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"Steward taught at Columbia from 1946 to 1952, and a number of his students there founded the facetiously named Mundial Upheaval Society, whose members included E. Wolf, S. Mintz, E. R. Service, S. Diamond, D. McCall and R. Manners. As Mintz has explained to me, the Society met to discuss Marxism and new trends in anthropology. A few years later Wolf, Mintz, Diamond and Manners would be working from a Marxist perspective, while Service, together with M. Sahlins, R. Rappaport and M. Harris, continued with the evolutionist approaches first developed by White and Steward and edited Evolution and Culture (Michigan UP, 1960)" (Gaillard 2004: 325).
Karl Marx s was one of the most influentual social scientists of his time, as is Juergen Habermas for social theory today. His writings were read over and over, and adapted to anthropology in the 20th century again.
At the Universiy of Columbia two parties formed anthropological research; on the one hand, the group of Franz Boas alumni stood for cultural relativist ideas and the culture - and - personality school, and on the other hand, the Mundial Upheaval Society rather engaged Marx s ideas to anthropology. Members of M. U. S. were for instance Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Morton Fried or Elman Rogers Service. Eric Wolf says in an interview,
"It started out as an effort to pass exams, a mutual education group where people who knew something would report to the others in order to condense and abbreviate the whole process of learning by trying to encompass everything, but the people who became bound together in this way had other commonalities. One of which is that we were veterans, and therefore slightly different and somewhat standoffish towards the rest of the student population. And we all had some kind of socialist sympathies, and I think we saw anthropology and that kind of socialist concern as having some connection with each other. The questions of class structure and state formation were there at the beginning, not just simply as a result of discovery. There were certain people, like Elman [Service], who were somewhat older and had more knowledge of anthropology, and also could talk about kinship in authoritative terms and really explain that field to us, whereas somebody else coming in learning Australian kinship might drown in the data" (Ghani/Wolf 1987: 355).
"Although the place and importance of Engels´s work in anthropology is debatable, mention must be made of his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1884, which was inspired by his reading of Morgan s Ancient Society. He takes up Morgan s data (and some of his factual errors) in summarized form, to which notes are added from Marx´s reading of evolutionist texts. In his reading of Morgan´s work, Engels presents the development of the forces of production as the motor of every facet of social life, sets out the genesis of social classes, and insists that the existence of societies as states is only transitory "(Gaillard 2004: 15).
"Whereas many American and British anthropologists who grew up during the Great Depression were inclined toward socialism and Marxism, they still believed in anthropology as a science. But now [AS Note: the 1960ies] even the truths of Marxism are in doubt. The hoped-for revolution has not come about, and the many governments that claimed inspiration and guidance from Marx and his heirs were dismal failures. Today, for many of those who counted on the imminent coming of the great transformation, the hold of capitalism and patriarchal hegemony is seen as so great and so corrupting that they no longer hope for anything better. And the whole Enlightenment ideal, humanism, and all that went with it are condemned as nothing but lies — a system of domination through which European and American males control all others" (Lewis 1999: 716).
Marxist anthropology had a strong influence on feminist anthropology, and postmodernists often refer to marxist concepts.
Reference
Gaillard, Gerald (2004) The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists. New York: Routledge
Ghani, Ashraf/Wolf,Eric (1987) Interview, In: American Ethnologist, Vol. 14, No. 2: 346-366
Lewis, Herbert (1999) The Misinterpretation of Anthropology and Its Consequences, In: American Anthropologist (3) 716-731
Marxists Internet Archives: http://www.marxists.org/ 2008-04-08 6:39PM
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