Consent’s Revenge

What is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? By "easy answer" one might think of a diagnostic, a characteristic of action, a statement of effect, rather than analysis that may course to the unthinkable. Recognition, repair, resilience, resistance, revolution-all diagnostics, all characterological, all containers for describing the political. And in this, for grasping at intent and at outcomes. The political describes distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility, the imagination of how action will unfold to reach back to that distribution for a re-sort, but also for a push on what should be. For anthropologists this is a record of the observed and of the political, rendered objectlike. And this rendering of complexity is far from new. The early Africanists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) took structure and function to constrain action, and even Americanists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1851) saw governance and hierarchy converge into stages of civilization that one could sort people into, seamlessly, in a global project of naming and sorting. Morgan's gaze on material culture operated as an anthropological and political magic wand of sorting, ordering, and ranking. The context for both was the colonial and imperial