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

In his History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology, Donald Donham states that, "the goal of Marxism is not just to construct social theory. Its final aim is to provide the terms for understanding history in some specificity" (p. 18). Donham does just that for the Maale of southern Ethiopia. Using Maale ethnography as both the object of his study, and the vehicle for an extended theoretical discussion about social and historical analysis, he also confronts Marxism with anthropology in order to sharpen each one's critical edge.

The University of California Press has reissued History, Power, Ideology (originally published by Cambridge in 1990) as a companion to Donham's 1999 book on the socialist revolution in Maale, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. At first glance, it might seem that an eleven-year-old book analyzing "central issues in Marxism" might have been surpassed by events. In Ethiopia as, indeed, on the rest of the continent, socialism of whatever stripe has generally given way to neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, academics--Africanist and otherwise--seem little interested in applying Marx's theories to a "postsocialist" world. Donham addresses this fact in his Preface to the 1999 Edition, and recalls a conversation in which he bemoaned recent academic indifference to Marx: "[A]n elder in the field quietly asserted, 'Wait until the next stock market crash.'" (p. xi).

Well, the crash has since arrived, but we need not have waited in order to make this a worthwhile text. While Donham's dissections of some fine points of Marxist debate will not interest every reader, the book's great strength is its painstaking, understated layering of Maale ethnography, each batch of data accompanied by a new analytical revelation that builds on the preceding discussion. The Introduction sets out his theoretical problem, of borrowing from anthropology to correct some of Marxism's oversights, and vice versa. Chapter One interrogates the usefulness of neoclassical analyses (especially Chayanov's and Marshall Sahlins') to the Maale material. Because this model fails to account for the importance of power and ideology in reproducing "productive inequalities"--Donham's gloss of Marx's produktionsverhältnisse--he introduces the Marxist anthropological analyses of Claude Meillassoux in Chapter Two. This model emphasizes the "domestic mode of production," in which household heads guarantee women and children the right to subsistence but retain control of all domestic surpluses, and in which lineage elders control exogamous marriage exchange, and thus the possibilities of reproduction. Donham argues that Meillassoux's argument works by sleight of hand. It takes as given what it should explain, namely, the reproduction of men's control over women's capacities, and fails to account for the factors that determine why some lineages and households grow at others' expense. These distinctions grow, writes Donham, out of productive, not reproductive inequalities, although their basis in wealth in people may confuse this issue.

In Chapter Three, Donham uses Maale ethnographic materials to explore both the gendered division of labor and the domestic cycle to see how specific ethnographic facts affect the generalized theory of the domestic mode of production. Central to his discussion of this point is his exploration of "fertility fetishism," the key ideology that helped reproduce inequalities in Maale society, both between men and women, eldest and younger brothers, and the Maale King and commoners. A structured hierarchy of men, ranging from the king down to household heads, exerted an ideological control over human, agricultural and livestock fertility, and used this preeminence to extract labor and animals from those who relied upon their goodwill. Fertility fetishism's role in Maale society is similar to that of commodity fetishism in capitalist societies. Anthropologists like Meillassoux, Donham argues, have taken local ideology at face value: "In fact, the reproduction of Maale society had as much to do with labour as with biological generation. . . . But no cultural vocabulary...