Anarchist Anthropology and Statehood: Insights from Johannesburg's Inner-City Occupations

Abstract (English)

Can the prospect of an Anarchist Anthropology benefit from the body of scholarly literature on the state? Since Phillip Abrams' groundbreaking work, Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1988), many other scholars have revisited the idea of the state as a coherent, bounded entity, challenging the conceptual boundaries between “inside” and “outside” statal forms by focusing on everyday social relations grounded in reciprocity, obligation, and debt, producing the appearance of state coherence. The state makes society legible by flattening complexities and suppressing forms of local knowledge to redesign the “social” according to a high-modernist scientific ideology (Scott, 2020). As anthropologists, informed by the discussions on political systems and grounded moral economies, we can also complexify the idea of the state by reading it through the lenses of “autonomies”. On the other hand, in a neoliberal context of global hegemony of the statal form, the idea of the state, if not the state system itself, often affects the autonomous forms of organisation we study.
This paper draws on the scholarly literature dedicated to rehabilitating the state as an anthropological concept and on David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) to accomplish three main goals: 1) to revisit the idea of the state informed by the perspective of an Anarchist Anthropology; 2) to show that the people who “make” the state are also embedded in forms of social organisation challenging state functions; and, finally, 3) to address the contributions of resistance practices to rethink bureaucratic domination based on the results of my current research in post-apartheid South Africa. My fieldwork centres on building occupations in Johannesburg’s inner city, where residents reclaim abandoned structures and govern them through popular committees operating on principles of mutual aid and collective decision-making to resist market-driven urban development projects.