Radical Anthropology

RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. With the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, radical scholarship had a positive impact on anthropological discourse by raising questions about how the societies anthropologists study are connected to larger domains of power shaped by colonialism, the articulation of modes of production, and gender. Additionally, it has motivated a self-critical and reflexive line of inquiry into how mainstream anthropology is itself colonialist, classist, and sexist. Hence, at the close of the twentieth century, anthropology recovered at least a part of the critical function it enjoyed a century earlier and at the start of the twentieth, when Lewis Henry Morgan was a major shaping influence on socialist thought and when the work of Franz Boas provided a scientific challenge to and refutation of the prevailing racism of the epoch.

After World War II anthropology became above all an academic discipline, and it was only between the demise of McCarthyism and the rise of Reaganism that Marxist anthroplogists in US universities could openly unveil a Left perspective. During the 1950s students of Julian Steward, notably Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, laid the foundation for an alteration of traditional approaches to community studies by situating the people studied in the broader context of U.S. hegemony and international capitalism. The customary objects of anthropological investigation were recast as colonized and proletarianized subjects rather than as exotic tribes or backward peasants. By the 1970s this perspective was clearly articulated by anthropologists who argued that the societies under study were not being transformed through the value-neutral processes of assimilation and acculturation, but through oppressive and exploitative colonialist and imperialist projects.

Innovative work by dependency and world-systems theorists and French structural Marxists (nonanthropologists and economic anthropologists alike) encouraged a return to the writings of Marx and Engels, above all Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the four volumes of Capital, and Marx’s Grundrisse (translated into English only in 1973). The Marxist concepts of mode of production and social formation assumed a saliency for understanding the societies anthropologists looked at. Marxist anthropologists were able to examine the dependent status of Third World societies in which class differentiation has assumed a variety of trajectories and where people confront different forms of capitalism. In this vein, theoretical and substantive advances have been made toward a historical anthropology, toward understanding the effects of merchant capital in “the periphery,” and regarding other topics that much pre-1970s anthropology ignored or refused to problematize.

Some radical anthropologists have focused less on colonialism as a form of capitalist domination and more on the process of globalization. In this emerging paradigm, anthropologists have sought to analyze the impact of increasingly global capital flows on the relations of power in specific cultures. They are 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 have examined how colonialism, imperialism, and different modes of production shaped what was for long a classic topic of anthropological research, relations between men and women. Writers and activists such as Eleanor Leacock have argued that relationships between men and women are historically variable and that gender relations in some noncapitalist societies are more egalitarian than in capitalist societies. At the same time, recognizing that patriarchy antedates capitalism, leftist feminist anthropologists have demonstrated how the interaction of patriarchy with capitalism is particularly oppressive for women. An important line of research has undermined the modernization theorists’ assumption that women’s status improves with the development of capitalism. Scholars have noted how the entrance of women into the labor market does not lead to an improvement in their status position, since they get the lowest-paying jobs and bear the double burden of having to perform domestic work as well as wage labor.

Feminists have not only developed alternative analytical approaches to mainstream anthropology, but have questioned fundamental aspects of the discipline. Some have challenged anthropology on the grounds of its manifest male bias. This was particularly evident in androcentric kinship studies and analyses of marital alliances, in which women figured as mere tokens of exchanges controlled by men, or in studies of economic contributions to the reproduction of society, where women’s roles had been glossed over, underanalyzed, or ignored.

Other Left anthropologists have criticized the way colleagues have wittingly or unwittingly been implicated in 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 were redrawn to condemn anthropological research conducted for the purpose of oppressing and exploiting the people being studied. This 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 has reshaped mainstream anthropology to the extent some scholars have claimed. While issues of domination and power have secured recognition in anthropological debates, few anthropologists have explicitly politicized their own work. However, those who have no longer simply write about the people they study; they also seek to empower them

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