2023-11-24 19:00:26
An anarchist who is passionate about sacred royalty. A few years ago, the test On kings (The Tempest, 620 pages, 35 euros) would perhaps have amazed you. Not anymore, and David Graeber (1961-2020), co-author of the study with Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021), surely counts for a lot in this new zeitgeist. With James Scott, now 86 years old, he is at the origin of anarchist anthropology, the object of which is the radical critique of the forms of power in our current societies. And in particular its incarnation: the State. From bureaucracy to debt, from state embryos that emerged in the Neolithic to the archeology of sovereignty, these two figures of the discipline have participated in the renewal of this central concept of our political systems.
Beyond this current, a whole section of social sciences, at the crossroads of anthropology, archaeology, history and political philosophy, is looking into the subject. “We are experiencing a moment of questioning about the State, in a context of hegemony of neoliberalism”observes sociologist Christian Laval, co-author in 2020 of Dominate. Survey of State Sovereignty in the West (La Découverte) with the philosopher Pierre Dardot. “The State appears today as an institution incapable of responding to problems: democratic aspirations, terrorism, inequalities and, above all, the ecological crisis”decides the philosopher Edouard Jourdain.
The social sciences are therefore thinking about getting out of the political impasse. But also academic, points out the anthropologist Philippe Descola: “The State has become an unsurpassable intellectual horizon. Contemporary thinking is very poor, because it is part of the double filiation of liberalism and socialism, which have in common the radical separation of humans and the rest of the world. »
James Scott traces this destructive blindness in The Eye of the State (The Discovery), work published in 1998 but only translated in 2021. The professor emeritus of political science and anthropology at Yale University explores the obsession of modern states with rationalizing and controlling the territory and individuals in which it at the expense. From civil status to metric standards, from the imposition of land registers to that of languages, James Scott understands the action of the State as a simplification of reality by force “in order to give it a more readable form and more convenient to administer”. The anthropologist focuses in particular on experiences of brutal modernization in the 20th century, such as Soviet collectivization, agrarian reforms in the countries of the South and forced villagization in Tanzania. These experiences all bear, in his eyes, the trace of an ideology “high-modernist”which has the effect of annihilating a fabric of vernacular knowledge built up over the centuries.
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