As I understand it (this is not my field!), Murra was a pretty well known (and badly persecuted) leftist anthropologist; I know he is well thought of in the Andean countries among progressive anthropologists whom he put a lot of effort into supporting. Many feel his ideas got progressive anthro in the Andes out of a sterile dead end debate.
From 1945 to the early '60s persecution limited Murra to secondary research*. Also in those years class-type analyses were largely taboo (sorry) in U.S. academic anthropology. Murra focused on reconstruction pre-Columbian Andean Civilization and how the Inca economy formed the Inca state, drawing heavily on Karl Polanyi and the so-called Substantivist School. (As an crude analogy to Pen-l economists: think of the U.S. Institutionalists.) Before Murra (pre-WWII) the Incas were often portrayed as primitive socialists [imho, conflating the presence of village level communal structures, (ayllu), with the nature of the Inca Empire]. Conservative (mostly French) anthropologists emphasized that such Inca socialism was despotic and inefficient (they produced supply and demand curves to *prove* the Inca socialist inefficiency). An emerging group of Peruvian nationalist "indigenistas" portrayed the Inca empire as primitive socialism and welfare-ist. (Some people feel that the famous Peruvian marxist Mariategui lent himself to the latter interpretation.) Murra was the first to get away from that sterile dichotomy - and in a progressive direction. AFAIR, Murra emphasized that the Inca's political power combined with the sharply changing climate zones of the Andes opened new productive possibilities - especially for the staple maize which required special irrigation and, unlike the potato, could be centrally stored for a long period (akin to the role of rice in the empires in Asia). Geographically, the new production possibilities structured the exchange of products and labor in a vertical fashion up and down the mountains' ecological zones. Labor time is the key medium of exchange (in Murra's concept). So Murra is drawing on Polanyi's category of a "distributive" Empire (Polanyi himself had fallen into the trap of putting the Incas in a communal type "reciprocity" economy) and also drawing on anthro's "neo-evolutionist" school (crude analogy think "materialist" but not specifically marxian or class based materialism which later Murra said he did not favor and in any case he could not have written about in those years). Younger people like Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz would produce such work outside of the Andes, and move the ball a little bit to the left. And, lots of analogous discussions went on about centralized production in Asian empires (without much comparing of notes). For the study of the Andes, Substantivists and Marxists of many varieties followed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- *Murra was born Issac Lipschitz in Odessa Russia but eventually wound up in the US as a young man in the 1930s. He was very much a product of the U of Chicago in its leftist social science days of the '30s but he quickly left the U.S. to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (Murra was his nom de guerre) . As a result he was blacklisted, fought a long battle against deportation and for his citizenship, couldn't travel even for fieldwork, could not even apply for grants, and most of his career was spent on short term assignments (hence teaching freshmen...even if Jim was in the class). Despite his prestige he was only given a tenure track post in 1968 (at Cornell where he was isolated in the Anthro Dept but where people in Cornell Area Studies, Agric School and Labor Schools spoke well of him). Paul Jim D., responding to Louis P. writes:
I wasn't slamming Murra. It's possible that the book's value exceeded its down-side. I think Murra was one of the best profs I had at Yale. > Jim Devine wrote: > > When I was taking frosh anthropology at Yale 1970 or 1971, the prof, > > J.V. Murra (reputed to be a leftist) assigned a book, titled (I > > believe) "Life in the Barrio." It was a an example of "applied > > anthropology" (for either Venezuela or Colombia), in which > > anthro-tools were applied to tell the government how to control the > > barrio. > > I am not sure about what this says about Murra. I have read him on Inca > society and found it quite useful, especially in contextualizing the > kind of tribute that was extracted by the ruling class (it was minor > compared to European feudalism). > > I will be blogging about anthropology and imperialism later today, btw.
