Anthropologies of Revolution

Front matter

Forging Time, People, and Worlds

IGOR CHERSTICH MARTIN HOLBRAAD

NICO TASSI

Chapter 4. The Revolutionary Leader: Charisma, Authority, and Exception

Chapter 5. Revolution and Ideology: Truth, Lies, and Mediation Chapter 6. Revolutionary Cosmologies: Spirits, Myths, Worlds

Conclusion. Worlds in Revolution

References Index vii

171 197

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the outcome of “Comparative Anthropology of Revolutionary Politics” (CARP), a five-year research project dedicated to developing a distinctively anthropological understanding of revolutions. The project was funded by a Consolidator grant of the European Research Council (ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP) and led by Martin Holbraad at University College London from 2014 to 2019. For catalytic discussions on the anthropology of revolutions during the early stages of the book’s development, we wish to thank Narges Ansari, Myriam Lamrani, and Charlotte Loris-Rodionoff, who were members of the project’s core research team alongside the three of us. For illuminating discussions at various stages of the book’s development, as well as for advice on relevant literature, we thank David Burrows, Maria Elena Canedo, David Cooper, Alice Elliot, Dan Hirslund, Caroline Humphrey, Bruce Kapferer, Nicola Miller, Morten Axel Pedersen, Mike Rowlands, Joseph Trapido, Kaya Üzel, and (particularly!) Lucia Michelutti. We are grateful to Pascale Searle and Suzanne Petrou for their dedicated administrative support throughout the project, and appreciate Michael Brown, Giles Machell, and Jen Morgan at UCL EU Grants Office, Martin O’Connor, Paul Carter Bowman, and Rikke Osterlund at the Department of Anthropology, and Susanne Kuechler as Head of Department, for providing the basic administrative and institutional structures on which projects such as this depend.

We are enormously grateful to our undergraduate and masters’ students in the course “Social Forms of Revolution,’ which we designed and taught together at UCL in 2016, and Cherstich continued to teach on his own in 2017 and 2018. The students’ thoughts and comments during lectures and tutorials have been a constant point of reference for us in the writing of the book, the chapters of which vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS are based on our lectures for the course. Some of the material that features in the chapters was also presented during the following conferences, workshops, and exhibitions: “Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics” (UCL, London, 2014); “How Goes It with the New Man? A Comparative Approach to Revolutionary Subjectivity” (Cuban Institute of Philosophy, Havana, 2015); “The Revolutionary Process in Bolivia: A Comparative Approach” (Vicepresidencia del Estado, La Paz, 2016); “Morphologies of Invisible Agents” (Space Gallery, London, 2019); and “After the Event—Prospects and Retrospects of Revolution” (UCL, London, 2019). We thank those who helped to organize these events and also thank the participants for their contributions, and not least the personnel of the Centro de Investigacion Social of La Paz as well as colleagues at the Instituto de Filosofia in Havana. We also give thanks to Hera Karagianni, Nikos Giannakakis, and particularly Panos Giannakakis (and Iris!) for their hospitality during a twoweek writing retreat in their house in Mount Pelion in June 2018. Kate Marshall at UCP has expertly guided this book to publication, and we are grateful also to the press’s two reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments on the manuscript. Finally, our gratitude goes out to our families in Bolivia, Italy, and the United Kingdom for their support.