Anthropology and anarchy: Romance, horror or science fiction?

This article introduces the special issue by considering some of the relations between anthropology and anarchy, real and potential. Anarchy, I suggest, is a word already burdened with strong (and often divergent) emotional overtones: it is invested with both romance and horror. These overtones point to related ideas about human nature as either social and peaceable or antagonistic and competitive. But are these parables about human nature just science fiction, political claims dressed up in the garb of neutral observations of actually existing humanity? Time and again, the questions raised by anarchy point to anthropology for their resolution, particularly to the ethnographic record and the conclusions that might be drawn from its analysis. Yet the ethnographic record yields no easy resolution to these questions, in part, I argue, because of this prior overburdening which becomes particularly acute when the ethnographic subjects are already politically marginalized. In this introduction, I take a different tack, attempting to approach anarchy as banal and everyday, as one kind of social relation among others, and as thus amenable itself to ethnographic observation not only ‘out there’ and ‘back then’ but here and now.