended ethnographic engagements with fairly limited numbers of people: ground the theory in the fieldwork, as we always say. I’m not sure this is how we really theorize, however, or at least how I theorize. It can be difficult to squeeze strong theoretical insights solely out of our fieldwork encounters given these limitations. I find that the value of fieldwork is not that it reveals great theoretical insight through tightly circumscribed empirical research in the vein of Enlightenment science, but rather that it stimulates theoretical thinking about important global questions as we wonder why our interlocutors say and do what they say and do. So, where else do we get our theoretical insights from, if not fully from ethnographic fieldwork? We read voraciously to find out what thoughtful people have said about similar matters. We rely on scholars, novelists, critics, artists, political leaders, ordinary people, etc. who articulate similar phenomena. They help us gain as comprehensive an understanding of things as possible. It’s a sloppy process, but that doesn’t make it a fruitless one. This is how I do theory.
4. Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?
Theory matters to me because it helps me understand the troubles that I and others must endure to live in the world. It would be dishonest of me to say that my theoretical ambitions are not tied to my personal struggles, but I also know that my struggles are tied to countless numbers of other peoples’ struggles in one way or another. If I can find an understanding, especially one that resonates with others, then I feel a certain sense of completeness and satisfaction, even if I can’t do much to improve those conditions. In any case, action must be accompanied by deep understanding, and that makes theory indispensable. We have to take seriously a counterintuitive fact: that the few academics who have inspired legions of political activists around the world – and whose work takes inspiration from those activists – are all exceedingly good theorists, several whom have fundamentally redefined their disciplines. Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Achille Mbembe, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Hardt and Negri, Frantz Fanon, David Graeber to name a few. These folks show us that theory matters big time.