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Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the October 1917 Commemoration

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Notes

  1. For Mauss, see Fournier 2006; Gane 1992 (which includes Mauss’ analysis of Bolshevism); Graeber 2001, 2014; Hart 2007, 2014; Sigaud 2002.

  2. It is remarkable how little has been published about the German and Hungarian revolutions in 1918–1919 and the political confrontations in their aftermath. The commemoration of the end of WW1 will be an opportunity: see recently Dent 2018 on Budapest, and Niess 2017 on Germany (hopefully to be translated).

  3. In several lectures, I have recently suggested that Wolf was fundamentally inspired by Trotsky without ever citing him, except an oblique reference in the Russian chapter in Peasant Wars (1969). Anthony Marcus tells me that he had helped in clearing Eric Wolf’s book shelves at the Graduate Center, CUNY, after his retirement. I quote him verbatim: “He let me have most of his books—Trotsky, Trotsky, Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel. So why did he never cite (them) in his … anthropological works? In an obituary I wrote for him in 2000, I suggested that Sons of the Shaking Earth read like a Trotskian doing Mexican history, though I was more polite in my language” (personal communication, email, May 8, 2018).

  4. There is a remarkable upsurge of interest in “combined and uneven development” both in anthropology and more broadly, see for anthropology Kasmir and Gill 2016; Kalb 2018b; Kasmir and Gill 2018. More broadly, for example: Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015; Davidson 2012; Dunn and Radice 2006.

  5. I recommend a quick stroll through the early volumes of the Zeitschrift für Sozial Politik to get an overwhelming sense of this. For anthropologists, I would also like to point to Otto Rühle’s two volume Illustrierte Kultur und Sittengeschichte des Proletariats (Berlin 1930; “Illustrated Cultural History of the Proletariat”). Rühle was a close collaborator of Trotsky and Luxemburg, and an adult teacher.

  6. Keith Hart has emphasized the importance of his journalistic writing, for which see Fournier 2006 in particular.

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Acknowledgements

This essay was presented in early form in lectures at respectively CUNY Graduate Center, New York, November 2017, and Central European University, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Budapest, January 2018. I thank David Harvey in New York and Daniel Monterescu and Dorit Geva in Budapest for the invitations. I also thank the public for their active prompting. Several friends have been part of conversations that form a background to this paper, including Chris Hann, Sharryn Kasmir, and Gavin Smith (I am omitting a larger list of interlocutors to whom I am sincerely grateful). I thank Oana Mateescu for research assistance and for seminal conversations on Marcel Mauss, on whom we do not always agree.

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  1. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Don Kalb

  2. University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands

    Don Kalb

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Kalb, D. Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the October 1917 Commemoration. Dialect Anthropol 42, 327–343 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9525-6

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