the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Lubbock, p. z) the curious (!) practice that a man’s heirs [but thenthey are not the man’s heirs; these civilized asses cannot free themselvesof their own conventionalities] are not his own, but his sister’s children.”Marx’s notes on Lubbock include a long extract from Cervantes, DonQuixote, where a point is made about delivering the great from need as(Marx’s parallel) in India the divinity is ransomed from his chains (excerpts,p. 4·)86Marx’s notes on Lubbock presuppose his having read Morgan, Maine,and Phear: thus, McLennan and Bachofen began their development ofmarriage and the family with a stage of hetaerism or communal marriage;to which Marx comments, “And Lubbock says, p. 70, that he believesthis nonsense, i.e., therefore identifies communal marriage and hetaerism;whereas clearly hetaerism is a form which presupposes prostitution (andthis exists only in opposition to marriage, whether communal, etc., ormonogamic. This therefore^ hysteron proteron.” (Marx, Lubbock excerpts,p. 1). Engels, following Morgan, brought in hetaerism only afterthe introduction of monogamy.87 McLennan had considered thatmarriage by capture arose out of tribal exogamy. Lubbock: “I believethat exogamy arose from marriage by capture__ ” 88 Marx commented(I.e.): “ Lubb. knows nothing of the basis - the gens.”5. G EN ER A L CONSIDERATIONS OF TH E HISTORICAL PLACEM ENTOF TH ESE WORKSThe place in the history of ethnology of the authors and works treatedhere and Marx’s relation both to them and to the ethnological fieldthrough them, may be examined within the tradition of the empiricalstudy of living peoples and of peoples of the past. Ethnography was thenbeing established by the initiation of reports by observers who set asidelong periods of residence among the ethnographic subjects, and who hadno obvious axe to grind in the way of demonstrating the superiority,innate or achieved, of race, of one mode of life, or of one religious beliefover another. In part for this reason, the ethnographer at that time tookon the viewpoint of an objective, distanced natural scientist, describingmen as though his relation to them were other than that of man to man,which is the formicological viewpoint of Hippolyte Taine. The sciencesof man had co-opted the field of ethnology and anthropology from thephilosophical study of the same undertaken by Kant, Hegel, Fichte,Feuerbach, a tradition out of which Marx emerged, which had figured inhis doctoral dissertation and in his Economic-Philosophical Manuscriptsof 1844.The work of Phear approaches the methods of modern ethnography,in part is identical with it, in part falls away by its representation of anabstract type specimen of the agricultural village of East Bengal. It44