360:自由的起源

在他们2021年出版的《推荐全球十大博彩公司排行榜》一书中, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow place the question of freedom as a central concern of all (pre)history.  Their interest in the past is presented as a guide to the present and future, 他们寻找三种自由, 他们称之为“原始”:(1)行动自由, (2)不服从的自由, and (3) freedom to change one’s 社会 relationships or form of 社会 organization.  The importance of the study of the past is not about material or 社会 inequalities but becomes one of asking how we have found ourselves recently “stuck” in systems that deny these freedoms?  在本课程中，由 凯西的障碍, we will engage the long archaeological and ethnographic records, including that of hunter-gatherers as well as states, to assess the material and 社会 conditions that have opened spaces for freedoms and closed doors on others.  We will tease apart various notions of freedom and try to locate them in diverse cultural moments under varying relations of kinship, 财产, 劳动, 平等主义, 物质不平等.  We will question the ontological (or “primordial”) status of freedom to consider if mobility, 不服从, and 社会-organizational shifts could also be experienced as “unfreedoms” in the creation and enforcement of both egalitarian and inegalitarian relations.  Students will be encouraged to think about the importance of the past from the vantage of their own political desires for the present and future, and we will force ourselves to consider the enduring question:  can we even find our future somewhere in the past?  在后台, we will also continuously return to the question of our relationship to 自然/environment and what 人类自由 may mean at this enlarging spatial, 时间, 生态规模.

在谈到卢梭的政治理论时, the conjectural state of 自然 first described in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) has frequently been identified with native societies as observed in America since 1492. 在他们最近的著作《推荐全球十大博彩公司排行榜》中, David Graeber and David Wengrow assume Rousseau’s state of 自然 is mostly inspired by the encounter of Europeans with native people, despite scholarly consensus that Rousseau might instead be considered the father of all ‘社会 construct’ theories. Why is this confusion still informing the way we read Rousseau? How did considerations on the so-called ‘noble savage’ taint his political theory? How can we assess the role an ‘indigenous critique’ played in defining Rousseau’s state of 自然? And incidentally: how ‘indigenous’ is this ‘indigenous critique’? Answering to Graeber and Wengrow’s (mis)reading of Rousseau will allow us to cast a new light not only on Rousseau’s ‘unnatural’ 人类学, 还有格雷伯 & Wengrow’s broader claims on human 自然 and political freedom. Our end goal is not to offer a scholarly take on either Rousseau’s discourse of Graeber and Wengrow’s book, but to answer this pressing question: should/could we discard the very notion of 自然 to regain political agency here and now? 教 鲁迪·勒·门萨伊姆.

本课程由 乔尔Schlosser, 探究自由的意义, how political communities organize themselves around freedom, and how contestation about freedom is essential in twenty-first century political life. We will take orientation from the argument developed by David Graeber and David Wengrow in 万物的黎明, which suggests that freedom and not equality is the site of political struggle today. 从这个原点开始扩展, we’ll then consider how theorists and practitioners around the world have considered freedom’s perils and possibilities: abolitionist organizing in the work of Mariame Kaba; democratic 社会ism in the theory of Axel Honneth; freedom as a mask for state-sactioned violence in the critical queer work of Chanan Reddy; escape and flight from such states realized through “freedom as marronage”; and freedom as an Indigenous political project in the the work of Taiaiake Alfred, 格伦-库塔, 和Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Each approach will offer an opportunity to think through the meaning and politics of freedom as well as to develop frameworks of political analysis that can illustrate how struggles for freedom shape and structure politics today.