Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Classical logic, Hegel observed, is premised on atomistic categories, forcing its thinkers to apply either-or judgements-contingency or necessity, universal or particular, discrete or continuous, and so forth.Dialectical reason, by contrast, recognizes such seeming antitheses as mutuallyconstitutive sides of conceptual wholes-empty, that is, in and of themselves (Hegel 2010(Hegel [1812]]).This insight gains relevance for the anthropology of capitalism due to our discipline's penchant for polemical reasoning, and one notable instance thereof.While its roots lie in earlier debates, the birth of anthropology's culture wars can be most readily set in the mid-1970s.For it was then that Marvin Harris (1974) published his Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, followed by Marshall Sahlins' (1976) Culture and Practical Reason.For Harris (1974:4), human cultural diversity could best be understood, not through 'spiritualized' explanations, but by tracing particular cultural phenomena back to their 'down-to-earth' material causes.For Sahlins (1976), by contrast, cultures were to be understood as symbolic orders operating according to meaningful internal logics rather than to cross-culturally recognizable material conditions.With the ascendancy of postmodernism in anthropology by the late 1980s, support for the materialist camp declined precipitously.For anthropological studies of capitalism, this meant a turn away from the earlier structural Marxism of Maurice Godelier and Claude Meillassoux, for
Source: Social Anthropology
Author: Stephen Campbell
Institutions: Nanyang Technological University, University of Bergen
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2906876366