Social Analysis

In this introduction we approach egalitarianism as an upsetting force that in various ways has shaped much of modern, especially Western, human history. We outline philosophical trajectories from the Enlightenment onward; consider the historical realization of an agency of ‘the people’ for the articulation of state, society, and politics; and highlight some issues that arise when the claims to freedom and equality clash against established institutions and values. Stressing the dynamic intertwining of the egalitarian with the hierarchical, we portray egalitarian life forms as modes of relationality that negate, subvert, or take advantage of open potentials in existing systems. Egalitarian life strives toward reconfiguring social orders through rupturing moments of effervescence and liminality while attempting to redefine central categories of life.

Intentional communities are social movements that are centrally concerned with producing new forms of social organization through experimentation with labor organization. Exploring the experiments of one of these communities, this article analyzes how members (communards) imagine how work can be organized to build a more egalitarian mode of life. Communards’ attitudes toward sharing work while balancing the needs of the community and the individual provide valuable insights into the sometimes paradoxical dynamics and practical relationships between power, hierarchy, justice, and equality. The article highlights how egalitarian life is perceived to come to fruition often through joy and playfulness, which must be balanced with more bureaucratic and rule-bound egalitarian social structures. Furthermore, the article argues that labor should be a central domain in grappling with egalitarian possibilities.

An ongoing paradox of egalitarianism is its immanence with various forms of hierarchical organization, including within non-hierarchical social movements. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the cascading effects of egalitarian dynamics that often manifest as anti-state and/or anti-corporate sentiments. UK anti-fracking activists challenged the state and the extractive industry on the basis of equality and justice, fundamental to their notions of democracy. Their experiences highlighted the ‘darker side’ of popular struggle because the distrust toward the government and industry overflowed and became directed inward. The personal impacts of activism and the challenges of forming non-hierarchical collectivities demonstrate the hidden backstory of egalitarian impulse that emerges from a sense of injustice and persists through personal hardship. It may also foster division, resentment, and conflict.

In this article I explore the fundamental tension in the world of Bitcoin between ‘maximalists’, who see Bitcoin as a tool for the promotion of a moral revolution, and ‘traders’, who approach Bitcoin pragmatically as a financial tool. Based on ethnography of a crypto gold rush that took place in the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv, I argue that, despite heuristic distinctions, both of these attitudes advance egalitarian tendencies. While maximalists offer a sense of belonging to a close-knit community of equals, traders promote the nominal equality of all value-making strategies in an open financial environment. I use the terms ‘ideational’ and ‘materialist’ to characterize these two modes of practice, which realize contemporary visions of egalitarian life in different forms.

The Kurdish movement has often been touted as an egalitarian struggle, and, in many ways, rightly so. However, the movement's relation to its undisputed leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has remained relatively unexamined. This article seeks to rectify this oversight by investigating how Abdullah Öcalan informs the movement's egalitarian life. To do so, the article employs a frame of analysis that utilizes anthropological theory on kingship. Drawing on secondary sources and fieldwork in Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan, the article argues that Öcalan works as and resembles a king for the movement in several key respects, greatly influencing the movement's structure. The article contends that applying this frame of analysis may bolster theoretical apparatuses for studying revolutionary movements and nuance polar understandings of hierarchy and egalitarianism.

Since independence in 1975, Mozambique has experimented with society-state relations, including an Afro-socialist revolutionary transformation followed by a multi-party democracy with nominal state functions, such as policing. Building on fieldwork, this article analyzes the genealogy and practices of community policing, arguing that while its emergence reflects a global transformation of state apparatuses reliant on securitization, this transition is still in progress. Community policing practices interconnect with both (petty and organized) crime and nominally past experiments in revolutionary citizenship in socialist Mozambique, including the promises of egalitarian life that linger on in political cosmology and memory. Mozambican community policing thus exhibits the core characteristics of a fluid and ‘predatory-protective’ security assemblage, while simultaneously harboring the potential for instantiating forms of egalitarian life beyond hierarchical state ordering.

Recently dubbed the new ‘Asian Tiger’, Bangladesh developed a post-independence citizen-centered economic strategy that included generating non-farm jobs and constituting a new type of model or ideal citizen: the independent, prosperous, and entrepreneurial woman. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka, in this article I document the model citizen campaigns by analyzing female ready-made garment factory workers’ lives. I also outline the form that egalitarianism assumed in this context. I argue that through investigating the emergence of joggo nari—women who challenge gendered norms and hierarchies, aspire toward forms of gender equality, and represent new women of a new Bangladesh—central paradoxes of egalitarian dynamics, such as contradictory and multi-layered gendered relationships and expressions of personhood, desire, and freedom, may come into view.

In this article I ask, at what level does the egalitarian life of the French Republic manifest itself? In what social spaces do people get to enjoy its slogan, Liberté, égalité, fraternité? I take these questions to be closely entangled with the concepts of public space and civil society, as well as that of the commons. How do Parisians use their urban commons? What kinds of restrictions and barriers exist to exclude people from this space? I describe the Bois de Boulogne public park in Paris and explore why this vast space of common enjoyment is subdivided to such a degree into zones of privilege and membership. I propose that the park exists as a miniature version, a heterotopia, of larger French society.