#title Communism In Motion
#subtitle How Hunter Gatherers Make Egalitarianism Work
#author Morna Finnegan
#date 19 December 2023
#source Radical Anthropology. <[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHAG1yR6tI][www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHAG1yR6tI]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-11-29T01:00:21
#topics anthropology
Talk given to the Radical Anthropology Group at Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Anthropology Building, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW on 19 December 2017. Morna Finnegan began with Women's Studies (UEL) and received her PhD in Social Anthropology (Edinburgh).This talk explores the implications of egalitarianism among Central African hunter-gatherers, sex, gender and child care.
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[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHAG1yR6tI]]
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Chris Knight: Anyway, why are hunter-gatherers important was one of the questions I wanted you to address to start with. And then what on earth you're doing, how do we get there? Maybe that's another question as well.
**Morna Finnegan:** OK. Well, I was thinking about this initially as a kind of more of a conversation than me giving a talk at the front of the room. Because I think The nature of what I want to talk about, which is communism in motion, is that it's dialogic and it's a kind of an egalitarian space where there isn't a leader or a chief or an expert or a boss of any kind, where everything from meat, to dances, to babies is shared and pooled and collectivized.
So, it's a very different kind of communism to what we're accustomed to thinking about. And actually, I find a very - what I thought was a very funny quote from Thomas Merton. in a book I happened to be reading, his biography actually, where he talks about his communist phase. It sums up for me what I would have imagined communism to be before I encountered the Mbenjele. So he says,
as soon as the citizens of the new classless world had had all the greed educated out of them by enlightened methods, The last vestiges of the state would wither away, and there would be a new world, a new golden age, in which all property would be held in common. All the land means production. Nobody would desire to seize them for himself, and so there would be no more poverty, no more wars, no more misery, no more starvation, no more violence. Everybody would be happy. Nobody would be overworked. They would all amicably exchange wives, and their offspring And their offspring would be brought up in big, shiny incubators, not by the state, because there wouldn't be any state, but by that great, beautiful third, the lovely, delicious, unknown quantity of the new, classless society.
And then he says,
I don't think even I was gullible enough to swallow all the business about the ultimate bliss that would follow the withering away of the state, but I simply assumed things would be worked out by the right *men* at the right time.
So I giggled reading that because my entire understanding of communism has been so changed by the hunter-gatherer ethnography, by the experience of coming to understand the Mbenjele and other egalitarian hunter-gatherers that I would never dare presume now that the right men will work it out at the right time because it's so not about men. It's about communities. But it's also very much about this loud, collective, maternal body that takes charge of the public space and cultures where women are still able to be routinely, publicly collected and vocal.
And the reason I think hunter-gatherers are very important in developing this more, in some ways, more ancient understanding of what communism is or could be is because all through the literature, regardless of where particular ethnographers started out, what you find is this current of power that emerges from, even though it's never confined to, that material biological body. It's A corporeal politics. It's rooted in the tension between male and female bodies, between desire and responsibility, between community and the individual, between the principles of hierarchy and egalitarianism.
Hunter-gatherers personify communism in motion because they're designed to. It's not just a happy coincidence. These are systems that are designed to keep churning up power and then shuttling it back and forth between collectives. And even when that's not happening on a macro level, as in the big three-day long rituals like a Jengi or Ngoku, it's happening constantly in these little eruptions of song and dance that are just so much a part of the daily landscape. It's like this constant buzz or hum going on under the surface all the time. To the extent that when a big ritual occurs, I think it's not a case of starting from scratch. It's just you're revving things up. You know, it's like you're bringing the noise up a notch as opposed to turning it on. It's always there. And what that buzz or hum is to me is this constant circulation of social but also reproductive, emotional and ritual power. It's constantly out there in the social field and it's constantly in flux. And that's not accidental.
Chris asked me whenever I was talking about coming, he sent me a few questions, you know, to focus what he would like me to talk about or what he would maybe like me to clarify from things I've said in the past. One of the things that you asked me was, what was your fieldwork experience? And I think that's relevant as well to this because I got pregnant very early in the fieldwork experience, which meant that I didn't stay long enough to learn and bend jelly. I didn't stay long enough to develop my own kind of theoretical ideas about what was happening. Everything that I witnessed there came without language and without cultural expertise, which was considered afterwards by me and a lot of other people to be a drawback, and of course in the traditional anthropology PhD is a big drawback. But actually, When you're exposed, when you're dropped into such a radically different environment and you're in those early stages where you're in culture shock, you're seeing things, things are flying past you, you're making connections that maybe later you would clarify for yourself, that can be valuable. that I left Mbule, the village, the semi-permanent camp, rather, where I was living, when I was in the early stages of the pregnancy, which meant I had only really been in Central Africa for about five months. But what I took away was this image of the dances that were happening constantly when I was there. And it's actually where this idea of communism in motion seeded itself. going back to Edinburgh and starting to go through the incredibly rich literature from so many long-term ethnographers. I'm putting that together with what I'd witnessed, which was this constant banter going on between girls and boys, women and men, adults and kids. And it was very much about no one being able to take hold of the public space or to command the ritual space for more than a few minutes really before someone else would come in and challenge them. And it's that dynamic. It's not even that you're talking about, you know, the lunar cycle. It's almost like a second by second cycle. It's just going all the time. And seeing that visually, seeing the way people would dance at each other, and actually you would always have one dancer swinging back and forth between poles or lines, as in Elanda, which is the courtship dance, where you have a line of women and a line of men who dance at each other. And as they're dancing, one girl, boy, man, woman will constantly swing back and forth. Seeing stuff like that before you've had a chance to kind of pin it down into your own ideas, into your own framework, whatever it is that you're particularly interested in, the fact that I was able to take that back and put it together with the literature on women's lyrics, which are incredibly graphic, strong body lyrics designed to emphasize the reproductive power and procreative power, just kind of it made something fit together that I think might not have fitted if I'd had time, ironically, to stay on in the field. I probably would have, I certainly would have gotten a lot of different material, but I don't know if I would have hit on that because it stayed so vibrant. And also, of course, having had to have a broad comparative understanding of other African hunter-gatherers, where you see that pendulum again and again with the Juntois or the Hadza.
So, that was the fieldwork experience that made me start to think that we can call this communism in motion. We don't have to be afraid of using the word communism, because it's much closer to Lewis Henry Morgan's communism than anything we've been used to in recent years. And Chris, you had asked me whether childcare and reproductivity, the fact that women have babies, Is this something that can connect them with each other rather than isolating them? What does the ethnography have to show us, have to teach us here? And I think, I mean, that's just so obvious and so inevitable that the fact that it doesn't points up this kind of critical tension that we're all living with now. I think as a society's premised on things rather than people and on production rather than nurture and on one form of labour which is about material items and cash rather than another form of labour which is about bringing new people into the world and allowing them to thrive.
The source of so much power in societies like the Mbinjele, and I saw it again and again at Mbula, is to do with women's collective childcare. It's to do with the fact that... Children are being raised communally by, not just by the entire group, but by a core of breastfeeding mothers who move through their day with babies and small children constantly circulating among them. And so that is, that's basically the non-privatisation of children and childcare. I mean, I have written a lot of stuff in response to the questions that you had sent me. But I think what I really would like to emphasize about this idea of communism in motion is that it's everything that, if we think about capitalism, what capitalism represents and what capitalism requires of us as individuals and as communities, communism in motion, especially whenever you see it in the ethnography, is Everything that that kind of system, that kind of industrial and later consumer-based capitalism is not. So where corporate capitalism would look ridiculous if it founded itself on connectedness and fluidity, dancing and laughter and babies, those are all the things that you're going to find at the core of what I'm calling communism in motion, which is basically sexual egalitarianism. And I mean, that's something that Bakhtin wrote a lot about, how the project of elite power from the Middle Ages onwards was to break apart that collective body that had been rooted in and sustained by Carnival and to silence the folk laughter that represented this moving common body and to make sure that people weren't able to lampoon authority anymore through it.
So, I think communism in motion is about the ability of a society to have two strong collective ritual bodies that are able to instigate this swing of power back and forth through the social landscape. What I've written about a lot with the politics of Eros is the attempt to bring out the sense of that collective female maternal body as it kind of stampedes through the public space again and again, asserting itself. But without those two collectives, and Marilyn Strathearn Her classic analysis of gender and melanesia shows how the male ritual body thrives. Individuals thrive because they have access to this male ritual body. But in the kinds of societies we're talking about here, you actually have two collective bodies, equally powerful and equally vocal. And that's really what's generating the sense of a moving social field where things are shared and nothing is able to be privatized or frozen into one set of hands. That the ongoing movement for economic localization has shown us this, that it's about bringing the sensual awareness back into the market and back into the ethics of production. offering a challenge to the monoculture of corporate capitalism and taking the scale back to the local community level. But that offers a model as well to where things are drawn back to the body, and particularly the reproductive body, and embedded in cyclic material processes, then people continue to experience power in a way that they don't. where bodies are privatized and shut off from each other and particularly where mothers are separated from one another and not able to collectivize that incredibly powerful buoyant reproductive body. And it's a cultural, it's a cultural explosion out into the entire society really. It's the elaboration of what individual biological bodies do, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, into a much bigger kind of almost like a dynamo, a collective body where these things not only are pluralized but take on another kind of level of power and potential and so I think whenever that when you live in the kinds of networks where that there isn't a voice for the female or the maternal body for the collective female body You're living like people, as people like David Graeber have said, time and again, you're living with the constant experiential absence of power. You're living with this individual experience that never kind of achieves the loud cultural voice that it could and should. and many ethnographers like Barry Hewlett or Meredith Small have written about the effects of this kind of system, this kind of closed, frozen social system, which is essentially hierarchy and capitalism. on children and on babies. So when Benjele women, and I know that a lot of you have heard about Ngoku and Ejenge and Elanda, when these things are charged through camp, Each gender group, each sex group, is able to make an assertion about power for itself. That's then encountered by the other gender group, so women might rush Ngoku through camp, whipping people out of the way, and then in another moment a gengi is brought in, and that kind of flexes the muscles of the male collective body. But when you step back, what you see from these dances is this big open body and process at every moment. This kind of unending physical dialogue that pulls things back from the abstract and breaks open concentrations of power across the social landscape. Because this speaking body is refusing to be broken apart or to be silenced, the negotiation about and the distribution of power remains in the hands of all the people. So basically, Coming back to the idea of communism in motion, there are two general possibilities. And I mean, if we go right back to the Neolithic and agriculture, there's stasis. There are societies based on this premise of stasis, where you need to claim things, people, territory. You need to fence things off and wall things in. And the whole concept of movement or of motion is dangerous to that because it's slippery and it's collective and it's difficult to control. And that's the model that we're familiar with having been raised and shaped by it. And it's anti-social not by accident but by design, because sociality, in the sense of true, open sociality, is threatening to it. And I think that's why Malinowski, the father of anthropology, found the idea of collective motherhood so disturbing. It was a direct counter to the institution of the nuclear family and a threat to everything that patriarchal hierarchy represents. True communism, by contrast, is a live creature. It's a quantum element. It has to be embodied. It has to be danced and sung and experienced on the level of the skin. And this hemmed in sort of agricultural ego characteristic of hierarchy, the ego self most of us live by, is threatened by this kind of communism because it's threatened by sharing. and by fluidity, and by the kind of socio-political openness that people like the Mbengele thrive on. So the misery of modernity that people like Hugh Brodie or Marshall Sahlans talk about, that general feeling of unwellness or misfit, whatever else it is, is the phenomenology of the fenced-in, walled-off body-mind. There's a sense of constriction, a shortness of breath almost that come with stoppage and social systems premised on stoppage. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's really, really striking that we're talking about virtual structure here. We're not talking about When you talk about hunter-gatherers like the Mbenjele or the Hadza or the Juntwa, you're not talking about the kinds of structures familiar to us, either socially, politically, or even relationally. You're talking about a type of virtual structure that unfolds without walls, without doors, without any kind of leadership hierarchy. And so it's slippery and it's hard to get a handle on. But someone like Colin Turnbull, for example, used his understanding of the large rituals that generate this virtual structure and keep it running all the time. He used his understanding of those. to reflect on the child-rearing practices that are the foundation for that. And what he found, like so many others after him, is that the child-rearing practices are intimately connected to the big political pendulum swings that you find in the political and cosmological domain. And the reason for that is that You have this constant, open, collective body of women who are fashioning children towards this open society from birth onwards. And the aim for this other kind of person, it's almost another kind of self. is that they'd be able to contain contradiction and paradox and tolerate inter-subjective spillage in a way that would really be alien to most of us. The fact that the maternal body stays public, strong, vocal and collective means babies are being nestled from day one at the crux of this common self, similar to the kind of self Barbara Ehrenrech talks about as a counter to Freud's romantic dyad. And when you look at the literature on the physiological consequences of cutting babies off from contact early on, which is really what has been happening for a long time in most cultures that aren't egalitarian, which is in most of the world, The effects of the stress, hormone cortisol, the accelerated heartbeat, the eventual numbing out and dissociation, and this of course is most acute in medical, recent medical culture in Euro-American societies. but it's still, it's a whole different development and understanding of the person and the self in relation to the social domain. You start to see that that becomes part of how the society operates, that sense of being cut off and closed in and having a strong sense of the separate ego, the separate identity, the culture premised on competition and command and control as opposed to nurture, contact, response, a whole different set of principles. And I think if you think about humans and evolutionary deep time, this isn't normal. in some ways hunter-gatherers and it's one of the reasons that they are so fascinating to anthropologists and also one of the reasons that so many people are antagonized by them. Egalitarian hunter-gatherers are involved in creating a different kind of body, a different kind of person. It's not just that all of this is an interesting aside to the main project of continuing with life as it is in the world at the moment, where the values that are driving society are so antithetical to anything even remotely related to communistic living or being. It's not just that life could be richer or happier for so many people. And it's not just that people are being crushed by social fields premised on accumulation and that American military imperative of control and command, close things down, keep things private, keep things safe and separate. Because as biological anthropologist Sarah Herty has pointed out in her last two books, as we move away from a species, from those communistic, tactile, contact-rich cultures that defined the life experience of our ancestors and still define the life experience of a small amount of societies, We're in danger of losing emotional and social capacities, refined over millions of years of evolution. So she makes the point that our brains will eventually change in accordance with these new kinds of systems based on closure and based on the freezing of power and the interpersonal freezing of the self, which means that our emotional capacity, our capacity for empathy, for example, for compassion, for connection, for being touched by anything, will eventually begin to change and possibly even wither. Because all of these emotional abilities, all of this wonderful wealth of emotional communication that human beings are so good at, developed out of a very particular kind of society. And that type of society was, it was a living, fizzing, organic communism that was never allowed to freeze or to belong to one person or another. And as we're moving away from that, and we really are moving very far away from it, we can't expect to keep hold of the emotional intelligence that was born out of it. And I think that's a really... I've been waffling a little bit tonight because I was expecting to be asked questions, but I think that this is a really urgent point that can't be overemphasized, you know, because not only for those of us who have children, but for anyone who's interested in the future of this planet. The fact that we have still got societies who are actively and assertively living communism, and they're living it in the most joyful, bawdy, irreverent, and unhappy where possible, it's not a serious, poor-faced kind of, let's all slog together for the common good. It feels good. And I've seen that. And again and again, hunter-gatherer ethnographers who talk about these people say, these are not idols. Nobody's getting overly sentimental. They're human beings who, by some kind of social or political genius, are able to maintain a moving structure, a moving system that moves with the people themselves, that comes out of the reproductive body and returns to it. So that it's like this wonderful to and fro where you're generating power, you're dancing it out, you're building up the energy, you're putting it out into the social domain and then you're experiencing it. So you're also experiencing yourself as a world maker, as an active, powerful part of your society. And I mean, I was thinking about this recently when I was reading Philip Pullman to my 11-year-old daughter. Because we read books at night sometimes, and we were reading Northern Lights, where he talks about how children were having their, part of what the church was doing to kids was severing children away from their demon or their soul by cutting off that part, that vital part of the child. And it was part of a project to control and manipulate the lost energy of the kids. It struck me as being not too far away, maybe it's a little bit extreme, but not too far away from what is being done on a routine level, on a very normal level to most kids, and in some senses to most mothers, when they're cut off from the collective body, they're cut off from that fluid, powerful experience of the self. as part of a larger body. And that's painful. But I think that that's also where any revolutionary potential begins, because in another place in the book that I've been trying to write out of my doctoral thesis, I called it the love with its tongue severed. It's this kind of profound Tenderness and pain, that's part of the experience of loving our children and grandchildren in this increasingly fragile world where they really are not the priority on a social level. And because we're not talking really about individuals here, we're talking about what the society chooses to highlight and to prioritize. And it's very clear that we've been living for a long time, thousands of years really, in societies that put the needs of children right down at the bottom of the list of priorities. So when we talk about egalitarian hunter-gatherers, and what they're doing in their forest camps when they sing lines like the penis gives birth to nothing or the penis is no competition or you know their testicles are broken these kind of very cheeky body assertive ritual lines being stamped out by women all the time it's not it's not an accident that they're saying you know It's an assertion of the female body and what it does, and it's an assertion of procreative power. And in some ways it's an assertion of the rights of the child as well. It's a claim, it seems to be a claim over the rights of the children, the rights of babies, to be at the very, very crux of the culture and to be prioritised. And I think we have to be clear that these songs and the dances behind them and the constant energy of the women in singing them and in stamping out these lyrics and in retaking the social public space again and again and again is not, it's not accidental. It's a direct aggressive counter. to those patriarchal agricultural motifs and the risk they pose to the lives of the young in any society. So this is the experiential field of the maternal body exploding out into a collective articulate body, indeed a cultural body, whose genius is that as it moves along, it's able to suck male ritual collectives into it. It's able to suck in the entire society so that an element or a potential that seems to have been stolen in hierarchical societies here is being shared. It's being given, and it's being used for the benefit of the entire community. And that's where I came to the idea. not only of communism in living, as Lewis Henry Morgan named it so long ago, but of communism in motion, because that quality of kinetic movement, that quality of being able to constantly circulate is one of the defining characteristics of it. And it really is the original template for what communism was and could be. And that's kind of - I think it would be good to have questions so that if there's anything to elaborate on.