A Radical Anthropologist

“Anthropology is a child of Western imperialism,” asserted the Marxist anthropologist Kathleen Gough in 1968, during an intense period of anti-colonial struggle in Asia and Africa. Since then, this assertion, now largely taken for granted within the discipline, has become more well-known than the intellectual who articulated it. A Radical Anthropologist: The Trials and Triumphs of Kathleen Gough tells the story of a scholar who, like many of her female peers, has been largely overlooked by history in spite of her striking contributions to her field. In her day, in the face of rampant sexism, she was an internationally renowned intellectual and political activist, publishing some seventy articles and ten books.

With clear and empathetic prose, author Sandra Lindemann, herself an anthropologist, invites us to trace the arc of a life lived according to the values of a radical anthropologist. Born in England in 1925 as the youngest daughter of the village blacksmith, Gough entered the world of higher education on scholarship and continued into academia with a pronounced sense of fairness and justice. Her outspokenness in favor of civil rights and against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War led to her placement on an FBI watch list, and institutional reactions to her progressive views disrupted her career trajectory on several occasions. She fielded the array of obstacles presented by workplace misogyny, only to find herself fired from some jobs and compelled, on principle, to resign from others. Eventually she withdrew from academia altogether to become an independent radical scholar, but not before her painstaking fieldwork in South India on marriage, class, and caste reshaped the anthropological understanding of these critical social relationships, and helped to transform the world of academia she had left behind. Through it all, she maintained her fierce dedication to the liberation of workers and peasants—whether in India, Vietnam, or anywhere in the world people were oppressed.

With the rise of fascism in the United States, and the unleashing of malign forces around the world, more than ever before those who struggle for justice are searching for examples of how to live a politically relevant life: Kathleen Gough’s is such a life. Fervently anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, Gough lived her life keeping a Marxist vision of a better, more peaceful, more equitable world in clear view at all times, never losing faith that such a world was within reach.