the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

actuality of the relations of the science of nature and of human historyfrom their potentiality; in this sense the periodization of human progressand the natural teleology are like, as potentially they are one, while actuallydifferent.Anthropology as a discipline has become increasingly empirical andself-sufficient in the past century. It had successively freed itself of culturalbondage as a particularism, together with biological, geographicand cultural-abstract determinism. It has at the same time separated itselffrom its own past, each generation in turn disinheriting its forerunner;yet each forerunner has retained its partisans in the next. The relation ofanthropology, not as a deterministic historicism, but as a historism, towit, the recounting of the story of man which is at once an accounting forhumanity in terms of a principle remains to be taken up; on the otherhand, the interrelation between the actual and the potential condition ofhumanity is eschewed as a speculative fantasy. Teleology was exorcisedas a doctrine by A. L. Kroeber’s disavowal of the organicism of thesuperorganic; there is left only the positing of man in the kingdom ofnature. Man is an animal as any other, but requires a special discipline ofanthropology, separated from the others. The last remnant of Cartesianismremains to be exorcised, revived in its subjective side by Jean-Paul Sartre. Man is related in and to the kingdom of nature; the resolutionof the subjective paradox of man’s imagined privilege and of theobjective teleology and ideological entelechy implied therein is a problemoutside the dialectic.The central figure of ethnology in these pages has been that of Morgan,as it was for Marx. Before all else it is needful to point to Morgan’scommitment to the totality of his doctrine, just as Walter Kaufmann hasrecently brought out the same in regard to Hegel, and all have in regardto Marx. Marx, Engels, Bachofen, White recognized this character inMorgan, which influenced their approaches to ethnology. The doctrineof Morgan was an amalgamation of scientific method, a simple materialism,and utopianism; it brought together what is perhaps the mostconvincing representation of man’s social development in its day.Morgan displayed originality and learning both in classical and contemporaryethnology, including reports of his own fieldwork; he argued withacuity, showing the royalist interest of his contemporaries as against hisown republican interest, forming the amalgam of data and interpretationinto an all-embracing doctrine which was particular to its time, hencecannot be directly translated into ours. At the same time it is part ofthe material of the present, a century later, since his issues are continuousfrom that time to ours, his methods are part of our instrumentation, hisconceptions part of our own. A turnabout in the appraisal of Morgan hastaken place in anthropology, beyond his continued, selective advocacyby White, Childe, the earlier Social Democrats and the modem Soviet57