After being widely rejected in the late 20th century the work of Karl Marx is now being reassessed by many theorists and activists. Karl Marx, Anthropologist explores how this most influential of modern thinkers is still highly relevant for Anthropology today.

Marx was profoundly influenced by critical Enlightenment thought. He believed that humans were social individuals that simultaneously satisfied and forged their needs in the contexts of historically particular social relations and created cultures. Marx continually refined the empirical, philosophical, and practical dimensions of his anthropology throughout his lifetime.

Assessing key concepts, from the differences between class-based and classless societies to the roles of exploitation, alienation and domination in the making of social individuals, Karl Marx, Anthropologist is an essential guide to Marx's anthropological thought for the 21st century.

About the author

Tom Patterson is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of California at Riverside. He is author of many publications including Marx's Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists (2003) and A Social History of Anthropology in the United States (2001).

Contents

Preface
Chronology

Introduction
Polemics, Caveats, and Standpoints
Organization of the Book
Ch. 1 The Enlightenment and Anthropology
Early Enlightenment Thought
The World Historicized
The New Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Rousseau's Historical-Dialectical Anthropology
The Scottish Historical Philosophers
The Institutionalization of Anthropology
Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology
Herder's Historical-Dialectical Anthropology
Göttingen: Beyond "Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers"
Hegel's Critical-Historical Anthropology

Ch.2 Marx's Anthropology
What are Human Beings?
The Corporeal Organization of Human Beings
"Ensembles of Social Relations" and Human Beings
as Social Individuals
History
Truth and Praxis

Ch. 3 Human Natural Beings
Charles Darwin and the Development of Modern Evolutionary
Theory
Darwin's Metaphors and Theory of Evolution
by Natural Selection
The Problems of Variation and Inheritance
The Modern Synthesis and Beyond
Human Natural Beings: Bodies That Walk, Talk, Make Tools,
and Have Culture
Engels's "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition
from Ape to Man"
Fossils and Proteins
Demography and Population Structure
Marx on the Naturalization of Social Inequality
Ch. 4 Anthropology, History, and Social Formation
Marx's Historical-Dialectical Conceptual Framework
Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production
Primitive Communism
The Asiatic Mode of Production
and the Slavonic Transition
The Ancient Mode of Production
The Germanic Mode of Production
The Feudal Mode of Production
Societies and Cultures
Pre-Capitalist Societies: Limited, Local, and Vital
Human History Is Messy

Ch. 5 Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World
The Transition to Capitalism and its Development
The Articulation of Modes of Production
Property, Power, and Capitalist States

Ch. 6 Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century
Social Relations and the Formation of Social Individuals
Alienation
Domination, Exploitation, and Forms of Social Hierarchy
Resistance and Protest
Anthropology: "The Study of People in Crisis by People in Crisis"

Notes
Bibliography