Taking another look at Marx and anthropology

Abstract

Karl Marx, Anthropologist By Thomas C. Patterson (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009, pp. xiii + 222, Paperback) Thomas Patterson offers this book as a response to a history of suppression of Marxian thought in the anthropology of the United States, initially through anti communism and red-baiting, and subsequently, after the fall of the "actually existing socialisms," through dismissal for being passe, a fate that Marxism also suffered in many countries where it once occupied a less beleaguered place in academic life. Ideas once deemed convincing enough to be considered subversive have clearly not been entirely disarmed. Some of Marx's critical spirit surely persisted in many of what Patterson describes (p. ix) as more recent "fads" in social theory, and a return to crisis conditions in the North Atlantic world not only placed a damper on liberal imaginings of an end of history but also revived interest in a theoretical framework that sees crisis as a normal driver of change and transformation in the history of capitalism, to judge from the widely reported worldwide boom in sales of Das Kapital since 2008. So this is a timely moment at which to encourage a generation of students (and maybe colleagues) that has likely never read Marx to do so. This is what this book seeks to do, but across a range of issues that go beyond Marx's contributions to understanding modern capitalism. What Patterson seeks to establish is that Marx's thought covered the field of questions that define the subject matter of anthropology both in the empirical sense (the study of human socio cultural diversity in history and the present) and in the philosophical sense that asks what it means to be human. Having established that through careful scrutiny of Marx's oeuvre, significant parts of which, including much of his thinking about