8/12/2019 [1975] Andr Gunder Frank. Anthropology = Ideology Applied Anthopology = Politics (In: Race & Class, pp. 57-68)

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Anthropology = ideologyapplied anthropology = politics*

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK is Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck-Institut,Starnberg, Germany.

Anthropology: Plus quachange, plus ca reste le m6me.(French saying)

Applied Anthropology: Changes must be introducedto keep things as they are.

( Th eL eopard )

Maurice Freedmans essay is presented to us by Sol Tax as aremarkable cooperative achievement; its breadth and highquality make it worthy of the fullest attention; and itssignificance for anthropology also requires critical discussion.Yes and no, with certain reservations! The essay exhibitsbreadth - and shallowness. Its occasional high quality insightsare swamped and negated by a morass of confused irrelevancies.The construction of the argument falls on sophistry of falsedisjunctions and identities. Its significance lies in the realproblems - the function and future of anthropology andanthropological ideology - which in the essay are conspicuousby their absence or avoidance. It is remarkable indeed thatinternational cooperation leads to such embarrassing results.

That is why the essay requires critical discussion.The whole of the co-ordinates and opposite attractions of

*This paper is a comment on Maurice Freedmans Social and Cultural Anthropology,written for the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and EthnologicalSciences, Chicago, September 1973, at the invitation of its President, Sol Tax.

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the first two main chapters (A and B), which reappear in laterones as well, rest on, or more precisely fall with, a series of falsedisjunctions and a few false identities to boot.

The oppositions between description and theory, science andart, comparison and particularism, structure and history, andevolutionism and functionalism rest on an un- indeed anti-scientific sophistry that is the authors figleaf for the totalmisunderstanding and mystification of evolution and history.We may well wonder whether ... the category of history hasany great relevance to anthropology, Freedman writes (p.27).No wonder he wonders, if history is what Freedman claims. We

mayrescue

him from his doubt and saythat it

certainlyhas no

_

relevance at all, if history is no more than given to the particular, =the descriptive, and the humanistic ... when its opposite isstructure (pp. 27-9), if not all historical writing (pace sometheorists) is diachronic and concerned with change while muchof it is a synchrony set back in time (p. 97). It would bedifficult to select a set of terms more erroneously opposite ofconcrete history and real historical writing, whose very essenceis the diachronical interaction between the structure of changeand the change of structure, which determine the descriptiveparticular, and which takes place throughout time, past, presentand future in combined and uneven development. -1

It is only Freedmans total theoretical obfuscation andideological negation of history and evolution that permit himto counterpose history to structure and the latter to evolution-(ism) and function(alism) (pp.27-31 ), or to pose such absurddisjunctions as in the long view [of the evolutionist vision ] ,there is beautiful order; in the short, a recalcitrant variety(p. 88), while identifying contemporary evolutionism andfunctionalism (that is seeking to attach some of the meritedprestige of the former to the also merited growing disrepute ofthe latter) through indications of their common heritage (p. 30),as though common origins could not lead to a diverse and even

opposing presentand

future,as

theyhave

throughall

natural

evolution and social history. Thus Freedman falls prey to andperpetuates the anti-scientific ideology of a Radcliffe-Brown, .the arch-priest of anthropological structural-functionalism .. ,(p. 30), who persuaded generations that history is irrelevant to

.

his reactionary pseudo-structure, and pseudo-function, and that

of the &dquo;structure&dquo;of structuralism, a doctrine [sic! ) which,ramifying in the kingdom of knowledge, has a branch in anthro-

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pology to which the name of L6vi-Strauss is attached (p. 28)in such a manner that time becomes irrelevant because neutral

(p. 30); because, in fact as L6vi-Strauss himself emphasizes butFreedman and others like to forget, that structuralism onlydeals with the structure of models and never of concrete -that is, historical - reality. No wonder that time is irrelevantand that Freedman wonders if history is relevant if by act ofideological definition history is vacated of all real content andreality is left out of account! And that from someone whohimself dares to tell us what it is all about, when he warns:

Above all, there is a danger in those reduced and impoverishedschemes of research which, for example, operate with simplenotions of social class and class exploitation or, as in some formsof neo-Marxism, with equally rudimentary concepts of powerand dominance (p. 155). We may be thankful, indeed, to MrFreedman and his colleagues for this warning, and theimpoverished schemes such as the co-ordinates of oppositeattractions, and rudimentary concepts, such as that of historymarshalled to back up this warning.

Moreover, Mr Freedmans Co-ordinates of study in time andspace also disregard, and thereby falsify, history in anotherimportant regard. In questioning and disregarding the relevanceof history they disregard the intimate relation between thehistory of the world and the history of anthropology itself.They disregard that, much of classical sociology arose withinthe context of a debate - first with eighteenth-century thought,the Enlightenment, and later with its true heir in the nineteenthcentury, Karl Marx,2 and that it has been said that anthropo-logy developed entirely independently of Marxism. Morecorrectly, 20th-century anthropology developed entirely inreaction to Marxism.3 Mr. Freedman and Co. and theanthropology they review further disregard - i.e., regard asirrelevant - not only history, but also materialism. They regardit to be irrelevant that their sociology and anthropology beganas and continued to be an ideological response to historical,materialism. ,

It may therefore be appropriate to review this ideologicalfunction of anthropology. Freedman himself offers us someinsights and cues for such a review, which his own ideologicalposition or limitations apparently inhibit him from pursuingto the readers advantage: j

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All anthropological theory changes with the world in which it is practised, ,but the response of applied anthropology in particular is more noticeable. ,... There is one point upon which nearly all anthropologists are agreed:applied anthropology is more like politics than engineering. It does not

-

rest upon a secure and precise theory ... (p. 111 ).

Agreed. But the political nature of applied anthropology is notso much a function of the insecurity or imprecision of its base, ,as it is a function of anthropologys application and functionitself. And the anthropological theory on which it rests, all the ,more so but not exclusively in view of its insecurity and .

imprecision, ismore

ideology than science. But this extension