Paper short abstract:

This is Part A of an introduction to the panel that sets out programmatic approaches for anthropology to center around Marxian and related analyses of social dynamics as structured over time and place in the context of global capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

In this introduction to the panel we set out an agenda to centralize the productive relationship between anthropology and the Marxist tradition. The aim is to strengthen anthropology as a cosmopolitan and dynamic part of those social scienes that contribute powerfully to a relational critique of global capitalism over place and time.

It means overcoming the shortcomings of current mainstream anthropology as visible in the latter's reaction to the recent turmoil in the capitalist world system. While mainstream anthropology has never been Marxist, the "globalisation" debate of the 1990s and its flat ontology of global versus meant that many anthropologists completely lost sight of the elementary structures of capitalism and their cyclical seismic changes. This briefly changed with an interest in "neoliberalism", which ironically however soon became yet another way of not speaking of capitalism. In response to the "crisis", then, we now see an even more defensive move toward "ethnographic theory" and "ethnographies of hope".

Showing an alternative to such revionist approaches, we will argue for strategies to overcome the lack of historically and geographically engaged theorizing in these recent mainstream moves. Such strategies include studying the production of value as inextricable from the relations of production and abandoning a notion of "diversity" that is blind to the inherent contradictions of capitalism. (Continued in: Introduction Part B)

Paper short abstract:

This is Part B of an introduction to the panel that sets out programmatic approaches for anthropology to center around Marxian and related analyses of social dynamics as structured over time and place in the context of global capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

(Continued from Introduction Part A)

As part of a Marxist agenda for anthropology, we likewise suggest studying those socio-economic practices that are increasingly misunderstood as role-models for a primitivist universal communism for the "99 percent" rather as effects of capitalist change. Such Marxist and related anthropology interprets "theory" and "methodology" in a radically different way from mainstream currents in anthropology and enables us to identify the interlinked, even if divergent, historical class trajectories unfolding in the capitalist world system. Yet, the repertoire of Marxism, at the same time, can be sharpened through critical anthropological engagement. Anthropology can help redress the scientistic and positivist biases in Marxism in other disciplines and restore its dialectical holism while adding relational foundations on the micro-level as much as on the macro-level of empirical and theoretical work. Using the strengths of global anthropology, we re-assert a Marxism that can help understand global class trajectories and other elementary structures of capitalism as deeply embedded in people's working lives, everyday experiences, and collective interpretations of the world --a relational and dialectical Marxism that can help prepare the ground for a real confrontation with capitalism's manifold miseries.

Paper short abstract:

Relying on case studies from the South, this paper discusses some subaltern groups’ forms of resistance against local materialization of global capitalism in the Sahel. In a broader and theoretical perspective, this paper questions the emancipatory role that political theories give to tactical and marginal forms of resistance of dispersed subjectivities while refusing collective strategies. In Gramscian terms, the paper wonders whether and how margins may turn into the scene of an organic counter-hegemony in an uneven capitalist world.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses some subaltern groups' resistance against local materialization of global capitalism. The paper relies on evidence collected during ethnographic and field analysis of some of these phenomena, such as former slaves mobilisation against speculation in African slums; "hunger riots" in the Sahel against food prices fluctuating on the global market; rebellions, banditry of former nomadic people coping with modernity. These experiences show the resistance capacities even of very subaltern groups coping with capital and market-driven crisis in these margins as new frontiers of capital. They seemingly confirm contemporary radical theories stressing the role of multitudes in struggling directly with the "Empire". The spatial margins of a globalized world may then turn out to be what Harvey calls "spaces of hope". Nevertheless, one should question the very impact of small-scale, and spontaneous popular bursts of counter-hegemony as long as political and economic dynamics affecting them are of the large-scale and structural type. Global capitalism turns into a "spectre": while it is a "presence" when incarnating locally with real and even tragic effects, it turns into a distant and inconceivable entity when asked to be politically accountable and socially managed. Small-scale, local and spontaneous resistances turn into a way for exorcising crisis. In a theoretical perspective, this paper questions the emancipatory role that political theories give to tactical resistance of dispersed subjectivities while refusing collective strategies. In Gramscian terms, the paper wonders whether margins may turn into the scene of an organic counter-hegemony in an uneven capitalist world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks back at the beginnings of Marxist anthropology in the 1970s, its temporary demise in the 1980s, its subversive continuation under the label of "political economy", and its resurgence as a much broader program in the 1990s-2000s.

Paper long abstract:

If, in the course of crisis and global transformation, we are talking again about a Marxist anthropology, it may be useful to try to conceptualize what that could be, how its intellectual program can be distinguished, and on what existing work it may build. I will look back at the beginnings of Marxist anthropology in the 1970s, its temporary demise as an explicit program in the 1980s, its subversive continuation under the label of "political economy" in Canada and the US, and its resurgence as a much broader program under various (inter)disciplinary guises in the 1990s-2000s, including also my own work. And I will discuss two or three things I know about how and why it must differ from the anarchist and Maussian anthropologies that currently seem to flourish.

Paper short abstract:

In Kinshasa an ideology of largesse means that politicians who have stored billions in off-shore accounts are proclaimed as wealth creators. I draw on Marx's theories of alienation and fetishism, and on theories of underdevelopment.

Paper long abstract:

In Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, the ability of 'extraordinary individuals' - be they politicians, gangsters, celebrity courtesans, popstars or pentecostal pastors - to acquire and distribute material and emotional goods on retinues, are crucial to popular ideas of legitimacy such that politicians who have stored billions in off-shore accounts are locally proclaimed as wealth creators. While recent political theories about Africa have tended to connect such figures to Weberesque ideas of patrimonialism or charisma, this paper hopes to demonstrate that Marxist forms of analysis offer greater insight into such phenomena. Specifically this paper will show how these forms of personal politics are underwritten by stable forms of appropriation, rooted in longue durée political economic facts about controlling the wealth of the interior and using it to truck with powerful outsiders. Drawing particularly on Marx's theories of alienation and fetishism, and on theories of underdevelopment, I look at the role of such ideologies in the perpetuation of a political economy of scarcity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes relations between nationalist formation and development of capitalist markets in Northeast Asia. By focusing on the Japanese response to US imperialism, I will explore the role of nationalist precepts in reordering Japanese society and the Korean peninsula in economic terms of industrial capitalism

Paper long abstract:

Ideas of globalization have stifled the imagination of social scientists and anthropologists, leading many to the naïve belief that national states are declining in the face of global capital. Ironically European invention of nationalism, and its uncanny ability to naturalize the capitalist state, was not only preceded by global markets but conditioned by the emergence of the global system of industrial capitalism. Many of the forecasts of the nation-state's demise are premised on a naturalization of state power that is eerily similar to the myths nationalists used to simultaneously build states and capitalist markets in the 19th Century. This paper analyzes relations between nationalist formation and development of capitalist markets in Northeast Asia. By focusing on the Japanese response to US imperialism, I will explore the role of nationalist precepts in reordering Japanese society and the Korean peninsula in economic terms of industrial capitalism. In building a strong nationalist state and a vast colonial project throughout East Asia, Japan laid the cultural and structural basis for the modern Korean states as well as South Korea's so-called economic miracle. Through this unique colonial experience, Japanese governors imposed capitalism and the politics of nationalism on the Korean peninsula. Central to these developments were the novel ways that the Japanese state directed capital, technology, and labor in terms European ideas of race and nation.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Gramsci’s work on hegemony, this paper maintains that the Chinese state’s production of marriage as an ‘apolitical’ field contributes to the reproduction of the capitalist system. At the same time, informants’ talk on marriage destabilises the state’s claim to be the sole legitimate moral referent.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on data collected in different cities of China's east coast to argue that the Chinese state's discursive production of marriage as an 'apolitical' matter contributes to sustaining the hegemonic political/economic system. According to Yang (2000), the ritual economy constitutes an isolated space where 'alternative logics' contest the capitalist system. A Gramscian perspective shows how it is precisely through the production of these fields as 'apolitical' that the Chinese state has maintained its legitimacy across the Open Door Reform and is continuously renegotiating consent.

In China, the 1950 marriage law stipulated that marriage had to be based on the spouses' affection and on their commitment to jointly undertake the project of socialist construction. In the post-Mao, however, state propaganda and the media gradually ceased to portray marriage as a matter of politics. The development of market economy and of consumer culture encouraged Chinese citizens to practice courtship and marriage as if they belonged to an 'apolitical' sphere of individual needs for competition and consumption. Marriage, however, remains also a family matter, where both feelings and wealth are at stake.

As the state retrenches from service provision and labour competition becomes more fierce, urban-based citizens struggle to become 'eligible' on the marriage market. While the Chinese state makes continuous efforts to produce a believable ideal of society, informants voice their growing discontent about the rise of 'hedonism' versus 'old values' of companionship. These ideological tensions point at the inherent instability of hegemonic systems, and do not necessarily herald the subversion of capitalism.

Paper short abstract:

If power bloc dominance of liberal democracy makes popular demonstrations mere rituals and the technical apparatus of capital and the state delimits direct action, can history help us to find effective forms of leverage for a revolutionary future?

Paper long abstract:

This paper starts from two assumptions. First that, because dominant blocs now use liberal democracy unapologetically as an instrument of rule (rather than 'representation'), so the persuasion effect of popular mobilizations cannot be translated into very effective political leverage. And second the leverage of more direct actions is limited by the technical apparatus at the disposal of capital and the state. The operative question then becomes, what leverage tools and sites might be identified for an effective revolutionary politics of the left? The paper takes a highly selective view of historical moments as a means for starting such an enquiry.

Paper short abstract:

At present capitalist financial crises lead to episodes of "primitive accumulation" in which wholesale dispossession of subaltern classes occurs. Anthropology, which up to now has failed to contribute to an understanding of capitalism, must develop a theorization of primitive accumulation.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the recurrent and intensified crises of global capitalism, contemporary anthropology and its current fetishization of ethnography and "culture" has so far done little to contribute to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, class formation, and the destabilizing processes by which capitalism generates, as Sider (2005) has pointed out, chaos among those who are its objects of control and exploitation. This failure is most explicit in the case of what Marx in Capital I referred to as "primitive accumulation" or what Harvey (2003) refers to as "accumulation by dispossession."

In a period dominated by finance capital and its crises of surplus absorption, and where the succession of "stable" capitalist labor regimes across the world has accelerated, leaving devalued classes and terrain in their wake, the processes of primitive accumulation have become the principal means through which accelerated capital accumulation now takes place. Thus the anthropological study of primitive accumulation must be central to a revitalized Marxist anthropology of the present. How therefore does anthropology theorize the processes by which capitalist states and capitalist corporations act together in the looting and wholesale appropriation of the means of production and reproduction of subaltern classes, and thus destroy and derange the relationships the latter have to these means of production and reproduction? In this paper, I ask, and seek to provide provisional answers to the questions: "What would an anthropological theorization of primitive accumulation look like?" And, "What are the methods within anthropology that would develop this theorization?"

Paper short abstract:

This paper articulates a historical sociology of the processes of dispossession and subordination through which Adivasis have been adversely incorporated into the political economy of postcolonial India. The paper draws on Gramscian perspectives on uneven development and modern state-making.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an historical-sociological account of the processes of dispossession and subordination through which Adivasis have been adversely incorporated into the political economy of capitalist development in postcolonial India. Specifically, the paper uses a Gramscian framework to trace the historical processes through which Bhil Adivasis in Western India have been constituted as marginal peasants and migrant labourers whose material deprivation is compounded by political disenfranchisement in relation to the Indian state.

The lineages of contemporary poverty and political disempowerment among Adivasis in India is located in two intertwined processes of restructuring that unfolded under colonial rule: on the one hand, the "primitive accumulation" of land and forests as these were incorporated in colonial revenue systems and global orbits of commodity exchange; on the other hand, the transition from a precolonial system of "shared sovereignty" towards the colonial prerogative of "exclusive sovereignty". Further, this political and economic structure was reproduced after independence as postcolonial processes of state formation were negotiated within a "passive revolution" that entrenched dominant structures of class power across spatial scales in independent India.

Theoretically, the paper will argue that a conceptualization of these processes entails an analytical engagement with "connected histories" of capitalist development and state formation across significant historical time and spatial scales. Drawing on Gramscian perspectives on uneven development and modern state-making, the paper articulates some central elements for a critical historical sociology of contemporary patterns of adverse incorporation among India's Adivasis.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the phenomenon of global large-scale land acquisitions, commonly known as ‘land grabbing’. This process seems to be at odds with some dominant trends in global capitalism to date. The paper will present an analysis of land grabbing, in particular in post-socialist Eurasia, and intends to discuss some benefits and limitations of a political economy approach in explaining this phenomenon.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the phenomenon of global large-scale land acquisitions, generally called 'land grabbing'. The land rush with the increase of investors' appetite for the primary sector and rural areas which takes place in developing countries and, although less known, developed countries, seems to be, at least partly, at odds with dominant trends such de-industrialisation in the West, increasingly urbanising capitalism, 'flexible accumulation' and sub-contracting, while intimately connected with the trend of increasing financialisation.

The paper will analyse field work and macro data on the global land rush, paying attention in particular to post-socialist Eurasia (Russia, Ukraine), widely seen as the re-emerging 'global breadbasket'. The agricultural sector of this region, as will be argued, rapidly moves from a 'backward' sector towards a forefront of global financialisation in agriculture, and therefore, its scrutiny is expected to generate fresh insights into the above-mentioned processes. Furthermore, the paper intends to discuss some benefits and limitations of a anthropological political economy approach in explaining a phenomenon such as global land grabbing.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the appropriation and transformation by the global tourism industry of collectively laboured social spaces. Such labour contributes to the surplus extraction in tourism as the capitalist subsumption of its oeuvres leads to the conversion of social space into land-as-a-commodity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper calls for attention to a process of accumulation in tourism that takes place outside the arenas of service-related labour and building activities. Instead I show how the global tourism industry also depends on the rather invisible appropriation of the localised, unwaged, yet highly productive labour stored in collectively produced social spaces.

In order to unveil this appropriation, I bring together the work on urban space of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. In applying their analysis to accumulation processes in the tourism industry of Majorca, I introduce a concrete example of how this industry incorporates the reproduction of social relations into the very process of production, thus, production-as-a-totality.

I illustrate this with two ethnographic sketches: First, how collective labour intended to rescue the built heritage and to liven up a gentrifying neighbourhood on the margins of the centre of the capital city is appropriated as the area becomes part of the existing tourism circuit. Second, how the conservation efforts towards the Northern Majorcan mountain range serve the same pattern of accumulation as it becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Such collectively laboured oeuvres, are thus converted into capitalist exchange value, land-as-a-commodity, which ultimately turns collective labour into unwaged labour for capitalism. What is happening is a quasi-perennial "original accumulation of capital".

By emphasising that theoretical and methodological insights need to be combined in order to understand the capitalist subsumption of collective labour, I stress ethnography is an essential project for social anthropology rather than a self-explanatory program per se.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores and critiques recent Marxist theories of space in neoliberal global capitalism by looking at the history of regulation of traffic systems in post-colonial African cities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores recent Marxist theories of space (Harvey 2001;2006; Candeias 2009) and discusses whether the development of traffic systems in post-colonial African cities substantiates the notion of a recent shift from "fordist" to "postfordist" capitalism. It argues that the real changes in African urban transport systems are not "neoliberal" shifts from public ownership to privatisation. Instead, since 1990, governments have established bodies for self-regulation. Rather than simply "deregulating" a formerly "regulated" urban transport system, these bodies tend to develop into corporatist institutions. This is most visible in Michael Sata's program in 1992 to reestablish public transport in Lusaka by enabling young men to acquire small buses and licences to operate, provided they were unionized.

These policies significantly affect the working class in African cities. Governments prioritise certain parts of cities in service delivery while neglecting others. Also, drivers and sometimes owners of buses are part of the urban working class. Many studies praise how local creativity has helped bridging transport deficits as government funds are limited. I argue that while creative reactions have produced some benefits, businesses with more capital control the most important routes, influence fares and dominate regulatory bodies. In several instances (Nairobi, Lusaka), the latter have been accused of having mafia-style structures.

Employing a historical perspective, I ask whether the said changes can be termed neoliberal and how regulation theory's diagnosis that a new accumulation regime has supplanted the old allows us to assess such urban transport projects.

Paper short abstract:

As Marx describes, localized economic upheavals provide a vehicle for capital accumulation by multiple means, including the dispossession of rural (and more recently urban) populations and the mobilization of labour whose exits and entries into wage labour are calculated on terms beyond their control. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Philippines and in Canada’s deindustrialized hinterlands, this paper examines how “neoliberal” restructuring of Canada’s immigration policy further privileges capital through the delivery of migrant workers experiencing different modes of dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists offer unique purchase on global processes and local lives, but this necessitates attention to the workings of capitalism. As Marx describes, localized economic upheavals provide a vehicle for capital accumulation by multiple means, including the dispossession of rural (and more recently urban) populations and the mobilization of labour whose exits and entries into wage labour are calculated on terms beyond their control. While it has become fashionable to link such disruptions to livelihoods and ways of living with the agendas of neoliberal states, more probing of people's responses to displacement, dispossession, and enforced geographic mobilities is required to move us beyond facile pronouncements. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Philippines and in Canada's deindustrialized hinterlands, this paper examines how "neoliberal" restructuring of Canada's immigration policy further privileges capital through the delivery of migrant workers experiencing different modes of dispossession. State-pressured labour market adjustments in Canadian regional political economies include further restrictions for seasonal workers receiving (un)employment insurance. Such workers are challenged to enter labour slots now occupied by temporary foreign workers, primarily Filipino. Meanwhile, in immigrant source countries such as the Philippines, thousands of skilled worker applications have been cancelled, clearing new terrain for employer-driven "just-in-time" immigration. This paper contrasts the continued devaluation of increasingly educated Filipino immigrants with the dispossession of contemporary Canadian workers in regional economies where employment is unpredictable. Neoliberal policy diffusion among immigration countries is thus linked to domestic uneven development, surely the proper subject of anthropology enquiry.

Paper short abstract:

This paper rethinks anthropology through the lens of labor, to encourage a critical engagement with important but marginalized anthropological forbearers and to imagine a "turn" in anthropology toward questions of labor, inequality and power.

Paper long abstract:

The insecurity and precariousness of our times are not altogether new. Some anthropologists in the past--St. Clair Drake, George Balandier, Bernard Magubane and Godfrey and Monica Wilson, among others--conducted fieldwork among laboring populations undergoing "detribalization," "proletarianization," and rural-urban migration, but while they studied particular cultural groups, they also questioned accepted disciplinary frameworks by exploring how their subjects' lives were shaped at the juncture of local and global processes and the "here"/"elsewhere" spatial divide. The promise of their innovative approaches, however, remains unrealized, as their work has too often been marginalized and their individual projects have not reoriented anthropology's very understanding of itself. This paper rethinks their work through the lens of labor, in order to help foster the "political turn" that their perspectives might have presaged.

Paper short abstract:

Developing a more nuanced picture of the historical and materialist roots of the ’new Left’, I situate how the trade union movements in Nepal and South Africa are embedded in their national histories of crypto-colonialism. Enlarging the scope of the embeddedness concept, I then juxtapose these findings with presumptions of anthropological studies of global neoliberalism.

Paper long abstract:

Michael Herzfeld (2005) argued that 'crypto-colonies' are doubly victimized. Not only have they suffered the effects of colonialism itself until the 1940s, their exposure to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s could not be challenged by reliance on the discursive and material socio-economic achievements of anti-colonial struggle. What then does the renewed global interest in Marxian thinking mean for these countries?

In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of the trade union movements in Nepal and South Africa to discuss what Kozloff (2008) called 'new Left' for the distinctively different context of South America - a fusion of indigenous rights movements, revived trade unions and resistance to hegemonic neoliberalism. A defining feature of both the Nepali and South African movements is a more pronounced recognition of the different and possibly overlapping social and cultural identities that shape economic, political and social realities. Both of these movements are much more explicitly concerned with addressing the inequalities and exploitation associated with social attributes such as race, caste and ethnicity.

In its heydays, neoliberalism prominently spoke the language of development in both Nepal and South Africa. As national trade union movements increasingly spoke out against such policies -- through anti-Panchayat movement in Nepal and anti-apartheid movement in South Africa -- their actions became embedded in a changing global context of movements which were much more diverse than is often acknowledged.

Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines the specific contribution marxist traditions can have to understanding the relationship between workers' militance and the contexts of transmission of historical memory. This theoretical puzzle is adressed through the case of the history of workers' militance in the Spanish railway sector from the last years of the Franco regime onwards.

Paper long abstract:

Using the case of workers' militance in the Spanish railway sector, from the last years of the Franco regime onwards, this paper seeks to formulate the specific contribution marxist traditions can make to the anthropology of memory and labour. Following especially its dialogue with oral history in the 1980s, the anthropology of labour has acknowledged the role of memory in structuring working class militance. However, contemporary understandings of the role of historical memory in working class militance still lack a comprehensive formulation of the relationship between working-class experience, transmission of memory and workers' radicalism. This, I argue, is partly due to the insistence on seeing social memory processes as internal to predefined groups. As I will try to show through the case of Spanish railway workers, one of the specific contributions marxism can make to the anthropology of memory and labour is a better understanding of the way in which the social contexts of speaking about memory are historically structured. This leads, in turns, to a specific task of the anthropologist when dealing with histories of militance: the task of treating any analysis of working class identity in the present as a social history of working class possibilities of speaking the past.

Paper short abstract:

Interest in Marxist anthropology has been stimulated by the recent economic crisis, but it also reflects the limitations of important disciplinary orientations over the past few decades. This paper identifies those orientations and their limitations, and relates Marxist approaches to them.

Paper long abstract:

The recent economic crisis has stimulated many to think again about the nature of social life and of the ways that we approach it. This rethinking has an ethical dimension, as the crisis makes the question of justice especially insistent. It also has a more purely academic dimension, as it has raised questions about how we can understand the nature of the crisis and its consequences. This paper seeks to locate this re-thinking in terms of the recent intellectual history of important parts of anthropology, particularly postmodernism and the cultural turn. It argues that these marked a fundamental shift in the ways that many anthropologists saw the world and the processes that exist within it, and the sorts of questions that they could ask about that world, including questions about topics that conventionally come within the purview of Marxist thought, especially the topic of class. The paper argues that the crisis has not only encouraged doubts about important institutions in the world, such as those in the financial system and national governments. In addition, it has encouraged doubts about those older anthropological orientations. This paper suggests that one of the reasons why Marxist orientations have become more popular recently is that they help overcome some of the important ethical and academic limitations of postmodernism and culturalism.

Paper short abstract:

"No measure will ever wrench from cities their fundamental irreducibility." (Latour 2006) Against Latour's foreclosure, this paper argues that structural Marxist ideas like 'determination in the last instance' by the economy can usefully be deployed by an urban anthropology which aspires to reduce urban complexity rather than to celebrate its irreducibility.

Paper long abstract:

Articulated around clarion calls such as 'Back to things!' (Latour 2005: 23), a burgeoning community of scholars have recently attempted to highlight the agentic power of nonhuman, material 'actants'. However, thinkers focused on emancipating tangible actants have betrayed a tendency to elide the significance of what they consider to be non-material 'factors', such as 'capitalism' or human intentionality. Referring to the anthropology of the built environment, I will suggest that the long-forgotten Althusserian (1969) concepts of 'overdetermination', 'determination in the last instance' and 'relative autonomy' point in the direction of how to appreciate the complexity and heterogeneity of the agentic field surrounding architecture, without foreclosing the possibility that factors might ultimately end up being more important than actants.

Laying common ground between materiality and materialism, I will identify 'the economy', or more specifically, the mode of production as a powerful factor-actant ('factant'), which ties the realms of the 'abstract' (relations of production) inextricably with the 'material' qua 'physical' (productive forces). Citing my ethnographic research in Warsaw, I want to claim that the place and role of architecture in a given social setting is determined in the last instance by its relation to the (political) economy. The task of an anthropologist investigating this determination is to test the strength of the last instance; to illustrate whether and how the determination of the built environment by the mode of production is mediated by a 'concrete diversity' (Godelier 1978) of 'relatively autonomous' material and immaterial entities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how foundational concepts of Marxist inquiry may be applied to the analysis of migration. It argues that by drawing on the key precepts of Marxism, can conundrums in efforts to rethink migration theory be addressed both within and beyond the discipline of anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which foundational concepts of Marxist inquiry may be applied to the analysis of migration. It argues that by drawing on the ideas of class differentiation, accumulation, exploitation and relative surplus population, can conundrums in efforts to rethink migration theory be addressed both within and beyond the discipline of anthropology. In making this argument, the paper begins with a consideration of the ways in which key concepts in Marxism may be applied to the study of migration, countering claims that unitary frameworks fail to illuminate its complexities. Then, by focusing on the example of Chinese trans- regional and transnational migration, the paper advances the notion of thinking through migration in terms of 'the migration question' as embedded in and conditioned by the formations of capitalism.