Dialect Anthropol (2008) 32:43–50 DOI 10.1007/s10624-008-9055-8
Reply: what’s changed (since 1975)? Kirk Dombrowski
Published online: 12 October 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
When Stanley Diamond founded Dialectical Anthropology in the mid-1970s, the discipline seemed poised for change. In situ at the beginnings of the post-colonial period, events argued for political changes in traditional anthropological venues on a scale unprecedented in the post-War era, while global events bespoke massive changes in the relationship between the West and the rest—the change in global monetary policy and Western state’s subsumption to the needs of capital that it represented, coupled and exaggerated by OPEC inspired reordering of the world’s energy markets, capital’s primary natural resource dependency (see, more recently, Harvey 2005). On both fronts, anthropology seemed to be at the center of coming crisis (Hymes 1969), and it was from this standpoint that Diamond argued that anthropologists—triply alienated from themselves by their individual position as citizens of capitalist states, from their fellow citizens by their position as elite scholars, and from their research subjects by a positivist methodology that objectified rather than humanized their fieldwork connections—were confronted by research subjects themselves undergoing similar processes of alienation, as a resurgent global capitalism spread (neoliberal) reforms throughout the world. All of this implied, Diamond argued, that the contradictions of capitalist alienation were likely to heighten to new levels, and that anthropologists would have to be involved if for no more reason than simply by virtue of their professional propinquity (Diamond 1977, 2004). So what has changed? The answer, predictably, is that much has changed for anthropology, and much has not. This essay will argue that anthropologists working in conventional ethnographic settings of ‘‘small scale’’ societies still confront the class dynamics and their own class positionality in their own societies, dynamics that condition their actions and interactions in the field. But now, they also confront class dynamics in even the most conventional ethnographic settings that, while they likely K. Dombrowski (&) CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College, CUNY, New York, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
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existed at the time when Dialectical Anthropology was founded, have received little comment from mainstream anthropology then or since. This is particularly true in areas where large scale resource extraction continues to drive the political economic engines of development, such as the North American far North where most of my fieldwork has taken place. In general terms, large scale resource extraction represents an important benchmark and lens for political economy. Classically, it represents one of five or so key areas where the State meets Capital—alongside such issues as managing the money supply, organizing economic boundaries (through tariffs, etc), regulating domestic markets, and ‘‘managing’’ labor. For this reason, an analysis of resource extraction, regardless of national or international context, provides an opportunity to examine the current state of affairs that exists between government-bodies and Capital, writ large and small. This issue is also of primary concern for contemporary anthropologists (as it was to Diamond), who recognize that such issues now often involve state manipulation of traditional anthropological subjects—indigenous peoples whose claims to land, sovereignty, self-determination and being have since the earliest years of colonialism been tethered to the sorts of uses that external states and actors find for them, those who Diamond saw at the forefront of global political change (see also Ballard and Banks 2003). Most recently, however, such groups have been subject to and engaged in a new praxis of indigenism that reframes aboriginal peoples’ claims to life and land as claims to specific pieces of property and the resources they contain, over which they can be made owners and thus, necessarily, enter into relationships with development forces (Dombrowski 2002). This process is akin to ‘‘recognition’’ discussed by Charles Taylor and others (Guttman 1994), but is actually far more closely tied to the vagaries of global politics and to an anthropological history of ‘‘distinctiveness’’ and ‘‘cultural incommensurability’’ than is usually discussed, and which serves to confines local choices to specific channels of engagement most often from a position of often dire need. One of the first places this new praxis was laid down is Alaska. There, the oil crisis of the 1970s and the new international monetary regime marked neither a chronological boundary nor moment of great transition. Oil exploration and the demand for extraction-friendly property regimes in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions both predate the oil crisis by more than a decade, as did the transnationality of the firms bent on achieving extraction friendly regimes in Western states. Nor did the effects of the energy crisis last particularly long. Following the heady late-1960s and early-1970s, oil industry stasis and poor economic performance (what the industry refers to as ‘the great oil field depression of the 1980s and 1990s’ and which featured the disappearance of such industry giants as Gulf, Arco, Sohio, and Getty) lasted to the end of the twentieth century when increasing global demand drawn mainly from outside the industrial West supported a wave of mergers that created the current industry megaliths. Even outside of the energy economy, the brief mineral resource rush of the 1970s (caused in part by the post-Bretton Woods deregulation of gold pricing) actually only managed to forestall decades of industry-wide contraction. The short-live boom to the mineral industries of the North, egged on by inflationary pressures that
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made mining commodities subject to higher demands as investors fled from both bonds and currency, lasted only as long as inflationary 1970s. After this, mineral prices began falling rapidly, a trend that did not reverse itself until, like oil, the last eight or so years. By this time, to put things in perspective, the total capitalization of all the world’s mining firms put together was just below that of the internet technology company Cisco (Coax 2003). All of these things conditioned both the way land claims were settled in Alaska, and the way they continue to be settled in Northern Canada today. The unequal ground on which the confrontation of Aboriginal claims and development projects takes place—common to all small holders in the face of global firms—is frequently remarked upon. Less so are the forms legislated by past and present land settlement agreements—forms such as corporate structures, co-governance boards, shareholderships, or fee-simple property ownership—few of which have received much attention in anthropology despite the fact that these forms are almost always dictated to claimant groups as a condition of their land settlements and a precondition of recognition by the states in which they are embedded.1 In this way, The US and Canadian states now require a rather narrow course of indigenous selfassertion—a very capitalist version of Tania Li’s ‘‘tribal slot’’—that links state recognition to development and turns local organizations into quasi-state entities (Li 2000; Rubenstein 2001). To take one specific example from the region, in the United States, the main vehicle for settling the land claims process was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which ‘‘recognized’’ native claims to much of Alaska by granting fee-simple ownership to corporations created by the Act, whose shareholders were the Native claimants themselves. The actual political bodies that were parties to the claims were given a separate status—not of land owners, but rather as quasi-independent subcontractors of government programs then being shifted over to local responsibility. Coming prior to the oil crisis, and reversing a two decade trend of, in effect, de-recognizing existing Native American groups of long standing (the so-called ‘‘termination period’’ of US-Indian relations), ANCSA represent a new direction not simply in Aboriginal claims, but a new strategy of corporate-state cooperation in the area of resource extraction. Outside of Alaska, corporate forms of recognition have not been the sole element of the settlement, but have played a significant role nonetheless, whether as a forprofit branch of newly created Native governments or as a specific aim of the recognition process. In Canada today this is abundantly clear in the recent development of the Impact Benefit Agreement (IBA) process that marks a transition from the large region-wide treaty settlements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to individual agreements between the Canadian state and local aboriginal claimant groups of the current era.2 Not surprisingly, the aboriginal groups most successful in pursuing land claims agreements in Canada today are 1
For interesting exceptions see Blackburn 2005, and 2002. For an exception from the Asian Pacific see Gardner 2001.
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Much of the discussion of mining on aboriginal lands in Canada follows discussion from an expanded recent conference paper (Bell 2008) to which I am much indebted.
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those with resources available for immediate exploitation. In these cases, state recognition of aboriginal claims has been made contingent on reaching a successful IBA, an agreement between the claimant group and the resource developer that specifies the leasing of resources, co-ownership of subsidiary development corporations, local small business development programs, job and hiring quotas, and so on. Ostensibly a ‘‘confidential,’’ two party agreement, both the Federal Government and the local Province remain parties to IBA’s as arbiters of disputes and beneficiaries (though tax and other revenues) of the resource harvest themselves. Indeed the only groups to whom the confidentiality seems to apply are the other aboriginal communities who might benefit from some knowledge of the terms and conditions reached by their peers. At the same time, and contingent on the achievement of an IBA, the Canadian state now ordinarily reaches separate land claims and recognition agreements with the aboriginal communities involved. Often this means a fairly narrow form of selfgovernance through which newly formed aboriginal governments gain responsibility for a host of social problems that have arisen in the wake of centuries of neglect and mistreatment through two centuries of colonialism (Tester and Kulchyski 1994), even while the Canadian Federal and Provincial governments retain oversight, tax, and resource ownership responsibilities in aboriginal communities themselves. For the outside observer, what remains so remarkable in this system is the way in which Native Governments quickly come to function as quasi-NGO’s, becoming service delivery sub-contractors for the Federal and Provincial governments, and corporate entities engaged in co-development of natural resources for global industries. Here as elsewhere, the old adage applies that the only thing non-governmental about non-governmental organization is the ‘‘non’’ in their name. As state sanctioned (often state financed) corporations, aboriginal-state joint venture companies work closely with large international firms to maximize resource extraction, often over very short periods of time, while as contractors to the Federal and Provincial Governments, Native Governments function as service delivery agents with all of the bureaucratic and oversight entailments that go along with this role (Ferguson 1990). What to make of the concept of ‘‘sovereignty’’ in such a position is seldom broached by either side in the negotiations process (though see Biolsi 2005). Roles such as these can reach far and wide. Ironically, this is at times most clear in cases where the corporate form of recognition has been most strictly applied. Again in an example from Alaska, the ANCSA-created Native corporation, NANA (the regional corporation for Northwestern Alaska) has over the last two decades moved from resource extraction and local service provisioning into the larger field of quasi-government service organizations. NANA’s Regional Development arm, originally funded through the leasing of the Red Dog Mine (the self-proclaimed ‘worlds largest zinc mine’) to Teck Cominco and a subsequent joint exploitation agreement with oil giant BP, has more recently branched out via a number of partially owned corporate subsidiaries into what it describes as ‘‘Contracting Services’’ with the US Federal Government. As minority owned companies (labeled Small Business Administration 8a Certified Companies in the US), these subsidiaries are eligible for non-competitive bids on work such as construction,
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maintenance, and logistics for US government and, primarily at present, military agencies, including providing base construction and military training in the current US war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Issues such as these lead one to question whether, in Northern Native communities at least, any serious retraction of the state has taken place in what has been labeled a neo-liberal era of shrinking state functions. Indeed what seems rather more clear is a subtle merging of state and capital, with a devolution of both State social functions and Capitalist inspired development into a rather ambiguous zone of state-capital-indigenous-NGO. That such tactics take in and make use of indigenous peoples (directly, through land claims for resource extraction, or more subtly through the category of ‘‘minority owned’’ business) takes little away from the manner in which the combined category of State and Capital is more thoroughly suffused in the lives of ordinary people in the North today, and increasingly over the last three decades, rather than reverse. The efforts of state actors and industry apologists to efface the role of the state from this process—using the recognition of indigenous claims to hasten the development process and at times avoid environmental regulation (Dombrowski 2004) while at the same time disappearing, as it were, the moment that the claimants are ‘‘recognized’’ (as all further negotiations take place ostensibly between property owners and those ‘‘willing’’ to develop their property)—is not difficult to explain. In Canada and the United States, and elsewhere, resources turned over to tribes and First Nations via and through the recognition process are public resources, resources on or under what are, at the time of the agreements, public lands. The history and injustice of how they came to be so is undeniable, but largely beside the point in so far as how and why land claims are answered by the US or Canadian states. Rather a crucial part of the current praxis of indigenism is the use of the recognition process by these governments to appear as a non-class actor while transferring large parcels of public resources to capitalist firms, and creating significant numbers of stateindigenous-industry joint ventures and para-state institutions in the process. The effacement of its own significant role is critical for States that wish to appear as nonclass actors to national populations, especially where those larger national class dynamics complicate resource development on the one hand, and government service delivery on the other. In these cases, an anthropological discourse of ‘‘neoliberalism’’ that focuses on the withdrawal of the state merely parrots the narrative that states themselves happily put forward. Interestingly, though, a second class dynamic has arisen in this process that complicates the States efforts to appear as a non-class actor: the growing class stratification of the native communities involved in development and service delivery projects themselves. While seldom remarked upon by anthropologists, a class of brokers able to occupy and exploit the quasi-NGO terrain of the new praxis of indigenism can be found across the northern portions of North America and elsewhere (Kirsch 2007; Filer 1999).3 While this class pales in power in comparison 3
Vincent (1990) sees this problem as endemic to professional anthropology, which passed up the opportunity to discuss emerging forms of Native American leadership/brokerage in the first great resource grab in North America in the middle and late nineteenth century (1990: chapter 1).
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to the capitalist firms and government entities with whom they interact, they nonethe-less represent a new element in many Native communities, and one that threatens to reveal the class-machinations of the recognition process itself. Coupled with the short time frame of development success (where few development projects expect to remain in business at a particular resource locale for more than one or two decades) and the gradual immiseration of large portions of the Native population in even the most ‘‘successful’’ communities, local class processes quickly bring the class basis and class-forming elements praxis of indigenism to the fore, provoking local resistance that can take a number of forms, from cooperation with environmental groups to intra-village factionalism to outright resistance to State projects (Polier 1996; see the collection by Evans et al. 2001). Those who would resist the praxis of indigenism face an uphill battle though, as the general success of the state’s effacement leaves aboriginal peoples subject to calls for greater state interventions. As local problems get seen as the result of ‘‘poverty,’’ rather than ‘‘distribution,’’ classic visions of the liberal state are invoked to call for greater state intervention. Such efforts are usually supported by the local brokerage class largely dependent on the State for their own class position— emerging elites anxious for the State to remain involved in local social dynamics. Such claims are now echoed by industry representatives as well, eager to see aboriginal claims expanded in the interest of expanding the amount of resources available for exploitation. The result is that two class dynamics—neither so close as to be a single process, nor so distant as to be entirely unrelated—place states (like the Government of Canada, or the US Federal Government in Alaska) in a precarious position of having at once to facilitate development and its requisite class dynamics while denying its own role as a class actor, only to find itself thereby creating a second class dynamic in which, at least to an extent, some voices call into question the state’s claims to its own absence and neutrality. All of this leaves anthropology with serious political and theoretical challenges, quite different than when Diamond saw anthropology’s traditional call to primitive culture as potentially awaking an un-alienated self in the West. When anthropologists in the North continue to use the term ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘culture’’ uncritically to characterize Northern aboriginal villages and towns, they (we might say out of generosity, unwittingly) facilitate and represent the views of one class of local residents, and simultaneously erase or silence other views from the same villages, other views that may help us understand the large scale exodus of individuals and families from these same communities. These ‘‘culturally necessary victims,’’ in the words of Hermann Rebel (1989), now flood many non-Native northern communities, yet remain largely (perhaps entirely) absent from contemporary ethnographic gaze. This is disappointing, but consistently true as their disappearance from our ethnographies serves as simple testimony to anthropology’s continued unwillingness to see a breach between its most fundamental concepts—like culture, or community—and its inherent political position of doing fieldwork at the cutting edge of capitalist development. This is, in one form, the dilemma that Diamond pointed to and it remains as true today as it did at the time of his writing. The point raised here, under the rubric of what has changed (in both anthropology and Northern Development) in the last 30 years, is that anthropological adherence
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to the discourse of neoliberalism, community, or culture in simplistic terms does little to provide the sorts of connections that Diamond saw as critical to anthropology’s human value, and does little to recognize the types of changes that have taken place since those revolutionary pronouncements seemed so plausible. Rather, current anthropological discourse seems instead to contribute to the states desire for invisibility, even amid the mass expansion of Western states into indigenous institutions and lives through such flexible means as land claims and aboriginal recognition. If anthropology is to recapture anything of this potential, though, it would seem critical to go beyond the humanism inherent in Diamond’s vision of rediscovering pre-alienated selves in the fieldwork moment. Anthropology must come to terms with class formation (often where it does not look right away like class) and the production of refugees at the center, rather than the margins, of global capital. One place to start in this effort is to look to the expansion of state presence, rather than its lack, in the lives of conventional anthropological subjects. Such an anthropology would connect with anthropologies now lost, such as those of James Mooney, Paul Radin, or Fredrick Barton, and see continuity not simply in the expansion of state power but as importantly, in our efforts to describe its effects.
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