The Clastrian Trace: Archaeology and the Success of Anarchy

“Overcome the myth of failure and we will feel at once, like the cool breeze that heralds rain in the desert, the inner certainty of success. To know, to desire, to act – in a sense we cannot desire what we do not already know. But we have known the success of anarchy for a long time onow – in fragments, perhaps, in flashes–but real, real as the monsoon, real as passion. If it were not so, how could we even desire it, much less act to bring about its victory?” – Hakim Bey (Gunderloy and Ziesing 1991)

“And, as always,
the event belongs to those who fight,
not to those who want to control it.” – Anonymous (2009)

Any archaeology of the North American Southwest¹ is bound up in discourses of power and counter-power, in narratives of hierarchy and resistance. To interpret the remains of material culture and the understanding of past uses of space implies an engagement with a political project. Particularly in regions whose historical trajectories have connected egalitarian nomadic or semi-sedentary peoples with sedentary hierarchical ones, such as the North American Southwest (Fowles N.d.), the theoretical and ideological perspective from which sites are approached is of paramount importance.

Discarding previous models of historical inevitability and progress as outdated and colonizing, anthropologists can recognize the agency of hunter-gatherers and other peoples whose societies did not comfortably fit into a “sedentarist” model of what forms of social organization are to be teleologically valued, by recognizing the intentionality of the social forms they constructed to maintain an egalitarian ethos. These societies have long been dismissed as results of inescapable environmental effects, their growth into a true state stunted by the inadequacy of their surroundings or by their lack of contact with sedentary societies whose civilization would present a challenge to a “simpler” people. McGuire and Saitta (1996) have remarked that even recent methodological developments in contemporary archaeology have largely failed to remedy the situation. They locate the root of the problem in the very dialectics underlying predominant archaeological models. They argue for “adopting a different framework of inquiry” and for a “radical change in perspective” (1996: 198).

One such radical change can be seen in Severin Fowles’s discussion of “‘complex simplicity’ – the simplicity of the anarchist or egalitarian defector” (N.d.: 16).² Fowles identifies the anarchists³ – among who are found Puebloan renegades as well as dissenter anthropologists – as those who may initiate the needed radical change away from the dominant statist ideology and toward a analysis. As anarchists seek to do away with current oppressive relations in the world at large, so may one imagine an anarchist archaeologist rejecting and dismantling the structures of an archaeology biased in favor of hierarchal societies and the exaltation of the State. An utilization of anarchist theory as a valid and meaningful perspective in anthropology and archaeology presents vibrant possibilities. We can see an application of anarchist thought in the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology as the beginning of a revolutionizing process within the academy.⁴

In a sense, this type of archaeology and anthropology is another manifestation of the anarchist project⁵ as identified by David Graeber (2004: 7):

“To begin creating the institutions of a new society ‘within the shell of the old,’ to expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination but always, while doing so, proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner which itself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary.”

In the context of these disciplines, these structures of domination range from the progressivist and evolutionist typologies of Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) to the very structures of thought that inform the archaeologists’ inquiries and imagination. A positivist approach in perpetual search for objective truths runs the risk of mistaking “their dreams for scientific certainties” (Graeber 2004: 10-11), and as it “seeks to generate laws of human behavior good for all times and places” (McGuire and Saitta 1996: 198). Anthropologists are well aware of where this leads those who begin such a search- “to impose their visions through a machinery of violence” (Graeber 2004: 11).⁶

Dismantling of these internal hierarchies and deinscribing their violence from archaeological practice is a difficult but most necessary project; in doing so anthropologists can not only expect to arrive at much more functional epistemology liberated from the authoritarian burden of prescriptivism and statist⁷ thought. Different theoretical approaches inevitably yield varied results; and archaeology, a discipline that is in many ways the rigorous application of the imagination, would do very well with an infusion of anarchy. The question then, is what will remain when we deconstruct the structure?⁸

Many archaeologists now working in the North American Southwest are currently investigating the histories of communities whose societies seem to have been established in opposition to great centralized hierarchical societies such as Chaco in the Rio Grande Valley (Fowles N.d.) and Hopewell along the Mississippi River (Wilson 1998: 91). These hierarchal and egalitarian societies were contemporaneous and proximate; their existences were predicated in a dialectal opposition to their respective Other.⁹ The centralized societies practiced various forms of coercion by the elites on the general population (Thomas 2000: 85, 157; Kehoe 2002: 72-73), even those who argue against particular forms of hierarchy remark upon the complexity of coercive labor and abundance of nonproductive classes and the presence of state-like¹⁰ tendencies such as elite networks and ideologies (Yoffee 2005).¹¹

As is to be expected, the interpretation of these sites is highly contentious- readings vary from “democratic societies” to “hereditary oligarchies” (McGuire and Saitta 1996: 197). Cahokia was at once a site of incredibly rich and strikingly beautiful material culture and a vast ritual landscape (Thomas 2000: 157-158), and the location of the cruelly violent sacrifice of hundreds of people for the mortuary ritual of a single elite (Kehoe 2002: 176).

Extensive experience with excavations of state societies and a preoccupation with the material remnants of social structures of domination, coercion, and hierarchy makes archaeologists well prepared to identify similarities between Cahokia and Mesoamerican societies, to render evident the parallels from one state society to another,¹² but allows them no equivalent methodology to articulate “the more important narrative” that “runs counter to the chief,” and counter to the state (Fowles N.d.: 19). With this overriding hegemony in place, set to favor the structures of power and domination and efface the evidence of collective labor and equality even in localities so deeply enmeshed in what seem to be clear countercultural histories, it appears impossible to envision a radical change toward an archaeology of resistance.

Yet perhaps the idea is not as fanciful as it seems.¹³ After all, those interested in this endeavor already adhere to the hope that “another world is possible.”¹⁴ It is not, then, a preposterous proposition for one to believe that another world may have already been possible; that this world may exist in the ethnographic present and lay discoverable in the archaeological record.

If we have accepted the thesis that another archaeology is possible, what follows is the realization that another analytical model is necessary. Peter Lamborn Wilson (1998) offers a vision of what such an archaeology might look like, and Graeber (2004) has brought together “fragments of an anarchist anthropology.” Among these fragments we may count works such as Michael Taussig’s involvement with the people of Putumayo, Colombia;¹⁵ and also Marshall Sahlins’s with hunter-gatherer societies, which led to his theory of the “original affluent society.”¹⁶

Behind Wilson, Graeber, Fowles, and a number of other archaeologists, anthropologists, and thinkers engaged with anarchist social theory and practice, is Pierre Clastres, who in his unfortunately short anthropological career¹⁷ gave a strong voice to the thesis that human societies inhere within them the possibility and realization of egalitarian relations and resistance to the development of the state. Clastres work is historically and theoretically foundational to the formulation of an anarchist anthropology and archaeology.

Wilson posits the existence of an egalitarian “Clastrian Machine”¹⁸ of counterpower¹⁹ that “never breaks down – entirely” (Wilson 1998: 96). This machine can be understood as “the entire system of rights and customs that resist State-emergence” (Wilson 1998: 75). It is ever-present, in egalitarian societies as the “predominant form of social power” (Graeber 2004: 35), but also in all societies as “a potential, a latent aspect, or dialectical possibility” of resistance to a hegemony of power and the violence of domination (Graeber 2004: 25).

As an analytical method and observable sociocultural phenomenon, the Clastrian machine withstands scrutiny. Anarchists in the academy and in the field have begun to untangle discourses of domination in historical narratives and uncover an extraordinary history of resistance in the archaeological and ethnographic records. The resilient marks of such resistance are everywhere to be found in the American record- alongside the rises and falls of massive centralized hierarchies are evidenced the stories of great small-scale or broadly dispersed societies²⁰ created in explicit opposition to such hierarchies- “societies against the state,” following Clastres (1987).

A review of this emerging literature of hunter-gatherer histories reveals, as Keith E. Sassaman remarks, “actions of resistance that separated human foragers from the rest of the world” (Sassaman 2001: 218). These actions include strategic economic, demographic, and discursive practices that exhibit “cross-cultural regularities… among traditions of resistance” and “bear witness to negotiations of power and privilege as groups defined themselves in opposition to others” (Sassaman 2001: 219). Whether or not such directly conflictive circumstances as those found in the North American Southwest are necessary to the appearance of cultures against the state, there does appear to be a tendency for a forceful discursive opposition to the idea of the state, even if such opposition is predicated against a spatially²¹ or temporally²² distant enemy. As Fowles asserts, “There are countercultural stories to tell whenever we look to the edges of a strongly centralized tradition such as Chaco. Orthodoxy never fails to produce non-conformists” (Fowles N.d.: 17).

Another archaeologist who takes up the Clastrian thesis is Bruce G. Trigger (1990), who applies the countercultural position to the Iroquois-speaking people of the North American Northeast. Expanding Clastre’s inevitably “sketchy and particularistic” thought by direct application, Trigger assesses leveling strategies in Iroquois society through different periods of Iroquois history (1994: 121). Drawing from the archaeological record as well as from extensive ethnographic and oral histories, he summarizes:

“Iroquoians, like all human beings, recognized the unequal power of individuals and groups, including the ability of some individuals and groups to dominate others by brute force… Yet the Iroquoians rejected all such forms of domination as a basis for their social organization… Among the Iroquoians, we observe the opposite of what is found in state societies” (1994: 135, 138),

and further on, we encounter echoes of something familiar:

“What is most important to recognize, however, is that whatever their differences, small-scale societies are not merely egalitarian by default… Instead, at least some of them appear to possess powerful and well-integrated mechanisms to defend equality that must be eliminated if hierarchical organizations are to develop” (Trigger 1994: 145, emphasis added).

or, the Clastrian machine by any other name. By now the value of a radical counter-model and practice against the state of archaeology is evident. An archaeology of counterculture and a counterculture of archaeology rapidly begins to emerge, in the imaginary as well as in the field. Theory, technique, approach, and method are developed in conjunction and soon may develop into an anarchist archaeology, or perhaps, archaeologies.²³ As a favorite locution of the radical student movement goes, “praxis makes perfect.”

And so appears a vision of an anarchist archaeology as the study of peoples’ histories of resistance from the Paleolithic onward, and as the assiduous search for the footprints of counterpower on the land.²⁴ This archaeology may take as its object a multiplicity of possibilities at the negation of the separation between the imaginary and the material.²⁵ Against the scars left behind by the machinery of violence, of the State,²⁶ and of coercion, we may begin to look for the soft tracks of the egalitarian machine, the Clastrian trace.²⁷

Several theories are already being articulated, and propositions being put forth, to these ends. It appears that from the beginning, the projects to bring anarchy to archaeology and anthropology go closely together. These approaches deal with not only egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, but also, following Wilson (1998), egalitarian horticulturalists. They are engaged with techniques and technologies²⁸ of nomadology, violence, festal practice, of opposition and escape. Also, they interpret the inscriptions of inequality and domination and opposition to these forces in material culture and in the social construction of space. Many more concerns lie undiscovered and unexcavated.

We sit in Union Square on a Friday night in early spring. A drum circle of a dozen or so people with instruments ranging from large skin drums to empty soda bottles make fluid music that floods through the – legally closed – park and returns to us as echoes from the solid, seemingly impermeable structures of the building that surround us. For the immediate moment, we are autonomous in each other’s presence and experience in ourselves the magic of the marvelous. Despite the police, cameras, and chains that block free movement and expression, we occupy the space. Even in New York City²⁹ such moments exist, even here the machine rumbles on. When we leave, nothing visible is left behind. But perhaps a trace remains.

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Endnotes

1. Or any part of the world where there has ever been struggle; that is, everywhere. The North American Southwest, and to a lesser degree, the Mississippi valley region, are here singled out for the sake of specificity.
2. This is presented as the counterpoint of what he calls “‘simple simplicity’ – the simplicity of innocent and naïve beginnings” with which “conventional archaeological wisdom” typologizes non-Chacoan communities in the Rio Grande Valley as “not-yet-complex” and “developmentally sluggish” (Fowles N.d.: 16). See also Christopher Boehm (1999).
3. “‘What is an anarchist?’ is not the right question. The right question is: ‘Who is this anarchist?’” – Hakim Bey (Gunderloy and Ziesing 1991).
4. An explosive vitality of theory and praxis now coursing through the anarchist milieu is already addressing these questions: “The university shall never again be merely the lukewarm appendage to civil society that our (hypo)critical theorists so highly acclaim; rather, as our friends in Greece have shown, the university can also be an appendage to civil war, a space in which impenetrable bodies and inflammable knowledges can conspire toward the dissolution of their very condition, that is, separation.” – “Q. Libet” (2009: 3)
5. “And yet there must be a project—if only because we ourselves resist being categorized as ‘nothing.’ Out of nothing we will make something: the Uprising, the revolt against everything which proclaims: ‘The Nature of Things is Such-&-such.’ We disagree, we are unnatural, we are less than nothing in the eyes of the Law—Divine Law, Natural Law, or Social Law—take your pick. Out of nothing we will imagine our values, and by this act of invention we shall live.” Hakim Bey (1994).
6. For example, historically through cooperation with colonial assimilationism, in present times through participation in state tactics of domestic or imperialist control such as human terrain or counter-insurgency programs. Another specifically relevant concern is the devastating effect of anthropologists’ theories on modern indigenous peoples of the Americas, see Deloria (1987: 78-90).
7. That is, state-centric or indentured to the repressive organizational forms of the state as recreated in archaeological practice.
8. Perhaps this is simply a rephrasing of the old “What would we do without the police?”
9. In the case of the egalitarian communities, it may be said the Other they were opposing might have been no other than the One of hegemonic power (Clastres 1987).
10. Not to say “pre-state.”
11. Yoffee proposes “rituality” as a mode of organization in Chaco, rather than kings he envisions elites with access to ritual or esoteric knowledge and resources who held sway over the region. While he denies that Chaco developed an “ideology of ‘statecraft’” (2005: 174) he recognizes “ideologies of domination” that nevertheless failed to adapt to a rapidly changing demographic and economic environment (2005: 177).
12. Kehoe points out “Cahokia’s Mesoamerican-style urban plan” and remarks that “A few individuals with filed front teeth, popular among Mesoamericans, have been excavated from Cahokia-period graves in the Cahokia area… and these might have been visitors, possibly architects and traders, from Mexico” (Kehoe 2002: 177). The possibility is fascinating.
13. And even if it were, that is not necessarily negative. “Basically, if you’re not an utopianist, you’re a schmuck.” – Jonothon Feldman (Graeber 2004: 1).
14. Or, as recently put by a certain anarchist tendency, “this world is possible.”
15. Taussig (1974) studied the intersections of shamanism and colonialism in the lives of people of the region.
16. Sahlins argues that through the “Zen road to affluence” – the belief that “human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate” – hunter-gatherers “can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty – with a low standard of living” (Sahlins 1974: 2). This theory now informs much of contemporary anarcho-primitivist and green anarchist thought, e.g. John Zerzan and his ilk.
17. Clastres was killed at age 43 in an automobile accident.
18. For an example of what may arguably be called a Clastrian structure, see Boehm’s (1999) form of the “reverse dominance hierarchy,” the collective, centrifugal, and leveling power of the many versus the upstart usurper.
19. Graeber (2004: 35) calls counterpower “that set of mechanisms which oppose the emergence of domination.” It can be said to be the force that drives the Clastrian machine.
20. Kehoe (2002: 66-79) describes how even sedentary Middle Woodlands people maintained a presence over relatively expansive areas through intentionally keeping distances between settlements. Such settlement patterns, many of which have survived into the present day, played important roles in civil political relations within and among communities.
21. In the case of the Effigy Mounds culture of present day Wisconsin, it appears their antagonism was directed against the southern hierarchal strains of Hopewell culture as embodied by the Temple Mound site and others, (Wilson 1998).
22. Fowles notes, of post-Chacoan Pueblo discourses of power: “The suggestion here is that Chaco came to be conceptualized during the post-Chacoan era as a dangerous historical transgression. Perhaps we might even go so far as to say that, in the Pueblo imaginary, Chaco assumed its place in the spectral nightworld that Graeber argues is so central to the construction of strongly egalitarian or anti-state societies” (N.d.: 17). Here Fowles is referring to Graeber’s theory of “imaginary counterpower:” As “totalities… are always creatures of imagination” (2004: 43) so is “counterpower first and foremost rooted in the imagination” (2004: 35). Against the “‘imaginary totality’” (2004: 65) of the state is posited an insurrectionary “‘liberation of the imaginary’” (2004: 102, borrowing the locution from Gerard Althabe).
23. The project is explicitly against homogeneity, and thus may appropriately be conceptualized as a constellation of “non-hegemonic particularities” (Wilson 1998: 137).
24. Equality and resistance do indeed appear to “walk lightly on the land,” creating difficulties for the archaeologist. But what better reward for a challenge than to find for fragments of anarchy among pottery sherds?
25. “We are the discoverers of a world new and yet known, which lacks the unity of space and time; a world still shot through with separations, still fragmented. The semi-barbarity of our bodies, our needs and our spontaneity (which is childhood enriched by awareness) opens to us secret passages that centuries of aristocracy never discovered, and which the bourgeoisie never even suspected. They allow us to penetrate the maze of uncompleted civilisations and all the embryonic supersessions conceived by a hidden history… And from the savage depths of the past, always so close and as yet unfulfilled, emerges a new geography of the passions.” – Raoul Vaneigem (1967).
26. On the nature of the state and its emergence in human societies, we may take the following comments as spectral guidelines: Max Weber’s formulation, “a compulsory political association with continuous organization will be called a ‘state’ if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order” (Graeber 2007: 162); Gustav Landauer’s insight, “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another” (Landauer 1910); and of course, (Norman) Yoffee’s Rule, “If you can argue whether a society is a state or isn’t, then it isn’t” (Fowles N.d.: 7).
27. In the rediscovery of another past may be found inspiration for another future. To reword Deleuze and Guattari, “[Archaeology] has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (1987: 4-5). And as for anarchists, whether anthropologists, archaeologists, magicians or shamans, Native American, European, or otherwise: “‘They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 353), except this time not to colonize, administer, or interpret, but only to share in a presence.
28. Much like Wilson’s (1998) “organic machine.”
29. Called by some “the fucking death metropolis center of capital’s hate” (Anonymous 2009: 3)

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