(The Negation of Hierarchy and Its Conseq PDF

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Anthropological Theory
2015, Vol. 15(1) 3–21
The negation of hierarchy ! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499614564887
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Vita Peacock
University College London, UK
Abstract
This paper traces the large-scale abandonment of hierarchical models of society by
human scientists in the aftermath of 1968. The late 20th century saw these scholars
emphasizing the contractual and ‘egalitarian’ relations between actors, at the expense of
relations predicated on status differences and the differentiation of function relative to a
totality. It simultaneously argues that these scholarly developments hinged on a set of
socio-economic conditions in Europe and the USA which defined ever-growing numbers
of social forms in terms of the commodity. The great paradox, of course, is that the
same historical moment in which the social was ‘flattened’ by human scientists also
witnessed the emergence of new structural inequalities on an unprecedented scale. The
paper concludes that this realization is leading to a resurgence of hierarchical models in
the human sciences.
Keywords
Flat ontology, hierarchy, neoliberalism, organizations, value
Introduction
Resplendent on the wall behind the dais of the Great Council Hall in Venice’s
Doge’s Palace, the former seat of its government for several centuries, is a gargan-
tuan painting called ‘Paradise’ by the Italian Renaissance artist Tintoretto. The
image is dominated by the figure of Christ, right of centre at the top, who, sun-like,
radiates gold upon the rest, and towards whom an unwieldy, brain-scrambling
mass of saints, angels and evangelists in varying degrees of dress appear to gravi-
tate in uneven concentric circles. The ground on which Christ stands is composed
entirely of slightly lost-looking plump-cheeked winged babies, or Cherubim, each face
tilted at a slightly different angle. Over a century ago, however, excavators discovered
that this bombastic piece had been concealing a long-forgotten fresco underneath it,
painted in the 14th century by Guariento of Padua.1 Its predecessor shared the same
Corresponding author:
Vita Peacock, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Email: vita.peacock@ucl.ac.uk
Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at University College London on March 26, 2015

4 Anthropological Theory 15(1)
paradisiacal theme, but in Guariento’s celestial portrait strict order and solemnity
reigned. The central figures of Christ and Mary were surrounded by a ‘multi-tiered
extravaganza’ with ‘rank upon rank of fiery-winged angels and saints’ (Paoletti and
Radke, 2001: 135) seated in static postures on rows of benches and individual stalls.
The angels around the throne were adult – rather than childlike, draped in long
robes, and gazed collectively at the central pair with grave expressions. After the
Great Fire of 1577, which damaged large parts of the fresco and the palace itself,
the Venetian aristocracy awarded Tintoretto the commission to replace it. For art
historians, the shift in representation from a heaven of variegated tiers of draped
adult angels and saints, to the same biblical characters as an overwhelming swarm
of winged children and semi-denuded figures, is emblematic simply of ‘changing
taste’ (Franzoi, 1979: 284): the substitution of a Gothic style for its Renaissance
successor.
Nevertheless, there is a parallel explanation which goes right to the heart of the
argument this article pursues: that this was a representation of one system of
exchange being substituted for another. In the intervening period, the Venetian
Republic had been the key northern nucleus of a global commodities trade: once
the primary passage point for the importation of silk spices and cotton from the
East into Europe, and the exportation of woolen cloths and metal in return, not to
mention large-scale transactions of slaves across the Adriatic (Goody, 2012). It had
witnessed the invention of still recognizable banking and accountancy practices: the
bill of exchange, the transaction tax, and double-entry bookkeeping (Lane, 1973;
Lane and Mueller, 1985). In short, this city state was an early progenitor of the
exchange relations which can be defined as ‘capitalistic’, and the transition from
Guariento’s to Tintoretto’s paradise reflected these developments. Since Pseudo-
Dionysus in the 5th century (2011), angels have been symbolic vehicles for social
conceptions of hierarchy, and in stripping them of their age, garments, and cohe-
siveness, Tintoretto was stripping these heavenly hosts of their potency. Just like
the occlusion of Guariento’s fresco, a new canvas of value was being painted upon
the surface of the old. Tintoretto’s social arrangement was less concerned with the
strict delineations between different kinds of persons, each of whom performed
different functions in a totality, than with setting a single individual (in the form
of Christ) against a chaotic and as yet unformed social mass. Thus the underlying
argument, which these artworks illustrate, is that the socio-economic conditions of
commodity exchange create social imaginaries which work against hierarchical
formations. Such conditions are, as Gadamer once said, the social theorist’s ‘his-
torically-effected consciousness’ (1979). This is the basic proposition on which the
paper rests, which I shall return to again and again.
The overlying argument, however, is rather more modest. I hold that the past
forty years of scholarship in the human sciences have witnessed a progressive mar-
ginalization, leading in many fields to negation, of hierarchy and hierarchical ideas as
analytic categories.2 This is a historical process which begins with the anti-
hierarchical critiques of 1968 (in which many of those who subsequently found
fame as human scientists were enmeshed), but gathers pace in the 1980s and

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particularly the 1990s, when the flattening visions of computational ontology, par-
ticularly the metaphor of network, becoming popularized. I trace this trajectory
through the first section of the article in three ways: a literature review of anthropo-
logical articles from 1970–2000 which tracks the changing associations of the cat-
egory of hierarchy, an examination of three popular metaphors for the social (the
rhizome, the fractal and the actor-network), all of which serve in some way to flatten
it, and in presenting a short review of Louis Dumont’s (a scholar virtually synonym-
ous with hierarchy) waning popularity towards the end of the twentieth century.
In the following section I search for answers, and thus return again to my basic
proposition, that these scholarly trends epitomize a Gadamerian consciousness,
historically affected by the increasing pervasiveness of the commodity-form as a
means of configuring relationships. To do this I rest on one of Strathern’s argu-
ments in The Gender of the Gift (1988), that entire societies are dominated by one
system of exchange or another. While her opposition is between commodity and
gift societies, here I erect an opposition between commodity and hierarchical socie-
ties. The 1968 critique delegitimized the idea of hierarchy at an intellectual level in
Europe and America through its egalitarian message. However, the cruel paradox
is that this egalitarian message simultaneously smoothed the transition from trad-
itional forms of hierarchical exchange (between teacher and student, doctor and
patient, among many others) to forms of exchange dominated by the idea of the
commodity, which in practice is no less unequal (indeed perhaps more so), creating
its own peculiar forms of alienation and asymmetry.
Before moving onto outline the final section, I shall pause for a moment to
elucidate some of the terms I am deploying here. The definitions put to work –
of hierarchy and its corollary, of value – are clearly drawn directly from Louis
Dumont (1980, 1986). For Dumont it is the location of its value which fundamen-
tally answers the question of whether a given social order is hierarchical or not. In a
hierarchical/holistic society, value arises from inside the whole social totality, and is
then unequally distributed to persons and things within it; as he says at one point,
‘to adopt a value is to introduce hierarchy’ (1980: 20). Meanwhile, in an egalitarian/
individualistic society value attaches itself to the part, deriving from individuals
and their activities. Therefore, when I talk about the negation of hierarchy I mean
the disappearance – or even denial – of the idea that an asymmetry of value is
already immanent within a social body and is collectively distributed. And when
I talk about its substitution for exchange value or the commodity-form, I mean the
ubiquity of the idea that for any shared value to exist it must have been actively
produced through part-part interactions, what Joel Robbins calls its ‘production-
oriented’ (2013: 100) definition.
Finally, as the title suggests, I chart some of the consequences of this negation.
I begin with strict reference to the human sciences and document some of the
epistemological effects of imagining worlds in which all of its actors are commen-
surable, and where social totalities are always secondary rather than primary to
their activity. Having dived, at the beginning of the paper, from socio-economic
conditions into scholarship, I then return to the surface and reflect on the

contemporary character of these conditions, which may, in turn, press the future
human scientist’s historically-effected consciousness into new and unfamiliar
shapes in the future.
The negation of hierarchy

The argument I submit is that the last forty years or so have witnessed a widespread
negation of hierarchy in the human sciences as a legitimate means of theorizing
social organization, and its corollary social being. It is an argument I deduce from
three beginnings. First, using a keyword search in the Anthropological Index
Online, I demonstrate the scholarly battle between the conceptual alternatives of
hierarchy and egalitarianism (or equality) played out in journal articles from 1970
onwards until very recently this battle has left hierarchy vanquished and egalitar-
ianism as victor. Next I explore some of the cognitive products of this victory, three
metaphors of heterarchy which have colonized the visual imagination of society
over the same period: the rhizome, the fractal, and the actor-network. Finally, like
many of these tacit attacks on hierarchy, I anthropomorphize the problem. It seems
that very few discussions of hierarchy can occur without some reference to the mid-
to-late 20th-century French anthropologist Louis Dumont. The rejection from
many quarters of Dumont has been, in this analysis, a sublimated rejection of
hierarchy itself.
One can see an incipient hierarchical critique emerging from roughly 1970
onwards. It is one which begins with distinct equanimity. An approach develops
of presenting hierarchical systems of social organization as simply one face of a
complementary dyad, the other being phenomena of an egalitarian character. For
George Marcus, while acknowledging that Tonga maintains ‘elaborate ideologies
of stratification’ (1975: 36) in most contexts, among Tongan commoners, this is
supplanted at the village level by an egalitarian emphasis on common kinship and
historical origin. Maurice Bloch, meanwhile, suggests the total interpenetration of
hierarchical and egalitarian modes in the expression of Merina kinship in
Madagascar. These modes are ‘so thoroughly mixed’ as to produce a ‘bewildering
kaleidoscope’ (1981: 6), splintering any monist analysis the anthropologist might
wish to present. Likewise for Jonathan Hill (1984), hierarchy and egalitarianism
again form two different modes of social structuring among the Wakuénai of the
Venezuelan Amazon, which alternate seasonally according to the relative wealth or
dearth of aquatic resources. This general interest in complementarity reverberates
into the ’90 s and can be witnessed elsewhere (Boehm, 1993; Hamer, 1986;
Harrison, 1985; Howe, 1989; Trigger, 1988; Parkin, 1994).
By the late ’80 s, however, the debate becomes more heated. Complementarity
gives way to antithesis, and the language surrounding hierarchy starts to take on a
more contentious and antagonistic tone. Although some years earlier Dumont had
already pointed out that his concept of hierarchy aroused ‘passions in some quar-
ters’ (1971: 58), it is not until Arjun Appadurai’s trenchant later intervention that
this is sharpened to the finest of polemical points. For Appadurai (1988), the

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concept of hierarchy is an entirely etic phenomenon, its genealogy inextricably

bound to the Western ‘construction’ (1988: 36) of non-Western natives. The only
righteous postcolonial response to such constructions becomes then to put hier-
archy (along with its progenitors) back ‘in its place’ (p. 36). Nicholas Thomas
elsewhere takes a similar line, proposing hierarchy’s negation outright: ‘It
doesn’t seem immediately clear that ‘‘hierarchy’’. . . stands as a concept that one
can use at all’ (1994: 109). Yet aside from such explicit rejections, possibly at a less
conscious level, the war waged on hierarchy is apparent from the linguistic weap-
onry which assails it. Hierarchy and equality have now become ‘antinomies’
(Young, 1994: 270). Like an opponent, there is an ‘alliance against’ it (Graham,
1994). It is ‘defeat[ed]’ (Mitchell, 1988). It becomes ‘dismantl[ed]’ (Young, 1994),
and ‘distintegrat[es]’ (Thomas, 1988).3 Even in the epilogue of a journal issue
devoted to exploring the enduring utility of the notion, Margaret Jolly seems to
channel the collapse of hierarchy as a thought-object. The metaphor she elects to
give shape to the argument could be no flatter: a ‘horizon’ (1994: 377).
On this subject, the relative ubiquity of certain types of metaphor in the human
sciences can tell us a great deal. As Donna Haraway (1976) demonstrates for the
biological sciences, paradigm shifts in thought are often (if not always) escorted by
simultaneous metaphorical shifts to represent them. This is certainly so for hier-
archy’s negation, as new images of heterarchy have arrived in recent years to pre-
side over our collective imaginations. I shall now briefly sketch three of them in the
order they appeared historically.
The rhizome is introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in their landmark work
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). It is a biological term
for a root plant usually found underground (like ginger or turmeric), which grows
outwards from a potentially infinite number of nodal points, reproducing itself
vegetatively as ruptured segments that can themselves continue growing. Indeed
Deleuze and Guattari are highly self-conscious about the attachment of metaphors
to thought-paradigms, and thus the implications of their deployment. With the
rhizome they arm themselves for tropic warfare against the ‘root-tree’ (1987: 16),
signalling the hierarchical paradigms of earlier epochs. ‘We’re tired of trees. We
should stop believing in trees . . . They’ve made us suffer too much’, they lament
(1987: 17). The rhizome as its image-adversary is defined by many things, the most
significant for us being its ‘flat’ as opposed to vertical dimensionality; its potential
for infinite connectivity as opposed to being fenced in by borders and ruptures; and
its lack of a central growth principle – unlike the tree, it possesses no ‘pivot-unity’
(1987: 9) ordering the relationships between and whole. It should also be noted – as
this is a common tendency among theorists of heterarchy – that the rhizomic
alternative is presented as the more just and human-oriented of the two. The
tree is ‘not a method for the people’ (1987: 8).
The fractal is another biological metaphor which performs hierarchy’s negation.
An idea first conceived of by Benoit Mandelbrot (1983), and occurring in both
natural and cultural phenomena (Eglash 1999), fractals are very simply the
reappearance of similar patterns at different scales. The introduction of the fractal

metaphor into anthropology comes from ethnographies of Melanesia (Strathern,

1991; Wagner, 1991), a good regional vantage-point from which to negate hier-
archy as – like Europe and America – its dominant ideology is one of egalitarianism
(Robbins, 1994). In any event, the fractal, like the rhizome, is again an effort to
reconfigure the relations between parts and wholes, except, where the rhizome
thrives on multiplicity and open borders, and is in essence the anti-whole, the
fractal is instead a ‘holon’ (Koestler, 1967): both part and whole together. What
they share, however, is the absence of a pivot-unity: a superordinate holistic logic
determining the interrelationships of parts.4 Instead the fractal, in the iterability of
its proportions at different scales, instantiates its own ordering principle: the rela-
tion (Strathern, 1991).
Finally we arrive at the actor-network: an idea which takes inspiration from the
rhizome (principally the notion of assemblage), yet neglects its poetry, being a
mechanist-materialist vision.5 Unlike the previous metaphors, the actor-network
is not borrowed from the natural sciences but is a conceptual invention of several
social scientists (Michael Callon, John Law, et al.). Without an extant organic
image, we shall then have to draw it. There is an enormous literature on actor-
network theory, but for the sake of brevity I will go straight to its godfather, Bruno
Latour, and his definitive text on the subject (2005). The key thing is that the
landscape in which actor-networks flourish is completely ‘flat’, therefore participat-
ing with both rhizome and fractal in hierarchy’s negation. Latour uses the word
throughout the text, even making reference to ‘the metaphor of a flatland’ to pic-
ture the landscape he sees (2005: 220).6 However, unlike the rhizome and the
fractal, this flatland is completely colourless. It is a ‘negative’, ‘empty’, and
‘blank’ space (2005: 221). On to this white void one then overlays a ‘grid’, of
which the intersections are constituted by actors which are either human or non-
human, forming a ‘star-like shape’ (2005: 221–2): one, which will look slightly
different from each node. What all of these popular metaphors share is an over-
arching vision of horizontality. They lack that ‘pivot-unity’ identified by Deleuze
and Guattari, unevenly distributing value in a given context.7
The final manner in which a general negation of hierarchy has been performed is
through the historical rejection of Louis Dumont himself. With this I am implying
two things. First, that Dumont, both within anthropology and beyond it, became
the de facto human face of hierarchy. There are many instances of this, of which a
few bear mentioning. Not only have the last two major collective interventions on
the question of hierarchy (Jolly and Mosko, 1994; Rio and Smedal, 2009) been
introduced with a thorough appraisal of Dumontian thought, but Appadurai’s
afore-mentioned article (1988) – which stated the titular purpose of ‘putting hier-
archy back in its place’ – dealt exclusively with Dumont and thus, in practice, was
putting the latter back in his ‘place’. This kind of slippage also appears elsewhere
(Graeber, 2007: 47). Secondly, it does not seem radical to suggest that Dumont was
never fully embraced by the mainstream. Indeed, one need look no further than the
comparatively stratospheric trajectory of his contemporary and compatriot Claude
Lévi-Strauss – whose binary and cybernetic visions caught both the scholarly and

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popular imaginations – to make this claim, but it is similarly illustrated by the

ambivalent way in which Dumont and his legacy still get characterized. Dumont
himself presaged this phenomenon very early on, describing the ‘general polemical
orientation’ (1971: 62) which infused much of the commentary on his work, and it
is one which endured long afterwards. Rio and Smedal, several decades later,
entered what they call ‘the highly charged field populated by the allies and enemies
of this controversial figure’ (2009: 1), while Jonathan Friedman (2012) has
described the way in which the groups which had been associated with Dumont
became ‘marginalized’ on his departure from academia. Meanwhile, right in the
thick of the narrative being drawn here, Joel Robbins expressed a faint surprise
that a ‘Dumontian anthropology’ (1994: 25) had not really taken off so far.
However, in this analysis, this has been no accident but the effect of deep ideo-
logical processes in operation.
‘But why is this so?’

‘But why is this so?’, as Dumont asks of his readers (1971: 64). What exactly is at
stake here? Who or what stands to benefit from the negation of hierarchy as a way
of conceiving of and differentiating persons and things? The answer has already
been given – the intense proliferation of exchange-value as the sole value metric
(and those in the business of producing it) – but it will require some elucidation.
Following Dumont (1980), hierarchy is – broadly speaking – the scooping up of
all members of a given social group into an imagined whole, and then their assig-
nations into particular locations and functions, relative to this whole, based on its
dominant ‘value-idea’. Thus in Dumont’s classic study of caste in India, this value
is one of religious ‘purity’ which characterizes a myriad of social practices and
arrangements, yet his model has also been applied elsewhere. For Sahlins, the
hierarchy of ancient Hawaii is organized around a principle of divinely originating
‘mana’ (1985: 207) while, in contemporary Tonga, James maintains this value-idea
is one of ‘eiki’ or honour (1992: 82). In my own study of the hierarchy of
Germany’s Max Planck Society, I conceptualize it as one of ‘charisma’ (sensu
Weber, 1979: 1111–46). Not only do charismatic principles govern the internal
structure of the organization – by means of the ‘Harnackprinzip’ (the Harnack
Principle) – but it is clearly those who embody this value-idea most closely (the
departmental directors) who are accorded the highest hierarchical status. The
important thing for Dumont, as I have said, is that in a hierarchical society this
value-idea derives from the whole social totality, as opposed to an egalitarian
society where it derives from the individual.
One can begin to imagine, then, how the increasing ubiquity of the commodity
form, which hinges on the practice of making all entities (or ‘parts’) somehow
equivalent and therefore tradable, would render the value which derives from a
whole obsolete. Exchange value and hierarchical value are two contrasting ways of
assigning value to people and things, which each preclude the other’s immanent
possibility. As Marilyn Strathern argues (contra Gregory, 1982), gift and

commodity systems do not just function as separate alternatives within the same
society. Instead, they are always in some sort of asymmetrical tension (1988: 18).
A society is dominated by one system of exchange or another, and thus a society
dominated by commodity exchange cannot help but imagine the gift in a specific
way. In proposing that a ‘whole economy’ (1988: 19) can be characterized by the
gift, she is making a claim about every domain of social life. A gift economy rests
upon the ‘enchainment of all relations’ rather than their sundering (1988: 161), an
enchainment partially revealed and reconstituted through gift transaction. Thus the
relation between exchange value and hierarchical value in Europe and America –
the region from which my research and its comparators are drawn – can never be
one of simple complementary difference. Rather, it has always been, and remains,
nothing less than a fierce competition to establish a universal meaning to all arenas
of exchange: a competition exchange value is now comprehensively winning.
Yet when and how did this competition come about? As I made clear in the
opening paragraph, the ‘when’ ultimately begins with the early modern history of
European capitalism (or more concretely, the large-scale exchange of goods across
the world and the institutions and ideas that were erected around this), but this
kind of longue dureé is too diffuse to be seriously examined in a piece of writing of
this length.
Instead, there is a much shorter trajectory which can be far more easily traced,
and its impact on scholarship more easily identified, which begins with the new
social movements of the 1960s. The ‘denunciation’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005:
170), or in my terms negation, of hierarchy was the central theme amidst a range of
critiques that drove the 1968 revolts across Europe and America. As these authors
argue, the ‘social critique’ – driven largely by unionized workers – raised questions
around the traditional exercise of moral authority and the concentration of wealth
and power. Meanwhile, the ‘artistic critique’ – driven largely by students, intellec-
tuals and artists – saw conventional hierarchical structures (familial, religious, pol-
itical) as oppressing the apparently unbounded creativity and mutability of a
unique individual. The following decades then – as Boltanski and Chiapello
show us – witnessed the sterilization of the radical content of both anti-hierarchical
critiques through their calculated incorporation into management discourses. The
most recognizable of these become the new ethical arguments for the reorganiza-
tion of work, which begin to gather speed in the ’70 s and ’80 s, around the trope of
‘flexibility’ (2005: 194).
The period after 1968 – which other social scientists have generally agreed to call
‘neoliberalism’ – from an anthropological perspective thus entailed a reconfigur-
ation of relationships in a huge variety of social contexts. As Margaret Thatcher
once put it rather aptly, ‘Economics are the method, but the object is to change the
soul’ (cited in Harvey, 2005: 23). It was this momentum to change the soul (of
which Thatcher was but one architect among many) that still reverberates today,
particularly in the UK. Stefan Collini, in a literary exegesis of the Browne Report
into Higher Education (2010), tracks the ways in which Lord Browne sought to
insert the logic of the market into the higher education sector: with universities as

Peacock 11
service providers and students as the rational consumers of these services, seeking a
return on their investment. The other obvious site of such a reconfiguration has
been the National Health Service. In a fascinating piece on the emergence and
development of the notion of ‘patient as consumer’, Alex Mold (2010) has charted
this particular version of patient personhood from the 1960s to the present day: one
who is now conceived of as yet another participant in a commodity transaction.
What is remarkable – although which should not, by this point, surprise us – is that
the very notion of the patient as a consumer in fact began life in the oppositional
discourses of grassroots patient organizations themselves, as a way to articulate
their demand for representation against the healthcare professionals to which their
bodies were subject. The origins of what is now viewed as a rather toxic notion
(2010: 516) was thus part of the same, once optimistic, anti-hierarchical social
critique which found its dramatic expression in the events of ’68.
Before moving onto its effects, it is worth briefly mentioning another set of
societal interests which drove the negation of hierarchy in the 20th century: the
informaticians. During the Second World War, the Allied powers had resourced
and developed a new applied science of information, to win a technological advan-
tage in improving gunnery systems and solving enemy encryptions. The essence of
the mathematical thinking behind this new ‘information theory’, as it came to be
called, was that processed data could be encoded as either ‘true’ (relevant to the
question being asked of it) or ‘false’ (irrelevant) (Boyer, 2013: 158–9). The effect,
then, as Boyer explains, was to relieve such information of its semantic content – of
all the various shades and complexity of meaning which it potentially held – and
reduce it to binary definition. Epistemologically, this hollowing out of the context
surrounding data had a natural flattening effect. One nugget of data thus had no
qualitative distinction from the next, no a priori asymmetry of import accorded to
it by its position within a broader context, it was merely relevant or irrelevant to
the present problem. This horizontal epistemology subsequently found its abstrac-
tions in the recursive feedback loops of cybernetics, and also – a metaphor with
formidable staying power – the concept of the network.
And this was just among mathematicians. The story of the importation of such
formalisms into anthropology and the other human sciences is well documented,
and has already been partially traced here. Famously, Gregory Bateson and
Margaret Mead were early mediators, later Claude Lévi-Strauss was another
and, more recently, network theorists such as Bruno Latour and Manuel Castells
(1996). Such moves by eminent social theorists have thus allowed ‘computational
epistemology to universalize itself, to strive towards becoming computational
ontology’ (Boyer, 2013: 162).
What Boyer does not go on to explain, however, which brings me full circle to
the nub of my argument, is why the flat ontologies of computer science have been
allowed to universalize themselves. If one momentarily shelves the straight fact of
their brilliance, why have Lévi-Strauss and Latour been the most renowned human
scientists of their day? My obvious answer would be that this is because such
ontology is utterly compatible with the expansion of capitalism and presents no

obstacle to the production of exchange value. Not only did the rise of computa-
tional technology create the possibility for massive new swathes of consumer goods
(so much so that the release of a next generation iPhone now gives a substantive
boost to the entire global economy), but fundamentally the flattening out of the
information it processes is conceptually indistinguishable from the even plane on
which, as Marx famously said, ‘20 yards of linen’ may be deemed equivalent to ‘one
coat’ (1995: 23). Computational ontology can thus be conceived as a sibling of
commodity ontology, on very close familial terms.
Consequences, narrow and broad

Thus far I have presented evidence of a progressive negation of hierarchy across the
human sciences over the past four decades, and examined some of its underlying
societal causes. It remains now only to document some of the consequences of such
negation, both epistemological and otherwise. I begin at the narrow end of this
wedge, with reference to the ethnography of organizations (a sociological as well as
an anthropological endeavour), and end at its widest point, its impact upon the
configuration of political relations in the Global North (one which covers the world
through the tentacular webs of economic imperialism). Finally, I touch on some of
the very recent discursive shifts within anthropology which suggest that, in this
discipline at least, this collective tendency may be in the process of being consigned
to a past paradigm. If scholarship itself is always the instrument of some or other
ideological configuration, the very process of being able to even think through this
set of assumptions may in fact evince that they are already in decline.
If the house that hierarchy built has been razed to the ground to make way for a
jostling open-air market of spontaneous exchange relationships, there are two con-
comitant assumptions regarding culture and personhood that have proceeded from
this. The first is that action becomes irreducible and primary to any cultural situ-
ation, and any supra-personal entity which appears is the secondary product of
such action. In the literature on organizations, this move towards the primacy of
action played out through the use of terms such as ‘agency’, ‘action’ and ‘practice’
which began to proliferate in the ’80 s and ’90 s, under the influence of Pierre
Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and their visions for the interminable production
of social life. Thus Gideon Kunda studies the assiduous manufacture and main-
tenance of a corporate strong culture inside an engineering company, designed to
‘facilitate the accomplishment of company goals’ (1992: 6). However, in doing so
he leaves other questions of value/hierarchy unanswered. Overlooking a suggestion
from one of his participants that ‘Puritan values’ (1992: 179) may be at work here,
he neglects to consider why one kind of culture is engineered rather than another,
or indeed why American corporations in general have such a need for manufac-
tured strong cultures (cf. Garsten, 1994). In Caitlin Zaloom’s later examination of
British and American financiers, while resting on similarly impressive ethnography,
her participants do so much creative fashioning of culture and self that she
takes to calling them ‘designers’ (2006: 177). Again, the question we are left with

Peacock 13
is – particularly in the wake of the banking crisis of 2008 – what is the configuration
of value that endowed these individuals with so much agency and, it seems, con-
tinues to do so? Indeed, what would a hierarchy of capitalism look like?8
This leads me then to a second notion, which is implicit in such studies. If social
meaning can only be made through action, then logically the person acting is
without prior meaning, effectively without culture. Bruce Kapferer and his
co-authors brilliantly illuminate this presupposition in a volume entitled The
Retreat of the Social: The Rise and Rise of Reductionism (2005). Kapferer describes
the general and incremental anthropological ‘retreat’ from collective concepts such
as ‘society’ and ‘the social’ (to which I would add hierarchy), and the equal and
opposite advance of a ‘powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology’
(2005: 2). Thus culture is reduced to individuals, but this reduction is not always
made clear. Kapferer cites Eric Wolf to bring this point home. This ‘abstract
individual is merely another monad, a timeless reified essence like the conceptual
entity it is supposed to criticize and oppose’ (2005: 12). Shifting the emphasis from
society to individuals is therefore only productive if it is acknowledged that both lie
on the same conceptual continuum – which many have done in the debates that
have sprung up around the Maussian notion of the ‘person’ across regions
(Carrithers, 1985; Wagner, 1991; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001).
Yet within the study of organizations – potentially because it has always been
an interdisciplinary endeavour – such acknowledgement can be absent in a con-
spicuous manner (cf. Schultz, 1995; Harper, 1998; Czarniawska, 2008). What
happens then, when the acting individual is made ‘abstract’, its cultural milieu
hollowed out, is paradoxically another replenishment. Culture can never be com-
pletely erased, thus the abstract individual is, in its common-sense proclivities, the
Western European and American individual.9,10 Indeed it must be noted first and
foremost that the very assertion of a rupture between thought and action – upon
which the primacy of action rests – is a key tenet of what Dumont calls ‘modern
European ideology’ (1986). It is one which permeates ethnographies through the
pincer movement of presuppositions held by both researcher and researched. For
instance Zaloom’s emphasis on ‘designing’ and on ‘practical experiments’ (rather
than connecting them with what the designs or the goals of these experiments are)
come directly from her participants’ illocutions, but are reinforced through her own
cultural immersion within the same ideological precepts. Another ethnocentrism
which has been influential within organizational theory, which I have spoken of
elsewhere (Peacock, 2013b), is a Butlerian/Giddensian notion of agency as a quality
fundamentally defined by choice (to resist, to invent, to acquiesce, etc.), a definition
which has now been thoroughly relativized, most persuasively by Saba Mahmood
(2005).
The final, culturally-specific characteristic of these individuals worth mentioning
is contained within the very notion of abstraction, as one of the most recognizable
proclivities of the Western European/American subject is that drive to universalize
itself, giving rise to flattening assumptions concerning the commensurability of
subjects. This is most explicit in one of Latour’s statements in his landmark

ANT text: ‘The circulation of quasi-standards allows anonymous and isolated

agencies to slowly become, layer after layer, comparable and commensurable,
which is surely a large part of what we mean by being human’ (2005: 230; emphasis
added). The negation of hierarchy in the human sciences has thus served to nor-
mativize a particular understanding of the subject, in substituting the incommen-
surabilities which hierarchy produces, for a hegemonic (and in that sense
conceptually colonialist) sameness.
What, then, are the broader societal consequences of hierarchy’s negation?
Probably too numerous to mention, but one profound effect has emerged from
the inextricable relation between hierarchy and responsibility. One of the charac-
teristic features of hierarchical societies is their endowment of its authority figures
with explicit and overt responsibility for the health of the social order. An extreme
example of this has been found among divine African kingships. The responsibility
over nature and society that such kings are felt to have is so powerful, that there are
cases of kings being ritually strangled when gravely ill, for fear that their illness
could endanger the health of the populace (De Heusch, 2005). In a less extreme
way, this relation was very apparent in my own ethnography of the hierarchical
configuration of natural scientific institutes inside Germany’s Max Planck Society.
Every two years, the institutes are comprehensively evaluated by an advisory board
(Fachbeirat), populated by international experts who assess its various outputs
(publications, patents, etc.) which can then be compared to other institutes.
Much like the African king, it is felt to be entirely upon the director’s head that
this judgement of success or failure hangs. As one among them told me, ‘I can fail
in the end and then the advisory board can tell me, ‘‘Hey, you’ve failed’’’. Such use
of personal pronouns when describing their department’s work is frequent, and
indexes the very open and direct responsibility they take for its assessment. The
director’s preeminent status in the Max Planck hierarchy is thus closely allied to a
profound sense of ‘Verantwortung’ (responsibility) for its productive operation. As
former president of the Society, Hubert Markl, once put it: ‘Only someone who has
never felt the challenge of the responsibility which weighs upon a scientist can think
that the scientists of the MPG have an easy existence. A life dedicated to science
is certainly an enjoyable existence, but by no accounts is it an easy one’
(my translation).11
If hierarchy involves the clear binding of responsibility for social projects to
known and visible persons, then the negation of hierarchy will do the very opposite.
I now confront my final (and perhaps most ambitious) point, which is that the
negation of hierarchy across European and American societies has sundered that
intimate relationship between hierarchy and responsibility, capitalist elites being
largely unknown and invisible and their social obligations largely abnegated as a
consequence. Michael Young follows an analogous line of thought in his work on
Goodenough Island, conjecturing that ‘the devolution of hierarchy in Kalauna. . . is
directly connected with, if not fully responsible for. . . the dissemblance and dis-
simulation of power’, so much so that the ‘first tenet of Kalauna’s political phil-
osophy is that real power is hidden’ (1994: 271). We see a similar tendency emerging

Peacock 15
within the political landscape of the West. Increasingly, the targets of social justice
campaigners are not the historic holders of political authority, politicians, but the
corporate elites working from the safety of the shadows. There is the general feeling
that real power is hidden, at the same time as there is a parallel effort to unmask it,
to see its face, to reweave that relation between hierarchy and responsibility.
A team of management theorists at the University of Zürich recently produced a
groundbreaking article on the network of 147 transnational companies that col-
lectively own 94 per cent of the world’s wealth (Vitali et al., 2011), sending such a
shockwave through the popular imagination that not only has it been cited in many
mainstream publications but its defining image, a web of nodes and threads con-
necting these companies which in their entirety mummify the globe, has featured as
the frontispiece of a rock band’s album cover.12
Such moves are emblematic of the possible paradigmatic shift I have already
indicated: a rediscovery of the possibility of hierarchy which has been buried for
years under the great heavy layers of egalitarian mythology. There has also been a
tangible turn within anthropology. Rather than using the rhetoric of negation
(‘dismantling’, ‘defeat of’, ‘against’) to theorize hierarchy in the vein of the previous
intervention, Rio and Smedal’s more recent edited volume on hierarchy seeks in
part to tell the story of its ‘persistence’ (2009). Meanwhile, the journal HAU last
year dedicated two special issues (3–1 and 3–2) to hierarchy’s sister concept of
‘value’, which included a reprinting of one of Dumont’s lectures on the subject.
Indeed, on the question of Dumont, there can be little doubt that his legacy is going
through some kind of rehabilitation back into the discipline. The ‘Dumontian
anthropology’ for which Robbins looked in vain in the early 1990s may finally
be maturing into a significant force. Of the nine articles in HAU’s first issue on
value, over half of them engage significantly with Dumontian ideas, while several
PhD theses completed over the past two years (including my own) involve him as a
major theoretical interlocutor (Haynes, 2012; Mikkelsen, 2013; Peacock, 2013b).
Hierarchy as an analytic category may remain marginal – the ’68 critique lives on in
its enduring toxicity – but the concept of value is now performing a lot of the work
that hierarchy once did, partly through an emerging ‘ethical turn’ in anthropol-
ogy.13 And not before time, as that chasm between mythology and reality yawns
wider every day.
Conclusion
This article has traced the scholarly negation of hierarchy within the egalitarian
societies of Western Europe and America, which takes off in the wake of the
ideational transformations wrought by ’68. Across the human sciences this has
resulted in the widespread appeal of flattening metaphors of relatedness; while
within the study of organizations it has entailed the broad acceptance of produc-
tionist theories of social totalities, populated by abstract individuals who are fun-
damentally commensurable with one another. It has argued that these scholarly
developments were themselves the product of developments in society over the

same period, which saw the intensification of the commodity form as a basic
principle of exchange, at the expense of exchange practices which remain
embedded in social totalities, such as hierarchy. Thus, despite the fact that the
anthropological endeavour often sets itself against the atomizing and fragmenting
work of commoditization, this article has shown that, in practice, the imaginary of
the commodity form has circumscribed anthropological theorizing in profound
ways.
To reinvigorate the notion of hierarchy (or value) is not to return to some static
transcendental determinism, but to see the great paradox of our day as the means
through which commodity societies, which maintain equality as a value, produce
enormously powerful and pervasive inequalities. Indeed, if one considers the recent
discovery by economic historian Gregory Clark – that the family names which
arrived in Britain with the Norman Conquest are still heavily over-represented
among Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates relative to their proportion of the
overall population (2014: 78–80) – it would imply that at least some contemporary
inequalities have grown directly out of medieval hierarchies established almost a
millennium ago.14
Yet the worm turns. Perhaps once more, in the vein of ‘historically-effected
consciousness’, the experience of egalitarian societies as overwhelmingly
unequal – one which has become much more vivid since 2008 – will generate
new representational models to reflect this. This would be a vital development.
If the discursive suppression of hierarchy as a descriptive and analytic category
simply pushed it underground in the form of an increasingly irresponsible tacit
domination, then by repopulating the discursive plane with hierarchical
models, we may forge the intellectual armoury to battle its uglier societal
expressions.
Notes
1. Tintoretto’s ‘Paradise’ was completed in 1594, while Guariento’s ‘Coronation of the
Virgin’ was finished in 1368.
2. By the ‘human sciences’ I mean all of those disciplines which examine human activity in
some fashion. Here this particularly includes philosophy and sociology as well as anthro-
pology. I deliberately avoid making this interpretive claim only with respect to anthro-
pology, being as it is the most well-placed to repel the penetration of indigenous Western
ideologies into its own analysis. It was, in fact, only anthropology which continued to
resist this trend at its zenith, in the closing decades of the 20th century and opening
decades of the 21st. It is therefore important to note that the argument I am making
here is not a totalizing one. This negation of hierarchy in the discipline ran parallel to an
enduringly supportive treatment by other scholars. However, the present end-point of
this narrative continues to have profound consequences for the contemporary anthropo-
logical imagination.
3. The reader should be aware that I am not suggesting an ideological conspiracy here but
simply highlighting one cluster among the routine borrowings and echoes which give
form to the development of any academic discipline.

Peacock 17
4. As Wagner states, ‘A holographic or self-scaling form thus differs from a social organ-
isation or a cultural ideology in that it is not imposed so as to order and organize,
explain or interpret, a set of disparate elements’ (1991: 166). Strathern says something
similar (1991: xx).
5. The actor-network is of course one iteration of a broader metaphor of hierarchical
negation, the ‘network’. The actor-network, however, offers an easier case study to
digest for the sake of argument, being located as it is in a specific science studies
literature.
6. Dumont actually anticipated this particular intellectual development many years earlier.
He identified flatness explicitly as a key expression of modern ideology, in which ‘a
previous hierarchical universe has fanned out into a collection of flat views’ (1986: 249).
7. Dumont called this the ‘predominant ideology’ (1994: 199) or ‘paramount value’ (1986:
25) of a hierarchy.
8. Interestingly, one diagrammatic image circulated online by ‘Occupy Welfare UK’
attempts to do just that, drawing symmetries between ‘medieval’ and ‘corporate feudal-
ism’. Hence monarchs are central bankers, landed gentry the big bankers, the clergy the
corporate elite, royal ministers elected officials, merchants top bureaucrats, vassals top
professionals, and ‘everyone else’ (some 98.5% of the population) the same in both
cases.
9. I quite self-consciously avoid the term ‘Euroamerican’ here as it papers over a large
cultural crack between Western and Eastern Europe, with their different cultural his-
tories and definitions of the self. I follow Alan Macfarlane (1993) and Ian Hacking
(1990), both of whom respectively assert a historical distinction between a ‘holist’ east
(which includes the most eastern parts of Germany) and an ‘individualist’ west of
Europe.
10. One explanation proffered by Boyer and Yurchak for the increasing slippage between
‘Western’ and ‘human’ (2010: 210) in the past three decades is the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and the significant site of alterity it had hitherto provided.
11. ‘Nur wer niemals den Anspruch verspürt hat, den solche Verantwortung an einen
Wissenschaftler steht, kann meinen, den Wissenschaftlern der MPG sei damit ein leichtes
Dasein bereitet. Ein schönes Dasein ist sehr Wohl, ein Leben für die Wissenschaft, aber
fürwahr kein leichtes’ (Henning et al. 1998: 19).
12. These publications include The Daily Mail (Waugh, 2011), The Huffington Post (Tencer,
2011), and The New Scientist (Coghlan and Mackenzie, 2011), while the article’s image
illustrates the album Antiphon from the American folk rock group Midlake (released 2013).
13. This is different to a conception of ‘values’ in the plural which, as Joel Robbins points
out, did not suffer the same ‘long period of neglect’ (2013: 99).
14. While immensely grateful to Gregory Clark for his archival work on this subject,
I should, however, make it very clear that I distance myself from his biologizing con-
clusions entirely, flirting as he does with a ‘genetic explanation of status persistence’
(2014: 13).
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