ABSTRACT

Karl Marx said towards the end of his life that he was not a Marxist, thus recognising that a separate body of work had grown up around his work. 'Marxism' has many strands, but the version of it that reached anthropology was an economic interpretation of history that emphasised four central theoretical elements: the physical reality of human life, the centrality of labour and the constant dynamic of practices; the systemic organisation of social relations of production; the conflict between different forms of such organisation; the historical evolution of different stages of development, to culminate in the overthrow of capitalism by communism. The neo-Marxist anthropologists derived certain key ideas from Marx's writings and used them as a hermeneutic to analyse ethnography in various parts of the contemporary world. In the hands of neo-Marxist anthropologists, 'mode of production' was a radical idea.