ALL STUDENTS MUST (RE-)READ
Frost, Robert Mending Wall 1914

A - Marx, Karl "History: Fundamental Conditions" in The German ideology. New York: International Publishers. [1845] 1970

B - Saussure, Ferdinand de "Linguistic value" in Course in General Linguistics pp. 111-122. Tr. by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. [1915] 1966

THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. (Rousseau 1754)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
(Marx 1852: Chapter 1)

 

Viruses do not name themselves, nor do they tell people what to do about them.

Only people can name and draw consequences

ON THE FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS OF ALL HUMAN LIVES: ACTION IN PRODUCTION

Two views of the making of marks, distinctions, boundaries and attending practices

Poets, philosophers and linguists (and many others) have noticed something that I take as fundamental to what drives anthropology: "why do walls make good neighbors when there is apparent other need for them and they may even be bad for everyone?"

 

Reading Marx as a guide for anthropological research using the classic questions:

  1. WHO makes/produces (history) (the conditions of existence)?
    1. Men (and women)?

    Marx: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals."
    2. MAN (human nature)?
    3. We (you and I)?
    4. They (the system? the capitalists? the neo-liberals?)
    5. ...
  2. WHAT is it that is made?
    1. nature?

    Marx: "[Human individuals] themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence."
    2. The means of their subsistence?
    3. what must be reproduced?
    4. History?
    5. future conditions

     

  3. HOW is it made?
    1. hands and/or minds?

    Marx: "The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce."
    2. by individual geniuses?
    3. by leading minorities?
    4. by inescapable interaction?
  4. WHEN is it made?
    1. with whom?

    Marx: "Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour. "
    2. with what?
    3. in what settings (context)?
    4. ...
  5. and then there is the question of "consciousness" (or is it communicational media and, first "language"?)
    1. imagination (how to tell the world to oneself): cognition, emotion, pre-judgments (domains of psychological anthropology)

    Marx: "we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life"
    2. narration (how to tell the world to others): dialogue, conversation, (domains of cultural anthropology)
    3. power of ideology (getting caught by our others): controversies, disciplines, (domains of political anthropology, discourse analysis, etc.)
  6. which leads to wondering whether "language" (and all communcation system) is to be approached as another human material product?
    1. the body as tool (the vocal box, the face, arms, etc.)

    Saussure: Language... is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty.

    2. the making of marks that make a difference (from phonemes to genres, etc.)
    3. development of conventions, need to live by conventions, change in conventions
    4. teaching, acquisition, of the conventions

People are united because they are people, that is to say distant beings. Language does not unite people. On the contrary it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate.-but also puts them in a community of intelligence (Rancière [1991] 1999: 58)

AND NOW FOR THE 'APPLIED' ANTHROPOLOGIST

  1. What is to be done next? (for whom? by whom?)
    1. by apprentice anthropologists (future anthropological research)
    2. by concerned citizens (including anthropologists)
    3. by "policy makers" (visionary philosophers like John Dewey, revolutionary politicians like Lenin)

      We [Margaret Mead and George Spindler] assumed that the educators wanted some help from anthropologists; so anthropologists, with two exceptions, wrote the papers, and the educators took the role of discussants and reactors. We began to solicit suggestions from educators as to what they wanted help on rather early in the progress of the planning and through the operations of several different planning groups, and we found that they had some rather clear-cut ideas as to the topical areas they wanted help on, but they didn’t always have a clear idea of the way in which the topical area should be put into problem form. This is because they were not, understandably, ready to take the role of the anthropologist so that the problem could be stated in their terms. (Spindler 1955: 261)