By Gijs Koopman – Paired with the failure to explain to my grandmother what it exactly is, I still wonder why I really chose anthropology. But when I think about what I learned from it most, complexity is the first word that comes to mind. Complexity is defined by Doyne Farmer (2024) in Making Sense of Chaos as emergent behaviour that appears sporadically as a result of sequential individuality. In other words, when many different simple building blocks like microbes, cells, flora and fauna in ecosystems, or humans in a social network, are grouped together, their sum opens up opportunities for previously impossible behaviour. This impossible behaviour, as a result of complexity, can be defined as chaos. Chaos is both endogenous and exogenous to systems and understood by traditional economics as crises. Something that, from my memory as a student, Thomas Eriksen (2014) in Overheating was always looking for.
I remember Eriksen’s TED talk We Are Overheating well due to the simplicity and the immovability of his argument. Through a multitude of increasingly ramped up developments like population growth, information growth, increased migration, waste output, energy usage, water usage, and climate change; consequently, differing social scales are prone to interact and collapse. This all happens within assemblages, following Anna Tsing’s (2015) book The Mushroom at the End of the World, where these scales are marked by indeterminacy, which is an inherent characteristic of the teleologies that govern global supply chains and destroy nature for crucial and ever scarce resources.
Based on teleological indeterminacy, assemblages can subsequently be described as sensitive frontiers with spatial-temporal idiosyncrasies that morally justify and render a need for violence, according to Violence & the Cultural Order by Neil Whitehead (2007). The idea of cultural expressions of order can be taken deeper with Zygmunt Baumann’s (2003) Wasted Lives, whichhighlights how capitalist ideology constitutes a hierarchy of human value, where non- and weak consumers are considered at the bottom of society. Thus, following Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2003) Cosmological Deixis and Ameridian Perspectivism, our cosmological deixis typifies us into vultures or maybe jaguars, who gorge on blood and feast on those we consider prey. We must consume and therefore we must destroy, whether this is horror to you depends only on your perspective.
In this example perspectivism means that none of this can be wrong; our brains are trapped in a tight ontological web and simply wouldn’t allow wrongness. Ontology refers to the metaphysics of human beings that are the relational historical, social, and cultural backdrop of socially informed human behaviour. Much human behaviour is coordinated by cognitive dissonance, which is a brain mechanic that makes certain behaviour possible and impossible based on these idiosyncratic ontologies. What becomes clear is how justificatory rationalities solve cognitive dissonance. Behaviour is subsequently formed by unique genealogical histories, unpredictable contemporary relationships, future fears, hopes, and dreams which move humans to hold, to love, to battle and to commit mass atrocities.
Wrong murder then simply is murder that is unequal by comparison. Comparison is a tricky exercise however, since comparing human categories quickly reveals paradoxes, oxymorons and juxtapositions, which seemingly creates unexplainable things like chaos. However, closer inspection reveals a certain determinacy: murder is rarely random, but rather the result of precise social constructions that wire our brains to view the act as not only justified, but necessary. Having been rejected, the man murders the woman to solidify his masculine pride. The 14-year old gang member assassinates the opposition to gain favour from her leader, who happens to be her uncle. Never mind the group of highschoolers who decide to bring guns to school; meanwhile, soldiers and paramilitary groups murder thousands because they themselves are virtuous, serve a greater purpose and need to protect their fellow comrades. The other is clearly less than human, malicious, and a threat to their way of life. Though I wonder, what do the rebels think?
We take and detach, transform and translate, to create something we hope is aspiring, understandable and simple enough to be recognized and applicable. Nevertheless, extremism and violence rise while climate change continues to exert pressure on the world. While all this initially seems chaotic in nature, the inherent complexity of these challenges can be broken down by us, the anthropologists, or so we’d say! But perhaps non-anthropologists already know or understand these things as simple truths, despite the scale and seeming unexplainability. Comparison between the jaguar and the vulture certainly reveals complexity, although this shouldn’t be an obstacle for understanding, rather its condition. Perhaps, then, the challenge for anthropologists is not to make complexity simple, but to make it matter by comparison.
Gijs Koopman is an alumnus of the bachelor programme Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.