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ANARCHS AND SOCIAL GUYS: COMMENTS ON ROBIN FOXS TRIBAL IMAGINATION

As one indebted to Professor Robin Fox (henceforth RF) for his enlightening contributions
to an evolutionary perspective in social anthropology [Fox 1983, 1993,1995], and as one
committed to the idea that our tribal past is still impacting our modernity either by
shaping it or by running against its grainI am particularly sensitive to what RF has to say
about this very subject, about how our ancestry is still kicking in the age of computers and
space explorations, of an overpopulated earth, of crowded megacities, hegemonic states and
democratic struggles. How is the lone Paleolithic hunter in each of us faring in these
unfavorable circumstances? There is a need to find a way of grasping the profound change
that has affected mankind, as well as the continuity between our ancestral and
primatological past and our civilized present.

Whether a consensus or a convergence, or just happenstance, anthropologists (in the broad
and vague sense of social thinkers roaming the fields of ethnology, history, prehistory,
sociology, linguistics, neuroscience and primatology) share a sense of some deep antithesis
between conflicting principles in the human mind, and between two irreconcilable aspects
of human reality. In the concluding chapter --The Old Adam and the Last Man Taming the
Savage Mind--, of his new book The Tribal Imagination, RF reviews the works of a number of
thinkers who thus offer a binary choice to the players of the social and cognitive game:
thymos against interest (Fukuyama), communitas against structure (Turner), mytho-poetic
versus rational-logic (Douglas), presentational against discursive (Langer), Mediocristan
versus Extremistan (Taleb), and teletropic versus autotropic (Smail). You may add right
hemisphere/left hemisphere, and you have what in linguistic-structuralist parlance is called
a correlation, so that communitas can be opposed to interest, rational-logic to
presentational, autotropic to thymos, and so on1. These aspects are located in the brain, take
their origin in biology and evolution and then manifest themselves in all sectors of human
activity, be it soccer, literature, music, religion or the very life of communities.

1 Note here that dualism reigns sovereign and that you need not be a genuine Levi-Straussian

structuralist warrior to wield the splitting ax of binary opposition, as you are hacking away at social
facts.

But what is old and what is new? As pointed out by RF, one is tempted to see one term as an
origin or as an archaic trait, while the other as historically recent: a desire for fame would
be more primitive than a wish to be equal, mytho-poetic (sometimes called symbolic)
thinking is probably more archaic than rational thinking, communitas is definitely more
tribal (ancient) than social structure (modern), and so on. The strong point that RF is
making is that both are coexisting in us, even if one is stressed to the detriment of the other.
In this way, we all live with a profound desire of communitas in spite of the fact that we are
living in a strictly regulated social structure. We still think in logical terms while mythical
metaphors retain their appeal2. The Old Adam and the Last Man both live within our hearts
and minds. They both are essential facets of our complex and deeply split human nature.

In the coming section I shall then pursue the two major leads proposed by RF: one, that
there are indeed conflicting principles at work in the making of societies, groups and
communities of all kinds; two, that these aspects are at the same time ancient and
contemporaneous, originating in our evolution as a biological species, but still very much
alive in us, modern human beings that we are. However I shall pursue these leads in a style
and within a perspective of my own. In doing so, I will propose to rethink the notion of
communitas, which in my view remains a central concept, but ill defined. I will also
suggest other binary oppositions, especially within the concept of the tribal itself. What RF
and others call the savage, the tribal, the ancestral, the primitive, etc. is not one solid
category. I shall wield the binary ax on it.

Communitas, psychological and sociological
Turner borrowed his concept of communitas [Turner 1974: 47, 274] from a French pioneer
in modern anthropology, A. Van Gennep, who was the first to call attention to a strange and
repeatedly verified property of certain social and cultural processes, that of unfolding
themselves in three stages, which he called separation, liminality, and aggregation
[Van Gennep 1909]. This model he called rites of passage and it applied primarily to
stages in life during which individuals change status. Initiation ceremonies are paradigmatic
rites of passage. This indeed has been one of the most successful cultural models ever

2 There would be a very strong counterargument to that. If the entire collection of the Myhtologiques

by Claude Lvi-Strauss [quote] is to be taken seriously, the mytho-poetic is nothing but logical.

proposed by social anthropologists. If they represent accurately the scenario of initiation

rituals, they apply as well to other collective phenomena, such as the Christian religious
calendar and to a representation of time itself [Leach 1961: 133-4]. Liminality is the central
stage in a rite of passage and it is characterized by certain activities and states that run
contrary to the normal order. For instance initiates are naked or live in the forest, or indulge
in homosexual practice, or eat special food, etc.

Turners original idea was to extract liminality from this three-fold envelope and to propose
the concept of communitas as a form of extended liminality. Such was for instance the
Franciscan order, also quoted by RF in the chapter under discussion. Here is a monastic
institution supposed to exist in perpetuity but in a permanent state of liminality, similarly to
what the sadhus and ascetics of India aim to do, that is a state of being permanently outside
society while being, inevitably, inside it. In these circumstances liminality is inherently anti-
structural, or if you will, anti-social. It goes against general rules of social life by repudiating
all self-interest, renouncing rank or riches, wandering naked or in state of destitution,
proclaiming poverty as an ideal, claiming brotherhood with birds, etc. Alas, an institution
being by definition a social artifact, it cannot preserve its anti-social, anti-structural moral
content. So perishes the Franciscan ideal, as do the hippie, the millenarian, the utopian.

However exotic liminality, or communitas, seems to be, it lives very strongly in most people.
Proof is that we experience it repeatedly and vividly, as exemplified by instances such as --
following RF--, communing in a collective state of mourning (death of President Kennedy),
rejoicing after victory on the football field, enjoying a Grateful Dead concert. Communitas is
then seen as an emotional experience characterized by limitless empathy and immediacy:
barriers dissolve and a warm feeling of togetherness suffuses the entire gathering. RF,
quoting Turner, said it perfectly well: a relationship between concrete, historical,
idiosyncratic individuals in a direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human
identities. Another important point would be that it involves also a model of society as a
homogeneous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with
those of human species. I have now an important question regarding the second part,
communitas as a model of society.

It seems to me indeed that one is in danger of confusing two very different realities, or two
different meanings of the same word communitas. One is the emotional state, collectively
experienced. It consists in a deep feeling of belonging to a group of individuals who share
the same emotions (of collective joy, mutual empathy, common concern). It is a matter of
strong vibes. There is immediacy, spontaneity (it has not been pre-ordained), concreteness,
and immanence. The other fact or process, quite different, is the construction and
development of a stable state of collective living, whereby individuals cooperate and
interact in such a way as to form an enduring and united community. Let us say then that
there are two kinds of communitas, one is the psychological and emotional communitas, the
other is the sociological communitas. I find it difficult to conflate both, and even more so to
see the sociological as the result of the psychological although they do share certain key
elements. Feelings that arise among a crowd after their soccer club has won a great victory
does not lead to the formation of a community. And the club of supporters is not a
communitas. RF of course would agree: a spontaneous communitas cannot last. But, and
this remains in my view a crucial observation, sociological communitas must be understood
as conceptually distinct from the psychological communitas. Both share certain elements
and tend to merge to an extent, but must be seen as resulting from different processes.

Turner defined communitas as anti-structure because within a structure, that is, a society, it
appears as running against all major rules of behavior and propriety; it projects an inverted
image of social behavior. But isolated3 communities that are organized along the lines of a
communitas, do not need to be anti-social because they do not conflict with anything inside
or outside themselves. Instead of being anti-social they are just non-social. They just lack
structure or at least what sociologists and anthropologists call structure. Also we
experience communitas as anti-structure because this is the only place that we, social
beings and last men that we are, can observe it. We observe communitas as basically a
collective emotional state arising from some deep source within us, we see it as a liberating
and spontaneous force, an escape from the social constraints, so that communitas appears
as necessarily forming a counterpoint to the rules and norms of our society. But this needs
not be not always the case. Sociological communitas was probably a normal state of affair
amongst humans until something happened when the social was invented and when

3 By isolated I do not mean absence of contacts. Until recently -middle of 20th century-- a number

of Inuit communities had never seen a white man. The Inuit world however had been in contact,
since the 18th century at least, with Europeans.

communitas then, and only then, appeared as something different and profoundly alien, but
in a way, still familiar. That is where we stand today.

There is another complicating factor that should not be overlooked. These feelings and
emotional states of conscience collective, when a crowd seems to possess a soul, whether
grieving or rejoicing, or these moments of peaceful and quiet exultation in the company of
others, the aptly labeled temporary autonomous zones [W.L. Wilson a.k.a. Hakim Bey
2003], do arise within, and because of a social context which is inherently opposed to the
very nature of the said feelings and emotional states. Nationalistic sentiments are a typical
example of this phenomenon. Sports or political nationalism is premised on a state of
competition between closed groups (tiffosi, patriotic citizens), when a collective entity (club,
nation) clashes with another. The feeling of communitas whose boundaries are ideally
coterminous with those of human species (see above) is not really compatible with, nay the
very opposite of, the sense of the us-group pitted, violently pitted, against other they-
groups. Nationalism is maybe the ultimate manifestation of the social, whereas the
psychological communitas is the ultimate expression of the non-social. It is a wonder that
precisely one could be arisen momentarily, fleetingly, within a context created by the other.

Conversely, if psychological communitas can flourish on a social, closed-group terrain,
sociological communitas as exemplified again by traditional Inuit communitiesgives rise
to conflicts and disharmony, entails homicide and occasional violence. Living in anarchic,
open-aggregated, and generally peaceful communities does not prevent the temporary
demise of psychological communitas and allows for the possibility of violently hostile
feelings within and without the community. Here again we are faced with two opposed but
always present facets of human behavior. From an epistemological point of view the
vocabulary of the non-social sphere and that of the social have been used interchangeably in
common parlance as well as in social science jargon. That is why nations themselves fool us
into imagining we are large families to quote RF (Tribal Imagination, same chapter).


I shall now explain in more concrete terms what I have in mind when I speak of
sociological communitas, or communities that are based on the principles that can be
defined as non-social; when communitas is, to use RFs terms, a state of social existence,

one that is actually and empirically implemented by real communities. This will enable us
to see the difference between what I have called psychological and sociological
communitas, and why there are so closely linked in many ways, and why they share certain
key elements.


Ethnographies of communitas
On the one hand ethnography has produced in the past century and a half, together with
descriptions by travelers, missionaries and administrators, a wealth of information on
primitive or pre-modern communities that display to an extreme degree qualities of
togetherness, peaceability, cohesion, solidarity, egalitarian sense in their relationships,
individual autonomy, and general mood of joyful collective living. Let me quote here, for
Southeast Asia only, the recently published volume Anarchic Solidarity [Gibson and
Sillander 2011]. Together with descriptions of Inuit life, numerous other ethnographies and
reports the world over (concerning foragers, hunter-gatherers as well as agriculturalists
and others) make for a fat file in the Rousseauian bon sauvage folder. Social anthropology
has dealt with them by putting them in the category foragers/hunters-gatherers (preferably
small-game hunters-gatherers in immediate-return economies to quote Woodburn [1998])
and by placing them at the bottom of the social complexity scale. They hunt, forage, and live
in small bands. They are therefore simple. This notion of simplicity is, in my opinion,
incorrect. They are simple in the kind of mechanical and deterministic terms in which we
understand modern society, but they are highly complex in a stochastic, nonlinear and
organic sort of way.

On the other hand, certain groups (actually some of the same as above, whether at the band
level or at a tribal level) have been reported to have no social structure at all. This has not
been considered by our discipline or the social sciences in general as really significant. It
was somewhat unsettling, but of no real consequence, or just a matter of faulty reporting.
Their otherness has been reduced to the status of zero degree of (hierarchy, social
complexity, societal development). I suggest to the contrary that this is one of the most
crucial discoveries in modern sciences. Some people do not live within a social organization.
They are non-social. Yet, they are supremely human and form real and enduring

communities. Theirs is a type of organization that possesses complexity and that has to be
understood in its own terms. If true, how are we to come to grips with this fact?

The communities or groups I have in mind are numerous, among them the Inuit in the
Arctic, the Paliyan and the Nayaka in India, the Mbuti, the Hazda, the !Kung and many
others in Africa, the Trio and Piaroa with other Amazonian peoples, the Semai, the Batek,
the Chewong, the Buid and countless others in Southeast Asia, including the people I have
observed in the field for many years, the Palawan shifting agriculturists in the Philippines.
They present to us a nondescript sociological landscape to which adjectives such as loose,
flexible, fluid, minimalist, have been applied due to their apparent paucity in their
social organization [Overing 1993]. Groups have no clear boundaries, are open-
aggregated, seem to cohere temporarily and then melt away, and are better called networks
or fellowships. Kinship is usually cognatic, creating no enduring groupings of kinsmen.
Hierarchies are weak or nonexistent. In all, there seems to be no structural principle on
which hinges the life of the group. Their egalitarianism is unquestionable and respect for
individual autonomy very high. Orders are not given, nor received, except in some
particular circumstances calling for quick action. Justice is not a major concern, if at all.
Conflicts arise but tend to be ignored, pushed away or drowned under torrents of talk. At
the same time these anarchic people show an astoundingly high degree of mutual concern
and know best how to share without counting.

These are obviously very peculiar communities, and should not be confused with other
tribal communities that are based on very different principles, such as a strong group
identity paired with territoriality, hierarchies of big men or chiefs, a divide between the
high and the low, the rich and the poor, warfare, feuding, large-scale circulation of goods
ritually exchanged, a code of justice enforced by tribunals with heavy fines, death penalty,
blood price and other penalties. Some tribal institutions are even based on debt-bondage
and slavery (Central Borneo, Norwest Coast, Mainland Southeast Asia).

It is very important not to confuse these two kinds of organizations, one being egalitarian,
open-aggregated, anarchic and generally peaceful (the anarchs according to R. Dentans
apt term [Dentan 2010]), the other containing rank and hierarchy, based on a holistic order

and displaying a tendency towards violence and warfare4 (the social guys). The former kind,
anarchic, egalitarian, or organic, should in no way (as it has been the case until now) be
seen as the zero degree or first stage of the latter. Non-social arrangements do not produce
structurally organized society. They are of a different kind altogether5.

When speaking of tribal people or the savage mind, and when referring to some primitive
ancestry, it is necessary to know which ancestry we are referring to: the organic or the
mechanical, the anarchic or the social, or, to use a binary I suggested in a previous article
[Macdonald 2008], harmony or order. Both sets of principles are alive in us, even if one (the
social set obviously) has been the preferred solution for collective living in the past ten
thousand years, a flicker in our life on earth. Therefore, while agreeing with RFs contention
that the savage lives with the civilized, I would define anew what the savage is and split
it into two radically different and opposed categories.

The civilized modern savage is the bureaucrat, the religious zealot and the patriot, but also
the soccer hooligan and the mafia boss, all devotees of hierarchical organizations and
transcendent powers. The other savage, uncivilized but still modern, is the anarch, the one
that lives in most of us, the peaceful, cooperative member of a post-disaster community, the
participant in a tea ceremony, the anonymous member of AA, the hippie, the 17th and 18th

4 In order to make sense of these peculiar anarchic and egalitarian communities, and to make sense

generally of what collective life among humans is all about, I disclaim the received wisdom according
to which humans are social animals. I propose instead to call the human animal gregarious in the
sense that it does not live a solitary life, ever. Man needs the company of man and always lives in
groups. That does not make him social. Just gregarious. Next I consider that there are two diverging
paths leading to a stable and organized collective existence. One path, arguably more ancient, is the
anarchic or organic. The other path, still very ancient (preceding the Neolithic) but maybe not as
old, is the social. I define the social, not unlike the model proposed by Alan Page Fiske [1992]
along three major lines: hierarchy, reciprocity, corporation (transcendence of the collective). The
anarchic-gregarious or organic is defined by the very opposite concepts of equality, sharing, and
fellowship (immanence of personal networks). From these principles follow all sorts of corollaries
and consequences. I have developed this general argument in several papers [Macdonald 2008, 2011
a, b and c, in press a and b]. One important concept I use is that of strong versus weak ties, a concept
first defined by M. Granovetter [1973] but that I owe to Maryanski and Turner [1992, 2008] and to G.
Benjamin who was the one who suggested it to me [personal communication]. Weak links are not
durable, however profoundly felt in the here and now. They belong to the communitas sphere of
interpersonal relationships and are supremely nonsocial. Strong links are durable, often
conceptualized as everlasting, and thus belong to the realm of the transcendent and the social (in my
definition of it).
5 I thus understand P. Clastres contention that the primitive cannot give birth to the state (where
the state is actually a synecdoche for society) [Clastres 1989].

century member of a pirate community, the maroon, the Cossack, the Southeast Asian
highlander [Scott 2009], or simply the friend sharing a meal with friends. Anarchs, it must
be noted, are not always anarchists.

Conclusion
Summarily, then, there are two concepts of communitas, not one, and at least two kinds of
tribal peoples, not one. To speak of what remains in us from our savage or tribal past we
need to understand our split nature, and that we have at least two savage pasts (so to
speak), one that is inherently given to dominance and conquest, the other that is given to
friendship and autonomy, one that is clothed in the vestment of transcendence, the other
that exists in strict immanence. Modern anthropological imagination has rarely been able to
grasp this fact. The social thinker who was probably the closest to the truth was Jean-
Jacques Rousseau who wrote The savage is a friend to all his kind (Lhomme sauvage est
lami de tous ses semblables) and Man is good by nature (Lhomme est naturellement
bon(my translation)- [Rousseau 1755]. Most social scientists have scoffed at this
pronouncement. Now we are better prepared to accept this truth, what RF calls, after J.Q.
Wilson, a need for morality, a need that is deeply embedded in us through our
evolutionary makeup and one we owe to our savage ancestor, the anarch, not to our more
modern father, the social guy.

REFERENCES

Bey, H. 2003.
T.A.Z. Temporary Autonomous Zones. Ontological anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York:
Autonomedia.

Clastres, P. 1989

Society Against the State. Essays in Political Anthropology. R. Hurley, transl. New York: Zone
Book

Dentan, R. 2010
Nonkilling social arrangements, in Nonkilling Societies, J. E. Pims ed., Honolulu: Center for
Global Nonkilling, pp. 131-182.

Fiske, A. P. 1992
The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social
Relations. Psychological Review, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 689-723.

Fox R. 1983

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The Red Lamp of Incest. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press
--- 1993
Reproduction and succession. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers
--- 1995
The Challenge of Anthropology. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers

Gibson, T. and K. Sillander ed., 2011
Anarchic solidarity: Autonomy, Equality and Fellowship in Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale
Southeast Asian Series, Yale University Press.

Granovetter, M. 1973
The strength of weak ties, American Journal of Sociology 78 (6), pp.136080.

Leach, E.R. 1961
Rethinking Anthropology. LSE Monographes on Social Anthropology No. 22, London and
New York: the Athlone Press

Macdonald, C. J-H 2008
Order against Harmony: Are humans always social? Suomen Anthropologi: Journal of the
Finnish Anthropological Society 33(2), pp. 5-21.
--- 2011 a
A Theoretical Overview of Anarchic Solidarity, in Gibson, T and K. Sillander ed. Anarchic
solidarity: Autonomy, Equality and Fellowship in Southeast Asia, pp. 24-53, New Haven:Yale
Southeast Asian Series, Yale University Press.
---2011 b
Kinship and fellowship among the Palawan, in Gibson, T. and K. Sillander ed., Anarchic
solidarity: Autonomy, Equality and Fellowship in Southeast Asia, pp. 152-175, New Haven:
Yale Southeast Asian series, Yale University Press,
--- 2011 c
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---In Press a
Joyous, Equal, and Free. On the Conditions of Felicity in Human Organization, in Egan, M. ed.
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--- In press b
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and London: Yale University Press.

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Overing, J. 1993
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Rousseau, J.-J. 1755
Discours sur lOrigine et les Fondements de lIngalit parmi les Hommes. A Amsterdam chez
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Turner,V. 1974
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Van Gennep, A. 1909
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Anthropological Tradition, 4863. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Charles J-H Macdonald
CNRS- UMR 6578
Marseille