I OFTEN find myself in agreement with David Graeber’s anthropological evaluation of “primitive” societies and how they operate, but his work nonetheless contains the occasional trace of what some would describe as “leftism” and therefore an inability to think beyond the existing parameters in which certain values and opinions have been framed.

Speaking of “ethnogenesis,” or the idea that certain groups are characterised as racial phenomena, Graeber rightly contends that the circumstances of a tribal coming-together often results from a social upheaval of some kind. He makes the point that the Tsimihety people of north-central Madagascar are spoken of as an ethnic collectivity and yet have their origins among a group of dissenters who refused to cut their hair in honour of a dead king. In other words, their identity arose as a direct result of rebelling against the dictates of the Sakalava monarchy and it is this which shaped their common ancestry and not the fact that they had lived in a particular area for hundreds of years.

National-Anarchists support autonomous village-communities that are organised along ethnic and/or cultural lines, meaning that in the case of the Tsimihety folk – who, incidentally, have since intermarried over a long period of time – would mean respecting their choice to identify with one another either on the basis of their common origins or merely because they happen to favour long hair. Graeber would favour the latter, of course, but whilst there is nothing wrong with that view he points out that communities of this type have a tendency to evolve into what Max Weber regards as the “routinisation of charisma”. As the former explains, these social tendencies become

“arenas for the recognition of certain forms of value [and] can become borders to be defended; representations or media of values become numinous powers in themselves; creation slips into commemoration; the ossified remains of liberatory movements can end up, under the grip of states, transformed into what we call ‘nationalisms’ which are either mobilised to rally support for the state machinery or become the basis for new social movements opposed to them.”

Whilst Graeber is correct to a certain extent, what he is really talking about here is the cult of personality and it is this which Weber identified as the “routinisation of charisma” that transforms dynamic communities into glorified re-enactment societies that merely seek to perpetuate the waning power of a deceased temperament. However, whilst Graeber is clearly hinting at political cults that attempt to cling on to power in the sudden absence of a powerful leader, it would be wrong to scapegoat the principle of nationalism altogether when there are forms of nationhood which do not rely on personality at all. This is where Graeber fails to think beyond the boundaries of “leftist” semantics.

Although he presents “nationalism” as something which might follow hot on the heels of a social catastrophe, what is one to make of a group of people who identify as a tribe or nation – for whatever reason – and who are neither statist nor obsessed with a particular individual? There is, after all, a profoundly more authentic nationalism that was not simply designed to shore up the defences of capitalism in the wake of the First World War and which has far more in common with the Tsimihety than with the values of the modern world.