History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology

By Donald L. Donham

Is Marxism a reflection of the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on recent work in anthropology, history, and philosophy, Donald Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically different social order: the former Maale kingdom of southern Ethiopia. Unlike capitalist societies, wherein inequality is organized by contracts between "free" individuals, in Maale powerful men were thought to "beget" others through control of biological fertility and material fortune. Donham scrutinizes this unusual system of domination in order to sharpen issues in social and cultural theory. He concludes that the interpretation of symbols and analysis of historical contingency should be crucial steps in any Marxists investigation. The result is a provocative and original re-reading of the Marxist tradition, and a spirited defense of its continued vitality and relevance. "Every once in a while there appears a book that . . . opens up new ways of inquiring into the ways of the world. Donald Donham has written such a book. The style is quiet and judicious, but the effect is stunning. . . . In putting inherited partisan approaches to the test of explaining the realities of Maale society and culture, Donham enriches anthropology and imparts new vigor to the analytical Marxian traditions. History, Power, Ideology embodies a major accomplishment."—From the Foreword

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999.
Is Marxism a reflection of the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on recent work in anthropology, history, and philosophy, Donald Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520920798

Donald L. Donham

Donald L. Donham is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and author of Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia (1994). Eric R. Wolf is author of Europe and the People without History (California, 1982).

Book preview

History, power, ideology

History, power, ideology

Central issues in Marxism and anthropology

Donald L. Donham

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

First University of California Press paperback, 1999

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Donham, Donald L. (Donald Lewis)

History, power, ideology: central issues in Marxism and anthropology / Donald L. Donham.

p. cm.

Originally published: Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-21337-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Maale (African people)—Politics and government. 2. Maale (African people)—Economic conditions. 3. Maale (African people)— Social conditions. 4. Marxist anthropology—Ethiopia. 5. Marxian economics—Ethiopia. 6. Communism—Ethiopia. 7. Ethiopia—Politics and government. 8. Ethiopia—Economic conditions. I. Title.

[DT380.4.M32D63 1999]

306.3—dc21 98-50668

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Nancy

Introduction

1. Homo economicus: A Maale mystery

2. Epochal structures I: Reconstructing historical materialism

3. Epochal structures II: The anatomy of Maale production

4. History at one point in time: Working together in Bola, 1975

Conclusion

Appendix: Predicting the past from the future

Bibliography§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

Index

Foreword

Every once in a while there appears a book that re-arranges our mental signposts and opens up new ways of inquiring into the ways of the world. Donald Donham has written such a book. The style is quiet and judicious, but the effect is stunning. In History/Power/Ideology ethnography is made to speak to social theory, and social theory to ethnography; Marxian approaches are made to confront neo-classical economics; economics and politics are brought face-to-face with issues of culture and ideology. In putting inherited partisan approaches to the test of explaining the realities of Maale society and culture Donham enriches anthropology and imparts new vigor to the analytical Marxian traditions. History/Power/ Ideology embodies a major accomplishment.

Eric R. Wolf

Distinguished Professor, Anthropology Herbert Lehman College and Graduate Center City University of New York

Preface to the 1999 Edition

When I began the thinking that led to this book, Marxism was a lively topic within social and cultural anthropology. In the preface to the first edition that follows, I noted the connection between my work and the academic and political ferment that began in North America in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, the spirit of our times is decidedly different. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many have consigned the writings of Marx to the dustbin of history, and to many, capitalism now appears as the only possible way to organize modern life.

So why return to Marx? My answer is that Marx’s analysis of capitalism - as opposed to his more weakly developed notions about socialism - continues to furnish an indispensable beginning point for understanding our times. All about us, we see an extension of the dynamics that Marx identified and explained: continuing commodification, technological innovation, ensuing competition among capitalists, the increasingly rapid movement of capital across the globe, with continuing crises, booms and busts. Perhaps the most macabre illustration of these processes is the recently uncovered black-market transfer of human body parts from executed prisoners in the People’s Republic of China to high-tech medical laboratories of the United States. Decentralizing and fragmenting the production process, blurring old boundaries between nature and culture, these developments have been identified by some as postmodern.1

Whether or not capitalism has recently undergone a significant transition, the strength of the boom during the 1990s has begun to outpace that of the 1950s and 60s. And the good times generated are apparently not conducive to critical social analysis. But if Marx is any guide, expansion will not continue indefinitely, nor will it spread uniformly across social space. Recently, as I was commenting on the lack of any significant engagement with Marx in recent anthropological discussions, an elder in the field quietly asserted, Wait until the next stock market crash.

Recent successes of world capitalism (ironically) constitute one reason, then, that Marx seems irrelevant to many today. But the collapse and all- 1 too-evident failures of socialist systems is another. Katherine Verdery recently began a book on this transformation with an epigraph: Q: What is the definition of socialism? A: The longest and most painful route from capitalism to capitalism.2

Marx’s writings, in fact, furnish only the haziest outlines of what postcapitalism should be or how it should be brought about. It fell to others - principally Lenin - to create actually-existing socialism. At the end of our century, it is clear - to me at least - that Lenin’s project is dead, having resulted in tragedy for millions upon millions. But if Leninism must be distinguished from Marxism, some elements of Marx’s own thought preconditioned these failures - none more so than his grand narrative of world history, the (teleological) notion that communism has to follow capitalism.

In a new book being published as a companion to this one, I examine the intersection between Marxism and what might be called modernism. Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution analyzes this intersection in the particular case of Ethiopia, focusing on what Ethiopians understood Marxism-Leninism to be and the consequences of these understandings for the creation of a revolutionary state. What I seek to present here is precisely a marxism freed from the modernist teleologies that so attracted Ethiopian revolutionaries - in Stuart Hall’s phrase, a marxism without guarantees.3

I have claimed that Marx’s work continues to be relevant primarily as a model of capitalism. But capitalism is not my subject in this book, at least not directly. What I seek to do here is to transfer Marx’s basic approach, in a way that he and others have not, to the analysis of a noncapitalist way of producing - namely to the Maale economy of southern Ethiopia where I have spent a number of years doing field research. In other words, I seek to apply Marx’s method to a very different cultural-economic system. In doing so, I confront two vexing issues: (i) the relationship between so- called base and superstructure, and (2) the difference between structural and historical explanation.

The first issue has given rise to a large and contentious literature. Does the base determine the superstructure? Does it do so only in capitalism, or in noncapitalist modes of production as well? What are bases and superstructures in the first place? And, not least, what is determination? Marshall Sahlins, who has been one of the most persistent anthropologi cal critics of the imposition of capitalist analytical categories upon other societies, has argued that Marxism itself is such an imposition, another species of practical reason.4 That particular (Marxist) analyses have fallen into this trap I have no doubt. What I have offered in this book is, however, a method of cultural analysis that escapes Sahlins’s strictures. In the conclusion I contend:

ideology is not something that simply legitimates power. … Rather it provides the very terms in which power regularly becomes power. … Once one starts with the realization that all empirical analysis must be carried out in particular superstructural terms, then the goal is not somehow to escape those terms in order to get down to the really real, the hard economic facts. Just the opposite: The task becomes one of interpreting and, in fact, deconstructing the cultural categories that are implicated in the continuance of productive inequalities- wherever they can be found (p. 196).

This understanding of base and superstructure - a modification of G. A. Cohen’s exposition hammered out in the course of an analysis of the Maale - suggests certain revisions to the way in which capitalism itself has been viewed.5 For Marx and many others, class within capitalism constitutes a primary (economic) reality, to which other forms of inequality are necessarily secondary. Recently, Judith Butler has argued that this view is manifestly inadequate, since social movements based on gender and sexuality cannot be understood as merely cultural.6 This book offers an extended argument for Butler’s position. In this way, the analysis of a radically different political economy, that of the Maale, is helpful in modifying and extending Marx’s own analysis of capitalism.

The second major issue that I confront concerns the relationship between structural and historical modes of explanation. Over the past three decades, structural models have lost all power to convince within anthropology. Nearly all anthropologists are now convinced that the locales they study are so caught up in change that pure structure no longer makes much sense. Consequently, structural forms of analysis have tended to be rejected as products of a colonial ideology, a static vision of the Other from which postcolonial theory will liberate us. In their place, history has become a touchstone, even a fetish, for virtually every school of current social and cultural anthropology.

My own view is somewhat different. I have argued that Marx’s Capital is not a historical analysis, and yet it retains the power to inform analyses of change. It does this not by predicting exactly what will happen but by ordering a series of possibilities around a set of central, unstable contradictions. I see this form of structural explanation as one moment in a necessarily complex methodology, one that prepares the way for actual historical explanation. What I argue for, therefore, is not a rejection but a motivated transition from structural analyses (which are understood as heuristic and therefore incomplete) to fully historical analyses (which are seen as conditioned).

This transition is not easily accomplished. Gramsci described the stakes inherent in delimiting structural and historical explanations many years ago:

A common error in historico-political analysis consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural. This leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones. … In the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element.7

in order to realize its goal, historical anthropology must confront the complexity that Gramsci highlighted. Rather than attempting to generalize about the transition from structure to history (which may, in any case, be a dubious undertaking), I seek to illustrate it with a particular analysis of the Maale.

I have not revised this text, except to eliminate errors. In it I attempt to follow out the logic of a marxist approach across radically different cultural economies. At times, this leads me to disagree with Marx himself, and at other times it requires me to rely upon the work of non-marxist writers. My hope is that this book will provide a contemporary introduction to a classic mode of analysis in the human sciences, one that may go in and out of fashion but that is not likely to be superseded as long as we continue to live in a capitalist world order.

1 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.

2 Katherine Verdery, What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

3 Stuart Hall, The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 25-46.

4 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

5 G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

6 Judith Butler, "Merely Cultural/’ New Left Review 227 (1998): 33-44.

7 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers [1948-51], 1971), p. 178. Quoted in the conclusion to this volume, p. 212.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Preface

According to Benjamin, to articulate the past means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. This book had its beginning in such a moment. Bridget O'Laughlin introduced me to Marxism when I was a graduate student at Stanford in the early 1970s. At that point, the upheavals of the ‘60s were still too immediate to constitute a memory. In 1968, 14/589 of my generation had died in battle - along with an estimated 180,000 Vietnamese. The same year, the Reserve Officer Training Corps Building at Stanford had been burned in protest. And not long afterward, a similar fire at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences destroyed the anthropological fieldnotes of M. N. Srinivas, who happened then to be a Fellow.

Science did not proceed unaffected by these events, and the movements of the ‘60s, whatever their miscalculations or excesses, eventually opened North American universities to radical thought in a new way. This was the case in social and cultural anthropology at least. Anthropologists like Eric Wolf and Marshall Sahlins helped to organize the first teach-ins in the ‘60s, and by the early 1970s, a self-consciously Marxist anthropology - much of it influenced by the French philosopher Louis Althusser - was beginning to leave its mark on the discipline. I well remember its disquieting effect on me, its peculiar combination of the most traditional academic opaqueness with the promise of somehow totally remaking anthropology.

It has taken me some time to come to what I consider a provisional understanding of Marxism. As a critical theory - a theory aimed at both empirical knowledge and human emancipation - Marxism is an order of magnitude more ambitious than those theories that have dominated anthropology, whether interpretive and hermeneutic or analytical and social scientific. In Herbert Marcuse’s bold language, All materialist concepts contain an accusation and an imperative. Understanding, in the context of analyzing a society not one’s own, exactly where the accusation should lie - not to mention the imperative - is difficult three times over. I do not claim to have accomplished this task. I hope to have clarified some aspects of it.

While I have pondered Marxism into the z8os, much has changed. As part of becoming an anthropologist, I have at various times lived among the Maale of southern Ethiopia for almost three years now - beginning in 1974, just before the Ethiopian revolution, and continuing afterward, through 1984. The revolution in Ethiopia was a top-down, socialist- influenced transformation of a very special sort. I do not treat its changes here, but observing the ironies of recent history in the lives of people I know well has made me wary of accepting too simplified a version of Marxism’s metanarrative of historical progress.

If Ethiopia has seen a revolution, the center of gravity in international Marxist discussion has also shifted: The influence of Althusser has dramatically declined while (in social theory more generally) problems of culture, agency, and historicity have begun to receive as much attention as those of structure and organization. In the process, Great Britain and North America have become much more active centers of debate. And new social movements - many centered on sex and gender - have put into doubt old versions of Marxism that do not comprehend the plasticity of power.

As far as I can see, the late 1970s were something of a turning point. In 1976, Marshall Sahlins published Culture and Practical Reason; in 1977, Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice was translated into English; and in 1978, G. A. Cohen published Karl Marx’s Theory of History, and E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, In both positive and negative ways, these works have influenced what follows.

Over the past twenty years, Marshall Sahlins has shown a remarkable ability to initiate the next wave of thinking in anthropological theory. Even if one believes, as I do, that he has gotten it wrong, Sahlins’s work has set the terms of debate within anthropology. Philosopher G. A. Cohen’s careful interrogation of Marxist concepts I have found more useful, and the following chapters build upon some of his insights. El- liptically put, what I attempt to do might be described as an anthropological critique of Cohen - one that gives the final say to historian E. P. Thompson, though not in the way that Thompson himself advocated.

In 1985, I published my Ph.D. dissertation, Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia. Here, I use parts of the data reported in that work, supplemented by materials from subsequent field trips in 1982-1984. The present work supersedes, then, some of the empirical arguments of my earlier work. But the objective of this book is not just to convey information about Maale. My choice of data in the following chapters is motivated, in the last instance, by the goal of clarifying issues in social theory. Work and Power contains information not presented here, and the reader inter ested primarily in Maale ethnography may prefer to consult it, rather than the present work.

Writing this book, like any form of production, has been a socially conditioned process, both enabled and constrained by its particular context. I am grateful to a network of teachers and students, colleagues and friends - many tied in one way or another to the Department of Anthropology at Stanford - who have done much to help me improve my arguments: Phil Ansell, Frank Cancian, George Collier, Jane Collier, Akhil Gupta, Donald Moore, Bridget O'Laughlin, Lisa Rofel, Renato Rosaldo, Bill Skinner, Carol Smith, Katherine Verdery, and Sylvia Yanagisako. I would also like to thank new colleagues at Emory: Wally Adamson, Peggy Barlett, Peter Brown, Betsy Fox-Genovese, Bruce Knauft, Bobby Paul, Judy Rohrer, Buck Schieffelin, and Carol Worthman.

Toward the final stages of finishing this book, Helen Siu and Bill Kelly invited me to discuss the manuscript in their seminar on culture and political economy at Yale. That exercise helped me to clarify central themes of the book. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the role of G. A. Cohen. As it stands, this book has many weaknesses, but it would have had many more without his incisive reactions to successive drafts.

Fieldwork in Ethiopia was made possible by National Science Foundation grants BNS 81-21547 and GS-41672 and by the sponsorship of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the Institute of Development Studies at Addis Ababa University.

Previous versions of Chapters 1 and 4 have appeared respectively in Man in 1981 (Beyond the Domestic Mode of Production, vol. 16, pp. 515-41), and in the American Ethnologist in 1985 (History at One Point in Time: ‘Working Together’ in Maale, 1975, vol. 12, pp. 262-84). I thank Iowa State University Press for permission to reprint figures 8 and 9, table 10, and map 6 from my book, Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia; Malaby Press, for permission to reprint a version of figure 10 in Jonathan Friedman’s article Tribes, States, and Transformations, in Maurice Bloch, ed., Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology; the Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany, for permission to reproduce the photograph on p. 93 of this book; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for permission to reproduce the photograph by Man Ray.

This book is dedicated to Nancy Donham, whose critical intelligence was the that-without-which.

January 1990

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Entrance to a Maale chief’s compound

Introduction

What, after all, is one to make of savages? … For the anthropologist, whose profession it is to study other cultures, the puzzle is always with him. His personal relationship to his object of study is, perhaps more than for any other scientist, inevitably problematic. Know what he thinks a savage is and you have the key to his work. You know what he thinks he himself is and, knowing what he thinks he himself is you know in general what sort of thing he is going to say about whatever tribe he happens to be studying. All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession.

Clifford Geertz

This book does not fit accepted categories of writing. For instance, what follows does not constitute ethnography - yet in the course of presenting my arguments, I return repeatedly to the details of social life in a remote area of southern Ethiopia called Maale. Similarly, this is not a work in abstract social theory - yet I attempt throughout to pose and to resolve conceptual issues of broad relevance. Neither simply ethnography nor social theory, the chapters that follow are both.

Trespassing the accepted boundary between fields involves some risk. Social theorists of the purist sort, those dedicated to what has been called the detachable conclusion, may well grow impatient with my Maale detail. After all, why should anyone but an anthropologist be interested in an out-of-the-way people? At the same time, ethnographers, many of whom are distrustful of wider-scale discussions, may tire of my didactic return to general issues. In the end, doesn’t abstract discussion distract from a proper appreciation of Maale society and culture?

The risks that these questions imply seem to me to be worth taking. A number of years ago, Robert K. Merton noted the persistent gap in academic sociology between grand theory and empirical analysis. A gap no less great nor any less debilitating exists in many Marxist discussions. More than sociology, Marxism has an inherent interest in closing this gap. Therefore, one goal of what follows is to trace out, as precisely as possible, the connections between abstract theory - in particular, Marxism - and embedded empirical analysis - in this case, of Maale political economy. Otherwise put, my problem is to translate megawords like history, power, and ideology into micropractices like dabo, lali ekane, and wolla soofane.1

The choice of where to situate myself relative to established discourses has, however, been motivated by more than a preference for the middle range. Located between ethnography and social theory, this book seeks to combine anthropology and Marxism so that the critical edge of one can be used to sharpen issues in the other. My master questions are: Can the critical moment in anthropology be used to transform aspects of Marxism? Can the critical aspect of Marxism be used to recast anthro- pology?

That anthropology indeed has a critical moment has often been overlooked of late. More attention has been devoted to ways in which the discipline - in the context of colonialism and the world capitalist system - has distorted the depiction of its subjects, suppressed inconvenient realities, and contributed, if only unwittingly, to extant forms of domination.2 All of these are aspects of the subject as it has been practiced.

But social and cultural anthropology has another side, one from which writers have used portraits of other cultures to reflect upon our own practices - to disrupt our common sense, to disorient our moral certainties, and, in general, to place in doubt much of what we have always assumed as simply given. Anthropologists attempting to accomplish these ends have had to construct other cultural worlds - that is, write ethnography - in enough density and detail to overcome the initial resistances set up by our own cultural conditioning.3

Thus one of my concerns below in interpreting Maale political economy: By attempting to make a radically different way of living "real/’ I hope to be able to place the analysis of my own, capitalist society in a different light.

If the critical aspect of anthropology (like history or literature) works in a positive way by expanding one’s sense of human possibilities, the critical moment within Marxism works negatively. It seeks most fundamentally to remove, to lift away, those forms of consciousness, those partially self-imposed ideologies, that limit and deform people’s lives. Such ideologies, according to Marxism, arise and function at particular social sites: namely, in relationships based on systematic differences in materially grounded power.

These relations may be as different, in different societies, as those between Maale commoners and chiefs, South African black workers and international capitalists, or - at closer range - middle-class American housewives and their husbands. Whatever the case, the critical assumption of Marxism is that such relationships, and indeed all others in which one group has the power to suppress the interests of another, are inevitably problematic. Ideologies naturalize power differences; they do social work. But according to Marxism, ideologies can be only partially successful for the fundamental reason that people suffer under such conditions. Not only do people suffer, they see, or in principle can be brought to see, the causes of their suffering.4

It is just in this context that Marxism takes on its critical aspect: of promoting the process of bringing people to see, of removing the veil of ideology, and by so doing, opening up the range of human possibilities.

These two notions of critique - anthropological and Marxist - are quite different. Characteristically, they exhibit opposite strengths and weaknesses. At its best, anthropology has stressed an unceasing respect for cultural differences, has maintained a genuine attempt to see the world from other, often despised, points of view. But at its worst, the anthropological project has descended into a kind of wearied relativism, a distanced and aestheticized practice, with very little critical purchase.

Marxism at its best has placed problems of human oppression at the center of attention and has stubbornly deconstructed ideologies that have perpetuated social inequalities. But at its corresponding worst, the tradition begun by Marx has degenerated into an iconoclastic disregard for other ways of living, a contempt for people who do not see the point of liberation, a contempt that has increased the fund of human suffering.5

Precisely because of these differences, something may be gained by attempting to hold anthropology and Marxism together - in tension. Such is the initial assumption, at any rate, of the chapters that follow.

Over the century since Marx’s death, anthropology and Marxism - these two bodies of theory and knowledge with such different social contexts and political aims - have gotten along better than one might have expected. At least, committed Marxism has often appeared satisfied with bourgeois anthropology.6 To overstate the case, it is almost as if two critical theories, brought together, cancelled each other out. The result has often been a strangely quiet theory of so-called precapitalist modes of production, irrelevant to the present except as a completed past. Marxism for capitalism. Anthropology for everything ‘'before."⁷

This pattern of thought began with Marx himself. Toward the end of his life, Marx read extensively in anthropology, and he used anthropological materials, as Maurice Bloch has shown, in two ways. The first was to construct the broad outlines of history that led up to capitalism: … to show how capitalism and its institutions have been produced by history and how it will therefore be destroyed by history.⁸ Related cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction for all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people" (p. 104).

⁶ How academic anthropology received Marxism is another matter. So far, we have no historian’s account of this question. See, however, James W. Wessman, Anthropology and Marxism (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), and Maurice Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). According to Sidney Mintz, While [we] Americans reconstructed a seamless past and resolutely avoided the present in dealing with our internal natives, the British studied a bounded present, and resolutely avoided the past in dealing with their external natives. I believe that it is in the context of these orientations that the absence of almost any reference to the work of Marx and the Marxists in the anthropology of the first half of the twentieth century is to be explained. See Mintz’s American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition, in Sidney W. Mintz et al., On Marxian Perspectives in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 1981 (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1984), p. 16; Eric R. Wolf, American Anthropologists and American Society, in Dell Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology; Joan Vincent, Anthropology and Marxism: Past and Present, American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 137-47; Hanna Lessinger and David Hakken, Introduction, in David Hakken