We are all part of a long struggle between inequality and democracy. They are each other’s opposite. If the democratic goal is for the people most affected by decisions to have the biggest say in their making, this becomes impossible when the resources that they bring to the process are vastly unequal. In the twentieth century, people’s aspirations for democracy in their lives were routinely squashed in the name of great ideas – state socialism and the free market – whose effects were to exaggerate the power and wealth of a few at the expense of everyone else.

Brilliant parody showing Adolf Hitler in the film "Downfall" as Gordon Brown in his Downing Street bunker after the European elections. The punchline: "Get me Shearer!"

The First World War was more than a watershed; it was an irreversible fissure in modern European history. The state had acquired undreamt of powers in the course of the war: to mobilize and kill off huge armies, to control production and distribution, to monopolize propaganda; from now on it was a struggle between rival state forms for world domination. The claim of Western societies to lead the rest of humanity in reason and civilization had been mortally wounded by the senseless slaughter of the trenches. Life after the war was quite unlike what had gone before. Marcel Mauss, who admitted to a sense of relief when the war first allowed him to escape from his scholarly burdens, took his time to resume his academic and political activities. The death of Émile Durkheim and numerous colleagues during the war took some adjusting to, while some close friends told him it was now time to grow up. So, to a double life as a professor of the religions of uncivilized peoples in the marginal École pratique des hautes études and as a political activist-cum-dilettante, he now had to add responsibility for the movement launched by his uncle at a time when the sociology project still felt rather precarious.
 

Max Forte has produced for his Open Anthropology blog an impressive meditation on the scope for solitary action in a world system facing possible breakdown. I was moved by it to comment on his approach as a variation of 'self-in'the-world' and on the analogy with a writer working alone:
 

In 1993, in Cambridge, England, the anthropologists Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart started a small press called Prickly Pear. Inspired by the eighteenth-century figure of the pamphleteer, their goal was nothing less than to revitalize a stagnant academy. Together, they published a series of ten pamphlets by a range of authors — young, old, unknown, and famous — on a range of topics in anthropology, the history of science, and ethnographic film. "We emulate the passionate amateurs of history who circulated new and radical ideas to as wide an audience as possible," they said. "And we hope in the process to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society." In 1998, Matthew Engelke and Mark Harris took over the press, expanding its operations in the world market and adding a few titles to its list.

In 2001, Prickly Paradigm established itself as a new incarnation of Prickly Pear, edited by Matthew, with Marshall Sahlins as publisher. In 2003, Mark Harris began publishing essays under the name "Prickly Polemics" in Critique of Anthropology. In 2004, Justin Shaffner scanned the original pamphlets into a PDF format and made them freely available for distribution on the Internet. The pamphlets may be downloaded below, with the exception of two that were republished by Prickly Paradigm.

“Don’t take this personal, it’s just business”

My essay is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries has become obscured. My starting point is a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.” But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a “person” is “a living human being” and what could be more personal than taking his life? Perhaps the hit man is referring to his own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a “business”. Why should business be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled with the person who practices it?

Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. So, at one level, the issue is the relative priority to be accorded to life and ideas. Because the encounter is live and therefore already personal, the hit man has to warn his victim (and perhaps himself) not to take it so. It would seem that the personal and the impersonal are hard to separate in practice. Our language and culture contain the ongoing history of this attempt to separate social life into two distinct spheres. This is the core of capitalism’s moral economy; and gangster movies offer a vicarious opportunity to relive its contradictions.

At the heart of our public culture lies an impenetrable confusion of people, things and ideas. We no longer know how to act or in what context of mutual interdependence. The feminists were right to insist that the personal is political. The political too is often necessarily personal. But, if we relied on persons alone to make society, we would be back to feudalism or its modern equivalent, criminal mafias. There must be impersonal institutions that, at least in principle, work for everyone, regardless of who they are or who they know. We have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities; yet the impersonal engines of society lie far beyond our grasp. What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social frameworks we live by? This is the hit man’s dilemma and it is ours too.

Alan Macfarlane interviewed me in April 2006 and January 2009 as part of his 'Ancestors' series (no comment).

The full interview, in two parts of an hour each divided by the year 1983, can be found here. Other interviews of anthropologists by Alan can be found here.