Praise for The Punishment Monopoly
“In a reckoning with the past that explains the horrors of the present, anthropologist Pem Buck digs into tales of her ancestors and historical archives to weave an unforgettable story of the rise and reproduction of the family, private property, and the punitive state. The secret global history of the United States revealed in this masterwork is a must-read for knowing the world, then and now.”
—ALISSE WATERSTON, author, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century
“Through the lens of family members, and those with whom they interacted, Pem Davidson Buck allows the reader to flesh out the structures of domination, inequality, the restrictions of gender, race, religious conflict, warfare, and notions of property present in the British Isles, West Africa, and mainland North America from the seventeenth century through contemporary times. A great book.”
—YVONNE JONES, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Louisville
“In the United States, we often assume that social theory of the state—specifically as an entity that has jealously gathered unto itself the power to kill—belongs on the other side of the Atlantic. Pem Buck’s work shows, through a revelatory 400-hundred year historical anthropology of her own family, that the U.S. has its own genealogy of state violence.”
—EDWARD E. BAPTIST, Cornell University; author, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
“In an extraordinary combination of state-theory and genealogical analysis, this book exposes the rarely acknowledged relationships between the right to punish and processes of accumulation of capital and dispossession in U.S. history. Pem Buck’s book is an outstanding contribution to political theory, American history, kinship studies, reflexive anthropology, and studies in culture and power.”
—NINA GLICK SCHILLER, Emeritus Professor, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, University of New Hampshire; co-editor, Anthropological Theory
“This book is a major feat in historical interpretation. It un-silences important aspects of the U.S. past and present through its intersectional approach to multicultural contact and interaction; the intricate workings of colonial power continued into the present day; the dehumanizing effects of indenture, genocide, and enslavement in a class and racially stratified social order that came to be organized around white privilege and supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and punishment. Like no other book I’ve read, Buck’s remarkable counter-storytelling brings the insights of an ethnographer and creative writer to her tales about her Scottish ancestors, whose privileges depended on the dispossession, displacement, and enslavement of others. Throughout the history she narrates, from colonial Jamestown to the current-day Fergusons and Standing Rocks, her analysis of statecraft, the power to punish, and ordinary people’s resistance is accessible, theoretically engaging, and methodologically honest.”
—FAYE V. HARRISON, Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; author, Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age
The Punishment Monopoly
Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States
by PEM DAVIDSON BUCK
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2019 by Pem Davidson Buck
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
available from the publsiher
ISBN pbk: 978-158367-832-9
ISBN cloth: 978-158367-833-6
Portions of previously published articles have been incorporated into various chapters: “The Violence of the Status Quo: Michael Brown, Ferguson, and Tanks,” Anthropology News 55(9): 2015; “Stating Punishment: The Struggle over the Right to Punish,” North American Dialogue 17(1):31-43, 2014; “The Strange Birth and Continuing Life of the U.S. as a Slaving Republic: Race, Unfree Labor, and the State,” Anthropological Theory 17(2):159-191, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617713137.
Typeset in Bulmer Monotype
Monthly Review Press, New York
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Contents
1—Tales of a Mythical Ancestor, Punishment, and Diarchy
2—Ancestor Tales of Dispossession and a Revolt of the Unfree
3—Ancestor Tales of Slavery, Slaving, and Women with Voice
4—Ancestor Tales of the Revolt that Happened and One that Didn’t
5—Ancestor Tales of the Logic of a Slave Society
6—Ancestor Tales of the Birth of a Slaving Republic
7—Ancestor Tales of the Dispossession of Women, the Domination of Men, and the Definition of Liberty
8—Ancestor Tales of Life in a Capitalist Slaving Republic
