Uneven and combined development in anthropology

In this brief essay, we suggest that contemporary efforts at reworking Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) are enriched by an historical ethnographic lens focused on “real people doing real things,” which grounds and de-fetishizes the abstractions of capitalist development. We sketch three ways to develop UCD to better apprehend contemporary capitalism: tracing the effects of unevenness and combination within social formations; pointing to the ways those processes fracture historical consciousness; and underscoring the political implications for dividing populations and for creating novel combinations of people and socio-political experience.