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1 IN THE MATTER OF MARXISM

Bill Maurer

The real unity of the world consists in its have insisted on an account of actually existing materiality, and this is proved not only by a few ‘men’ in their real, material conditions of exis- juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome tence. Reactions against abstraction in theory development of philosophy and natural science. more recently often explicitly or implicitly (Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877) invoke the Marxist heritage as both a theoreti- cal formation and an agenda for oppositional You make me feel mighty real. political practice. As Marx wrote in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The philosophers have (Sylvester, 1978) only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Or, as a colleague once put it to me, ‘Derrida never helped save a WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH Guatemalan peasant.’ MARXISM? This chapter uses a narrow delineation of the field of Marxist-inspired debate and critique, emphasizing those anthropologists (and, to a It is difficult to think about materiality, or to lesser extent, archaeologists) who explicitly think materially about the social, without invoke Marxism in its various guises and who thinking about Marxism. The Cold War led seek in Marxist theories a method and a theory many scholars in the West to use ‘materialism’ for thinking materially about the social. The as a code word for Marxism for much of the chapter pays particular attention to the instances twentieth century. More recently, in certain when such authors attempt to think critically quarters of social scientific thought, materiality about what difference it makes to stress mate- stands in for the empirical or the real, as against riality and to think ‘materially’. Such an exer- abstract theory or discourse. Materiality is also cise, however, while admittedly also bounded invoked as causal and determinative, as mov- by the partiality imposed by the imperatives of ing things and ideas toward other states of the essay format, cannot escape replicating the being. Invoked in this sense, materiality, with a antinomies of Marxist thought itself. nod or more to Marxism, is sometimes offered Perhaps the greatest of these is the tension as a corrective to the idea that concepts or ideas between the dialectical method and historical are autonomous and causal, or as an attack materialism that inflected subsequent argu- against presumed extravagances of ‘postmod- ments about the nature and analytical standing ernism’ or other forms of ‘idealism’. of materiality. This tension derives from Marx’s This review of Marxism and the problem assertion of the practical and objective basis of materiality is concerned with the supposed of humans’ subjective consciousness, his inver- limits of critical reflection for dealing with sion of Hegel’s dialectic, and the reductionist actually existing materialities embodied in tendencies that Marx shared with many living, human agents as well as the sedimented nineteenth-century social and natural philoso- histories and concrete objects that occupy the phers as diverse as Auguste Comte and Charles world. Historically, Marxist-oriented scholars Darwin. In the nineteenth century various 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 14

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materialisms sprung up in reaction to, or were human mind’ (1978: 27). Here, the architect’s enlisted against, G.W.F. Hegel’s idealist theory imagination is simply a reflection of his material of history. For Hegel, the Absolute, the univer- reality, his material conditions of existence. sal spirit, moved people to perceive the contra- There is no dialectical movement. So, where dictions in the governing ideas of the age; the dialectic between consciousness and prac- through the dialectic between each idea and tice distinguishes the worker from the bee, still its opposite, men achieve new understandings the worker’s ideational or subjective reality and move human history ultimately to culmi- ultimately ‘reflects’ the material world in the nate in a Christian state. For Marx, material last instance. forces and relations of production moved Marx laid the groundwork for both his people to realize the contradictions of their dialectical method and his materialist theory of material existence, culminating in revolution- history in responding to Ludwig Feuerbach’s ary transformation. Inverting Hegel – placing rejection of Hegelian idealism. For Feuerbach, matter over thought in a determinative albeit Hegel’s theory of history as the unfolding of dialectical position – opened the door to a the absolute idea neglected sensuous and solidification, as it were, of materiality itself as empirically perceptible reality in all its multi- irreducibly real regardless of any human effort farious particularity, by positing that that real- to conceptualize it; as autonomous; and as ity was the expression of spirit, much as in determinative, in the last instance, of every- Christianity Jesus is the material incarnation of thing else. Dialectics gave way to reductionist divinity. Thus, according to Feuerbach, ‘[t]he causality even as that causal argument gave Hegelian philosophy is the last magnificent Marx a means of seeing human ideas and attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost human societies unfolding in history without and wrecked, through philosophy’ (Feuerbach relying on the Christian metaphysics implicit 1966: 34). in Hegel’s universal spirit. Marx is often said to have married Although writers on Marx have sometimes Feuerbach’s materialism to Hegel’s dialectic. argued that his writings betray a dialectical Indeed, the Theses on Feuerbach bear out this phase (‘the early Marx’) and a historical mate- claim. ‘Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really rialist phase (‘the late Marx’, or, sometimes, distinct from the thought objects, but he does ‘the works written with Engels’), within Capital not conceive human activity itself as objective itself one finds evidence of the tension between activity’ (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach). For Marx, dialectial and historical materialism. In distin- in contrast, ‘The question whether objective guishing the labor of humans from that of truth can be attributed to human thinking is not animals, Marx emphasized humans’ capacity a question of theory but is a practical question.’ for projective consciousness, humans’ ability Marx here criticized Feuerbach’s materialism for to plan a material world in advance of their its refusal to see human thought as a material own shaping of it: process, a practical, dialectical engagement with the sensuous world. A spider conducts operations that resemble those The dialectic is difficult to sustain, however, of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an given the imperatives of the new ‘science’ of architect in the construction of her cells. But what Marxism in the nineteenth and twentieth distinguishes the worst architect from the best of centuries, and the social and humanistic fields bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in that would try to adopt it. In a review essay imagination before he erects it in reality. on Marx and anthropology, William Roseberry (1978: 174) (1997) spent considerable time worrying over the distinctions and relations among ‘what men This passage nicely demonstrates the dialec- say or imagine, how they are narrated, and men tic between human consciousness and practi- in the flesh’ (p. 29), taking his cue from the cal activity that Marx borrowed from Hegel. It famous passage of The German Ideology: is not simply that people imagine things sepa- rately from the things themselves, but that [W]e do not set out from what men say, imagine, their practical activity in turn shapes their con- conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, sciousness. The worst architect projects his will imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in into material constructions that then not only the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on reflect that will but operate back upon it to shift the basis of their real life-processes we demon- it in another direction. Elsewhere in Capital, strate the development of the ideological reflexes however, one reads that ‘[t]he ideal is nothing and echoes of this life-process. else than the material world reflected by the (Marx and Engels 1970: 47) 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 15

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In order to resolve the ultimate epistemological mind and thing. The final opposition is that status of these ‘real men’ vis-à-vis the concep- between realism and empiricism. This may not tual schemes within which they operate (what at first be self-evident, but I use these terms they say, conceive, or what is said or imagined in the particular sense developed by philoso- about them), Roseberry suggested a ‘modest’ phers of science. Realism strives for knowl- reading of the text that would see these ele- edge independent of any theory or any sensory ments as ‘constitut[ing] an indissoluble unity’ act, and discounts the perceptible as the only (Roseberry 1997: 30), echoing the Engels of the or the privileged route to the truth. Empiricism Anti-Dühring as quoted in the first epigraph to discounts anything not perceptible to the senses this chapter. Roseberry also gestured toward or beyond the range of the human sensorum. the critical reflexivity that apprehension of this Realism posits an observer-independent world, unity entails, since the analyst also occupies a and its Platonic presuppositions – that universal position in an analogous unity, which of neces- forms or laws exist autonomously from human sity emphasizes ‘certain “real individuals” and history or consciousness – permit a kind of theo- not others, or certain “purely empirical” rela- retical abstraction disallowed by strict empiri- tionships and not others’ (p. 30). Thinking cism, which depends on the immediately about the indissoluble unity of real ‘men’ and perceptible. (One could thus equate realism with their (and our) conceptual schemes gets to the positivism, the doctrine of universal, generaliz- heart of one of the problems of Marxist cri- able laws separate from any subjective human tique: the extent to which, as a strong reading understanding or encounter with the world.) of Marx would argue, Marxism is of necessity The aligning of the ideal, the theoretical, and internal to its object, the capitalist society of the real, on the one hand, and the material, Marx’s day (Postone 1993). This, in turn, gets plain speech and empiricism, on the other, was to the heart of the problem of the application of a contingent articulation of a kind of social sci- Marxist theory in anthropological analyses of entific ‘common sense’. It did not occur seam- materiality in other social formations. This is lessly or without contradiction (or confusion). the problem faced by most of the writers In looking chronologically at materialist whose work is reviewed in this chapter as they theories of society in anthropology and archae- attempted to fit Marxist concepts to the empir- ology, this chapter charts the shifts among ical relationships of actually existing people – these concepts and their generative potential ‘real men’ (and women) – and the material for thinking materially about the social in spite world of non- or pre-capitalist contexts. of their inherent instability. The quest for a We are faced, then, with two distinct prob- science that would explain causal relations lems. The first is the unresolved tension between among material and social variables looms Marx’s use of the dialectic and his materialist large in my story. Such a quest for causality reductionism. The second is the applicability occupied Marx, as well, and helps explain his of Marxist concepts outside of the world deep interest in the work of natural and social for which they were imagined – or outside of evolutionists like Charles Darwin and Lewis the world that compelled the mind of Marx to Henry Morgan. reflect the material conditions and contradic- How did Marxism’s convergence with other tions of capitalism in his dialectical and histor- materialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth ical materialisms. I argue in this chapter that centuries encourage the denunciation of these two problems wended their way through abstraction in favor of plain speech, that is, in anthropological and other social scientific favor of a critical metalanguage that denies its accounts of materiality in such as way as to status as such by purporting to reveal the bring a series of otherwise independent oppo- deeper reality, the ‘real men’, and their histo- sitions into alignment. The first is the opposi- ries behind the veils of ideological abstraction tion between the ideal and the material, where of which ‘theory’ is a component? the former is taken to reference the subjective If I overdraw the terms, it is because anthro- world ‘inside’ consciousness and the latter the pological debates over materiality and history objective world ‘outside’ consciousness. The have done so, as well. Consider, for example, second is the opposition between theoretical two responses to the work of Jean and John discourse or abstraction and what we might Comaroff. In their work on the historical anthro- call ‘plain speech’. Where the former reflects pology of southern Africa, the Comaroffs have on found materialities to seek potentially hid- attempted to correlate shifts in consciousness den or latent content, the latter claims to reflect with shifts in material culture, daily practices, them ‘directly’ in language, and purports to and routines. For example, they show how reduce or even eliminate the gap between mission school architecture encouraged certain 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 16

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kinds of movement that in turn shaped people’s the formal analysis of capitalism. The former self-understandings. Critics have taken them to tends to rely on empirically observable evidence task on the causal assumptions of their argu- for the postulation of a telos to world historical ment and on the level of speculation necessary development; the latter tends to model under- for them to make such arguments. Sally Falk lying causal relationships at the expense of the Moore, for example, worries that their ‘imagi- empirically observable. So, for example, those native sociologies’ run too far ahead of actual Marxisms (like structural Marxism, discussed ‘cases’ – empirically observable instances – to below) that attempted to discover the motor support any claims of ‘causality’ (Moore 1999: driving a particular social formation did not 304). Donald Donham argues that the Comaroffs have to rely on empirical evidence but could employ ‘a post hoc rhetoric’ of cultural difference still claim realism; those that were steered by to the detriment of the analysis of ‘actual events’ empirical data could reject the abstractions of and Tswana agents’ own narratives (Donham structural Marxism as part of the ideological 2001: 144). The Comaroffs reply, to both critics, obfuscation of capitalism. Indeed, the history that they seek a methodology that is ‘empirical of Marxist anthropology in the twentieth cen- without being narrowly empiricist’ (Comaroff tury has seen this opposition play itself out, and Comaroff 1999: 307). By this, they mean between the evolutionary and cultural materi- to capture sensuous material realities without alist approaches that made a strong claim to imputing to them the kind of autonomy or empirical verifiability and to the status of causal determination that some materialisms science, on the one hand, and the various presuppose. They write that they sought, in Of approaches tracing a lineage to Louis Althusser Revelation and Revolution (1991, 1997) to: that worried less about verifiability than logical consistency and another sort of claim to underscore the need to transcend a procrustean the status of science, on the other. Post- opposition: to separate ourselves, on the one hand, Althusserians (and I would include here fol- from postmodern theoreticism and, on the other, lowers of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault) from those more conventional colonial historians face the charge of abstraction from the inheri- who have sought to avoid theory via the empiri- tors of the more reductionist cultural material- cist strategy of finding order in events by putting ist approaches (even if those heirs do not events in order. always recognize themselves as such; although (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 159) few may cite Marvin Harris in the early 2000s, there is a sense in which his cultural material- It seems that the unity of which both Marx and ism, discussed below, has been naturalized as Engels wrote has difficulty maintaining its common currency for many anthropologists, integrity, that it is continually unbundling especially for lay audiences, or before under- itself into the neat dichotomies of the material graduates). And the latter, realist Marxisms, and the ideal, the empirical and the real, the can surprise when they pair up with empiri- directly apprehensible and the theoretical. cist Marxisms in arguments over whether Marxist-inspired theories tend to equate each anthropology is a ‘science’ and the supposed pole of these oppositions with one another bourgeois romanticism and aestheticism of despite the friction this might cause for causal ‘postmodern’ discourse. or dialectical forms of argumentation. Hence, it A specter is haunting anthropologies of mate- has become routine in anthropology and else- riality; the specter of empiricism. It should be where to stress, when dealing with materiality, clear by now that mine is an interested review that one is neither valorizing nor rejecting out- that has an exorcism in mind. It is borne of ana- right the empirical; that one is appreciative of lytical frustration with the tools available for the discursive constitution of the material even thinking materially about social formations, a as one is attentive to the ‘significance intrinsic frustration that also has to do with the way to material life’ (Farquhar 2002: 8); that one is ‘data’, ‘the facts’, and ‘materiality’ are first con- steering between the rocks of high theory and flated and then asked to speak for themselves in the shoals of naive empiricism. readily-accessible causal languages that as a Whence the conflation between the empiri- matter of course reject the need for any ‘theory’; cal and the material, and all those categories the way that evolutionary and cultural materi- that can stand in for those concepts, such as alist Marxism has been deployed as just such a history, the body, people’s ‘actual lives’, language; and the way that structural Marxisms objects, geographies, nature, and so forth? As sometimes play along by eliding their realism Roseberry and others have noted, there is a with empiricism. Approaching the problem of tension in Marxism between the historical and materiality through the specter of empiricism 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 17

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haunting anthropology places anthropological ENGELS, EVOLUTION AND ENERGY knowledge production at the center of the dis- cussion, as it calls into questions the material on which anthropology makes its analytical Engels can be credited with the elevation of claims as well as the very opposition between historical materialism to the status of science the material and the theoretical. after Marx’s death. Using the ethnological data In what follows, I review four moments in that were beginning to filter into Europe from the history of anthropological and archaeologi- explorers, missionaries, and others around the cal engagement with Marxism on the question world, Engels posited discrete stages in the of materiality. The story begins with Engels and evolution of social formations. ‘Men can be the consolidation of historical materialism in distinguished from animals by consciousness, the various theories that posited distinct social by religion or anything else you like. They forms occupying specific evolutionary stages. themselves begin to distinguish themselves After a brief detour through the Manchester from animals as soon as they begin to produce school, which had more affinities with the their means of subsistence’ (Marx and Engels dialectical method than contemporaneous 1970: 42). In acting on nature to procure their evolutionisms (especially those on the other subsistence, people at the same time change side of the Atlantic), I consider the French their own natures, and so make history (see structural Marxists. The structural Marxists O’Laughlin 1975: 346). The dialectical relation- eschewed some of the more reductionist ship between human consciousness and nature aspects of evolutionary theory and worried is such that consciousness as such must always less about evolutionary stages than the causal be understood materially, as praxis, not just con- relationships among structural components templation. As I have indicated above, Marx of a society: the economic base, including the made this clear in his attack on Feuerbach’s material conditions and relations of subsis- materialism. Contemplation, then, thought tence; the ideological superstructure, including itself, ‘therefore part of the material world and all the stuff of ‘culture’ as it has been defined governed by the same law of dialectical move- by other anthropologists; and the structures ment that characterizes nature’ (O’Laughlin mediating the two, especially kinship. Next, I 1975: 343). explore Marxisms of the 1970s and 1980s that The standard account of Marx’s materialism reformulated mid-century evolutionisms in is that changing relationships with nature terms of world histories and world systems. determine the shifts in consciousness that Such Marxisms increased anthropologists’ define the stages of social evolution. Yet the attention to commodities’ circulation and the theoretical impulse toward evolutionism itself spatial formations such circulations engen- then places those changing relations with dered. Finally, I consider work done in the nature in a position of ontological priority 1990s and the early 2000s that attempts to despite Marx’s unity of thought and matter. tackle globalization and transnationalism and Hence Engels’s deterministic account of that is working in the tracks of critiques of human evolutionary change in The Origin of the Marxist and other grand narratives. Some of Family, Private Property and the State (1884/ this work relies on heirs of Althusser, such as 1972). In it, Engels appropriated Lewis Henry Bourdieu and Foucault. Some of it is beginning Morgan’s (1877/1963) Ancient Society because to unpack the oppositions between abstract it so readily suggested a correlation between and concrete, real and empirical, theory and different forms of the organization of subsis- practice by drawing attention to how the poles tence and different forms of the organization of of these oppositions continually merge into family. The suture between Engels and Morgan one another in the coproduction of subjects is near pefect, more so than in Marx’s own and objects. writings; indeed, the first word of Engels’s What’s the matter in Marxism? Can there book is ‘Morgan’, and the name appears in the be a Marxist anthropology of materiality that first sentence of each of the first three chapters. obviates the antinomies between the concrete Where, in The German Ideology, Marx and and the abstract, empiricism and realism, Engels were able to posit ‘various stages of world and word? Can there be a Marxist development in the division of labor’ (Marx approach to materiality that recuperates the and Engels 1970: 43), now, with Morgan’s data, dialectic without falling into idealism and Engels could more precisely chart those without replicating the teleology and tempo- various stages, and provide an evolutionary rality of historical materialism? I return to this account for the appearance of private property. question in the conclusion. And Morgan’s text was perfectly amenable to 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 18

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this task. As Morgan wrote, and Engels quoted, nineteenth-century evolutionary concepts and ‘the great epochs of human progress have been a focus on technology to mid-century American identified, more or less directly, with the enlarge- anthropology. Placing the emphasis on the ment of the sources of subsistence’ (Morgan acquisition of subsistence, White argued that 1963: 19). More or less directly, then, Engels human culture evolves as the amount of outlines the history of this enlargement: from energy harnessed from nature in the form of ‘man’ as a ‘tree-dweller’ living on ‘fruits, nuts plants, animals, and other material objects and roots’, to ‘the utilization of fish for food ... increases. The science of culture should seek and ... the use of fire’, to ‘the invention of the data that might verify this formula. Hence, the bow and arrow’, to ‘the introduction of pottery’, emphasis on technological aspects of culture – to ‘the domestication of animals’, to ‘the smelt- the tools used to procure energy from the envi- ing of iron ore’ (Engels 1972: 87–92); we have ronment. As for cultural conceptions, myths, here a history of social formation in terms of ideas: ‘there is a type of philosophy proper to material appropriations from nature using new every type of technology’ (White 1949: 366). technologies developed in tandem with nature Julian Steward’s (1955) counterpoint to White and with the dialectical evolution of human was that universal evolution could not explain consciousness. either variation or parallel emergence of simi- The emphasis on food can be found in lar traits in widely geographically separated Bronislaw Malinowski’s materialism (see Kuper societies. For Steward’s multilinear evolution, 1996: 29), as, for Malinowski, all of society and then, human relationships with their specific culture ultimately boiled down to satisfying environments produce specific cultures. The one’s basic human needs (having sex and filling kinds of data necessary for the analysis were one’s belly, according to Malinowski). The similar to those required by White, but also emphasis on material culture can be found in included environmental variables. Marshall Franz Boas’s corpus; despite his reluctance Sahlins and Elman Service (1960) brought the toward Marxism, Boas found the material two theories together in their delineation of record of signal importance in demonstrating ‘general’ and ‘specific’ evolution, the former that Native Americans had histories marked the grand story of the evolution of Culture, the by change and development and in providing latter the smaller stories of the evolution of the new science of anthropology an untapped cultures. Various cultural ecological approaches field to collect, record, and document. This (e.g., Rappaport 1968, Vayda 1969) extended emphasis on material culture was an archaeol- and refined the framework, sometimes displac- ogist’s dream. In the early twentieth century, ing its evolutionary pretensions altogether, and V. Gordon Childe (1936) could posit a theory of sometimes vociferously discounting any con- universal evolution in terms of archaeological cern that the directions of causation might be data that neatly fit into the framework of histor- multiple, as with Marvin Harris’s (1979) cul- ical materialism. ‘Progressive changes’ in social tural materialism. Imported into archaeology via evolutionary time ‘came from the base’ (Trigger the ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s and 1970s, 1981/1984: 72). Using archaeological data on such perspectives, as Bruce Trigger (himself an subsistence, tools, trade, and house construc- exponent of Childe) writes, helped maximize tion, Childe could test Marxist theory and refine ‘the explanatory potential of archaeological data’ it (by supplementing evolutionary theory with (Trigger 1978: x). diffusionist theories from other quarters in Regardless, then, and despite the lengthy anthropology, for example). The result was a debates among them, in each of these Marxist- research strategy that took particular kinds of inflected materialisms there was a clear dis- data – amenable both to archaeological discovery tinction between data gathering and theory and collection and to incorporation in the building, one that replicated the causality pre- Marxist evolutionary framework – and deduced sumed in Engels’s materialist historiography from them specific social arrangements. from tools and food to families and philoso- Childe’s research strategy brought the phies. These mid-century evolutionisms were problem of causality into relief, as it made an exercises in hypothesis building and hypothe- explicit scientific program of material determi- sis testing with the positivist aim of building nation. The professionalization of the disci- generalizable laws. Still, despite the deductive pline and its practitioners’ quest to have it orientation – or precisely because of its posi- accorded the status of a ‘science’ permitted the tivist inclinations – it was taken as a matter of complete obviation of Marx’s dialectics in course that one could simply see, collect, and favor of strictly reductive material determina- measure the data, since the data were material tion. Leslie White, for example, reintroduced facts that did not require any theory for their 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 19

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apprehension. The materialist theory of the does not pre-exist the act of prayer but is rather social was not a theory of materiality. Instead, its effect (p. 114). it was an effort to ground anthropology and Take, for example, Maurice Godelier, on the archaeology in certain empirical facts amenable Inca: to the scientific method; and to proceed deduc- tively even as one leaped inductively from religious ideology is not merely the superficial, material objects or measurable forces like phantasmic reflection of social relations. It is an energy to grand theories of the evolution of element internal to the social relations of produc- society. tion; it functions as one of the internal components of the politico-economic relation of exploitation between the peasantry and an aristocracy holding DEEP AND DEEPER STRUCTURES State power. This belief in the Inca’s supernatural abilities ... was not merely a legitimizing ideology, after the fact, for the relations of production; it was If Marx’s totality got unbundled in cultural part of the internal armature of these relations of materialist evolutionisms of the mid-twentieth production. century, it was reified in the contempora- (Godelier 1977: 10) neous Manchester school. Although it left questions of ultimate determination aside, Max Godelier, and the other so-called structural Gluckman’s (1955) theory of functional conflict Marxists, folded superstructure into the base bore more than a passing resemblance to the and laid the groundwork for a critique of ideol- dialectical method. Peter Worsley’s (1956) ogy in ‘primitive’ and ancient societies not Marxist reanalysis of the Tallensi studied by simply reducible to the unmasking of a ground Meyer Fortes (1945) placed signal importance on or base of empirically observable relations rights to arable land, a scarce commodity that and forces of production. Widely influential in Worsley revealed to be the basis of elder men’s sociocultural anthropology and imported into authority. Attention to the material conditions of some quarters of archaeology (Friedman and production allowed Worsley to illuminate the Rowlands 1977; Miller and Tilley 1984), the lineage system. In its implicit apprehension of a structural Marxists represent a different relation socio-material totality, Worsley’s re-evaluation to Marx’s corpus than that of, say, Leslie White of the Tallensi resembled and prefigured the and others whose reception was more directly structural Marxists of the 1960s and 1970s. If via Engels. Something deeper than surface mid-century Marxisms in anglophone anthro- appearance is sought, but not necessarily in the pology remained resolutely if sometimes spirit of unmasking. For our imbrication in our vulgarly materialist (as Friedman (1974) claimed own social formation ever removes the really of Harris, because of the latter’s insistence on a real – here, the supposedly autonomous material direct causal relationship between the deter- world separate from our empirical perception of mining base and the epiphenomenal super- it – from our grasp. ‘All science would be super- structure), those developed in France strove fluous if the outward appearance and the for a realism that sometimes left the empirical essence of things directly coincided’ (Marx, to one side. The influence of Louis Althusser quoted in Spriggs 1984: 3). Indeed, this struc- cannot be overstated. Turning to Marx’s writ- turalist element places naive empiricism to ings on ideology as opposed to his statements one side, but at the expense, perhaps, of rein- on evolution, and by way of the psychoana- vigorating the material/ideal dichotomy, an lytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Althusser (1971, aspect of Althusserian Marxism that vexed the 1977) moved the discussion of ideology archaeologists (see Rowlands 1984: 109). beyond its role in covering over the really real Another aspect of Althusser that proved (i.e., subject to universal laws, if not empiri- problematic to archaeology was its ascription of cally observable) economic base, and as dialec- the institutions of the state, and the accretions tically constitutive of subjects, productive of state power in material objects, to a society’s forces and relations of production themselves. powerful members – the so-called dominant Like Lacan, Althusser argued that ideology ideology thesis – permitting ‘only the powerful was less like a dream (a ‘purely imaginary, i.e. to make statements with artifacts’ (Beaudry et al. null, result of the “day’s residues”,’ 1977: 108) 1991: 156). Although it led to a new focus on and more like a language that structured access elites and material culture, ideological analysis to an always-just-out-of-reach reality. Ideology in archaeology tended to assume rather than is also always performative: Althusser referred explain how certain categories of objects came back to Pascal on how belief for the Christian to signify prestige (see Robb 1998: 333–4). Here, 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 20

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artifacts were taken as ‘symbolic’ unless they land became more determinative, emphasis were clearly functional, and ‘ideological power’ shifted to control over the ideological meaning came to be seen as ‘an elite tactic’ analogous to and perpetuation of the lineage and the medi- other more straightforward forms of elite ation of supernatural powers expressed by power (ibid.). Thus, Elizabeth Brumfiel (1995) megaliths; women’s importance declined and criticized Mary Helms’s (1993) interpretation of the megalithic burial takes the symbolic and skilled crafts and long-distance trade items as ideological place of the longhouse (ibid.). linked to political leadership for being insuffi- Meillassoux, like Rey (1971) and Terray ciently attentive to the situated negotiations (1972), was also interested in the relations and relationships of prestige and power. Still, among different modes of production coexist- Brumfiel notes the importance of Helms’s ing in a society; Althusser’s acceptance of insight that style horizons can be used to overdetermination or multiple determination demonstrate the connection between skilled aided this analysis, although it left it open to the crafts and the development of symbolic sys- charge of muddying the distinction between tems that diffuse over space and time. The base, superstructure, and the totality a more question is whether to see style horizons as orthodox Marxist would insist obtains between simply evidence for the geographic and tempo- them. The concept of overdetermination was ral extension of power, or, possibly, the sym- first used by Sigmund Freud in rejecting bolic inversion of power relationships and the simple material reductionisms to explain phe- formation of new kinds of resistance (see, e.g., nomena like hysteria in favor of the idea that Brumfiel 1992, 1996). Thus, despite some limi- observable symptoms might have multiple, tations, the structural Marxist orientation pro- interacting causes. For Althusser, overdetermi- vided new ideas for the analysis of material nation meant that the contradictions in a social culture, more notably in archaeology than formation were not strictly speaking always sociocultural anthropology, I think, drawing reducible to the economic base. Needless to from the humanist Marxist toolkit of concepts say, some Marxists did not take to the struc- such as hegemony, dominance and ideology tural Marxists’ seeming rejection of the base- (Rowlands and Kristiansen 1998). structure-superstructure model of society. In sociocultural anthropology, structural Thus, Bridget O’Laughlin on Terray: ‘There is a Marxism had an impact in rethinking the struc- confusion here of concepts and concrete reality,’ tural and material position of kinship in the the latter, the base, which of necessity ‘can be forces and relations of production. Works by realized within a social totality’ such that ‘every Claude Meillassoux (1972) and Pierre Philippe mode of production describes not only a base Rey (1971) explored how non-productive elder but corresponding forms of superstructure’ elites extract surplus labor in lineage systems. (O’Laughlin 1975: 358). Meillassoux argued that senior men seek con- trol over the means of reproduction – women. Women here were reduced to their bare, or, one WORLD HISTORY, NEO-SMITHIAN should say fertile, materiality, and not treated MARXISM AND THE COMMODITY as social subjects (see Harris and Young 1981); indeed, one could argue that Meillassoux treated land in those societies where land is the The idea that more than one mode of produc- subject of labor (as opposed to its instrument) tion might exist within a society, theorized in as having more of the qualities of subjecthood the work of the structural Marxists, informed than women. Ian Hodder (1984) was able to analyses of colonialism that began to shape the read Meillassoux into the archaeological record discipline of anthropology in the 1970s and by comparing Neolithic central and western into the 1980s. Maurice Bloch’s (1983) survey European megaliths with central European of Marxism and anthropology made use of the longhouses. Hodder argued that the tombs concept of the ‘social formation’ to describe represented a symbolic and material transfor- such situations. Talal Asad’s (1972) critique of mation of the longhouses that took place as the Frederik Barth’s (1959) ethnography of Swat productive base of societies shifted. When Pathans attempted to excise the economistic, labor was more determinative than land, functionalist and bourgeois assumptions of emphasis was on the domestic and the natural- British functionalism by introducing the same ization of women’s reproductive abilities; concerns over land and labor highlighted by ‘material culture [was] used to form a world in the structural Marxists, as well as introducing which women [were] to be emphasized, cele- the problem of history as the sediment or brated but controlled’ (Hodder 1984: 66). As residue of past material relations. Asad argued 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 21

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that Barth had overlooked the history of British Britishness like tea drinking. Tea also remade colonialism, its impact on land tenure, and its time; the new daily ritual was itself the mater- indirect enrichment of certain elite landhold- ial instantiation of new regimes of work disci- ers because of Barth’s implicit adherence to pline and abstract, universal time. what Asad called a ‘market model’ of society. Sahlins (1976) would berate the Marxists for This Asad explained with reference to the elevating ‘practical reason’ to the status of the Enlightenment thinker Thomas Hobbes, who transcendent real and being ultimately bour- argued that men in the state of nature com- geois utilitarians. Sahlins argued that ideas are peted with one another over scarce resources autonomous of any prior causes that could be and that, without the firm hand of a sovereign, found in a separate ‘material’ domain and that life was nasty, brutish, and short. While ideas themselves have material consequences. Hobbes may have accurately described the In a different vein, Taussig (1989) attacked the competitive market society emerging in his work of Mintz and Wolf for making of history own day, Asad argued, he also conveniently a fetish, and creating for anthropology ‘a mode naturalized the individualist and competitive of representation which denies the act of repre- nature of capitalism, which Barth then inad- senting’ (1989: 11). In Mintz and Wolf’s histo- vertently imported into his account of Swat. ries, Taussig wrote, quoting Barthes, ‘everything Indeed, with the work of Sidney Mintz and happens ... as if the discourse or the linguistic Eric Wolf, students of Julian Steward, the ‘con- existence was merely a pure and simple crete reality’ that occupied O’Laughlin took on “copy” of another existence, situated in an a decidedly historical cast, and history, histori- extra-structural field, the “real”’ (ibid.). Mintz cal process, or historical transformation pro- and Wolf, for their part, read Taussig’s critique vided a necessary supplement to materiality. as preoccupied with ‘subjectivity and reflexiv- Rather than simply looking for material ity’ (1989: 25), rejected the implicit charge that culture, the economic base, or what have you, they are ‘positivist, naturalizing devils’ (ibid.), and using them in causal arguments about the and attacked Taussig’s ‘nihilism’ (p. 29). formation of societies, Mintz and Wolf paid Defending their work as providing histories of attention to historical processes that brought how ‘particular things became commodities’ new material formations into existence and (ibid.), however, they opened themselves up to made old ones obsolete. Wolf’s (1982) ‘kin- the further charge, levied against Wallersteinian ordered’ and ‘tributary’ modes of production world-systems analysis, of what Robert Brenner emphasized the flow of material goods within (1977) had called ‘neo-Smithian Marxism’. lineages and tribute-based political economic Brenner argued that the work of Wallerstein orders, respectively, and enabled a retelling of and his acolytes was Marxist in name only, as the histories of traditional anthropological sub- it elevated the circulation and exchange, rather jects in terms of a grand narrative of the devel- than the production, of commodities as explana- opment of extractive colonialism, industrial tory of social, political and cultural formations. capitalism, and the making of peasants and Such criticisms would also dog new atten- proletarians that did not suffer from the tion to commodities as things and commod- Eurocentrism of world-systems theory. Mintz’s ification as a process. The idea that things Sweetness and Power (1985) traced the inter- had a ‘social history’ or ‘cultural biographies’ twined emergence of peasant, proletarian, and smacked of commodity fetishism even as it bourgeois through the history of a particular was offered by Arjun Appadurai (1986) and commodity, sugar, richly describing it in all its others as a means of softening the gift/ material and symbolic dimensions as it moved commodity distinction and refusing the pro- in the circuits of trade and the culinary table. gressivist teleology implied in many discus- Mintz is interested in the materiality of sugar sions of the commodity form up to that point. itself, demonstrating how sweetness as a sen- The conceptual separation of gift economies sory experience shifts its modality such that it from commodity economies in anthropological becomes associated with sugar to the exclusion theory took attention away from those moments of other sweet-tasting substances. As a history in non-capitalist societies when a thing’s of the sense of taste, and ultimately of ‘taste’ exchangeability became its most ‘socially rele- itself as a mark of ‘civilization,’ Mintz’s study vant feature’ (Appadurai 1986: 13). Looking at links an emerging commodity not only to his- things this way introduced a temporal dimen- tories of slave labor and nascent forms of sion to the study of material objects, their ‘life industrialized production but also to a general- course’, as it were, the ways they can move ized culture of taste that associated sweetness into and out of relations of exchange and with sugar and sugar with essential markers of formations of value (see Hoskins, Chapter 5). 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 22

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The commodity is thus ‘not one kind of thing Rofel (1999), Katherine Verdery (1996, 2003), rather than another, but one phase in the life of Anna Tsing (2000), and Akhil Gupta (1998) some things’ (p. 17). The commodity form is challenge the modernist aesthetic and analytic thus, for Appadurai, only contingently materi- of both development discourse and anthro- alized in objects. This realization allowed pology, and make a case for a richer under- Appadurai and others analytically to separate standing of the many forms of contemporary commodification from reification, and to open capitalisms, post-socialisms, as well as the non- up the possibility of reification – the making- capitalist social formations operating within or material of a thing – without commodification. alongside dominant ones (Gibson-Graham Renewed attention to the commodity form 1995). Although materiality is rarely fore- as a contingent stage in the life of a thing, grounded as such in these works, attention to together with attempts to escape Marx’s use the built environment, the manner in which value/exchange value dichotomy, helped architecture and planning interface with and invigorate the field of material culture studies. make material ideologies of dominance and With a dose of Bourdieu’s or Giddens’s theories rule (e.g., Bourdieu 1977 on the Kabyle house; of practice, anthropologists, archaeologists Caldeira 2000; Holston 1989; Pemberton 1994), (e.g., Rowlands and Kristiansen 1998) and and practices of embodiment, dress, and habit others were initiating a discussion about the (Bourdieu 1977) characterize this kind of work. coproduction of subjects and objects in specific It is best exemplified, perhaps, in the Comaroffs’ and mobile social formations (see Miller 1998, corpus cited at the outset of this chapter. 2001). In archaeology, for example, some older What in an earlier moment would have been interpretations of Paleolithic European cave art separated out as ‘political economic’ versus assumed the paintings to be human attempts ‘historical’ approaches now cohabit – indeed, to represent their relationship with nature, intermingle – to the extent that the one is not symbolically to mediate it. More recent inter- dissociable from the other. Ara Wilson’s work pretations reject the firm delineation between on the ‘intimacies of capitalism’ through the symbolic and material/technological systems global commodities of Avon stitches together this implies. As Margaret Conkey summarizes, the world of consumer goods with what she in this approach ‘material culture is produced ... calls ‘folk’ economies and ‘market’ economies not just to use or not even just to “mean.” deeply in the bodies and desires of Thai Rather, technology is viewed as ideology, pro- women (2004: 193). Alan Klima (2002) and duction as meaning’ (Conkey 1987: 424). Rosalind Morris (2000) attend to money, mate- Similarly, Christopher Tilley writes, ‘Material riality, magic, and mediumship in exploring culture may be physically embedded but it is other modalities of fetishism via, or sometimes at the same time culturally emergent ... [T]here askance, its theorization in Marxist thought. In can be no simple or formal demarcation between this, their work resonates with a tradition of what is internal to, or is in, and that which is scholarship in anthropology on exchange and external to, or outside, the object’ (Tilley 1993: 5). money (Parry and Bloch 1989), gift and com- Work on the coproduction of subjects and modity (Gregory 1982) property (for a recent objects through material symbolic practices collection, see Verdery and Humphrey 2004), bridges the intellectual and institutional divides and consumption (e.g., Foster 2002). between anthropology, archaeology, material If attention to material forms, forces, or culture studies, design, architecture, fashion objects seems to slip away in such works, how- theory, and geography, and contributes to ever, it is because Marxist legacies, realist pre- discussions about global and transnational tensions, and empiricist ghosts still haunt such material/social fields. endeavors, because we have not, ‘even now, escaped the ontological division of the world into “spirit” and “matter”’ (Keane 2003: 409). SPECTERS OF MARX Archaeologist Elizabeth Brumfiel (2003) can claim that ‘it’s a material world’ by emphasizing artifacts and excavations but without question- It is just such discussions about globalization ing either the separation of spirit and matter and transnationalism that have brought the that allows her to ‘abstract signs from the soil’ commodity form and its materialization in (Masri 2004) or the linguistic ideology that objects and in persons to the forefront of understands words unproblematically to refer contemporary anthropologies of capitalism. to things in the world. The movement from Rejecting earlier developmentalist frame- object to knowledge proceeds as if the object works, figures like James Ferguson (1999), Lisa pre-exists its enlistment – an assumption 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 23

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warranting both realism and empiricism and continues to be that common, everyday thing, allowing them to blur into one another – and as wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commod- if its enlistment in language is a straightforward ity, it is changed into something transcendent. It referential affair. Attempts to revivify Marxism not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in often resituate a materialist analysis of social relation to all other commodities, it stands on its formations and reanimate its old reductionisms head, and evolves out of its wooden brain and dichotomies: the causal determination grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table- afforded the economic base or the forces of pro- turning’ ever was. duction; the dichotomy between material and (Marx 1978: 71) ideal, practice and theory. The material/ideal impasse mirrors the structure/agency problems Lingering over Marx’s image of the turning of an earlier era. Writings densely attentive to table at the opening of Capital, Derrida writes: materiality, the pressing back of the material on The capital contradiction does not have to do simply the ideal or the coconstitution of objects and with the incredible conjunction of the sensuous subjects (and objects as subjects and vice versa) and the supersensible in the same Thing; it is the nonetheless neatly replicate the magic of willful contradiction of automatic autonomy, mechanical and moving commodities and the reduction of freedom, technical life. Like every thing, from the ‘real, active men’ to their labor power. moment it comes onto the stage of a market, the Alongside such work is an emergent atten- table resembles a prosthesis of itself. Autonomy tion to abstraction, ephemerality, virtuality, and automatism, but automatism of this wooden and the apparent dematerialization of political table that spontaneously puts itself into motion, to economic forms. Authors speculate on the be sure, and seems thus to animate, animalize, spir- increasing detachment between money and itualize, spiritize itself, but while remaining an arti- ‘real’ commodities or labor power, the virtual- factual body, a sort of automaton, a puppet, a stiff ization of money and finance, and the fantasy and mechanical doll whose dance obeys the techni- work that seemingly animates contemporary cal rigidity of a program. Two genres, two genera- capitalisms after the end of the gold standard tions of movement intersect with each other in it, and the Bretton Woods agreements. There is no and that is why it figures the apparition of a spectre. unity on how best to approach such phenom- (1994: 153) ena or what their implications might be, but there have been a number of forays into these The living, moving commodity haunts the fields (e.g., Miyazaki 2003; Tsing 2000; Maurer thing’s use value (p. 151) and renders it ‘not 2004; LiPuma and Lee 2004; Miller 1998). sensuous and non-sensuous, or sensuous but Miller (1998) makes explicit the relation non-sensuous; [Marx] says: sensuous non- between the apparent abstraction of the econ- sensuous, sensuously super-sensible’ (ibid.). omy, the work of abstraction of capital hypoth- Derrida thus finds in Marx a different kind of esized in Marx, and analytical abstraction as an unity of matter and thought than posited by intellectual enterprise. Those seeking a new Engels in the first epigraph to this chapter. Marxism for a new set of problems presented Engels’s unity was ultimately the subordina- by dematerialized property offer grand theory tion of thought into matter. In Derrida’s read- less attentive to materiality and more con- ing of Marx, the relation between matter and cerned with the effectivity of political argu- thought is not dialectical – as thesis/antithesis ment and action in the academy and beyond in or contradictory poles whose tension and reso- a world where there are seemingly no alterna- lution create a new conjuncture no longer legi- tives to capitalism (e.g., Jameson 2002; Hardt ble as ‘matter’ and ‘thought’ – but spectral. and Negri 2000). Derrida’s (1994) extensive A specter is a shadow from another time, consideration of capitalist time and the time of whose time has gone, but yet manifests itself in Marx’s Capital stands as a signal contribution this time. It is out of synch with the rest of today’s to the contemporary rethinking of ideological time-space, not in opposition to it, not contra- abstraction and commodity fetishism. dicting it, just not quite fully in or out of it. ‘Two Marx illustrated the concept of commodity genres, two generations of movement intersect’ fetishism with the example of a table, and in the ghost, as in the commodity-table. referenced the nineteenth-century craze for Despite their apparent self-evidence, then, mystical parlor games in which objects appar- matter and thought, thing and person, are con- ently move without any human intervention: tinually infolding and intertwining, a dense web that momentarily and for particular pur- The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by poses congeals subjects and objects with making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table elements of willfulness or agentive power. This 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 24

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is essentially Bruno Latour’s (1993) position on inculcating the ‘rationality’ of that notion of the ontological status of non-human agents in time as well as natural order. In addition, by We have Never been Modern. But to continue with carefully arranging plants based on detailed Derrida: ‘The wood comes alive and is peopled knowledge of their growing behavior the with spirits: credulity, occultism, obscurantism, garden planner was able to map knowledge of lack of maturity before Enlightenment, childish precedents – based on systematic observation or primitive humanity’: believing commodities and temporal demarcation – that redounded to take on value in relation to other commodi- into juridical order. As Leone writes, ‘just as ties, believing commodities to move of their precedent inserted into law allowed the estab- own accord or to reach out to us and pique our lished order to protect its own position by mak- desire, we demonstrate childish credulity in ing that position appear historically valued, so spite of our better Enlightened selves. And yet that same social position seemed to be more such childish, primitive credulity is integral to – fixed when it appeared to be served by optical, indeed, constitutive of – the market itself, and astronomical, and geometrical phenomena ‘what would Enlightenment be without the displayed in the garden’s allées and vistas’ market’ (1994: 152)? The paradoxes compound (1984: 29). Here, capitalist time, abstract labor, themselves in that the super-sensibility of the and juridical order come together in the materi- sensuous – our inability to grasp the real – also ality and embodied experience of a formalized warrants the practical and intellectual tech- landscape. niques at our disposal to make the attempt. ‘Empiricist’ and ‘bourgeois’, one might say (and Marilyn Strathern practically does, 1992: 173), CONCLUSION: DOES MARXISM are analogues of analytical practice in capital- MATTER? ism and its techniques of self-reflection and autodocumentation, the sciences. Including Marxism. As Dipesh Chakrabarty Here’s the rub for studies of materiality else- reminds us, echoing Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978) where and in other times: if abstract labor pro- and Moishe Postone (1993), Marx’s concept of vides ‘the key to the hermeneutic grid through abstract labor, the ‘secret of the expression of which capital requires us to read the world’ value’ that places all activity, human or other- (Chakrabarty 2000: 55) then how are we to read wise, on one scale of quantifiable value, ‘could ‘other’ worlds? Marilyn Strathern provides a not be deciphered ... until the concept of case in point in her analysis of Melanesian human equality had already acquired the per- exchange and the Maussian legacy apparent in manence of a fixed popular opinion’ (Marx, how anthropologists have understood it. By quoted by Chakrabarty 2000: 52). ‘The general- assuming that Melanesian exchange operates ization of contractual equality under bourgeois according to a ‘barter theory of value’ (so many hegemony,’ Chakrabarty summarizes, ‘created pigs equals so much taro, a comparison of the historical conditions for the birth of Marx’s quantities) anthropologists continually misread insights’ (ibid.). Chakrabarty goes on to empha- the nature of the gift. ‘I suspect we have been size that the abstraction entailed in abstract dazzled ... by the precision of the counting,’ she labor was ‘a concrete performance of the work writes, and have missed that the counting is of abstraction’ (p. 54) – abstraction as concrete less about establishing ratios based on aggrega- practice, the historical unity with which Marx tions of items, than about creating analogies (and Hegel) began his inquiry into history, the between them (Strathern 1992: 171). Strathern formulation subtending the effort to keep the refuses to take for granted the discreteness of Marxian totality bundled together despite its subjects and objects, much less persons and continual unravellings. things, and instead asks how transacting brings In the meantime, however, the very realiza- the persons and things into being and into tion of capitalist time’s specificity and the for- embodiment or materiality. The work of Bruno mal dynamics of contractual equality provide Latour, and actor-network theory in general, occasions to rethink the materiality of the cap- has inspired similar work on the networks of italist landscape. Mark Leone’s (1984) analysis human and non-human actors that materialize of a formal Georgian garden in Annapolis, MD, persons and things as distinct in spite of their shows how the use of perspective and scale continual blurring. Anthropologists adopting as well as classical quotations and botanical while sometimes chafing against this sort of science created both a representation of uni- approach are doing research on science (Raffles versal history and abstract, evenly segmented 2002; Hayden 2004), bureaucracy (Riles 2000; capitalist time, as well as an instrument for Fortun 2003), activism (Jean-Klein 2003), 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 25

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money (Maurer 2005), law (Reed 2004), and experiments with the interface among rocks, anthropological reflection itself (Crook 2005). landscape art, and archaeology which seek to Fred Myers’s research on the creation of transform experiences of the materiality of markets for Australian Aboriginal art demon- place by highlighting the way rock, art, and strates that the materialities at issue are not archaeology formally replicate one another. necessarily the art works themselves so much One might see the objects here – dematerialized as the dense set of curatorial events, the ‘mate- databases and code, on the one hand, and rock rial practices through which these objects have and stone, on the other – as opposite ends of moved’ (Myers 2001: 167, punctuation omitted). a virtual-material continuum. However, like Such practices include the mundane materiali- Kelty’s work, Tilly et al.’s experiment ungrounds, ties of a printed ‘number on a painting that as it were, the perceptual bases of empiricist link[s] it to a document on file’ (p. 202). modes of knowledge generation. ‘An aware- Research agendas for Marxist-inspired studies ness and interpretation of the significance of of materiality, I am suggesting, should continu- different stones on the hill is ultimately a rela- ally work to unground their own perceptual tionship between the body and the object. ... foundations, their own empiric, since the performing art is a process of engagement that Marxist paradigm insists on the situatedness of allows us to see the hill, its stones and the perception itself (and its objectification as such, prehistoric architecture in a new way’ (Tilley as a separable element of consciousness) in cap- et al. 2000: 60). I am suggesting a performative italist modalities of time, space, subject, object, scholarly engagement the enactment of which and evaluation. So, were one to study a com- constitutes its critical currency. modity chain today, for example, one would also Lurking everywhere, of course, is still the want to understand the networked processes ‘fissure of the consciousness into “practical” ˇ and subjects/objects that constitute the commod- and “theoretical”’, which Slavoj Zizˇek (1989: ity as well as the perceptual apparatus warrant- 20) views as the product of the abstraction of ˇ ing its stabilization as such. This would include exchange. This leads Zizˇek away from the clas- the research enterprise that materializes forth sical Marxist conception of ideology as false the object in the material/discursive terrain of consciousness of the real conditions of exis- scholarship itself. tence and toward a conception of ideology as Taking the lead from new objects of ethno- the real conditions of existence themselves. graphic scrutiny, the kind of contemporary Like Sohn-Rethel and, to a lesser extent per- ˇ research agenda I am suggesting would focus haps, Chakrabarty, this also leads Zizˇek to a as much on the form as on the content of the peculiar form of stage theory, in which it is not work. New Marxist-inspired attention to mate- until commodity exchange is ‘generalized’ and riality brings into its purview the materiality ‘universalized’ that it ‘brings about its symp- of the presentation of research. No longer sim- tom’ of hiding the real within it (1989: 22–3). ply experimentations with textual and discur- The ghosts of stage theory lurk in the temporal ˇ sive strategies, such exercises in form make phrases of Zizˇek’s account: pre-capitalist soci- explicit the mutual imbrication of research eties have not ‘yet’ witnessed the universaliza- objects, research processes and research results. tion of the production of commodities, but ‘as Examples can be found in work like Christopher soon as’ the generalization takes place, labor is Kelty’s (2001), which queries the ‘freedom’ and abstracted and the ‘freedom’ to exchange ‘openness’ of new virtual materialities such as ‘becomes its own negation’ (p. 22). It is as if one open-source software. Despite its apparent could go and measure whether or not a pre- separation from the market of commodities, capitalist had ‘yet’ achieved – progress! – the open-source code relies on a strict set of cita- general equivalent of the commodity form in tional practices required to be on display abstract labor, abstract human equality, and whenever and wherever it is appropriated. universal exchangeability. These mirror academic practices of the creation It seems, then, that even if we open up the and circulation of reputation and regard mani- material analysis of the social to the instability, fest in databases like the Social Sciences the uncanniness attending the tendentious Citation Index (see Kelty 2001). Publishing in purification of hybrid subjects/objects, we can- a free-access ‘virtual’ journal/database makes not escape capitalist time and its attendant explicit the relationship between form and con- teleologies and empirics. And this is a problem tent in both the object and Kelty’s own repre- not just with Marxism, but with the symptom sentation of it in an ‘open source’ venue. Kelty’s that Marxism identified in its internal critique virtualization of open source and academic of its own social formation. It would seem citationality reminds me of Tilley et al.’s (2000) to make the apprehension of ‘other’ worlds 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 26

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impossible, even as it sets for itself the very Brenner, Robert (1977) ‘The origins of capitalist task, as an imperative that justifies and defines development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, itself, of locating such other non- or pre- New Left Review, 104: 25–92. capitalist worlds. Brumfiel, Elizabeth (1992) ‘Distinguished lecture in Does it matter? I am not sure that it does. archaeology: breaking and entering the ecosystem – Writing against the apocalyptic narrative of gender, class and faction steal the show’, American feminism’s failure, and the frequently heard Anthropologist, 94: 551–67. lament that academic feminism has abandoned Brumfiel, Elizabeth (1995) Review of Mary Helm, ‘real women’s lives’ to take up complex theory, Craft and the Kingly Ideal, in Ethnohistory, Robyn Wiegman makes a case for a feminism 42 (2): 330–2. not identical to itself, that is, a feminism that is Brumfiel, Elizabeth (1996) ‘Figurines and the Aztec not correlative with actually existing women’s state: testing the effectiveness of ideological domi- subjectivities and that therefore ‘demands nation’, in R. Wright (ed.), Gender and Archaeology something other from the political than what Pittsburgh, PA: University. of Pittsburgh Press, we already know’ (Wiegman 2000: 822). Such a pp. 143–66. feminism recognizes that theory ‘will exceed its Brumfiel, Elizabeth (2003) ‘It’s a material world: contemporary emplottment as the critical con- history, artifacts, and anthropology’, Annual tainer of US feminism’s activist subjectivity’ Review of Anthropology, 32: 205–23. (ibid.). I have been making a case for an analo- Caldeira, Teresa (2000) City of Walls: Crime, gous, non-identical Marxism: it ‘will not be effi- Segregation and Citizenship in São Paolo. Berkeley, cient; it will not have the clarity of productive CA: University of California Press. order; it will not guarantee that feminist [or any Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe. other] struggle culminates in a present that is Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. without waste to the future. This is the case Childe, V. Gordon (1936) Man Makes Himself. because the future is itself the excess of produc- London: Watts. tive time: elusive, unimaginable, and ultimately Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (1991) Of unable to be guaranteed or owned’ (ibid.). If Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, Marxism is capitalism’s critique, it is also its and Consciousness in South Africa I. Chicago: definition. And if Marxism can be a moving and University of Chicago Press. emergent critique, then it can abandon without Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (1997) Of apologies its empiricist and realist pretensions Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and instead allow itself to trundle along, to and Consciousness in South Africa II. Chicago: muddle through, its own potentialities as they University of Chicago Press. emerge together with its objects, material, Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (1999) ‘Second immaterial, and everything in between. thoughts: a response to Sally Falk Moore’, American Ethnologist, 26 (2): 307–9. Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean (2001) ‘Of fallacies REFERENCES and fetishes: a rejoinder to Donham’, American Anthropologist, 103 (1): 150–60. Conkey, Margaret (1987) ‘New approaches in the Althusser, Louis (1971) Lenin and Philosophy, and other search for meaning? A review of research in Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. “Paleolithic art”’, Journal of Field Archaeology, 14 Althusser, Louis (1977) For Marx. London: Verso. (4): 413–30. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things. Crook, Tony (2005) ‘Kim Kurukuru’.Unpublished Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MS. Asad, Talal (1972) ‘Market model, class structure, Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx. New York: and consent’. Man, 7: 74–94. Routledge. Barth, Frederik (1959) Political Leadership among Swat Donham, Donald (2001) ‘Thinking temporally or Pathans. London: Athlone Press. modernizing anthropology’, American Anthropologist, Beaudry, Mary, Cook, Lauren J. and Mrozowski, 103 (1): 134–49. Stephen (1991) ‘Artifacts and active voices: material Engels, Frederick ([1877] 1962) The Anti-Dühring: culture as a social discourse’, in Randall McGuire Herr Dühring’s Revolution in Science. Moscow: and Robert Paynter (eds), The Archaeology of Foreign Languages Publishing House. Inequality. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 150–91. Engels, Frederick ([1884] 1972) The Origin of the Family, Bloch, Maurice (1983) Marxism and Anthropology: the Private Property and the State. New York: Interna- History of a Relationship. Oxford: Oxford University tional Publishers. Press. Farquhar, Judith (2002) Appetites: Food and Sex in Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Post-socialist China. Durham, NC: Duke University Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Press. 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 27

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