Neither This, Nor That:
Anarcho-existential Anthropology of Violence
Anarchists presume no inevitable course of history and one can never further the course of freedom by creating new forms of coercion. In fact all forms of systemic violence are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle. I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. The only way to begin to think about eliminating systematic violence is to recognize that “where there is authority, there is no freedom (Kropotkin)!”
Establishing the Object of Inquiry
Violence constitutes much more than a timely topic for anthropological research; it constitutes the fabric of existence and as such addresses fundamental anxieties, values and aspirations, also an integral part of the researcher himself.
All groups are to some degree at war with themselves. There are always clashes between interests, factions, classes and the like; also, social systems are always based on the pursuit of different forms of value which pull people in different directions. The invisible worlds surrounding them are literally battlegrounds. It’s as if the endless labor of achieving consensus masks a constant inner violence— or, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact the process by which that inner violence is measured and contained—and it is precisely this, and the resulting tangle of moral contradiction, which is the prime font of culture. So It’s not these conflicting principles and contradictory impulses themselves which are the ultimate evolutionary reality, then; it’s the regulatory process which mediates them.
This conceptualization reframes much current thinking by envisioning human evolutionary patterns as constantly constructing—and being constructed by—constituent elements of demography, social interactions, cultural variations, complex information transfer, and manipulation of the environment in intra- and intergroup contexts in addition to the biological and ecological factors in development and throughout the course of life history (Oyama).
The choice of subject was inspired both by the topicality of violence in the world today, and by the considerable extent to which these developments in wider power-structure apparatus’ have come to be represented in the evolutionary perspective. There seems to be a persistent focus on competition and violence that mirror Darwinian-based trajectories of human evolution with minimal attention given to the mutual inclusivity of cooperation and the vital role of existential isolation*. This myth-cum paradigm perpetuates a Manichean view of humanity as either war-like or peaceful and ignores the complexities of culture and the dialectic* relationships between the individual and environment.
Authority: is there anything more violent than truth?
This paper may serve as a reminder that violent conflict is often the other side of the identity coin; and at the same time serve as proof that despite advancements in the study of evolution, there is a prevailing apparatus that propagates a dichotomous view of humanity as either innately violent or peaceful. So, rather than to establish any trajectory of his existence, I apply an anarcho-existential approach to view human evolution more holistically and transcend the ducky-rabbit paradox to look at both sides of this coin.
Violence is not a routine subject of inquiry, but a social phenomenon that we can only expect to approach with integrity if we do so at the existential level. Violence is not primarily an act, but a frame of thought on the part of the actor. In order to understand this reality, any talk of “human nature” must begin with its deconstruction and resume on shared paths of inquiry through which clear concise conclusions can come about. Historical fallacies and contemporary conflicts must be explored to make way for the construction of a penultimate evolutionary reality.
Identity: what is the nature of conflict?
At birth the individual doesn’t possess identity, he is made social, because, not having any real individuality, he becomes, with those whom he resembles, part of the same collective group; in the second case, because, while phylogeny and a personal activity which distinguishes him from others, he depends upon them in the same measure that he is distinguished from them, and consequently upon the society which results from this union (Durkheim).
Was homo pekinensis, 300,000 years ago, truly a cannibal? Is culture our life insurance against an innate violence inherited from nature? Or is culture, on the contrary, the very source of violence? Is our official respect for life a universal human value and as such a likely ingredient for inclusion in the reality whose construction we see all around us? Or is such respect, far from universal and culture-free, a specific (post-)Neolithic response based on deferred reciprocity between generations, whereas in earlier, Palaeolithic contexts the presence of an extra, unproductive mouth to feed was usually an invitation to infanticide(cf. Darlington 1969).
If the latter is the case then the absolute nature of the sacredness of human life reveals more about the dramatically increased capacity of (post-)Neolithic man to create absolutes (as part of a package to which also belong: writing, science, the state, agriculture, cities, religion; cf. van Binsbergen 1996 and references cited there), than that it reveals a universal and possibly innate propensity towards respect for human life. Or did violence yet originate as the most obvious solution of a truly primordial condition of conflict, which we might try to conceptualize (of course, at some a-historical, archetypal and hypothetical plane) as a standard response to existential-isolation. Perhaps, the preparedness for violence and hence the temporary shedding of internalised social inhibitions depend on individual regression in the face of nihilism.
At this point the ducky-rabbit complex is most clear; the perpetual debate as to the evolutionary role of violence will forgo conclusion so long as revolutionary ideas are seen as scientific certainties. There should be no opposing discussions of the purpose or meaning of conflict because there is no totalizing or individually centred explanation for it; instead, each known base principle functions as the structure for an alternative translation. Throughout our conversation it becomes clear that anarchy and existential-nihilism allow for a reformation of life history that does not ignore the ubiquitous violence of the power-structure other than to explore the human capacity for happiness, individuality, and agency and culture.
Power: is culture the countermeasure of social control?
Conflict resolution is universal so much as aggression among human primates is viewed as an adaptation. I noted earlier that all social orders are in some sense at war with themselves. Those unwilling to establish an apparatus of violence for enforcing decisions necessarily have to develop an apparatus for creating and maintaining social consensus (at least in that minimal sense of ensuring malcontents can still feel they have freely chosen to go along with bad decisions); as an apparent result, the internal war ends up projected outwards into eternal cosmic battles and forms of spectral violence.
The emergence of inter-personal conflict is directly related to increased reciprocal altruism and kin-selection in response to environmental constraint and cultural capacity to access human and natural resources. Increased patterns of group beneficial behavior and power differentials between groups makes humans unique insofar as individuals, in pursuit of their self-interest, maintain group mentality. Between-group violence in early man[sic] and widespread cooperation among kin-based groups is evidence that the evolution of “human nature” is shaped by the individuals response to social control.
Recognizing the Ducky-Rabbit
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun(Geertz). He establishes and maintains histories of interaction with other individuals to form social relationships to which he attributes meaning (significance). He is neither innately “peaceful” nor predisposed to “war”. He is not “unique” and he has yet to realize his specific function. Any trajectory of his nature is neither this nor that. What then is it? It is the inner smile provoked by the patent nonexistence of both.
To existentialists, the human being - through his consciousness - creates his own values and determines a meaning to his life by posing the acts that constitute him; he makes his existence more significant (wiki). What an individual perceives as reality is thus a projection of internal process of symbolic meaning and value. Without choice, the individual is enculturated into the mentality of the group and becomes an active participant in its perpetual construction. Values and behaviors are maintained by an apparatus of power-relationships that shape the individual to maintain group homogeny. Again it appears that the culture of collective interactions functions as a catalysts in individual antisocialism which I discuss in terms existential-isolation.
This section deconstructs contemporary science and expands along the lines of anarchist anthropology to imagine what it would take to live in a world in which everyone really did have the power to decide for themselves, individually and collectively, what sort of communities they wished to belong to and what sort of identities they wanted to take on. This will always be met with stubborn, and ultimately violent, opposition from those who benefit from the power-structure apparatus. Those who instead write as if these identities are already freely created—or largely so—ignore the intricate and inflexible problems of the degree to which their own actions are part of this very identity machine.
Human Capacity: to what extent are we successful?
Anthropologists tend to focus on competition rather than cooperation to understand evolutionary fitness models and novelty. Successful traits are defined in terms of reproductive benefit and the degree to which male-male competition facilitates aggressive behavior and conflict that is sexually attractive. A more integrative approach, nonetheless, reveals that it’s not all sex and violence in discussing the forms of human engagement.
Anthropologist A. Fuentes employs us to look beyond the egocentricities of neo-Darwinian approaches and make use of the theories of kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and individual fitness strategies to respect that competition and cooperation may be mutually inclusive. Again it has become visible that by removing the ducky-rabbit divide, complex social patterns reveal interdependence between evolutionary process and products of selection.
An integrative evolutionary trajectory explains, “Costly interindividual and intergroup competition—whether in the form of communal aggression, war, or homicide most certainly produced deaths and affected the ability of some individuals to pass their genes to future generations (Fuentes, 2).” Increased mortality as a result of intra-and intergroup violence limits the selection of particular traits. Fuentes also proposes “that looking at cooperative intergroup interactions, multilevel selection, and aspects of how intra-and intergroup interactions affect the selection pressures on individuals within those groups… (Fuentes, 3).”
This fitness model of human cooperative/competitive patterns is incomplete because it ignores cultural complexities and the dynamic (dialectic) relationships between the individual and the environment. Violence as product of totalizing development has a prerequisite belief that an overarching, determinative mechanism flows throughout the course of human life; note that it also focuses upon the individual as intrinsically part of the group.
The model is process-oriented so much as the individual is a passive actor at the whim of the collective. Despite this, it does enable the placing of individuals in a system to permit a strict empirical approach that does not isolate the cultural environment from the object of inquiry. In this respect, aggressive behavior is evolutionary novelty to the extent that the systematic processes (such as the repeated selection of cooperative/competitive qualities) that allow for social life are themselves defined as successful and advantageous.
Anthropomorphism: what is the role of empathy in research?
Use of anthropomorphism: The study of great apes in their own environment has changed attitudes to anthropomorphism; it is now more widely accepted that empathy has an important part to play in research. As Frans de Waal writes: "To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us." Alongside this has come increasing awareness of the linguistic abilities of the great apes and the recognition that they are tool-makers and have individuality and culture.
Anarcho-existential anthropology explores the notion of control, stating that humans anthropomorphize inanimate objects around them in order to enter into an interpersonal relationship with them (M. Jackson). In this way humans are able to feel as if they have control over situations that they cannot control because rather than treating the object as an object, they treat it as if it is a rational being capable of understanding their experience.
This where I think language comes from; the individuals attempt to transcend isolation towards the almost spiritual communion upon the solidarity of consciousness between individuals. Increased social relationships, relative to complexity and particularity, create the need for a shared value system to allow high-level abstractions to be expressed as symbols. The individual communicates culture through language to ensure the mutual benefit and advancement of social interactions. Specialized relationships and the division of labor thereof, often coerce individual choice to collective works and further disintegrate desires, aspirations, and meaning from the cultural construct that maintains such social regulation. As a result, the individual ceases to exist, as significance and value that constitute personal action dissolve in the scope of nonexistence, and is bound to a perpetual unhappiness that measures existential-isolation.
Happiness: how can we measure existence?
Aggression as intrinsically antisocial is now viewed as a countermeasure of competition. “When survival depends on mutual assistance, the expression of aggression is constrained by the need to maintain beneficial relationships”. Acts of “reconciliation” visible in primate communities reveal the balance between competition and cooperation exists only as result of social valuation.
Aggression is a social phenomenon and all primates are social. Aggression-induced anxiety creates the need for calming countermeasures. Reconciliation will occur after conflict especially between parties that represent high reproductive or social value to each other: all members of a group are actively establishing and maintaining histories of interaction- cooperative relationships are fundamental.
Antisocialism should be viewed as a maladaptive trait in response to the experience of unreal abstraction (culture): because normative patterns of behavior are abstract, their significance and value is also abstract, permitting extreme inequalities in reality. I see antisocialism as existential-isolation: an increase in individual freedom to recognize personal identity and happiness yet does not limit collective cohesion and benefit. To experience a state of isolation upon the rapture of nihilism is to realize the manifest of nonexistence, that is, liberation in the cultural context.
Bruce Knauft, through a comparison of simple human societies to the four great-apes and among pre-state populations, proposes a model for the evolution of human social behavior and violence which makes connections between the distribution of food, access to female resources, male-dominated power-structures and intergroup competition and aggression. A U-shaped trajectory of the selective advantage of violent traits appears throughout the evolution of Homo sapiens and suggests the role of group-selection in symbolic transmission has increased human capacity for systematic violence. His research points to the importance of cultural and environmental constraints in interaction with biogenetic selection as necessary conditions for establishing behavioral norms and violence in humans.
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