simona on fragments
via simona ferlini fb share (on ref to fragments of an anarchist anthropology):
Included in the details of life under siege, is DG’s ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’
Thank you for this wonderful article. I admire the writer’s ability to keep studying and thinking under the bombs, and their observations connecting #Fragments of an anarchist anthropology to real life self-organization in a shelter are priceless.
My take on what the author says: imo he misses one point of David’s discourse on self-organization: self-organization is spontaneous (as soon as there is no authority people start self-organizing, and is quite good at it), *but is far from being “natural”. Rather, it’s the ever changing result of negotiations, conflicts and agreements. It’s a series of social arrangements that **need to be constantly worked out (as described in The Dawn of Everything, ch. 11 if I remember well), and it can and should be a collective work: ***you don’t need any Moises /Solon style Legislator for it.
i think spont self org (undisturbed ecosystem ness et al) is *natural.. our blindness is from only observing/being whales in sea world.. so we think it’s not natural.. and we insist on the **working it out ness.. which just messes/compromises the dance.. again.. perpetuating our blindness.. we have no idea what legit free people are like.. ***and again.. don’t need an form of people telling other people what to do.. any form of m\a\p.. we just think we need those things in sea world.. because myth of tragedy and lord verifies that thinking
this is no small detail.. this is huge.. because it’s keeping us from us
*Unless we collectively and self-consciously work them out, our social arrangements are most likely to reproduce the patterns, and, on the not-so-long run, the hierarchies we are accustomed to. A clear example is barter: the recourse to cigarettes in the place of money that the author describes is the same process described in Debt ch. 2 (The myth of the barter): exchanges and cooperation are regulated in many possible ways in human groups, and anthropologists have found almost no evidence of barter, but for people accustomed to regulate exchanges through money, which, when money is missing, resort to barter.
*this is about the need for detox.. we do need detox.. we need an unnatural means to undo our hierarchical listening.. but spont self org is not the unnatural thing
notes/quotes from articel by Evheny Osievsky (mar 24 2022)
Yet, it was the Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by Leftist social theoretician David Graeber that provided the most productive foil for my Vorzel’ experience.
Vorzel’ under Russian occupation witnessed the simultaneous unfolding of several directly opposite processes. Crisis, it appears, reveals both the best and the worst that people are and can be. (refers to spont self org vs shops not selling needed things).. Cigarettes transformed into a universal currency, while paper money lost all its value and meaning.
Life under occupation goes on. If not exactly uninterrupted, then at least untamed. Throughout the time of isolation, a new couple emerged in our shelter (in defiance of a two-week-long absence of a shower). Fifteen children were born in the maternity hospital down the street.
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be you. 