Chapter 12 - Coda: Reflections on Grey Theory and Grey Zones

Summary

Introduction

Grey is good to think with, as this edited volume demonstrates in wonderful detail. The phrase that something is ‘good to think’ comes, of course, from the reflections of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the value of animals for human thought (1963, 89). Given the structuralist ambition for rationalist clarity that drove this phrase, it is perhaps ironic that the value of greyness for contemporary thought, as this volume also demonstrates, has largely been to undermine the ‘black-and-white’ analysis that has become structuralism's main legacy in anthropology (if not necessarily its only one: there are also many ‘grey’ ways of reading Lévi-Strauss). Grey is resolutely poststructuralist, it would seem. In their introduction to this anthology, Martin Demant Frederiksen and Ida Harboe Knudsen usefully reference Primo Levi (quoted in Auyero 2007, 32) to suggest such a poststructuralist thrust to the colour grey. A grey zone is ambivalent throughout.

a zone of ambiguity that severely challenges pervasive polarities such as we/ they, friend/enemy and good/evil – what Levi refers to as the ‘Manichean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities […] prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels – we and they’.

This is an intriguing proposition: Greyness is opposed to opposition, dichotomies and clarity, while it highlights ambiguity, ambivalence, absence, complexity, doubt, excess and paradox. These latter concepts are all highly valorised in contemporary social and anthropological theory. Flick through any recent issue of an anthropological journal and you are likely to find a domination of analyses whose figuration is that of ambivalence, multiplicity, absence or another of the terms above, authorised by references to Agamben's homo sacer (1998), Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizomic (2013), Derrida's concept of différance (2001), Badiou's concept of the event (2013), Haraway's cyborg (1991) or some other term that denotes a reality in conflict with itself, an ambivalence of identity, or the subversion of an imagined order.