![]() ![]() In the tributary mode of production, the primary producer pays tribute in the form of material goods or labor to another individual or group of individuals who controls production through political, religious, or military force. However, power and authority may be exerted on specific groups based on age and gender. Domestic or kin-ordered production organizes work on the basis of family relations and does not necessarily involve formal social domination, or the control of and power over other people. Wolf identified three distinct modes of production in human history: domestic (kin-ordered), tributary, and capitalist. Marx argued that human consciousness is not determined by our cosmologies or beliefs but instead by our most basic human activity: work. This concept originated with anthropologist Eric Wolf, who was strongly influenced by the social theorist Karl Marx. ![]() Finally, Edward Said delivered what appears to have been the coup de grâce, by arguing that, in formulating the concept, Marx and Engels were the unwitting bearers of a noxious discourse that he termed ‘orientalism’ (see his 1979 book of the same name).\)Ī key concept in anthropological studies of economic life is the mode of production, or the social relations through which human labor is used to transform energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge. For example, Perry Anderson subjected the concept to a widely accepted empirical critique in his Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), while Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst made it the object of a (rather more controversial) theoretical critique in their Precapitalist Modes of Production (1975). In the 1970s, however, such hopes were exposed to a barrage of criticisms, which largely explain the concept's current eclipse, and which in one way or another appear to have owed something to the rise of structuralist Marxism. In the Cold War climate of the 1950s, Karl Wittfogel disinterred the concept in his Oriental Despotism (1957), suggesting that the real reason for its unpopularity in the Soviet Union was the uncomfortable similarity between it and the reality of Stalin's Russia.ĭuring the 1960s the concept excited some interest on the part of Western Marxists, who hoped that it might provide them with a means of avoiding a Eurocentric conception of social development. Between the two world wars, the idea was disavowed by Soviet-influenced Marxists, who probably saw it as an obstacle to the Soviet Union's political ambitions in and for the Far East. The subsequent status of the concept among Marxists and non-Marxists alike has varied with changes in the political climate. ![]() At other times-and this is what allowed them to broaden the range of societies to which the term was applied in most of their later work-they suggested that it was the communal nature of landholding that isolated the inhabitants of different villages from one another and so made them prey to state domination. Sometimes, especially in their earlier work, Marx and Engels stressed the dominant role that the state played in such societies because of either its monopoly of land ownership, its control over irrigation systems, or its sheer political and military power. Underlying this referential variation was a conceptual variation. Sometimes the term ‘Asiatic society’ was used to refer to all non-Western social forms other than ‘primitive-communism’ and slavery, whilst at others it (or its more common synonym oriental despotism) was said to be applicable only to the cases of Japan and China. Of all Karl Marx's conceptions of the modes of production which he considered to have provided the base for the various forms of society known to human history, this was perhaps the least developed, and is certainly the one that has given rise to the most controversy. ![]()
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