Hannah Arendt, an anthropologist's ally? Relational subjects, political action, and anti-racism in the twenty-first century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hannah Arendt has never held a significant place in anthropology. Perhaps her focus on mid-twentieth-century Europe and the USA, where she misunderstood Black struggles, outdates her for a twenty-first-century global discipline. However, this article argues that core aspects of Arendt's oeuvre can advance debates on relational subjectivity and political action because her efforts to think past the scourge of totalitarianism in Europe parallel the discipline's own efforts to think past colonialism everywhere else in the world. These two intertwined phenomena require the same undoing of “modern” Western political discourse, particularly its emphasis on bounded entities like individuals, nations, and states. The article synthesizes Arendt's work on subjectivity and action to unite the anthropology of personhood, existential-phenomenological anthropology, and political anthropology for the sake of an ontology of subjectivity supporting progressive politics. It, firstly, presents Arendt's tripartite division of human existence—labor, work, and action—to convey her unique understanding of political life. Secondly, it presents the relational subject as composed of an inner plurality but appearing as a singularity requiring recognition from a plurality of other such subjects. Thirdly, it argues that Arendt's view of council-style politics exemplifies a generic polity allowing relational subjects to simultaneously reconstitute themselves and their polity through joint action. Fourthly, it examines her argument that racism marks the end of humanity so we can align her work with decolonial anthropology. This tricky task requires us to unpack Arendt's Conradian representations of the colonized to understand how imperialism abroad pre-conditioned the destruction of political life in Europe through totalitarianism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".