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Anthropologies of Revolution ANTHROPOLOGY CHERSTICH WHAT CAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THINKING contribute to the study of revo- lutions? The fi rst book-length anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthro- pologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted | attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolu- HOLBRAAD tions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead regard them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people’s lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence. | TASSI “With insightful references to cases around the world, this book advances a brilliant holistic theory that offers credibility and signifi cance to the ways revo- lutions unfold in culturally specifi c practices without diminishing their political impact and universal aspirations.” ANTHROPOLOGIES Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the ANTHROPOLOGIES OF Enlightenment “This fascinating volume opens up new horizons in the study of revolutionary practice. It is diffi cult to imagine a more important or original work.” David Nugent, author of The Encrypted State: Delusion and Displacement in the Peruvian Andes REVOLUTION “This book is a truly original (in all senses of the term) contribution to under- Forging Time, People, and Worlds standing the global and human condition of far-reaching political, social, and cosmological change.” Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, author of Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, OF and Power in Mozambique IGOR CHERSTICH REVOLUTION Igor Cherstich is Teaching Fellow in Social Anthropology at University College London. He is coeditor of the special issue “The Multiple Narratives of the Lib- MARTIN HOLBRAAD yan Revolution,” Middle East Critique. Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at University College Lon- NICO TASSI don. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Div- ination and coauthor of The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Nico Tassi is Research Associate at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, and author of The Native World System: An Ethnography of Boliv- ian Aymara Traders in the Global Economy. University of California Press www.ucpress.edu A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Cover design: Glynnis Koike. Cover illustration: © strizh/iStock Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Anthropologies of Revolution Anthropologies of Revolution Forging Time, People, and Worlds Igor Cherstich, Martin Holbraad, and Nico Tassi UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by Igor Cherstich, Martin Holbraad, Nico Tassi This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. Suggested citation: Cherstich, I., Holbraad, M. and Tassi, N. Anthropologies of Revolution: Forging Time, People, and Worlds. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.89 ISBN 978–0–520–34379–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978–0–520–97516–3 (ebook) 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Multiplying Revolutions 1 Chapter 1. Revolution as Event: Ritual, Violence, and Transformation 18 Chapter 2. State and Revolution: Nations, Tribes, and Lineages 41 Chapter 3. The Revolutionary Person: Penitence, Sacrifice, and the New Man 66 Chapter 4. The Revolutionary Leader: Charisma, Authority, and Exception 94 Chapter 5. Revolution and Ideology: Truth, Lies, and Mediation 113 Chapter 6. Revolutionary Cosmologies: Spirits, Myths, Worlds 134 Conclusion. Worlds in Revolution 155 References 171 Index 197 Acknowledgments This book is the outcome of “Comparative Anthropology of Revolutionary Politics” (CARP), a five-year research project dedicated to developing a distinc- tively anthropological understanding of revolutions. The project was funded by a Consolidator grant of the European Research Council (ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP) and led by Martin Holbraad at University College London from 2014 to 2019. For catalytic discussions on the anthropology of revolutions dur- ing the early stages of the book’s development, we wish to thank Narges Ansari, Myriam Lamrani, and Charlotte Loris-Rodionoff, who were members of the project’s core research team alongside the three of us. For illuminating discus- sions at various stages of the book’s development, as well as for advice on rel- evant literature, we thank David Burrows, María Elena Canedo, David Cooper, Alice Elliot, Dan Hirslund, Caroline Humphrey, Bruce Kapferer, Nicola Miller, Morten Axel Pedersen, Mike Rowlands, Joseph Trapido, Kaya Üzel, and (par- ticularly!) Lucia Michelutti. We are grateful to Pascale Searle and Suzanne Petrou for their dedicated administrative support throughout the project, and appreci- ate Michael Brown, Giles Machell, and Jen Morgan at UCL’s EU Grants Office, Martin O’Connor, Paul Carter Bowman, and Rikke Osterlund at the Department of Anthropology, and Susanne Kuechler as Head of Department, for provid- ing the basic administrative and institutional structures on which projects such as this depend. We are enormously grateful to our undergraduate and masters’ students in the course “Social Forms of Revolution,” which we designed and taught together at UCL in 2016, and Cherstich continued to teach on his own in 2017 and 2018. The students’ thoughts and comments during lectures and tutorials have been a con- stant point of reference for us in the writing of the book, the chapters of which vii viii Acknowledgments are based on our lectures for the course. Some of the material that features in the chapters was also presented during the following conferences, workshops, and exhibitions: “Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics” (UCL, London, 2014); “How Goes It with the New Man? A Comparative Approach to Revolutionary Subjectivity” (Cuban Institute of Philosophy, Havana, 2015); “The Revolutionary Process in Bolivia: A Comparative Approach” (Vicepresidencia del Estado, La Paz, 2016); “Morphologies of Invisible Agents” (Space Gallery, London, 2019); and “After the Event—Prospects and Retrospects of Revolution” (UCL, London, 2019). We thank those who helped to organize these events and also thank the participants for their contributions, and not least the personnel of the Centro de Investigación Social of La Paz as well as colleagues at the Instituto de Filosofia in Havana. We also give thanks to Hera Karagianni, Nikos Giannakakis, and particularly Panos Giannakakis (and Iris!) for their hospitality during a two- week writing retreat in their house in Mount Pelion in June 2018. Kate Marshall at UCP has expertly guided this book to publication, and we are grateful also to the press’s two reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments on the manuscript. Finally, our gratitude goes out to our families in Bolivia, Italy, and the United Kingdom for their support. Introduction Multiplying Revolutions NOT MISSING THE REVOLUTION In his provocative 1991 article “Missing the Revolution,” American anthropologist Orin Starn admonishes anthropologists of Peru for having allowed the insurgency of the Shining Path—the Maoist group whose violent revolutionary campaign dominated life in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s—to take them completely by sur- prise. Hundreds of ethnographers had been conducting research in the Andes throughout the 1970s, often in the very parts of rural Peru where the Shining Path’s uprising made its deepest inroads. Yet in their writings, Starn complains, they remained oblivious not only to the popular ferment that led up to the Shining Path’s campaign from 1980 onward but also to the socioeconomic conditions that contributed to it. Little or no attention was paid to the developing impoverish- ment of the countryside and the unrest it produced, while the dynamics of inter- nal migration that had created the pool of mobile youths from which the Shining Path drew its cadres also went unnoticed. Rather, anthropologists working there at the time stayed within the narrow confines of what Starn disparagingly calls “Andeanism,” portraying peasant life as somehow immune to the flow of history, and focusing instead on such exotic and apolitical topics as environmental adapta- tion, ritual, and cosmology (see also Starn 1995). Starn’s critique is relevant well beyond the case of Peru. To be sure, it would be wrong to contend that anthropologists have in general ignored the revolution- ary upheavals in their ethnographic midsts. As we shall explain in more detail 1 2 introduction presently, there are plenty of anthropological studies of revolution, including a number of substantial monographs, written by ethnographers who have been caught up in the action of revolutionary uprisings
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