ANTHROPOLOGY. The rise of the 1960s social movements prompted a newer anthropology, raising large questions long discounted or evaded. How had the societies that anthropologists studied been shaped to colonialism, the nature and shifts of modes of production, gender and race? The newer radicalism also motivated a reflexive line of inquiry: how mainstream anthropology itself had been deeply, often unquestioningly, colonialist, classist, and sexist? Remarkably, at the close of the twentieth century, anthropology recovered at least a part of the critical function that it had enjoyed more than a century earlier, with Lewis Henry Morgan a shaping influence on socialist thought, followed by Franz Boas’s scientific challenge to the prevailing racism of the epoch. The widening appreciation of mutual influences between Marxists and anthropologists helped to create a new intellectual history of the field.
The influence of Morgan’s writings upon the first major English-language thinker of US Marxism, Daniel De Leon, could hardly be exaggerated. De Leon described his socialist ideas, for some years, as the “Marx-Morgan” theory of society. Until 1920 large numbers of socialists in the United States, as abroad, believed that a precursor “Golden Day” had existed before the rise of social classes and that socialism would, in a very real sense, return to that cooperative form but with industrialism’s benefits. That Marx and Engels had themselves grown increasingly interested in details about these societies would not be well known for generations, but a mutual sympathy of socialists and the researchers of the new field of anthropology was no secret. Robert Lowie, one of the most prominent of the young practitioners-theorists, added his name to the masthead of the Masses magazine a few years before its suppression for antiwar views.
From the 1910s-1930s, anthropology could be described as a field of aggressive amateurs, with a growing minority of university-trained scholars, the most prominent among them guided by Franz Boas at Columbia. Existing theory, European or American, nevertheless had little room for the fieldwork of Boas’s students who disputed the “stages of civilization” theory, suggesting that only primitive, premodern societies could function without authoritarian controls. Or for later arguments of radical anthropologists that apparent authoritarian control might be essentially seasonal and ceremonial, anticipating dispersal into small population groups lacking any “state power.”
After World War II, anthropology became a heavily-funded academic discipline, with fixed views on the exceptional cases of egalitarian “backwardness” as mere diversions from the gradual arrival of classes and the centralized power required to manage agricultural output, distribution, and collective defense. A considerable number of anthropologists worked with intelligence agencies and other bodies around the US State Department, funded to explore such issues as “Land Tenure” in developing societies, interpreted to favor to US strategic and corporate aims. “Development,” viewed as a counter-strategy in the global South to challenges from the Left but especially the popularity of Communists, thus created flash points within anthropology for campus activists of the 1960s-1970s.
Between the demise of McCarthyism and the rise of Reaganism, Marxist anthropologists in US universities gradually unveiled their own Left perspective. During the 1950s, students of Julian Steward, notably Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, laid the foundation for newer approaches to community studies by situating the subjects of study within the broader context of US hegemony and global capitalism. The peoples studied came to be viewed as colonized and proletarianized subjects rather than as exotic tribes or backward peasants. Indeed, by the 1970s-1980s, key anthropologists argued that these societies had never been transformed through the value-neutral processes of assimilation and acculturation, but rather, through exploitative colonialist and imperialist projects.
Innovative work by dependency and world-systems theorists and French structural Marxists, by this time including the work of non-anthropologists and economic anthropologists, encouraged a return to the writings of Marx and Engels. Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the four volumes of Capital, and Marx’s Grundrisse (translated and published in English only in 1973), came under close study. Marxist concepts of mode of production and social formation assumed a saliency for understanding the societies of special interest. Marxist anthropologists thus examined the dependent status of Third World societies in which class differentiation assumed a variety of trajectories and where populations confronted different forms of capitalism. A historical anthropology thus emerged, grappling with the effects of merchant capital in “the periphery,” and treating other topics that pre-1970s anthropology had effectively ignored.
Increasingly, some radical anthropologists focused less on colonialism as a form of capitalist domination and more on the process of globalization. In this emerging paradigm, anthropologists sought to analyze the impact of accelerating global capital flows on the relations of power in specific cultures. They were particularly interested in exploring the relationship between a worldwide homogeneous commercial culture on the one hand and assertions of local identity on the other.
Feminist anthropologists examined how colonialism, imperialism, and different modes of production shaped what had long been a classic topic of anthropological research, relations between men and women. Leading writers and activists such as Eleanor Leacock argued that relationships between men and women have been historically variable and gender relations in some non-capitalist societies likely to be more egalitarian than in capitalist societies. At the same time, recognizing that patriarchy antedates capitalism, leftist feminist anthropologists demonstrated how the interaction of patriarchy with capitalism intensified the oppression of women. An important line of research undermined the modernization theorists’ once-standard assumptions that women’s status improves with the development of capitalism. Scholars noted how the entrance of women into the labor market does not necessarily lead to an improvement in their status position, since they occupy the lowest-paying jobs and bear the double burden of having to perform domestic work as well as wage labor.
Feminists not only developed alternative analytical approaches to mainstream anthropology, but questioned fundamental aspects of the discipline. Some challenged anthropology on the grounds of its manifest male bias, particularly evident in androcentric kinship studies and analyses of marital alliances. Here, women had figured analytically as mere tokens of exchanges controlled by men, or in studies of economic contributions to the reproduction of society, their roles glossed over, under-analyzed, or ignored entirely.
Other Left anthropologists criticized the ways in which colleagues have wittingly or unwittingly been implicated in a wide variety of colonialist, imperialist, and hegemonic projects. The participation of anthropologists in efforts by the US Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to undermine popular protest in Chile and Thailand during the 1960s were revealed, and ethical guidelines for the profession redrawn to condemn anthropological research conducted for the purpose of oppressing and exploiting the people being studied. This reconsideration has had important consequences for the shape of the discipline and contributed to the creation of an intellectual space within anthropology in which radical analysis has been able to develop. It is less clear, however, whether Marxist and Left criticism reshaped mainstream anthropology to the extent that some scholars have claimed. While issues of domination and power secured recognition in anthropological debates, few anthropologists explicitly politicized their own work. However, those who did so no longer simply wrote about the people they study; they also sought to empower them.
The Dawn of Everything, summarizing a decade-old dialogue between anthropologist David Wendrow and generalist-theorist David Graeber, argues that all “stages” theories had been decisively refuted through the growing fieldwork of archeologists and anthropologists across the globe. Elaborate systems of managing the surrounding environment, for instance of building gigantic structures for ritual reasons rather than statecraft or even economic management, likewise widepread annual travels of populations and communications between them, even the use of geometric imagery, indicated a drastically different approach was needed to understand ancient societies at large. Further, where societies had emerged from smaller collective entities into kingships, as in Cahokia, the kingships themselves tended toward ritual rather than statecraft and dissolution eventually followed. If in scholarly literature and popular explanations, “complexity” has been seen as virtually synonymous with “hierarchy,” Marxists and anarchists wished to dispute the point. Perhaps, the authors suggested, “bureaucracies” functioned more through neighborhood councils with significant influence of women, and land management emerged in a cooperative fashion, all related to ritual practices. Arguably, the great physical monuments of ancient civilizations could never have been built through coercion alone. If no “original” state of society or civilization existed, then the gates opened to alternative views, emphatically including radical ones.
Further reading
Asad, Talal, ed. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press, 1973.
Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. (1884). New York: International Publishers, 1942.
Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2121.
Leacock, Eleanor. “Marxism and Anthropology.” In The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, edited by Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoffs. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
Lem, Winnie and Leach, Belinds, eds. Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Patterson, Thomas Carl. Karl Marx, Anthropologist. New York: Berg, 2009.
Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.