Steur, Luisa Johanna

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u n i ve r s i t y  o f  co pe n h ag e n  Københavns UniversitetThe "savage slot" of class polarizationSteur, Luisa JohannaPublished in:Focaal - European Journal for AnthropologyPublication date:2006Document versionEarly version, also known as pre-printCitation for published version (APA):Steur, L. J. (2006). The "savage slot" of class polarization. Focaal - European Journal for Anthropology, 48, 169-172.Download date: 03. Feb. 2020Book reviews I 169Inevitably, Celtel has had to generalize manyof Dumont's discussions because he focuses cen-trally on the analysis of individualism. The priceis a rather impoverished sense of Dumont's ownwide learning and the many interconnected top-ics in his case-studies. The discussion of caste isan example. For Dumont, this includes the ar-gument that there has been a fundamental op-position between pure and impure and adissociation of status from power in India; crit-ics have addressed different aspects of this in-terconnected analysis. Some critiques have beentemporally situated, and deploy actor-centeredtheories against Dumont's position. Theories ofagency, which has to be seen temporally, clearlyinvolve 'categories of the self but agency is setaside by Celtel, explicitly ignored as just part ofa (presentist) 'postmodernism' and outside hisbrief. Celtel's take on the historical is rather un-considered and casual. But his own presentationsuggests that over time, Dumont's perspectivebecame more historical and attentive to actors.Yet, Dumont's analysis of Marx in From Man-deville to Marx is effectively ignored, as is thecontemporary relevance of this critical historyof economic individualism.Celtel finally concludes that Dumont's grandperiodizing is out of fashion. Could Dumont bemore influential? And what is theory for? Onetheory offers one way, not the only way, to com-plex realities. Perhaps Dumont could be betterrehabilitated for anthropology by aligning whathe himself described as 'the evolution of ourown society' with social history rather than withphilosophy?Elizabeth TonkinQueen's University, BelfastThe 'savage slot' of class polarizationGerald Sider, Living Indian histories: Lumbeeand Tuscarora people in North Carolina. ChapelHill and London: University of North CarolinaPress, 2003, pp. kxii + 309, ISBN 0 8078 5506 5(paperback).Fortunately anthropology has left the 'savageslot'. However, with a global economy creatinghavoc and governments that encourage newrounds of class polarization—in other words,with true savagery called neo-liberalism engulf-ing millions of people's lives—the 'savage slot'reinterpreted thus, is arguably what most ur-gently demands anthropologists' attention.Sider's book indeed focuses its attention pre-cisely on the effects of class polarization amongthe Lumbee and the Tuscarora under the pro-found transformations of the last quarter of thetwentieth century. The 72-page preface (the fo-cus of this review) carries his earlier (1993)original and thrilling 'reverse history' of Nativepeople's struggles in Robeson county (NorthCarolina) into the twenty-first century. LivingIndian histories is basically an account of howoppressed people such as Native Americans inthe US have to live "within, and also against,their own histories and their own cultures andsimultaneously within and against the historiesand cultures that others try so intensely to im-pose on them" (p. xiii).As an analytic concept, culture has alwaysbeen a primary concern for Sider. In his earlierbooks (e.g., his 1986 book. Culture and class inanthropology and history: A Newfoundland illus-tration) he has proved himself one of the mostintense critics of what may be called the Boasiantradition of culture as somehow a consensualwhole. If Eric Wolf opened the anthropologicalagenda of connecting culture to history in con-stant interaction with class inequality, it wasprimarily Sider who successfully developed thisagenda and inseparably tied culture to everydaystruggles about and within this inequality. ForSider, culture and in particular the splits, ten-sions, and antagonisms within a culture are notsimply in history but constitute history. Likewise,the tensions and contradictions within lived In-dian culture in fact constitute the unity of whatit is to be Indian.The title Living Indian histories stresses thefact that the abstract Indian 'culture' that thestate demands proof of as a criteria for recogni-tion "is also a people's culture that comes frompeople with multiple ties and allegiances, is170 I Book reviewsirreducible to its own history and is not con-tainable in any one place" (p. xxvi)—hence is'living'. Culture and cultures are continuallyformed through the assertions, rejections, andnecessarily incomplete acceptance of the formsof knowledge and ways of being that power cre-ates. Sider thus never uses culture in a static orcomfortable sense—culture is at most a verytemporary condensation of a balance of con-fiicting powers. Though much of anthropologyhas started to adopt a more antagonistic anddynamic view of culture, Sider remains one ofculture's sharpest critics: unlike for instance Ap-padurai or Hannerz, who undermine a static,consensual notion of culture by showing itsuntenability in the face of external forces likecreolization and global media images, Sider'scritique of culture is an internal one, whichoriginates in the contradictions of the everydaylife of ordinary people.Sider's fascinating, concentrically progress-ing argument on culture in Living Indian Histo-ries soon also brings us to the state. Indeed forSider culture, and particularly its inherent con-tradictions, is crucial because it "reveals the state"(xliii) as a self-perpetuating mechanism of classpolarization, i.e., of the increasing well-being ofsome that goes hand in hand with the increasedvulnerability and dependency of others. Thestate's role in class polarization is captured bySider's concept of'politically constructed classes'.The concept emphasizes how inequalities areproduced primarily in the political arena andare used: not only in and for the economy butalso in the maintenance of the state itself. ThusSider notes that precisely at the moment thatAfrican Americans and Native Americans havegained a modicum of rights in the US, they be-come useless: "an African American [or NativeAmerican] with civil rights [is], in this econ-omy, a contradiction in terms" (p. xl). Thus anew mass of exploitable labor has been created:thousands of 'illegal' Mexican immigrants—'illegal' being in parentheses as one must won-der what that means if everyone, including thepolice, knows exactly where these 'illegals' liveand work (p. xxxf.). For Sider, the US bordercontrol is not there to stop Mexicans enteringthe US but to intimidate them into acceptingtheir illegal, rights-less status. Together with theoff-shoring of the entire textile industry, thishas lead to massive job loss among the AfricanAmericans and Native Americans of Robesoncounty—a situation that is in turn aggravatedby a change in labor practice whereby people,forced by revised unemployment insurance rulesto find any possible work, are increasingly hiredas eternal 'temps' ('temporary workers', withoutbenefits) through regular firing and re-hiring.All this again is done in full view of the stateand Sider, drawing a complicated but fascinat-ing parallel to the impunity earlier granted toorganized lynchings of Blacks in the SouthernUS, argues that this is fundamentally how thestate works to reproduce itself: it creates lawsthat supposedly ensure the equality of all, butthrough impunity allows these same laws to beused precisely to create inequality, i.e., on the onehand a mass of vulnerable people whose de-pendency makes them turn to the state for alle-viating the hardship the state itself created, andon the other a small elite, for example those whoget jobs as staff in poverty alleviation programs.This is the background against which Siderdescribes in more details the process of class for-mation taking place among the Native Indiansof Robeson country whereby as they becomewealthier as a group, differences among thembecome stark. Sider adds that these "two mani-festations of native life, prosperity and hard-ship, are inseparably joined into one range ofpossibilities, one public people, one politicallyconstructed category" (p. xxxviii). This "rangeof possibilities" includes for the Lumbee a searchfor federal recognition, first through petitioningthe Bureau for Indian Affairs and later throughan appeal to Congress. This (expensive) searchis initially lead by the Lumbee Regional Devel-opment Association (LRDA), which Sider him-self helped to set up in the 1960s. The LRDA inthe course of time, however, develops into a pro-fessionalized for-profit organization and is even-tually, through a struggle fought out in the court,superseded in 2000 by an elected tribal councilas the legitimate 'Lumbee government' that thestate requires the Lumbee to have before theyBook reviews \ 171can gain federal recognition. Sider's deep engage-ment, what he calls "partisan anthropology",can be felt in a footnote saying"[m]y critique ofhow things subsequently have developed in theLRDA's programs and policies is partly an at-tempt to come to terms with the political inno-cence of my own youthful dreams about socialchange, dreams that in one shape or another Iwould still rather revive than bury" (p. xliv).A group of Indian people who did not wantto join the Lumbee tribal roll, the Tuscarora, ap-pealed to another 'option' in the range of possi-bilities, "partly by necessity, and more by choice"(p. lx). Through an alliance with the AmericanIndian Movement, they began searching for aform of sovereignty that, in the words of a Robe-son county Tuscarora "the federal governmentdid not give ... , and cannot take ... away" (p.bdi)—i.e., a sovereignty that is not about dress-ing up as the kind of Indians that the statewould be willing to recognize but is about beingsovereign regardless of the state, a sovereigntyoriented not toward the state but toward theTuscarora and other Native Indians themselves.This, however, also entails "making one's peacewith widespread poverty and hardship, whichgovernment funds certainly do not remedy, butdo somewhat lighten" (p. lxv). In sum, lookingat these initiatives by Native Americans in Robe-son county, we see a "nearly irresolvable contra-diction between service and sovereignty" (p.xxxiv), between ensuring some kind of well-being through the state and keeping some senseof independence and community.Sider thus not only provides a very impor-tant conceptualization of culture in terms ofstruggle and everyday life within and againsthistory, but also proves the value of his theoryin enabling us to get a deeper and sharper un-derstanding of concrete historical situationsand political dilemmas. However, there are alsoa few problematic aspects to the book. First ofall, making reference to others than the very fewscholars Sider finds absolutely 'brilliant' andavoiding turning the rest into invisible straw-men is not Sider's strong point. It often seemshe would like to attribute the use of a totally ob-solete culture concept to the unmentioned 99.9percent of anthropology—this may not beentirely justified.More problematic however is Sider's exces-sive emphasis on the state, which he can onlyget away with through a total lack of interna-tional comparison. His conceptualization of thestate, moreover, is as he himself admits (p. xliii),too vague and unitary. His argument that theUS state uses its border control to produce anillegal and thus exploitable mass of labor ratherthan to actually keep illegal immigrants out, forinstance seems incompatible with the Bush ad-ministration's definite plans for a huge fencealong the US-Mexican border. Sider's radical ar-gument that the state creates social laws underthe pretence of ensuring equality but in factensures inequality through their unpunishedtransgression I find uncanny because it simplycollapses all the contradictory interests of whichthe state is an outcome. Might we then just aswell not oppose the present endeavors by theRepublican-dominated National Labor RelationsBoard to deny millions of US workers the rightto unionize by redefining every worker whosometimes gives instructions to others (e.g.,nurses) as 'supervisors' (Paul Krugman, Inter-national Herald Tribune, 7-8 October 2006)?Sider's conception of the state I would find moreuseful if he saw the state as he does culture: as acontradictory and temporary condensation ofongoing struggles.What may have also enriched the book isa bit more statistical data on certain key socio-economic trends, more elaborate and detailedlife-stories, and more direct quotes of Sider'sdiscussions with Lumbee and Tuscarora people.'Partisan anthropology' can produce insightsthat an anthropology that is less directly en-gaged in struggle cannot and it is to some extentlegitimate that precise documentation wouldtherein have to give way to lived-through ac-counts. However, when the impreciseness getstoo much, 'partisan anthropology' comes dan-gerously close to paternalist anthropology: miss-ing the more precise facts that could make usreally decide for ourselves whether the Tusca-rora for example indeed took a different route tosovereignty "partly by necessity, and more by172 I Book reviewschoice" and lacking more elaborate transcrip-tions and biographies of Sider's "truly insightful"(p. xxxivf.) and "very special" (p. xvii) comradesin arms (or what for more conventional anthro-pologists would be 'informants'), the reader hasto rely a bit too much on Sider's personal judg-ment in these matters.Impreciseness is also risky when Sider claimsthat recent changes are "so fundamentally differ-ent from the transformations that characterizedthe first three-quarters of the twentieth centurythat partisan anthropology has been shakento its roots" (p. xiii). In principle I agree, butwhen making such claims it is crucial to provideenough concrete data on political-economicand biographical shifrs. Where his writing be-comes, at times, more suggestive than precise,Sider could see himself in the strange companyof postmodernists and 'we-have-lost-all-our-sense-of-direction' (and, some add, 'moral com-pass')-perspectives.Having exhausted my critique of Sider's bril-liant book, I warmly recommend it to any activistor scholar interested in the intense analyticaland political dilemmas of having to live "withinand against" one's own and others' history andculture in these savage times. I strongly doubtthey can find a sharper expose of the dilemmasinvolved than the one offered here by Sider.Luisa SteurCentral European University, Budapest

The "savage slot" of class polarization

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