The Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, the civil rights movement, the Prague spring; hippies in Haight-Ashbury, student riots in Paris;
the Beatles, the Moon landing, Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War – all this is emblematic of the ‘Sixties’, as the time is known in the West. But the radical political climate to which these events contributed did not come to bloom before the end of the decade, and belongs, strictly speaking, to the ten years following 1968.
Certainly this was true in academia, where students shout their slogans but tenured professors remain as the years go by. Anthro-pologists, always a radical bunch, may have searched their souls more deeply than many other academics, but were no less subject to the academic routine. Enter the 1970s, the forgotten decade, sandwiched between Flower Power and the Iron Lady, between Richard Nixon’s election victory and John Lennon’s death, the decade when world population hit 4 billion, when we saw the Yom Kippur War breed the Middle East oil crisis, the CIA-assisted coup in Chile, the founding of Microsoft, the deaths of Mao and Elvis (overdue and premature, respectively), the first Polish pope and the Iranian Islamic Revolution. It was a decade of revolutionary dreams that would soon enough be crushed under the wheels of history – in anthropology as elsewhere.
As we get closer to our own time, we need to alert the reader, again, to the inevitable bias of in any book such this. As time goes by, the sheer size of the discipline must necessarily force us to be either extremely selective, or too superficial to be informative at all. By 2012, the American Anthropological Association alone had more than 10,000 paying members, and around the globe there are countless regional centres of academic and applied anthropology, each with their specific research traditions. No historian in the world could do justice to this growing multiplicity – which, by the end of the 1970s, was already well advanced.
In this chapter, we deal mainly with two of the most powerful intellectual currents to arise from the radicalisation of academia:
Marxism and feminism. Both were insistently present everywhere in
anthropology in the 1970s, until disillusion set in and new agendas were set. However, gender and power had arrived in anthropology, separately and in tandem, and they were destined to stay.
But an account of the 1970s which concentrated exclusively on radicalisation would leave out some very important features of the anthropology of that period: it was also the decade when ethnicity studies came into their own, when sociobiology became a household word (to abhor or to emulate), when economic anthropology had its golden age. French anthropology had re-entered the international scene with Lévi-Strauss, and now a whole troupe of Frenchmen appeared beside him, with messages that were not only politically radical, but intellectually complex. It was a decade of controversies, and it is the first decade in which anthropology had grown so vast and interconnected that it was no longer possible for a single anthropologist to follow the entire discipline. For the authors of this book, this is the decade in which it was no longer possible to trace more than the most important trends and connections in the discipline. This chapter should nevertheless give an impression of some of the milestones of that decade.
THE RETURN Of mARX
Of the previous generation of anthropologists, Steward, White and Gluckman were the most decisively influenced by Marx – Steward in his materialism, White in his technological determinism, Gluckman through his interest in crisis and conflict. However, references to Marx in their work were all but absent. There are scattered references to Marx and Marxist theory in the work of a few Anglophone anthropologists in the 1950s and early 1960s, including Eric Wolf and Stanley Diamond in the USA, and Peter Worsley in Britain. But the ideological climate of the time was neither congenial nor receptive to Marxists; this was especially so in the USA, and not much easier in Britain. A card-carrying English Communist like Worsley had serious difficulties obtaining research permits and finding employment, before finally securing a job in sociology at Manchester, supported by Gluckman, who had had similar experiences himself (Chapter 5).
In Britain, the USA and France, all this changed quickly in the 1960s, certainly among students. Marxist theories of alienation, of ideology as false consciousness, of the infrastructure–superstructure distinction and the concept of contradiction, entered the academic vocabulary in the late 1960s, and many young anthropologists
began to engage intellectually with the old, hoary theory of social classes and historical change. But grafting Marxist theory onto contemporary anthropology was no easy task. As explained in Chapter 2, Marxism was chiefly a theory of capitalist society. Its attempts to describe and compare other modes of production and engage in long-term cultural history (the latter mainly undertaken by Engels after Marx’s death) were influenced by Victorian evolutionism and Hegel’s philosophy of history. Anthropology had been moving for almost a century since then. If anything at all held the sprawling discipline together in the mid-1960s, it was a commitment to empirical variation, a distrust of simplistic, universalist models, and an ingrown cultural relativism. The global pretensions of Marxism and its antiquated empirical base did nothing to attract anthropologists.
But Marx had a compelling vision of the modern world, which, in a context of ever more visible global disparities, seemed no less relevant to the 1970s than the 1870s. The Vietnam War, seen by many as a war of imperialist expansion, was the main item of foreign news for years. On fieldwork, too, anthropologists were increasingly exposed to such injustices, and many were eager to contribute to their demolition, as Wilson and Gluckman had done a generation before them. Now as then, Marx was the sociologist who spoke most eloquently of these problems, and so it was to Marx that the young revolutionaries flocked. No matter that Marxism was more than a social theory; that it had become the official state ideology of a substantial portion of the world and was thus a resource of political power. To a Marxist in particular, this should have been a fact of deep significance, though it rarely was. Instead, the power structures of the Communist states reproduced themselves in the organisations outside those states that fought for freedom from other power structures. Meanwhile, in Western academia, devastating battles took place between Maoists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Anar-cho-Syndicalists, and so on, ad infinitum, who nonetheless all united to face the common enemy, frequently personified in the local anthropology professor. Out of all this commotion grew the academic Marxian anthropologies.
There were several distinctive strands of Marxian anthropology.
One, which we could label cultural Marxism or superstructure studies, arrived so late on the scene that it was post-Marxist before it was established in anthropology in the 1980s. This brand of Marxian theory was inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s critical studies of ideology and hegemony and the Frankfurt school’s (Adorno,
Horkheimer), critique of the commodification of culture, and entered anthropology via Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a book that criticised ‘exotifying’ European representations of the Middle East (Chapter 8). Take Said’s critique, mix with Michel Foucault’s post-structuralism and add a dash of deconstructionism à la Derrida, and the result is the heady cocktail that would hit anthropology in the 1980s.
The two main flavours of Marxian anthropology were structural Marxism and political economy. It is a testimony both to the breadth of Marx’s work and the scope of anthropology that there was little contact between these schools, and that the questions they raised were strikingly different.
Finally, there was also a fourth brand of Marxism, that followed up Marx’s emphasis on the person as a productive, creative material body in a material world. We shall return to this ‘sensual Marxism’, with its roots in German Romanticism, towards the end of this chapter.
STRUCTURAl mARXiSm
A harbinger of the new era was a paper published in 1960 by the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux (1925–2005), who presented an unmistakably Marxian analysis of subsistence production in agricultural societies. Originally an economist and a businessman, Meillassoux had studied anthropology with Georges Balandier (1920–), a lone voice of sociologically oriented anthropology in structuralist-dominated France, who did fieldwork among the Guro of the Ivory Coast in the late 1950s.
His research from the start had a Marxian orientation: not only did it concentrate on economic life, it tried to map the dynamics between the social relations of production and the technological and environmental means of production in Guro society. Meillassoux’s article represented the first evidence of an emerging French Marxist anthropology. He would later develop a typology of ‘pre-capitalist modes of production’ in Africa, but, unlike his younger contemporaries, he was mainly a committed empirical researcher, and would be increasingly critical of the abstract theories that would soon dominate French Marxist anthropology. Indeed, among the French Marxists, Meillassoux was the one most sympathetic to the British school. In a preface to the English translation of his 1975 book Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Maidens, Meal and Money, 1981), he writes that Balandier had introduced him to ‘the best of
current anthropology – that is British anthropology’ and goes on to praise the work of Schapera, Gluckman, Monica Wilson and others. However, he notes, functionalism ‘was based more on a sort of legalistic empiricism than on a thorough analysis of the content of economic and social relationships’ (1981: viii), and he adds that it concealed economic exploitation by allowing kinship to permeate the field of enquiry. A main task for Meillassoux, then, was to extricate economics from kinship. This was not easy when writing about societies organised on the basis of kinship (Chapter 2), and he eventually proposed a mode of production new to the Marxist canon, which he called ‘the domestic mode of production’, based on the family and household. Interestingly, Sahlins, in his Stone Age Economics (1972), developed a nearly identical concept, but with a different aim: rather than reconciling African economies with Marxist orthodoxy, he sought to rescue economic anthropology from the perils of formalism, where the individual maximiser was the universal actor. In Sahlins’ view, the household taken as a unit was not a maximising actor, and drawing on both Chayanov’s early peasant studies and Mauss’ theory of reciprocity, he argued that household-based production is not a means of maximisation, but a way of procuring necessities. To this Meillassoux answered that the household was not a productive, but at reproductive unit, it created the labour that was exploited by whatever system dominated it.
An enduring obstacle in Marxist theory for the new French anthropologists was the notion that power ultimately rests with control over the means of production, that is ownership of tools, fields, machinery, and so on. Since, in traditional African societies, such ownership is most often not individual but accorded to kin groups, there was a problem in locating power in the system.
Meillassoux concedes, seemingly contradicting Marx, that ‘power in this mode of production rests on control over the means of human reproduction – subsistence goods and wives – and not over the means of production’ (Meillassoux 1981: 49).
Structuralism had little influence on Meillassoux. Others were more ingenious in forging links between Marx, anthropology and current intellectual sensibilities, including not only Lévi-Strauss’
work, but also the original interpretations of Marx proposed by the philosopher Louis Althusser. When Althusser’s Pour Marx and Lire Le Capital (the latter co-written with Étienne Balibar) were published in 1965, they had a major impact not only on French intellectual life, but on the new generation of anthropologists. Althusser’s Marxism seemed to suit anthropology, since it introduced a measure
of flexibility in the infrastructure–superstructure relationship. A conventional reading of Marx would state that the infrastructure (material and social features of the process of production) determines the superstructure (everything else in society). In non-capitalist (or ‘pre-capitalist’) societies, it was often very difficult to see how this came about. Non-Marxist anthropologists simply would not believe it; it contradicted everything they had ever learned. In British anthropology, kinship was assumed to be fundamental; in American anthropology, culture – whatever that meant, but certainly not economics. And Lévi-Strauss (who explicitly but confusingly had called himself a Marxist) was concerned with the superstructure exclusively, as was Dumont, whose view that the values of society ultimately determine its power structure was directly opposed to that of the Marxists (Parkin 2005).
Althusser, who wrote extensively on ideology, made it legitimate to study rituals and myths as devices of domination. He further held that in a given society, any social institution can be dominant in the sense that it de facto dominates, but whether it does so or not will always ultimately be determined by the infrastructure. In medieval Europe, for example, the Church was the dominant institution, but the Church’s dominance was ‘in the last instance’ determined by the feudal mode of production – and ultimately served the ends of that mode of production.
In the hands of the most famous of the French Marxist anthro-pologists, Maurice Godelier (1934–), the influences from Marx, Althusser and comparative ethnography merged with an equally strong admiration for the work of Lévi-Strauss. Originally educated as a philosopher, he was converted to anthropology by Lévi-Strauss and has done extensive fieldwork among the Baruya of New Guinea.
The Baruya, with their non-monetary economy based on subsistence and barter, indicated important differences between capitalist and non-capitalist societies. Unlike Meillassoux and several other French Marxist anthropologists, who regarded structuralism as neo-Kantian, idealist mystification, Godelier – who worked with Lévi-Strauss in the early 1960s – saw structuralism as a real scientific advance. In his view, the Marxian concept of contradiction could make structuralism more historical, while the conceptual apparatus of structuralism was indispensable in locating the hidden mechanisms of society and culture. At one stage, Godelier even went so far as to suggest that Marx was a structuralist avant la lettre (1966, republished in Godelier 1977).
Godelier was also – like Meillassoux – concerned with kinship.
Since kinship seemed to be ‘everywhere’ in traditional societies, he reasoned that it had to be seen as part of both the superstructure and the infrastructure (Godelier 1975). Rather than looking for particular institutions that took care of economy, ideology and so on, he proposed a ‘formalised Marxism’ that instead looked for functions. Such formulations further indicate the need felt by many of these researchers for a more flexible Marxian theory.
Much of the structural Marxian scholarship dealt with modes of production. Marx and Engels’ old idea of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was unearthed and eagerly discussed, and notions of one or several ‘African modes of production’ were widely debated, following the research of Meillassoux and others on that continent.
These debates died out towards the end of the 1970s, along with most anthropological attempts at grand typologies.
British Marxist anthropology was largely an offshoot of the French ‘structural’ variety. Since Lévi-Strauss, on the eve of the late 1960s radicalisation, was acknowledged as the worthiest partner in argument outside Britain for British theorists, the attraction of structural Marxism for young British radicals was easy to understand. (Of the alternatives, the older Marxism of the Manchester school seemed outdated by this time, and American Marxist anthropology was perceived as close kin to human ecology, a poorly understood and practically non-existent field in Britain, except at Forde’s department at University College Loondon.) Symp-tomatically, the most important British Marxist anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, was of French origin.
The fundamental problem with Marxism in anthropology was, and is, that it is essentially a theory of capitalism, and that its account of ‘pre-capitalist societies’ was based on speculation and inadequate data. To reconcile orthodox Marxism with ethnographic research required a strong will, and as Jonathan Spencer (1996: 353) points out, when competent ethnographic analysis was carried out by Marxian anthropologists, ‘it did become more obviously cultural, but looked less and less convincingly Marxist’. Nevertheless, many French Marxist anthropologists, notably Godelier, continued to publish anthropological work with a distinctly Marxian flavour through the 1980s and 1990s. Others, like Bloch and Marc Augé (Chapter 9), eventually changed their research priorities. Though Joel Kahn and Josip Llobera, in a review article from 1980, wrote that it was too early to ‘produce a definitive critique’ of the
movement (Kahn and Llobera 1980: 89), it seemed that movement had somehow expired while the article was in press.
THE NOT-QUiTE-mARXiSTS
While French Marxist anthropologists were often politically active, within or outside the Communist Party, this was rarely the case for the new generation of American Marxist or Marx-inspired anthro-pologists – though in retrospect it is easy to see that their efforts had more direct bearing on political issues of global injustice than the more academic contributions of their French contemporaries.
Marxist anthropology in the USA developed among Steward’s, White’s and Fried’s students in the early postwar years. It began to make its mark by the end of the 1960s, flourished in the 1970s and peaked only in the early 1980s. The concerns of these scholars, inspired by the practical bent of Steward’s research, continue to play an important role in anthropological studies of power and underdevelopment today. Though this generation of materialist Americans included some of the most important figures of the 1970s, some (like Marvin Harris) never really became Marxists, while others (like Marshall Sahlins) followed complex intellectual itineraries of their own, passing through a Marxist phase but eventually abandoning it. Sahlins (1930–), originally an evolutionist trained first by White, then by Steward, engaged creatively with the European Marxist debates about modes of production and forms of subsistence, arguing, in a famous, almost Rousseauesque contribution to the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium, that hunter-gatherers were ‘the original affluent society’ (1968, reprinted in Sahlins 1972), and that economies of scarcity were the result of the inequalities imposed by the agricultural revolution. In ‘On the sociology of primitive exchange’, the centrepiece of his subsequent collection of essays (Stone Age Economics, 1972), Sahlins argued that the logic of generalised reciprocity, or sharing, was the norm in tribal societies, where the calculating, ‘economising’ actor of the formalist economic anthropologists was conspicuously absent.
But as early as in this book, marked by Marxian concerns as it is, Sahlins was more convincing in his culturalist arguments than in his attempts to show causal connections between modes of production and symbolic culture. Then, in 1976, in his important theoretical treatise, Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins angrily criticised Marxism for its reductionism and for not treating symbolic culture as an autonomous realm.
The itinerary followed by Sahlins – from cultural ecology via Marxism to symbolism and history – was no mere personal idiosyncrasy. Several other American anthropologists followed similar (but rarely identical) paths. Columbia-trained Andrew Vayda, whose research priorities moved, between the 1960s and 1980s, from a strong version of cultural ecology to a cognitivist and almost postmodern attitude to theory, is one example (Vayda 1994).
A collaborator of Vayda in the 1960s and a long-time associate of Bateson, Roy Rappaport, also moved from a materialist to a
A collaborator of Vayda in the 1960s and a long-time associate of Bateson, Roy Rappaport, also moved from a materialist to a