When Marcel Mauss coined the term “phénomènes sociaux totaux,” he challenged social scientists, himself included, to find ways of approaching “total social facts” without the reductionism characteristic of a project so deeply attached to its positivistic roots.Footnote ¹ Mauss proposed his holistic answer in the same essay in which he raised the issue, therefore supplying, in Marshall Sahlins’ catchy phrasing, his “gift to the ages.”Footnote ²

Maple Rasza, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology at Colby College, recently compiled a new and original, but equally holistic response to the Maussian gauntlet. It comes in the form that gradually ceases to be seen as unusual in anthropology and the social sciences. The form can be described, somewhat cumbersomely, as a multimedia package of engaged anthropological contents. Entitled as the “Bastards of Utopia triptych,” its original form makes possible “a richness and complexity of representation that remains largely unexplored within anthropology.”Footnote ³ While the enthusiasm of the author is understandable, it should perhaps be noted that Rasza's endeavor does not lack illustrious predecessors (Michael Herzfeld 2007, 2009; for a recent review of how anthropology is mediating the public see Sarah Pink and Simone Abram 2015).Footnote ⁴ Never before has the degree of interconnection of various forms of material been so high, however, and the effectiveness of their usage so compelling.

The Bastards of Utopia triptych consists of separate but thoroughly intertwined analytical and reconstitutive procedures that combine visual, aural, and textual forms of expression. Inviting the reader/spectator to participate in their interplay, Rasza prepares the preconditions for a collective interpretive effort aimed at the decrypting of the fuzzy logic of various “alter-globalist movements” in the northern parts of what used to be Yugoslavia.

The first part of the triptych to come out was a “traditional feature documentary,” Bastards of Utopia, co-directed by Pacho Velez in 2010, produced by En Masse Films and the Film Study Center at Harvard University and distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. During the years that followed, other elements grew out from the same research project. Contrary to what the title might suggest, Rasza and Velez resisted the challenge to add up one more visualization of “riot porn”—explicitly violent content often consumed by activists in order to arouse a combat-ready state of mind (139). Rather, they intertwined excerpts of documentary films from the socialist era, their own footage of intimate everyday routines and exchanges, anthropologist included, and shots of more heroic, at times risky and violent feats of three Croatian alter-globalist activists (Fistra, Dado and Jelena), whose activities the author followed during more than a decade of anthropological research. The spectator is thus acquainted with the flow of life, as well as the self-perceptions and self-presentations of the main characters. Their views and deeds are made understandable, if not fully acceptable, as they “fight in their own way for a new leftism” amidst the radically-nationalizing ruins of what used to be the Yugoslav socialist project. Occasionally, the activists cross state borders to join fellow comrades in battles on the new fronts against a neoliberal, rapidly globalizing, transnational superstructure (be it Genoa, the border camp between Croatia and Slovenia, or Thessaloniki).

Blending their main observational approach with a reflexive and critical stance, and reaching out towards participatory and engaged positions, Rasza and Velez walk (but also run, crawl, eat, sleep, jump, or drive in bicycle caddies, cars, and trains) together with their protagonists as they struggle to forge radical and anarchist (but usually well-argued and principled) political positions after the demise of the old Left. On its own, the film supplies penetrating insights into activist initiatives, and reconstructs comprehensive soundscapes from the cacophony of competing radical voices (see a thorough and illuminating film review by Jessica Greenberg).Footnote ⁵ The film can thus be understood as an intimate theme-by-theme introduction to the main characters, places, and events, but also to the ways of being in the body, emotions, and ethos of the activists, and finally to the contradicting logics that stand behind the ideas that are upheld and lived by them. The film makes possible not only the rational comprehension of its topics, but also forms of understanding that transcend the logical and argumentative approach characteristic of text-based formats. In that way, watching the film becomes a “bodily experience,” which is “sensually linked to the elicitation of embodied memories”—or, even more forcefully put, to “the bodily inhabiting of images of others” (142). Seen in a different perspective, the film becomes a seductively crafted sensorial trailer for the conceptual content that will be approached analytically in the next expressive form of the triptych, in order that alternative but interconnected layers of meaning might be reached.

Accordingly, the documentary Bastards of Utopia, was paired five years later by a book under the same title by Indian University Press, the central and probably most complex of the three endeavors (for a penetrating book review see Andrew Gilbert).Footnote ⁶ Rasza supplies a perceptive and subtle ethnography reconceptualized by a tightly-knit web of thoroughly-argued theoretical positions. Intertwined together, the adequately-used theory and the detailed ethnography empower the reader to grasp the intricacies of global and local contexts that condition the wayward practices of “living radical politics after socialism” in a territory described by activists as the “ground zero of leftism's defeat” (2).

The book is organized into chapters that concentrate on different places and practices—mainly Zagreb in Croatia and Ljubljana in Slovenia, but also locations of fierce conflict like Genoa and Thessaloniki—of the three activists introduced in the film as “Fistra,” “Dado” and “Jelena,” and renamed in the book as “Rimi,” “Pero,” and “Jadranka,” creating, at least according to this reviewer, unnecessary inconsistencies in character portrayal. Importantly, the book narrative also reconstructs organizational and ideological developments on a temporal axis. It sweeps over more than a decade of continuous activist struggles, witnessing their respective ups and downs, and in particular a general trend of transformation of internationalist radical-anarchist militantism into more pacific localized initiatives, concentrating on alternative lifestyles, self-realization, and direct democracy. By combining spatial, temporal, topical, and biographical axes; by concentrating on telling cases; by promoting an activist and engaged stance; and by relying on corresponding videography to methodologically incite a reflexive standpoint, Rasza manages to probe in an unparalleled way the most important problems and tendencies that have characterized the conflict-ridden transition from Yugoslav socialist self-management to the highly-specific local manifestations of globalizing neoliberalism.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the everyday life of three alter-globalist activists in Zagreb, contextualizing their struggles against various manifestations of the fervently nationalizing Croat state after it underwent war (1991–95) and gained independence in 2000 (39). As the action evolves, Rasza puts to the fore the practices through which local activists build transnational allegiances, striving to contribute to an autopoiesis of the “movement of movements” (15). A short section of the chapter (50–56) foreshadows Rasza's future arguments about “the embrace of video by alter-globalization activists” (50). It starts by mentioning the activists’ conviction that “seeing is believing” because of which “video production, distribution, and consumption were woven thoroughly into the fabric of activist life” (50). Not only can video provide “a catalyst for further action” (54), but video images “also had affective, sensory, and bodily dimensions that were crucial to their effects, especially on their individual and collective subjectivities” (56).

The second chapter further probes the logic of activist engagement in Zagreb, concentrating on the coalitions that were formed (and dissolved) around antiwar initiatives and protest activities targeting the imminent aggression against Iraq by the “Coalition of the Willing.” It also elaborates one of the most complex and contradictory themes of post-socialist political activism—that of the logic of functioning of international and local NGOs and of their paradoxical policies and practices vis-à-vis foreign officials and donors, the local state, various independent activist and militant groups, and the local population in general. As has been noted by in a number of penetrating studies, civil society initiatives, various types of NGO activism, revolts powered by new social movements and wired by new communication technologies, and electoral or “colored” revolutions were at the heart of a complex nexus that dispersed an often-confusing fog of war over the interconnection of specific western political interests and political developments in a number of postsocialist and Middle East states.Footnote ⁷

Here it might be appropriate to question Rasza's seemingly benevolent though somewhat paradoxical belief that alter-globalist initiatives actually counter the interests of neoliberal globalization. To put the question in Carl Schmitt's politically incorrect but sobering phrasing, how can one seriously hold that movements that have basically the same nominal political ideals and goals (cosmopolitan globalization, individualism, rationalism, universal human rights), the same or more-or-less interconnected organizational allies (corporate capital, various state and para-state funds, and philanthropic initiatives on the one hand, and the academe and leftist liberal intelligentsia on the other, mostly financed by capital coming from the first hand), and the same ideological and political enemies (state sovereignty, nationalist movements, petty bourgeois mentality, religious fundamentalism, collectivism, traditionalism, cultural relativism), should be perceived as opposed to one another?Footnote ⁸ Might not one see in various alter-globalist movements and initiatives useful, though unconscious, and therefore unwilling fellow-travelers of the proponents of neoliberal globalization? Are not such groups supplying to their supposed neoliberal antagonists both with a much needed unifying bogeyman—the molotov-coctail-throwing-anarchist—in opposition to the image of whom decent cosmopolitan liberals can peacefully regroup under the globalist flag? Are not such activists at the same time, and equally unconsciously, systematically weakening the only political barriers left to a world unified and controlled by the 1%—the already shattered and tirelessly vilified remnants of state sovereignty?

Moving the scene on to Thessaloniki, Greece, Chapter 3 introduces the themes of trans-border militancy and of the transformative power of violent mass protests, and in particular the experiences of “performative violence” (120) and of “bodies resisting” (121). The chapter also probes “the limits of confrontational protest” (124) by bringing to the fore the intended and unintended consequences of disagreements over “political limits … of confrontational direct action” (130). Furthermore, provoked by what he described as the “methodological limits of … participatory research” (130), Rasza returns to the problem of the reflective potential of video, opened in the first chapter, thoroughly discussing the channels through which the practices of consuming self-made and/or acquired videography, including “riot-porn,” install emotional states and embodied memories amongst radical activists, and how his own filming practice influences his understanding of the filmed subjects, as well as the intricacies, and even paradoxes of his own positionality in the research process (139–48).

In Chapter 4, the focus is turned back on the Croat capital, as Rasza explores various forms of activist struggle to regain their “rights to the city.” At the heart of the chapter is the thick ethnography of the activist's attempt to squat and refurbish a ruined and privatized socialist factory, in order to put to life their ideas and ideals centering around the Network of Social Solidarity. Rasza unpacks the values they attempted to materialize in practice, centering on key anarchist ideas of the common, mutual aid, autonomy, the right to the city, and of self-realization, in other words the struggle to become the person one wants to be. The fifth chapter undertakes a spatial and temporal jump to Slovenia in 2011, and investigates how activists in Ljubljana re-contextualize the “global uprisings” and forms of Occupy-style initiatives to practice their specific “democracy of direct action” in the frame of a “politics of becoming” (193). In the spirit of the triptych, the concluding chapter is everything but a restatement of previously presented points. Starting from an interpretation of the recent (2013 and after) wave of protests in the region as pointing to “the persistence, even escalation, of neoliberalism in the guise of austerity” (209), Rasza goes on to “question the limits of a critical anthropology of neoliberalism,” in the hope of promoting “an affirmation of other social and political possibilities” (210).

Throughout his book, and culminating in the conclusion, Rasza strives to develop “new strategies of ethnographic representation” in order to “bring (his) collaborators’ political alternatives into sharper relief” (210). A particular place in this engaged practice of double-sensed “alternative writing” (writing about alternatives in alternative ways) is once again given to the powers of video, “so as to better engage the bodily, sensory, and affective dimensions of politics” (213). The capacities of video-enhanced alternative writing are channeled towards the bringing about of an “affirmative politics” (214), in the frame of which local activists “resisted incorporation into the national body politic” (215) and “actively participated in the production of an alternative transnational community through a whole web of collaborations that transcended national frontiers” (215). Rasza seems thrilled to recognize what he perceives as a particular anthropological sensitivity in the activist practices that he describes. He thus notes that “they rejected the nationalist concept of culture as internally unified, unchanging, and bounded from that which is “outside national borders” (215), whereby “they affirmed culture as a participatory field of struggle, as a place to make meaning—and new people—together with others” (215). Refusing “polite and proper forms of political expression” (216), they embarked on an open-ended process of “becoming-other-than-one-is-now” (216), and found themselves “struggling to develop intersubjective understandings and articulate common demands and political hopes, and never quite knowing where this might take them” (217). Here, one might be reminded of Evans-Pritchard's proclivity of seeing his monotheistic God in whichever Nuer belief he pleases to.Footnote ⁹

In times described by Petra Rethmann as an “age of late liberalism and cynical reason,” Rasza seems to willfully cultivate a well-intentioned, but no less credulous, specifically anthropological form of naïveté.Footnote ¹⁰ He himself seems to be quite aware of the fact, as he worries in a slightly differing register that next time he sees his interlocutors and comrades, he might find them “simply burned out, exhausted from the draining effort of fighting on so many fronts at once, fighting in conditions that seem to undermine their efforts at every turn” (217). The practice of “watching and rewatching, writing and rewriting” the lives of his activist comrades has, as he put it, furthermore forced Rasza to ask hard questions about his own political and personal choices (222), as he perceives what were once deeply intertwined experiences, becoming separated by his push “toward a career in the academy, toward a secure life within hierarchical institutions” (222). Once this “dirty secret” of activist anthropology is exposed, what is to be made of activist pronouncements that what is needed “is an affirmation of other social and political possibilities” (210), which might be seen as “a return to anthropology at its best: the exploration of ways of being human that are at odds with what appears natural and inevitable from the vantage point of the present” (210), or, in Michael Herzfeld's words, of our own “common sense” (210)? The answer might, perhaps, be found on the pages of David Runciman's magisterial study of political hypocrisy.Footnote ¹¹ As he put it: “The problem is that hypocrisy, though inherently unattractive, is also more or less inevitable in most political settings, and in liberal democratic societies it is practically ubiquitous.”Footnote ¹² Runciman goes on to note: “No one likes it, but everyone is at it, which means that it is difficult to criticize hypocrisy without falling into the trap of exemplifying the very thing one is criticizing.”Footnote ¹³ At this point, any further criticism of the hypocrisy of anthropological activism must itself be exposed as hypocritical. As Runciman notes: “Keeping the mask in place while being aware of what lies behind the mask is precisely the problem of hypocrisy for liberal societies; indeed, it is one of the deepest problems of politics that we face.”Footnote ¹⁴

The last element in the triptych is probably the most questionable, at least if looked upon from the vantage point of text-based and theory-wielding scholarship. It consists of a set of short interactive online video clips ambitiously described as “choose-your-own” or “remixable documentary” (XV).Footnote ¹⁵ At its core are scenes from the original film, videos shot by local activists, and additional sequences edited out from the more than two hundred hours of footage which Rasza and Velez recorded during the project. Each on their own, or combined in whichever order pleases the viewer, they offer sensory, affective, and embodied renderings of the events and themes not all discussed in the book or depicted in the feature documentary. They contain a considerable wealth of information, and offer the power to juggle with it as one pleases. Access to the information, however, and even more so the chance to understand it meaningfully, is made difficult by what Marcus Banks might have called the paradox of interactive multimedia.Footnote ¹⁶

Lacking an interpretive red thread, the myriad of offered opportunities risks turning into a confusing and unproductive labyrinth. However, the video clips can also be accessed in a temporal and logical order suggested by Rasza in notes inserted in the main text of the book (for example, “Down with Fortress Europe,” 1). Approached in that way, the clips on the one hand gain access to a theoretical frame that transcends their proper capacities, while on the other they manage to offer a parallel but independent flow of voices and ideas that enrich and at times even question the main book narrative. Many of the clips also picture the anthropologist, either as he gathers data in his urban “field,” or as he joins militants in various nighttime actions or street protests, but also as he chats, eats, drinks, goes to the flea market, or visits friends. These images normalize and humanize the power associated with the role of the researcher (and a western one, at that), rendering him as vulnerable, and as prone to questioning and criticism (and the force of “materialized” arguments applied by the police) as is any one of his informants. The screening of such footage to the informants has obvious advantages for the repositioning of the anthropologist in her or his actual field hierarchies. However, as was noted previously, the physical presence of the anthropologist amidst the harsh actual life situations of his informants also contrastingly highlights what was hinted to as the hypocrisy of engaged, and even more so, of militant scholarship. For as much as we might wear shabby shorts, squat, collect and eat leftovers, steal flags from nationalist party headquarters under surveillance cameras, run away from charging police, and wash our tearful eyes when gassed, all the time we know that we have our passports to bail us out when the going gets tough, and our liberal arts colleges with their paid leaves and grants, and our tenure-track careers to rely on, and to return to, once we decide that the research and filming (as well as activism) are done.

Controversies of activist anthropology apart, it must be stated (and restated if needed) that the third part of the triptych, or what might be called as Rasza's video footnotes, do not pile up as redundant visual illustrations to the book text; they do not simply retell the verbal contents of the book in a visually compelling manner. Rather, it seems that the three main gains from their introduction are a) supplying alternative and even contrary voices to the ones presented in the book text; b) increasing the dialogical, reflexive and critical potentials of the book; and c) enriching the communicative channels of a “discipline of words” (Mead 1975) with content that speaks directly to the senses and thus contributes to the establishment of a truly holistic and humanistic anthropology that speaks to the human person, not only to her or his mind.Footnote ¹⁷ The most straightforward example might be offered by the clips that feature Jelena, one of the three main protagonists of the film (and the book as well, where the person based on Jelena is named Jadranka). The personal aura that materializes almost to the point of becoming visible whenever Jelena enters the frame, coupled with her seemingly boundless energy and courage, and tempered by innate kindness and a pronounced capacity for human compassion, taken together contradict the more doctrinaire, ideological porte-parole kind of persona of Jadranka, rhetorically crafted by Rasza in the book to fulfill a preordained narrative function, but also to protect the real person from legal and political persecution.Footnote ¹⁸

To conclude, each element of the triptych can, and indeed should be approached on its own, offering to the readers-spectators “the opportunity to explore the distinct representational potential and limits of text and video as media” (14). As has been noted, informative, thoughtful, and well balanced reviews of the film (Greenberg 2012) and of the book (Gilbert 2016) have been published recently. However, in the case of multimedia packages like the Bastards of Utopia triptych, reviews of independent elements, however welcome, will not suffice. The potential of the synergy of elements cannot be adequately addressed if they are approached each on its own, for it is only when all the elements of the package interact in the minds of their readers/spectators that the results of their fusion come close to Mauss's ideal of a “totalizing” approach to “total social facts.” Only then do they open up “dimensions of social life not expressed in language, such as gestures and space, as well as the sensory, affective, and embodied aspects of protest” (13). Much more remains to be done if the creatively-controlled synergy between moving images, sounds, and text is to become accepted as the standard communicative procedure for the dissemination of scholarly content. Visual and multimedia anthropologists, however, have made pioneering steps, as have other scholars like John Collier, David MacDougall, Rod Coover, Peter Biella, Jack Ruby, Sarah Pink, Michael Herzfeld, and many others. Their contributions have now been joined by Maple Rasza's remarkably rich, complex, and creatively provocative triptych. It is to be hoped that the Bastards of Utopia triptych will receive the attention it deserves.

Researchers and teachers interested in numerous subfields of contemporary cultural anthropology can profit from Maple Rasza's complex Bastards of Utopia triptych—from those specializing in the anthropolog[ies] of politics, economics, postsocialism, nationalism, neoliberalism, social movements, globalization, southeast and central Europe, Eurasia, applied and engaged anthropology, to visual anthropologists and anthropologists of the media. The package will be of considerable use in problem-focused courses, but also in courses that are theoretically- and methodologically-oriented, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels. Furthermore, it will be of interest to neighboring disciplines, and in particular to scholars and teachers working in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and political science.

Finally, a word about the limits of established genres of academic writing, and in particular of the formats of book reviews, book review essays, multiple book review essays and film reviews for the adequate treatment of unorthodox forms of communicating scholarly contents has to be added. This addendum is prompted by the question of how to approach and analyze complex and elaborate multimedia structures such as the Bastards of Utopia triptych. Namely, the challenges presented by Rasza's package, and similar engaged projects, clearly cannot be dealt with in the previously mentioned formats. The problem has been marginally addressed in the literature on academic aspects of book reviews and other genres of textual communication of scientific content, particularly in the frame of reflection on “the crisis of the book review genre,” most recently dealt with by the cultural studies scholar Boris Stepanov.Footnote ¹⁹ While the treatment of factors that have brought about such a crisis lies beyond the scope of this review, may its author be permitted to state that the introduction of new forms of expression of scholarly content should invite the creation of new genres of review literature. This “essay” in the original meaning of the word, imperfect as it is, humbly attempts to contribute to the establishment of a new format—a format which might perhaps come to be known as the interactive media package review essay.