As anthropologists we are concerned with understanding the intellectual tradition of processes of capitalist development as it relates to the non-capital world because our discipline was formed around trying to answer questions of what it means to be human, to be a social humans, within the social formation of capitalist development. Though this is no longer the central concern of our discipline, the traditions that were used to bring own theories to the point they are today are worth understanding so as to not repeat past mistakes in our own work and in order to spot mistakes out when we see it others work.
The intellectual traditions that attempt to explain the relationship between the non-capitalist world and the the capitalist world expands a period of two-hundred years. For this class we began with the evolutionist theories and the tradition of liberalism. Theorists like Locke and Smith tried to understand how various social formations gave rise to modes of production. In this model, notions of property and capitalism are seen to characterize the most advanced societies. The idea of private ownership and property will lead to equality.
Similarly Spencer and Morgan wanted to understand human organization through the concept of cultural evolution. These traditions gave rise to critiques and new theories. Through Morgan’s model of social evolution Marx derives his analysis. Marx critiques Morgan’s notion of progressive steps instead addressing societies as historically contingent communities and modes of production. He stresses labor as the connection between humans and nature something I think is residual from the liberalist tradition since Locke as well stressed the connection between labor, humans and nature (additionally Marx does not question Darwin’s notion of natural selection). Marxist theorists like Engels, Althusser, Gramsci, and Wolf based theories on individual agency rejecting the positivist notion of teleology.
127 our experts are availableright now
Another intellectual tradition that is important to our understanding of capitalist and non-capitalist relations is the structuralist tradition and methodology. This tradition is concerned with the deep structure of systems. Anthropologists like Levi-Strauss used structuralism in order to study kinship as a structured system. One critique of this tradition by post structuralism is that it ended up creating binary oppositions that were based on Western concepts in order to study the non-western world.
This is still used today and is important to take out of our methods and theories for understanding societies and people as noted by Keller in her critique of ideological orientations that skew the capitalist view. Sacks also discusses and questions the universality of dichotomies and how these are based on western categories. Marxist’s used structuralism with a historical approach in order to understand the structure of non-captialist societies. A notable figure in this is Eric Wolf who wanted to show how tribute and kin-ordered societies are not precursor’s to capitalism but a product of their encounters with various state formations.
Understanding this philosophical, theoretical and empirical traditions tells us why and how certain claims to truth are privileged over others. Foucault notes that it is important to study the genealogy of discourse. To understand the history of our epistemes in order to see how categories of human society are historically situated.
Our understanding of the relationship of non-capitalist world to the capitalist would has been fraught with definitions of cultural evolution, primitive vs civilization, and the universal subordination of people of color and women. Anthropologists need to be aware of how subjective a claim to truth really is and how these claims are an attempt to organize the world in a way that reaches a goal. Through studying the history of anthropological traditions we can see how history is created, how our discipline shifted from studying culture to power and how we can go about deconstructing paradigms that use ideology to indiscriminately describe social relationships.
Anthropology has been a discipline that is concerned with the study of societies on the margins of the global capitalist world since its creation. Stemming from the philosophical traditions of the enlightenment era, anthropology has always been curious in ‘discovering’ the other. In the 18th and 19th centuries intellectuals were attempting to understand their reality in relation to other realities using travel logs of biased Europeans to do this.
Morgan was a huge early contributor to anthropology who was concerned with non-capitalist world. They wanted to understand why their was so much variation in societies such as Spencer who was also trying to understand why some societies, in their view, were less civilized than capitalist society. They turned to theories of biological organisms to describe why kin societies could maintain order. Another early theorist, Locke wanted to explain the definite human nature of individuals and their uniqueness.
This was placed by Durkheim in an opposition between mechanical societies (that were less unique and less specialized) to organic societies (that reflected industrial capitalism). Anthropology as a discipline came to want to understand the structural relationships between societies. This was originally used to place hierarchy and support the objective claims to truth that anthropology was so fond of making. Today this is less the case.
More recently anthropologists try to study power and its relation to the stratification of society. This is in an attempt to understand why societies on the margins of the capitalist world face higher rates of illness, poverty and death which Wallerstien attributed to their relationship with the dominant center or capitalist production. Though this is a very ethnocentric way of looking at other societies and does give the people in those societies any power or voice of their own since its claimed that power is centralized and that those on the periphery are only in a subordinate position. Encylopedias of recent creation, which we used in our class, attempt to understand the societies on the margins of capitalism by defining what societies in industrial capitalism look like (John Hall, Hugh Aitken).
Anthropology is concerned with studying these societies because of the relationships of power that are created between them and the claims to universalism that are created to support certain agendas. This implies that anthropology needs to be able to deconstruct the paradigms set up about the world. The practice of anthropology needs to reflect the view point of others as pointed out by Wylie. The standpoint of the person, the epistemology they subscribe to has an effect on the knowledge produced.
By critically looking at how anthropology has been concerned with societies on the margins of the global capitalist world we can see how anthropology has contributed to the continued poverty and subordination of those societies. We did not give them their own voice but imposed ours. A perfect example of this is given by Keller in her critique on the ideology of science and scarcity.
By privileging competition and making mutualist and symbiotic interactions secondary, the practice of anthropology shifts how relationships within a society can be understood. If we want to study the societies outside of the capitalist world then we need to stop thinking about them as only in a relationship to being on the margins of the capitalist world. By doing this we are privileging our western perspective and assume that other relationships of power are not there or not as important.
Class structures in anthropology have tended to occupy a privileged position over socially constructed categories such as race, gender, and ethnicity. Though this is beginning to be critique by feminist theorist, understanding class relations such as wealth and power is an important part of understanding race, gender, ethnicity.
In the Marxist tradition, race, gender, and ethnicity are subordinate to class. Class structures are the determining factors for a persons social position and societal relations. Class struggle, as Marx saw it, was the prime mover of society. In his evolutionary approach to society, through class struggle change will occur and classes will realign. However, through things like commodity fetishism and ruling classes mythification of reality and the false consciousness of the lower class, the ruling classes tend to stay in power and the revolution of lower classes is slow moving or delayed. More recently people have been seeing the connection of class, race, ethnicity, and gender as having a lot of intersectionality rather than one being the determining factor for a populations position.
One connection they all share in the practice of anthropology is how they all contribute to a persons reality (how they see themselves in relation to others). What an individual experiences and understands is based on their location in the hierarchally structured system of power relations that include a persons material conditions and the relations of production and reproduction of norms, identity, and status.
In order to see what is wrong in society, how a society can be oppressive, we have to look from the standpoint of those occupying subaltern positions in order to recognize where the friction in society is located. Though there are no claims to truth we can maximize epistemic advantage through socially positioned knowledge. Wylie argues that those in a position of alterity within a system offer a socially positioned, embodied knowledge, that offers a distinct advantage to recognizing social structures.
Another connection is presented by Hubbard who argues that patriarchal ideologies underlie the scientific discourse on evolutionism which has implications for gender and social position. Additionally, Gailey discusses how gender stratification is within the overall stratification of society. These categories come from the states attempt to impose law and order and are rooted in the principles of binary oppositions given to us by structuralist intellectuals. Mullings explains how a persons race and gender, positions their class which in turn positions their health and the health of their family.
If we allow race and gender to be subordinate to class, as Mullings shows, theories that point to biology or culture and not to an analysis of the position that a population occupies in society tend to take over the conversation. Manning argues that race is socially structured. Permanently preventing the educational and economic development of others through the use of inclusive and exclusive tactics. This is such an important insight because it shows how race is used to condition a persons class. Class is not separate to race it is conditioned by it.
What all these theorists are pointing out is that class, gender, race and ethnicity all intersect in the formation of social stratification.These feminist theorists help to modify the Marxist version of class and class struggles as well as expand on the meaning of the working class and to include in it places like the domestic sphere as a viable form of labor. These works recognize the subordination based on gender and race. By attempting to show how they are interconnected we can see the various epistemes that make up a persons position. And instead of waiting for a class consciousness to unite the lower class we can show how power and knowledge can flow through these spheres of societies as well and how situated knowledge can contribute to our deconstruction of categories of oppression and discrimination.
