the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

approaches the modern ethnography by the infrequency of the intrusionof the ethnographer, the accumulation of detail about a particular subject,e.g., the household accounts and the listings of the household furnishings,the enumerations of the types of landholdings and the dues levied on each,and by its spatio-temporal specificity, contradicted in turn by his asseverationof the type. Morgan’s work includes four chapters of descriptionof the Iroquois gens, phratry, tribe and confederacy, and compendiousdescriptions of Greek and Roman institutions of the same scope. Maineapplied the Brehon tracts to an insight into the Irish antiquities. All theseethnographies, after the fashion of that time, provided a knowledge indetail of a particular people in a particular subject matter: material culture,household economy, social and political organization, kinshiporganization, legal customs, with insight into the mode of life of thepeoples whose practices were described. These concrescences werejoined in the cases of Morgan and Maine to general theories of developmentof political and kinship organization, or legal organization. Thework of Lubbock, in contrast, belongs to the opposite tradition ofscattered data unrelated to ethnographic particularity, of which HerbertSpencer was the coeval representative, and which has since fallen intodisuse.Morgan and Lubbock figure among the leading writers in ethnology ofthe late nineteenth century; Marx was no doubt well served in choosingthem as the indicators of the state of development of the science. Hehad treated of Kovalevsky, Tylor, Maurer and Bastian in other contexts.(See Addendum 2 on Tylor and Bastian; see above on Maurer andKovalevsky.)The interrelation of the abstract and the concrete data was developedduring the late nineteenth century in ethnology, yet the subjective andthe objective sides of the nascent science were not well formulated. Marxin his correspondence and in his ethnological notes drew attention to thecultural limitations of the observer, in which the mode of social life ofthe observer formed his object-glass. There remains to be integratedinto the field of ethnology the relation of the human actuality to thepotentiality of man as subject in relation to the object, man the subjectof the ethnography, on the one side. And on the other, there remains theactual disunity and opposition of man in relation to the potentiality ofunity with himself, society and nature, positions which had been setforth by Marx four decades earlier.Hegel comprehended civil society in its unity, Marx in its internalopposition; common to the two is the formation of civil society as theachievement of the civilized condition, as the condition of that condition,which is a process of general development on the one side, of the particularhistory on in the other, and the relation between the general and theparticular. The achievement of civilized condition as the human agency45