Maroon Anti-necropolitics Multispecies Justice without Human Sovereignty

Maroon Anti-necropolitics STUART EARLE STRANGE Anthropology, Yale-NUS College, Singapore Abstract This article describes Maroon anti-necropolitics and its implications for multispe- cies justice to aid in creating a genuinely decolonial Caribbean ecological theory. Ndyuka Maroons, the descendants of one nation of self-liberated formerly enslaved Black Surinamese peoples, have created a cosmopolitical order based on the refusal of necropolitics (which is the assumption that politics must be predicated on the sovereign human appropriation of the right to kill or let die). In its place, Ndyukas practice an ethics of sociality premised on the shared collective vulnerability of present and future generations to the consequences of acts of killing. This Maroon anti-necropolitics has three primary principles: (1) death always relates specific deaths to future collective harm; (2) humans do not have a sovereign right to death over the lives of others; and (3) death does not rupture relations between the living and the dead, or the community and its enemies, but intensifies them by imposing ineradicable connections of tragic loss between perpetrators and victims. Ndyukas accordingly articulate a theory of relational justice that rejects human sovereignty while emphasizing human responsibility. This article illustrates how Maroons have imagined a world beyond necropolitics and why this helps confront the ways in which necropolitical assumptions inflect how multispecies justice is imagined. Keywords T Caribbean, environmental justice, Maroons, multispecies studies, Ndyuka he ecological crisis that now determines the future of the earth bleeds from the values imposed by the global expansion of European colonial capitalism. Underlying the extractive racializing violence of colonialism and its successor states is necropolitics— the formulation introduced by Achille Mbembe to describe how “sovereignty resides . . . in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”1 Population, the nation-state, the economy, development—the uncontested commonsense categories of the present—are all founded on the way death has been appropriated by states and capital as the elemental tool of political life. 1. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11. Environmental Humanities 16:2 ( July 2024) DOI 10.1215/22011919-11150067 © 2024 Stuart Earle Strange This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 Multispecies Justice without Human Sovereignty Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 292 Scholars are attempting to think outside necropolitical reason in the hope of affirming alternative political imaginaries in a time of ecological crisis.2 This involves seeking for paradigms of justice not reducible to the vengeance of the state and property owners, and forms of multispecies care that resist the attenuation of life to economic or nationalist values.3 This article is one such attempt. I present the voices of slaved West and Central Africans—to show how they and their ancestors have consciously built a vision of political-ecological justice in contradiction to colonial necropolitics. More than that, I illustrate why the ethics of Ndyuka anti-necropolitics actively repudiate the necropolitical assumptions that buttress currently hegemonic notions of justice. Keeping with Malcolm Ferdinand’s call for a decolonial Caribbean ecological theory, this article starts by hearing Maroon voices to learn how these descendants of survivors of the plantation—perhaps the platonic form of necropolitical modernity—“put into practice another way of living together and relating to the Earth.”4 What follows is an admittedly ideal-typical attempt to understand one Maroon vision of justice—both among humans and between humans, other species, and the environment—built from an explicit rejection of necropolitics. This Maroon anti-necropolitics has three primary principles: (1) death always relates specific deaths to future collective harm; (2) humans do not have a sovereign right to death over the lives of others; and (3) death does not rupture relations between the living and the dead, or the community and its enemies, but intensifies them by imposing ineradicable connections of tragic loss between perpetrators and victims. This article explores these principles and suggests how they defy the necropolitical and in this way show how the necropolitical continues to restrict contemporary thought. In Ferdinand’s words, if “in Marronage lies the search of the world,” this article presents one of the worlds realized in living Maroon communities’ own expectations for justice.5 Ndyuka society is, I show, an ongoing political experiment in trying to live with the real consequences of specific deaths, human and more-than-human, and the constitutive power of every one of these deaths in a reality where the effects of killing or letting die will inevitably reverberate through the lives of all future generations. Sovereign Necropolitics, the “Original Political-Society,” and Severing the Living from the Dead To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment 2. Lykke, “Making Live and Letting Die”; Mbembe, Necropolitics. 3. Clarke, introduction; Chao, Bolender, and Kirksey, Promise of Multispecies Justice; Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World. 4. Ferdinand, “Behind the Colonial Silence,” 147; Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale; Chao, “Plantation.” 5. Ferdinand, “Behind the Colonial Silence,” 184. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 contemporary Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons—the descendants of self-liberated en- Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 293 and manifestation of power. This sums up what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has asserted its control. —Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics For Michel Foucault, medieval European sovereignty was condensed in the sword and modern period, when the prior model of sovereignty as the right over death was superseded by “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them” to “ensure, maintain, and develop” the life of the state.6 This was the dawn of “biopolitics” and the reorganization of politics around the regulation of the life of national populations as aggregate statistical facts within clearly delineated frontiers. As condensed in Hannah Arendt’s complementary analysis of the rise of the Eurocentric nation-state, this “national economy” or “social economy” was imagined as a form of “housekeeping” in which “the collective of families [is] economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family.”7 For Foucault and Arendt alike, something changed in the early modern period with the rise of nation-states that radically redefined the conceptual premises of sovereignty. And yet, as Achille Mbembe recognizes, the sovereignty of even the most biopolitically driven nation-state is founded on the state’s absolute right over death such that it can manage life. It is evident that something did change with the advent of the nation-state and the technologies of population and economy that framed it. It is more debatable whether the control of life was in fact a new focus of politics. The ethnographic archive reveals a rather different common sense in which politics has been more or less identical to the ritual regulation “of all that is necessary for life.”8 This “original political-society,” as Marshall Sahlins called it, is extraordinarily diverse and multifaceted.9 All ethnographic examples—from Canadian Inuit and Malaysian Chewong ritual prohibitions to Amazonian Achuar or Melanesian Trobriand garden rituals—share an experience of ritual practice embedded in a cosmopolitical order in which there are no clear boundaries between human action, natural events, and other species. Elementary to many of these socioritual orders is the dependence of the living on the dead. Rather than driving an ontological wedge between those who have died and those who survive them, death intensifies connections of both care and vulnerability. Such ritual biopolitical orders often revolve around managing not so much the dead’s absence but the degree of their continued presence in defining how the living may live in the shadow of specific deaths and the inevitability of death in general.10 To understand necropolitics requires grasping how it is that states—whether the ancient Greek polis, the Roman imperium, medieval principalities, or contemporary 6. Foucault, Introduction, 136. 7. Arendt, Human Condition, 28. 8. Hocart, Kings and Councillors, 59. 9. Sahlins, “Original Political Society.” 10. Mueggler, Songs for Dead Parents; Sahlins, New Science of the Enchanted Universe. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 the ruler’s “right to take life or let live.” Foucault asserted a dramatic shift in the early 294 Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 nations—can break such relations and pry apart the living from the dead. The sovereign’s sword, made famous by Foucault, not only took life from the condemned; the power to do so was likewise sutured to the ability to negate continued ritual and ethical relations to the dead and any signs that these relations remained consequential for the flourishing of the living. A sovereign assimilates not simply power over death but the ruler to kill is to kill a person and any causal continuity that their death might create between them and the future. Necropolitical sovereignty erases the moral hazards of death willed by the state for the state itself, beyond—in contemporary biopolitical nation-states—its statistical effects on economic and demographic measures. In a necropolitical regime the dead are gone, and they can cause nothing other than grief for those who remember them. Different ontologies of biopower and death should therefore be distinguished. Foucault’s notion is distinctive for how the European sovereign’s power over death anticipates the primacy of the secular state upon which the current international order of sovereign nations depends. Sovereign states in our present postcolonial world decide who lives and dies purely in accordance with their representatives’ own resolutely secular biopolitical concerns, even when these are legitimized by appeal to theology.11 The affairs of the state are generally seen as definitionally separate from the continued agency of the dead that would otherwise entangle the political with questions of either kinship, history, or a cosmic ethics beyond raison d’état. Rather than prosperity hinging on ritual regimes in which the dead—and the right kinds of death—are integral to collective welfare,12 it is the ways in which such questions are axiomatically excluded from the concerns of the state that substantiates the secular reality of national sovereignty. When such issues do arise—such as in the deaths of soldiers in war—they are subordinated to the cause of the ruler and nation and not a source of fecundity or danger that must be addressed to ensure continued collective well-being. And if this is the case for relations with the intimate human dead, it is doubly true of nonhumans, whose deaths become of purely economic concern instead of a vital political presence within an encompassing cosmopolitical community.13 The above reduction is necessary for isolating the place of death in the necropolitical common sense that unifies capitalism, plantation slavery, and the nation-state. Current attempts to think beyond the necropolitical axioms of the current biopolitical order—such as Mbembe’s declaration that “the twenty-first century opens onto an avowal about the extreme fragility of all” capable of sowing a new “ethics of care”— all wrestle with death as the end of relatedness.14 Extinction has necessarily stoked a 11. Mahmood, Religious Difference. 12. See Puett, “Life, Domesticated and Undomesticated.” 13. Povinelli, Geontologies; TallBear, “Why Interspecies Thinking.” 14. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 184; Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care; Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 authority to erase the active presence of the dead in the lives of their subjects. For a Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 295 sense of urgency in a present in which the enormity of our ecocide defies our ability to comprehend its implications.15 Nonetheless death and its apotheosis in extinction is construed as a nullification of relatedness and its results rather than in terms of what relations such catastrophes will inflict on the future. The assumption that death is preeminently a negation is the unsteady center of against a real sense of dying as extirpation.16 “Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because it reveals that the state and other paradigmatically modern institutions like the plantation and the corporation are incapable of fully extinguishing the violent and traumatic ramifications of their power.17 Just as viruses “creep” in ways that render biopolitical hegemony radically uncertain, so continued signs of the dead in the world of the living disclose repressed histories capable of undermining sovereign claims and thus throwing the future wide open.18 Because the sovereign’s right to exterminate enemies and the academic presupposition that “death is nothing less than an end of the world” are intertwined in the prevailing view of death, we must contemplate the ways in which death is a constitutive absence that might yet engender relations and what kinds of relations these can be. At the same time, death must also be confronted as a rupture in the world, as an incitement to feel injustice and to search for its repair.19 The thick conceptual connections that chain sovereignty to extinction, however, likewise ensnare our notions of justice. The sovereign sword that hacks through the bonds between the living and the dead shadows notions of justice and its achievement. The sovereign’s right over death is a vision of justice in which killing can restore a disrupted whole, where a subsequent death cancels out a prior one through the simple arithmetic of legitimized domination. If haunting is invoked “in the name of justice,” then accounting for how dominant discourses of justice remain beholden to the sword of the state is required to grasp other ways of realizing just lives and good deaths.20 Ndyuka anti-necropolitics denies both that humans could wield sovereign power to impose justice through killing and the ability of human institutions to purge the relational consequences of violence. For the Ndyuka interlocutors with whom I lived and worked as an ethnographer between 2007 and 2018, only other-than-human spirits (including the ghosts of the unjustly killed) and deities have such powers. More emphatically, Ndyuka anti-necropolitics recognizes that, rather than blotting out relations, 15. Despret, “Afterword”; Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, “Introduction”; Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction; van Dooren, Flight Ways. 16. Derrida, Specters of Marx. 17. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 37; Despret, Au bonheur des morts; Gordon, Ghostly Matters; Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 18. Lowe and Münster, “Viral Creep”; Govindrajan, “Spectral Justice.” 19. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 140; Despret, “Afterword”; Haraway, When Species Meet; Kirksey and Chao, “Introduction”; Mills, Racial Contract; Nussbaum, Justice for Animals. 20. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 Derrida’s notion of “hauntology,” in which the ghostly presence of the dead is weighed 296 Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 killing others intensifies and heightens the connections that lash the living to the fate of the dead. If Carl Schmitt’s dictum that “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” is the logic that imbues the sovereign’s sword with the right to both kill and efface the consequences of that killing, Ndyukas retort that every act of killing an enemy imposes an enduring Ndyuka ideas about death to illuminate justice in our present age of mass extinction. Maroon Anti-necropolitics Ndyukas, who refer to themselves as “the twelve” (den twalufu) in reference to the number of the major matrilineal clans into which they organize themselves, live along rivers in eastern central Suriname, as well as in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, French Guiana, and the Netherlands. They are one of the Guiana region’s six recognized Maroon nations—each an ongoing experiment with the liberation (fìí) that their ancestors wrested from Dutch colonial plantation owners in the eighteenth century. Ndyukas are selfgoverning with authority invested in titleholders collectively chosen by the people (lanti), human and other-than-human, of each Ndyuka village (kondee). Titleholders are always paired so that they counterweigh each other to enforce cooperative decisionmaking in councils (kuutu) where political issues are decided through oratorical persuasion and consensus. The more senior of these titleholders (kabiten) are also members of the council that advises the gaanman—the paramount chief whom many Ndyukas describe as their “king.” The gaanman, however, like the currently installed Da Bono Valenti, does not dictate the affairs of an emphatically decentralized Ndyuka political system. He instead acts as a source of authority with wisdom and perspective enough to create accord between the fractious purposes of the major Ndyuka clans.22 Humans never decide issues alone. Ndyuka politics is always cosmic and involves living with the dead and a diverse and proliferating polity of normally invisible entities whom Ndyukas refer to as gadu or wenti, as well as sentient animals (meti), plants (uwii), and places (peesi). The rightful owners of the land and the guarantors of human flourishing, these beings are always an active part of political decision-making through oracles and oracular possessions. Ancestors, like deceased titleholders, also play an active part in politics, speaking through living authorities in moments of inspiration or in dreams and other signs. Thorny political questions are often concluded by an eventful night’s sleep and portentous events offer important evidence for resolving disputes caused by human recalcitrance and ignorance.23 It is this co-governance with other-than-humans that helps explain Ndyuka resistance to human necropolitics. It is the plural sovereignty of these other beings that 21. Schmitt, Concept of the Political. 22. Parris, Interoger les morts; Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering, Shadow of the Oracle. 23. Cunha, “Self-Fashioning and Visualization”; Cunha, “Introduction”; Moomou, “Entre vivants et morts”; Strange, Suspect Others. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 relation of fatal interconnectedness.21 As I will show, it is this insight that enables Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 297 dictates human decisions. The notion of the kunu, avenging spirits, is also involved. They are created by violence, both physical and emotional, done to others against the principles of “respect” (lesipeki) necessary for maintaining healthy relations. Both murder and dishonesty can make kunu. Once betrayed, the wronged soul of the deceased dedicates itself to causing the collective extinction of the lineage that it holds responsimedium (obiyaman), explained in an interview, Kunu are the most powerful spirit [sani; literally, “thing”]. When a person kills a woman or a girl, it means that no one from the guilty lineage should be able to have children either. Because the woman or girl who has been killed would have been able to have children, so the family [who raised the killer] must not be able to reproduce either. [The kunu] will shut [tapu] all the wombs of [the killer’s] family. In this manner, your generation [paansu; literally, “shoot”] will end.24 As is apparent here, kunu act on lineages. They do not distinguish between the perpetrator and their collateral kin. All are equally to blame for the deed that destroyed their life. According to my field assistant and teacher Da John, “Kunu come back to kill [their killer’s] descendants to make [the killer’s] own family feel the same grief that the kunu’s family felt. The same loss that the kunu’s family experienced, the feeling of emptiness that his family feels, is what the kunu wants to make his killer’s family feel.” The decentralized and distributed nature of Ndyuka political practice is likewise paralleled in the actions of kunu; according to Da Sako: If you kill a boy, he will remain a calamity within the killer’s family and kill for all time. And the kunu will continue to grow. Every time the guilty family has an argument with others, they can only think about killing. That’s something that a kunu drives them towards. That’s why Ndyuka elders and titleholders say that there are always more incitements to murder. At present, when the young men murder people to steal from them, they create a further category of kunu that we call heelumi [woe befalls me] kunu that cause many more varieties of tragedy for the lineage. When a killing makes a heelumi kunu, it enrolls other kinds of spirits to assist it with its destruction of the guilty family. All of this occurs because of the initial killing [which only expands in its implications]. That’s why the elders and Ndyuka titleholders are so insistent on the perils of killing. Once incited, kunu are impossible to eradicate. The best a lineage can do is to recognize the spirit’s right to judgment over the family by giving it a medium through whom to speak and the requisite ritual respect. In this way Ndyukas convert the forever burning outrage of those they have wronged into a principle of collective solidarity. Because kunu demand deference from the entirety of a lineage, they expect all its members to 24. This and all following quotations in this section are from interviews from my fieldwork. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 ble for its premature and frustrated death. Da Sako, an esteemed Ndyuka healer and 298 Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 collaborate in their appeasement lest they should continue to kill and maim—dangers which can befall any lineage member at any time. All such measures, however, are temporary. The kunu will kill again and again for as long as the condemned lineage persists. Humans are the paradigmatic kunu and the most difficult to mollify. But many animals, plants and places in the environment also become kunu. This is especially so beNdyuka cosmopolitics. This stems principally from the pragmatic ethics through which Ndyukas relate to the diverse subjectivities that crowd existence—a phenomenology of intersubjectivity that is most expressively bundled up in the concept of akaa. Often translated as soul, the akaa is not so much the unitary first-person consciousness of Platonic or Abrahamic metaphysics as an active principle and complement that stands beside—and acts through—the bodies and sentience of all living beings. As Basiya Otmar, a titleholder from the village of Godo Olo, explained: “Everything from motion, to thought, to speech, attests that all living things have an akaa.” Sudden desires for ornaments or beverages, but also unexpected intuitions or muscular twitches—are all seen as indicating the presence and influence of the akaa in ordinary life. Da Tom Yuku, a Cottica Ndyuka elder, glossed akaa this way: You have many other beings that have an akaa because an akaa is the spirit [yeye]. That’s why the elders said that you should never kill something that you were not going to eat. Everything that you kill without eating is a potential kunu. If you kill a caiman and you do not eat it, then it will come into your lineage [bee; literally, “womb”] and will become a child. Then [the child’s] face will be like a caiman’s but have a human body. If you kill an anaconda [mboma], it will become a kunu if you don’t eat it. Pythons [papa sneki] will similarly become a kunu because if you kill one, they will pursue you wherever your family is. If an animal can be eaten, its respectful incorporation into the body of another who requires it for sustenance suffices to mitigate the vengeance of its akaa. This applies for animals as well as humans. If a jaguar kills a person, it will not become a kunu for the jaguar’s family because it is in the jaguar’s nature to eat humans. If the animal cannot be eaten, as with pythons, it will visit itself in perpetuity on the offending family unless ritually acknowledged as a tutelary deity or through elaborate burial rites. While human consumption of other-than-human animals is permitted because there is a relation of need, this must be done in a way that acknowledges the animal’s subjectivity. It is the complex relational choreography of working out this recognition that defines the metaethics of Ndyuka relatedness. Frits Wanabo, an Tapanahoni Ndyuka gold miner, reiterated and deepened this conclusion: “Everything has an akaa. When you harm and kill a python, then it is their akaa which pursues you. The spirits that seize people to speak through them are the akaa of the spirits that have become possessing spirits. You don’t see the akaa but every living thing has one.” The akaa, alongside two (or sometimes more) other constituents of each person’s self—the nenseki (a partially reincarnated ancestral spirit) and the bun gadu (the tutelary spirit of the place of a person’s birth)—is pivotal to Ndyuka anti-necropolitics. These spirits show that the life and agency of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 cause of the complex ways in which these other beings delimit the wider horizons of Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 299 every living thing is woven out of intergenerational relations of care for and by others. Life is always a story of relations in and with definite places, and the lineal histories that bring these relations into being such that a specific sentient life can holographically take shape out of them. Akaa express this interrelatedness. The lasting presence of the akaa in everyday existence is what prevents death tions. Since akaa animate the embodied ecology of inherited spirits that imbue the living with life, they reveal that personal agency is a byproduct of intergenerational interdependencies of lineal care, reproduction, and accountability. An akaa is dangerous because, once transmogrified into a kunu, its agency becomes violently untethered from the relations of nurture that limited it to a physical body and subjectivity. The transformation of akaa into kunu is grievous evidence of how trying to sever or stamp out relations between living beings exposes the existential integrality of these interconnections. Kunu proclaim the inevitably disastrous results of any human sovereigns’ attempts to arrogate authority over who lives and dies to themselves and the delusion of assertions that an act that extinguishes a life could ever be quarantined from the future relational consequences that every death necessarily portends. Making Kin and Not Population beyond the Plantation For Maroons, to make kin is to make ancestors.25 Kunu express an even more urgent interconnection: it is enemies who make kinship. Through acts of negative “becoming with,” kunu are made into enemies (feyanti) because their killers have failed to recognize them as having kin of their own, and as potential kin.26 This is in contradistinction to necropolitics, which asserts that in designating enemies, human sovereigns gain the right to kill others and erase any ongoing relation of obligation between them and the dead. As vividly witnessed in Da Tom Yoku’s description of a caiman that physically becomes a member of the lineage who killed it, for Ndyukas, denying another their bodily agency—which is itself an expression of their participation in an otherwise independent network of interrelatedness and care—forges a relation of vengeance that enforces a moral and metaphysical debt between the kin group of the victim and the family of their killer. In this way kunu show that attempting to alienate others from their relations can only cause the killer’s deeper enmeshment in those very relationships. Disrespecting another to the point of denying their and their kin group’s right to exist engenders an ineradicable existential obligation between previously unrelated agents. This shared vulnerability of everyone within a lineage to the retribution of those outside of it is what binds lineage members together. Without kunu, Ndyukas imply, lineages would lack the existential and moral integrity that accounts for their continuity.27 25. Moomou, “Entre vivants et morts.” 26. Haraway, When Species Meet. 27. Cunha, “Self-Fashioning and Visualization”; Thoden van Velzen, “Geloof in wraakgeesten.” For Saamaka examples, see also Brittes W. Pires, “Funerals, Rhetorics, Rules”; Price, “Avenging Spirits.” Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 from becoming a political tool for drawing boundaries between populations or genera- 300 Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 Kinship, as imposed by kunu, is accordingly the result of neglecting to care for the ways in which others instantiate the networks of lineal care that have brought them into existence and the future care that they have yet to provide. As with the interdependent independence of akaa that makes them simultaneously the essence of a person and a sign of the collectivity of relations that have brought them into being, it is the unique the relative autonomy that enables them to care for others. Autonomy, then, is always relational, an accomplishment of knowing how to care for others such that they can care about your freedom.28 In this regard, Ndyuka ideas about kunu parallel recent feminist “pro-kin and nonnatalist” rethinking of the ethics of interconnectedness.29 If kinship is to be a bulwark against white supremacist, settler-colonial, and patriarchal biopolitical population regimes, it is because it requires us to “live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths.”30 To see others as kin is to look past abstract distinctions between supposedly disarticulated populations to the interdependent practices of care that already enmesh all of us in each other. For Ndyukas this means recognizing kin groups as expressions of intentionally parallel and complementary practices of maintaining differences between lineages by caring for how these differences depend on respecting others. From this perspective, necropolitical efforts to make populations instead of kin will inevitably result in the ontological imbrication of whoever is killed and excluded in the intergenerational “afterlife” of the population from which they were expelled. If white supremacy or human supremacy are ontological projects for reducing persons to atomized and erasable instantiations of essentially discrete and hierarchized populations, kunu rupture the limits of these sets to disclose how they are implicated in each other. One cannot care for one’s own alone, and violence in pursuit of purity or domination can only deepen this truth. Taking Ndyuka premises to their logical conclusion, kunu make necropolitical projects of population impossible because they deny the ability of violence to install impregnable frontiers of existence between groups and generations. Every time death is marshaled to circumscribe which populations count, the interrelatedness between those that the violence is meant to separate intensifies. If population is founded on the necropolitical power of sovereigns to keep populations separate, numerable, and subtractable, Ndyuka anti-necropolitics reveals ethical and ontological imbrication between killers and the killed, oppressors and oppressed. Attempts at thinking of groups as populations— independent wholes reducible to arithmetical values given form by letting some live and others die—inevitably fail because a group’s very distinctness is evidence of the violence that attempted to conceal its interrelations with others beyond it. 28. Strange, “Vengeful Animals.” 29. Clarke, introduction, 1. 30. Sahlins, “What Kinship Is,” 14. Also see Benjamin, “Black AfterLives Matter”; TallBear, “Making Love.” Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 way that each person acts as both a receiver and giver of care that endows them with Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 301 Ndyuka anti-necropolitics is most conspicuous in the refusal of Ndyukas to impose the death penalty. When asked why Ndyukas do not practice capital punishment, Da Willy Patra explained that this was something that the ancestors had had to learn: It happened that [during the period of Maroonage (loweten) and the early period of liberatitleholders. What occurred was in retaliation for witchcraft or some other grievous evil; [then a few of the original groups of Maroons] retaliated by [trying] to burn the culprit. They did so in emulation of what they had seen the white slave owners do on the plantations [my emphasis]. But it was never approved collectively by the Ndyuka people [who rejected such punishments]. As Da Willy relates, the early ancestors of Ndyukas struggled to build a system of justice contrary to the relentless necropolitical negation of the plantation. Ndyuka attempts to lay hold of the necropolitical in emulation of those who had enslaved them were finally repudiated. More than one Ndyuka elder called attention to this. According to Kabiten Da Pompe, If another living human being would kill a murderer, they must have an even crueler heart than the original killer. Because, maybe, the original murder was something done spontaneously [in an accident or a moment of rage]. But if the authorities sat down to plan out when the murderer must be killed, they would be more malevolent [ogii] than the murderer . . . [and] if the authorities killed the killer as punishment, then that would drag down a kunu onto themselves [in the same way that the murderer had done]. This did not mean that there was no corporal punishment, just that kunu are an ontological principle of justice that far exceeded what would predictably become ill-conceived efforts by humans to establish justice. Those who harm others will be harmed in the same manner. Da Willy Patra described what did occur: “When someone attacked someone else with a weapon, they would send them to Puketi (a Misidyan clan village on the Tapanahoni river) and draw blood in compensation, like by cutting the attacker’s leg. But afterwards they would always treat the wound with medicine [obiya] [to heal it].” The councils understood that living humans cannot genuinely claim to wholly resolve matters of justice. The guilty would be injured so that they fully grasped the pain that they had caused and dampen the anger of the family of their victim. Nevertheless, they knew that the victim themselves would become kunu, and deities like Sweli, who ensures the legitimacy of oaths and shepherds kunu in their vengeance, would not only eventually avenge the crime but also inflict its enduring and unanticipated repercussions down the generations. Kabiten Da Pompe elaborated, “In the past, the community would punish a machete attack by . . . slicing you with a razor blade. But if you killed someone, they would not kill you in retaliation. This was because Sweli (the oath deity) would ensure your eventual death.” Elders and titleholders might have the authority to Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 tion (fìíten)], there was revenge killing, but it was never ordered by Ndyuka elders and 302 Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 draw blood, but never in proportion with the original offense, for which no human could possibly make adequate amends. Instead, by birthing a kunu, each death will continue to ramify throughout time. Attempts by humans to appropriate justice by meting out further deaths can only exacerbate the conditions that suture the living to the dead and future deaths to those in the past. mans remain exposed to ongoing conditions created by earlier injustices. Killing a murderer cannot obliterate the fact that their death will never suffice to compensate for the original loss. A homicide committed by one person or the whole community amounts to the same thing: more death and mourning. Because of this, no equivalence can be established between deaths such that one could recompense for another. For Ndyukas, death cannot be calculated in terms of parts to wholes or as sums that can be equaled out. Every injustice seeds further injustices, and the only hope is to acknowledge this inevitability and try and strive against it by living respectfully with others, human and more-than-human, as both ends in themselves and as icons of the collective care that made them and with which they will make others. Necropolitics and the Polis Model of Justice Ndyuka refusal of justice as an equation for making parts whole or two persons completely equivalent has important implications for theories of multispecies justice. It is easiest to think about this through Aristotle, who has exerted a near hegemonic influence on framing the question of justice as a matter of proportions and wholes within Euro-American thought. For Aristotle, “We call just anything that tends to produce or conserve the happiness (and the constituents of happiness) of a political association.”31 Within this context, “what is just is equal”; therefore “what is just will be a sort of mean.”32 There are, accordingly, two kinds of justice: distributive and rectificatory. The first is analogous to geometry, the second to arithmetic. Distributive justice concerns the “distribution of honor or money or goods divisible among the members of a community,” the second “rectifies the conditions of a transaction.”33 Such justice is geometric “because the effect is that the ratio of whole to whole is the same as that of each part to corresponding part.”34 Rectificatory justice is arithmetical, since “what is just in transactions is a kind of equal” and all that must be evaluated in terms of equalizing a fraudulent or harmful transaction “is the difference caused by the injury”:35 “Even when . . . one has killed and the other been killed, the active and passive aspects . . . exhibit an unequal division; but the judge tries to equalize them with . . . a penalty . . . reducing the gain. 31. Aristotle, Ethics, 173; my italics. 32. Aristotle, Ethics, 177. 33. Aristotle, Ethics, 176–77. 34. Aristotle, Ethics, 178–79. 35. Aristotle, Ethics, 180. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 Though punishment may be appropriate, it is only so relative to how mortal hu- Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 303 When the damage has been estimated the effects are called loss and gain. It follows that what is just will be the mean between the loss and the gain.”36 In both distributive and rectificatory forms of justice it is consequently necessary to imagine a prior whole, whether of community or condition, the violation of which can be restored to something like what preceded its disruption. munity for whom the equality of others within that community matters: “Justice obtains between those who share a life for the satisfaction of their needs as persons free and equal.”37 At the same time, this equality of certain members of a community was founded on exclusion: “Justice is equality; and so it is, but not for all persons, only for those that are equal. We make bad mistakes if we neglect this “for whom” when we are deciding what is just.”38 In the polis, equality depended on the active subordination of women and slaves within it (“There cannot be injustice . . . towards that which is one’s own; and chattel, or a child . . . is, as it were, a part of oneself”)39 as well as the exclusion of outsiders—whether citizens of other Greek city-states or non-Greek “barbarians.” Justice is consequently something that is “relative” since “justice is only found among those whose mutual relations are controlled by law.”40 The scope of this law, and the way in which it presupposes a ratified membership premised on its exclusivity, is decisive for how justice can be imagined. It is ultimately a matter of establishing boundaries of equality from which others can be debarred such that justice is held not to apply to them. The furies (Erinyes), who fulfilled a similar role as kunu in ancient Greece, are nowhere apparent in this theory of justice. All that matters is the idea that a status quo has been violated and a proportional solution imposed that claims to reestablish it. Aristotle’s theory of justice necessarily takes for granted the polis as the default form of collective life and its exclusionary definition of flourishing: “But a state’s purpose is not merely to provide a living but to make a life that is good. Otherwise it might be made up of slaves or animals other than men, and that is impossible, because slaves and animals do not participate in happiness, nor in a life that involves choice.”41 This refusal to acknowledge slaves, women, and nonhuman animals as subjects of justice is the constitutive necropolitical act: the appropriation of the right to decide who lives, who dies, and whose suffering matters, in terms of a tightly circumscribed communal whole from which the rest of the living and the dead have already been banished. Kunu dispute all of this. The best outcome of an injustice is the collective recognition of its reality such that it becomes critical to the constitution of the community that the kunu holds responsible. Community is accordingly a result of cooperatively 36. Aristotle, Ethics, 180. 37. Aristotle, Ethics, 188; see also Arendt, Human Condition. 38. Aristotle, Ethics, 195. 39. Aristotle, Ethics, 189. 40. Aristotle, Ethics, 188, 177. 41. Aristotle, Politics, 196. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 Implicit in Aristotle’s theory is the ancient Greek notion of the city (polis) as a com- Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 304 remembering one’s own lineage’s past cruelty and negligence. In this schema the collective cannot be imagined as a preexisting whole; it is instead something made from its responsibility to others for violating their chances of independent flourishing through acts of care. While this might track Aristotle’s statement that “justice is the only virtue that is regarded as someone else’s good because it secures an advantage for another question of what is good for others or definitively establish who is deserving at others’ expense. Kunu reveal that community is grounded on a collective vulnerability that comes from existential accountability to others. In this context the law, as an expression of a cramped ideology of community like that of the polis that restricted justice to adult male citizens, will continually fail to contain injustice, either within or between communities. Even enemies have moral standing capable of defining the ontological conditions of the culpable community’s existence. The kunu that haunt Ndyukas imply that such an arrogation of life and death to human authority is delusional. A community on its own cannot stipulate its own happiness without realizing its precarious and exposed dependence on those beyond it, whether human and animal others or the clamorous enormity of the dead. Justice can never be made relative to a single community but must accord with elementary principles of intersubjective recognition between beings whose lives and deaths matter existentially, not only for themselves but to others as well in the past and into the future. In some ways Ndyukas understand the ethical lesson of kunu to be analogous with the “capabilities approach” advocated by Martha Nussbaum for establishing multispecies justice.43 Each being is meant to be evaluated in terms of its own unique capacity for flourishing, and this potential should be the key concern for how they are related to. What is sharply divergent with kunu is how they index the consequences of violating the possibilities folded within other lives. For Nussbaum, the deaths of animals matter because humans can recognize that animals have potential that has been thwarted by human action; death is a tragic squandering of rich and unrealized possibilities but nothing more. Kunu, on the other hand, assert something deeper: that the deaths of others are important, not simply because they impoverish the sum total of individual potentials in the world but because each death will have specific and inevitably immiserating relational consequences for how others can live now and in the future. Kunu refuse to think in terms of generic goods or prior divisions; they always particularize and entangle specific deaths in wider and irreducibly relational realities. Dying happens to someone, and how they die leaves an indelible mark on others that spans generations. Death is a relationally constitutive negation, a tragic relation that makes new relations by threatening to unmake the forms of existential fullness that those 42. Aristotle, Ethics, 174. 43. Nussbaum, Justice for Animals. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 person,”42 kunu reject any complacency about the ability of a community to settle the Strange / Maroon Anti-necropolitics 305 who have died, and those defined by their presence, would otherwise have had. Ndyuka anti-necropolitics thus begins by rejecting the basic premise of human sovereignty—the claim to be capable of determining the real value of living and dying—which sets the necropolitical machine in motion. In showing the eternity of suffering extruded by this machine, kunu disclose a Maroon world where killing can never be done with impunity everything and everyone. Conclusion: Maroon Anti-necropolitics in a Time of Mass Extinction So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such. The time of learning to live . . . would amount to this . . . to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better . . . more justly. But with them. . . . And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations. —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx [Natural selection demonstrates that] . . . from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species In our extinction haunted era we are necessarily preoccupied with endings. The reality revealed by kunu goes between and beyond these quotes by Derrida and Darwin in thinking through what death does. The Maroon anti-necropolitics embodied by kunu declare that each death is not only an end but also a dubious kind of beginning. In keeping with Malcolm Ferdinand’s call to listen to living Maroons, Ndyuka anti-necropolitics reveals another way of knowing the world and the role of death within it. Perhaps precisely because Ndyuka ancestors freed themselves from necropolitics at its most naked on colonial plantations that grew their crops from the mass deaths of those whom the European enslavers enslaved, Ndyukas confront a world that is more alive to the consequences of human claims to legitimately wield death and decide who deserves it. Derrida reminds us that justice requires living with ghosts; Darwin that the possibility of present life grows out of the multitude of deaths that created the conditions for each one of our idiosyncratic births as specific conspecifics in a world of inevitably interconnected proliferation and demise. What kunu do is to undermine the difference between Darwin and Derrida. If Derrida is pursued by all the ways death trespasses the necropolitical hubris that would claim that any death could be safely consigned to the past, Darwin discloses that our own lives are as much the outcome of cosmic tragedy as a reason for wonder. Kunu make this larger tragedy intimate; concurrently they deny that it can ever be tamed into an aggregate fact of disconnected populations or species. Every effacement of another creates a specific space of loss that must reach out of its Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/16/2/291/2123977/291strange.pdf by UIO - UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEKET user on 29 July 2024 and every bad death will eventually have ultimately unfathomable repercussions for 306 Environmental Humanities 16:2 / July 2024 time and into the lives of future generations. When this imperative is thought in relation to Darwinian theory, it compels us to recognize the irrevocably ethical implications of thinking death as an irrepressible condition of relatedness. Though particular deaths are lost sight of in the intricate seething and transformation of natural history or the statistics of states, kunu proclaim that unjust deaths will eventually tell their tales by our current ecocide must confront—especially if it appears as though the necropolitical order will continue to shield us from the extent of our culpability and its consequences. As with climate change and mass extinction, kunu testify that such a state of selfsatisfied complacency will yet reap its results. Ndyuka visions of justice nonetheless also point to how flawed even the most righteous revenge is. Kunu are cosmically invested with the right to kill and harm and to secure the recognition and submission of the lineage who wronged them. Ndyukas, however, are dubious about whether this signifies as justice. In the breach of enforcing an equalizing resolution to an earlier harm, what is left is the fact of having to live with the realization that one and one’s relations are always morally implicated regardless of personal guilt; the only answer to this conundrum is to redouble efforts to live otherwise and beyond necropolitical ambitions and values. The Ndyuka elders I know imply that justice in the Aristotelean sense is impossible. In its place is an ethics of relating that gives full weight to the need to try to live justice in the present rather than declaring it a matter that can be firmly decreed closed. It is an invariably precarious attempt to “to live otherwise and better” under conditions in which justice must be sought but can never be ultimately achieved.44 This is not the repudiation of justice or a stimulus to impunity. Rather, as born in the wrath of kunu, it is a disclosure of what making justice fundamental to reality might truly mean. STUART EARLE STRANGE is assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Acknowledgments This article could not have been written without Da John Willems, Giermo Willems, Da Sako, and inspiration from my many other Ndyuka teachers. I want to graciously acknowledge grants from the US National Science Foundation (Award #1123530), the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the University of Michigan, and Yale-NUS College that supported this research. Thanks are owed to Kristina Wirtz, Radhika Govindrajan, María Elena Garcia, Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Bart Van Wassenhove, and David Merry, as well the editors at Environmental Humanities for their enthusiastic support. References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Aristotle. Ethics. London: Penguin, 1976. Aristotle. Politics. London: Penguin, 1976. 44. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii. 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