Marxist analyses and social anthropology

This collection reflected the first evaluation among British and American anthropologists of the relevance of Marxist theory for their discipline. It is a classic teaching text.
Maurice Godelier's theme is the problem of the structural causality of the economic; Emanuel Terray applies the concepts and methods of historical materialism to a case of pre-capitalist economic formation in his study of classes and class-consciousness in the Abron kingdom of Gyaman; Joel Kahn explores the relationship between the scale of social and economic organization and the cycle of petty commodity production among blacksmiths in Indonesia: Stephan Feuchtwang offers an interpretation of the religion of Imperial China in terms of structures of exploitation; and Jonathan Friedmann reanalyses Leach's ethnography of the Kachin of Highland Burma from the standpoint of historical materialism. Maurice Bloch, who also provides the introduction to the volume, analyses causal relationships between kinship, system of production, and the representation of property. In addition, Raymond Firth's wide-ranging critical survey assesses the value of some central ideas of Marx and Engels to social anthropology and places in historical perspective the changing attitudes of social anthropologists to the Marxist tradition.