Introduction
1. For example, the contrast between Renaissance and sixteenth-century anthropology can be drawn by the emphasis on language and then archaeology in the former and the concern with comparative ethnology in the latter (Pagden 1982; Rowe 1964, 1965).
2. Anthropology was clearly taught in different university faculties—e.g. law, theology, and medicine—by individuals with diverse backgrounds and philosophical presuppositions (Kelley 1984: 247; Vermeulen 1995). It also is doubtful that the empirical and philosophical strands were ever entirely separated in anthropology courses taught in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, judging by the content of Kant’s lectures (Kant 1798/1978; Stark 2003).
Chapter 1 The Enlightenment and Anthropology
1. Jacques Roger (1963/1997: 181–204) discusses “the God of philosophers and scientists” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As he points out, the shift in conception was complex; describing it as solely in terms of “a growing hostility to Christianity which drove many into deism and some into outright materialism and atheism,” while accurate at one level, misses the nuances and subtleties at other levels (Bowler 1974: 161).
2. The imprimatur of the Royal Press was important for two reasons. It made the volumes official publications of the Crown. It also allowed Buffon to avoid censorship, which was a continual threat faced by his contemporaries, notably Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau (Fellows 1963a: 608–9).
3. Rogers (1963/1997: 259–60) describes the doctrines of preformationism and preexistence of germs in the following way. Preformationists argued that the actual generation of a living being occurred in the body because of its ensoulment by the seed of the male parent. This seed contained an entirely formed or preformed individual, and embryonic development consisted merely of the enlargement of the already existing parts. Advocates of the pre-existence of germs argued that the germ contained in the seed was not produced by the male genitor but rather by God at the beginning of the world and had merely been preserved in the adult male until the moment of development.
4. While Buffon conceptualized descent with modification, he did not accept the idea of transformism—i.e., one species developing into another. He reasoned that no new species were known to have appeared, that the infertility of hybrids constituted a barrier, and that, if one species did evolve from another, then the process was a gradual one (Mayr 1982: 330–6). Buffon’s friend, Denis Diderot (1713–84), crystallized the idea of transformism in 1753, when he argued that: “(1) each species has had a history; (2) it has evolved over a long period of time; (3) new species appear through a process of variation, but maintain a relation to each other” (Crocker 1959: 131; Fellows 1963b; Lovejoy 1959a).
5. Ronald Meek (1967: 35–7, 48) characterized the Scottish historical school as Smith (1723–90), Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), William Robertson (1721–93), Adam Ferguson (1723–1815), and James Millar (1740–1805). David Hume (1711–76)), who was a close associate of Smith, and James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–99), whose views were outside the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment, might also be included as well. Marx mentioned Smith, Hume, and Ferguson by name in his own writings and cited works that mentioned Millar.
6. My understanding and appreciation of Enlightenment social thought have benefited generally from the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Crawford B. Macpherson, Ronald Meek, Roy Pascal, and Robert Wokler, and especially from Asher Horowitz’s pathbreaking analysis of Rousseau’s anthropology, Peter H. Reill’s studies of historicism and the importance of history in the formation of the social sciences in the late eighteenth century, Robert Louden’s discussion of Immanuel Kant’s “impure ethics,” and Frederick Barnard’s explorations of Herder’s ideas about culture and history.
7. Rousseau’s relationship with Buffon and their contemporaries, notably Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis (1698–1759) and Diderot, is discussed by Bowler (1974), Fellows (1960), and Mason and Wokler (1992).
8. While Rousseau was not the first to argue that apes occupied an intermediate position between human beings and animals, the Origins of Inequality sparked an interesting debate that linked the origins of language with what Robert Wokler (1978) called “perfectible apes.” Wokler (1978, 1980, 1988) describes the debate in the following way. Comparative anatomist Edward Tyson (1650–1708) argued in the 1690s that, while apes were intermediate because of physical characteristics they shared with human beings, they were nonetheless not human beings because they lacked the mental powers of humans—i.e., they did not possess language which, at the time, was taken to be the true mark of rationality. Buffon agreed and further suggested that only men had souls. In the late 1740s, the gap between man and animal closed briefly. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) argued that souls were fictitious, and Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (1714–80) claimed that the cries of animals were evidence of thought. In contrast, Rousseau argued that the development of language was part of the perfectibility of human beings, which occurred in the context of contingent social relations, and that apes, even though they did not speak, were still a variety of human being, because of their behavior. Lord Monboddo developed Rousseau’s ideas concerning the humanity of apes and historically contingent nature of language; like Rousseau, he stressed the importance of the capacity for language rather than its attainment. In the 1770s, social critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and physiologist, comparative anatomist Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), often claimed as a founder of physical anthropology, disagreed with Rousseau and Monboddo. They argued instead that the anatomical differences between apes and humans were too great to permit considering the former as part of the human species. By 1795, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) wrote his essay on the origins of language, the whole question had once again become dehistoricized (Stam 1976: 182–9).
9. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), by contrast, argued that self-interest alone was the sufficient basis of society.
10. Kant did not champion the rights of women in the public sphere. He argued that women did not think independently and thus should work behind the scenes in the private sphere (e.g. Louden 2000: 84–5).
11. Kant’s (e.g. 1775/2000, 1788/2001) views on race, developed from 1775 onward, played an important role in distinguishing species and races and in developing a historical interpretation of species (Lenoir 1980; Sloan 1979). While Kant was skeptical about the possibility of physiognomy (i.e., judging the dispositions or thoughts of individuals from their visible or exterior forms), he practiced it with some regularity (Bernasconi 2001).
12. Winckelmann is arguably one of the founders of both art history and classical archaeology as we know them today, and Blumenbach has been portrayed for more than a century as the first, truly modern physical anthropologist.
Chapter 2 Marx’s Anthropology
1. Marx’s views about human nature have been discussed by a number of authors, especially during the past thirty years (e.g. Archibald 1989; Geras 1983; Heyer 1982; Lewis 1974; Lichtman 1990; Márkus 1978; McMurtry 1978; Sayers 1998; Soper 1981, Venable 1945/1966). They do not always agree with one another.
In this section, I generally follow the persuasive arguments set forth by Joseph Fracchia (1991, 2005) and David McNally (2001).
2. The geologists Marx had in mind were Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875) (Foster 2000: 116–20; Greene 1982: 19–68). He had studied with Henrik Steffens, one of Werner’s students. Both Werner and Lyell were concerned with empirical evidence for geological change and with the mechanisms that underpinned those changes.
3. Kosík (1963/1976: 24) observed that Marx’s notion of totality differed from both the atomist-rationalist conception, which asserts that “reality [is] . . . a totality of simplest elements and facts,” and the organicist view, “which formalizes the whole and emphasizes the predominance and priority of the whole over the parts.” Marx’s view, instead, is a dialectical conception “which grasps reality as a structured, evolving and self-forming whole.”
4. I am indebted in this section to the insights of Karl Kosík’s (1963/1976) Dialectics of the Concrete and Richard Bernstein’s (1971) Praxis and Action.
Chapter 3 Human Natural Beings
1. The “bourgeois Darwinians” specifically mentioned by Engels were Ludwig Büchner (1824–99), Karl Vogt (1817–95) and Jakob Moleschott (1822–93). The first was a physician and the latter were physiologists. All were scientific materialists and reductionists who believed the properties or forms of behavior exhibited by human beings should be sought in the laws of physics. In the political sphere, their politics were reformist, and they concentrated their attention on education and popularizing rather than political action (Gregory 1977a, 1977b).
Chapter 4 History, Culture, Social Formation
1. Later anthropologists inspired by Marx and Engels—e.g. Eleanor Leacock (1972), Richard Lee (1988), or Eric Wolf (1982: 88–100) to name only three—refer to Marx’s original communal (tribal) form as primitive communism or the kin-ordered mode of production. Lewis H. Morgan (1881/2003: 63ff.) coined the phrase “communism in living” in his Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.
2. The concept of Oriental or Asiatic society had a substantial history before Marx wrote. Marx’s conceptualization of the Asiatic mode of production relied not only on analyses of societies in India, Persia, and China but also on those of Peru and Mexico (Bailey and Llobera 1981; Krader 1975).
3. Hobsbawm also remarked that Engels (1850/1978, 1876–8/1987, 1882/1989, 1882/1990, 1884/1972) wrote more systematically about feudalism than Marx, and that there is no indication that the latter disagreed with what Engels wrote.
4. V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957), arguably the most influential archaeologist of the twentieth century and a political activist of the Left for his entire life, described the origins of agriculture and the rise of states in terms of the “Neolithic Revolution” and the “Urban Revolution.” He was aware that the former involved a changing metabolism between people and the natural worlds they inhabited, and that the latter involved new forms of surplus extraction, social-class structures, conquest, repression, and craft specialization as well as literacy, monumental architecture, and new forms of settlement (Childe 1936/1983, 1950/2004, 1954).
Chapter 5 Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World
1. Engels’s (1845/1975) study of the conditions of the workers in Manchester was arguably the first urban ethnography. While Marx began with the available sources on India, including Hegel, he was already impressed by 1853 with the shaping effects of common property in the village community rather than religion in the organization of Indian society. Marx and Engels discussed the bases of this view and its implication in letters, and the former mentioned it in one of the early Tribune articles (Marx 1853/1983a: 332–4, 1853/1983b: 347–8, 1853/1979a; Engels 1853/1983: 339–41). Marx (1857–8/1973: 473, 1863–7/1977: 477–9) elaborated his views on the communal ownership of land and the village community in the Grundrisse and Capital (Habib 2006; Patnaik 2006).
2. The two accounts were polarized to some extent by informed commentators on Marx during the debates on the “transition question” after the Second World War (e.g. Brenner 1977, 1989; Byres 2006; Dobb 1947; Hilton 1953/1976, 1978/1990; Sweezy 1950/1976; Wallerstein 1974).
3. Marx’s views about articulation generated a significant debate in the 1970s and 1980s among anthropologists who were coming to grips with the linkages between capitalist and non-capitalist relations of production and reproduction in former colonies. This discussion, which was launched by Pierre-Philippe Rey (1971, 1973/1982, 1975, 1979) and Claude Meillassoux (1971/1980, 1975/1981), was soon joined by Harold Wolpe (1980, 1985), Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera (1981), and Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (1985) among others.
4. Godfrey and Monica Wilson (1945/1954), Eric Wolf (1959, 1969,1982), Peter Worsley (1961, 1968/1970), June Nash (1979), Joel Kahn (1980, 1993), Michael Taussig (1980, 1987), Peter Rigby (1985, 1992), Christine Gailey (1987), Marshall Sahlins (1988/2000), and John Gledhill (1991, 1995) are only a few of those who come immediately to mind.
5. As Aijaz Ahmad (2001) notes, Marx, and Engels to a greater extent, wrote about the issues of nation and nationality in the eastern and southeastern parts of the Hapsburg Empire and the Crimean War. They did so at the same time that the Marx was also writing about China, India, the independence question in Ireland, condemning slavery in the United States, and denouncing the caste system (e.g. Marx 1846/1982: 101–2, 1853/1983c: 339–42; Engels 1851–3/1979: Benner 1995).
6. Long-term monopolies over the sale of particular items seem to have been a common practice for the English. In 1884, English bondholders gained control over a railroad built in southern Peru in the 1870s to facilitate the transport of wool from the southern highlands to the port city of Mollendo. In exchange for the cancellation of the debt, the bondholders received a 66-year monopoly on the railroad as well as monopolies on the sale of coca, matches, and playing cards (Spalding 1975).
7. The Fenian Brotherhood was formed in 1858 by members of the Irish-American petit bourgeoisie who desired political independence for Ireland and whose goal was fueled by hatred of the English landlords which appealed to many of the Irish immigrants. In the wake of the American Civil War, some of its leaders, former officers in the Union army, organized raids into Canada in 1866 and 1870. Others sailed for Cork, Ireland in 1867 where they planned to organize and lead an army that would overthrow the British. Many were quickly arrested, imprisoned, and deprived of habeas corpus, much like the prisoners held unconstitutionally by the government of the United States at Guantanamo today. Their supporters attempted to blow up a prison in London but succeeded only in destroying nearby houses. The British press used this to whip up anti-Irish sentiment. Some of the prisoners were eventually executed; others served their sentences in Australia.
8. Dick Pels (1998: 18–73) has argued that the concepts of property and power are enmeshed in disciplinary and intellectual politics. Today, it is commonplace to treat property and power as distinct—the former concerned with socially acquired things, their possession, use, and disposition, and the latter with command over the actions and activities of persons. He also pointed out: (1) the bases for this dichotomy were already present in the writings of seventeenth-century theorists; (2) the boundary between the two concepts has often been blurred; (3) one concept has frequently served as the limiting case of the other; and (4) the prominence of one category relative to the other not only depends on national traditions (Scottish and French vs. German and Italian) but also has shifted over time (power being the more prominent of the two in late twentieth-century intellectual discourse).
9. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 73, 89) saw nationality as an attribute of existing states rather than ethnic communities defined exclusively in terms of language and culture or language and blood or as peoples aspiring to self-determination. This form of nation or nationality had pejorative connotations for them and was not a substitute for the formation of communities from the bottom up that genuinely dealt with the needs of their members. In their later writings, they sometimes also used the term “nation” to refer to peoples, like the Irish or the Russians. As Erica Benner 1995: 45) put it:
They saw pre-political forms of ethnicity, language community, and territorial attachments as unthreatening to their revolutionary project so long as these were not pressed into the service of aggrandizing authoritarian states. What worried them, and what they wanted most urgently to discredit, were the “political claims” of such states to represent what Hegel had called the “genuine nationality” or patriotism of “the people.”
6 Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century
1. I use the term “intimate” as a synonym for “sharing” in order to indicate the relationships among those with whom one shares with no particular expectation of immediate or future return. In this sense, sharing is distinct from reciprocity, where there is some expectation of return. John Price (1975: 4) notes that sharing is the glue that holds together the members of intimate societies are which are typically “small in scale and personally in quality, such that the members have extensive knowledge of each other, interpersonal sentiments have developed, and changing the identity of the persons would change their relationships. There is usually face-to-face interaction of the same people over an extended period of time. In an intimate economy the particular patterns of personal interdependency significantly influence the patterns of economic production and distribution.” Anthropologists—Eleanor Leacock (1982) among several others—have pointed out that the social units forged by sharing are often larger than households or families, which of course are not necessarily the same thing. While sharing is certainly not a predominant form of economic behavior in capitalist societies, the sense of community embodied in the practice clearly exists; moreover, people continually struggle to maintain and re-create it in these and other contexts (e.g. Gailey 1987).
2. What distinguished one kind of pre-capitalist state from another, as Eric Wolf (1999: 5) noted, were kinds of relational structures that resulted from the capacities to control that inhered in groups, how these were manifest in interactions with others, the contexts in which they were activated and realized, and how the relationships operated in and organized those settings. While
3. August Nimtz (2000, 2003) provides textured discussions of Marx’s views about slavery, racism, and race in the North America from the early 1850s onward as well as his active participation in abolitionist and democratic political movements in the United States.
4. In 1971, Noam Chomsky (1928–) and Michel Foucault (1926–84) engaged in a debate with one another about human nature and with the proposals made by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Chomsky and Foucault 1971/2006: 37–66).