Stephen Reyna
Visiting Toronto Metropolitan University
Spring 2024
Research focus while a CERC Scholar - Governance
Knotty Causation: How Migrations Make Wars and How Wars Make Migrations
This project has two goals. The first is to further formulate a theoretical approach to social situations of causal complexity. The second is to apply this approach to particular instances where migration is said to provoke war, and where war is said to provoke migration to better explain their causal complexity.
Monocausality refers to situations where A caused B, end of story. More frequent are those of causal complexity, which refers to situations where there are multiple, often competing, claims to explain why some social event occurred. For example, in Syria there are competing assertions that migration was the result of climate change, politics, or neoliberal economics. In Connections (2002) I formulated a concept of ‘knotty causation’ as a method of understanding the formation of causal strings. The CERC Migration project will enlarge this approach to be a method for analyzing how different causal strings connect with each other, operating to cause a particular social event. For example, in the particular instance of Syria how a particular climate causal string knotted with an authoritarian causal string, itself knotted with a neoliberal causal string all of which knotted with a causal string of warfare that in turn produced migration.
This knotty causation methodology will be applied to three cases of war and migration. The first in contemporary Syria, where warfare is credited with producing migration; the second in Darfur in the Sudan, where migration is argued to have produced warfare (2003-2020), the third is in colonial Chad (2010) were imperial conquest is believed to have caused migration. The goal of these analyses to take them beyond monocausality to reveal something of their causal complexity.
Related to CERC research theme: Governance of Migration in a Globalizing World
Career Achievements
Stephen Reyna has written well over a hundred books, journal articles, scholarly book chapters, technical reports and opinion pieces on topics including, but not restricted to, social theory, political economy, imperialism, warfare, the brain, migration, kinship and marriage, fertility, development, climate change, and African ethnography. He is known for introducing the notion of ‘knotty causation.’ He was the founding editor, and continues as co-editor, of Anthropological Theory. He is currently a research partner with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He has taught at the University of Ife (Nigeria), College of William and Mary, University of New Hampshire, Central European University (Hungary), and the University of Vienna (Austria).
Relevant Publications
Books
Reyna, S. (forthcoming). The Thing of It Is. Vol I. Social Reism. Vol II. Past, Present and Future Fate of Things
Reyna, S. (2017). Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology. NY: Berghahn Books.
Reyna, S. (2016). Deadly Contradictions: The New American Empire and Global Warring. NY: Berghahn Books.
Reyna, S. (2002). Connections: Brain, Mind and Culture in a Social Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Journal articles
Reyna, S. (2016). The jeweler's loupe: validation. Anthropological Theory 16(2-3): 295–319. DOI: 10.1177/1463499616654364.
Reyna, S. (2012). Neo-Boasianism, a form of critical structural realism: it's better than the alternative. Anthropological Theory 12(1): 73–99. DOI: 10.1177/1463499612436466
Reyna, S. (2010). The disasters of war in Darfur, 1950-2004. Third World Quarterly 31(8): 1297–1320. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2010.541083
Reyna, S. (2007). Waiting: the sorcery of modernity, transnational corporations, oil and terrorism in Chad. Sociologus 57(1): 11–39. http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-7215-4 (external link)
Reyna, S. (2005). American imperialism? "The current runs swiftly". Focaal 45 129–151. DOI: 10.3167/092012905780909216.
Reyna, S. (2003). Force, power, and the problem of order: an anthropological approach. Sociologus 53(2): 199–223. http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-7238-5 (external link) .
Reyna, S. (2001). Theory counts: (discounting) discourse to the contrary by adopting a confrontational stance. Anthropological Theory 1(1): 9–29. http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-7221-8 (external link)
Reyna, S. (1997). Theory in anthropology in the nineties. Cultural Dynamics 9(3): 325–350. DOI: 10.1177/092137409700900304.
Reyna, S. (1994). Sometimes to be less than brilliant is brilliant: an accumulation of labour approach to the domestic mode of production. Man 29(1): 161–180. DOI: 10.2307/2803515.