I don't know what his status was at Yale (beyond his status as a visitor) but I bet he was doing more teaching that just frosh anthro in 1970-71. I do know that one of the profs during the Spring semester (who was subbing for Murra, I believe) threw off a remark like "you know he's a Marxist, don't you?" I guess he was hoping that we'd reject Murra's perspective. In reality, he presented a bunch of different perspectives, including ones he likely disagreed with strongly. Alas, he didn't talk much about the Incas. -- Jim Devine / "The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous." -- Naomi Klein.
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition November 4, 2006 Saturday Obituary: John Victor Murra: An anthropologist who dedicated himself to understanding the Incan civilisation BYLINE: Olivia Harris SECTION: GUARDIAN OBITUARIES PAGES; Pg. 39 The anthropologist and historian John Victor Murra, who has died aged 90, revolutionised the study and understanding of the Inca state. While earlier scholars had been fascinated by its unique and exotic features - marvelling at the vast centralised state stretching for thousands of kilometres along the Andean chain, functioning without the wheel, without markets or money and, apparently, without any form of writing - Murra's genius was to analyse it as a system of extraordinarily effective administration. He was born Isak Lipschitz, a year before the Russian revolution of 1917, in Odessa, the cosmopolitan Black Sea port. His earliest memory was of running over the bridge spanning the Dnieper into Romania with his mother carrying the family silver on her back and guns firing behind them as the young Soviet Union was engulfed in civil war. He grew up in Bucharest, identifying enthusiastically with a country in the process of inventing itself as a nation, in the shadow of the ruins of the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires. However, as the ultra-nationalist and anti-semitic Iron Guard gained prominence in his early teens he joined the social democratic youth movement associated with the Communist party. By 1934, his parents - despairing of keeping him out of jail - arranged for him to go to the US, where one of his uncles was a double bass player in Chicago. Murra studied at Chicago University during the tenure of AR Radcliffe-Brown, leader of the distinctive intellectual tradition of British social anthropology. While he learned much, he was a rebel, standing at the back of Radcliffe-Brown's lectures shouting "what about the class struggle?". He briefly married Virginia Miller, a fellow militant, volunteered for Spain and from 1936 to 1939 he was in the 58th battalion of the 15th (International) Brigade of the Republican army defending the Spanish republic against Franco's rightwing insurgency. Fluent in Russian, Romanian, French, German, English and Spanish, he was seconded to the high command during the civil war as a translator. This gave him an unrivalled understanding of the workings of power, and the devious manipulations of the commissars. Wounded in action, he escaped over the Pyrenees at the end of the war and found himself stranded in an internment camp on the beach of Argeles with thousands of others. Again working as a translator, he was shocked by the cynicism of the Communist party as many ex-combatants went home to certain death at the hands of their now fascist governments. His ex-wife arranged for his visa to return to the US, undoubtedly saving his life. But his commitment to communism was over, the final blow having been the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, and he left the party. As a break with his past he reinvented himself as John Victor Murra. Mura (meaning blackberry) was his Romanian nickname because of his piercing black eyes; Victor signalled his radical politics, and John he chose as anonymous, down-to-earth, American. During the second world war he worked with the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, and visited Ecuador. With the coming of the cold war, anti-left witch-hunts and restrictions on anyone suspected of having communist sympathies, he was first denied US citizenship, and after it was granted he was refused a passport until 1956. He therefore turned to historical sources for his PhD, at Chicago, The Economic Organisation of the Inca State. Murra's fascination with the workings of Andean civilisations, and the originality of his analysis, were grounded in his identification as a Romanian, and in what he had learnt as a young militant. One of the factors that drew him to study the Inca state was undoubtedly the way it had been compared with the fledgling Soviet Union and identified as the "first socialist state", notably by the French rightwing historian Louis Baudin. His readings of the 16th-century Spanish sources were attuned not to the divine rulers, nor to the exotic cosmology, but to the far more pragmatic questions of how this unique polity was organised and run. He believed passionately that it was a precious resource for humanity, because it was a great and distinctive civilisation that had developed independent of European or Asian influence. He was no romantic, still less anti-power. He celebrated the efficient running of an extraordinarily centralised system of government in the apparently unpromising environment of the central Andes, and sought to understand the symbolic and material means by which ordinary peasants saw the state as a source of justice, and were encouraged to work for their rulers. At the same time the Romanian in him was attuned to the margins rather than the Inca royal capital of Cusco. The figures he identified with especially were the provincial bureaucrats who kept the census and distributed the work allocations; the ethnic groups that were able to avoid hunger by a sophisticated practice of managing far-flung resources at different altitudes. He dismissed the term "Spanish conquest". For him, what had happened was an invasion - conquest implied a legitimisation of the new order. It had been a catastrophe, the loss of unique knowledge and understanding, partly through wilful destruction and partly through ignorance and misunderstanding. At the same time, he appreciated those Spanish officials and soldiers who began to get a grasp of the civilisation they were destroying, and his later research focused on such figures. The robust materialism of Murra's approach was taken up by the Marxist anthropology of the 1970s. At the same time, new generations of indigenous intellectuals in South America were inspired by his work, and used it in their attempts to revitalise their own social traditions. He held various academic posts in the US, notably in Puerto Rico, and at Vassar College and Cornell University in New York state. An indefatigable traveller, he spent much time in Latin America. He was a co-founder in 1964 of the prestigious Institute of Peruvian Studies, and in 1966 the great Peruvian writer Jose Maria Arguedas dedicated to Murra one of his most famous poems Llamado a Algunos Doctores. Anthropology was his home, Murra often said. Murra was a man of intense paradox: patriarchal and authoritarian, he was also deeply supportive of women in their struggles to create personal space and gain professional recognition - one of his students, the Californian feminist Laura X, had earlier adopted his surname as her own. He loathed the Soviet regimes, and admired and appreciated the localism of US politics, but believed in a strong state, and had little sympathy for the libertarian student movements of the late 1960s. The figures he most admired were often powerful strategists: people such as his Romanian comrade Petru Navodaru, or Angel Palerm, the Catalan republican commander turned Mexican anthropologist. He was an enthusiastic advocate of psychotherapy, and before his death donated many notebooks of his own dreams to the US National Anthropological Archives. His second marriage to Elizabeth Sawyer ended in divorce. He had no children, but he was an inspiring teacher and father figure to an extraordinary range of people across the world, and he was an indefatigable correspondent. His sister Ata survives him in Romania. John Victor Murra, anthropologist, born August 24 1916; died October 16 2006
