Re: Lisa and her critics

[lucinda <lucinda1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In response to Lisa's posts on anthropology and the connections
between her work and Marxism, Carroll Cox and Devain both attempt
to take her to task for her understanding of "economic base" and
"relations of production".

In contrast, I believe Lisa's position (and work) is tenable and potentially
fruitful. Carroll suggests that Lisa cannot create a distinction between
economic base and social relations, because the two are the same thing.
This is, of course, not true. By designating something as an _economic_
base we have already abstracted out of the material reality a particular
set of factors to be considered important.

Rather than Lisa making abstraction mistakes, it appears to me to be the
problem of her critics. It is true at some level that all these phenomena
are identical, except at the level of abstraction. Indeed, can we distinguish
between the mode of production and the relations of production primarilly
on the basis of identifying the mode as "hunting and gathering" and then
examining differences between such societies to find particular sets of
relations which can be diffentiated at that level.

However, we can refine our concept of the mode of production to include
distinctions in the particular ecological/societal nexus. For example,
a fishing society on a river bank is distinct in mode from a hunting
gathering society transversing arrid mountains. And indeed, anthropologists
have been successful at showing significant differences in the ways
these people organize productive, reproductive, and (if you want
to abstract things this way) non-productive relations.

Lisa's work is useful because it establishes links between the ethnological
analysis of resource acquisition, the anthropological analysis of rudimentary
social forms, and the conceptual aparatus of marxian social thought. Mainstream
sociology is currently undergoing a re-discovery of these "ecological"
relations in affecting migration patterns (see the recent work of Steve
Murdock if you're interested in such things), and important links might be
established to numerous ongoing projects if a conceptual aparatus is
developed to allow the incorporation of such research into a more
appropriate framework.

Rather than simply suggesting that Lisa is making a "new comer's" mistake,
respondents might consider suggesting more developed conceptual schemes to
approach her concernns. Unfortunately, my knowledge of such types of
anthropology is extremely limited. I have come across a volume by Charles
Woolfson, 1982, _The Labour Theory of Culture: A Re-examination of Engel's
theory of Human Origins_, that *might* prove useful. It attempts to use
recent archeological and anthropological evidence to defend Engel's theopry
that the labor process explains the emergence of language and culture.
Woolfson spends too much time arguing that monkeys can't talk (which I find
beside the point), but he does adopt a material dialectics perspective,
and provides a useful discussion of Engel's on these issues.

Brian S-J.



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