Critical Anthropology

Foundational Works

Stephen Nugent, Stephen Nugent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315431277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Critical anthropology has had a major influence on the discipline, shifting it away from concepts of bounded societies with evolutionary trajectories to complex analyses of interconnected economic, political, and social processes. This book brings together some of critical anthropology's most influential writings, collecting classic articles and spirited rebuttals by major scholars such as Eric Wolf, Marshall Sahlins, Sidney Mintz, Andre Gunder Frank, and Michael Taussig. Editor Stephen Nugent positions these key debates, originally published in the journal Critique of Anthropology, with new introductions that detail the lasting influence of these articles on anthropology over four decades, showing how critical anthropology is relevant today more than ever. An ideal supplementary text, this book is a rich exploration of intellectual history that will continue to shape anthropology for decades to come.

PART I

Marxism in the American Anthropological Tradition

This article is a response to a review of Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes ed. 1972) by David Kaplan.¹ Diamond, Scholte and Wolf particularly address issues raised in and about Diamond’s contribution to the volume, and in doing so they outline the general aims of Marx-informed anthropology of the time.

In his book review, Kaplan had presented a clichéd demonization of Marxism common in anthropology in both the United States and the UK. At about the same time that Reinventing was published, Asad (ed.) published Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter in the UK in 1973. This collection provided an intervention parallel to that of Reinventing Anthropology, and both volumes were received in a spirit of ‘the-establishment-under-siege’.

Diamond, Scholte and Wolf – all now deceased – were major figures in the post–World War II attempt to reconfigure anthropology as a discipline sensitive to the political conditions (of both academia and the broader world) in which, especially in the 1960s, anthropology was expanding and consolidating its place within the social sciences.

Wolf is one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the 20th century and his work has had the most lasting influence. His early work on peasantries and economic anthropology (based on fieldwork in Puerto Rico and Mexico) set the tone for historical anthropology for many decades and his Europe and the People without History (1982) stands to this day as a monument of historical anthropology. Diamond was a key figure in the establishment of the anthropology department at the New School for Social Research and founded the journal Dialectical Anthropology. Scholte, after training and teaching in the United States, returned to the Netherlands, where he was a leading anthropological polemicist and celebrated teacher. He was actively involved in editing Critique of Anthropology.

The second piece in this section, an encounter between Wolf and Godelier (which took place in Amsterdam), is more of a discussion than a heated debate and offers excellent overviews of US and European anthropology of the time as articulated by influential figures. While critical anthropology then was very much in the idiom of the New Left, many Marxist influences in the field dated from an earlier period. Neither Wolf nor Godelier, who has been a prominent figure in French and international anthropology for decades, is speaking ‘on behalf’ of the field as a whole, but both are clearly allied with an historical approach soon to be challenged by the ‘literary turn’ allied with an aggressively postmodernist turn in anthropology.

Both anthropologists, though hailed for their singular, specialist contributions, display the features of accomplished generalists as well, comfortable with an anthropology whose explanatory remit is open to history and prehistory. In terms of the development of critical anthropology it is noteworthy that neither Wolf nor Godelier insists on defending a particular, canonical theoretical position, nor is either given to sweeping pronunciamentos, in striking contrast to the heated, prescriptive declarations of much hyper-theoretical anthropology that followed.

NOTE

1. As the response is addressed to the journal rather than the reviewer it might be fair to infer that the authors take the views expressed in the review to represent more than the opinions of the individual reviewer.

Chapter 1

ON DEFINING THE MARXIST TRADITION IN ANTHROPOLOGY*: A RESPONSE TO THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

STANLEY DIAMOND, BOB SCHOLTE AND ERIC R. WOLF

One does not anticipate a knowledgeable response from any establishment that is under attack. Academicians who are reluctant to inquire into their own motives, are ill-equipped to assess radical and dialectical alternatives to analytic scientism in cultural anthropology. They distort or simply talk past an intellectual tradition that commences with Vico and Rousseau, passes through Herder and Kant, becomes explicitly dialectical in Hegel, politically concrete in Marx, and is rendered extemporary with Lukacs, Sartre and many others. Like all exclusively analytic thinkers, Kaplan deals in discrete and reified entities: self and other, subject and object, committed or value-free method, scientific or metaphysical beliefs.

In his review of Reinventing Anthropology, Kaplan charges that we are voluntaristic, narcissistic, even solipsistic (and therefore irrational, idealistic, metaphysical). Such a psychologistic reduction of what is in fact an epistemological argument is impermissible. The analytic separation between subjectivity and objectivity does not exist in the dialectical tradition; such a categorical separation reflects a mechanistic imagination, which, in turn betrays an essential idealism. As Sartre puts it:

There are two ways to fall into idealism: The one consists in dissolving the real into subjectivity; the other in denying all real subjectivity in the interests of objectivity. The truth is that subjectivity is neither everything nor nothing; it represents a moment in the objective process (that in which externality is internalized), and this moment is perpetually eliminated only to be perpetually reborn. (Sartre 1963:33)

Kaplan’s remarks about Diamond’s essay and the interpretation of Marx are symptomatic of his modus operandi. First of all, Marx is nowhere treated as an “inspirational Guru” in Diamond’s essay (or anywhere else in the book); he is conceived, rather, as the paradigmatic figure of the revolutionary, non-academic, intellectual tradition in the 19th Century – a transformation of the enlightenment – and he is approached critically. Although Diamond’s essay is substantially addressed to the question of an ethnology in the mode of Rousseau and Marx, his definition of Marxism, far from avoiding the “contradictions of capitalism,” as Kaplan maintains, is as follows:

If (Marxism) can be epitomized at all it is as a theory of social, hence political constraints on material possibilities. It is, therefore, dialectic in method and must be distinguished from all types of reductive materialism or technological determinism … that is, Marxism is based on the social process of exploitation in terms of class conflict; the question of class consciousness becomes the critical political question … It is only when men act politically, not only through aesthetic or religious symbols, to change the economic basis of their lives in accord with their “truly human” interests that they may begin to make history. (Hymes 1972:416–17)

For a discussion of surplus value, which Kaplan claims is not part of our Marxist lexicon, we refer him to Diamond’s recent book (1974: especially pp. 9–12) which concludes that Marxism, indeed all revolutionary theory must base itself on the fact of “surplus” expropriation. This does not mean that the conventional Marxist analytical categories are inevitably applicable to the understanding of primitive societies since such categories have developed within the revolutionary critique of capitalism. However, the ethnological project remains Marxist precisely because it approaches primitive societies through categories pertinent to their operation, and on the basis of the critical Marxist analysis of our own society (Diamond 1972:414, 423–4).

More generally Kaplan is confused about the relationship between the “early” and “late” Marx, a confusion which reflects the limitations and the spirit of his review. He connects the early Marx to Rousseau, whose name as usual seems to be invoked as an epithet. But in Anti-Duhring Engels (1939:153–4) disagrees both with Kaplan’s chronology and interpretation, stating that:

“Already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a sequence of ideas which corresponds exactly with the sequence developed in Marx’s Capital, but that the correspondence extends also in details, Rousseau using a whole series of the same dialectical developments as Marx used …” (Italics added)

Kaplan does not realize that Marx thought of himself as the heir of the French tradition of revolutionary and socialist thought. As the subtlety of his revolutionary insight developed, and his analysis of capitalism sharpened, Marx’s antipathy toward imperialism increased; he became less Europecentric in his thinking (not more so as Kaplan seems to think). Hobsbawm, for example, has indicated that Marx – after the publication of Capital (about 1869) returned to a reconsideration of the primitive commune and its potential because of his increasing revulsion for the capitalist system, thus repudiating his earlier acceptance of imperialism on the basis of its unfortunate but supposedly progressive impact on pre-capitalist societies (1962:49ff). And Krader in his introduction to The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, shows how Marx used the comparison to man’s past as the basis for both the critique of the present civilized condition, … and the perspective upon the future of society (1972:3, 35). In this connection we note that Marx’s comments on the Paris commune reveal that in 1871 (certainly not the early or “Rousseauian Marx”) he was anticipating both the dissolution of the state apparatus which had finally achieved the status of a thing in itself during the Second Empire, and the defeat of the dominant bourgeoisie. As David Fernbach makes clear in The First International and After, Marx “uses the terms Commune and State as opposites … [Marx describes] the Commune as a revolution against the State itself the hypertrophy of the bourgeois state was the result of class conflict, but the Commune was to be resumption by the people for the people of its own social life” (1974:38).

Obviously, Marx’s attitude to the Commune is of a piece with his dialectical understanding of primitive communism, that “primitive condition” which, as Krader documents, “[he did not regard] as an end, but as a critical weapon to be applied against the antagonisms built into and arising out of civilised society” (1972:61). This we should note is the point of Diamond’s recent book (1974) – and of his critical work in general – which bears no resemblance to Kaplan’s misrepresentation of it as a romantic primitivism. Thus “the position of the notebooks makes it possible to oppose the condition of primitive men in particular societies to the life of man in the divided, industrial, urban societies” (Krader 1972:21).

It is in the understanding of the historical opposition between primitive societies and civilization which Marx reflected on so well, that the possibility of socialism originates. And it is this primitive communalism which Diamond treats as the “archetype of socialism,” the antithesis of civilization, and most particularly of capitalism, in order to shed light on the revolutionary imperatives of our own time. Need it be said that contrary to the impression that Kaplan tries to convey, this does not imply a return to the actual forms of primitive society (see Diamond 1974:48, 174–5); it implies, rather, a dialectical return on a higher level, and in different form to certain defining functions of primitive society – classlessness, communal command of the basic means of production; integration of labor and related phenomena. This would not include a return to infanticide (Kaplan’s implication), but rather a development of the means and relations of production that would render that usage – which has never been ascribed to cruelty – unnecessary. Still, Kaplan might well reflect – as did Marx, Engels and Rousseau, on the depth and extent of civilized crimes against children – crimes noted for their cruelty and senselessness, although one must, of course, contextualize, and make the effort to understand them socially.

Correlatively, it would certainly be a mistake to equate the “dismantling of the industrial apparatus” (Kaplan’s phrase) with the socialist transformation of capitalism to which we ascribe, but it is not our mistake. Neither Diamond nor anyone else represented in Reinventing Anthropology has ever suggested that industrialism as such is the enemy. That is a conclusion in the style of our adversaries; we do not reify social institutions or technology, and we are certainly not Luddites. The process of dialectical return that we have outlined constitutes the basis of the Marxist historical method. It is nowhere more evident in Marx’s work than at the end of his life (the Ethnological Notebooks were written in 1880–82; Marx died in 1883).

Curiously enough, Kaplan himself, in quoting Morgan’s famous passage at the end of Ancient Society in order to establish the latter’s supposed opposition to Social Darwinism seems momentarily to approve of this historical dialectic.

It is clear that Marx was not a scientist in the abstract academic, logico-deductive, hypothetical-propositional, ultimately positivistic sense. As Krader properly observes, he “opposed … the (positivist) conception of science as classification and definition, and consequently … (the) separation of science and politics” (1972:42–3). Correlatively, Marx was no empiricist in any formal definition of the term; he did not believe that facts speak for themselves. He was a dialectician, and a historian who practiced no particular discipline but focused on the whole range of socio-cultural phenomena in order to discover the key to the exploitation of man by man. His scientific (or realistic) – as opposed to Utopian – socialism included the necessity of political action based on class consciousness and conflict, in society at large. But Marx did not subscribe to universal, positivistic laws. In 1870, he stated,

Comte is known to the Parisian workmen as the prophet in politics of Imperialism (of personal dictatorship), of Capitalist rule in political economy, of hierarchy in all spheres of human action, even in the sphere of science, and as the author of a new catechism with a new Pope and new saints in place of the old ones. (Harrison 1971:14)

In 1877, Marx denied that he had worked out “a historical-philosophical theory of the general path that every people is fated to tread.” In response to the Russian populist N. K. Mikhailovsky, he had argued that

he has to transform my sketch of the origins of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of a universal movement necessarily imposed upon all peoples, no matter what the historical circumstance in which they are placed, and will lead in the last resort, to an economic system in which the greatly increased productivity of social labor will make possible the harmonious development of man. I must protest. He … discredits me. (Bottomore and Rubel 1963:37)

Or as Maurice Godelier states: “Marxism is not evolutionism, and history is not the unfolding of a seed” (1975:81). Thus when Diamond supposes that abstract, non-historical, reifying social science will disappear in a classless, communitarian society, he is arguing in a dialectical, rather than an academic mode. For the cognitive categories and related organization of academic social science are symptoms of alienation, of particular social circumstances. But the identification of the structure of the academy with that of civilization itself, and thus the effort to eternalize both, is an old illusion; it goes back to Plato. Any serious attack on the academy is thus perceived as an attack on civilization, and we find Kaplan in the typical stance if the apologist, charging us with opposition to all institutions as such. Unfortunately for our critic, we are not “anarchists,” but critical socialists in the Marxist tradition, engaged in the task of analyzing the salient structures of exploitation.

We do, however, certainly envisage the eventual demise of the alienated “expert,” and the consequent freeing of social intelligence from disciplinary constraints and monopoly control. This is what Lenin meant in stating that any cook should be able to run the State. Demystification of the historical structure and position of the academy remains a radical, and critical task.

Accordingly, we find it understandable that Kaplan fails to mention Levi-Strauss, whom Diamond characterizes at length as the academic anthropologist – a formalist, reductionist, and “scientific” relativist who denies t...