Circulation,reciprocity and activism: Interview with Professor Michael Herzfeld

In your talk, you addressed Marcel Mauss’s dire predictions about the collapse of reciprocity under conditions of modern capitalism. You argued that a combination of technological innovation (especially the Internet) and a new commercial ethic (‘neoliberalism’) has subverted older forms of hospitality, exchange and other systems of reciprocity. At the same time, you claim, that new circulation systems, especially of information, and the secrecy rules that purport to protect it, provide new loopholes corresponding to some older modalities, and suggest that human beings will always try to circulate goods (material or otherwise) as a way of remaining connected, but will also always seek to subvert this connectedness (or ‘connectivity’) as a way of resisting the structures of power. You also argue that it is in situ fieldwork, albeit not always in static locations, that allows us as anthropologists, sociologists and cultural analysts to gauge these sometimes enormous changes and their effects on our daily lives.

Why is the question of reciprocity and the social important, even critical, for today’s social and cultural scholarship?

I think that such questions are important at a number of levels. First of all, there is the intrinsic level of understanding how society works and how it worked in the past. That is simply an academic question. But in practical terms, I also think that, as we lose sight of the ways in which reciprocity informed the idea of social knowledge – that is, the idea of knowing one another – we see that people are alienated, are disillusioned, cynical, unhappy with their lot. And very often they end up also being very passive consumers. This is not to say that they don’t know what they are doing when they accept that role, but it looks to me more like the satisfaction of immediate needs than it does the solution of long-term problems. Again, the temptation, of course, is to produce some kind of nostalgia for a past that never existed, and such is certainly not my intention. On the other hand, most of us – that is, most of the people of my generation and quite a bit younger – grew up under conditions in which we knew the people we corresponded with as individuals; we engaged in various forms of reciprocity with them – a reciprocity of ideas and affect as much as of objects and goods. And the visible and palpable and tactile dimensions of such reciprocity were very important in maintaining one’s sense of belonging to a society. These things are now being displaced – not necessarily always in a bad way, but I think that it would be disastrous if we did not at least look critically at that process and try to understand what it is doing to us.

How should we then understand, in your view, the relationship between reciprocity and circulation in today’s neoliberal world?

There is an increasing assault on the notion of reciprocity. Circulation is seen, especially under conditions of neoliberalism, as a way of ensuring the flow of goods very often to those who can least afford them. Any question of actual reciprocity is wiped out by the pretence that people really do have free choices. That they have choices under the system is indisputable, but the choices are set by the system in such a way that other alternatives that might be more conducive to an enjoyable and dignified social life are often taken completely off the table. This is a rather pessimistic view of the matter, but it seems to me that the entire neoliberal agenda is designed to create illusions of freedom so that a relatively small proportion of the world’s people can profit, can create profit, at the expense of the vast majority. And this increasing inequality upsets the kinds of equilibrium, imperfect though they may have been, that made social life both direct and enjoyable in the past.

I am not necessarily saying that we should endeavour to return to an Edenic state of perfect and balanced reciprocity, nor frankly do I necessarily think that such a condition ever really existed, but the possibility for reciprocity and for correcting its incidental deficiencies is vastly decreased to the point where I at least don’t really understand what social life could possibly mean if the logic of the neoliberal market is pushed to the extreme towards which it now seems to be tending.

In the framework of anthropology, how should we locate the theoretical root to the dynamics between reciprocity, circulation and the social?

In many ways, of course, it is useful to make a distinction between reciprocity and circulation, just as it is extremely important to make the distinction Edwin Ardener made between reciprocity and exchange, where reciprocity is a structure of principle and exchange is a structure of action. Circulation would seem to me to come much closer to the level of action, and of course, not all circulation involves reciprocity. So these are complex matters. If we use the terms precisely, we might get rid of the illusion that we are really creating new theory by talking about these matters. That the notion of reciprocity is theoretically very important is certainly not made any the less so by the apparent occlusion of reciprocity by modern forms, or through modern forms of technology and the increasing physical distance that we see among interlocutors – among people who are in dialogue with each other.

We really have to be very careful here because it is quite possible that new forms of reciprocity are emerging, and that the circulation of ideas and of technologies makes such mutations of fundamental patterns of reciprocity possible. These are empirical questions, and I think they have to be answered empirically and indeed ethnographically. I would therefore greatly regret it if the practice of intense immersion in the field would be displaced by the kind of simulacrum of fieldwork that in the hands of less practised and careful analysts goes by the term of multi-sited ethnography coined by George Marcus.

I suspect that he (Marcus) initially had no idea how it (his concept) would be abused. For me, good multi-sited ethnography involves the same kind of detailed and focused attention on the minutiae of everyday practice that we saw in the older and more conventional ethnographies. We would expect under those conditions that there would be connections, either formal or preferably substantive, among the people in the various sites in question. That kind of multi-sited ethnography can be very valuable. When the term is used to justify a superficial variety of academic tourism, however, I would argue that it actually is quite destructive because it provides an excuse in the name of what looks like a legitimate research project to do extremely shallow work and to abandon precisely the kind of intense focus that allows ethnography as a method to give anthropology its distinctive contribution to the social sciences. It becomes particularly important to focus on this problem when we talk about reciprocity and circulation. Clearly, we are not talking about circulation of the geographically rather restricted kind intended by Malinowski and his study of the Kula ring, for example; we are talking about very complex and very far-flung processes of circulation, and these necessarily entail new elaborations of the basic principles of reciprocity. Those elaborations will emerge as forms of hospitality, for example, some of which are completely taken over in the sense of becoming rhetorical rather than substantive, as in the hotel industry’s portrayal of itself as the ‘hospitality industry’. These are all processes that we can identify, describe and analyse. And I think that it does not require enormous theoretical sophistication to do this. I would caution against overtheorising these problems precisely because then I think we lose the acute descriptive sensibility that, as I say, makes our contribution to the social sciences so very special.

In your talk, you discussed immediate technology and the relative virtual sociology in rather critical terms as something less real, less authentic compared to the physical sociology created and maintained in traditional coffee shops and so on. What is your take on the creative potential of emancipation and all resistance in new media technology? You mention the Occupy movement as one of the contemporary sites and forms of resistance, and as we know, people in the Occupy movement are very effective in using immediate technologies in their creation of shared social reality around movement and its political goals.

I am absolutely not against new media technology, but I believe that it requires a critical response that is largely lacking in the public sphere. Of course, the use of social media and other forms of media technology enhances movements such as the Occupy movement, to which on the whole I am very sympathetic – how could it be otherwise for someone who works with problems such as gentrification?

I feel, nonetheless, that we must also look very carefully at the ways in which this technology is used to fill people’s lives with a lot of rather meaningless chatter. And I think it is reasonable to ask what purpose that serves, without wanting to resort to any kind of conspiracy theory or indeed to attribute evil intentions to anyone; I simply want to raise the possibility that this is a very effective way of preventing people from spending time and effort on a critical analysis of current political problems. I also think that the ways in which people now often use coffee shops, in some countries at least, are not conducive to shared sociable critical discussion. They are, however, conducive to highly individualised and even selfish forms of interaction or indeed of non-interaction. When one person sits at a table designed for four or six people and occupies that table completely with a computer and other office accoutrements, it seems to me that this is not unlike the process of gentrification played out by one individual in a small place capable of supporting a larger population and a more engaged social life. I take over this place, I use it as my office, let everyone else find their own solution. This expresses the neoliberal version of choice remarkably well, and I hope that we will be able to build a critical response to it, not only in our analysis but also in our practices and by bridging those two things, of course, in our ethnographic research.

Last but not least, in your keynote address at the SIEF congress, you left us as an academic audience with the challenge to join in the resistance against the neoliberal politics and its practices of quasi-sociology. Why should we take on this battle and what is it that we can do as academics to rescue the social as a concept, as a practice, as a condition?

I would never impose on any colleague, friend or acquaintance the imperative of joining in a battle against a dominant ideology. I would simply seek to warn everyone that, if we don’t take a critical stance towards the current explosion of neoliberal control, we are likely to find ourselves living in an increasingly precarious, unpleasant and dangerously uncertain world. This being the case, it behoves us as academics to try to develop ways in which our research concerns, which are valuable in their own right, can also illuminate processes that threaten the very possibility of social life.

It is possible that I am exaggerating or that I am exaggerating a great deal, but to know whether this is an exaggeration means that we have to look very closely at the way that the neoliberal and other kinds of ideology shape those spaces of social interaction. This is an ethnographic question. It is always an ethnographic question, and even the threats to ethnographic practice that we see coming from supposedly progressive sources in many cases are actually very reactionary because they are attempts to suppress the individuality and eccentricity and the undisciplined nature of human life, which are subjected to a kind of regimentation that makes it much easier for certain economic forces to prevail.

In my view, we do have a responsibility to speak out, but we have to base our critiques on actual research, and the research we are trying to do, and that we do well, is ethnography. I see ethnography as a necessarily political activity – political, that is, in the broadest sense. I believe that without it, the world will have very few sources of insight into the relationship, into that very complex relationship, between what happens in our everyday existence and the forces that are increasingly and ever more invisibly shaping the world that we inhabit. So there is a collective responsibility; it is everybody’s individual choice as to how far one wants to go in pursuing those goals. I certainly think that speaking out without an informed view is irresponsible, and I would rather see people doing pure research than simply emoting in public about the dreadful things that are happening in the world. But if we can use our research to initiate a serious discussion about how the various economic ideologies constrain or, as they sometimes do, enable the pursuit of attractive forms of social life, then there is surely no reason why we should not develop our thinking and our actions in that direction.