The Relevance of Anthropology? A Marxist Response

 

 

Firefly: My friends, this man’s case moves me deeply. Look at Chicolini! He sits there alone, an abject…

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Just after ten o’clock on Monday night, there was the first intimation that trouble was coming: sounds of a mass moving up the street outside – a sense of heavy presence. Turning off the lights, I looked out of the window. Down below, some sixty people were milling about. The constituency of the crowd was mixed: some white, some black, some Asian, though mostly young men. Many of them were hooded, their faces further hidden behind bicycle breath-masks, bandanas, or more…

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‘My own view is, and I still hold with this view, that in terms of the reaction of people, the reaction is going to be primarily Washington and not the country because I think the country doesn’t give much of a shit about it other than the ones we've already bugged…most people around the country think that this is routine, that everyone’s trying to bug everyone else, it’s politics. That’s my view.’



This was Nixon, speaking in the Oval Office on the morning of the 21st…

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I want to tell you about Henry Mayhew. His work is neither new (he wrote during the same decades as Charles Dickens), nor was he an anthropologist, yet for all that, he produced a vital and urgent anthropology that speaks critically to our current moment.



Mayhew’s aim (in his own words) was to ‘publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people… Continue