From Primitive Rebels to How to Change the World: Reflections on Two Periods in Anthropology and History

Introduction

Gavin Smith has taught anthropology at the University of Toronto since 1975, becoming a full professor in 1986 and reaching official retirement in 2010. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Barcelona and is currently co-editor of Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, a journal published in the Netherlands. Although his discipline is officially that of anthropology, Smith can be considered more broadly as an intellectual of the left, always integrating his anthropological research with social history and political economy.

At the forefront of Smith's intellectual concerns are political protest and forms of production, subjects he explored in both highland Peru and the shantytowns of Lima in 1972-3 and again in 1981. In 1978-79 he took his interest in petty commodity production and the history of property and labour relations to Valencia, Spain and later did extensive comparative work in Spain, France, and Italy on the relationship between capitalist production processes, the informal economy, regionalism, and politics. Ever moving with the times, his more recent work has explored the role of the European Union and other regulatory regimes in shaping both knowledge about Western Europe and the processes of production, memory, citizenship, and place-making on the ground.

Widely published in such important venues as the Journal of Peasant Studies, Critique of Anthropology, and other Canadian and Latin American journals, Smith has contributed greatly to a materialist and historicized anthropology. His Peruvian research culminated in his 1989 monograph Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru and his Spanish work in the 2006 book, co-authored with Susana Narotzky, Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain (both with the University of California Press). He has compiled his essays in collections whose titles speak for themselves: Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (Berg, 1999) and Critical Practice - Capitalism, History and Place: Essays In Historical Realism (Berghahn, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Challenging Anthropology: A Critical Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (with David Turner, McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, 1979) and of the important collection, Between History and Histories: The Production of Silences and Commemorations (with Gerald Sider, University of Toronto Press, 1997), as well as Rethinking Petty Commodity Production (1986, with Jonathan Barker). This list of publications is far from exhaustive. All of Smith's writing is characterized by attention to modes of social reproduction at multiple levels of scale, the articulation of power to lived experience, and the role of engaged intellectuals.

The talk published here, on the occasion of Smith's retirement, illustrates why Gavin has been such an arresting presence in the department at Toronto and in the profession more generally - a scholar who is forceful, witty, erudite, elegant, personal, passionate, and uncompromising. It would be impossible to exaggerate Gavin's influence as a teacher, colleague, and mentor and as an intellectual and professional presence in anthropology more widely. Gavin Smith has been a charismatic force, moral visionary, and guide for generations of students, many of whom have gone on to write and research in the particular tradition of critical social science that he helped to establish in Canada and that he energetically nurtured for more than three decades. Staunchly realist, creatively materialist, scholarly rigorous, and politically engaged, Gavin Smith's work illuminates the intersection of theorized histories of productive relations, class conflict, and forms of regional and political identity. Retired in name only, Smith continues to be a forceful and creative presence.

Michael Lambek
Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto

• From Primitive Rebels to How to Change the World: Reflections on Two Periods in Anthropology and History
• Gavin Smith (bio)

Gavin Smith 2010

A little while before he died of cancer in 1999, I wrote a letter to Eric Wolf, telling him my story of the "Three Erics I Have Known". One of these, my uncle Eric, born in Vienna the youngest child of Melanie Klein, had married my father's sister and found himself the idiosyncratic...