Acknowledgments

As always, this Forum would have been impossible without the generous contributions of our participants, as well as the support of Patty Gray, Janine Latham and the rest of the team from Berghahn.

A Note on Jatin Dua's Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean

Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Over the past three decades, anthropologists have heeded the injunction to follow the ‘modes of construction’ (the people, the thing, the metaphor, the plot, story or allegory, the life, and so forth) underlying relationships among people (Marcus 1995). In the process, the ways in which people themselves seek to frame those relations as they make and break them seem to have receded into the background of anthropological interest. We subsequently stopped looking for cultural wholes as though they resided in places—villages, regions—and indeed more or less dispensed with the notion of the ‘whole’ altogether as an outmoded or naïve unit of analysis in our postmodern condition (Appadurai 1988; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). And yet, while we may no longer reify such villages, we have not abandoned our penchant for reification; we have merely honed and re-channelled it (together with the imaginary that sustains such an exercise; Candea 2007: 171–172). In the process, those things that we once studied as ubiquitous dimensions of social life—requiring understanding and potentially holding insight wherever they may be—are now transformed into condensed emblems of sorts, which, by the force of their systemic staging of this or that aspect of life, promised privileged, perhaps dramatized insight. And so it was to be that instead of political anthropology, we now have anthropology of the state; instead of economic anthropology—accounts of financial markets. The study of kinship found new life as the anthropology of new reproductive technologies, and the anthropology of knowledge has been reincarnated in scientific laboratories. In a vicious circle, this monochromatic dramaturgy only reinforces the domaining tendency already present and long critiqued (McKinnon and Cannell 2013; see also Bear et al. 2015; Hughes 2019; Yanagisako and Delaney 1994). It is as if we have at once dispensed with the possibility of grasping a multidimensional totality (unless at the ‘seamless’ global scale; Candea 2007: 170), and yet we have been projecting a new sense of reified totality, only now conjuring it in closed quarters, where one dimension overpowers all others.

Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean provides a refreshing reminder that the pursuit of ‘modes of encounter’ on vast and varied scales, in this case ‘in the Indian Ocean and beyond’, can bring together disparate practices, actors, and sites under a ‘unifying category’ while at the same time foregrounding the ways in which people seek to frame those encounters (Dua 2019: 23). The spectrum of practices that Captured at Sea intertwines spans from piracy to counter-piracy, embracing institutions we tend to construct as invested in ‘protection’ within and without law: from the worlds of hospitality and its suspension of violence, to the worlds of capture that revolve around it. What Dua reconstructs throughout the book he then dramatizes wonderfully in the final chapter: how forms of protection within and without law shape—and can at times be confused and replaced with—each other. As the book's chapters unfold, he constructs the transnational constellation that emerged out of the socio-spatial dynamics in the coastal communities of northern Somalia, the projects and processes of governance, law, and economy along the East African coast, the combination of naval operations, maritime insurance actors the world over, and private security companies. In all of these modes of encounter, actors offer, accept, and at times enforce protection. As a framing for power-laden and violence-menacing relationships, protection orders the most disparate social structures. It emerges in a professionalized suit-and-tie form in business districts and situation rooms, and it appears as categories in insurance bills that change as expert security committees determine the insurance costs of ships and cargo depending on the estimated risks associated with different shipping lanes. Dua also situates this same protection, as well as the rise of piracy during the previous decade, within a long history of coastal encounters, in which expanding imperial navies along the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean met coastal communities and their political practice of extending protection through terms of relatedness (aman, abaan) and the mobile institutions that these invoked (2019: 22).

Dua interweaves his compelling ethnography in the various sites, and with the various actors in the piracy/counter-piracy constellation, with a revelatory historical reconstruction of each of these sites. The book thus gradually builds the image of capture and its aftermath from elements and actors that resemble each other, even as each side seeks to define itself in contradistinction to its counterparts. The book charts ‘these geographically and legally distinct domains’ historically and ethnographically, and then ‘lift[s] the divide’ between them, revealing ‘a crowded and shared, if competing, world that emerges in the aftermath of capture’ (Dua, 2019: 122). Both worlds mobilize the political idiom of protection in comparable, competing, and mutually dependent ways. Furthermore, these worlds share modes and systems of risk pooling. Whether it is the diya group in northern Somalia and its vicissitudes since independence, or insurance actuarial mechanisms, contracts, and institutions since ancient Greek bottomry practice (2019: 107–108, 178–179), Dua's fine-grained analysis of the mechanisms of risk-pooling shows their roles in the distribution of financial responsibility. He traces how, in the case of the diya, that shared responsibility permitted compensation through restorative justice procedures, and a form—social mutual aid—that with time became a sort of joint venture group, pooling the resources and risks involved in hijacking operations (the farther offshore the hijacking, the wider the resources required). He also examines how these groups provided the risk-pooling support required for lengthy operations involving capturing vessels and negotiating their ransom. Within the insurance/navy side of this constellation, Dua shows how a similar requirement for risk-pooling gave rise to reformulated terms for obligation, responsibility, and payment; those too revolved around the idiom of protection, and here too protection served as a mechanism for managing and harnessing violence (or its threat) across perceived or erected boundaries.

The resulting historical anthropology pays careful attention to the details of the making and breaking of power-laden, potentially menacing relationships, with their respective claims to obligation, as much as it does to the longer histories of these terms of engagement both in the world of investment and empire and in coastal communities in the Western Indian Ocean. This choreography of detachment and entanglement between mediators and negotiators on both sides in the aftermath of capture finds its most complex and tense instance when coastal sailors from Somalia capture Dhows and transform them into motherships. Here, Dua's ability to bring into conversation writing on protection, captivity, and hospitality carries perhaps this book's greatest contribution. For it situates hospitality, refuge (and asylum), protection, hijacking, and captivity on a continuum and dramatizes the switches between them, when these usually are treated in thematic, geographical, and analytical separation.

Scholarship on hospitality often invokes Marcel Mauss's writing on the gift. While the comparison between hospitality and gift emphasizes the reciprocity implied in both kinds of interactions, it elides the specificity of hospitality's combination of reciprocity and realm, morality and politics, generosity and mastery over space and people (Dresch 2012; Pitt-Rivers 2011; 2012; Shryock 2008). Because hosting is a key ritualizing device for claiming the moral high ground and staging political relations (Herzfeld 1987), persons’ social trajectories rise and fall as they stage hospitality (Shryock 2004). This is perhaps why gifting still serves as an emblem of reciprocity tout court (in spite of the sustained critique of that comparison; Algazi 2002; MacCormack 1976; Parry 1986), as though it distilled a pure aspect of social life, while hospitality—exactly because it conjoins matters of power and space with those of reciprocity—has had a more complex career (Shryock 2012). Writing on the gift has famously emphasized the analytical distinction between archaic gifting and that carried out under state institutions (Parry 1986: 466–467): between those situations in which gifting forms the paramount mode of relating to one's counterparts and thus includes reciprocal and redistributive transactions, and those situations in which ‘[t]hose who make free and unconstrained contracts in the market also make free and unconstrained gifts outside it’. In contrast to this, hospitality is often deployed analytically across periods and places—especially in writing on refuge, asylum, and migration—as if the emergence of centralized powers and the monopolies they claim over violence (or its legitimation) in their domains did not significantly alter the terms of engagement between would-be hosts and guests. As a result, we run the risk of forgetting the differing, historically related permutations of agreement and force that hospitality shares with protection, refuge, and capture. Part of the issue may stem from the fact that, as an anthropological theme, hospitality emerged already in a discussion of a transformation out of the nomadic way of life (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 160–163). Imagine the entire Essay on the Gift written focusing on the material of just its third chapter, ‘Survivals of These Principles in Ancient Law and Ancient Economies’ (Mauss 2016). Either way, while hospitality always contains within it the threat of violence, in contemporary renderings of hospitality in the context of ongoing Europe-bound migration, this latent threat has been mostly elided or deferred to institutions, with two notable exceptions that focus on the scaling of hospitality from the domestic to the state and beyond (Candea 2012; Shryock 2012). Thus, to paraphrase Parry's statement above, ‘[t]hose who exert free and unconstrained exclusion in their states’ borders also extend [or at least proclaim] free and unconstrained hospitality [within them]’. By forgetting this, we apply simultaneously our own models of ‘archaic’ and ‘contemporary’ hospitality when we try to sort out the roles and obligations of protection.

It is this aspect that resurfaces in Dua's account of the relationship between protection and force as he brings it into relief on these different scales (coastal village; Indian Ocean) and arenas (diya group, insurance company, NATO and its member states). In Captured at Sea, we see Somali pirates setting out to sea in search of ships to capture, only to end up capturing dhows, then seeking refuge in their holds in the hope of using them as the means for other captures (rather than as just an end, Dua 2019: 169). We see how the framing of the encounter oscillates between captivity and hospitality, and how both sides insist on denying any reciprocity, even as their gradually entwined worlds bring them within fewer degrees of separation. As he weaves together the various actors involved in the aftermath of capture—aboard dhows and more broadly—Dua thus succeeds in deploying protection to concatenate the world of the social contract, the market, and the individual into that which we've always between told it has succeeded—the world of the gift.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Chloe Haralambous and Geoffrey Hughes for their comments on earlier versions of this text.

Reflections on Jatin Dua's Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean

Judith Scheele

‘Protection’ is the term that holds together the otherwise admirably eclectic ethnographic and historical material of this book. It connects, in often unexpected ways, Somali pirates, insurance brokers in London, and NATO officers in charge of naval security in the western Indian Ocean. Although all of these actors seem to have different projects and undertake them drawing on a distinctive range of social and economic resources, Dua shows how they all speak a language of protection, whether they are pirates relying on their diya-group to outfit a raiding expedition or insurance brokers operating from the city of London. Even naval officers employed on NATO-warships sent to the area to ‘stamp out’ piracy see their role as one of protection. Moreover, they all hope to achieve this protection collectively, by pooling risk, and in a more or less decentralised, or at least multilateral, fashion. They all draw on longstanding institutions and practices, of which ‘piracy’ itself is but one. To trace different regimes of protection ethnographically, then, is to cross-cut boundaries, and to include actors that are usually seen as essentially different in the same interpretative framework, thereby avoiding the ‘domaining’ (state versus non-state, legal versus extra-legal) that is otherwise current (or implicit) in analysis, and that Dua, in his contribution to this forum, rightly deplores.

This of course also applies to other settings. Dua's claim that an ‘anthropology of protection’ promises a way out of the impasse of current social theory, trapped either in the ‘parochial gaze of the nation-state or the boundless imaginary of deterritorialization that often replicates spatial fantasies of global capital and its neoliberal proponents’ (Dua 2019: 178), deserves further consideration, in particular as the one dominant political institution of the contemporary world, the (nation-)state, has also famously been described as a ‘protection racket’ writ large (Tilly 1982). An emphasis on protection might thus help bring it into focus; political and legal anthropologists everywhere should take note. Dua's characterisation of protection does raise a number of questions, however, which I will probe here with reference to Dua's material and my own work on the Sahara. The first question hinges on the word ‘alternative’, used repeatedly in Dua's definition of protection: protection is an ‘alternative’ system of connectivity and possibility. Alternative to what? On the one hand, the answer seems simple: this is about a new (or renewed) conceptual approach, that, as Ben-Yehoyada notes in his contribution to his forum, ‘follows the relations’ as they constitute ties and claims of (temporary) protection. But it also seems to describe a different political reality, independent of anthropological analysis: a differentiated political space, without a centre or fixed boundaries, that is more easily crossed by some than by others, and that promises no exclusive sovereignty. Different regimes of protection can co-exist, interact, and be legible to one another, in a way that different claims to state sovereignty in the same space cannot, at least not on paper.

From this vantage point, an emphasis on protection indeed proposes an alternative political vision. But this makes one wonder what the other term of the comparison might be. Not ‘the state’, quite clearly, as states play an important role in the processes Dua describes. Perhaps rather a particular (and largely fictional) vision of the state, as an exclusive territorial sovereign creating a bounded political community, within a world in which sovereignty was (and in many parts still is) in fact patchy, temporary, reciprocal, imperfect, and overlapping. Claims to protection are and long have been a privileged way in which this kind of sovereignty was constructed (Benton 1999); and contemporary oceans might just exemplify a logic that is also at work elsewhere, to different degrees. This means that rather than thinking in terms of alternatives, we might do better to think in terms of encompassment, or of ongoing attempts, by different political institutions and principles, to contain one another.

No intellectual parallel, meanwhile, should make us forget the immense gulf of power and opportunity that distinguishes Somali pirates from NATO naval officers, and that makes mutual intelligibility asymmetric and temporary. The protection that can be invoked by a European officer qua European officer is incomparably more potent than that of Somali fishermen or even Indian traders. This is something everybody knows, and it translates mathematically into risk to body and life, and ransoms paid.

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The second question, related to this, is whether the term protection—used, as Dua notes, by all participants—always covers the same reality, or rather, a reality close enough to make comparison productive, and what is gained and lost by such an analytical move. To be clear: I absolutely agree with him that much more is gained than lost. But I also think that to probe the blind spots created by this perspective—in the way in which all perspectives necessarily create blind spots—might be one way in which Dua's ‘anthropology of protection’ can show its full potential; in fact, little would be gained if an anthropology of protection just came to replace the anthropology of the state, the current ‘condensed emblem of sorts’ (Ben-Yehoyada) of political (or legal) anthropology, thereby just adding another hue to the reigning monochrome.

Comparison works if it shows up not only parallels, but also differences; this is most productive when comparison is reciprocal (Austin 2007), that is, when it is used to destabilise both terms of the debate. This is not a matter of debating the respective merit of ‘folk’ over ‘analytical’ concepts: legal anthropology has thankfully moved on since Bohannan and Gluckman. Nor can the concepts at hand here (nor elsewhere) usefully be considered ‘folk concepts’, let alone as standing in for a ‘savage slot’. Dua traces the regional idea of protection to the Somali abaan, which is a pact of protection concluded and usually paid for to enable safe travel or to guarantee commercial transactions over distance; the equivalent, Dua writes, of the Arabic aman. The latter is a concept that can be found throughout northwestern as well as northeastern Africa; it can refer to a payment for safe passage (for traders, for instance), to all kinds of local power-holders including state officials, but also to ‘submission’, the recognition of a more permanent relation of sovereignty against tribute. Aman is also a category recognised in Islamic law, and invoked, today, in legal debates over diplomatic immunity, for instance. It is thus a longstanding, region-wide political and legal tool, that has given rise to centuries of transregional jurisprudence.

The question at hand is thus not one of the opposition of ‘folk’ to ‘analytical’ concept, but rather one of comparative symmetry. Aman is highly ambivalent: it means protection and submission; it is horizontal, but not egalitarian; it can encompass state institutions or be encompassed by them (all features it shares with hospitality). Aman was the thing ‘granted’ by the French imperial army to local communities as it conquered northwest Africa; but it was also the thing ‘broken’ by the same communities as they rebelled. Throughout the Sahara, it was given by the strong to ‘their’ poor or weak people, thereby defining those statuses; as it was exchanged against wealth, it maintained ‘the poor’ in a permanent state of poverty, even when in fact they owned more than anybody else (as ownership without protection is meaningless). In its extreme form, aman was ‘bought’ by relinquishing one's own freedom of movement and attachment, in forms of dependence and servility, one extreme of which was slavery.

Outsiders could work this system, more or less, but they clearly never felt quite satisfied. Indeed, their dissatisfaction was built in, as protection was often primarily against those who offered it, and was always both empowering and diminishing. Traders paid protection money, but if they wanted to engage with the area on a permanent footing, they always also attempted to back up their protection in different ways: by claims to superior spiritual worth, and, ideally, by alliances established through marriage—which then, of course, made them vulnerable to all sorts of claims, and meant that they eventually ceased to be outsiders. Protection, then, provided a framework for navigation, but it was never quite good enough; it was too flat a social relation to be allowed to stand on its own for long. This is also, perhaps, where the parallels between NATO warships, Somali villages, and London insurance companies start to become fuzzy around the edges. NATO warships and London insurance brokers are usually too far removed to make this kind of additional claims-making possible: hence, arguably, their inefficiency in the long run. Captains of dhows are not. They get entangled in complicated relationships where captivity and hospitality blur—which is why the analysis of their position is, as Ben-Yehoyada notes, particularly compelling.

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An anthropology of protection allows for a different kind of political and legal anthropology. Like hospitality, it is deeply rooted in an older ethnographic tradition, and it might help us preserve some of this tradition's insights while avoiding its well-known functionalist pitfalls. Like hospitality, it has the great advantage of portraying politics horizontally, as lodged into a relationship between people that is temporary and potentially reversible. It thereby allows us to question not so much that old anthropological bug-bear of ‘the state’, but its official and mostly illusory claims to vertically exercised exclusive territorial sovereignty. Horizontality, however, does not exclude stark power differentials; and the somewhat greater moral ambivalence of the term aman—which means both protection and submission—might help us to keep them in mind. A focus on protection should not be a way of side-stepping questions of power; and like hospitality, protection might in fact be analytically most productive when it breaks down (Shryock 2012). Notwithstanding, protection clearly has an ability to speak to political regimes universally, and to thereby avoid false oppositions—between state- and non-state institutions and personnel, for instance. In this sense, the claims made by Dua in his book for the analytical potential of an anthropology of protection are, if anything, too modest.

On Histories and Geographies of Concepts

Jatin Dua

Academic knowledge production, much like the world at sea, is a system of debt, engagement, hospitality, and sometimes capture and protection. Like being at sea, there are long periods of solitude punctuated by moments of camaraderie, and sometimes pirates and assorted others also show up. It is a true honour to engage two fellow academic travellers whose work has greatly influenced mine and whose thinking about law, scale, and sovereignty from their work in the Sahara and the Mediterranean crucially informs my own reflections on these questions from the vantage point of the Indian Ocean.

At the heart of my book is a tale of capture and hijacking at sea. Unlike other places (though also like many other places and times), capture marked the beginning and not the end of a social relationship. Ships were hijacked in the Western Indian Ocean not for their cargo, but for value that emerged through negotiations. Instead of an ‘art of not being governed’ (Scott 2010), the capture at sea that inaugurated Somali piracy was a form of connectivity and an entrée into a world constituted by protection. In her response to the book, Judith Scheele queries the extent to which ‘protection’, as used by my numerous interlocutors, from insurance agents to ship owners and Somali pirates themselves, ‘always covers the same reality, or whether its transcendental value, and even the temporary legibility between “parallel systems of protection” that it implies, is just an artifice of English-language categories[?]’. As Scheele notes, and indeed as my work underscores, multiple regimes of protection—while emerging from distinct histories and spaces—can nonetheless be legible and operate in a shared conceptual and geographic space. Indeed, my goal in the book is to highlight the historical and contemporary intimacies of protection that are otherwise divided into separate worlds.

In reading her work on the Sahara alongside mine on the Indian Ocean (and Paul Dresch's on Yemen), Scheele brings alive a world that has many parallels. In all these places, sovereignty is fragmented and multiple, where political relations are situated, temporary, and bound to particular persons and their relations with each other. It is in such a space that protection emerges most clearly, not simply as a system of guaranteeing security or safe passage, but as an alternative political vocabulary for structuring social relations. The centrality of protection is, however, not simply limited to the desert and the sea, but protection is in fact an emic category for NATO at sea, and for insurance underwriters and others in London. My book argues for taking that seriously, not as a form of ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972)—though that remains a potent and important form of legal anthropology (see also Gusterson 1997)—but to understand the production and persistence of multi-scalar relationships across space and time. Instead of a binary opposition between state and non-state central to a territorial imagining of legal anthropology, at sea we are confronted with multiple and overlapping non-state orders with no entity claiming sovereign monopoly over space or violence. Protection works here because it is a shared language, though one with incommensurabilities and limits.

Scheele and I are in complete agreement that comparison is neither a tool for side-stepping issues of power nor simply about showing facile parallels, but in fact is most powerful when it can destabilise both terms of the debate. The power differentials between coastal Somalia and the Lloyds Headquarters on Lime Street are stark and ever-present. Whether in watching a daily procession of oil tankers sail into the horizon from the vantage point of small fishing villages in Puntland or in the failed attempts of a number of my interlocutors to channel greater resources in the name of ‘counter-piracy’, these power differentials shaped the possibilities and impossibilities of certain itineraries. In fact, the comparison generated through my transregional methodology is precisely to make visible these power hierarchies that separate coastal Somalia from those that are ordinarily included in worlds of maritime capitalism.

However, unlike Scheele, I'm not entirely convinced that ‘legal anthropology has thankfully moved on since Bohannan and Gluckman’, and perhaps it might actually be worthwhile to linger briefly on the Gluckman-Bohannan debate as a way to reflect on comparison and the histories and geographies of concepts. Noted as ‘one of the most important debates in the history of the anthropology of law’ (Goodale 2017: 15) the Gluckman-Bohannan debate is often (reductively) rendered as a question of legal epistemology: how does the anthropologist study non-Western legal systems? In their own terms, as Bohannan argued, or through the application of western legal categories such as contract and the ‘reasonable man’, as Gluckman championed in his work on the Lozi in southern Africa? It is important to note, as Anthony Good (2005), Laura Nader ([1969] 1997), and Sally Engle Merry (2006) variously emphasize, that the contrast between Gluckman and Bohannan is often overdrawn. They both recognized the critical role of taking local categories on their own terms (while also imagining an always-present difference and distance between the anthropologist and the social world being studied), but differed on the possibility of comparison and the limits of translation.

For Bohannan, the rejection of comparison was a mode of legitimizing the anthropologist as the master [this was always a gendered world] of the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 1991). Gluckman's comparative project laid the groundwork, however unacknowledged, in the transformation of legal and political anthropology into anthropologies of the state. My goal is not to re-adjudicate the Gluckman-Bohannan debate, but to point to a possibility of envisioning legal anthropology beyond the savage slot in a way that also does not simply transform it into the anthropology of the state. There is perhaps a need, as I argue for in Captured at Sea, to lift the divide between piracy and counter piracy and see that the protection of London and the protection of coastal Somalia might in fact be facets of a shared world (while simultaneously destabilizing both facets of this world). The history of insurance, for example, takes us to similar places as the history of abaan. Yet, when they appear together, they do so either in an evolutionary schema of status to contract, protection rackets to the state, or as ontologically distinct modes of imagining sociality and polity. Confronting and acknowledging these historical convergences and resonances is not about flattening difference, nor is it imposing English-language categories; rather, it rejects forms of domaining and destabilizing projects of conceptual boundary making that locate kinship in one world and contract in another. As I've written elsewhere and expand upon in the book, ‘systems of exchange that secure insurance always exceed the limits of contract and are collateralized, like diya, in principles that precede the moment of contract’ (Dua 2019: 502).

As Naor Ben-Yehoyada notes in his engagement with the book, anthropologists have ‘dispensed with the possibility of grasping a multidimensional totality (unless at the “seamless” global scale; Candea 2007: 170), and yet we have been projecting a new sense of reified totality, only now conjuring it where one dimension overpowers all others.’ Ben-Yehoyada refers to this as a form of ‘monochromatic dramaturgy’. In my work, I have sought to write against this tendency and the forms of domaining that emerge from this by emphasizing the violence and inequality that constitute these encounters of protection, but also the surprising moments of reversal and modes of cohabitation that also constitute them. Hospitality and its ability to move between capture and care is key to apprehending this and bringing into the same frame the multiple threads and histories that constitute protection. I am appreciative of the attention that Scheele and Ben-Yehoyada give to this aspect of my argument in their responses, and here I simply want to thank them for amplifying the centrality of this slippage between captivity and hospitality. In a variety of spaces and sites, anthropologists have noted the violence behind the gift or the hostility that lurks beneath hospitality. These are profound and important insights, but lest we forget, sometimes pirates can become guests, and capture transforms into temporary forms of living together in a shared, though unequal, sea.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Geoffrey Hughes for putting this forum together, and my deepest gratitude to Naor Ben-Yehoyada and Judith Scheele for their generous engagement with the book.