Some reflections on
anthropological structural
Marxism
Stephen Nugent Goldsmiths College, University of London
The primary topic in this discussion is the brief career of anthropological structural Marxism and the
possibility of its continued relevance. That issue is framed by a more general one: on what basis are
explanatory theories adopted and discarded in anthropology? The discussion of structural Marxism
is framed within recent debates about the desirability of socio-cultural anthropology’s traditional
associations with other sub-fields of anthropology, and it is argued that the isolation of sub-fields is
a regressive theoretical move.
Introduction: explanation and holism
Debates about ‘theory’ in anthropology are typically unresolved, often acrimonious,
and frequently conducted through the wielding of symbolic power rather than prosaic
evidence. In part, the function of and attitudes towards ‘theory’ flow from the problematic
status of ‘ethnography’, at one and the same time a narrative rendering of
empirical material and also a package of material bound by often implicit assumptions
about causality, logical fit, and intrinsic coherence. Another source of the disputatious
character of ‘theory’1 may not be as mysterious as a fetishized ‘ethnography’: the
attempt to maintain alliances with both of what C.P. Snow (1993 [1959]) famously
depicted as the ‘two cultures’ – those of the sciences and of the humanities – such that
anthropology self-consciously balances universalizing and relativizing tendencies.
Recent efforts to resolve this tension/ambiguity by declaring the ‘interpretative’
versus ‘scientific’ détente finished (see contributions to Segal & Yanagisako 2005)
depend primarily on a re-definition of the anthropological division of labour with one
camp assembled around the ‘crisis of representation’ and the other around ‘evolutionary
psychology’ (to cite ideal-type demonizations). This re-definition of the field,
however, does not erase or resolve – except by exclusion – the characteristic, historical
dilemma of an anthropology that has tried to produce social theory that is at once
sufficiently clinical (society/culture as an object of analysis) to be able to historicize
culture and, simultaneously, sufficiently acknowledging of the subjectivity of ‘cultural
difference’.2
One of the issues highlighted in anthropology’s ‘two cultures’ conflict – the sustained
uncertainty about the relative weights of the universalizing and relativizing
tendencies of anthropology – has been the variable character of the criteria used to
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decide whether an explanation is strong or weak.3 This disposition is often revealed in
the way ‘theory’ appears so commonly as a label of total affiliation rather than a
working premise, some aspects of which may be retained, others discarded as they lose
explanatory value.A revealing structure-functionalist account of the internal dynamics
of a social system, for example, may offer little insight into processual change, but that
failing indicates the limits of explanatory power, not a generic, ‘theoretical’ inadequacy.
The nominalist character of much ‘theory’ in anthropology underpins the strong
tendency for demonization in the field (see Wolf 1994).
A related issue concerns an eclectic ‘standard’ literature that tends to be cumulative
rather than successional.A new study typically adds to the literature without displacing
antecedent explanations. The history of the development of the field, firmly embedded
in the primary literature itself, may provide a sense of continual re-evaluation,
re-orientation, and re-calibration of the explanatory dimensions of the field,4 but it
may also produce a miasma.5 The ‘theory’ that has maintained a grip over the disparate
elements that comprise anthropological holism is less paradigmatic than episodic.
Areas in which successional explanation rather than interpretation is to the fore may be
only awkwardly accommodated (if at all) within certain holistic views, but are more
often demonized as ‘positivistic’ or simply regarded as belonging largely outside
anthropology.
The decline of anthropological structural Marxism (hereafter ASM)6 may be an
example of an explanatory theory being sidelined not as a weak theory, but as the
wrong kind of theory, ‘wrong’ in the sense that it challenges a prevailing interpretative
holism. Its explanations do not just amount to new additions to the literature, but they
supersede other explanations in a way that stretches some aspects of anthropological
holism intolerably. There is, for example, a holism in functionalist claims about the
interdependence of structures of kinship, politics, and economics that may be descriptively
adequate, but which retains little more than metaphoric power in the face of
accounts of social change requiring specification of causal factors.7 It is one thing to
engage holism for the purpose of accounting for the complex interdependence of many
dimensions of sociality, but another to demand that causal explanation always seek
calibration through holism.8
Although there has been a long historical relationship between anthropology and
Marxism,9 an overt anthropological drawing on the work of Marx and Engels (rather
than ‘official’ Marxism) became a notable feature of anthropological discourse in the
1960s. Vincent (1985: 137) notes that most of the entries in the bibliography of
Wessman’s Anthropology and Marxism (1981), for example, are post-1968, and fully half
date from the narrow period 1973-8. Previous Marxist tendencies in the field, as in the
work of Leslie White and his associates (Price 2004), effectively censored in a McCarthyite
climate, were idiomatically materialist and evolutionist, but the successor
tendency was clearly allied with a New Left/Western Marxist revisionism. A hybrid
anthropological structural Marxism was concerned with multiple forms of determination
and power, not just economic ones. It was as much globally orientated as it was
focused on the extremely local and it accommodated the scale of dependency theory as
well as that of the detailed, village-level study. Additionally, it located modern (i.e.
post-Victorian, Malinowskian/Boasian) anthropological preoccupations (such as the
interrelations of kin-groups and political power) in a long-term historical framework
such that, for example, Sacks’s (1979) analysis of Engels had direct relevance for the
study of domestic labour in late capitalism.
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ASM’s explanatory advance on functionalist orthodoxy occurred in a nested
context: at one level a particular expression of a more general critique of the discipline
occurring in the 1960s;10 at a higher level an expression of a field still comfortable as a
socio-historical discipline rather than in thrall to the humanities.With the general shift
of the field towards the literary-hermeneutic – symbolically benchmarked by the publication
of Writing culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986)11 – and refinement of what was
‘anthropologically holistic’ (vigorously outlined in Segal & Yanagisako 2005), the particular
and subtle qualities of the ASM critique were enveloped.At a further level, while
the literary turn seemed to enlarge the anthropological remit through an emphasis on
multi-disciplinarity, it had as a corollary the tendency for the more scientific (or
scientistic) tendencies to be identified with the cognates of particular sub-fields –
economics, evolutionism, politics, psychology – and in some respects become lost to
the new mainstream in anthropology.
Even if the predominant tendency within the field has been to reconfigure anthropological
holism in a manner openly sceptical of the virtues of scientific affiliations, the
rationale for anthropology’s cultural authority as ‘best-informed interlocutor’ (against
challenges to that status from NGOs, development/area studies, ‘the tourist experience’,
travel writing, and the like) still rests on a science-like and realist disposition (see, e.g.,
Besteman & Gusterman 2005). In key respects, the now largely discarded intervention
of ASM may be seen as a crucial statement of a different kind of holistic anthropology
from that which now asserts itself: that is to say, one more concerned with theoretical
adequacy than theoretical propriety.
Economic anthropology
ASM emerged under the influence of several sources, one of which was an orthodox
anthropological conception of a generic pre-modern, tribal economy in which – in
idealized form – a division of labour was primarily shaped only by factors of gender
and age. Economic anthropology emerged forcefully as a sub-disciplinary specialty in
the context of the geo-political restructuring that followed the conclusion to the
SecondWorldWar, and the dominant theoretical discussions largely turned around the
substantivist-formalist distinction. While ‘economic anthropology’ in one reading
meant ‘economics in a tribal/peasant setting’, it also retained the strong notion of
embeddedness, that is, the expression of economic logic through an array or filter of
social relations (e.g. of kinship and politics), a non-autonomous12 economy along lines
indicated by Polanyi (1944) and particularly well known through Sahlins (1972).
The substantivist-formalist debate, however, was in crucial respects at crosspurposes.
At one extreme, formalists who insisted on a market definition of economic
rationality had little to say about non-market economies, except that they were typically
irrational.At the other, substantivists who insisted that economic logic was always
subordinate to diverse culture-logics undermined the prospect of a generalizable
notion of the economic. Each approach actually concerns a very a different kind of
economic target,with – roughly – substantivism being concerned with the structures of
material provisioning regardless of how they are culturally expressed, formalism being
concerned only with structures of material provisioning expressed in prices.13 The
point about confusion of targets is strongly made by Godelier (1972: xxviii) in his
comments on the contradictory advice provided in Notes and queries on anthropology
(Royal Anthropological Institution of Great Britain and Ireland 1960), wherein fieldresearchers
were instructed both to reject and respect ‘ordinary’ economics.
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Another significant influence on the emergence of ASM was the new global expression
of economic formalism through the perspective of a modernization theory that
projected a crude form of economic evolutionism onto the anthropological landscape.
From an anthropological vantage-point, the diversity of anthropological subject societies
(whether codified as tribes, peoples, nations, or races) as well as the diversity of
links that such societies had with larger systems was hardly comfortably expressed by
modernizationist prescriptions. Within the new context and framework offered
by modernization theory – realized in more explicit form with the hegemony of
neoliberalism in the 1980s – the formalist position became an expression of applied
anthropology, and substantivism represented a kind of truculent romanticization of
pre-capitalism. Despite the fact that ‘economic anthropology’ appeared to provide a
richly textured alternative to a monocausal-tending and reductionist modernization
theory, the incommensurability of formalist and substantivist positions with respect to
synthesizing an adequate alternative theory was marked. In a sense, neither provided a
theory adequate to account for what was happening in an anthropological world beset
by a new modernizationist programme,14 yet each contained elements that might be
conjoined in an appropriate synthesis via ASM which – labelled as such, or as political
economy or Marxist anthropology – tried to fuse functionalist and historical accounts.
A new anthropological landscape
The early task of the modern anthropological project was to document and model
extant socio-cultural systems.15 A derived project was the analysis of the institutions
that regulated these apparently self-reproducing systems.16 That ‘investigation of regulation’
project was conducted under a number of sub-field headings (e.g. symbolic
anthropology, structure functionalism, environmental determinism, culture and personality,
etc.), and although there was acknowledged secular change in privileging
certain factors or elements – and hence kinds of tendencies in explanation – the
suggestion that the practice of anthropology itself was shaped by the mode of its own
insertion in the modern world was treated as highly provocative. Both the collections
by Hymes (1969) and by Asad (1974) contained arguments to the effect that although
the subjects and subject matter of anthropology may, in some senses and cases, seem to
be ‘outside of history’, the relationship between anthropology and its subjects certainly
was not. The arguments contained in these two influential volumes were widely
regarded as transgressive, if not scandalous, but it was impossible for critics to refute
the evident systematicity of certain relationships between, for example, national
schools of anthropology and their preferred subjects.Was Dutch expertise in Southeast
Asia a reflection of a natural affinity?WereNorth, Central, and South American peoples
particularly alluring to North American anthropologists? Did Africa and Asia fall under
the gaze of UK anthropology by chance? These associations, of course, were not those
that were directly challenged; rather, the defensive emphasis was placed on the constructions
attributed to those who modestly pointed out that anthropological practice
tended not to be reciprocal (no Inuits doing fieldwork in Shaker Heights, no Dinka in
Peckham) and that political subjectivity tended to be a precondition of anthropological
subjectivity.
ASM emerged in the context of a strongly revised geo-political landscape as the shift
from what is glossed here as the colonial-to-the-neo-colonial was consolidated. The
expected economic depression following the Second World War had not transpired,
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and the immediate post-war years showed an intensification of unsubtle transformation
of pre-capitalist and marginal capitalist societies, the fields of anthropological
inquiry.
Sources of revision
The theoretical borrowings from Marx in ASM tended to be of a non-dogmatic type,
sometimes labelled ‘neo-Marxist’, not the caricature of formulaic application of ‘theory’
– an all-purpose template of historical materialism – but a projection of a series of
hypothetical explanations. In view of the shortage of empirical anthropological material
at the time when Marx and Engels were preparing their theories, the only way to
‘apply’ their theories to such ethnographic material as subsequently emerged was
speculatively/hypothetically. The issue central to ASM’s credibility was not ‘how good
its Marxism was’, but how good the emergent explanations were.17 ASM directly confronted
the insistence thatMarxism is relevant only to the analysis of capitalist societies
by focusing on the dynamics of articulation between pre-capitalism and capitalism,
and less on strict, timelessly valid definitions of those categories themselves.18
‘Structuralism’ also has a qualified and nuanced relationship to ASM, although for
reasons different from those that apply to theMarxist relationship. Structuralism has so
many affinities with incommensurable claimants that a generic definition is impossible.
The versions of structuralism most pertinent to the anthropology of the time are
those associated with Lévi-Strauss and Althusser, but it is the fact that ASM is seen to
draw generally fromthe milieu of structuralism rather than any particular ‘structuralist
authority’ that proves troublesome.
It is Lévi-Strauss’s (1961: 60-1) rather old-fashioned, elementary sociology depiction
which seems most apposite, that is, his allusion toMarx, Freud, and geology – the three
mistresses – as indicating what is intended by structure: something not directly apprehendable,
that is, assumed/hypothesized (and then modelled) on the basis of tangible
evidence (material or behavioural) available to direct examination, quite a ‘normal
science’ approach. While Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism accommodates the more representational
matters (the projection of the mental from the material), Althusser lends a
political economy framework for comparative analysis.
This is not to suggest that ‘structuralism’ and‘Marxism’weremerely adjectives added
for stylistic enhancement, but to suggest that the theoretical abstraction associated with
the more grandiose projects of the period, such as that of Hindess and Hirst (1975), did
not necessarily form a key part of ASM. The theoretical departures implied in ASM
certainly had purchase elsewhere in a broader neo-Marxist set of debates, but in
relation to the orthodoxy of structure functionalism, ASM’s shift was a modest upping
of the explanatory stakes.19 ASM posed the question: at what level of analysis is it
possible to discern the internal structures of Non-market Society X while at the same
time specifying the relations according to which that (pre-/non-capitalist society) was
functional with respect to capitalist society (i.e. subordinate to it and/or co-existing
with it). The strong hypothesis was that it was at the level of economic structures/
material provisioning that one could express both the internal dynamic of precapitalism
and the compatibility of pre-capitalism and capitalism. For illustrative
purposes Wolf (1981) pursues this same line of argument (without resorting to the
more familiar ‘modes of production’ vocabulary associated with ASM) in his comparison
of the kin-based, tributary, and capitalist modes of labour mobilization.
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Despite the emphasis on ‘theory’ in much commentary on ASM, the ethnographic
case studies explicitly flagged as ASM tend to be quite straightforward. The transparency
of explanatory goal is well illustrated in the work of Meillassoux (1981), where,
despite O’Laughlin’s (1977) charge – amongst many others – of a defective and ‘fundamental
ambiguity’, Meillassoux proposes a very plausible explanation for the conservation
of a pre-capitalist domestic community in the presence of exploitation
through articulation with capitalism, an explanation very similar to that provided in
Wolpe’s (1972) analysis of ‘tribal homelands’ and South African apartheid.20
The theoretical precision found wanting in Meillassoux notwithstanding,
O’Laughlin’s‘Mediation of contradiction:whyMbumwomen do not eat chicken’ (1974)
is a display of theoretically uncluttered analysis that draws on ASM in the same way as it
draws on amechanical structure functionalism. There is no‘theoretical’ incompatibility
(or inconsistency) as theory functions to aid explanation, not shore up one or the other
antagonistic positions. In her example, structure-functionalist analysis defines the limits
of an atomized systemwithin whichseniors’ control of external trade goodspermits their
maintenance of culturally legitimated power. The inequalities in that system, however,
which ensure the accumulation of surplus by senior males, ensure the flow/exchange of
essential materials necessary to maintain Mbum ‘autonomy’. This approach does not
dissolve the distinctiveness of Mbum society (or derogate structure-functionalist analysis),
but raises interestingnewissues (e.g.does senior male controlof external trade goods
– and the prohibition on women’s consumption of them – constitute exploitation?). Of
central interest is the way inwhich relations of production that characterize local society
articulate with dominant relations of production in adjacent societies.A similarly lucid
example is provided in the work of Kahn (1975; 1981), where the dynamics of subsistence
and petty commodity production within a Sumatran peasant society maintain an
articulated/semi-autonomous relationship with a set of regional/national economic
structures that significantly shape the boundedness of local society.
These kinds of detailed studies, relatively few though they are,21 represent an ASM
grounded as much in ethnographic reality as in modelling ambition, but they tend to
be overshadowed by a theoretical diversion resulting from ASM’s being just a minor
corner of a generalized Western Marxism.What was to some a multi-disciplinary and
somewhat militantly postured convergence could also become a vortex. The enormous
attention granted Hindess and Hirst’s Precapitalist modes of production (1975), for
example, was part of a theoretical extravagance22 in which the concerns of a historical
materialism-informed exploration of uneven development seemed paltry compared to
emergent hyper-theory. In retrospect, much of the work once identifiable as significantly
related to ASM – the literature of espousal and critique of Althusser, to name one
obvious source – now seems quite tangential to durable, anthropological concerns.
Key fieldwork-based studies are cited in Terray’s Marxism and primitive societies
(1972), the most influential volume of early essays. They represent the first significant
French ASM work to be translated and taken up directly in US and UK anthropology.
They also reveal a tension between evolutionist preoccupations and attempts to characterize
‘primitive’ economy rigorously. Additionally, though, they significantly downplay
the connection between the colonial question and extant ‘primitive social
formations’. Terray notes, for example, of the final two chapters of Meillassoux’s
L’anthropologie économique des Gouro (1964), ‘however interesting the chapters in
which Meillassoux studies the colonial period may be, I think they are far less new and
original than his analysis of the traditional economy’ (Terray 1972: 96).23
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It is with regard to the third matter – the colonial context – that two quite different
tendencies – both identified as ASM – become clear. One of these pertains to the
characterization of the anthropological object – a bounded cultural unit/society/tribe
versus something more abstract. Terray, despite a theoretical armoury that seems to
indicate a demolition of traditional anthropological approaches, recapitulates the traditional
object. The second tendency – social change with respect to the primacy of
economic transformation – is less caught up in the definitional swordplay associated
with concerning the exactitude of the definitions and conditions of modes of production,
and more associated with the question of articulation: that is, how do precapitalist
and capitalist relations and societies co-exist?24
One consequence of the awkward forcing of definitional and explanatory tendencies
under a single heading was that purely ‘theoretical’ work seemed to be far more
voluminous than empirically based work. Additionally, there was some sense in which
economic anthropology approached from a Marxist perspective was regarded as being
implacably ‘economically deterministic’ at the expense of appreciation of ‘culture’, yet
the empirical studies produced ‘under the influence’ (see, e.g., the contributions to
Bloch 1975; Kahn & Llobera 198125) do not actually exhibit this mechanical dependence.
Additionally, the accusation of economic determinism seems particularly disingenuous
in an era of ascendant neoliberalism in which the market prevails and a highly culturalist
anthropology seems to thrive.
While criticism of the shortcomings of other approaches to analysing ‘primitive
economy’ was often excoriating (e.g. Godelier 1972), harsh criticism was reserved for
internecine battles and much of the most revealing work in and around ASM paid little
heed to Marxist credentialism. The influential contributions contained in Bloch’s
(1975) and Kahn and Llobera’s (1981) volumes represent examples of all three of the
tendencies flagged in Terray’s (1972), as well as strong indications of how the explanatory
horizon could be extended. The work of Kahn (1975) and Friedman (1975) in
particular invoked a globalist perspective that decisively pushed the object of anthropological
analysis outside of a debate confined to ‘the local-level’ system and regulated
by the obedient theoretical vocabulary of the kind of empiricism associated with
British structure functionalism.
An optimistic stocktaking was offered in Kahn and Llobera’s (1981) collection, and
ASM seemed to be a strong candidate for combining the advances in synchronic
analysis (which borrowed from structure functionalism, structuralism, and systems
theory26) and analysis over time (longue durée as well as ‘the history of events’, à la
Braudel). The prospect of a maturing ASM in which theoretical advance – which is to
say, refinement of an explanatory agenda – proceeded with a systematic realignment
with the results of the growing body of ethnographic material was short-lived. Instead,
ASM came to be treated as a complex, hyphenate-reject, seemingly a product of a folk
chemistry specializing in the combination of such elements as ‘French’, ‘structure
functionalist’, ‘neo-Marxist’, and ‘structuralist’, and – depending on combination and
context – a perplexing mix of approbation and derogation.
Far from offering a substantial and authoritative link between the anthropology of
pre-capitalist societies and the anthropology of societies-of-various-relationshipswith-
capitalism, the legacy of ASM reflected in Spencer’s ‘Marxism and anthropology’
(1996) and Eriksen and Nielsen’s A history of anthropology (2001) – to cite two critical,
but not wholly unsympathetic accounts – seems quite faint. Spencer notes of ASM and
the attempt to engage class analysis at the local and global levels that ‘[t]hese were
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important issues for any understanding of the modern world (Wolf [1982] provides a
skilful and judicious synthesis of this work), yet the results were oddly unimpressive’
(1996: 353). He continues:
In short, structuralMarxism was threatened by two opposing possibilities: asMarxism it was relatively
indifferent to issues of ethnography and culture and thus was not particularly anthropological; or, in
the hands of ethnographers like Godelier and Maurice Bloch, it did become more obviously cultural,
but looked less and less convincingly Marxist (1996: 353).
Eriksen and Nielsen, who cite Spencer’s ‘neither-one-nor-the-other’ judgement, add
that ‘[t]he fundamental problem with Marxism in anthropology was, and is, that it is
essentially a theory of capitalist society, and that its message about “pre-capitalist
societies” was couched in the language of unilineal evolutionism’ (2001: 116).
Questions of the acuity of these particular judgements aside, it is hard to dispute
Eriksen and Nielsen’s observation of Kahn and Llobera’s optimistic 1981 overview that
ASM‘had already fizzled out as a cohesive trend when the review article was eventually
published’ (2001: 116).
None of these retrospective criticisms, however, is quite convincing in accounting
for the discrepancy between the intensity of interest in the novel aspects of ASM,
however short-lived, and the diffidence of critical commentary shortly thereafter. The
‘oddly unimpressive’ assessment of the legacy of ASM as well as the suggestion that the
failing of ASM was due to its being couched in the ‘language of unilineal evolutionism’
hint at some lack of fit between promise and realization, but this judgement seems to
be based on the appropriateness of labels rather than explanatory adequacy. In the
course of his discussion of Morgan, Terray certainly invokes a stage-ist Marxism, but it
is difficult to see in the protracted debates about modes of production and articulation
(see Foster-Carter 1979) that evolutionist discussion continues to command much of a
position in the overall ASM profile. Similarly, a doctrinaire isolation of ‘Marxism’ and
‘the cultural’ is not so easily recognizable a failing in a literature that seems preoccupied
precisely with the evaluation of the nature of reciprocal relations between economic
and non-economic structures. In sum, the post mortems offered by Spencer and
Eriksen/Nielsen acknowledge the ideological package of ASM far more than they do the
substantive impulse and potential as an advance on existing anthropological theories of
social change, either at the level of the sub-field of economic anthropology or more
generally at the level of socio-cultural anthropology within a holistic framework.
Demise and partial demise
Whether ASM was a logical successor to functionalism or an unwieldy and unsustainable
union of ‘Marxism’ and ‘culture’, its influence was short-lived. For Mintz the fact
that such a development took place at all is surprising. He writes that: ‘If much of the
so-calledMarxist debate seems remote from contemporary social realities – as much of
it is – then in no discipline may its presence seem less probable than in North American
anthropology’ (Mintz, Godelier, Trigger & Hoijer 1984: 12). His explanation for this
improbability applies as well to the UK, for both US and British anthropology cultivated
ahistorical or non-historical positions, with the US projecting its contemporary
Indian natives into the past in order to avoid dealing with them in the present while the
British carefully analysed their colonial natives’ present and regarded them as being
without history, without a past (Mintz et al. 1984: 15). By this reckoning, the last thing
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either anthropological tradition needed was a theory of social change that disrupted
these versions of the ‘ethnographic present’.
Mintz acknowledges Firth’s (1975) attempt to explain the reasons behind the
seeming improbability of British anthropology’s paying any attention to Marxism,
these being: (1) a broadening of anthropological interest to work through other major
sociological figures; (2) a failure of current theory to explain changes in anthropological
material; and (3) a questioning of established institutions and values (i.e. a secular
not an anthropological factor) (Mintz et al. 1984: 17, citing Firth 1975: 42). He goes on
to add an additional four elements of explanation: (1) recognition that the gulf between
‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ was not perhaps as broad as once thought (and perhaps never
existed at all); (2) realization that to characterize the anthropological subject as ‘savage’
in any sense was misplaced; (3) awareness that the 500 years of the capitalist world
system represented a ‘qualitatively different experience for humankind’; and (4)
acknowledgement of the possibility that anthropological techniques could in fact be
applicable in big, complex societies (Mintz et al. 1984: 17-18).27 The emphasis in this list
is on the degree of fit between explanation and the world as encountered anthropologically
and it was a perception of explanatory shortcoming in anthropology that
made a Marxist approach relevant. The ‘so-called Marxist debates’ are a distraction
(Mintz et al. 1984: 12).28
If the emergence of a Marxist anthropology was improbable, its demise was less
surprising, but its demise was not complete, and this incompleteness hints at a crucial
distinction between theory-by-way-of-explanation and theory-by-way-of-identity.
While ASM, for example, waned in part because of particular, negative readings of its
associations and affinities with structuralism and Marxism, other structuralist29 and
Marxist associations have acquired a degree of respectability and acceptance in various
post-structuralist, semiotic, and literary tendencies well represented in contemporary
anthropological discourse. Even if class- and economically orientated Marxism is
regarded as retrograde, indicative of what some dismiss as folk tales, exhausted master
narratives of social theory (see Tyler 1987), the Marxism of identity/cultural politics is
viable.30
Conclusion
Although ASM is generally perceived as passé, the kinds of things it sought to explain
have neither disappeared magically behind the punditry of ‘globalization’ nor have
earlier ASM analyses of the durability and variety of uneven development been convincingly
superseded by superior explanations.31 Instead, what ASM set out to achieve
may simply have proved too difficult and unwieldy: individualistic, fieldwork-based
analyses of the global encounters among the diverse shadows of pre-capitalism and
capitalism.32 Where it failed was not so much in its theoretical ambitions, but in its
power and relevance to the current cultural landscape, able neither to challenge the
managerial systems of modernization nor to persuade by the power of argument and
fact. This does not negate the ambition of a ‘critical anthropology’ as a social science,
but does render it marginalized.
An associated effect of this marginalization, and one evident in the culturalist swing
in anthropology since the 1980s, is that the effective scope of anthropology is increasingly
seen to lie within a humanities rather than social-scientific tendency. There is a
possibly instructive analogy with the circumstances of sociology as described by
Burawoy, who notes in the case of that discipline that regardless of the potency of
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arguments for and against the pursuit of unified-field andmulti-disciplinary strategies,
the struggle still remains situated ‘in the abiding foundations of the societies that
created them. Thus, to wish them away is to indulge in utopian fantasy’ (2005: 518).
A quite different evaluation bears the weight of opinion in many current overviews
of the state of anthropological theory.Here the tendency is towards modifying, perhaps
to the point of severing, connections with its epistemological roots, ones shared with
sociology. In an indicative piece, Yanagisako, for example, writes:
In sociocultural anthropology, the innovative theoretical and methodological developments of the
past quarter century – including reflexive, feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and transnational
approaches to culture – were not generated by competition between cultural anthropology and other
fields in the discipline; nor were they stimulated by competition with evolutionary approaches to
culture. Rather, they were incited by the growing dissatisfaction of sociocultural anthropologists with
prevailing forms of cultural theory, including structural-functionalist, economic determinist, psychological,
cognitive and androcentric approaches. This dissatisfaction led us to look beyond the boundaries
of the discipline to scholarship in the humanities and other social sciences (2005: 95-6).
Many of the positively evaluated adjectives cited in the passage above, portrayed as
part of an internal conversation in anthropology, were also characteristic of other
tendencies in the field, ASM included, but it remains a matter of debate whether the
critical posture ‘socio-cultural anthropology’ is better served by a narrowed reading
‘cultural theory’. That ASM now commands little attention may in the end – and
ironically – have less to do with the stigma of itsMarxist (and structuralist) associations
than with its fidelity to a conception of the social sciences that continues to acknowledge
the conditions of the societies in which they were created, a contradictory, and not
necessarily conciliatory, space of a ‘disciplinary knowledge’.
NOTES
I would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Earlier versions benefited
from the comments of Stephan Feuchtwang, Jonathan Friedman, Keith Hart, Joel Kahn,Mike Rowlands, and
Mitch Sedgwick, to whom many thanks.
1 Ortner’s (1984) celebrated article expresses a notion of ‘theory’ that captures an agency + structuremodel
that is – broadly – uncontroversial in socio-cultural anthropology. Attempts to disaggregate the terms are
generally resisted, as in Ingold (2000), for example, and Segal & Yanigasako (2005).
2 Wolf observes that it is now difficult to teach anthropology of the former sort in as much as: ‘It used to
be that we taught our students about the people out there. Now the very same people sit in my classroom
[and] explain the virtues of various medicines and the physical power of witchcraft’ (Friedman 1987: 117).
3 The ‘rationality debate’ provides instructive examples (see Wilson 1970).
4 The genre of ‘reflexive anthropology’ has emerged to accommodate this self-consciousness.
5 The ‘ethnographic present’, for example, often has mystifying effects when extended into the ‘actual
present’.
6 ASM is broadly defined. Here it includes both a UK tendency directly shaped by French influences (and
with very Althusserian overtones) and a US tendency with different Marxist sources and much less structuralist
affiliation. Although Marxism has different histories in the two national traditions (see Mintz et al.
1984),ASM is represented in the simultaneous critique of both fields as exemplified in Asad (1974) andHymes
(1969).
7 Ironically, it is precisely Marx and Engel’s acknowledgment of holism/interdependence of institutions –
prior to the emergence of modern anthropology – that provides such a fundamental link between Marxism
and anthropology (see discussion in Bloch 1985: 94).
8 Sperber (1985: 60-3) makes a similar point in his critique of relativism.
9 See Bloch (1985) and Wessman (1981), as well as Vincent’s (1985) review of same.
10 See Firth (1975) for a UK ‘institutional’ view. The papers in Hymes (1969) and Asad (1974) provide a
thorough overview.
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11 See Scholte (1987) for a critical overview.
12 Sometimes ‘non-market’ is a synonym.
13 Hence, for example, substantivist approaches continue to provide much insight into hidden forms of
domestic labour – even in late capitalist settings – whereas formalism does not.
14 The emphasis is on the new modernizationist programme, exemplified by the wide influence of neoliberalism.
Another one had been going on for 500 years, globalization theory notwithstanding.
15 A ‘task’ still referred back to the ambitions and influences of the founding figures Boas and Malinowski,
hardly figures immune to criticism – often damning – but also figures whose successors never managed to
supplant them, however frequent the father-killing exercises.
16 Even if early on it was recognized that the boundedness of such systems was frequently itself an artefact
of investigation.
17 This – the ‘testing’ of historical materialism on new empirical material – is made abundantly clear in
Terray’s (1972) early discussions, but he also displays what was to become a typical, and destructive, preoccupation
with ‘correct reading’ of canonical texts. Outside the fog of ‘correct reading’, claims that Marxist
analysis applies only to capitalism imply (1) that a capitalist/non-capitalist interface is beyond analysis and/or
(2) that such an analysis cannot be retrospective, such that, by analogy, the appearance of a new species (or
previously thought extinct species) would not be appropriate material for biological analysis.
18 Wallerstein (1974) proposes a different resolution, namely that what the analysis of articulation hints at is
the unsuitability of the units of analysis (‘societies’),the better unit of analysis being the global capitalist system.
19 In crucial respects the key question raised by ASM with regard to pre-capitalism within capitalism may
be seen as a slightly more emphatic statement of the comparativist goal of structure-functionalist explanation,
but going further in seeking to expose a logic of a kind of social reproduction that is apparent in the
ethnographic and historical record, namely the co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist types of societies.
20 What O’Laughlin seems to object to is not the explanation somuch as the lack of theoretical consistency:
how, she asks, can Meillassoux be correct in his analysis if he inadvertently displays an ‘underlying pattern of
evolutionist thought in his work’? (1977: 22) The evolutionist shortcoming is compounded by his alleged
functionalism and empiricism, demonized on the same page.
21 Although geographically diverse, ASM as represented in an area-based framework is probably most
strongly represented in a French colonial African literature focused around the ‘lineage of mode of
production’.
22 See Taylor (1975; 1976) for detailed critique, and reply by Hindess and Hirst (1977). Also see Rod Aya’s
review (1976).
23 It is this work of Meillassoux that forms the subject of the second half of Terray (1972).
24 In the US tradition represented byWolf and Mintz, the issue of articulation is treated differently and is
not the novelty it is in a European context, perhaps – as Mintz (Mintz et al. 1984) implies – because of the
different character of the US ‘colonials’ (internal: Indians).
25 The same holds for such US collections as Littlefield & Gates (1991).
26 Both Lévi-Strauss and Godelier drew on Saussurean and computational notions of ‘system’.
27 In this, Mintz turns the table on Terray (and certain critics of Marxist anthropology), by asking not if
historical materialism worked on the primitive, but whether anthropology worked on the non-primitive.
28 A distraction which, in Friedman (1987: 133), led to ‘self-destruction’.
29 Maurice Henry’s classic cartoon of founding-figure structuralists depicts a fleeting unity.Wearing grass
skirts, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes converse beneath a palm tree (La Quinzaine Letteraire, 1 July
1967).
30 This has given rise to the odd designation post-Marxism, indicating a rejection whose authority is
derived in great part precisely from its association with Marxism.
31 For comparative purposes see ‘The persistence of underdevelopment: institutions, human capital, or
constituencies?’ (Rajan & Zingales 2006, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research), in which
the underlying cause of underdevelopment is attributed to the ‘initial distribution of factor endowments’,
even though conceding that this distribution may well be ‘a legacy of the colonial past’.
32 Among the other liabilities: preponderance of qualitative rather than quantitative methods; long training
times; extended time in the field; small size and poor funding in relation to other social sciences; advocacy
of interests of others; etc.
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Quelques réflexions sur le marxisme structurel en anthropologie
Résumé
Le principal sujet de cette discussion est la brève carrière du marxisme structuraliste en anthropologie et
la possibilité qu’il soit, malgré tout, encore pertinent. Ce problème se situe dans une autre problématique
plus générale : sur quelle base les théories explicatives sont-elles adoptées et rejetées en anthropologie ? La
discussion du marxisme structuraliste s’inscrit dans les débats récents sur l’opportunité des associations
traditionnelles de l’anthropologie socioculturelle avec d’autres sous-domaines de l’anthropologie. L’auteur
avance que l’isolement des sous-domaines est une régression au niveau de la théorie.
Stephen Nugent teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the Institute for the
Study of the Americas.He has published on ethnohistory and peasant economy in the Brazilian Amazon and
is currently director of the Centre for Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths.
Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK.
ana01sln@gold.ac.uk
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