Gavin Smith | University of Toronto (original) (raw)

Papers by Gavin Smith

We seem to be stuck between an accurate assessment of what Gramsci would call an organic crisis a... more We seem to be stuck between an accurate assessment of what Gramsci would call an organic crisis and confusions and differences about the making of a social revolution that paralyse our agency. In many cases moreover this is not helped by the use of evocative words (revolution, resistance, etc) in ways that are quite different from their usage when actual revolutionary political practice required greater precision. I believe a renewed interest in the variety of possible forms struggle might best be understood by re-examining the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) for understanding the current organic crisis so I begin there. I then move on to a re-examination of ‘resistance’ suggesting that advances in method and research design might be made by replacing the notion ‘citizen’ with a view of subaltern people as potential ‘resistants’. This is followed by a discussion of revolution in terms of UCD, specifically as an initial period in which multiple insurgencies are combined, and a later period that is challenged by issues of dual power. There is no wrapping up. The intervention is meant as a provocation for a possible collective conversation.

The paper discusses the limitations of the first year of fieldwork in the 1970s that resulted fro... more The paper discusses the limitations of the first year of fieldwork in the 1970s that resulted from a combination of the fieldworker's own ignorance and informants' reluctance to discuss their life-histories.

Critique of Anthropology, 1991

The urgent call among contemporary anthropologists for a new form of ethnography or a new ethnogr... more The urgent call among contemporary anthropologists for a new form of ethnography or a new ethnographic form has encouraged us to roll over in the family bed from the side occupied by the parent of science to that occupied by the charming young bride of literary fictions and criticism. Yet the rapidity with which the new ethnography has replaced the discourse of referentially specific truth claims with an evocative discourse of dialogical open-endedness tempts us to ask what conditions have arisen to give it such instant intellectual credibility. A tentative hypothesis would be that it allows intellectuals engaged simultaneously in cultural production and consumption to acknowledge the ethical albatross they carry round their necks-as the intellectuals who produced the monstrous and failed modernist constructions in the past-while giving them a device by which they do not have to resolve the problem of responsibility by any serious commitment of their own. Indeed the ethical dilemma is resolved precisely by passing responsibility for what reality claims are to be made either back to the 'voices' of the original subjects, or on to the interpretive choices made by the ultimate readers (Birth, 1990). Ironically, the narcissistic preoccupation of the new ethnographic writers with the way they themselves perform cultural production, does not focus attention on their responsibility; to the contrary, a style is devised by which they can remain ethically pure while also staying on the political sidelines.

Journal of Peasant Studies, 1979

Page 1. Socio-economic Differentiation and Relations of Production among Rural-Based Petty Produc... more Page 1. Socio-economic Differentiation and Relations of Production among Rural-Based Petty Producers in Central Peru, 1880 to 1970. Gavin A. Smith* In an attempt to uncover the complexity of socio-economic differentiation ...

Current Anthropology, 2006

What might an ethnographic study of late capitalism look like? Anthropologists have answered this... more What might an ethnographic study of late capitalism look like? Anthropologists have answered this question by increasingly assuming that what distinguishes their discipline is the study of culture-the culture of capitalism, of globalization, and so forth. Instead, we need to ...

American Anthropologist, 1991

... totally ap-plicable to these pieces, they do illustrate the "art of assemblage" whi... more ... totally ap-plicable to these pieces, they do illustrate the "art of assemblage" which reflects a larger theme in Kal-abari culture, a ... Of special ethnohistorical note is Bell's personal ac-quaintance with one of the last Miskito "kings," George Augustus Frederick, a boyhood friend and ...

History & Memory, Jan 1, 2002

This article focuses on attitudes toward participation in public politics (being político) in con... more This article focuses on attitudes toward participation in public politics (being político) in contemporary Spain and the ways in which they have been affected by the violence and fear generated by the Francoist regime (19391975). Social memories and silences are an important part of ...

Over the last few years occasions have arisen in which I have found myself talking to people who ... more Over the last few years occasions have arisen in which I have found myself talking to people who have experienced radical displacements in their lives as a result both of economic distress and of political disturbance. They have been obliged to 'move on', to 'move out', to 'move away'. Yet these are not really narratives that help put order into the world we live in. They are less to do with narrative, which is a rather literary way of believing the world can be settled for us. They're more to do with the simultaneous solidity and the elusiveness of the role place plays in these people's lives -even when they are not there. And they're about the slipperiness of a time-past that sometimes deceives people that it can help deal with the present, and a time-future that keeps jumping about and producing either perpetual anxiety or simply resignation.

"More dangerous than a standing army is private control of the money supply" Abraham Lincoln

IUAES Conference Paper, Japan, May 18, 2014

The argument I make in this presentation is a fairly obvious one. It is that the spatially widesp... more The argument I make in this presentation is a fairly obvious one. It is that the spatially widespread insurrections in the global south during the sixties, and especially their victories against France in Algeria, the U.S. in Southeast Asia, and Portugal in its various colonies, obliged anthropologists and historians on the Left to re-think the way they did anthropology: their methods, their research design, and the concepts they used. Though in many cases it may not have been explicit in their work, the fact is that they began to design their research questions in very much the same way as the issues that insurgents themselves had laid out (or were laying out) in their various forms: "What is to be done?". Moreover the work of this bridgehead of Left scholars had a knock-on effect on the discipline as a whole, reshaping the entire enterprise of what socio-cultural anthropology was.

T]he capitalist mode of production can never be reproduced in an identical manner. It is impossib... more T]he capitalist mode of production can never be reproduced in an identical manner. It is impossible to reproduce the relations of production in the same form in which they existed at a certain moment in history, in a certain phase of accumulation… Capitalism is forced to transform itself, its own modes of exploiting the labour force, its mode of socializing individuals. It is therefore impossible for capitalism not to evolve, and this is the only possible form of "reproduction". This is capitalism's necessity.

La pregunta que nos encuentra es: si los cambios en los últimos años, al nivel global y a los niv... more La pregunta que nos encuentra es: si los cambios en los últimos años, al nivel global y a los niveles regionales y locales, implican nuevas cuestiones, conceptos y metodologías en antropología. Pero esta pregunta provoca otras: ¿no es verdad que los antropólogos han cambiado sus métodos y conceptos en el ultimo cuarto siglo tanto que no son, en ninguna manera, los mismos métodos y conceptos de, por ejemplo, los estudios de los cincuenta? Si eso es verdad -y creo que lo es -pues, La pregunta es: si hemos experimentado cambios a varios niveles en los últimos años de tanto momento que surgen nuevas desafíos para los antropólogos.

Labour/Travail, 2012

A little while before he died of cancer in 1999 I wrote a letter to Eric Wolf, telling him my sto... more A little while before he died of cancer in 1999 I wrote a letter to Eric Wolf, telling him my story of the "Three Erics I Have Known". One of these, my uncle Eric, born in Vienna the youngest child of Melanie Klein, had married my father's sister and found himself the idiosyncratic outsider in a rural English family. As a result, he earned the undying allegiance of a nephew who likewise felt himself to be in some way on the margins. My uncle never spoke of himself, except when pushed to answer questions about childhood and his famous mother. But I gradually came to learn that he had been in a small group who set up a British maquis organized in the event of a German invasion.

which I argue that a) finance capital operates especially by targeting difference -among people, ... more which I argue that a) finance capital operates especially by targeting difference -among people, places, assets -to achieve something called securitization through diversity; b) this leads to the replacement of the old Keynesian "expansive hegemony" with a new "selective hegemony" which lives off and produces difference; c) the distinctive populations that are reproduced as a result then negotiate for their own exclusivity to be part of the hegemonic fieldnurses, gays, indigenas etc -and hence against others; d) because finance is not about productivity but about capture (what Harvey calls a "class concentrating project), so the result is an absolute surplus population who will never be re-absorbed into the social economy: "the residuum"; e) already involved in exclusivist politics and always afraid that they too may become part of the residuum, the selected groups collude in the discourse of a threatening residuum; and finally f) it follows that this dominant process produces two responses: one the negotiated politics within the field of selective hegemony, and the other a counter-politics that is beyond negotiation. The so-called new and identity-type social movements of the selected groups will never expand to include the residuum, therefore the residuum will produce its own politics. If the Left does not develop a project that relates to this latter, they will remain a series of isolated minefields like the old forms of anarchy in late 19thC Europe. It is therefore imperative that the Left cease being squeamish about the inevitable violence of the counter-politics of the residuum.