I am writing a piece about "How Anthropology Disparages Journalism and Activist Marxism," lauding CLR James as one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century. If you haven't read part of his oeuvre, you have missed a great Marxist humanist mind. James was a journalist, a revolutionary activist, a great critic of the Soviet Union, and a fierce African American activist.
It turns out that it is an anthropologist, Anna Grimshaw, a visual anthropologist at Emory, who was responsible for bringing much of James' work to public attention. In the 1980s I hosted Jim Murray, a James scholar, to Temple University's anthropology Department, to great fanfare. In my reconceptualizing anthropology as a citizens practive, largely colonized by bourgeois academics, overdetermined by Homo Academicus culture (see Bourdieu), I seek to reclaim the best of anthropology (with a small "a") for the educated lay public. That means Marx, Freire, Steffens, Cockburn, and James, among others. Here's an excerpt from an interview about CLR with anthropologist Grimshaw: "Kent: Do you think of him as an anthropologist? Anna: Do I think of James as an anthropologist? Yes, i n some sense... I wasn’t so aware of what the connections were between my anthropology and James’ approach to the world. I now see that they were very deeply and intimately connected, that he always began from what people actually did, how society worked, what people did in society, and of course that’s the20whole basis, or was the whole basis, of anthropological inquiry. It may not be so in the 1990s, but the real foundations of anthropology in the early 20th century were fieldwork, ethnography. And that was where James began. full: http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org/convers.html Comments welcome as I write this. . . Best, Brian McKenna
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