Toward a Marxist anthropology of religion

Abstract

It is not my intention to present here a textual analysis of Marx and Engels on religion. Rather, I wish to give an example of how Marxist anthropologists can proceed to analyze religion in the precapitalist societies which are their concern. Nevertheless, I shall briefly recall Marx's theses on religion. For Marx, religion is a fantastic reflection of the real world in the minds of humans. Primitive thought personifies nature spontaneously and unconsciously ? and projects such personifications as objective real? ities which appear to be both transcendent and independent of the human mind. Marx posited (in Capital) the analogy between the religious forms of ideology and the spontaneous repre? sentations which humans construct concerning the origin and nature of the value of goods. What Marx called the enigmatic character of commodity fetishism stems from the fact that what appears to the naive consciousness as stem? ming from things themselves, albeit in a mysterious way, is, in reality, crystallized social labor, the product of social relations. All the categories of mercantile capitalism share this same fetishism, which culminates in the idea of capital; that is to say, of money producing money, value producing new value, or surplus value: Value appears as an automatic substance, with a life of its own, while changing its forms incessantly, also changes in size and spontaneously, in as much as it is value, produces a new jump, a new surplus-value and finally grows by itself. In a word, value seems to have acquired the occult quality of reproducing itself or at least of laying golden eggs. {Capital, I, 1, p. 158)