Marxism and Political Anthropology: the Possibilities of Methodological Convergence

This article deals with the possibilities of integration of Marxist and neoevolutionary paradigms in history and anthropology. By the 1990s historical materialism and neoevolutionary branch of political anthropology reached a certain theoretical deadlock. Trying to preserve a holistic kernel of hist...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Целунов, Алексей Борисович
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:Russian
Published: МГУ имени М.В.Ломоносова (Lomonosov Moscow State University) 2018
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Online Access:http://www.historystudies.msu.ru/ojs2/index.php/ISIS/article/view/205
Description
Summary:This article deals with the possibilities of integration of Marxist and neoevolutionary paradigms in history and anthropology. By the 1990s historical materialism and neoevolutionary branch of political anthropology reached a certain theoretical deadlock. Trying to preserve a holistic kernel of historical materialist method, some marxists rejected the traditional five-membered scheme and embraced the fundamental similarity of social and economic nature of majority of known pre-capitalist societies. Yet the new-born model of a unified pre-capitalist formation lacks any historical dynamism. On the other hand, political anthropologists revising their own unified stadial sets developed a new vision which absorbed the concepts of contingency and multilinearity as well as collapse and desintegration in the societal development. Despite this its fundamentals are still based on the positivist theory of «factors». The return of world-wide holistic vision combined with the rediscovery of the traditional subjects of labour systems and modes of exploitation could enrich the euristic and explanatiory potential of political anthropology. Similarly, rich empirical data collected by the political anthropology could serve as a point of departure for deepening the marxist vision of social reproduction in pre-capitalist societies. К 1990-м годам как историко-материалистический метод, так и неоэволюционистские направления политической антропологии зашли в тупик. Сохранив своё холистическое ядро, а именно понимание человеческой истории как единого всемирно-исторического процесса, многие марксисты пришли к пересмотру традиционной формационной модели, признав фундаментальное сходство социально-экономического строя большинства докапиталистических обществ. Тем не менее, зародившиеся на почве этих сомнений социологические модели оказались слабо восприимчивыми к исторической динамике. С другой стороны, политическая антропология в попытке преодолеть универсально-стадиальный взгляд на общество пришла к представлению о разнонаправленности ...