History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology (review)

294 Book Reviews Note 1. See, for example, Paul B. Henze, The Horn of Africa: From War to Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); David A. Korn, Ethiopia, The United States, and the Soviet Union (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Marina Ottaway, Soviet and American Influence in the Horn ofAfrica (New York: Praeger, 1982); and Bruce D. Porter, The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology Donald L. Donham Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Editions de Ia Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Cambridge/Paris, 1990. 242 pp. Rarely could so much intellectual brilliance and meticulous scholarship have been expended to such stultifying effect as in the debates of the 1970s about the "relevance" of Marxism to the analysis of "noncapitalist social formations." The trouble lay in what the debate took for granted: the validity of the capitalist/noncapitalist dichotomy. This, of course, was just one of many versions of the "us and them" categorization of the world on which anthropology was founded. It is only now beginning to confront this problem as it attempts to overcome "otherness "—the tendency to define "them" as residual to "us"—while preserving difference. In this book, Donham has attempted a truly anthropological critique of Marxism, with the aim of constructing a relevant and defensible historical materialism. His critique consists, essentially, in showing that Marxism has been encumbered with the concepts and categories of the very capitalist system which it has sought to demystify. Such a task requires comparison; it requires gaining a perspective on capitalism (and, therefore, Marxism) from a safe distance. Donham finds this distance in his ethnographic study of Boia, a settlement of 500-odd households in Maale, southwestern Ethiopia, which he has already reported on in his book Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia (UMI Research Press, 1985). Book Reviews 195 He begins, in Chapter 1 (which first appeared in Man, 1981, pp. 515-41, under the title "Beyond the Domestic Mode of Production") by gaining a perspective on neoclassical models, applying Chayanov's dependency ratio theory and Sahlins's revision of it (still, according to Donham, essentially neoclassical) to household production in Bola. While neither theory accounts for the observed facts, they do lead to a "more rigorous and fine-grained analysis" (p. 46) which in turn reveals the general limits of neoclassicism: its "helplessness before histOTy" and its "lack of analysis of domination" (p. 48). This is where a historical materialist model is needed, but it cannot simply be found, or unearthed , in the works of Marx; it has to be constructed "not only from Marx's works but from those of his critics" (p. 51). This is attempted in Chapter 2, a beautifully clear exposition of recent discussions in Marxist theory, focusing particularly on how inequalities in relation to production ("productive inequalities" in Donham 's terminology) are regularly reproduced, and on what we should understand when it is stated that productive inequalities "determine" the superstructure ("reproductive schemata"). Donham follows G. A. Cohen's functional reading of determination—a certain set of productive inequalities select a certain set of reproductive schemata because they are consistent with (i.e., have positive consequences for) that particular set of inequalities. In this sense, the superstructure helps to explain the continuance of productive inequalities as weU as being explained by them. Of course, there are always functional alternatives to any particular set of reproductive schemata; one can only examine what did happen at a particular place and time, not what had to happen (p. 136). Thus Donham is led back, in Chapters 3 and 4, to Bola. Chapter 3 is an attempt to use Marxist theory to reveal the processes that reproduce household inequalities over time. The key concept here is fertility: Whereas in reality the success of men and women in accumulating wealth and in bearing children depended on their own productive and procreative powers, the way that labour was organised in Maale made it appear as if that success depended on other people's fertility: that of the king and chiefs in the first place, that of de- 196...