Marxist anthropology
Marxist anthropology analyzes social life through historical materialism, class relations, and the organization of production, exchange, and power.
Historical materialism: An approach to history that explains social change through material conditions and changing modes of production. Provides the account of historical change underlying Marxist anthropological explanations.
Karl Marx: A nineteenth-century philosopher and political economist whose work founded historical materialism and the critique of capitalism. His analysis of class, labor, and production supplies the approach’s central concepts.
Articulation of modes of production: The coexistence and interaction of distinct modes of production within one social formation. Used to explain how capitalist relations depend on noncapitalist forms of labor and production.
Cultural materialism: An anthropological approach that explains cultural practices through material conditions, infrastructure, and resource use. Shares materialist concerns but does not depend on Marxist class analysis.
Political economy: The study of how political power and economic activity shape one another. The wider analytical tradition through which Marxist anthropologists connect local life to institutions and markets.
Mode of production: A society’s organization of productive forces and relations of production. Links technologies and labor to the social relations Marxist anthropologists examine.
Friedrich Engels: A German social theorist and political activist who collaborated with Karl Marx and wrote on class and family history. His account of property, kinship, and the state shaped anthropological debates.
World-systems theory: A framework that explains global inequality through a capitalist world economy structured by core, periphery, and semiperiphery. Extends political-economic analysis from local communities to the global division of labor.
Structuralism: An approach that explains cultural meanings through underlying systems of relations and contrasts. Offers a different account of social structure, emphasizing symbolic systems over production relations.
Economic anthropology: The study of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption across human societies. Marxist anthropology helped establish production and power as central economic-anthropological questions.