Marxism and Anthropology

• Genearl economic institutions were deemed political in character because they were manipulated by national governments seeking to maximize gain through capitalist appropriate and change
• Wallerstein = proletariat is trapped in world-system of unequal exchange in which Euro-American soc penetrates, subjugates, and exploits other populations.  Makes anthropology possible, BTW
• 1960s…Prsitine, timelss, and self–conained organic community = ethnographic imagination.  Better understanding of human soc circumvents Cartesian assumptions of bourgeois culture.   -> Results in scholars displaying various conflicts, class-interests and arrganements of power.
• Vs. world system theory = Anthros commit to understanding autonomy and integrity of loal societies
• Local peoples and cultures exercise a degree in agency in accepting, transforming, or rejecting expansion of market economies
• Infrastructure = modes of production and reproduction = primary determinant of culture vs. material conditions give rise to culture.  Whoever controls the means of producing wealth and power, also controls conditions for the production of knowledge itself.  When knowledge about the world is taken for granted, or unqeustioned, it loses its arbitrary character and comes to be seen as natural.
• Heart of what anthropology atempts to do:  devise powerful and parsimonious models that explain how people interact with each other and the world.
• Michel Foucault = Soc institutions and rels are grounded in a pervasive economy of discourses of power.  Power ceases to be solely a function of formal political institutions and became something inscribed in everyday life.  Whoever dominates relaionships, controls the economic and ideological conditions under which knowledge or truth are defined.
• Power determines social forms throughout history.  Asylum was founded to enforce and institutionalize a separation between rational society and that which was considered pathologically irrational.  Those defined as crazy were considered to be a part of the natural world, and thus subject to scrutiny — penetration, investigation of science.
• Foucault – what is considered truth and objective knwledge is contingent on dialectical relationship b/w vagaries of history and shifting power relations b/w social classes.