Towards a dialectical anthropology of capitalism

Abstract

Classical logic, Hegel observed, is premised on atomistic categories, forcing its think-ers to apply either–or judgements – contingency or necessity, universal or particular, discrete or continuous, and so forth. Dialectical reason, by contrast, recognises such seeming antitheses as mutually constitutive sides of conceptual wholes – empty, that is, in and of themselves (Hegel 2010 [1812]).This insight gains relevance for the anthropology of capitalism due to our discip-line’s penchant for polemical reasoning, and one notable instance thereof. While its roots lie in earlier debates, the birth of Anthropology’s culture wars can be most read-ily set in the mid- 1970s. For it was then that Marvin Harris (1974) published his Cows, pigs, wars, and witches, followed by Marshall Sahlins’ (1976) Culture and practical reason. For Harris, human cultural diversity could best be understood, not through ‘spiritualized’ explanations, but by tracing particular cultural phenomena back to their ‘down- to- earth’ material causes (1974: 4). For Sahlins (1976), by contrast, cultures were to be understood as symbolic orders operating according to meaningful internal logics rather than to cross- culturally recognisable material conditions.