Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New light on old debates - Richard B. Lee
Submitted by hedgehog on Feb 10 2019 17:22
A leading specialist on hunter-gatherers exposes Steven Pinker’s poorly-researched claims that humans have always been war-like.
Richard Lee also summarises decades of research on hunter-gatherers showing how they emphasise food-sharing, gender equality and cooperative childcare. Lee concludes that it was this sort of less aggressive and more cooperative social environment in our evolutionary past that permitted the long childhoods required for human brain growth.
On "Bullshit Jobs"
This is a review of David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs."
'Communism in Living' - What can early human society teach us about the future? by Camilla Power
Submitted by hedgehog on Apr 1 2018 19:56
We need to appreciate the significance that understanding primitive communism held for the early Marxists.
Marx himself put aside his work on Capital to do some anthropology, which we find in his notebooks - from which Engels extracted the work which led to The origin of the family, private property and the state. Besides Marx and Engels, there is Rosa Luxemburg: as a prisoner in World War I, she wrote Introduction to political economy, where she deployed the cutting edge of anthropology of her day.
The illusion of the precapitalist gift - humanaesfera
What was the precapitalist gift? In what concrete material circumstances did it make sense? Here, we briefly want to show that the precapitalist conditions which made the gift to make sense are not only without return, but are also absolutely undesirable today. In communist society the enjoyment of the productive forces can neither be a gift nor an exchange of commodities.
A dissection of the metaphysics of scarcity - humanaesfera
Philosophical article that criticizes the metaphysics of scarcity, widely used (as "unquestionable presupposition") to justify the status quo, repression, commodity exchange, state, exploitation - a true theodicy (an imaginary justification of the sufferings and evils of the world). It shows how both economics and ecology are variations of this same metaphysics, radicalized by the commodity fetishism that pervades subjectivity in modern, capitalist society. And there's an addendum that addresses the pre-capitalist gift.
Abundance and scarcity in primitive societies – La Guerre Sociale
A 1977 text reviewing recent scholarship on social anthropology and its implications for understanding the communism of the past, and how it may shed light on the communism of the future, based for the most part on extensive excerpts from Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, as well as from the works of Pierre Clastres, Robert Gessain and other anthropologists and explorers.
Chris Knight’s theory of human origins: an abridged account
Edmund Bradden provides an introduction to Chris Knight's theory of human origins. Reposted from the 'Radical Anthropology Group' website.
Karl Marx en de Irokezen - Franklin Rosemont
In zijn laatste levensjaren werkte Karl Marx niet aan verdere delen van Het Kapitaal, maar verdiepte zich, aan de hand van antropologen als Lewis Morgan, in pre-kapitalistische sociale structuren, van de Amerikaanse indianen tot de Russische boerencommune. Volgens Franklin Rosemont zijn de conclusies die hij trok echter nog nauwelijks geregistreerd.
In dit essay uit 1989 verdiept Rosemont zich in Marx' Ethnological Notebooks en onderzoekt hun belang en betekenis voor de sociale bewegingen van vandaag.
The construction of homosexuality - David F. Greenberg
At various times, homosexuality has been considered the noblest of loves, a horrible sin, a psychological condition or grounds for torture and execution. David F. Greenberg argues that homosexuality is only deviant because society has constructed, or defined, it as deviant. The book examines a vast terrain of examples and details in the history of homosexuality.
Action Anthropology ot Applied Anarchism?
KENNETH MADDOCK, born in Hastings, New Zealand, 1937, is a first-generation New Zealander. He graduated in law from the University of Auckland, before turning to social anthropology in which he completes his degree this year.
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