Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis

Abstract

Winnie Lem and Belinda Leach (eds.), Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, viii + 311 pages.Reviewer: Constance de Roche University College of Cape BretonFor Lem, Leach and crew, anthropological mainstream has been flowing in wrong direction for past quarter century. CASCA (the Canadian Anthropology Society/Societe Canadien pour Anthropologie) has, for a decade, served as a port-of-call for this loose affiliation of colleagues who harbor discontentment with post-modernist cloud and neo-liberal storm. On wind of Marxist inspiration, they set out to a new materialist headland where once again can have feet. Their enterprise seeks the implications...of considering as a phenomenon that is not sui generis, but [is] produced and reproduced in relation to political and economic (p. 3). Thus class becomes reinstated as a key concept for capturing relational dynamics under conditions of globalized capitalism.While eschewing later-day idealist anthropology, volume is necessarily reflexive; its epistemological point of departure is realization that doing anthropology entails choice-making and is thus inherently a political act (p. 3). is always formulated on tides of political-economic forces. Thus, part 1, Nations and Knowledge sets its sights on how those forces affect production of anthropology itself. It opens with a treasure by Thomas Dunk, who trenchantly critiques recent attempts to root absence of a distinctive Anglo-Canadian anthropology in lack of a stable, uniform, Canadian national identity. Dunk offers instead a cogent analysis of how that anthropology was formed by parameters of internal colonial [of First Nations] and neocolonial relationships [with U.S. and Britain] (p. 31). Susana Narotsky continues theme of how national and transnational power relations affect knowledge formation and dissemination. Her somewhat discursive contribution, which visits political-economic anthropology in Spain since late Francoist years, includes a critique of American-centrism in discipline, and concludes with a critique of works that ignore dialectical tension between doing and being that relates to tension between structure and agency, in history (p. 45). In another rare glimpse beyond British/Anglo-American academic community, Guillermo de la Pena links anthropology to state discourses on Mexican nationalism and economic development. The text then returns to domain of dominant academic powers with a chapter by William Roseberry, on how academic politics have impacted fate of political economy in U.S., and another by John Gledhill, on how British state's journey to ideological right is crippling potential for a politically engaged, critical anthropology.These fellow travellers do not ask us to go back to future. There is nothing vulgar or old-fashioned about their materialism. It recognizes complexities of power, and generally delivers on promise to present an interpretively sensitive approach to culture (p. …