Some reflections on anthropological structural Marxism

Abstract

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 holismDebates 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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