Historiographical representations of materialist anthropology in the Canadian setting, 1972-1982

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to make a contribution to the historiography of North American anthropology in the 1970s. Specifically, it asserts that by focussing exclusively on academic literature, the historiographical representations of materialist anthropology in this period are incomplete. Starting with the work by Sherry Ortner and William Roseberry on the development of Marxist anthropology and their analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the political economy and structural Marxist / mode of production trends in the discipline, it then turns to the explication of two case studies, from the Canadian context in the 1970s, where these approaches confronted each other directly. In particular, it examines the application of anthropological theories to the representation of Indigenous economies in disputes about resource development projects in the Canadian North. In these two examples — a court case, Kanatewat v. James Bay Development Corporation, where the Cree of James Bay sought an injunction against the construction of a series of dams which would flood large parts of their homeland, and a tribunal, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, where the Dene and Inuit sought to demonstrate that the construction of a massive gas pipeline would irrevocably damage the land and their societies and economies as a result — advocates for the projects adopted a political economy orientation to justify development in the regions, while those working on behalf of the Indigenous groups adopted an approach based on mode of production analyses to demonstrate the continuing vitality of Indigenous economies and social structures. More generally, I will show that the historiography of the period does not accurately reflect the relative impact of the two approaches on the wider world beyond the discipline; the conclusion includes a discussion of this problem as a problem shared by the historiography of anthropology more generally.