2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 17–24

DEBATE

Through a glass, darkly

James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge

Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others:

Theory since the eighties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1):
47–73.

Sherry Ortner’s (1984) paper on “Theory in anthropology since the sixties” was
an extraordinarily skillful, timely, and influential synthesis of what a range of an-
thropologists and others were thinking at the time, and it set a theoretical agenda
for many within the discipline for years to come. Her new essay, clearly intended
to be an update of its predecessor, displays many of the same qualities of breadth
of range and skill in synthesis, and is equally effective in giving voice to widely
shared concerns and attitudes in the discipline. If some of what I say below argues
more or less directly against some aspects of Ortner’s presentation, this is a quar-
rel not so much with her as with the anthropology she describes. And insofar as it
is with her, it has to be said that it is also indebted to her, because she has enabled
me to see more clearly a number of things about recent anthropological discourse
that I had perceived only dimly before, and to see in a new way what might be at
stake in them. I agree wholeheartedly, moreover, with one of Ortner’s principal
recommendations—to “rethink the seemingly monolithic category of ‘capitalism’”
(2016: 65)—the difference being that I think this will require a rather more com-
prehensive theoretical retooling than she seems to contemplate here, including re-
thinking the equally problematically monolithic category of “neoliberalism.”
The story Ortner tells in this article is of anthropology’s response to how the
world has changed in the last few decades, a set of changes that are presented as be-
ing unrelentingly negative—unraveling social fabric, spiraling inequality, intensify-
ing conflict—virtually all of which she sees as so many facets of the all-pervasive
force of neoliberalism. The “dark anthropology” that has documented this dysto-
pian scene, and described lives lived in conditions of marginalization, exclusion,

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © James Laidlaw.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.005
 James Laidlaw 18

and uncertainty, has also been, by Ortner’s account, a theoretical interrogation,

and moral prosecution, of neoliberalism. She discerns the emergence of two com-
plements to this central theoretical endeavor: anthropologies of the good, on the
one hand, and of activism, on the other, which are to serve that greater enterprise,
as cheering relief and motivating fillip, respectively. But neither is looked to as a
source of theoretical innovation in itself. I shall leave others to comment on the
anthropology of activism. But the anthropology of ethics and the good, I suggest, is
rather a profound departure from the very premises of dark anthropology.
Ortner does express some hesitancy that her accounts both of the world at large
and of anthropology might be partial. She acknowledges that there have been theo-
retical developments that are not obviously best understood as responses to neo-
liberalism, though she doesn’t venture an opinion on whether they are also to be
explained in an indirect way by it, or by some other facet of the contemporary
world, or are, on the other hand, outside the explanatory paradigm of the paper in
general. What is more striking, perhaps because it ought logically to be inessential
to her arguments, is the relentlessly one-sided negativity of her account of how the
world has gone since the 1970s. She worries this, too, might be partial, but only in
the sense of being parochially American, and the relatively stagnant earnings and
increasing job insecurity of the American middle class do seem to be especially
acutely felt. But it is not so much the national distribution of misery that seems
unbalanced. The point is significant, and worth commenting upon, because Ortner
here, as on many points, is brilliantly lucid and accurate in representing the content
and tone of the anthropology she describes.
The grim things that have happened during recent decades are undoubtedly
many, and should be given full weight. But the period in question has also seen
global levels of absolute poverty, illiteracy, child malnutrition, and child labor fall at
what are in all probability the fastest rates in human history. It has seen life expec-
tancy increase sharply, and the near eradication of a number of diseases that only a
few decades ago killed millions every year. It is also the case that during this period
the proportion of the world’s population living in servitude has fallen sharply, that
large numbers of people who were formerly persecuted and oppressed on account
of factors such as gender, race, sexuality, or disability enjoy many greater rights
and freedoms than heretofore in a wide range of countries, and that a considerably
smaller proportion of the world’s population now lives under authoritarian, tyran-
nical, or dictatorial regimes, and a higher proportion under at least moderately
accountable electoral democracies. A picture of the world and how it has changed
in the last several decades that leaves all this out, or that gives the impression that
more or less all change has been for the worse, whether that picture emerges in a
single polemical paper or, more seriously, cumulatively by weight of publications in
an entire academic discipline, is getting something fairly important wrong.
And we get a clue as to what that might be from a really very striking omission
from the paper. By Ortner’s account, the most consequential thing that has hap-
pened in recent world history is the rise of neoliberalism. But however narrowly
or broadly that phenomenon is interpreted, from the writings and ideas of authors
such as Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan, or more expansively including
policies that might be attributed ultimately to some degree to their influence, even
if implemented by people who have never heard of them, and of whom they would

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19 Through a glass, darkly

heartily have disapproved, it will just not bear scrutiny to attribute to it the most
dramatic and far-reaching changes of the era. At best, neoliberal ideas might have
played a subsidiary role in causing (their subsequent dissemination was certainly it-
self a consequence of) the incomparably larger and more important defining event
of the period covered by Ortner’s essay, arguably indeed the most important thing
that happened in the second half of the twentieth century, but of which she makes
absolutely no mention at all, namely the systemic failure and collapse of Soviet
communism, and, with the almost complete abandonment of Marxist economics
by the most significant remaining communist polities (China and Vietnam), the
effective exit from the historical stage of Marxist socialism.
Now it is admittedly a complex and interesting question just to what degree the
material failure of “actually existing socialism” constitutes a refutation of Marxist
social theory. Pretty well all academic Marxists, pretty well right up to the moment
this happened, firmly maintained what was then called “the unity of theory and
practice,” so they at least ought to have been fairly irrevocably committed to the
conclusion that what happened was very bad news indeed for the theory. But that
doesn’t mean, of course, that they were correct in having held that position, and
perhaps the many who more or less seamlessly abandoned it in favor of retain-
ing commitment to the theory itself were right after all? Perhaps the apparently
repeated patterns of purges and mass famines really were caused by chance con-
catenations of individual “mistakes” and “natural calamities”? Perhaps the repeated
systemic failures really were because the theory hadn’t been applied “correctly,” yet
again? These are not the arguments I wish to enter into here. What I do wish to
comment on is just one consequence of the fact that, all these events notwithstand-
ing, as Ortner rightly points out, the framework of Marxist political economy be-
came so dominant in anthropology from the 1980s.
Ortner describes the major political, economic, social, and cultural changes
across the globe which have been seen as resulting from “neoliberalism,” and she
describes how Marxist perspectives “came to prevail” in anthropology, as if these
were independent developments. But my contention is that they are not: the former
is a consequence of the latter. It is only through the dark-tinted glasses of a Marxist
orientation, in a world that has moved so resolutely against the expectations that
orientation inculcates, that so much of what has changed looks to be so unified.
A Marxist framework for the analysis of the global political economy commits
you to certain concepts and beliefs, whether more or less consciously: the labor
theory of value; wealth creation as a necessarily zero-sum game (“the enrichment
of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless . . . the divi-
sion of the world into rich and poor nations . . . as a result of . . . the extraction of
wealth from the colonies of the past” [Ortner 2016: 51]); the absolute impoverish-
ment of an increasingly large working class in advanced capitalist societies; declin-
ing rates of profit; consequently declining technological innovation; the erosion of
national and religious in favor of class identities; and, of course, the inevitable and
irreversible replacement of crisis-ridden capitalist economies by socialist societ-
ies, which then proceed toward full communism. If and insofar as the basic tenets
of Marx’s analyses of world history and the dynamics of capitalism are correct, all
this does indeed follow “inexorably” and may be confidently expected, as he mod-
estly said himself. The confidence such an analysis, were it correct, would inspire

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 James Laidlaw 20

is reflected in the impressively millennial tenacity with which some authors still
refer, long after it has outlived its supposed successor stage in world history, to
“late capitalism.” If all this is what your theoretical premises and analytical (as well
as political and moral) commitments lead you to expect, then it is understandable
that the major trends of recent history—complex, various, and heterogeneous as
they may be—can come to seem to have a certain unity, insofar as basically none
of them are conforming to these predictions. They are all part of the same histori-
cal “deviation.” They are all moves away from rather than toward state socialism as
it was conceived mid-twentieth century, even if they are moves away in divergent
directions. The fact that they are all moves away from Marxist socialism in truth
endows these various trends with no real unity of cause, structure, form, moral va-
lence, or consequence, except when viewed through the spectacles of Marxist pre-
suppositions and hopes. “Neoliberalism,” as it appears in so many anthropological
texts—as a designation not for a specific set of ideas or policies but for everything
the author doesn’t like—is the name of the optical illusion that results. And this
must also be how so many other salient trends that cannot be readily fitted into
the metanarrative of the rise of neoliberalism can fail to come into view, as is the
case in Ortner’s paper, from the eradication of major diseases to the rise of militant
Islam. These latter are not so much counter to as unimaginable within the terms of
the theory and its predictions. What Ortner’s spirited and in many ways inspired
narration illustrates, I think, is that in a world after Marxist socialism, a Marxist
anthropology cannot but be an anthropology of real-world negations of Marxism.
And in such a project, “neoliberalism,” as the catchall concept for its anguished
concerns, must needs expand almost indefinitely.
It is necessary at this point to say a few words about how the thought of Michel
Foucault appears in Ortner’s account of recent anthropology. Once again, as with
the anthropology of neoliberalism, I think Ortner summarizes with devastating
accuracy what has occurred. Even if no one until very recently (e.g., Bidet 2016)
has explicitly argued for it, and notwithstanding Foucault’s repeated statements dis-
tancing himself from Marxism, there has been a widespread working assumption
that they may be read as saying basically the same thing; that Foucault provides, in
a more up-to-date and vivid idiom perhaps than Marx’s sometimes dully econo-
mistic language, a political supplement to historical materialism which, as Ortner
(2016: 50) puts it, “asks us to see the world almost entirely in terms of power, ex-
ploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality.” It is not merely, as Ortner acknowl-
edges (ibid.: 51), that some of Foucault’s later work “moves away from the relentless
power problematic.” Certainly, the project for a genealogy of ethics that dominated
his later years did constitute a thorough rejection of deterministic social science in
general and historical materialism in particular, but this was not because he aban-
doned his earlier concern with power. It was because he worked out its implications
consistently. He remained centrally concerned with power throughout his later
writings, but it became increasingly clear that his understanding of power, togeth-
er with the rest of his social ontology, was fundamentally at odds with Marxism
(Grace 2009). All his writings, at least from The history of sexuality ([1976] 1979)
onward, involved rejecting the central premises of Marxist historical materialism,
a fact that was immediately perceived by Gilles Deleuze, who never again spoke to
Foucault after the publication of that book, relations between them already having

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21 Through a glass, darkly

soured following Foucault’s support for dissidents in Soviet-dominated Eastern

Europe (Eribon 1991: 258–62; Miller 1993: 297–98; Paras 2006: 90–92; Bourg 2007:
239–40). The history of sexuality itself was an explicit repudiation of the then-fash-
ionable Marxist-Freudian thesis that sexual “repression” was functional for capital-
ism, and it was a repudiation, equally, of the “liberationist” conception of freedom
as the removal or absence of relations of power. Hence Foucault’s explicit claim that
it was simply a misreading to attribute to him the idea of “a system of domination
that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom” (1997: 293). And his sub-
sequent writings were centrally concerned with how freedom might be conceived
(and practiced) not as an absence of power but as particular forms of the exercise of
power, and particular configurations of power relations (see Faubion 2011; Laidlaw
2014: ch. 3).
All that notwithstanding, Ortner is undoubtedly correct that in much of what
she calls “dark anthropology,” Foucault is represented as being essentially a con-
tinuation of Marx, and it may well be that crude injections of some of Foucault’s
ideas and language have prolonged the life of otherwise moribund forms of analy-
sis. The distorting effect this has had on many anthropologists’ reading of Foucault
has, however, been considerable.1 It has fostered the notion, for instance, that there
must be a radical theoretical discontinuity between, on the one hand, concerns
with governmentality, or, for example, tracing the configurations of power and
knowledge in disciplinary institutions, and, on the other, the study of ethical life.
One widely expressed ground for skepticism toward or mistrust of anthropo-
logical interest in morality, ethics, well-being, or the good is that it must necessarily
be “apolitical,” in the sense of being cut off from the analysis of power. Ortner’s
interest and approval in this paper also come with this caveat. She calls (2016: 65)
for exponents not to ignore “larger contexts” of power and inequality, and not to
position their work in opposition to those concerns, but to see them instead as be-
ing “in active interaction.” And she cites two fine recent works that seek to achieve
a unified approach. What she doesn’t cite are instances of exponents who have
done otherwise. And when she speaks of a “sharp line that is sometimes drawn”
(ibid.: 60) between work on virtue and the good and work on power and inequality,
the implication is that such a line is being drawn by those writing about virtue and
the good. But importantly, there is no such line drawn, in their own understanding
and practice, by any of those interested in developing this field, so far as I know.
Some, myself included, would distinguish what they do specifically from “the work
on power, inequality, and violence discussed earlier” (ibid.), but this is because of
the premises and methods of some of that work, not from a desire to exclude or
avoid, still less to deny, those aspects of social life. Observers from outside this
field sometimes imagine there is a lack of interest in these matters because they do
not see them addressed by the methods, and in the idioms, they have become ac-
customed to from what Ortner calls “a steady diet of (early) Foucault” (ibid.). But

1. The misreading has not been confined to anthropologists. Belated recognition in some
quarters of how much Foucault’s interest in freedom separates him from Marxist tradi-
tion, and of the depth of his critique of the welfare state, and of the care with which he
read some liberal thinkers, has fueled a growing suspicion that he must have been (you
guessed it!; what else is there to be?) a neoliberal (Zamora and Bennett 2015).

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 James Laidlaw 22

what many working in the anthropologies of well-being, ethics, and the good have
been concerned to do is precisely to develop an approach that incorporates into
that work a reading of late as well as early Foucault (and of course others) on power,
understood thereby as a dimension of all social relations.
Take, for instance, Teresa Kuan’s exemplary recent study, which provides a uni-
fied analysis of the politics and the ethics of child rearing in contemporary China.
Kuan (2015) seeks to convey the dilemmas confronting middle-class mothers,
faced, on the one hand, with a set of official discourses that stigmatize ambitious
parents as a threat to their children’s psychological health, and, on the other, with
the demands of a ruthlessly competitive educational system and job market. She
draws creatively on elements of “traditional” Chinese thought to develop her un-
derstanding of the workings of power, in a situation that requires a good parent
to be an active subject of ethics, engaging in the task of governing and improving
herself. She notes how unsatisfactory it would be to interpret the situation, as do so
many easy readings of “neoliberal responsibilization,” as people being duped and
manipulated by the state into toiling on its behalf. Instead, she brilliantly shows
how the mothers she worked with felt burdened by the contradictory demands
placed upon them, but also knew and recognized much more about the situation
they were in, and about themselves, than such forms of analysis can give them
credit for. Her claim is not only that such theories miss a good deal about human
experience, but also that they miss substantively the work that is involved in deal-
ing with the inconsistencies, multiplicities, ironies, and tragedies involved in living
a life. Incorporating fully into the analysis, but never reducing human action to,
supposedly “larger-scale” historical processes, Kuan sees squarely the challenge of
theorizing how people negotiate conflicting moral values and ethical demands, and
the kinds of judgments and negotiations of responsibility this involves.
Ortner provides in her paper an insightful and sympathetic introduction to re-
cent anthropological work on morality, ethics, and the good. She rightly identifies
Joel Robbins’ recent paper, “Beyond the suffering subject” (2013), as one of the
most compelling manifestos for the enterprise. And it is true that there Robbins
represents what he calls “the anthropology of the good” as a successor, and in
some respects a reaction, to the anthropology of suffering, much of which cer-
tainly counts as part of Ortner’s dark anthropology. But it does not follow (and is
not Robbins’ argument) that the emerging anthropology of ethics and morality is
merely a complement to the kind of Marxist diagnoses of the ills of neoliberalism
that Ortner rightly describes as having become so prevalent. It is not merely “a
refreshing and uplifting counterpoint” (Ortner 2016: 60), but a direct challenge to
some of the fundamental premises of dark anthropology.
This is because it asserts the inadequacy of any form of social theory that per-
sistently refuses to acknowledge, adequately describe, or attempt to understand the
ethical dimension of human social life, and this conspicuously includes theories
that seek to explain it (away) in terms of class interest and ideology or an economy
of practices. It is important to emphasize that there is lively emerging debate within
the field about how best to characterize what I have just referred to as the ethical
dimension of human life. How central is reflective evaluation and judgment? Is
some notion of freedom necessary in order to make sense of it? How helpful is an
understanding of formal properties of language or interaction? Is a formal analysis

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23 Through a glass, darkly

of values and value-relations possible? Should we be looking more to how implicit

recognition of the-human-in-each-other might be manifest, without conscious re-
flection or decision, in the everyday? How helpful or distinctive is a phenomeno-
logical perspective? It remains to be seen what implications differences in emphasis
between, or different combinations of, these lines of thought might have for our
general understanding, and for how we go about our work of describing specific
ethnographic and historical circumstances. But however deep and far reaching the
differences in perspective on the ethical, it is striking that those who have sought
most strenuously to articulate them have done so in contrast to one or other aspect
of dark anthropology, whether it be the universalism implicit in the category of
the suffering subject (Robbins 2013), the reduction of all conduct to “the political”
(Lambek 2000), the reduction of what it is to be a subject to subjugation (Das 2007:
59) or interpolation (Faubion 2011), or the false accounting perpetrated by Bour-
dieu in converting all notions of value into “capital” (Keane 2003; Evens 2008; Lam-
bek 2008; Laidlaw 2014). Foucault himself remarked that “we need to free ourselves
of the sacralization of the social as the only instance of the real and stop regarding
the essential element of human life and human relations—I mean thought—as so
much wind.” He continued, “Thought does exist, both beyond and before systems
and edifices of discourse. It is something that is often hidden but always drives hu-
man behaviors. There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions;
there is always thought even in silent habits” (2000: 456).
The anthropologies of ethics, well-being, and the good, by challenging anthro-
pology generally to take seriously the ethical dimension of human sociality, chal-
lenge it also to abandon failed understandings of power, inequality, and violence,
because the latter is not a separate subject matter, but part of the way in which
human ethical life is lived. They do not represent a complement or counterpoint
to a Marxist political economy, and they do not corroborate a myopic view of the
contemporary world in which everything is attributed to the diffuse all-powerful
force of neoliberalism. They represent, instead, in my view, the beginnings at least
of a comprehensive alternative to them.

References
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Das, Veena. 2007. Life and words: Violence and descent into the ordinary. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Eribon, Didier. 1991. Michel Foucault. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Evens, T.  M.  S. 2008. Anthropology as ethics: Nondualism and the conduct of sacrifice.
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Faubion, James D. 2011. An anthropology of ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 James Laidlaw 24

Foucault, Michel. (1976) 1979. The history of sexuality: Volume 1. An introduction. Trans-
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———. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties.” Hau: Journal of
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Polity.

James Laidlaw is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the Univer-

sity of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College.
 James Laidlaw
 Department of Social Anthropology
 Free School Lane
 Cambridge CB2 3RF
UK
JAL6@cam.ac.uk

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 17–24