Thanks to Louis P. for forwarding the well written obit and for the link to his interesting piece on the Incas.
The remark Jim P repeats tells us an awful lot, no? I have always felt that the direct impact of the McCarthy era lingered on for decades. In fact, Murra was a leftist, but not a marxist. If he was in economics today we would call him a heterodox. Murra's point about the Inca Empire is that they are a "distributive" state-economy (which in Polanyi includes unequal redistribution) NOT an exploitative one. He sees labor hours as a means of social exchange but not of a measure of surplus extraction. He has given interviews where he emphasizes that, in general, he does not see class as a major impetus in society. IMO, Louis is right to contrast this with the work on the Incas of Tom Patterson, who is chair of UC Riverside Anthro, publishes books at Monthly Review and articles in Dialectical Anthropology. pleased to be spending Columbus Day on the Incas, Paul Jim D (responding to me responding to him and Louis P. writes
I don't know what his status was at Yale (beyond his status as a visitor) but I bet he was doing more teaching that just frosh anthro in 1970-71. I do know that one of the profs during the Spring semester (who was subbing for Murra, I believe) threw off a remark like "you know he's a Marxist, don't you?" I guess he was hoping that we'd reject Murra's perspective. In reality, he presented a bunch of different perspectives, including ones he likely disagreed with strongly. Alas, he didn't talk much about the Incas.
