There is a lot of food for thought in this discussion/interview of two Platpus Affiliated Society members.

Excerpted from Jacob Cayia:

” I’m very suspect of any attempt to give a political dimension to anthropology, which is something that has come into vogue recently with the Occupy movement and some of its figure-heads like the “anarchist” anthropologist David Graeber. One way I understand this trend is that it is searching for better and more democratic ways in which humans might organize themselves socially. So they look to the history of human civilization and evaluate the different models of sociality that humans have given themselves and they pick and choose which ones they think might be best to emulate today. So, for example, feudal Europe might be hierarchical, patriarchal, economically stratified, and anti-democratic. But some jungle-tribe in South East Asia might be state-less, egalitarian, democratic, gift-driven, so on and so on. So, the political import of Anthropology is that we should modify our existing practices in order to emulate the egalitarian and democratic jungle-tribe. It is a form of pre-figurative politics. Even the “spokes-council” model at the Occupy Wall Street takes its inspiration from pre-modern culture.

This has my sympathy in some sense. The history of human civilization is but the catalog of the various and diverse ways in which humans have organized themselves socially. So yes, it is true, the way we life today in modern capitalism is not the way in which we necessarily are destined to live. There are other ways, but for me, the question is how to get from *here* to *there*. I do not think pre-figurative politics are the solution, and in many instances pre-figurative politics takes a conservative, anti-liberal form. Only in modern society does something such as “anthropology” exist as a field of study. Only in modern society do humans begin to look back at their entire history and start thinking about their human nature. Rousseau looked back at the entirety of human history and concluded that the essence of man is his “perfectibility,” or, in other words, that what human nature is is humankind’s infinite potential for becoming-other. Nonetheless, Rousseau did not think we could merely choose to live in a different way in what amounts to a kind of pre-figurative politics. To quote Rousseau, we must search for the remedy to the ill in the ill itself. Capitalism poses certain challenges with respect to changing transforming the world. We cannot ignore this. It is something new.”