Carrol kindly sent the message below in response to Jim. The message is a rather good summation of Engel's standing in anthropology by her friend Maureen (the entire message is reproduced below.
I am not taking issue with Maureen because she has correctly and concisely summed up the general consensus on some important matters - it is the academic consensus I have trouble with not the contributor. I hope Maureen will forgive me then of using her words to introduce the topic, I intend no attack on her. This is the bit, which is made in reference to Engels' The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State and how it is generally viewed by progressive anthropologists. "Not surprisingly it's his interpretations most bound up with 19th c. social evolutionary theory that are most "trashed." That, and his (related) presumption that there was an original, egalitarian, "natural" gendered division of labor (women = domestic/reproductive sphere, men = outside jural and econ spheres). Both ideas - that gendered divisions of labor are ever natural, and that a gendered domestic/public division could ever be separate-but-equal egalitarian - have been widely refuted. But there's a modified version of the latter theme, that the extent of male dominance is proportional to the degree of division between a social formation's domestic and public spheres (hunter-gatherers tending towards one end, peasant and industrial societies at the other), that does have a respectable following." Over the last century we have spent so much intellectual energy distancing ourselves from the great discoveries of the 19th century and have shoved so many anachronistic concerns onto classic texts that collectively we have missed understanding the great depth that is to be found in these works. The usual practice in reviewing works like those of Marx's which are peppered with comments, phrases and words of their times, is to attempt to reconstruct the context and derive the intention from this reconstruction. It is labourious and not always very successful, a major problem being the temptation to create over-elaborate reconstructions which throw not very intelligible light on the original. Maureen's excellent paragraph shows one absurd aspect of this. Anthropologists having dispensed with "natural" as a social explanation, are forced in a roundabout way to say the same thing but not nearly so well (the modified version referred to above). In fact they have abstracted biology out of the picture altogether (if my reading of trends in this area are any guide) in an effort to make old Engels compatible with modern feminist prejudices. Having said this, no-doubt every reader will immediately assume that I am about to trot out some silly misogynist notion about biology dictating social roles for the sexes. No such luck, my point is that biology cannot be dismissed from social evolution, the question is just how does it determine - the answer to this is not some cheap socio-political comment but a broad understanding of the differences between social and biological evolution and how the first presupposes the second but completely modifies its thrust. A mentioned earlier that trying to reconstruct the original context of the expressions used by Marx and Engels is not necessarily the best and certainly not the most productive way of rescuing their meaning. First note that Marx uses nature a lot, especially in his early works and in important respects does not ever completely dispense with it. Second that speculation (prior to Morgan) about the sexual division of labour came considerable earlier than Darwin (In the German Ideology it is most developed). Rather than try and work out what he means by reconstruction of a whole era, we can take the easier path of reconstructing the whole concept in which the sexual division of labour is labeled as natural. Deep within this is the concept that exchange-value as a social relation is entirely social (alienated from natural conditions), while productive relations preceding this were less alienated from nature (they have components that rest directly on the natural world or are directly conditioned by it). The origin of the sexual division of labour lies in the natural world as transmuted by the social world (which is not the same as saying that biology dictates). It is the form of this transmutation which is passed over by Marx by his term "natural" - it is not explored but occupies a logically determined place in is understanding (despite whatever social prejudices he might have had as a 19th century man - I emphasize "despite"). Being a pre-darwinist conception, Marx sustains it in the light of biological evolution but never elaborates further. So we are not confronted with some mere slippage of a misogynist Marx, what is within the concept of "nature" as Marx used it, is room for an elaboration that he never made, we are not given the choice of dispensing with it or any short-cuts (ie modifications) rather at some point it has to be taken head on. If the natural division of labour is dispensed with then so too is the natural economy of pre-class societies and as they fall we loose sight of the peculiar nature of a society driven by social contradictions which stand on nature but work themselves out largely free of its constraints - in otherwords we lose sight of what is peculiar about capitalism - of contradictions running free through social life and tied into nature only at the point of production - which in history is a rather peculiar position to be in. Famine kills peasants, but in capitalism a bad season is an adjustment of prices in a world system. That is very peculiar - historically speaking - a capitalist farmer may go bankrupt but s/he will not suffer biologically because of nature's mischief. To return to the sexual division of labour as a natural one. The connection between nature and this division is not genetically determining (this could not have entered Marx's head), but biologically determining. 20th century thought dominated by genetics makes this mistake by identifying biology too closely with genes, hence to say nature is responsible becomes code for saying that genes determine. Despite Dawkins genes are not the be all and end all of biology, our bodies and their functions are not simply outgrowths of the battle for survival of genes - our bodies exist as natural entities within nature. Biological evolution is the struggle of existence of individual animals, which gains evolutionary expression through genes and is expressed as developing species (species don't compete, nor genes, but individual animals do even when they club together as protio-social animals). Humans by inventing society did not escape nature but side-stepped some of the natural contradictions. From a social perspective, individuals do not compete but societies do (compete for natural resources in the same sense of Darwinian animals do). This is a major difference that distinguishes human existence from animal existence. The social whole competes against other social wholes (not as much as some would think), but constantly it competes for its existence against nature, nature in this sense imposes limits but more so appears as both provider and enemy. Given a social group which has to reproduce both socially and biologically (the former presupposing the latter) is pressed by nature (which may well include other human beings in other social groups) the invention of the sexual division of labour is natural (notice the contradictions of invention which is social and natural which is imposed). Rather then being gene driven, it is biologically driven that is given biologies manifestation in living human beings of both sexes and a number of ages at any one time. This is a given just as biological roles in sexual reproduction are. It is a natural condition, wholly natural - but the response to it is social (in fact the proportions of age and sex and the number of those within a given society results from social production not any pregiven genetic disposition) - thus the sexual division of labour was an invention, not a gene driven cul-de-sac, but one directly determined by nature. Marx's conception (carried on by Engels) is correct in calling such a division natural, for once societies came into being the struggle of individual existence was sublimated to the struggle for on-going social existence and this dictated that women were best left to the tasks near the camp and men best left to the risks of the periphery. A society can loose a lot of males and still succeed in reproducing itself socially and biologically, but it can afford to lose only a few reproductive females before it goes into crisis - that is the connection between nature and society - the biological imperative from what so much has grown and that is why Marx properly identified it as natural. Now that we live in gigantic societies (perhaps just one gigantic society) where social contradictions are allowed to playout (there is a definite natural limit to how far this can proceed), the sexual division of labour remains, but only as a hang-over from our shared history (not denying its critical importance in less developed parts of the world). The 20th century could well deny there was anything natural about it, but this is a product of our times and an anachronism that should not be loaded onto Marx. Greg Schofield Perth Australia --- Message Received --- From: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 21:21:00 -0500 Subject: [PEN-L:19019] Re: query: Engels & anthropology]] I fwd Jim's query to a Chicago anthropologist who posts to lbo occasionally. Her reply below which seems quite useful. Carrol -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Fwd: [PEN-L:18974] query: Engels & anthropology] Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 20:32:16 -0500 From: Maureen Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hi Carrol, No, not in Africa - just swamped here in gray Chicago. Including right now being in the midst of a messy and unanticipated change of residence. I'd walk to the bookshelf and look for some possible citations re the query, but my books are boxed up or otherwise chaotically strewn about the apartment at the moment. In general though, you might want to point out that some of Engels' ideas continue to be influential, even mainstream, in the soc sciences, e.g. the linked association between the narrowing of wider kinship relations to the patriarchal nuclear family and increased economic specialization/industrialization. And his production/reproduction distinction was a central component of the Marxist (esp. French structuralist) econ anthropology that flourished in the seventies. Not surprisingly it's his interpretations most bound up with 19th c. social evolutionary theory that are most "trashed." That, and his (related) presumption that there was an original, egalitarian, "natural" gendered division of labor (women = domestic/reproductive sphere, men = outside jural and econ spheres). Both ideas - that gendered divisions of labor are ever natural, and that a gendered domestic/public division could ever be separate-but-equal egalitarian - have been widely refuted. But there's a modified version of the latter theme, that the extent of male dominance is proportional to the degree of division between a social formation's domestic and public spheres (hunter-gatherers tending towards one end, peasant and industrial societies at the other), that does have a respectable following. In another vein, there's an influential collection from the late eighties, ed. by Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako, _Gender and Kinship: Essays Towards a Unified Analysis_ that addresses the same intersection of issues as Engels, and would probably give a representative taste of where recent anthropology has gone with these issues. Among other things it's an effort to get beyond sweeping gender dichotomies that western scholars since well before Engels have taken to be universal (public/domestic, nature/culture, production/reproduction), when they actually say more about experiences of western/bourgeois history and cateogories. Their larger point is that even approaches that locate women's universal oppression in dichotomous cultural categories and social structures (not biological "natural fact") still get caught up in the same quagmire they're trying to avoid. The sweeping dichotomies still end up locating the subordination in biological facts of reproduction and they do so in tautological ways. ...It's not an entirely convincing argument, but they make many intelligent points (with several good ethnographic cases). And it's been influential enough that contemporary anthropologists who want to continue talking in terms of these sorts of universal dichotomies have to address their critiques. ...Hoping to re-enter some list discussions some time in the next month, and hope your wrist's fully recovered from your fall (dios mio that was a while ago wasn't it??) Maureen
