Abstract
Anastasia Piliavsky’s Nobody’s People: Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves is a lively and provocative book. Written with panache, it contains some colorful if sketchy ethnography and single-mindedly advances a bold—if quixotic—theoretical line. The ethnography, from the Indian state of Rajasthan, celebrated for Rajput rulers and Princely States, relates to the Kanjars, a caste of thieves, their erstwhile clients. The British classified Kanjars as a “criminal tribe.” The theory aims to redeem hierarchy as a concept from the “pariah” status to which it has been allegedly consigned by (unidentified) “metropolitan thinkers” (p. 3). It involves some tilting at windmills.
In June 1991, a pogrom was unleashed against a Kanjar satellite settlement of the multi-caste village of Mandawari. Its perpetrators were farmers from surrounding villages provoked by a spate of thefts. Ten Kanjars were killed, dozens wounded, the houses all razed. Piliavsky first visited four years later. She subsequently stayed, simultaneously maintaining a base in the local town, the seat of the Rao, a former feudatory of the Maharana of Mewar. Historically, the Kanjars enjoyed royal patronage and were licensed to thieve outside their patron’s domain or from his rivals within it. Theft, that is, was done at the behest of local lords, for whom Kanjars acted as spies, escorts, watchmen, and hitmen. The British disrupted such arrangements, though in independent India the police continue the patronage role of the king, exchanging protection for criminal intelligence and a share in the proceeds of crime.
Now, however, Kanjars steal close to home where their police patrons can ensure their impunity. That probably explains much about the pogrom. Today they serve as police informers, steal “on commission” for patrons, protect their property as watchmen, recover “lost” goods, and act as go-betweens in delicate family disputes. Different sections of the wider Kanjar community are associated with different occupational roles: as burglars, bards (who double as beggars), and prostitutes. The thieves claim superior status and try to remain aloof, though some intermarriage persists.
Kanjar ideology is resolutely hierarchical, as is that of most Indians and of much of the world’s population. Inequality is normative, natural, and not in principle bad. Talk of equality, Kanjars say, is just “government speak.” Though themselves regarded as “vermin” and the lowest of the low, they dream not of equality, but of more and better hierarchy, of more exalted superiors more able to behave as superiors should. An “honest ethnography” required Piliavsky to unlearn her most deep-rooted cultural assumptions, recognize hierarchy as a positive value, and resist entrenched professional prejudice, for by then “the very word stank of the bad old days of frigid structuralism, essentialism, elitism, imperialism, generalization, patrimonialism, and Louis Dumont.” One reader’s report charged her with deploying a concept “ethically and politically unfit for print.” “The only thing one can acceptably do with hierarchy is denounce it as inequality” (pp. xxxiv–xxxv). Even from the study of India, it has been extirpated—a proposition then qualified by claiming that though it continues to be recognized empirically, all theoretical reflection on it is silenced. In contemporary anthropology more generally, the situation is little better.
So, what is hierarchy? Dumont’s theory of caste is shortly dismissed, and though appreciative of the importance his anthropology attaches to hierarchy, Piliavsky’s understanding of it is quite different. For Dumont, it was an essentially religious phenomenon, inseparable from holism and a collective conception of man, and in pure form the product of a strict ideological separation between status and power. None of that here. Curiously, Piliavsky never straightforwardly defines it. She is more explicit about what it is not: not (pace Dumont and de Tocqueville) incompatible with individualism; not a value particular to “traditional” societies; emphatically not the same as inequality. What’s the difference? Hierarchy is “normative inequality” (p. 4), inequality embraced as legitimate. What makes it that? The proper fulfillment of patronage obligations. These include political protection, material support, and the esteem that association with a powerful patron confers—in India the rule being that the relative status of clients is contingent on that of their patrons and on the durability of their ties.
All this invites interrogation. Especially in a changing world, legitimacy is often unstable, uncertain, and contested. Of that Piliavsky’s account gives little sense. Kanjar views seem granite certain. If, moreover, hierarchy is normative inequality, the meritocratic ideology of the modern West is (as Piliavsky recognizes [pp. 172–73]) as hierarchical as that of caste. Equality of opportunity justifies inequality of result. Apart from a handful of “immediate return” hunter-gatherer groups, it is in fact hard to think of societies that are not hierarchical, making one wonder if, in becoming so all-embracing, the concept does not lose analytical purchase. It is fine to propose “different logics of hierarchy” as a promising comparative agenda for anthropology (p. 174), but only one logic figures here—inequality legitimated by patronage. And if that is what hierarchy is, we might wonder if Piliavsky’s portrait of herself as a lone ranger riding to the rescue of an unpopular cause is not overdrawn. Which anthropologists consider that an improper subject for study?
While preoccupations certainly shift, it is exaggerated to claim that hierarchy has disappeared from disciplinary view. David Graeber’s book on Debt (2011) has, for example, been one of the blockbusters of the past decade. It identifies hierarchy as one of three bedrock moral principles on which all economies are founded and that are simultaneously present in every society. Another is communism, in its “everyday” form as the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to need.” Paradoxically, that comes close to Piliavsky’s “hierarchy”; and Graeber emphasizes that his principles may easily morph into one another and that this provides scope for ideological change—a dynamism missing from Piliavsky’s more one-dimensional picture.
The style of argument she favors is to go for broke. It’s courageous, but likely to put non-specialist readers at a disadvantage when contrary evidence remains undeclared. That’s quite often. In the Indian ideology of the gift, she claims for example, the giver is always superior. Not straightforwardly true, as Piliavsky certainly knows. Consider hypergamy, or the ideology surrounding gifts to the Brahman. The status of clients, she claims, is a function of the permanence of their relationship with their patrons. Copious evidence suggests otherwise that the highest-status Brahmans are beholden to none and abjure patronage ties.
The fact is that alongside the conceptions she stresses runs a strong strand in the ideology that derives from the ideal of world renunciation and that valorizes the contradictory ideas of autonomy and independence. Though their motives have more to do with escaping subordination and subservience than with any ascetic ideal, many low-caste service groups completely opt out of patron-client relationships. They plainly don’t agree that “to be someone one needs to be someone’s” (p. 142).
It is not that Piliavsky’s version of the ideology is not real; it is rather that it is partial. The result is that her analysis reproduces—indeed compounds—some of the most conspicuous defects of earlier sociologies of India. It is similarly restricted to a sociology of values, but the range of values on which it focuses is even narrower—to the point at which we are being sold a cartoon caricature of Indian ideology.