Preface

The productive provocations offered by this Special Issue are clear from the first words of its title. Taking inspiration from a phrase originally used by Eric Gable (1997), contributors turn exploration of ‘nightmare egalitarianism’ into a comparative project of both power and subtlety. The positive dimensions of egalitarian social arrangements are not denied, but the focus here is on the darker sides of practices and technologies of commensuration: the envy, mistrust, and procrustean violence that can characterize the work of ‘equalizing’ humans (and potentially other salient social agents) according to shared standards of measurement. Authors reveal many shades of darkness across seven case studies that traverse four continents and take us from prehistory, to relatively recent history, to the present. Taken as a whole, they express scepticism of older anthropological tendencies to ‘discover’ idealized egalitarian social orders in the field as a means of critiquing the political and economic foundations of capitalist modernity. Indeed, authors are wary of characterizing any social formation in terms of a single paramount value, or of interpreting the worlds of others as one-dimensional sources of moral value. The egalitarianism that emerges from these pieces, then, is ethically complex, dynamic, and realized more in action and story than in abstraction. It is also emergent from situations and encounters that are neither definitive nor permanent in their social outcomes. The editors do suggest the utility of thinking through varied ethnographic materials with the aid of three analytical ‘modes’ of egalitarianism, which differ in terms of the degree and diffusion of commensuration in operation at any given moment, but their point is that a social formation might well shift between, or even mix, modes. In addition, some of the case studies depict societies undergoing political shifts likely to influence experiences of egalitarianism, and therefore associated nightmares. Given these nuances, it is no surprise to find authors often drawing on an analytical vocabulary that permits sensitive descriptions of the intensity and salience of forces of commensuration (and non-commensuration): notions of indexicality, calibration, register, and proximity/distance are sprinkled across these pages. I conclude with two further remarks. First, that this collection shows how reconsideration of egalitarianism has implications for how we think about other classic anthropological themes: exchange, relationality, mutuality, personhood, autonomy, and the notion of measurement itself. And second, that the collection is of course a collaborative product of the labours of editors, authors, and members of the RAI Publications Committee. I thank them all, with particular gratitude to Ros Little, the RAI's excellent Publications Officer, who made the compilation of this issue much more of a dream than a nightmare.