RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY GROUP TALKS IN LONDON
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Radical Anthropology
Evolution, Archaeology and History
Summer 2013
Symbolic culture emerged in Africa over 100,000 years ago, in a social revolution whose echoes can still be heard in myths and rituals around the world. These talks are a general introduction to anthropology, including the latest findings from genetics, evolutionary biology, primatology, cave painting research and archaeology. There is hot food in the venue and plenty of time afterwards for socialising in local pubs.
May 7 Revolution in Judea: Jesus in anthropological perspective Chris Knight
May 14 Early human culture as reverse dominance Chris Knight
May 21 Culture as creative refusal David Graeber
May 28 Greenham Common: a modern matriarchy June Cleevely
June 4 The secrets of Stonehenge: a critique of Mike Parker Pearson Lionel Sims
June 11 Frogs, moon and sun at the Avebury monuments Lionel Sims
June 18 The origin of the family, private property and the state Chris Knight
June 25 Red stars and snowy mountains: linking folklore and archaeology Fabio Silva
All talks held at the St Martinʼs Community Centre
43 Carol St, London NW1 0HT (2 minutes from Camden tube)
Tuesday evenings, 6.15–9.00 pm.
radicalanthropologygroup.org
For regular updates on meetings and anthropology news, please follow us on Twitter (@radicalanthro) and Facebook
Just back from the talk. Extremely interesting, with wide ranging discussion, from which I learned a lot, got some good further reading recommendations as well. One of which, and one which was central to the talk, is Hyam Maccoby's book Revolution in Judea. While I disagree with Chris (and probably Hyam Maccoby) about the definitive proof of Jesus the man existing (Josephus was stated as the main source). And the description of Jesus as an (early utopian) communist and revolutionary akin to Che Guevara to be unproven and speculative. I did find the relation between tribal totemism and Christianity's tradition of communion to be truly fascinating.Chris also kindly offered to do a talk at head office which I shall pass on to the campaigns department.All in all a very enjoyable evening and I will certainly be back for more.
Ed wrote:Chris also kindly offered to do a talk at head office which I shall pass on to the campaigns department.All in all a very enjoyable evening and I will certainly be back for more.Excellent stuff and I'm sure were all looking forward to your next report
‘Culture as creative refusal’ a talk and discussion led by David Graeber (author of ‘Debt: the first 5000 years’).Tuesday, May 21st 6.15–9.00 pm. Venue: The St Martinʼs Community Centre 43 Carol St, London NW1 0HT (2 minutes from Camden tube) http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org
Just occurred; an even more important meeting is taking place on the same evening as Graeber's talk on May 21st……http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/event/democracy-corporation-city-london-chiswick-800pmDeary me; black mark and no picture of the speaker either!
Here's how Chris Harman's review (from International Socialist Journal No 54, Spring 1992) of Chris Knight's book on Blood Relations and the theory behind it begins:
Quote:Every generation of Marxists has to fight its battle against those who produce the latest proofs — strangely enough, always the same old proofs — that Marxism is finished. But we have also had, repeatedly, to fight another, even more tiresome battle against people who claim to be on our own side. Ever since Herr Professor Durhing beguiled half the intellectuals of the German socialist movement with his ''revolution in science'' in the 1880s, Marxists have had to expose a series of intellectual quacks who have tried to present their pet systems of myths and half truths as the latest thing in scientific advance.Chris Knight's book about the origins of human culture falls straight into the same tradition of quackery.Every chapter is headed by a quote from Marx. But the intellectual basis of the book owes little to Marx's insistence that the social production is the key to the development of humanity.Rather Knight's acknowledges his debt to: ''sociobiology's achievements'' in seeing that ''what animates … the flesh and blood individual…are…genes…whose only law is to survive..'' to the mystical poets Peter Redgrove and Penelope Sharp, whose ''style and tone'', he tells us, is ''Jungian'' to those ''involved in the Greenham Common anti-missile campaigns of the early 1980s'' who refused ''to collaborate in the whole masculinist political set up…'' and to his ''political friends'' which include prominent Labour MP Ken Livingstone and two lesser known luminaries of the London Labour left, Keith Veness and Graham Bash.His politics are those of the Labour left of a decade ago — when Knight himself edited the ''personal politics'' section of the Labour Briefing, mixing Greenham Common feminism with municipal socialism — and his methodology is a similarly eclectic. The resulting confusion leads to absurdities like speaking of a ''class conflict…between genders'' among ''monkeys and apes''.I think Chris Knight's politics may have changed since then but not his basic theory. But we shouldn't reject Harman's criticism just because he was a member of the SWP. On this issue he could be right. Certainly the alternative view of the origin of human society that he presented in Engels and the Origin of Human Society is impressive.
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