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ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
A Study in Comparative Economics
Originally published in 1940 as
THE ECONOMIC LIFE OF PRIMITIVE PFOPLES
B Y
MELVILLE J. HERSKOVITS
1952
NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF
5; 1 1 IIS IS A ROR/OI BOOK
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Copyright 1910, 1952 by Melville J. Herskovtts. All rights reserved. No part of this book in excess of five hundred words may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland &• Stewart Limited.
Originally published in 19-JO as THE ECONOMIC LIFE OF PRIMIIIVK PEOPLES. Second edition, revised, enlarged, rewritten, reset, and printed from new plates.
ECONOMIC: ANTHROPOLOGY
PREFACE
THIS BOOK, a thorough revision of The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples, is an introduction to comparative economics, in the broadest sense of the term. It would have been desirable so to entitle it, had not economic science already assigned to this designation the more restricted field of the comparison of free enterprise with communist and fascist economies. The present title, which stems from a suggestion put forward in 1927 by N. S. B. Gras, seemed a feasible alternative, especially since the term "economic anthropology" has slowly been finding a place in the relevant anthropological literature. It is to be hoped that it will gain currency among economists to define an aspect of their discipline whose significance is receiving increasing recog- nition from them.
The change in title represents a reorientation in point of view that goes far beyond the question of mere terminology. Ten years ago, the word "primitive" came easily to the lips. It is only with the rapid development of communications of the past decade, and the growing integration of peoples of the most diverse cultures into the world scene, that the essentially pejora- tive and tendentious character of this designation, like others such as "savage," "backward," or "early," when applied to any functioning way of life, became apparent. This is not the place to analyze the cultural or psychological problems of the emergent nationalisms found in expanding and newly literate communities of Africa and Asia and of other non-machine societies. Yet when their story is told, the role played by the reaction of their leaders against designations of this order will be found to be a major
VI PREFACE
factor in the latent or explicit hostilities of which these move- ments are in many cases the expression.
The word "primitive" is open to objection, further, because it is incapable of precise definition. The presence or absence of a written language, of power machinery, of least common de- nominators of value — these are objectively ascertainable facts that have bearing on the study of many problems where cultures of differing historical backgrounds, institutional organization, and psychological orientations are to be compared. They are of particular relevance where economic behavior and mechanisms are under consideration, and in this context exemplify strikingly their desirability as criteria of comparison when contrasted to the essential lack of preciseness of the earlier, more inclusive desig- nation "primitive."
The fact that this revision has necessitated what in many cases amounts to a re-writing of the original work reflects in a very real sense the developments in the study of the economics of nonliterate, non-industrial, and non-pecuniary societies that have taken place since 1940, when the earlier volume was pub- lished. The neglect by earlier anthropologists of the economic aspects of the cultures they studied no longer exists. Under present conventions of field-work, no anthropologist of com- petence takes as synonymous the technology of a people with their economics, or considers it sufficient it he only studies the canons of ownership, where problems of differentials in wealth and position are his concern. The change is shown by the differ- ence in length and treatment of many topics in this volume and in its predecessor. The earlier single chapter on labor has had to be expanded into two, one on work-patterns, the other on the rewards of labor. Consumption norms now require separate treatment. Elsewhere, the new data amplify presentations and make it possible to clarify the implications of points that could only be sketched a decade ago.
The expansion and revision of the first section, which deals with theoretical and historical aspects of our subject, is likewise the result of this development, though it concomitantly repre- sents a growing interest in the subject-matter on the part of econ- omists. It is true that much of this interest, expressed in con- versations, has not as yet yielded substantial published results; but it is apparent that the interest is there, and that systematic
PREFACE Vll
exploitation of the data by economists is only a matter of time. I have made it a point to discuss with economists of widely differing orientations problems of mutual concern treated in this book, and have found a receptivity and understanding that could not have been predicted ten years ago.
There will perhaps be those who will seek in these pages some treatment of the effects of contact with the economies of Europe and America on the systems with which we are concerned. This is an aspect of the contemporary scene which is focal to the problem of world adjustment. Too often, however, those who must deal with situations of this order assume that the changes that are concurring must be uni-directional, that the simplicity of the "primitive" systems on which the industrialized order is impinging makes the problem one of imposition rather than of interplay. To the extent this is the case, this book may contribute to the understanding of the historical forces at play by bringing to those having to do with problems arising out of the spread of Euroamerican technology and industrialization throughout the non-industrial world a realization of the background against which these innovations must be projected, if a workable adjust- ment is to be achieved. But these situations of contact, or the processes involved in them, are not within the terms of reference of this particular work. It is rather my aim to give the reader a sense of the variation that marks the manner in which all men achieve those aims of the application of scarce means to given ends that can only result from an overview of the various systems that mankind has devised to accomplish this fundamental re- quirement of human civilization.
The purpose of this book thus remains what it was when first written — to provide information concerning the economic life of nonliterate peoples, to consider some of the questions in eco- nomic science that can be examined by the use of these data, and to suggest lines of attack which may be profitably defined for future use. In the main, I have tried to follow the conventional categories of economics and to indicate the points at which the economies with which we are concerned diverge so sharply from our own that it is not possible to follow these conventions. I have kept to a minimum the specialized technical terms of both an- thropology and economics, so that what is written may be ac- cessible to all whose interest lies in the dynamics of culture and
Vlll PREFACE
the variety of forms in which comparable institutions of differing ways of life can be cast.
In documenting my discussion, I have used examples from my own field research sparingly, sacrificing at times the special in- sight that first-hand knowledge of a culture affords in enlarging on a point, in order to use pertinent materials from other societies. The history of social science is replete with examples of students who have not learned the lesson of scientific method, that valid generalization must rest on a broad base of factual materials. On the other hand, I have not gone to the lengths of some of the older writers of the comparative school, such as Frazer, or Westermarck, or Sumner, who saw to it that every possible in- stance bearing on a given point was included in their discussions. For this, we have learned, means that while the reader ranges widely, he is left without any sense of cultural depth and co- hesiveness. It has seemed to me to be more advantageous to cite fewer cases, and to present these more fully, than the tradition of the comparative method as classically practiced would dictate. I have therefore turned in the main to those contributions wherein economic life is adequately treated in preference to those where economic facts enter incidentally, to works repre- senting the use of modern field techniques rather than to the older sources; and I have favored the use of less well-known data over those few instances of economic processes and institu- tions, like the potlatch, which have been cited so often that they need only to be referred to in order to call them to mind.
I may express again my indebtedness to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and to Northwestern Uni- versity for the support that made it possible for me to write the original study, and to Northwestern University for funds that aided me in preparing the manuscript of the present work for the press. I may likewise repeat my thanks to those institutions, colleagues, and friends whose advice and assistance were so valuable in helping me write the earlier book. In addition I should like to acknowledge the stimulating suggestions of those, like Professor K. F. Walker of Adelaide University, Australia, whose perceptive and detailed reviews of that work I have found helpful. To those others who have read and commented on parts of this re-writing in manuscript I likewise extend my thanks — Professors Yale Brozen, Frank Fetter, Jules Henry, Elmo Hoh-
PREFACE IX
man, Dr. Helen Hohman, Mr. Edward E. LeClair, Jr., Dr. Karl de Schweinitz, Jr., Professors Sol Tax and Harold Williamson. Finally, I take pleasure in expressing my appreciation to my friend, Professor Frank II. Knight, for his willingness to allow me to reprint his analysis of my original presentation which, with my reply, will be found in the Appendix.
MELVILLE J. HERSKOVITS Evanston, Illinois
ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
CONTENTS
Parti. INTRODUCTION
i. Economizing and Rational Behavior 3
ii. Before the Machine 25
in. Anthropology and Economics 42
Part II. PRODUCTION
iv. Getting a Living 67
v. Patterns of Labor 88
vi. Incentives and Rewards 109
vn. Division of Labor and Specialization 124
Part HI. EXCHANGE AND DISTRIBUTION
viii. Gift and Ceremonial Exchange 155
ix. Trade and Barter 180 x. Business Enterprise, Credit, and the Determination
of Value 204
xi. Money and Wealth 238
xii. Constunption Norms and Standards of Living 269
xiu. Capital Formation 298
xi
Xii CONTENTS
Part IV. PROPERTY
xiv. The Problem of Ownership 313
xv. Land Tenure: Hunters, Herders and Food Gatherers 331
xvi. Land Tenure: Agricultural Peoples 350
xvii. Goods, Tangible and Intangible 371
Part V. THE ECONOMIC SURPLUS
xvni. Population Size, Economic Surplus and Social
Leisure 395
xix. The Cost of Government 416
xx. The Service of the Supernatural 439
xxi. Wealth, Display and Status 461
PartVI. CONCLUSIONS xxii. Some Problems and Points of View 487
APPENDIX
Deduction and Induction in Economics
(by Frank H. Knight and Melville J. Herskovits) 507
Bibliography 533
Index follows page 551
ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
TEXT FIGURES
1. "Trade" in Aboriginal Australia and "Trade"
Relationships with Torres Strait, Neiv Guinea 200
2. Value of Pigs and Tusks on Malekula 267
3. Seasonal Variation in Food Resources of the Lozi 294
4. Average Weekly Expenditures per Family for Various
Types of Food-Stuffs and Supplies, by Malay of Kckintan 296
5. Total Number of Pigs Owned by Households in
Noronai Village, Northeast Sinai, Solomon Islands 410
Maps of Tribal and Place-Names
I. POLYNESIA AND THE AMERICAS 548
II. THE OLD WORLD ' 550
Xlll
PART I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
ECONOMISING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR
THE ELEMENTS of scarcity and choice, which are the outstanding factors in human experience that give economic science its reason for being, rest psychologically on firm ground. It is a truism that wants are capable of a degree of expansion the end of which has not been reached by any known society. Wants, that is, apparently manifest a certain dynamic quality, which seems to derive from the inventiveness and receptivity of man, and are ultimately to be referred to the cumulative nature of human culture itself. Each generation takes for granted the cultural setting of the society into which it is born. And each, because of the creative restlessness of man, adds its contribution to the total culture of the group it comprises.
It is important for us, at this point, to consider the breadth of social effort included under the term "economizing." How wide this is becomes evident in reading the many discussions of the scope of economics and its relation to the term from which the discipline derives its name. Knight holds that common definitions are too inclusive: "The term economic has come to be used in a sense which is practically synonymous with intelligent ' or ra- tional." "It is in accord with good linguistic usage," he continues, "to think and speak of the whole problem of living as one of economy, the economical use of time, energy, etc. — resource of every sort." Yet he stresses the point that "the restrictions which mark off the modestly limited domain of economic science
3
4 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
within the inclusive sphere of knowledge as a whole" must be clearly understood.1
This limitation is indicated by Benham, who states that "the rationale of economic activity is to satisfy human wants by producing consumers' goods." He explains: "People are continu- ally deciding how they will use their time and energy and property and how they will spend their money. . . . It is these decisions which determine the nature and extent of economic activity." 2 A philosopher, assessing the nature of the economiz- ing experience, states: "We can start with one agreed quality: Economizing is a way of doing things; first, of thinking about them, then, of acting; in sum, of arranging or choosing them. It is imposed on us by scarcity of means in relation to expanding desires. In this sense, it is purposive, a process which we direct and develop creatively; for we can agree that choice involves this." 3 This mode of circumscribing the term emphasizes con- scious choice, stresses the essential role of alternatives between which to choose, and relates the whole to the problem of attain- ing efficiency through choosing.
Like any phenomenon that exists in time, the development of the wants of a people is irreversible. Small, isolated nonliterate societies may sometimes seem to the observer to live in terms of a degree of stability and conservatism that belies this. But there is no study of cultural change in process, or of contact between peoples having different cultures, which does not document the proposition that a people give over an item in their cultural store only when it becomes apparent to them that a more desirable substitute — iron implements for stone tools, for example — is at hand, or when circumstances beyond their control dictate this. There is nothing more difficult to accept than a lowered stand- ard of living.
Our primary concern in these pages is to understand the cross-cultural implications of the process of economizing. We may begin our analysis by considering the concept of a free good. It is a commonplace in economic theory, for example, that no economic value can be assigned to a sunset or the view of a mountain, since these are to be had for the taking. It is only when a given good is not available in quantities to supply every
1 Knight ( 1933), 1-2. 3 Macfie, 20.
2 Benham, 5-6.
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 5
desire for it that the economizing process comes into play. Even in the case of the utilization of what would seem to be a free good, however, some economic factors may enter. There may be more than enough animals available, and no restrictions on the member of the tribe as to where and what he will hunt; but choices will nonetheless have to be made. These considerations cannot be overlooked if the free good is not to lie, inert, as a theoretical concept and not as a functioning element in the daily life of the people.
It is generally recognized by economists that even the utiliza- tion of air, an example of a free good often cited, entails econ- omizing. This is apparent if we consider so simple an example of economic behavior as occurs when an Australian aborigine decides to build a fire and a wind-screen. In this case, a choice is made between the cold (free) air of the night and the warmed ( economic ) air available only after the energy needed to collect wood, kindle the fire (no mean task where a fire-drill must be used), and build the screen, has been expended. It is apparent, in these instances, that the question of whether a resource is free or economic is not a simple concept. An understanding of these critical cases confirms empirically the economic principle that the applicability of the concept depends on the ends sought. Where choice enters so that the satisfactions derived are to be maximized, the free good becomes an economic one.
Beyond whatever free goods may be available, even to mem- bers of societies with the smallest numbers, the simplest tech- nologies and the most direct economic systems, the far greater number of goods are not free. Even the provision of basic needs, food and shelter and clothing and implements, must inevitably involve choice; moreover, these choices are dictated not only by the alternatives between available items, but by the patterns of the culture of the individual who, in the final analysis, must do the choosing. Choice between alternatives is limited not only by the goods and services available to satisfy wants. The nature of the available goods and of the wants they are to satisfy is like- wise restricted. Economizing, that is, is Slrried on in a cultural matrix. The matter has been phrased cogently in considering the economy of southern Bougainville, Solomon Islands: "At the present, in answer to the problem of discrepancy between needs and resources, it is sufficient to recall that these needs are cultural
6 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
rather than nutritional, and to state the conviction that there will always be discrepancies between cultural needs and available resources."4 Social conventions, religious beliefs, aesthetic con- ceptions, and ethical prescriptions all function in shaping the wants of peoples and the times and places and circumstances in which they can be satisfied.
We shall see how, for example, certain West African peoples conventionally and traditionally expend food so liberally on feasts that must be given during the dry season that at the beginning of the rainy season, when hard labor of breaking the ground for the new planting has to be performed, there is an actual inadequacy of caloric intake that could easily be supplied if food resources had been conserved.5 It must b.e emphasized that there is no question of lack of foresight, for it is well estab- lished that these peoples are aware of the alternate possibility. It is rather a question of economic choice dictated by the drive to maximize satisfactions in terms of the traditional values of the culture.
As another instance, we may consider the utilization of land among the Kogi (or Kagaba) Indians who inhabit the Sierra Nevada range of northeastern Colombia. Because of the steep- ness of the mountains and the degree of erosion, this agricultural people is faced with a scarcity of land that forces each family to work patches in the lowland and highland areas, moving from one to another at considerable cost of expenditure in time and energy. In these mountain ranges, however, are many terraces, built by the earlier inhabitants, where numerous archaeological remains suggest a stable and considerable population. These terraces, each of which might provide on the average about two and a half acres of arable land, are not used, but the difficult mountain-sides and tiny patches in the valleys, often far re- moved from the habitation, are cultivated instead. The reason is a supernatural one: "There are many spirits of the dead there," they say. Except when they place offerings at these places, they avoid them, thus "depriving themselves of their best land" and "being forced to plant in patches far from each other, patches which at times are steep and very small." 6
One of the principles of early economic theory was to regard
4 Oliver (1949a), 18. 6Dolmatoff, 97-101.
5 See below, 277-80, 290-3.
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 7
the individual as the point from which all development of theoretical principles must begin. We have come to realize that the individual never exists alone; that a society, as it has been put, is more than an aggregate of Robinson Crusoes; and that social interaction in terms of cultural tradition dictates recon- sideration of the earlier starting-point. The process of economiz- ing, we recognize, is essentially based on the broader organiza- tion of society. Yet the individual cannot be left out of the picture, for all forms of social behavior, in the final analysis, must be referred to the behavior of individual members of a given society in specific situations.
This is why we must be on our guard against permitting the pendulum of reaction against the older point of view to swing to a point where we reify the common elements in the behavior of individuals into a construct that is conceived as existing by and of itself. There is much truth in the statement by Polanyi: "The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships." However, anyone who has had first-hand experience among nonliterate, non-machine, and non-pecuniary peoples, can but wonder at the validity of the statement which succeeds the sentence just quoted: "He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end." 7
Paulme has drawn conclusions concerning this point, based on her research among the Dogon of West Africa, which depict somewhat more realistically the interaction between individual and social factors in the economic process. "It is clear," she says, "that individual advantage, understood as the realization of the greatest possible gain with the expenditure of a minimum of effort is not the sole force that causes men to work in the society we are studying. Each person is motivated, more or less consciously, in more or less indirect ways, by the desire for the well-being, wealth and prestige of the community as a whole." 8 All choices, that is, however they may be influenced by con- siderations of social standing, social claims, and social assets, are ultimately the choices of individuals.
7 Polanyi, 46. 8 Translated from Paulme, 194.
8 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
In short, we must not reject Economic Man only to substitute Society as an exclusive formula for understanding economic behavior and as a base-point for analysis. Economizing is never carried on unilaterally. The choices of the individual must al- ways be limited by the resources of his society and the values of his culture. But the factors of variation to be found even within the smallest, most homogenous, and most conservative society must not be lost sight of. The economic unit, we must conclude, is the individual operating as a member of his society, in terms of the culture of his group.
This implies that any analysis of the schedule of wants of a given society which projects these wants against the supply of goods and services available to satisfy them must be supple- mented by introducing a third term into the equation; the cul- tural definition of wants and the conventions that dictate how and when they are to be regarded as adequately satisfied. It is in terms of these factors that we will consider the economic systems of nonliterate, non-machine, and, often, non-pecuniary peoples treated in this book.
THE MEANS by which the ends of the economizing process, however defined, are achieved, comprise universals in human experience. They therefore provide the basis for all generaliza- tions concerning the nature and functioning of economic systems, whatever their form and whatever the particular mechanisms they may use to convert these means into satisfying the wants that make up the socially sanctioned ends toward whose fulfill- ment a given economy is directed.
We may move, first of all, to those human and ecological factors that provide the goods and services which satisfy the demands of living, both biological and psychological, and that are at the core of any economic system. In some form, these factors are present everywhere; without their interaction life as we know it could not exist.
Initially, the elements that are given by the world as it is constituted must be considered: the natural resources derived from the habitat, and the labor power of men themselves, the prime mover in the utilization of what is provided by the natural
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 9
setting. As Knight has phrased it, these are the "ultimate" re- sources, from which, through intermediate steps that vary in number with economies of different degrees of complexity, come the consumption goods that make possible the gratification of wants.9
But these do not tell the whole tale, for everywhere there must be the technical knowledge that permits men to take advantage of the resources to which they must look for the raw materials of their economy, and those tools they devise to permit them to utilize their labor effectively in exploiting the natural re- sources of the territories they inhabit. Their technologies, how- ever crude, are expressed in the form of goods which are to be thought of, in the less complex economies, as capital goods of varying degrees of permanency. Clearing a waterhole can be interpreted in this way, despite the simplicity of the technique whereby the improvement of the natural resource is achieved, and the slight amount of time and energy that is expended in achieving this end. A bow and arrow is likewise an intermediate good of this sort. The effort capitalized in its making brings return in the greater effectiveness of its maker when hunting the game he needs for subsistence, or for prestige, or for other desired ends.
Yet while all these factors — natural resources, man-power, tech- nical knowledge, and capital equipment — must be present in the productive processes of any functioning economy, the weight- ing of each in making the whole a going concern may differ
widelv. It is not chance that economists in their discussions have
j
found it necessary to stress these prime factors, and especially to make explicit the role of "ultimate" resources. In a pecuniary, machine economy such as that of Europe and America, they are easily lost sight of in the face of the wealth of technical knowl- edge and the complexities of capital investment, with their re- sulting equipment which pours forth the enormous quantities and variety of goods that satisfy the needs of the people living in these societies.
In the non-pecuniary, non-machine societies with which we will be concerned, almost the exact opposite obtains. The factors of natural resources and man-power stand out in bold relief. One must search and interpret if the phenomenon of capitalization is
0 Knight (1933), 41.
1O ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
to be taken into account; the technological equipment is direct and relatively simple and at once apparent; the intermediate steps between the utilization of raw materials and the pro- duction of a consumption good are few. We shall see, in consider- ing the simplest economies, how close to the subsistence level a society can be. Among nonliterate peoples in general, both the inventory of goods and services and the range of wants to be satisfied, as expressed in the standards of living of the people, are relatively restricted. The margin between available resources and physical survival, in the simplest of these economies, such as are found among the South African Bushmen, or the Indians of the Great Basin region of western United States, or the in- habitants of Tierra del Fuego, is slender indeed. The scarcity of available goods in societies living on this level holds the factor of choice to the narrowest of ranges; the wants are to a considerable degree biological and are of the order of survival itself. Here, in short, the need to economize does not have to be analyzed in forms of mathematical formulae; it is apparent, in all its stark biological implications, for the most casual traveler to observe.
These simplest economies, however, are few in number. They shade imperceptibly into systems in which increasing command of technology and greater capital equipment cause the factors of natural resources and labor-power again to be obscured by the secondary aspects of the total equipment for production. Even so, it is rare in these intermediate societies to find individuals as completely removed from the primary factors as, let us say, are the urban dwellers of Europe and America, though such persons are sporadically to be found. The apparatus to care for wants is capable of greater productivity, and the wants to be satisfied are correspondingly expanded. The margin which permits the ex- penditure of labor-power for the production of services as well as goods is greater, and this in turn leads to a greater degree of specialization.
In these societies, too, the entrepreneurial function, where it is to be discerned at all, is at a minimum. The men who, in terms of the economies of Euroamerican society, direct industrial enterprises, decide what is to be produced and how, hire work- men and direct what they shall do, borrow money to acquire capital goods or land holdings, and assume the risks inherent in their ventures, do not exist, in the sense of the word as used by
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 11
economists, in non-pecuniary, non-industrialized societies. For in these societies, production and distribution involve little of the profit motive, and labor is only in special instances for hire. Attempts that have been made to discern the entrepreneur in a South Seas chief or in a Bantu household head afford ex- amples of this. Firth's statement, that he employs the term, "in default of finding a better," is to the point. "It must be taken in its simplest sense," he cautions, "of the person primarily re- sponsible for an undertaking, and is not intended to imply prop- ositions about risk-taking and profit-reception. For the Tikopia economy the term covers ownership of the final product, re- sponsibility for payment of the workers if such is to be made, and usually some actual participation in the work." 10 In the case of the Bantu, Goodfellow, commenting on the fact that "the function of consumers to release part of their resources for further general production has scarcely existed," concludes that, "there has been little room for the function of the entrepreneur in managing such
resources." n
We come here to a point that cannot be stressed too early in our discussion. This concerns the generalized nature of the mech- anisms and institutions that mark the economies of all the non- literate, non-machine societies. It is a point that will recur as a basic theme of this book, and will be extensively documented in the pages that follow. It explains the difficulties that arise when we attempt to apply the more refined concepts of economics to these societies, or when we attempt to test some of the more debated hypotheses of economic theory by reference to them. The example given above of the nature of a capital good in such an economy makes the point; it could be equally well made if the question of the character of rent or interest were raised. In addition, the intimate interlarding of economic motivations with these of a religious or artistic nature further complicates the analysis.
Nonetheless, however generalized and however difficult to disentangle from their cultural matrix, the basic elements of the apparatus to care for wants are present in every economy. We may conceive of the totality of economic systems as lying on a kind of continuum. At one pole we find the societies living closest to the subsistence level, with the exploitation of natural
10 Raymond Firth ( 1939), 134 n. n Goodfellow, 80.
12 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
resources slight, a slender endowment of technical knowledge, and implements few and simple. At the other end we place the great literate population aggregates, with their machine tech- nologies, producing vast stores of goods and supporting a great variety of specialists to satisfy the wants of the people. Between these extremes lie the many societies having intermediate de- grees of economic complexity and technical resource. As we move from the less to the more complex, the choices that are afforded between alternative possibilities become greater, the range of wants to be satisfied wider. But in every case choices must be made.
THE MECHANISMS of production represent only the initial steps in the total system whereby the goods and services that meet the needs of a people are made available to them. The apparatus that utilizes the resources at hand to care for wants must be linked with some mode of distributing what has been produced if the members of a group are to be able to make their choices among the goods and services that represent the alternative possibilities presented to them. And as with the mechanisms of production, the distributive system, though a universal in human social life, takes on a vast number of forms. These vary from the highly specialized and complex modes of distribution found in the pecuniary, mechanized societies of Europe and America to the generalized and diffuse forms found among small, isolated, nonliterate groups.
How rudimentary the distributive mechanism can be is realized when we consider those societies where the economic unit is the self -sufficient family. It has, indeed, been held that there could be no distributive mechanism present at all in such situations, since "logically . . . each household would provide for its own industrial wants. No products would be exchanged in such a society. Productive effort would be directed solely to the satis- faction of the wants of the household." 12 In terms of our discus- sion, this implies that the distributive element of these economies is simply omitted, and the middle term of the progression from
12 Usher (1920), 4.
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 13
production through distribution to consumption falls out. In actuality, however, this never happens. An exchange of goods and services may not occur between households. Yet from the fact that no human society exists wherein at least the division of labor along sex lines is absent, it follows that within the smallest, most self-sufficient households some kind of exchange of services, and of the goods produced by these services, must be postulated. For there can be no division of labor without a resulting economic exchange. The universality of the fact of division of labor, even if only on sex lines, underscores the essential soundness of the reasoning which has made of exchange and distribution basic factors in all economic theory.
This is apparent, for example, when we consider the distribu- tion system of the Lunga and other tribes of the Kimberly Divi- sion of Western Australia, who have this kind of family-band subsistence economy.
The husband must from time to time give kangaroo to his wife's parents and brothers; besides this he always distrib- utes a little among his blood relatives. Most of what the woman has obtained is consumed by herself, husband and children; if she has a little extra she takes some to her mother, sister, mother's mother, father, in fact to any close relative. She on another occasion receives similar offerings from them, and also meat from her male relatives, which she shares with her husband and children. These gifts are not compulsory as are her husband's to her people. They are dictated by tribal sentiment and her own affection for these individuals; by kinship system which finds concrete ex- pression not only in attitudes and linguistic usage, but also in the exchange of the limited food resources and the mate- rial and ritual objects which are found in the community. Kinship as seen in Australia is practical altruism or enlight- ened self-interest.13
A somewhat analagous state of affairs is found among the cattle- keeping Swazi of South Africa, where "economically the family is the unit in production and consumption" and where, in pre- contact times, trade was non-existent.14
The simplicity of the distributive mechanism in societies such 13 Kaberry, 33. u Marwick, 43-4, 177-8.
14 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
as these, or as are to be found in the Ama/on basin, stands in sharp contrast to the manner in which goods are distributed to the ultimate consumer in the industrialized societies of Europe and America. Here the economic problem resolves itself into an analysis of market operations which are so vast and which present such a multiplicity of choice that they seem to differ in kind rather than in degree when compared to the household econ- omies of many nonliterate peoples.
From one point of view, indeed, the difference actually is one of kind. In the simplest economic systems, no pecuniary factor enters. What elementary types of exchanges of goods and services occur are on the basis of an immediate, ad hoc kind of give and take. Because of this, the problems raised in assessing the nature and forms of exchanges, and the kinds of choices that are made, take on a new and particular shape. The market is present in such rudimentary form that it exists by definition only; no least common denominator of value obtains; there is a face-to-face relationship between producer and consumer.
We must not, however, lose sight of the intermediate societies, such as those of Central America or West Africa, in stressing the economies of the simplest sort. In these more complex systems, where the market, distinguishable as such in its institutionalized forms, and based on exchanges involving the use of pecuniary media — money — is present, the complexity of the process that marks the movement of goods and services to the ultimate con- sumer in industrial communities is almost entirely lacking. This derives from the fact that even among nonliterate peoples, whose economies are of this order of complexity, the individual controls a substantial proportion of the techniques employed by his group in the basic tasks of getting a living, in addition to whatever specialized skills he may possess in the production of capital and consumption goods. Here again, then, it follows that even in such societies, as far as the necessities of life are concerned, distribu- tion is in large measure a process of allocating what has been produced by members of the household to those who constitute its personnel. Such commercial transactions as do take place, except among social aggregates large enough to permit a degree of specialization rare in nonliterate societies, are again personal, direct, and specific.
Moreover, to the extent that the market in such societies does
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 15
possess an objective and formal existence, it is a mechanism that facilitates the exchange of goods between members of different communities rather than between those who belong in the same group. This proposition will be amply documented in later pages.15 Here it need only be pointed out that where the degree of specialization in production is slight, no market-place is needed to effectuate whatever few exchanges of goods may be consummated. By far the greater number of cases of market operations we shall encounter will be those in which members of different villages or tribes exchange such commodities as each produces in excess of its own needs for such other goods as its members do not themselves manufacture.
In the absence of pecuniary mechanisms and the element of profit in the transactions of the market, it follows that the prob- lem of the relation between supply and demand takes on unex- pected turns. The West African woman trader who will not lower the price of the commodity she sells when business is dull — and this is an economy where values have for centuries been expressed in the quantitative terms of the prevalent form of money — presents a difficult enough problem. But where the total supply of commodities, even of subsistence goods, avail- able to the members of a given society is severely limited, the question of fluctuations in value becomes pointless.
Economic theory, on the whole, is not geared to consider the problem of demand schedules where the alternatives are so re- stricted that there is no margin between utility and disutility — or to put it in other terms, where the choices are so few that no curve of indifference can be drawn between satisfactions and costs, where costs are always maximized, since individuals must work or starve. In situations such as these, the utility of any good recognized by the culture as having utility is maximized in its mere possession, where it is a tool; or in the very opportunity to consume it, if it is a commodity such as food. There is no inducement to trade it for something else, since there are no costs (disutilities) to be taken into account.
Thus food, to a South African Bushman or a native of Tierra del Fuego, who lives always in a state of potential hunger, is always of maximum value, since it is essential to the mainte- nance of life itself. And since there is little surplus of energy or
15 See below, Ch. IX.
l6 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
resources available for other activities than the food quest, it follows that whatever commodities, such as clothing, weapons, and the like are produced, likewise have constant maximum value and are not subject to exchanges essential to the existence of a market in any sense of the term. Differential utilities do enter, as, for example, where an Australian aborigine cannot kill an animal that has food value for him, despite his hunger, because of a system of totemic belief that taboos the animal Here the disutility of the animal as food is matched by its utility as a supernatural and social agent. But in setting the standards of utility in such a case no distributive mechanism, no market factor, enters, and the utilities are of the all-or-none variety.
In the vastly greater number of non-machine societies, in which people are not pressed against the iron wall of subsist- ence needs, and the range of choice widens, the factor of differ- ential utility is present. A hungry man may choose between fowl and game for his meal, or between yams and taro. A less hungry one may make his choice between work and leisure, food and effort. A person confronted with a problem beyond his means of solving may employ the services of a diviner or of a worker of magic. But even here the measurement of differential utilities in terms of price based on the fluctuations of the market in re- sponse to the factors of supply and demand may be discerned but dimly, if at all. In these societies the market is not free; it is a market in which "prices" — evaluations in whatever terms — are "administered" by custom.
It is not a question of which food is cheaper, and of balancing this against a desire for a change to taro after having eaten too many yams. Both foods, in all likelihood, will be equally avail- able; they may well be perfect substitutes, as concerns effort required to grow them as well as concerns preference in taste. But money cost will be of no importance because it is not a factor. Or again, the decision where to seek advice will be made on the basis of entirely extra-pecuniary considerations — that is, with- out weighing costs against satisfactions. Our man may have lost faith in the skill of his diviner, or he may have decided that the situation calls for a magic charm rather than the intervention of the gods. Choice is thus dictated by differentials in utility; but the utility is not measured in terms of alternate costs (prices)
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 1^
by the one who makes the choice, and is not measurable in quantitative terms by the student.
We have again reached the point where we must take into account the fact that the economic institutions and mechanisms that are sharply differentiated in the machine societies become blurred and generalized in nonliterate cultures. There can, for example, be no question that the functioning of price mecha- nisms in the economic systems of Europe and America can be studied in the objective terms of economic theory, which has tellingly employed it as affording a precise measure of the choices made in the market by consumers. Its place in popular thinking likewise reflects its importance as an isolate in the economy. "No judgements are more closely associated with our daily living than judgements of price and the judgements of material values that underlie the structures of market prices," Usher has observed. "Because they are commonplaces of our living we are prone to think of them as simple and obvious, though they are no less complex than any other value judgements." 1G
But what of the price mechanism in societies where cost is but one of a number of considerations dictating economic be- havior? Or where it does not figure at all? Where the producer is the consumer of the goods he produces or of the greater pro- portion of what he produces, where market dealings are deter- mined by all kinds of non-economic factors? Here the problem of ascertaining why given choices are made and how the eco- nomic devices that help maximize satisfactions actually function calls for an attack that will take into account the cross-cultural variations in the nature of the data.
4
WE HAVE seen that the scarcity of goods in the face of the wants of a given people at a given time is a universal fact of human experience; that no economy has been discovered wherein enough goods are produced in enough variety to satisfy all the wants of all the members of any society. This is true whether the group is small or large, the mechanisms of its economic sys- 10 Usher (1949), 146.
l8 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
tern simple or complex. More important, it is true whether the society is undisturbed and the differences in its way of life from one generation to another slight, or whether it is in a state of dynamic change. The dissimilarities between any society and any other in these respects is one of degree and not of kind. The general principle, therefore, stands, despite the many changes that are rung on the basic theme manifested in the particular forms it assumes in functioning economies.
It can also be taken as cross-culturally acceptable that, on the whole, the individual tends to maximize his satisfactions in terms of the choices he makes. Where the gap between utility and disutility is appreciable, and the producer or consumer of a good or service is free to make his choice, then, other things being equal, he will make his choice in terms of utility rather than disutility. One need not accept the hedonism of classical economics to recognize the validity, on broad lines, of the prop- osition, at least in the terms in which we have phrased it here.
Yet it should be apparent that the two basic postulates of •economic science — the allocation of scarce resources among al- ternative ends and the conscious determination of the choices made in maximizing satisfactions — are not of the same order. The first is a statement of fact that can be objectively verified. In pecuniary, machine economies this can be done by means of price analysis which shows how the market responds to scarci- ties or overproduction of given commodities. In non-pecuniary, non-machine, and nonliterate societies we can have recourse to ethnographic descriptions of the range of goods produced by a people and record the choices that are actually reached. The empirical nature of analyses that press the point further, inquir- ing into the kind of resources a people can draw on, and how they are utilized in producing ultimate consumption goods, is likewise apparent. The forms taken by competitive striving for a good in short supply, if competitive patterns are present, and the degree to which this striving stimulates to further produc- tion, can also be objectively described. We can determine whether bidding will be in terms of prestige or price. We can ascertain whether a failure to increase supply is due to lack of ultimate resources, or to non-economic causes of a social or reli- gious order. Or, where the response to increased demand is in- crease in supply, we can find out how this increase has occurred
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 19
and, given time and resources for adequate investigation of the problem, the extent to which the supply has increased.
The second proposition, however, lies in the realm of values, not only in the technical sense of economic science, but in the broader philosophical connotation of those ultimate sanctions to behavior that give meaning to life. It is possible to bring ob- jective proof, that is, as to what men do in the way of economiz- ing; the question why they do it rests on subjective and cultural factors. It is significant that so much of that aspect of economic theory that bears on this latter point derives from assumptions of a psychological nature. It is more than a figure of speech when economists speak of "rationalizing" production or distribution. The usage derives logically and semantically from the promi- nence traditionally given the view that man, in his economic behavior, acts rationally.
The earlier concept of Economic Man, the most extreme ex- pression of this position, has long since been given over by economists, together with any conclusions that may have been drawn concerning the relevance of this concept as indicative of Human Nature in the large. The influence of the earlier eco- nomic historians was important in bringing about this changed point of view. They indicated the need to take time and place into full account if the economies of earlier periods of western European society were to be understood. The process of refining the conception of the role of rational choice has continued, with stress being laid on non-economic choices to be made in "the business of living," or by successively eliminating more and more variables in drawing assumptions so that the choices to be made rationally are restricted not only as to time and place but to the economic as against other aspects of living, as well.
We may take as an example the case of the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast of North America, whose economy has been the subject of much study, earlier in terms of its dramatic pres- tige give-away rituals termed potlatches, and in later years concerning the productive and social system that made this insti- tution possible. As a result of these investigations, an inner dy- namic of considerable significance for the point under discussion has been revealed. Codere has phrased the matter in these terms: "In what might be called their 'economic life* the Kwakiutl are virtuoso technicians and extravagant producers and storers. It
20 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
is in their 'social life' that they 'economize'." In this society, that is, a basic aim was the attainment and maintenance of position, to be achieved only through the expenditure of valuable goods. -As will be seen in a later chapter,17 this was carried on by cer- tain financial mechanisms — investment, credit, and the payment of interest, which, as it is phrased, "maximized the potlatch." The underlying drive in this complex system, therefore, "is to be found in the relation of the arbitrarily determined scarcity of potlatch positions to the superabundance of some economic goods." 18
The factor of rational choice, even when its applicability is narrowed, still remains as an element in the basic postulates of economic science. Price movements may theoretically be pre- dicted without reference to the behavior of individuals on the basis of fluctuations of supply and demand in an assumed eco- nomic universe involving perfect competition, or where it is assumed that competition is not perfect, and monopolistic fac- tors enter. Yet underlying the argument is the human factor. Thus Boulding, in explaining "the method of economic analysis," states that it begins "with very simple assumptions concerning human behavior." He goes on "to discover what consequences would follow for the economic system as a whole if these as- sumptions were true" before bringing these findings "into closer relation to real life by introducing qualifications of our original assumptions and seeing how they affect the picture as we see it." 19 In other words, it is the individual, the ultimate producer and consumer, who is the prime economic mover. His mode of rationally choosing the economically more advantageous alter- natives, expressed in price, is considered so fundamental that it is often not even verbalized, to say nothing of being ques- tioned.20
From the cross-cultural point of view, however, it is this as- sumption that is at the crux of the analysis, no matter how quali- fied or restricted it may be. For the economic anthropologist
17 See below, 226. nomena." Here, introducing his final
18 Codere, 68. two categories, he writes: "But what
19 Boulding, 15. is finally, or almost uniquely, dis-
20 Cf,, for example (512 below), tinetive of human phenomena is the Knight's statement concerning the aspect of conscious purpose, or ra- categories to be distinguished in the tionality."
"interpretative aspect of social phe-
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 21
deals with the total range of human societies. Many of the ques- tions he must ask thus arise from the fact that the economies with which he deals present a vastly greater range of differ- ences than the earlier systems of western Europe and the Medi- terranean, which themselves had enough of a special quality to cause the economic historians to raise comparable questions concerning early statements of the universality of economic mechanisms.
It is essential at this point to consider the problem of rational- ity in the light of our knowledge of the psychology of culture. The concept of culture, it will be remembered, includes all phases of the learned, traditionally sanctioned behavior of hu- man beings. These phases are conceived as aspects of culture, which are universals in the ways of life of all human groups — technology, economics, social organization, political structures, religious beliefs and institutions, language, art, music, and lit- erary modes of expression being the broadest categories. These universal aspects, in their institutionalized forms, are different in all of the many different societies found over the earth. Yet each of these forms represents the working out, in terms of its own particular historical stream, of universal processes of cul- tural dynamics which have brought about the results to be observed in the life of any given people at any given point in time. Thus, for example, we may say that the process of inter- change of cultural items between two peoples will result from contact between them; but what forms will be taken over in a given case — whether material or non-material elements, for ex- ample— will depend on the nature of the contacts, the varied emphases laid by the two bodies of traditions concerned, and the like. It follows that since the economic aspect of a given cul- ture is but a part of the total range of culture, any valid princi- ples that apply to the whole must likewise apply to any part of the whole.
From the psychological point of view, culture is behavior in the broadest sense of the term — overt acts and their implicit sanctions. The mechanism that gives stability to a culture is the learning-conditioning process. An infant is born into a society that is a going concern. In his education, he is conditioned to behave, within the limits of variation sanctioned by his group, like the other members of his society. This process is called en-
22 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
culturation. Not only motor habits, but also modes of conceptu- alizing and evaluating are learned — and learned so thoroughly that, for the most part, they are taken for granted, and seem to the enculturated individual to be as immutable as the contours of his physical environment. Later in life, through the process of invention or because of contact with other peoples, reencul- turation may occur. But basic motor-habits and, above all, value- systems and other sanctions are extremely tenacious, and are modified slowly, if at all.21 More than this, these value-systems and other sanctions are taken for granted and form the basis for judgments of all sorts.
The pertinence of this last fact for an understanding of the nature of rational behavior is at once apparent. We may accept the findings of psychology concerning the role of emotions and other non-cognitive mechanisms in influencing behavior. In ad- dition to these mechanisms, however, we find in the encultura- tive process a further qualifying element — the patterns of thought that are laid down in accordance with the value-systems of the group to which the individual belongs. The question of rational- ity, then, at once poses itself: rational in terms of what system of thought and behavior?
Granting the force of the enculturative conditioning, it is ap- parent that this forms the principal basis for judgment, for choice, for rational behavior in any given situation where alternatives are presented. In the light of the principle that the process, though universal, may manifest itself in different forms, we can understand why peoples hold so stubbornly to their own value- judgments. This brings us to cultural relativism, which stresses the validity of the most diverse kinds of value-systems for the peoples who live in accord with them. It derives from the fol- lowing proposition in cultural psychology: "Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." 22 Its documentation is vast, and derives principally from much research that has established the devotion of every people to their own way of life, and the extent to which the malfunctioning of culture can be ascribed to a break-down in the value-systems of a people.
21 Cf. Herskovits (1948), 17-42, 22 Herskovits, op. cit, 63; see pp.
for a more extended discussion of 61—78 for an elaboration of the im- this phenomenon. plications of this proposition.
ECONOMIZING AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR 2$
The principle of relativism is nothing new. In economics, it has been present for many years, though its voice was never strong and has become stilled with the passage of time. The elder Keynes, in his classical work on the nature and method of economics, turns continually to the problem. The major presen- tation of relativism is to be found in a section entitled, signifi- cantly, "On the Limits of the Validity of Economic Doctrines," though various passages elsewhere are devoted to considering the "relativity of economic definitions." 23 "It is as true of eco- nomic conditions, as of social conditions in general," he says, "that they are ever subject to modification. They vary with the legal form of society, and with national character and institu- tions." ~4
He likewise points out how the earlier German economic his- torians combatted the principle of the "absolutism of theory/' His analysis, in terms of "abstract" and "concrete" economics, recalls the point just made concerning the differences between process and form. He does not in any sense cede the importance of what he terms "abstract analysis"; he quite properly stresses the need to ascertain the underlying least common denominators, and then to discover how they manifest themselves in differing concrete situations. But the "inferences which possess the charac- ter of universality" — the processes assumed to occur — are to be understood through the study of the varying forms they take.25
This relativistic approach to the comparative study of eco- nomic behavior and institutions provides the epistemological foundation essential if the differences between different ways of life are not to be analyzed and assessed in terms of principles that derive from a single culture — in this case, our own. The point of view this latter engenders is called enthnocentrism, the roots of which, in Euroamerican cultures, will be considered in the next chapter. Here it need merely be pointed out that this
2:1 J. N. Keynes, 293-307; see also in Ch. XV of his work. It may, at
p. 15, n. 1; p. 64; pp. 163-7. this point, also be indicated that
24 Ibid., 295. the phrase "comparative economics,"
2ft It is not without significance, in which he attempted to study in
this connection, that almost the only broad terms of reference, in the ter-
economist who has attempted to sys- minology of economics is restricted
tematizc a comparative, cross-cul- to the comparative analysis of the
tural approach to economics has economic systems of free enterprise,
been R. Mukerjee, the relativism of communism, and fascism.
whose point of view is made explicit
24 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
is a habit of thought that must be guarded against if understand- ing of any modes of behavior and value-systems other than those of one's own group is to be attained.
The principle of maximizing satisfactions by the conscious exercise of choice between scarce means is valid because we find that this does occur in all societies. The cross-cultural per- spective, however, gives us pause when defining "rationality." 26 We are tempted to consider as rational the behavior that repre- sents only the typical reactions to be expected of those who order their lives in terms of the economic systems of Europe and America, where it is rational to defer the gratification of wants, to accumulate resources, to produce more goods and multiply services. Yet, as we shall abundantly see, there afe many cultures, if not a majority of them, where the deferment of wants is held to be disadvantageous, where best judgment dictates that re- sources be expended, where there is no tradition of expanding production and increasing services. None the less, in societies having traditions of this sort, choices are not only made, but debated. It will be our task in the pages that follow, then, to discern the economic universals in human society by sampling the many forms in which they are manifest.
26 This is implicit in a discussion of economic behavior, he distin-
of the subject by Diesing (16-23), guishes, as one of these, "norms of
though the question of economic property, manners, or taste, which
relativism as regards the nature of appear to the individual in exem-
economic rationality is not taken up plary actions and the approval or
as such. Yet it should be noted that disapproval of other people." in discussing the normative aspects
CHAPTER II
BEFORE THE MACHINE
THOUGH man has inhabited the earth for more than half a million years, the invention of the steam engine, which introduced the machine age, occurred less than two hundred years ago. In this mere instant, as the life of the human race is counted, the ma- chine has come to hold a place of such importance in present- day America and Europe that it is not easy for us to imagine a machineless existence.
Yet for much of mankind the machine holds little significance. Even in America and in Europe, where the influence of a mech- anized technology invades all phases of life, quiet backwaters still exist where farming folk or village communities live lives relatively little touched by the machine. More important are the untold millions who today follow patterns of life almost entirely different from those by which we order our lives and who, in the Americas, the South Seas, Australia, Asia, and Africa meet their needs without the use of any of those complex mechan- ical aids we hold essential.
The term "primitive" has been applied to most of these folk. Because with but few exceptions, they have developed no writ- ten language, the word thus became synonymous with "non- historic" or "nonliterate." These terms, however, are actually to be preferred because they do not carry the connotations of in- feriority, simplicity, and lack of sophistication that have come to cluster about the word "primitive," and thus to obscure its mean- ing. Such large differences are, indeed, to be found among non- literate societies that to characterize them in any general manner is exceedingly difficult. Every institution shows a tremendously wide range of variation in its "primitive" manifestations. It has
25
26 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
therefore become a truism that there is no generic difference be- tween "primitive" societies and literate ones, but that, the world over, all cultures represent specialized local developments which have come into being as a result of the unique historical devel- opments that, as was pointed out in the preceding chapter, mark the past of each of them.
This being the case, we may find it worth while to sketch the characteristics of the nonliterate societies that justify us in mark- ing them off for special study. We will, in particular, consider those traits that will occupy us in contrasting and comparing their economics with those of the literate, machine cultures.
At the outset, we are struck by the differences in population size between "primitive" and literate groups. This is true not only where density is concerned, but in the numbers of those who make up the self-conscious social entities which we vari- ously designate as "band" or "tribe" or "kingdom." Another difference between nonliterate and literate folk lies in the re- spective degree of contact they have with the outside world. In supplying their wants, what the nonliterate tribesman could ob- tain "was usually near at hand," as it has been put. On the other hand, "the whole world . . . contributes to our needs. A compli- cated business organization makes this possible, one that stands out in marked contrast to the simple system" of these folk.1 Even in pre-machine days in Europe, or in the non-machine but literate cultures of Asia, the range of communication and the consequent breadth of horizon of these peoples were and are in general greater than those of an African or a North Ameri- can Indian tribe, or even, for all their voyaging, of the inhabit- ants of the Polynesian islands. Literate societies, as we have seen, also manifest a greater degree of specialization of labor, a greater emphasis on the market and on a standard medium of exchange — money — as an expression of value to facilitate market opera- tions, and a resultant greater economic complexity than do non- literate communities.2
The machine, however, most highly developed in the cultures of North America and Europe, has been the outstanding factor in accentuating all those characteristics of an economic order that have been mentioned as distinguishing the lives of literate from nonliterate peoples. The implications of the machine for
1 Gras ( 1922), 3-4. * Cf. Bruijnis, 4 ff.
BEFORE THE MACHINE
human society are therefore greatest in these cultures, and it is between these machine cultures and all others, especially the nonliterate ones, that the differences are widest. That is why, at the outset, the role of the machine must be emphasized as a factor in differentiating their life from ours.
IN CONSIDERING the influence of the machine in our lives, we must constantly bear in mind the effect the technological per- fections that have gone with its development, the greater degree of productivity these have permitted, and the changes they have wrought in the economic sphere have had on some of the more important currents of thought of our day. Especially important is the fact that the achievements of the machine are objectively demonstrable, from which it follows that technological and eco- nomic gains can most readily be used when evaluating different cultures. The mechanistic philosophy of our day, when raised in the field of method to a tradition of objective observation, is readily contrasted with the mystical elements in the technology and economic order of nonliterate societies.
This is one of the principal reasons why the identification of the word "primitive" with the concept "lower" as regards social development — or its converse, the use of "civilized" in the sense of something "higher" — has been so convincing and, as expressed in the term "progress," has come to lodge so deeply in our every- day manner of thought. Here is the apparent documentation of the cthnocontrism that makes the appreciation of the values of other cultures than our own so difficult. Descriptions of our tech- nological achievement and the multiple interrelations of our eco- nomic organization can seemingly be employed to demonstrate the more complex nature of our culture as compared with the cultures of all other peoples, especially of nonliterate folk. That such a demonstration has had so great an appeal and has been so difficult to dislodge from the popular mind is not strange. It was such an assumption that gave the attempts to establish an evolu- tionary sequence for human civilizations their greatest psycho- logical force. For from this point of view — but this point of view only — the Australians could be regarded beyond question as a
28 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
simpler people than the Africans; or the Africans could be de- monstrably shown to be on a lower level of culture than the great aggregates that peopled Central America, Mexico, and Peru at the time of the discovery of America; or these latter, in turn, could without fear of contradiction be held less highly developed than ourselves.
In the same way, the concept of progress, so deeply rooted in our habits of thought, has derived its most important sanctions from demonstrations in the field of technology and economics. That a man, working with a machine, can produce more in given units of time with a given expenditure of energy than when work- ing by hand, is not difficult to prove. It is not so easy, however, to show that one set of religious beliefs is more adequate than another, or one type of family organization more effective than the next. Here the validation of judgment must derive from as- sumptions that lie quite outside objective proof. Even in the eco- nomic and technological spheres the argument couched in terms of relative powers of productivity is by no means self-evident when the ultimate ends toward which such activities are directed — as against the values that guide day-to-day living — come to be analyzed. In all societies, that is, the technological and economic order must at least be efficient enough to permit survival. Grant- ing this, we know enough about the psychology of culture to understand that the satisfaction of human wants is by no means dependent upon an abundance of goods. Increased efficiency in production is likewise not necessarily accompanied by a corre- sponding efficiency in achieving an effective distribution of what the technological system is capable of producing.
It is not alone in evaluating societies as a whole that the ma- chine has shaped our thought. Certain concepts respecting the psychology of nonliterate peoples have been influenced by that phase of our culture which is to be broadly included under the term "science." The scientific tradition, and the nature of the problems with which scientists deal, require that every effort be made to reason from cause to effect, to work under conditions of rigid control, eliminating extraneous factors that might influence the result of any given experiment. It is not generally understood, however, that this technique, which marks scientific thinking, is by no means characteristic of the reasoning of most persons in our society, nor even of scientists in their everyday life. Yet de-
BEFORE THE MACHINE 2Q
spite this, these particular modes of thought have given rise to a concept which maintains that our ways of thinking differ from those of "primitive" peoples, who are held to be prelogical.8 With- out a tradition of reasoning from cause to effect, they are held to be enmeshed in a body of "collective representations," in which the mechanical relationship between effectuating forces and their objective results is lost in a maze of mystic associations. Life is thus lived in a world where reality, as we know it, constitutes but a portion of valid experience.
We need here do no more than enter a demurrer to this posi- tion, for many refutations of it have been written out of the first- hand experience of those who have studied nonliterate societies,4 The significant thing for us is to realize how a mode of thought, closely associated with the basic technological processes of our culture, can be rationalized as a habit of thinking presumably followed by all those who live in this machine society, as against the habits of all who do not.
Another instance of how pervasive the indirect influence of the machine has been may be introduced here, though some of its implications for our subject will be treated at length in later pages.5 This concerns the theory of economic determinism. The increased productivity of our technology and the accompanying complexity of economic organization has resulted in a correspond- ing increase in the interdependence of individuals and communi- ties. But it was just when the industrial revolution was at its height, and the economic problems presented by it had attained an order of difficulty perhaps never before experienced, that this theory in its present form, was developed. It seems, therefore, that there might well be a discernible relationship between a point of view that holds economic phenomena to be basic in shaping other aspects of life and the historical setting of the period during which this concept was developed.
There can be little doubt that economic factors do play an important role in influencing non-economic aspects of culture; but this merely recognizes the fact that all phases of life are closely interrelated and, because of this, tend to modify each
. 8 L. LeVy-Bruhl (1923), is the point of view is still widely held by
work which has most influenced many writers who are not anthro-
thought along these lines. Though pologists.
its author, before his death, greatly 4 Driberg (1929), passim.
modified his original position, the 5 See below, 488-96.
gO ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
other. In these terms, ours is by no means the only culture where economic factors are preponderant in influencing the other facets of culture. Yet it does remain an historic fact that it was only among a people — ourselves — whose economy had become more complex than any before experienced by man, and at a time when the problems presented by the economic order were becoming most serious, that this theory made its appearance.
We must, then, be on our guard against a position that fails to take due account of modes of life other than our own, or which disregards directive forces other than those that to us appear to be of the first magnitude. Above all, we must guard against think- ing of all the cultures of nonliterate peoples as one undifferen- tiated mass, to be contrasted with our own particular body of traditions. These reservations must be kept in mind in recogniz- ing that the machine has made it possible for us to live in an order of society which, in its economic aspects, is to be set apart from all others because of its complexity. Only with these reser- vations can we achieve a workable basis for the analysis of the problems to be considered in this book. We may, therefore, in these terms, proceed to sketch the more outstanding of these distinctions. For though, in most instances, they will be found to comprise differences of degree rather than of kind, we must analyze them so that we will not lose sight of them as we later describe and seek to understand the economic processes em- ployed by nonliterate communities.
3
THE RELATIONSHIP between the machine technology and the pecuniary organization of our economy has by no means been made clear. Yet it is apparent that this relationship has given rise to certain special kinds of economic phenomena, such as the busi- ness cycle, and the periodic unemployment that has followed on technological advances. These phenomena are the direct result of the increased productivity of the machine, coupled with a sys- tem whereby the sale of goods for profit as a technique for amass- ing wealth has become an end rather than a means in life. This entire complex operates so as to deprive many persons of an op-
BEFORE THE MACHINE gl
portunity to obtain the basic necessities of living, no matter how willing they may be to work or how able.
Such conditions are unknown to nonliterate man. These smaller groups may live on a level but little removed from subsistence needs, where the margin between starvation and survival is slight. Yet even in such societies, the individual who, as an individual, is reduced to such straits that he must either depend on some agency set up for the purpose of preventing his giving way be- fore the harsh dicta of the economic system, or starve, is rarely, if ever, encountered. In societies existing on the subsistence mar- gin, rather, it is generally the rule that when there is not enough, all hunger alike; when there is plenty, all participate.
This does not mean that in cultures where the margin of avail- able goods is greater than in those existing on such a low eco- nomic plane, an equal distribution of available resources exists. Practically all societies where life is lived on more than a sub- sistence level know the concepts of rich and poor, of leader and follower. But even in societies with relatively complex econo- mies, such as those of West Africa and Melanesia, where buying to sell at a profit is of some importance and the hiring of labor is not unknown, the phenomena of the business cycle, of techno- logical unemployment, and of malnutrition resulting from- an in- ability to obtain the necessities of life are not found. Thus, for example, clan solidarity among the East African Baganda assured that "real poverty did not exist"; furthermore, "no one ever went hungry . . . because everyone was welcome to go and sit down and share a meal with his equals."6 Again, the labor market, though by no means entirely absent among nonliterate groups, never attains a place comparable to that which it holds in our own economic order.
Among nonliterate folk we encounter conditions in many re- spects analogous to the economic system of the Middle Ages and before. As in pre-machine-age Europe, the laborer is almost in- variably the owner of the means of production and to that ex- tent is the master of his own economic destiny. That is, capital- ism, as we have come to know it since the advent of power machinery, is foreign to non-machine economies. Capital goods may be concentrated in the hands of individual members of cer-
6Roscoe, 12.
32 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
tain communities of this type, but this merely signifies that the difference between these systems and our machine economy is one of degree rather than of kind. In nonliterate societies, we do find men who control the labor of others, whether completely, as under the institution of slavery, or for limited periods of time, under forms of employment for wages. We can even encounter, in Samoa, something akin to an organized body of workers who do not hesitate to interrupt their labor where this is necessary to enforce their demands, or even to indulge in sabotage. But the demands to be enforced are demands of prestige and not of live- lihood, for among these workers there is no one to whom the re- turn for his labor is essential to his existence.7
Another outstanding difference between machine and non- machine cultures is found in their degree of specialization. In the latter, as has been noted, almost every person controls all the techniques essential for his own support and for the support of those dependent upon him. Even the man who excels in build- ing a canoe, or hunting game, or weaving, or iron-working will, with the aid of members of his family, also carry on agriculture or tend the herds, and he can, when necessary, build a house and fashion household utensils, or make the clothing that habitat and tradition dictate as necessities. Similarly, though some women may be better potters than others, or may excel in basketry or in some other occupation, yet all women will know how to do the household tasks and other kinds of work that are allotted to women under the prevalent patterns of labor. Conversely, it is rare, even where individuals surpass in certain skills, that these skills are restricted to them alone.
Thus, among the Ifugao of the Philippines,
Division of labor is not carried further than a mere begin- ning. Some men are highly skilled blacksmiths. Nearly all know something about blacksmithing. Some are highly skilled wood carvers, but nearly all are wood carvers for all that. Almost the only division of labor is between men and women.8
In Samoa,
The division of labor which is of importance to the mere physical well being of the people is the division of labor 7Hiroa (1930), 414-16. 8 Barton (1922), 423.
BEFORE THE MACHINE 33
along sex lines. Every man knows how to build a small house, how to hew out a rough canoe, how to make a coco- nut cup, or carve a rough food bowl. The carpenters and makers of sennit lashings are essentially specialists, called in for important occasions. But upon the balance of men and women workers within the household, and upon their skill in the usual tasks in which every adult is supposed to be pro- ficient, depends the prosperity of the household.9
Among the Hopi of Arizona,
Common wants and desires, fairly standardized, simple and easily satisfied, require no diverse specialization to satisfy them. ... It is evident that division of labor is primarily conventional, based on sex secondarily and more indefinitely on age.10
In Haiti,
The life of the Haitian farmer, though hard, is simple and self-contained. With but few exceptions, he supplies all his necessities, for he commands almost the entire range of tech- niques known to his culture; hence Haitian economy shows a lack of specialization that in the main is only relieved by the sex division of labor.11
The Maori, we learn, employed
... no very intricate division of labour, such as occurs in the highly complex social structure of the 'civilized' com- munity. The fairly simple character of economic wants did not necessitate any great diversity of occupations to satisfy them, and every man was able to master something more than the rudiments of the principal crafts. Entire absorption of the working powers of the individual in one industry, or in a single process of an industry, was rare, if not unknown. At the same time division of labour on a limited scale, both as regards separation of employments and of processes, was not absent.12
Or, in Dahomey, a non-machine economy outstanding for its complexity, and where craft specialization is marked, "no mat- 9 Mead (1930a), 66. ll Herskovits (1937), 67.
10Beaglehole (1937), 18. « Raymond Firth (1929), 193-4.
34 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
ter what the rank of a Dahomean or what his trade, he must know how to cultivate the soil, and he will have his fields." 18
We must recognize that all men and women in non-machine societies can control the techniques essential for obtaining a living, and, where there are specialized crafts, that the crafts- men are never dependent for their livelihood solely upon what they produce. These are sufficiently striking differences between nonliterate economies and our own. Even more striking, how- ever, are the implications of the fact that among nonliterate peo- ples the extreme forms of specialization known to us, where the worker must restrict his activities to minor operations in the entire production process, is but rarely encountered. Specializa- tion within one industry does occur in non-machine societies, as where an individual will be expert at making one special part of a canoe. But, again, almost without exception, such a worker is found to be a full-fledged member of a larger co-operative work group, and psychologically has no difficulty in identifying himself with the finished product.
The subject of industrial psychology is important in making effective the human resources needed for the kind of mass pro- duction that has been developed in our society, since the degree of specialization characteristic of the organization of our larger industries has given rise to serious problems of individual ad- justment. A man who for hours on end tightens a bolt on the en- gine of an automobile which he will probably never see, and with which he can in no way identify himself, or who, in a packing house, makes the same cut on each of an endless procession of carcasses as they pass before him, is deprived of something that is deeply rooted in the human psyche.
It is not necessary to do more than indicate this to cause us to see why questions of this sort have been found so urgent a subject for study. Veblen put it as follows:
The share of the operative workman in the machine industry is ( typically ) that of an attendant, an assistant, whose duty is to keep pace with the machine process and to help out with workmanlike manipulation at points where the machine en- gaged is incomplete. His work supplements the machine process, rather than makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process makes use of the workman.14 13Herskovits (1932), 266. 14 Veblen (1918), 306-07.
BEFORE THE MACHINE 35
In the unconscious processes of identification an infinite satis- faction is achieved if, at the end of a day or a week or a year, a worker can point to something of which he may be proud, of which he is the maker or in the making of which he has partici- pated, and in which he retains a sense of creativeness. But this is precisely what cannot be achieved by the majority of those employed in the specialized occupations of an industrial society. Sapir, in developing his idea of "what kind of a good thing culture is," felt that this factor of specialization was so impor- tant that it could be used as a criterion to divide cultures into those which are "genuine" and those which are "spurious":
The great cultural fallacy of industrialism, as developed up to the present time, is that in harnessing machines to our uses it has not known how to avoid the harnessing of the majority of mankind to its machines. The telephone girl who lends her capacities, during the greater part of the living day, to the manipulation of a technical routine that has an eventually high efficiency value but that answers to no spir- itual needs of her own is an appalling sacrifice to civiliza- tion. . . . The American Indian who solves the economic problem with salmon-spear and rabbit-snare operates on a relatively low level. . . , but he represents an incompara- bly higher solution than our telephone girl of the questions that culture has to ask of economics.15
We need not set up a system of comparative values in modes of living, however, to recognize that in terms of achieving a rounded life, the patterns of production in non-machine socie- ties afford far more satisfactions to one engaged in the industrial process than in a machine society. No more apt illustration of this point could be had than in the following description of the manner of work of the Andamanese and of the drives that under- lie their efforts:
In the manufacture of their weapons, utensils, and other articles, they . . . spend . . . hour after hour in laboriously striking pieces of iron with a stone hammer for the purpose of forming spear or arrowheads, or in improving the shape of a bow, etc., even though there be no necessity, immediate 15 Sapir, 308, 316.
36 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
or prospective, to stimulate them to such efforts. The incen- tive is evidently a spirit of emulation, each one priding him- self on being able to produce work which will excel, or at least compare not unfavourably with, that of his neigh- bors.10
This may likewise be seen in the choices of occupation made by certain native peoples who are in contact with the world economic system. Thus, of the Malay fishermen of Kelantan, it is stated:
Popular opinion is apt to regard the Malay, in contrast to the Indian and Chinese who share his native land, as lazy, improvident, and lacking in foresight or ability to work hard and to save. . . . Because a Malay refuses to do long and monotonous work on rubber plantations away from his fam- ily, under conditions which Chinese and Indians willingly accept for the sake of the wages, it is assumed that he is lazy. No one who has seen the long, often cold, exhausting and disappointing labour of fishermen on the east coast would doubt that the Malay is capable of sustained, skilful and energetic labour. But he needs to have interest in his work, a factor which modern industrial organization has subjugated to the desire for a higher standard of living.17
Certainly the resources an individual in a non-machine so- ciety brings to his task must be greater and more varied, in terms of productive activity, than when he carries on the intense spe- cialization demanded of him in a machine technology. What in the field of art has been termed the drive toward virtuosity can be given full play where every step in a process is in the hands of the producer, from the gathering of the raw materials to the finished product that may be admired by the worker's fellows.
Yet another distinction between machine and non-machine societies lies in the development of the tradition of business en- terprise, as we know it. As will be shown in later pages, practi- cally no present-day human group is entirely self-supporting, and there is good reason to believe that trade existed in quite early prehistoric times. Where tribal specialization has followed on the localization of natural resources, the needs of a people for
10 Man, 26. 17 Rosemary Firth, 113.
BEFORE THE MACHINE 37
those goods they cannot produce because of a lack of essential raw materials cause them to trade for what tbey desire, and much of their own productive activity is devoted to the making of their own specialty for this same market. A comparable phenom- enon is found within certain tribal economies, as where the mak- ers of iron objects, to the degree that they devote their time to this work, must exchange their products for such food, utensils, or non-utilitarian objects as they need or desire if they are to have them. In a number of nonliterate societies where trading is a recognized occupation, and where, as in West Africa, trade is carried on by the use of money rather than by barter, buying in order to sell at a profit, or manufacture of goods primarily for disposal in the market, is well known. We shall also encounter cultures in Melanesia, in East Africa, and in North and South America where the trader as middleman plays an important part in the circulation of commodities from tribe to tribe. But the role which these aspects of trade play in the economic life of such peoples does not have an importance comparable in any way to that held by business in our own economy.
Though in non-industrial societies sparring between traders for advantage does, of course, mark their operations, sometimes even this seems to be absent where values in terms of goods ex- changed by direct barter are fixed by traditional usage. Nonethe- less, among nonliterate groups the conduct of business transac- tions has nothing of the impersonal quality that has come to be an outstanding characteristic of our economic system. It is well known that where a non-European has to deal with a European in a matter involving trade, both parties to the transaction are often subject to no little irritation because of differing traditions of trading. Among many who live in non-machine societies, spar- ring for advantage in the exchange of goods is something of a pleasurable contest of wits.
Nonliterate societies also differ from our own in the relative stress they lay on pecuniary standards of evaluation. Among our- selves, these standards assume such importance that values in terms of money not only dictate our economic judgments, but tend to invade evaluations of all other phases of our culture as well. This has brought it about that money, by and of itself, has come to have a place quite aside from its function as the least common denominator of the market-place. As a matter of fact,
38 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
it is not easy for us to think of ends that are not expressed as monetary values, even though they concern art or religion or family relations. That we use phrases such as "to have a heart of gold/' or to "give a gilt-edged promise," means only that our lin- guistic usage, like that of all peoples, reflects our standard of values — not as this standard may operate in an economic sense, but as the phrase is applied to moral and personal judgments of the broadest sort.
Now this kind of evaluation is a rarity in nonliterate societies. It is found, notably in Melanesia and in northwestern North America, where outward emblems of wealth are psychologically as important as among ourselves. Yet, in general, there are many more of these groupings where goods, to say nothing of people, are not to be bought at a price, than where the opposite is true. Many instances have been recorded where objects desired by a purchaser have been refused him in the face of fabulous offers — fabulous, that is, in terms of the values set by the people among whom the owner of the desired object lived. It is more revealing of our own psychology than that of those against whom the charge of economic irresponsibility has been laid that the basis of this charge, so often repeated in the accounts of contacts be- tween natives and Europeans, is that these peoples are prone to accept trifles, such as beads, in recompense for objects which we hold to have the highest value, such as golden ornaments or pre- cious stones, In reality, this merely means that in such cases the standards of value brought into play differ from our own.
One of the most widely spread traits of human beings, mani- fest under the most diverse types of social order, is the desire for prestige. As we shall see, there is an intimate relationship be- tween prestige and the control of economic resources in most societies living above a subsistence level. The degree to which those who live under the regime of the machine are dependent upon others for almost every necessity of life, whether material or psychological, and the extent to which it has become neces- sary to translate experience into terms of those monetary units on which we are so dependent for the goods and services we find essential or desirable, demonstrate the economic consequence of extreme specialization. Here we see money assuming an impor- tance out of all proportion to its manifestation in other cultures or at other times.
BEFORE THE MACHINE 39
It is a commonplace that Europe of the Middle Ages stressed other-worldliness in evaluating its satisfactions and directives. This, however, is merely one way of recalling to ourselves that prestige and the resultant power associated with it can and, in most societies, is to be gained through excellence in other fields than the accumulation of wealth, that the rewards for outstand- ing accomplishment can be conceived in terms other than those of money.
All caution must understandably be exercised in making state- ments such as these. In some nonliterate groups, especially where a money economy prevails, motivations quite similar to those found in any community living under a machine technology are not lacking. On the other hand, we must not forget that many persons in our culture are not dominated by the pecuniary ideal to anything like the extent of the majority. However, granting the existence of exceptions both in nonliterate societies and our own, the broad differences in the patterned attitudes toward money in machine and non-machine cultures must be recognized.
A FINAL distinction between machine and non-machine societies has to do with the utilization of economic resources for the sup- port of non-subsistence activities. Because of greater powers of production, the goods available under a machine technology to release man-power from direct concern with the tasks of pro- ducing the necessities of life are more numerous among ourselves than in any other society. The conversion of these resources into what is to be termed social leisure is of the highest importance for the understanding of many aspects of the organization of hu- man societies, wherever they are found and whatever their com- plexity. As such, this point will be given extended treatment in a later chapter.1* Here we will consider only that phase of the de- velopment of a mechanistic approach to life that accompanied the advent and growth of a machine technology, which finds its most characteristic expression in the scientific tradition.
From the beginning of the industrial revolution, the amount of economic resources devoted to the support of the scientific in-
18 Sec below, 395-415.
4O ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
vestigation of the world in which we live has become ever larger. This in turn has so helped to increase the efficiency of the proc- esses of production that much more consumption and capital goods have been available than ever before. But the relationship is a reciprocal one, which has released an ever increasing meas- ure of social leisure; and this, in turn, has permitted the investi- gation of a constantly wider range of problems.
Science, of course, did not begin with the machine age, as is apparent when we consider the history of physics and mathe- matics. Medicine, one of the scientific disciplines that has most flowered in our culture, also has a history that long antedates the coming of the machine. Those whose task it is to care for human life and assuage human suffering, whether as practitioners of scientific medicine or as magic healers, are in all societies held to be worthy of support out of the subsistence goods produced by those who are always potentially, at least, in need of them. As regards science in general, however, since there was more to con- sume, more social leisure has been available since the advent of the machine age to release scientists for the pursuit of their in- vestigations. The increased efficiency of the productive processes that have resulted from the application of discoveries in the fields of the exact and mechanical sciences to industry is striking. In such matters as housing and all its related conveniences, or quan- tity and variety of foods, or aids to health and the prolongation of the life-span, or the wider recreational facilities and opportuni- ties for a broader outlook on the world, the resources of machine societies are not to be compared with those where the technology does not permit an equivalent production of material goods.
There is no intention to suggest in what has just been set forth that the machine technology, by and of itself, causes the societies in which it develops to live under optimum conditions, any more than there is of indicating that the societies in which man lived or lives in what is sometimes termed a state of nature — in non- machine cultures, that is — represent a golden age.
What is meant is that the more admirable developments of sci- ence and the multiplication of resources, like those less desirable aspects of life under this same order of society, are concomitants of the machine as against other technologies. In non-machine cul- tures, life, though lived at a slower pace, must be lived with far more constant regard for the demands of the natural environ-
BEFORE THE MACHINE 41
ment, and often in actual fear of not surviving. That is perhaps why the most convincing exposition of the values of our culture to native peoples is on the technological and scientific level; and this is also why we are so prone to insist that our way of life is the best.
One further point must be clarified before we proceed to an exposition of the data descriptive of the economic aspects of non- literate societies with which we shall deal in succeeding chapters. The division of labor in the intellectual field has brought it about that students who investigate nonliterate cultures have had but little contact with those whose special concern is with the eco- nomic aspects of life; while those who study our economic or- ganization have been so occupied with the problems of our com- plex industrial order that they do not customarily turn to other cultures for relevant materials against which to project their gen- eralizations. For the problems with which we are concerned in this book, the implications of the fact that there is no established discipline of the kind envisaged by Gras under the term "eco- nomic anthropology" 1H is crucial. Hence, in probing these im- plications, we shall profit by a clearer view of the usefulness of the materials with which we shall be dealing.
luGras (1927), 10.
CHAPTER III
ANTHROPOLOGY AMD ECONOMICS
To UNDERSTAND why anthropology and economics have not had more contact, we must first of all consider the materials with which each primarily deals. Economics derives its data not only from our own culture, but, except for economic history, from this culture as it exists today.1 Anthropology, on the other hand, rang- ing the peoples of the nonliterate world, presents materials hav- ing to do with all phases of social activity in civilizations of all kinds. As concerns the economic life of these folk, it is under- standable that such data are not easily assimilated to traditions of procedure based on the intensive study of the economic patterns of only one culture. Yet, as we have said, the general outline of all human civilizations is the same. If we recognize that a differ- ence of degree rather than of kind exists between most of our economic institutions and those of other peoples, the unity of the data concerned with the problem of economizing must be ap- parent.
Economists and anthropologists have drawn but little on the work of each other for still further reasons. One of them arises out of the historical circumstances under which the social sci- ences developed. Another derives from the psychology of those who participated in this development. Finally, purely practical considerations, which have figured in shaping the division of labor between the disciplines concerned with various aspects of the study of human societies, have entered. Of these, the psycho- logical and practical reasons are the more fundamental. They
*€£. Gras (1927), 11-12.
42
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 43
account for the historic fact that, in studying man, we have un- derstandably tended to attack those problems lying about us which, pressing for solution, are more obvious and, from a prac- tical standpoint, far more accessible than those which are to be studied in the far corners of the earth.2
With the expansion of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, contacts were increasingly had with native peoples as a result of slaving and merchandising operations, missionary ac- tivities, and the growing policy of colonization on the part of European nations. The writings descriptive of the tribal cultures with whom contact was thus established eventually claimed the attention of those interested in the nature, the mechanisms, and the development of human civilization. It is not necessary here to trace the growth of this interest into scientific anthropology. It need only be pointed out that, though it became essential for the student of nonliterate societies to treat of all phases of life in describing the civilizations with which he was concerned, in one respect his work became as highly specialized as that of any other scientist. This specialization lay in the method he devel- oped for amassing and interpreting these varied data.
This matter of method very largely resolves itself into a tech- nique that enables the student to recognize, isolate, and analyze modes of thought and behavior taken for granted when the in- stitutions of one's own society are studied. The student who ana- lyzes his own economic order, his own political life, his own family organization, his own art, or his own literature is so prone to accept as given the cultural matrix in which are lodged his data that he feels no need to subject this setting to any consid- erable analysis. This can be a handicap, especially when general- izations having cross-cultural validity must be drawn; but it is also a short-cut for those who study any phase of their own cul- ture. Lacking this short-cut, the student of nonliterate societies must, however, before anything else establish the nature and the underlying sanctions of the institutions in the groups he studies. It is this fact that, presenting anthropologists with their greatest challenge, forced them to develop as specialists in method.3
2 "Apart from mediaeval theo- Bonn (1931), 333. ries, the more important modern 3 A vivid summary of the meth-
economic theories have developed odological problems presented in
out of violent discussions of the the study of land tenure and the
merits of rival economic policies." use of land in a specific nonliterate
44 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Because of their methods, anthropologists have been able to provide us with an impressive body of accounts setting forth the behavior, traditions, and customary attitudes of peoples whose cultures differ strikingly not only from our own but also, in vary- ing degrees, from each other. It is understandably impossible for any field ethnologist, from whom our primary data concerning these cultures must come, to be specialized in the study of all those aspects of culture upon which he must touch in giving a rounded description of the life lived by a specific group. Students of economics, or politics, or art, or literature, or religion have de- veloped theories that have the qualities of penetration and in- sight that can only flow from long preoccupation with data bearing on a restricted field. But those who have developed such theories have found it difficult to grasp the possibilities of sub- mitting the validity of their assumptions to the scientific test by applying them to civilizations that are quite different from our own in terms of their historic past, their environmental setting, and their technological equipment.
When we understand, then, that the specialization of the an- thropologist along methodological lines has enabled him to amass data of value for those who restrict their attention to specific fields of human activity in single cultures, we have taken an im- portant step in establishing the basis for a greater degree of mutual give-and-take between anthropologists and economists. To this end, therefore, let us see wherein the results of special- ization in the two fields have inhibited a useful degree of co- operation between them. Let us also see what kinds of data are available, and what must be made available, if the findings of the anthropologists concerning the variation in economic proc- esses and institutions that exist the world over are to be of use to those whose techniques and problems have tended to confine their investigations to the economic aspects of our own civi- lization.4
community, will be found in Fordo given, and it is not proposed to sug-
(1937), 30-1. For a general dis- gest any criticism of work by econ-
cussion of anthropological field omists in their own field. Certain
method, see Ilerskovits (1948), Ch. comments germane to the issues un-
6, "The Ethnographer's Labora- dcr consideration that have been
tory," 79-93. made by economists themselves
4 We shall take the data, mcth- may, however, be quoted at appro-
ods, and theory of economics as priate times.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 45
MOST of the earlier definitions given by economists of their field of interest related the subject-matter of economics "to the study of the causes of material welfare/' Because of this, perhaps, an- thropologists have tended to overlook how deeply the modern approach to the subject is concerned with the matter of choice, the "relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses," s that has formed the basis of our discussion of the process of economizing in the first chapter of this book. As was pointed out there, this involves a universal process in human society of maximizing satisfactions. This process varies with the degree of productivity and canons that traditionally dictate desirability according to available goods or available time. Here we must return to the fact that the data on which economic theorists have based their definitions and principles pertain to a single culture, our own. This means that, from the point of view of the comparative study of culture, the "laws" derived from these data are the equivalent of a statistical average based on a single case.
This has been increasingly realized by economists, who have phrased the matter in various ways. Thus Papandreou takes the following position: "It is not sufficient to postulate the rational norm. We must further make commitment to value-systems which are 'ideally typical' in the culture under analysis." As he puts it: "The very attempt of economic analysis to build a theory of universal validity, to avoid any and all psychological and so- ciological commitments takes it into the path of operational ineaninglessness. The only way out of the impasse, the only way for arriving at an empirically relevant science is to make these commitments. This would reduce the universality of the proposi- tion, but at the same time it would increase their range of mean- ingfulness." In short, "we should extricate ourselves from the shackles of economic univcrsalism and experiment with less gen- eral but often more useful construction." G
We may begin our discussion of the implications for the an- thropologist of the cultural particularism that has marked eco- nomics by turning to the definition of the subject given by Alfred
0 Bobbins, 4, 16. ° Papandreou, 721^3.
46 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Marshall, which its author has restated in several ways. First of all, it is expressed in the following familiar terms: "Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of material requisites of well-being." Some pages later we read: "Economics is a study of men as they live and move and think in the ordinary business of life. But it concerns itself chiefly with those motives which affect, most powerfully and most steadily, man's conduct in the business of life." These definitions, it is evident, are broad enough so that they easily include the economic organization of any society.
As we go farther into Marshall's book, however, we find that the promise of breadth in these definitions is by no means real- ized. It soon becomes apparent that this "ordinary business of life" is essentially a discussion of the phenomenon of price and its ramifications into the activities of the market as these concern the motivations behind the production, distribution, and ex- change of goods and services. In other words, Marshall is con- cerned, in everything but his definition, with just those aspects of our economic system that are seldom encountered in other societies. We are told, for example, that the contribution of eco- nomic science to an understanding of the economic aspects of social life derives its special value from the precision it can at- tain in analyzing its data: "The problems, which are grouped as economic, because they relate especially to man's conduct under the influence of motives that are measurable by a money price, are found to make a fairly homogeneous group." Or, again: "Eco- nomic laws, or statements of economic tendencies, are those so- cial laws which relate to branches of conduct in which the strength of the motives chiefly concerned can be measured by a money price." 7
This tradition of economic analysis which studies economic motivation, economic processes, and economic institutions by measuring them in terms of price phenomena has continued to dominate economic thinking, whatever theoretical point of view may be held. Almost any work in the field of economic theory may be cited to make the point.
7 Marshall, 2, 14, 27, 33; see also which the economist addresses him- the series of "chief questions to sell," pp. 40-1.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 47
J. M. Keynes, for example, considers the elements to be taken as given, the independent and dependent variables in what, sig- nificantly for the point under consideration here, he calls "the" economic system.
We take as given the existing skill and quantity of available labour, the existing quality and quantity of available equip- ment, the existing technique, the degree of competition, the tastes and habits of the consumer, the disutility of different intensities of labour and of the activities of supervision and organization, as well as the social structure, other than our variables set forth below, which determine the distribution of the national income.
Most of these "given" elements can, obviously, be determined for any economy, pecuniary or not, given adequate research oppor- tunities and reasonable flexibility of interpretation of the terms employed to name them. However, this is not so apparent when we consider his further stipulations, where he says: "Our inde- pendent variables are, in the first instance, the propensity to consume, the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital and rate of interest. . . . Our dependent variables are the volume of employment and the national income (or national dividend) measured in wage-units." 8
Yet how are these variables to be studied in economies where the price-system is absent, where entrepreneurs exist only by definition, and where employment and unemployment are sea- sonal, regulated by social tradition and not the result of com- petition for work in the labor market? The difficulties in this may be seen from the attempt that has been made to arrive at the "economic balance" of the Nupe culture of West Africa. Despite the fact that these people have, and for many generations have had, a pecuniary economy, the results yield little more than a series of family budgets showing income and outgo, and a sense of the power of prestige motivations as well as subsistence drives in their economic system.9 The comment of a student of another nonliterate, nonpecuniary economy concerning the well-known proposition of Keynes on saving can be cited here as relevant: ". . . his definition of 'saving* is framed in terms of the behav- iour of individuals in a society with a price mechanism. Where
8 Keynes (1939), 245. ° Nadel (1942), 335-65.
48 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
there is no point of price equilibrium at which transactions can take place, his terms cease to be applicable." 10
The concept of economic equilibrium, prominent in the writ- ings of economists of various schools, can likewise be scrutinized from the point of view of its applicability to economies other than our own. There is no reason, of course, why the following three sets of data, which we must know before we attack the problem of equilibrium, cannot be studied in any society. These three sets are "(1) the external obstacles to the production of want-satis- faction, ( 2 ) the nature of the wants and resources of the organ- isms concerned, and (3) the principle of equilibrium — in this case the maximization of utility, or of 'advantage.' " These, Bould- ing tells us, lead to "ultimate determinants . . . the physical laws of production, as expressed in the physical production func- tions, and the psychological laws of behavior, as expressed in the system of indifference curves." n Yet the type of closed eco- nomic system he envisages as the "stationary state" or his condi- tion of "dynamic equilibrium," while conceptually applicable to the economies with which we are here concerned, are so de- scribed in terms of interest, price, stock, and the operation of firms that serious methodological problems arise in utilizing them outside the economic systems of literate, industrialized societies of Europe and America.
It is self-evident that any functioning economic system must, in the broadest sense, be in a state of equilibrium. That is, the total output of all kinds of economic goods and services, plus whatever "savings" are made in the form of capitalization of wealth, must equal its intake.12 When this ceases to occur, as where, in undeveloped areas, economic productivity is drained off for the benefit of outside investors, without adequate return being provided the producing native society, malfunctioning sets in, with results that have been made well-known through the many studies of this particular kind of situation.
But equilibrium economics is only by implication concerned
10 I
'Raymond Firth (1939), 23. Primitive" (72-84) is drawn. The
Firth's footnote at this point refers author here is essentially concerned
to Keynes, op. cit, 64, 220, 373. with establishing 1 ) the fact of pur-
11 Boulding, 767. posive activity among the Bantu and
12 It is in this sense of the term 2 ) that values derive from the allo- that Goodfellow's chapter entitled cation of resources among different "Equilibrium Economics and the wants.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 49
with the phenomenon of economic balance in this broad and general sense. The problem of how value flows from fluctuations in supply and demand, in its essentially mathematical character, needs the quantitative index of value contained in price as mani- fest in the market to permit its analysis. More than this, even in a price economy, a whole range of assumptions is made before the analysis is begun. Hicks, in explaining the workings of the system of general equilibrium, may be cited here:
The laws of change of the price-system, like the laws of change of individual demand, have to be derived from sta- bility conditions. We first examine what conditions are nec- essary in order that a given equilibrium system should be stable; then we make an assumption of regularity, that po- sitions in the neighbourhood of the equilibrium position will be stable also; and thence we deduce rules about the way in which the price-system will react to changes in tastes and resources.
Again, given time and research opportunity, these are prob- lems which, though difficult to study in non-pecuniary economies, might be susceptible of attack. Yet it would obviously not be possible even to accomplish this in terms of the clarification of method given in the next paragraph:
In order that equilibrium should be stable, it is necessary that a slight movement away from the equilibrium position should set up forces tending to restore equilibrium. This means that a rise in price above the equilibrium level must set up forces tending to produce a fall in price; which im- plies, under perfect competition, that a rise in price makes supply greater than demand. The condition of stability is that a rise in price makes supply greater than demand, a fall in price demand greater than supply.13
It is apparent that the situation envisaged in this approach — and in the discussions of economic statics and dynamics in de- termining equilibrium that derive from it — affords little place for the analysis of economies not under the entrepreneurial sys- tem, where a simple technology fixes the ceiling of productivity, where demand is restricted, and where value, whether monetary
13 Hicks, 62.
50 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
or cast in terms of consumption commodities, is determined by tradition and not by market fluctuations. The point at issue can- not be better made than by citing a comment by Schurnpeter on the Keynesian approach: "What I admire most in these and other conceptual arrangements of his is their adequacy; they fit his purpose as a well-tailored coat fits the customer's body. Of course, precisely because of this they possess but limited use- fulness. ... A fruit knife is an excellent instrument for peeling a pear. He who uses it in order to attack a steak has only himself to blame for unsatisfactory results." u
This same restricted approach also characterizes the writings of Karl Marx. Here we are again confronted with an intricate economic analysis based almost entirely on data drawn from our own society, dealing with problems that arise out of the complex development of the special kind of economic system that has re- sulted from the invention and development of the machine. Once more, as in Marshall, the system we contemplate, in aspect after aspect, is based on our own economy, as in the discussion of money, which by definition is limited to gold and silver, and thus precludes even the application of the term to any of the numer- ous kinds of tokens that, as will be seen, are employed to express value in nonliterate societies.
CERTAIN other economists, particularly Thorstein Veblen, gave more consideration than either the neo-classical group or the Marxians to economic problems susceptible of investigation in non-machine, non-pecuniary societies. But it may be noted in passing that the problems that have claimed the interest of those who have followed Veblen touch only lightly upon the matters which are at the core of economic theory as this is ordinarily expressed in the writings of most economists. And even Veblen's followers, as their work has developed, have tended to restrict their field of interest to matters that are specifically related to our economic order. As an illustration of this we may cite the work of C. Wesley Mitchell on the business cycle. For all its brilliance of attack and the insight it yields on this particular 14 Schumpeter, 97.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 51
problem, these researches are but an intensive study of precisely that phase of our economy that, more than any other, is absent outside our own economic system.
Ayres, the neo-Veblenian who has perhaps most retained the point of view of what may be termed classical institutionalism, in theory, at least, continues in the tradition of recognizing the usefulness of cross-cultural terms of reference. But the matter is different in practice; one finds in his work a minimum of ethno- graphic documentation to supplement the historical, psycholog- ical, and philosophical arguments he employs in developing his hypotheses. This is especially true, for instance, in his discussion of the problems of price, of value, and of technology. Here the appeal to the concepts and data of the single historical stream of Euroamerican culture often makes his conclusions highly vul- nerable from the point of view of cross-cultural analysis.15
A more striking example of how neo-institutionalists fail to take advantage of cross-cultural data is to be found in Gambs's discussion of institutionalist economics. Like Ayres, though in a more critical vein, he takes Veblen as his starting-point. But one misses completely in his work those references to "the Poly- nesian islanders," "the Andamans," "the Todas," and "the Pueblo communities" which at the outset of Veblen's book establish the pattern of his entire system and concern data that form the back- ground against which his argument concerning certain aspects of our own economy is implicitly projected.16 Gambs seems not unaware of the cross-disciplinary implications of economic sci- ence, and the arguments from psychology he brings to bear on the problems he considers are welcome contributions. But one finds among the questions he has difficulty in answering some that might prove to be considerably less formidable if cross- cultural data were taken into account along with the psycholog- ical and historical facts.
Thus we may consider the following passage:
The word "rational" has for so many centuries been associ- ated with a false concept of the mind that we may properly discard it as having no useful meaning. Until new concepts arise to define economic behavior, we shall not advance far
lft Ayres (1944), passim, but cs- lrt Veblen (1915), Ch. I.
pecially Chs. II, IV, VI, and X.
52 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
if we speak of it as being either rational, irrational or some- times the one and sometimes the other.17
Yet the cultural definition of rationality, developed in our first chapter, indicates that the problem of rational behavior, at- tacked from a relativistic point of view, need not lead to the counsel of despair that yields only a negative conclusion on such an important point.
Gambs goes to the heart of the problem of institutional eco- nomics, indeed, when he writes:
I would say that the under-development of institutional the- ory results from . . . the extreme difficulty that even the strongest human propensities have of transcending the Ge- stalt in which they find themselves. In other words, the "in- stinct of idle curiosity" though occasionally competent enough and strong enough to escape from its environment, is normally bound down by the institutions in which it op- erates.18
Here, however, we have nothing more than a statement of the difficulties of the student, in the face of his own enculturative experience, of extending his analysis beyond the bounds of that experience. But an extension of that experience, first-hand or by reference to the ethnographic literature, into the cultures of other societies is not difficult, and would seem to provide the path along which institutional economics — granting its present state as described — can move so as to "transcend the Gestalt" in which it finds itself. We only have to recall that there are many Gestalts, each the result of the working out, in institutionalized form, of universal processes operative in all cultures.
Whether the approach be through concern with the pecuniary motivations that cause men to struggle for economic betterment, or with market processes conceived in terms of supply and de- mand as reflected in a price structure, whether it has to do with the productivity of labor and its reward, or is concerned with the description and analysis of our economic institutions, an an- thropologist's reaction to all these approaches must be much the same. He can only conclude that such problems are so couched
17 Gambs, 51. ls Ibid., pp. 87-8.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 53
in terms of a single body of tradition that their investigation among nonliterate peoples can yield results only of the most gen- eral kind; where, indeed, results gained from this approach can- not be predicted in advance to be negative.
Some economists, as well as anthropologists, have reached this conclusion. Thus, one unconventional critic redefines economics as "a science of human behaviour in an exchange economy based upon freedom of contract, and upon property-rights approxi- mating to the type that is familiar in the Western Europe or North America of our own time." The broadness of Marshall's definition is commented on in much the same vein as has been done above from an anthropologist's point of view, and it is made clear how neither Marshall nor his followers have been concerned with any but a small portion of the range of phenom- ena implicit in it. Their work, it is pointed out, has consisted either "of the formulation of a body of economic laws or propo- sitions which relate strictly to market processes of one kind or another," or "of a mass of 'realistic' or 'institutional studies' which pass as economics ( if indeed they are permitted so to pass at all ) solely because the particular institutions or activities of which they treat have had some special importance in determining the concrete background in which at particular times or places, the laws of the market have in fact operated." 19 The fact that the attention of economists has been focused so exclusively on just those aspects of our economy least likely to be found among non- literate folk has thus confused anthropologists who turned to economic treatises for clarification of problems and methods in the study of the economic systems of nonliterate societies.20
THE WRITINGS of the economists failed to attract the interest of anthropologists for yet another reason. In no conventional trea- tise on economic theory is "primitive" man depicted in a manner either in harmony with the facts of nonliterate societies as known
10 Wootton, 129, 45. and anthropologists of the work of
20 For a discussion of the dcfi- each other in a special field, that of
ciencies that have resulted from a money, cf. Einzig, Ch. 2, 1&-25.
lack of knowledge by economists
54 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
to anthropologists, or in line with anthropological theory con- cerning the nature of the interaction between man, his environ- ment, and his traditions. In all justice, it must be pointed out that since the early days of economic theory the economists, perhaps discouraged by the immensity of the task of finding out for them- selves what "primitive" life was actually like, left "primitive" man severely alone. References to some hypothetical tribe living on an island and using seashells for money have, indeed, survived, at least in class discussions at one distinguished institution of learning, where an equally hypothetical investigation is under- taken to ascertain the effect of the sea-shell being a free good, so to speak, on the value of the non-existent currency.
There are some instances, however, where students of eco- nomic theory have not left nonliterate man severely alone. From the anthropologist's point of view, the description of primitive life by Biicher and his followers is an outstanding example of dis- cussions falling in this category. These writers so misunderstood even the most elementary facts of "primitive" cultures 21 that the effect of their analyses on anthropologists was to excite derision, where it did not have the more unfortunate result of inculcating a conviction that any approach to the study of "primitive" eco- nomic life from the point of view of economic theory is futile. For to envisage "primitive" men as entirely individualistic and non-social, marked by an animal-like striving for food, without stability, foresight, or any concept of value, was to caricature what even the anthropologist most innocent of any economic training knew.
Now it is true that while Biicher decried any attempt to "ex- emplify the primitive (i.e., the prehistoric or earliest) condition of man by any definite people," he did maintain that "there is more prospect of scientific results in an endeavour to collect the common characteristics of human beings standing lowest in the scale in order ... to arrive at a picture of the beginnings of economic life and the formation of society."22 But such an ap- proach runs afoul of elementary anthropological method. An-
21 Even a cursory reading of the where among primitive peoples the accounts of travelers available at children become independent very the time would, for example, have early in youth and desert the so- shown the untenability of such a ciety of their parents." Biicher, 37. statement as the following: "Every- 22 Bucher, Cri. I.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 55
thropology has given over the search for "origins" since the time it became recognized that, except as archaeological materials can be dug out of the ground, the beginnings of any phase of human activity cannot be scientifically established. Even if an- thropologists ever did accept the proposition that generalized portrayal of early life could be derived from abstracting the least common denominator of all "primitive" cultures existing at pres- ent, as was suggested by Biicher, they have long since rejected any such idea. There has been sufficient refutation of Biicher and those who have taken positions similar to his,23 so there is not need here to repeat these critiques. But writings falling in this category must at least come in for formal recognition and some consideration if we are to understand why anthropologists have been prone to give but little weight to mention made of "primitive" life by economists.
The concept of social evolution, which was developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century,24 further beclouded the thinking of economic theorists, though not of all economic his- torians. Notable here is the criticism of Biicher drawn by Usher: "Social history does not begin at the beginning of social life. . . . Despite the brilliance of Bucher's work and the keenness of his sense of historical development, evidence is constantly forced upon our attention that he could not free himself from the dis- position to describe the dawn of history as if it were the origin of organized social life." ~5 It is quite possible, as has been done, to trace the "evolution" of the industrial techniques of European culture from the simplicity of its prehistoric beginnings to its present complex forms.*' But this is neither the point of view nor the method of the earlier evolutionary or present-day neo-evolu-
2:5 For the most extended critique after the fallacies of this position
of Bucher's approach to the eco- had been exposed, he persists in
nomics of nonliterate peoples and regarding living "primitive" peoples
his idea of the relevance of these as the contemporary ancestors, so to
data for the problems of economics, speak, of more "developed" folk,
sec Leroy, passim. and in tying in their customs at the
24 The most recent work of this end of a sequence derived from pre-
type, a curiosity in its uncritical ac- historic data,
ceptance of a pseudo-evolutionary 25 Usher ( 1920 ) , 24.
picture of the presumed "develop- 2G Dixon and Eberhart, 50-66,
nient" of economic life, is Viljoen's 80-106. » volume. Published in 1936, long
56 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
tionary approach, which held that living primitive peoples might be regarded, so to speak, as our "contemporary ancestors" and that by studying their customs the "earlier" manifestations of our own traditions can thus be traced.27
Both point of view and method die hard, since even where they do not significantly function, they tend to give a subtle bias to basic approaches. This is seen in simple form where "pre- literate" is used instead of "nonliterate" in writing of "primitive" folk, or where students in describing nonliterate societies employ the past tense when considering institutions that today flourish in full vigor. It is found in tenuous or modified form in the elab- orate sequences of the purported historical development of types of economies set by Thurnwald.2* It is present in a less sophisti- cated form in an early study of the psychology of property by Beaglehole, where it is couched in terms of the sequence "prop- erty among animals — property among primitives — property among civilized children." 29 It is to be seen in the manner in which Schmidt, Koppers and the members of the culture-his- torical "school" of anthropology force economic data into a mold made out of a hypothetical progression of cultural types based on the assumption of the existence of cultural "layers" resulting from the interplay of reconstructed "historical strata." 30 It is a vestige of the evolutionary approach that causes Hoyt to turn to data from "primitive" societies in order to discover the "origins" of trade and of the concept of value; 31 that places discussions of nonliterate economies, where they are found in economic his- tories, before considerations of the mediaeval manor and the guild system, again implying a time sequence.32 Certainly Mar- shall, Marx, and Veblen, whatever differences may otherwise mark their points of view, were all strongly influenced by the evolutionary position. As a matter of fact, this approach is to be regarded as the most important single factor standing in the way of an adequate use of data from nonliterate societies by econ- omists as a means of broadening concepts and checking general- izations.
21 For the best statement of the Childe ( 19461) ).
neo-evolutionary approach as con- 2M Thurnwald (1932b), 59 ff.
cerns the development of technology 2" Beaglehole ( 1932), 22-3.
and economics, see Childe (1946a). 30 Koppers; W. Schmidt.
His defense of the "contemporary 3I Hoyt (1926), 6-11.
ancestor" method will be found in 82 Cf . Gras ( 1922 ) and Weber.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 57
5
THE FAILURE on the part of earlier anthropologists to recognize and treat fundamental economic facts in their studies of non- literate societies was extraordinary. The sections of older ethno- graphic monographs headed "Economics" are ordinarily more or less adequate discussions of technology. In the face of a very important tradition in anthropology, dating from the early Ger- man students, that technology and economics are not to be differ- entiated, it was almost entirely forgotten that "after all, fish-hooks and canoes, spears and tree traps, fire drills and bronze adzes, while constituting the technological foundation of economic ac- tivity are in reality the tools and not the life of economic activ- ity." 33 Many elaborate studies were made of how pots are fash- ioned, or how houses are thatched, or how fibers are woven or wood-carving done. In these earlier, more conventional descrip- tions of nonliterate peoples, however, we seldom encounter state- ments as to the organization of those who make pottery or of the values of the finished product, in terms either of other com- modities or of such money as the tribe may employ, or of what gain accrues to these potters as a result of their specialized labor. In several American series of anthropological contributions it has been customary to devote the section headed "Economic Life" to an exposition of the data dealing with technology, wherein human beings make their appearance rarely, if at all. Here details of trading, or the means of expressing value, or other more relevant economic tacts are included in that part of the discussion headed "Social Organization."
That some anthropologists should eventually have themselves reacted against this consistent reluctance to study one of the most important aspects of human social life is understandable. A tradition of including the study of economic aspects of culture in programs of field study was, it is true, quietly developing, but the first explicit manifestation of this reaction took the form of a vigorous attack on the doctrine of economic man.34 This initial volume was followed by another on the economics of the New Zealand Maori,™ by one on the role of food in the lives of a South
3<Gras (1927), 20. 85 Firth (1929).
34Malinowski (1921, 1922).
58 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
African people,36 and by still further contributions where the focus of attention was fixed on economic phenomena. Finally, in this series of works, came a supplementary treatise37 on Tro- briand Island economic life.38
In all of these studies we had better economics than in most conventional monographs dealing with nonliterate cultures that preceded them. Yet the fact remained that if other anthropolog- ical \vriters held economics to be technology, this last-named group conducted their research and presented their findings on the principle that economic life in nonliterate societies could not be treated unless consideration was given to every facet of tradi- tion that impinged on the economic institutions of a people. It is not difficult to understand how this position was reached. Econ- omists, as has been pointed out, can take for granted the cultural matrix in which their data lodge. Early anthropologists, finding but little to stimulate their research in the highly specialized problems considered by economists, retreated into technology. Reacting against this and other aspects of earlier work, these later writers brought into the fore-conscious the cultural setting of the economic data in societies other than our own. Tersely stated, it may be observed that if for the earliest anthropologists economics was technology, for these it was garden magic and gift exchange.39
A development which not only combined the economic and sociological approach but injected a psychological element in terms of personality types is also to be remarked, though it has stimulated no field investigation which might test its methodolog- ical value, or the validity of the hypothesis on which it is based.
36 Richards (1932). are of the highest importance for
37 Malinowski (1935). an understanding of comparative
38 These works have been selected economics, especially since in their for mention because, emphasizing as books and papers the ethnographic they did the same insistent point of materials are not obscured by di- view, they were characterized by gressions on theoretical points.
one methodological attack on the 39 From one point of view this
problems. It must not be overlooked, reaction, though in general highly
however, that other studies were valuable, was unfortunate. It was
also being made by students em- so violent that out of it developed
ploying other approaches (Arm- a strong antipathy to carrying on
strong, Barton, Blackwood, DuBois, studies in the perfectly legitimate
Provinse) in Melanesia, Africa, and field of technology or, as it is termed
elsewhere at the same time. The by the anthropologists, material cul-
data in the works of these students ture.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 59
Bunzel, defining economics somewhat in terms of earlier eco- nomic writing as "the total organization of behavior with refer- ence to the problems of physical survival," stated that "funda- mentally the function of any economic system is to maintain some kind of equilibrium between material needs and the potentiali- ties of the environment." Indicating the "endless variation" of the manner in which these needs may be envisaged, she advanced three "complementary principles" which were to be discerned in the functioning economics that satisfy wants. These were ( 1 ) the material principle, which "deals with the physical relationship to the environment and with the classical anthropologist's 'material culture' "; ( 2 ) the "formal principle . . . roughly 'social organ- ization' "; and ( 3 ) the "psychological principle . . . concerned largely with the general question of value in its widest sense, the structure of the personality that determines choice, and the at- titudes that animate institutions." 40
How to give full weight to the ways in which the institutions of a given culture are interrelated, and the manner in which they influence one another, is to take an unassailable anthropological position which is recognized as a principal aim of field research. One can also envisage problems wherein the influence of a given economic system on the personality types of those who live under it might be of importance.41 Yet one cannot but ask whether such matters as the production, the distribution, and the utilization of goods and services cannot be studied, even where the cultural matrix and psychological traits of the carriers must be made ex- plicit, without constant reference to all the psycho-cultural mech- anisms which everywhere underlie and sanction these processes.
It is questionable if anthropologists need burden the economic theorist with all those traditional rules of social behavior, re- ligious beliefs, and other masses of interrelated non-economic ethnographic and psychological data which are essential in a rounded study of a single culture, but are merely encumbrances in an intensive analysis of materials bearing on any given single
40 Bunzel, 327. type he assumes to exist, and ac-
41 This is implicit in the earlier count for the typical psychological writings, and explicit in the later configurations that mark off one work of Kardiner ( 1939, 1945 ) group from another. It is interesting where the economic aspects of a to speculate to what extent his culture figure among what he terms thinking along these lines may have the primary and secondary institu- been influenced by Bunzcl's position, tions that set the basic personality
6o ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
aspect of social behavior. As the matter has been put: "In de- scribing agricultural and hunting magic, must I give a complete account of these economic activities, and in mentioning magic for singing and dancing, must I describe song and dance? I think not. Everything in the world is ultimately related to everything else but unless we make abstractions we cannot even commence to study phenomena." 42 To hold that economic phenomena con- stitute but one aspect of culture does not mean that these phe- nomena cannot be studied without studying all of culture. It may be regarded as clear gain, as far as an interdisciplinary attack on the common problems is concerned, that anthropologists are coming to study economic phenomena in terms that add to the body of economic knowledge by presenting thfeir materials with- out so much reference to social context and psychological con- sequence that these matters stand in the way of seeing the eco- nomic implications of the data that are the basis of the study.
The subsequent development of an economic anthropology, wherein economic aspects of nonliterate societies arc studied in economic terms rather than as material culture, or myth or magic, or cultural psychology, has been rapid. Goodfellow's study of Bantu economics, to which reference has already been made, was one of the first of these. 4J Far more balanced in pointing the way toward an economic anthropology whereby the intensive study of a given people leads toward the analysis of economic generalizations already established, or to the setting up of new hypotheses applicable in cross-cultural analysis, is Firth's study of Tikopean economics. Here the social and religious setting of the economy is accorded full recognition as an effective force in shaping economic effort; yet the focus of the discussion remains continuously on the economic implications of the data, and on the economic institutions that document the principles of eco-
42 Evans-Pritcharcl (1937), 2. that, were this not so, the result
43 As is apparent from the previ- would be not only scientific conlu- ous citations to this work, its tend- sion but practical chaos" (3) e\- ency is to conceive of the economic plains why the data he adduces anthropologist as apologist for ceo- tend to be given far-reaching in- nomic theories rather than as ana- terpretations to enable him to bring lyst of their applicability in non- them into line with particular prin- machine and non-pecuniary cultures. ciples of economics that arise out of His statement, "The aim of this the study of Euroamerican econo- book is to show that the concepts mies (e.g., 90 on the entrepre- of economic theory must be taken neurial function).
as having universal validity, and
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 6l
nomic behavior.44 In addition, an appreciable number of descrip- tive monographs concerned with nonliterate peoples living in North, Central, and South America, the South Seas, Southeast Asia and Africa, from which data in the chapters that follow have been drawn, have appeared, in which economic life is treated as such, or has been the primary focus of the study. It is to be an- ticipated that this tradition, now firmly established in anthropol- ogy, will give a sure foundation of relevant data for further comparative insights into the nature and functioning of the eco- nomic process.
THAT conceptual as well as methodological difficulties stand be- tween anthropologists and economists in communicating with each other has been made apparent in this and the preceding chapter. Walker points out that anthropology, with its insistence on induction from observed fact, differs significantly from "the method of economics which, being largely deductive, is not the method of a positive science." He elaborates the point in the fol- lowing passage, which returns us to a point made in the first chapter:
Anthropologists are focused on the community rather than the individual; they view society as a system of mutually dependent elements, and emphasize the influence of social forces on behaviour. The economist, on the other hand, de- rives the forms of economic behaviour from assumptions concerning man's original nature. He begins by considering how an isolated individual would dispose his resources, and then assumes that the individual members of a social group behave in the same way. The "economic man" is not a "so- cial animal" and economic individualism excludes society
44 Firth (1939). This hook ap- chapters of "The Economic Life of pearecl while the earlier version of Primitive Peoples," as a demonstra- the present work was in press. It is tion of how two students, approach- interesting to compare the initial ing the question of the relation chapter of Firth's study, especially between the two disciplines from the section ( 22-9 ) entitled "Lack of somewhat different anthropological Coordination between Anthropology points of view, can reach strikingly and Economies," with the first two similar conclusions.
62 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
in the proper human sense. Economic relations are imper- sonal. The social organization dealt with in economic theory is best pictured as a number of Crusoes interacting through markets exclusively. ... It is the market, the exchange op- portunity, which is functionally real, not the other human beings; they are not even means to action. The relation is neither one of cooperation nor one of mutual exploitation, but is completely non-moral, non-human.45 The failure of economic theory to present man as a social animal ... is the basis of anthropologists' (and some economists') dis- content with economic theory.4"
Yet it would be unfortunate to ignore the considerable con- tributions of these two disciplines that are of potential or actual use to each other. Not all of economic theory is by any means as little adapted to the study of societies other than our own as cari- catures of the subject drawn at one time or another by anthro- pologists would have us believe. As has been repeatedly indi- cated in preceding pages, we must allow for the inapplicability of certain aspects of current economic theory to research in non- literate, non-machine, and non-pecuniary societies. Yet we have also seen ample suggestions in the literature of economics for anthropologists to consider. In any society, for example, as has been pointed out in our initial chapter, "the adaptation of means to ends and the 'economizing* of means in order to maximize ends" are a fundamental problem to be discussed under the headings which, in one analysis, have been set forth as the "elementary factors" in the achievement of this larger goal: "(1) the wants to be satisfied, (2) the goods, uses, or services of goods and human services, which satisfy them, (3) intermediate goods in a complicated sequence back to (4) ultimate resources, on which the production of goods depends, ( 5 ) a series of tech- nological processes of conversion, and (6) a human organization for carrying out these processes" — comprising "the social or- ganization of production and distribution in the large." 4T
45 F. H. Knight (1935), 282. found in the critique of the earlier
40 K. T. Walker, 135. Documen- version of this boolc by Knight and
tation of the differing conceptual the rejoinder to this critique, that
and methodological points of view comprise Appendix I, below,
sketched in this passage will be 47 Knight ( 1924), 260.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 6g.
The interests of the institutionalists 48 must lead inevitably to an ethnological position. Economists who approach their mate- rials from the institutionalist point of view have much to give anthropologists concerned with the economic organization of non-machine societies. This is the case whether they seek to un- derstand the possible range of variation in these institutions, to analyze the dynamic forces they exemplify for a comprehension of growth and change in culture, or merely to describe them ade- quately as they occur in a culture with which they happen to be concerned. What, for example, can we learn from nonliterate so- cieties of the processes by means of which the unequal distribu- tion of economic resources make for the formation of social and economic classes? What is the economic role of the drive for prestige, as this is exemplified in patterns of the conspicuous consumption of valuable goods and services in order to bolster social position? Translating the Veblenian concept of the "in- stinct of workmanship" into a generalized psychological principle concerning the satisfaction derived by the worker when he can identify himself with what he produces, and the corresponding loss of pleasure in performance when this is denied him, what can be learned by studying the relevant industrial processes in terms of the opportunity in nonliterate societies for the worker to enjoy to the full the rewards of his labor? These are some exam- ples of what anthropologists can obtain by going beyond the em- phasis laid by economists on questions dealing exclusively with our economic order.
Anthropology, too, is less remiss than might appear at first view. It is only too true that anthropologists in earlier times con- cealed the economic data they collected with a cunning that seems calculated. Yet in the aggregate, even in these older works, there is a great deal to reward one who will read them, to say nothing of the growing body of literature which deals with com- parative economics in terms understandable and accessible to economists. Thus we can now learn for a number of societies not only how people are traditionally expected to work, and why, but how much work given individuals actually did over given periods of time. We can find not only native theories of land tenure and accounts of its manifold interrelations with social and religious custom, but also actual descriptions of land owned and
48 Cf. Atkins, Ayres, Gambs, Harris.
64 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
transferred, with mapped and measured indications of the bound- aries as they exist. Accounts have been made available of what actually was bartered in specific trading expeditions, while not only descriptions of money and the regard in which money- tokens are held are being presented, but also detailed systems of value in terms of these units of currency.
That more quantitative analyses, so important in the study of economic problems, are not available can perhaps be ascribed to the practical difficulties of method faced by those who would gather materials of this sort. But even here a beginning has been made, and data of this order will be called upon wherever possible in the ensuing pages, since we must recognize that such quantitative materials vivify discussions of any* phase of economic life, in whatever culture, in a manner out of all proportion to their extensiveness. Certainly, it is a favorable omen that despite the methodological difficulties — which are so basic as to involve finding an answer to the problem of determining a stable unit in which figures may be expressed — alertness to the importance of such materials has come to be recognized by anthropologists concerned with the economic life of the peoples they study.
PART II
PRODUCTION
CHAPTER IV
GETTING A LIVING
IT is not necessary to have an extensive acquaintance with descriptions of nonliterate societies to realize how immediate is the existing relationship between economic life and the natural environment, or habitat. So immediate is this, indeed, that in some societies the annual yield of the principal food-bearing plant or the migration of the herds upon which a people must depend for nourishment is the primary determinant of survival. Under such conditions, it is by no means unknown for a commu- nity to be restricted to an absolute maximum in size, beyond which numbers are to be increased only on pain of starvation. So rigorous a life, to be sure, is found only where the habitat is most harsh, as within the Arctic Circle or in desert regions. Yet even where nature is less difficult, and where knowledge of agri- culture and husbandry have brought to man a greater measure of control, his immediate dependence upon his natural environment may still be vastly greater than anything known to our culture, so that all other considerations must give way before the all- important food-quest.
The account of an early explorer-trader in the territory in- habited by the coastal Indians of the Gulf of Mexico affords a ready illustration of this:
We made mats, which are their houses, that they have great necessity for and although they know how to make them, they wish to give their full time to getting food, since when otherwise employed they are pinched with hunger.1
1 Myer ( quoting Cabeza de Vaca ) , 739.
67
68 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Periodic recurrences of famine afford another manifestation of nonliterate man's immediate dependence on nature. This is evi- denced by the frequency with which West African stories have as their opening phrase: "It was a time of famine." In such a Melanesian island as Manam the fact that the principal crop cannot be stored without becoming unfit for consumption causes annual difficulties in providing food at the end of the dry season, difficulties which even the processes of trade cannot wholly resolve.2 A vivid account of a great famine in another part of Melanesia, the Trobriand Islands, given by a native, shows how in times of stress, even men of rank did not disdain various despised foods and "other abominations" * as aids to survival.
The ability of peoples having simple technologies to manip- ulate their resources effectively is thus the most fundamental aspect of their economic systems. As might be expected, the most striking instances of this are to be found in those societies sometimes termed marginal, among peoples who have been forced by the superior strength of their neighbors into the least desirable portions of the earth. The Bushmen of South Africa, living in the Kalahari Desert, are one such folk. Here the paramount problem is to obtain water. To meet this need they bury water in ostrich egg-shells against the time of severest drought, or make use of their knowledge of where to find the roots, bulbs, and melon-like fruits whose moisture may spell survival. They have also developed a means of filtering water in stagnant pools by the use of a hollow reed to which grass has been fastened. Food is mainly obtained by hunting, and the insight of these people into the habits of the animals on which they prey has long been famous,4
The aboriginal Australians are a classic illustration of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest. In many places their habitat is even more severe than that of the Bushmen, although this is perhaps not quite true in the northern portion of the continent. A tabulation of the foodstuffs which the aborigines of northwest central Queensland extract from the country they inhabit is instructive. Nothing seems to escape them; seeds, edible roots, fruits and vegetables, flowers and honey, insects and crustaceans, frogs, lizards, crocodiles, and
2 Wedgewood, 393. 4 Schapcra (1930), 140-3.
3Malinowski (1935), 163-4.
GETTING A LIVING 69
snakes, fish caught in weirs or by poisoning the water, turkey- bustards, flock-pigeons, and other birds, emus which are driven into nets, bandicoots, opossums, kangaroos, and dingoes.5 The variety in this list is impressive, but we must not be deceived into thinking that variety indicates plenty, for the available quantities of each element in it are so slight that only the most intense application makes survival possible.
In some areas, certain flora or fauna predominate as the pri- mary source of food. Among the Chipewayan and the Caribou Eskimo of the far north, where agriculture is unthinkable and the gathering of wild plants restricted to a brief summer season, caribou form the mainstay of the diet. Moose, buffalo ( in earlier times, before the destruction of these herds), bear, wolverines, otters, beaver, hares, and birds, particularly the ptarmigan, are subsidiary sources of food, and their knowledge of the habits of these animals, especially the caribou, is described as remarkable. They exploit their resources in game so cleverly that they never destroy or even demoralize the herds which provide them with the essentials of life/' The most studied inhabitants of the arctic, the Eskimo, need only be mentioned to bring them to mind as an outstanding example of efficiency in adjusting life to the difficulties posed by nature. Here no possible resource is neg- lected; in addition, to help them meet the demands of their difficult setting, these people have developed mechanical aids that are so delicately tuned to this setting that persons who go into the country of the Eskimo, no matter how complex the technology of the culture from which they derive, in some meas- ure adopt the techniques of these people if they are to survive.7
The Indians of central and northern California, in the days before their contact with the whites, supported themselves en- tirely on what was available in their habitat — seeds of various kinds, roots, nuts, berries, fish, and game. The difficulties in obtaining the means with which to sustain life, and the methods by which this problem was solved, varied over the state.8 Along the coast, especially in the north, fish were plentiful, but in the interior grasshoppers, angleworms, and yellow-jacket larvae were regularly called upon to provide nourishment, while in times of
6 Roth (1897), 91 ff. 7Cf. Boas (1888); Jenncss; Bir-
G Birkct-Smitli (1930), 19. ket-Smith (1936).
8 Krocbcr, 523-6.
^O ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
stress the large yellow slug was by no means scorned. Like their neighbors, the Yurok consumed the acorn extensively, and salmon that came up the rivers were an additional staple. Deer and other small game, though not plentiful, were hunted to add to the total of food resources, while bulbs were dug in early sum- mer, and later in the season seeds were beaten out of the prairie grasses. Seaweed furnished salt. The people living on the coast gathered mussels and other Crustacea, surf fish were captured when the occasion offered, and the stranding of a whale was an event.9
These instances show how close the association between man and nature in non-mechanized societies can be, but they should not be taken as in any sense typical of the assumed economic poverty that has sometimes been mistakenly held to characterize "primitive" societies as such. As a matter of fact, the examples given are exceptional, since the proportion of non-industrial peoples whose technological equipment is so meagre, or whose environmental settings are so severe as in the case of the tribes given here, is very small. A very large proportion of nonliterate societies engage in food-gathering and hunting to supplement what they produce by means of agricultural and herding tech- niques, or, in many instances, merely to provide delicacies. But even where such peoples command techniques that are sub- stantially advanced over those of the food-gathering and hunting societies, they manifest a similar closeness to their natural en- vironment. This is essential if they are to make the most of their technological equipment and to provide themselves with the supplementary foods to be had without cultivation or the need for domesticating animals.
The Indians of the Guianas afford a concrete illustration of the manner in which a people who are not forced to meet prob- lems as serious as those posed by the habitats of the Australians or the Bushmen, and whose technology, though not highly developed, is more complex than that of any of the peoples who have been mentioned, effectively exploit the resources they find to hand. From the forests in which they live they obtain the agouti, the armadillo, the bush hog, the deer, the manati, monkey, otter, rat, sloth, tapir, and water haas. Of birds they
9 Ibid., 84.
GETTING A LIVING 71
trap quail, duck, toucan, and guacharo; they have thirteen dif- ferent methods of catching the fish in the rivers, while from these streams they also gather turtles, iguana, alligators — whose flesh and eggs are both consumed — frogs, crabs, and molluscs. Toads and snakes offer another food resource, as do earthworms, beetles, ants, and wasps and bees, together with the honey these last afford. Vegetable foods are mainly supplied by agriculture, which yields cassava, maize, rice, and some twenty-four "economic plants/' But there are a number of "cassava substitutes" collected from natural sources — mora seeds, greenheart seeds, dakambali seeds, pario seeds, and nuts of the swari tree, besides the twenty- seven kinds of "wild fruits, berries, nuts, etc." that have been listed. In addition to all the foregoing, these Indians draw on their forested home for the materials they use to make their fermented and non-fermented drinks and, besides tobacco, which they grow, for the four other types of narcotics and stimulants they enjoy.10
The North American tribes of the upper Missouri may also be mentioned, among others, as further illustrating how natural surroundings can be exploited. They gathered twenty-two kinds of roots, berries, and other wild foods of these types, hunted fifteen species of animals, and trapped six kinds of birds to supplement their agricultural produce.11 Many of the tribes that lived in the region of the Great Lakes made a major resource of the wild rice that grows there, to which they added the flesh of the fowl that fattened on the ripened stalks.12 Or, to move to an entirely different area, we find that in West Africa, where a steady supply of food and, in addition, a considerable surplus over what is needed for primary purposes of supporting life are ensured through the complex organization of the economic order and its technological proficiency, hunting provides an additional source of food, while products of forest and stream supplement the domesticated staples in the diet. A comparable phenomenon is found in the place accorded fishing in the basically agri- cultural economy of Polynesia. Thus the Society Islanders know in amazing detail the habits of the numerous varieties of fish found in these waters and call on their knowledge to assure
10 Roth (1924), 174-247. 12Jcnks, 1073 ff., 1099.
11 Donig, 583.
72 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
themselves the most advantageous conditions under which to seek out the schools of fish that afford the largest catch or the choicest food.13
So CLOSE, indeed, and so seemingly obvious is the relationship of nonliterate man to his habitat that one of the several deter- minisms which from time to time have been advanced to explain the nature of human civilization is based on this fact. The more extreme position of those who hold to this point of view, that all human culture is to be understood in terms "of this need for meet- ing the demands of the natural environment, need not be taken too seriously. To make such a position tenable it would be nec- essary to establish similarity for all bodies of custom existing under a given habitat, while different cultures would always have to be found under different natural settings. Happily, this point of view is more often met with in the writings of those who set it up to disprove it than in the discussions of those concerned with the real and extremely important problem of the relationship be- tween man and his environmental setting.
The answer given by a number of students of comparative culture is that the environment is a limiting rather than a deter- mining force. It sets the lines beyond which a people can go in exploiting their surroundings only if their technology permits it, and dictates certain limits beyond which they cannot conceiv- ably go at all, whatever their technological equipment. Further- more, it is apparent that the habitat does not exert its influence equally on all aspects of culture. This is an important point for our discussion, since it is the economic modes of life that most immediately respond to the natural environment and are most obviously adjusted to it. Hypotheses concerning the relationship between a culture and its natural setting thus almost invariably, and certainly most convincingly, draw on data of this character. Yet, as has been indicated, between a people and their habitat stands their technology. Though future research must furnish full documentation, our present knowledge permits us to indicate two principles that apply in this relationship. In the first place, it is
13 Nordhoff, 243.
GETTING A LIVING 73
apparent that in so far as the various aspects of culture are concerned, the natural environment will play a more important role where getting a living is involved than in religion, or social organization, or art. Secondly, the available data indicate that the more adequate the technology, the less direct are the demands made by their environment on the daily life of a people.14
The Ifugao of the Philippines afford a good instance of a people who, though possessing but a relatively simple technologi- cal equipment, extract a varied living from their habitat. Not only do they exploit what it offers of itself and employ many of its possibilities in producing their basic food necessities, but also, because of one especially developed technique, force it to yield crops of rice in seeming defiance of what would seem to be the limits set by the natural environment. A statement of the range in the sources of food-supply, in terms of percentages yielded by each of the various techniques employed, has been provided us. Produce from which peoples lacking agriculture or husbandry would have to derive their entire subsistence — hunting, fowling, fishing, and the collection of insects and wild vegetable foods — accounts for something under ten per cent. Animal-culture — chickens, pigs, goats, and cattle, of which the last two are in- consequential— provides a further four per cent. Finally, at the time when the report from which these proportions are derived was written, another two per cent was imported. This means that over four-fifths of the total subsistence produce, eighty-four per cent, comes from agriculture.
If, before considering the relationship of Ifugao processes of production to the natural environment, we sketch their setting, we find that its most striking aspect, and the one that presents these folk with their greatest problem, is the configuration of the land. The people live in narrow valleys, flanked by precipitous mountains, rising five thousand feet and more over their bases. So broken is the country that the largest single area of flat land contains no more than five hundred acres.
The two major crops are camotes (sweet potatoes) and rice; all others are negligible compared with these. Carnotes grow well on the mountainsides. The steeper the slope, the more favor- able the conditions for planting this crop, since here the worker,
14 Cf. Dixon, 31-2; Herskovits (1948), 153-66.
74 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
as he clears his land and plants the roots, need not bend as he would were the slope less steep. Indeed, these plants are grown on mountainsides so precipitous that none but an Ifugao can climb them. Since the growing crops need little care, flourish in poor soil, and are not subject to the depredations of insects or other pests, it is obvious that we have here a crop admirably adapted to the environment in which it is grown.
Rice differs from the camote in every respect. It not only is a much more delicate plant, but requires irrigation. Now to be able to irrigate ricefields situated on steep mountainsides means that some device must be perfected which enables the water to be retained. The device by means of which the Ifugao defeat the limits set by these mountains is terracing. Rice does not grow above an altitude of 5,000 feet, so that the fields cannot go beyond this height, but some terraces that attain the upper limit of pos- sible cultivation soar in sheer reaches of 2,500 or 3,000 feet. The only requirement is that there be a spring above the topmost level. The resulting flow can then be turned at will from one step to the next, until all the fields have water, a process which allows the fertile silt, that would otherwise be washed into the valley and down the river, to be retained.
The labor that goes into the construction and maintenance of the system of terraces is prodigious. In most places the earth will not permit terracing without the construction of stone re- taining walls, and the stones of which these walls are built must be carried up from the bed of the river in the valley far below. Terrace walls which rise to a height of twenty feet permit fields some eleven feet in depth; elsewhere, among neighboring tribes, where the mountains are steeper, terraces rise as high as fifty feet. The details of how rice is planted, cared for while growing, and harvested need not be given here; the fact that the Ifugao have apparently achieved a contradiction in terms of what would seem to be insurmountable limitations set by their habitat, and in so doing have widened the economic base of their society, is the point that concerns us at the moment.15
Another illustration of how original difficulties presented by the habitat may be overcome by human effort is found in the atoll of Pukapuka, which lies some four hundred miles northeast of Samoa. This atoll consists of three islets, of which the northern
15 Barton (1922), passim.
GETTING A LIVING 75
one, where most of the inhabitants are found, is but a mile wide. There are a number of villages on these tiny specks of land, faced by the problem of how to produce a sufficient amount of food to support life, since coral cannot be used for agriculture and the coconut trees that grew on the island when it was first settled did not provide enough nuts. The problem, however, was met by manufacturing soil in which taro, the staple in this Pacific area, could be grown. Large pits were dug, into which dead coconut fronds and other fallen leaves from the bush were placed and allowed to rot. Water seeped in through the coral, eventually forming a thick mud, in which taro flourished. As time went on, these pits were enlarged to allow for the production of more taro, and today enormous excavations yield enough to feed entire villages.10
This point, however, must not be pushed too far. For while culture can, and often does circumvent the restrictions of the habitat, more often we find a response to the natural setting in such matters as the rhythm of work as manifested in the annual round of economic and other activities. This is amply apparent in the analysis of Mende agricultural operations made by Little, where the production cycle and certain other phases of the culture have been projected against the average monthly rainfall for 1931^44 in the region of Sierra Leona they inhabit: 17
Month and
Rainfall
(Inches per
month]
December
(2.76)
January (0.83)
Farm Operations
on Rice
Selection of farm sites. Brushing commences. Storing of last crop. Harvesting of inland swamps. Brushing cere- monies.
Brushing upland farms completed in some dis- tricts and commenced in others. Felling of trees in some districts commences. Harvesting of last year's crop com- pleted.
10MacGregor (1935), 13.
Other Crops
Harvesting guinea corn, millet, sweet potatoes, coco yams. Ground nut harvest complete. Cas- sava harvesting and planting in process.
Harvesting of guinea corn completed. Sweet potatoes, coco yams, and cacao being har- vested. Cassava har- vested and replanted. Planting of vegetables on wetlands.
17 Little, 231-4.
Other Activities Women fish- ing. Secret so- cieties initiate.
Preparation for House Tax payments. Se- cret societies continue in ses- sion. Men house-build- ing, hunting, and weaving. Women fishing.
76
ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Month and
Rainfall
(Inches per
month)
February
(0.37)
March (4.21)
April (5.0)
May
(8.1)
June (10.2)
July
(5.0)
Farm Operations
on Rice
Brushing continues. Felling completed and burning commenced in some districts. Late swamp rice harvested.
Felling trees and burn- ing still in process. Burning completed in other districts. Prepara- tion of sites for v\etland rice and planting of hill- side depressions and semi -swamp areas in some districts. Brushing of early swamps.
Burning completed. Threshing of seed rice in preparation for sow- ing. Ploughing and sow- ing on some uplands commenced. Short du- ration varieties sown on swamps. Brushing of swamps.
"Ploughing" and sow- ing generally in prog- ress. Sowing finished in some districts. Prepara- tion and sowing of swamp nurseries.
Sowing completed and seeding of early planted crops begins. Broad- casting on swamps.
General weeding of up- lands. Late planting of uplands completed. Harvesting of early planted wetlands.
Other Crops
Preparation of sites for garden crops; e.g., on- ions, beans, etc. Cacao plantation brushed. Coffee and kola har- vested. Yam harvest continues. New season crop palm kernels gathered.
Sweet potatoes planted in swamps. Palm ker- nels, kola harvested. Yam harvest completed.
Harvesting and plant- ing of cassava. Yams and ground nuts plant- ed. Coffee plantations brushed. Palm kernel harvest continues and late crop of cacao.
Other Activities Final society ceremonies. Initiates "pull- ed*5 from the bush. House- building, hunt- ing, and fishing.
Continuation of house-build- ing, weaving, hunting, fish- ing.
Men weaving.
Harvest of early sweet Men weaving, potato crop. Cacao and coffee plantations brushed. Cassava, mil- let, guinea corn, etc. planted on uplands. Yams planted.
Planting of late ground Women spin- nuts. Harvest of old cas- mng thread, sava crop and sweet po- tatoes. Yams staked and weeded.
Harvesting of early ground nuts and early maize varieties. Plant- ing of millet and guinea corn on uplands com-
Month and Rainfall
(Inches per month)
August (22.9)
GETTING A LIVING
Farm Operations
on Rice Other Crops
Transplanting of swamp pleted. Kola planta- rice seedlings. tions brushed. Sweet
potato harvest continues.
77
Other Activities
September (17.7)
October (9.81)
Weeding completed on uplands. Weeding of early planted swamps. Broadcasting on very late uplands completed. Scaring of birds general on uplands. Swamps transplanted.
Harvesting of early up- land rice. Bird scaring continues Weeding of early planted swamps. Transplanting contin- ues and broadcasting on late wetland still con- tinues.
Harvesting of main up- land crop begins. Bird scaring on late uplands continues. Late trans- planting of swamp com- pleted. Harvest of early short season swamp rice.
Harvesting of upland rice completed.
Harvesting and new planting of cassava. Weeding of yams. Ground nut harvest continues, also maize. Intermediate crop of kola harvested. Palm kernel harvest slackens.
Ground nut harvest continues. Yams and coco yams weeded. Har- vest of old and new cas- sava crops. Replanting of potatoes on swamps. Maize harvest contin- ues. Planting of bread- fruit.
Ground nut harvest completed. Main plant- ing cassava completed. Late maize crop har- vested. Planting of s\\ ect potatoes.
November Harvesting of upland Preparation of sites for House-build- (5.9) rice completed. dry season vegetables, ing begins.
particularly in stamps, begins. Sweet potato planting continues. Ca- cao harvested.
In so far as the matter of obtaining a living concerns the primary problem of producing the supplies of food necessary to sustain life, then, we must conclude that while the habitat is important, the technology of a people, playing on the environ- mental factor, molds and shapes the possibilities offered by nature. It will therefore be apparent how significant is the state- ment made in the preceding chapter that while technology is not economics, we cannot escape the fact that the basis of eco- nomic life is technological. But technology is a part of culture —
^8 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
that body of traditions which every group possesses. Hence we are justified in drawing the conclusion that culture plays a con- siderable part in dictating the forms that any given mode of obtaining a living, as any other aspect of life, may take among a given people.
THIS leads to the question as to the uses toward which tech- nological devices are put, as playing on the permissive limits of the natural environment, they push these limits outward with every invention, every improvement in tools, every change to- ward an increased efficiency in production. Here we must look further into the question of the degree to which economic pat- terns are pointed toward a greater degree of efficiency in the production of goods, and to what extent the responses of a people to what is produced can be channeled by their habits of con- sumption so as to further or block the development of a richer material background of life.
Certainly it cannot be claimed that non-industrial peoples are not alive to many of the possibilities within their reach. Nor is their technology such as not to cause admiration for the way in which they meet the total range of the practical problems in- volved in obtaining their livelihood. There are numerous in- stances to indicate that nonliterate man has developed techniques involving a degree of foresight and of minutely detailed knowl- edge which not only constitute a complete refutation of the stubborn idea that "savages" lack vision and intelligence, but indicate how far these peoples will go in rationally attacking the primary tasks of gaining a livelihood. Indeed, a rich documenta- tion is at hand not only to demonstrate the extent to which they can exercise foresight in providing for their daily needs, but also to show how effectively they are able to plan for whatever special requirements they may have to meet.18
The Chuckchee of Siberia depend almost entirely on their herds of reindeer for subsistence. Chuckchee herdsmen carefully select for breeding purposes does that come from hereditary lines known to produce the strongest fawns. The herd is shrewdly
18 Mead (1937), 12.
GETTING A LIVING 79
evaluated from this point of view, the herdsman noting the lineage of each of his animals over three or four generations and determining, from his knowledge of the kind of deer each lineage characteristically produces, which does are the least desirable. When the need for meat arises, he selects those females least likely to produce the best fawns; on the other hand, in breeding he arranges the mating of his animals so that his herd eventually consists of the most desirable type.19
The words of an Ojibway chief may be cited to show how his people were alive to the benefits to be derived from conserving their resources:
Wherever they went the Indians took care of the game animals, especially the beaver. ... So these families of hunters would never think of damaging the abundance or the source of supply of the game, because that had come to them from their fathers and grandfathers and those behind them. . . . We Indian families used to hunt in a certain section for beaver. We would only kill the small beaver and leave the old ones to keep breeding. Then when they got too old, they, too, would be killed, just as a farmer kills his pigs, preserving his stock for his supply of young.20
Among the Tsimshian, special storehouses were built during good times to conserve foodstuffs against periods of scarcity. In the myths of these people, for example, we read of a chief who possessed four storehouses full of provisions — one of salmon, one of bullheads, one of seals, porpoises, and sea lions, and one of whale meat. Another myth tells how the owner of storehouses filled them with boxes of porpoise meat and seal-blubber against the time that this food should be needed.21
On the Polynesian island of Mangaia, taro is irrigated by means of a race which supplies water to terraced patches. Despite the fact that only wooden digging-sticks were available as tools in earlier days, it was nonetheless possible, by means of the co- operative effort of the entire community, to achieve the com- pletion of "public works" which attained considerable magni- tude, since the race had to be dug from some distance upstream to obtain a sufficient fall of water.22
19Bogoras (1904), 70 ff., 79, 16. 21 Boas (1916), 396.
20 Speck (1914-15), 186. 22 Hiroa (1934), 130.
80 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
However, while every culture must operate efficiently enough to ensure that its human carriers survive, it does not follow that this efficiency is as apparent when viewed from outside the culture as it appears to those who carry on the traditions under which it is sanctioned. For just as any given technological equip- ment can be used to extend the possibilities of the environment and thus to broaden the basis of economic and other aspects of life, so this equipment can be used to maintain traditional modes of procedure, despite objective proofs that the traditional way is more laborious and even more difficult than another equally well-known method. Many instances of this have been pointed out in our own culture. Indeed, the sociological concept of "lag" is based largely on the fact that even in our mechanistic society, a laborious operation is preferred, more frequently than we realize, to a more efficient one.
The element of tradition is thus of great importance in deter- mining the forms of technological and economic aspects of cul- ture no less than of any other aspects. Existing custom also profoundly influences the way in which a people will react to subsequent possible additions presented by inventions and dis- coveries made from within, or by ideas and techniques coming from contact with other cultures. Again we are faced with questions of the dynamics of cultural growth and the nature of cultural change — questions of the first order of difficulty, no less than of importance. We cannot help being impressed by the many different forms taken by institutions and techniques as expressed in the great variety of methods which groups of hu- man beings employ to attain a given end. Yet when we find that in every culture the particular means evolved for solving a par- ticular problem are looked upon as the only valid ones and that change is made with reluctance, we must also be impressed with the conservatism of human beings in modifying their customary modes of behavior.
Can nonliterate peoples, however, be said to be more con- servative than literate groups? The lack of historical data on the rate of change in these non-historic societies has caused many writers to stress their conservatism. But it is doubtful whether such a position could stand a documentary test were we able to follow the course of development of some nonliterate people over a period of several hundred years. The data of archaeology
GETTING A LIVING 8l
testify to the ubiquity of cultural change. Furthermore, the brief histories of people without written languages of their own who have had prolonged contact with those who could write of them, give us sufficient grounds for holding that as regards their accept- ance both of inner change and outer borrowings they are no dif- ferent from literate peoples.
What we find is rather that in every culture change is less difficult to effect in certain aspects than others, though the element of culture most susceptible to change will vary from peo- ple to people. In our own society, the centers of sanctioned change lie in the fields of material culture and technology. But, to take only one instance, equal receptivity to change certainly does not characterize our attitude toward the intangibles of our economic organization. The vitality of the concept of laissez faire in the face of alterations in the mechanical basis of our economy that have deprived this point of view of all but the justification of traditional usage, bears eloquent witness to this point. Strictly speaking the terms "invention" and "discovery" describe the means by which any new elements are introduced into a body of custom, whether material or non-material. Yet we reserve the praiseworthy title of "inventor" for one who intro- duces a change, no matter how revolutionary, in the mechanical processes of industry, while we apply the less complimentary term "revolutionary" to the inventor of new concepts applicable to the economic structure we have raised on the industrial base.
The generalization that material culture and its concomitant economic aspects are more susceptible to change than nonmate- rial-elements is not borne out, for example, by the considerable data available from Mexico and Central America. These data rather suggest that this hypothesis was drawn under the influence of observations concerning the differential rates of change found in various aspects of our own way of life. Thus, for example, we may consider the changes that have taken place in the life of the Mexican town of Tzintzuntzan, concerning which our knowledge covers a period of over four hundred years. At its initial contact with the Spanish conquerors, it was the "capital and nerve center of the vast Tarascan Empire"; today it is a small, isolated village. Though we learn that "the changes that have taken place . . . are enormous," yet "in the basic economic organization of the village, perhaps fewer changes have taken place than in any
82 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
other aspect of life." That is, "a dweller in Tzintzuntzan of four centuries ago would find, in spite of great differences, more than mere traces of similarity between the outward, material manifes- tations of life today and that which he had known," while "the political, social, and religious forms of today would ... be en- tirely unrecognizable." "M
Whatever the case concerning change in the various aspects of culture, we are constantly presented with this paradox when we study any given culture as a whole: while human beings are strikingly conservative in the maintenance of their institutions, no body of tradition continues in living form without changing. As a result of this balancing between conservatism and change, we find a series of institutions in every culture that, held together by the sanctions given them under traditional codes of behavior, to the outsider often seem curious or quaint or inefficient. But they never seem either curious or quaint, and rarely seem in- efficient, to those who live in terms of a given culture. It is the business of the anthropologist to seek out and understand this inner logic that causes a particular grouping of patterns to seem right, and most often uniquely right, to a given people. And it may be remarked in passing that this is yet another reason why those not trained in this method find it so difficult to view the customs of others with scientific detachment, especially where technology and economics are concerned. For it is in these fields that the logic of a culture is most readily to be tested by the objectively ascertainable facts of the situation in which its con- ventions operate.24
THIS theoretical digression has been necessary to understand the point of view that must be taken in studying even so elementary a phase of comparative economics as the methods a people em- ploy to obtain a living. So powerful is the body of conventions that rule the lives of every folk that no people exploit the pos- sibilities of their environment to the degree their technological
*J Foster (1948), 6-15, 282-6. change in culture, cf. Herskovits
24 For a more extended discussion ( 1948), 479-504. of the problem of conservatism and
GETTING A LIVING 83
equipment permits, since sanctioned modes of behavior cut across any approach to complete efficiency in the utilization of natural resources. The members of a community, in choosing from such resources as are at hand, operate within the patterns that dictate what is and what is not permissible.
This is apparent in many instances, but as will be seen in later pages, nowhere is it more striking than in the conventions that dictate what may and what may not be eaten or worn. Even where such primary goods are not involved, taboos often exist against the utilization of certain materials for tools, or their use by certain individuals or classes of individuals within a society, or at certain periods of the year. These taboos are observed with faithfulness and fervor, despite the fact that they materially lower the efficiency of the group as a whole in wresting from their environment the means of support or survival. Many of the psychological imponderables of a religious, sociological, or artis- tic nature found in a given society do not, of course, bear sig- nificantly on economic patterns. But those that do concern economic life are of the greatest importance for any comprehen- sion of this phase of existence. It is not difficult to understand how an undue neglect of such imponderables has tended to give to the speculations of those economists who have been concerned with nonliterate cultures a certain air of unreality, when the applicability of their hypotheses to life as actually lived has been put to the test of the empirical facts.
In most societies, either because of the rigors of the habitat or because of the directives given to economic effort by tradition, certain categories of natural resources are exploited far more than other equally usable elements. This is true even where no technological reasons exist for not exploiting such resources, as, for example, in East Africa, where herding and food-raising peoples in contact have failed to grasp the opportunity to learn agriculture from one another. This channeling of productive activity has been given a great deal of attention by students of the problems of the development and organization of the eco- nomic life of nonliterate peoples. Expressed in the concept of economic "types," it constituted an integral part of the evolu- tionary approach sketched in the preceding chapter. And since it has continued to figure in economic theory, any discussion of the way in which peoples gain their livelihood would be incom-
84 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
plete without mention of the classifications of types of economies that have been made.
Gras has concisely summarized in the following passage some of these classifications of types of economies:
The old theory was that early peoples went through three stages, hunting ( collectional ) , pastoral, and agricultural. This was the view of Dicaearchus (4th century, B.C.), of Varro (1st century, B.C.), of Condorcet (1793), List (1841), Nieboer (1900), Vinogradoff (1905), and Hobhouse, Whee- ler, and Ginsberg (1915). In 1874, however, Gerland as- serted that in remotest times plant culture preceded animal culture, and that later some peoples became nomads and others hunters. In 1875, Hellwald, and in 1893, Biicher, doubted whether the three traditional stages were univer- sally true. In 1896, Hahn put different forms of plant culture before animal culture. In the same year Grosse held that the pastoral stage was not invariable. In 1897, Bos placed the hoe culture before pasturing. Pumpelly, in 1908, maintained that agriculture preceded the domestication of animals in prehistoric Transcaspia.23
Such a listing of contradictory progressions demonstrates the fruitlessness of seeking to establish any unilinear scheme in describing the development of economic life through various stages. The categories themselves, however, can be used to good purpose if they are considered as descriptive of the several kinds of economies that actually exist, since, as in all scientific endeavor, data must be classified as a preliminary step to any further analysis. And though such an approach is not germane to the objectives of this book, inasmuch as our interests center on the variation in economic drives and institutions in nonliterate soci- eties, yet it will not be unprofitable to indicate some of the systems that have more recently been advanced.
Gras sets up the following categories: "Collectional economy (hunting, fishing, grubbing, and so forth), cultural nomadic economy (pasturing or planting or both), settled village econ- omy ( developing a true agriculture ) , town economy, and metro- politan economy/' 2r> Such a classification has several advantages. It is not evolutionary in its approach, it differentiates between
25 Gras (1922), 44. 20Gras (1927), 19.
GETTING A LIVING 85
types of economies in different parts of the world, and it takes into consideration what is known of the prehistory or history of the groupings it sets up. The very fact, however, that it is pro- jected into these several dimensions, and must include so many subdivisions, indicates the difficulties that lie in the way of attempts to classify social data of any sort when the realities of the social and historical situations are all taken into account.
Another classification of economies, which exemplifies these difficulties has been suggested by Thurnwald,27 who distinguishes the following types of economies: "homogeneous communities of men as hunters and trappers, women as collectors" ( pp. 59 ff. ) ; "homogeneous communities of hunters, trappers, and agricul- turalists" ( pp. 63 ff . ) ; "graded societies of hunters, trappers, agri- culturalists, and artisans" ( pp. 66 ff . ) ; "homogeneous hunters and herdsmen" ( pp. 76 ff. ) ; "ethnically stratified cattle-breeders and traders" ( pp. 79 ff . ) ; "socially graded herdsmen with hunting, agricultural, and artisan populations" ( pp. 85 ff . ) ; and "feudal states and socially graded communities" (pp. 93 ff.). Each of these categories is illustrated by various nonliterate societies, and the series is ended by a discussion of the "familia" and "manor" in Europe, thus giving a distinct flavor of time to the progression.
This classification is open to several objections, of which the two most serious may be mentioned. It is apparent, first, that the introduction of sociological and political criteria into a classifica- tion of economies blurs the lines along which the classification has been drawn and, by confusing the objective, defeats the primary aim of simplification. In the second place the system seems to imply certain universal genetic processes in establish- ing these socio-politico-economic cultural types that would be difficult to establish.28 The progression of Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg already mentioned, is likewise amenable to use as a classificatory device. Based on "an order corresponding to the degree of control over nature and mastery of material condi- tions," it thus indicates a series of differences between economic types quite as much as it is a statement of evolutionary progres- sion. It is to be noted that it has been employed in this clas- sificatory sense by its authors."9
By far the most satisfactory classification of economies, how-
27 Thurnwald (1932a), 52-84. 29 Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Gins-
28 Thurnwald (19321)), 59-102. berg, 29 ff.
86 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
ever, has been drawn by Forde. He first of all prefaces his state- ment of types with the striking caution: "People do not live at economic stages. They possess economies, and again we do not find single and exclusive economies but combinations of them." Then he proceeds to name "in the broadest way" five kinds of systems: collecting, hunting, fishing, cultivation, and stock-rais- ing.30 His reservation that these must not be thought to exist in pure form is most important. As we have seen, peoples every- where are prone to utilize what is "given" them by their natural environment as their technological capability permits and within the lines set by their traditions. It is only in extremely rare in- stances, if in any cases at all, that they have been found to confine their efforts to one form of productive activity. Thus even where agricultural organization is advanced, hunting and fishing are carried on. We need but recall, as an example of this, the sources of the foods consumed by the Ifugao, an agricultural folk, to recognize how it was possible in the same way for the Plains Indians, whose cultures as they existed in the days of pre-white contact have been accepted as almost classical ex- amples of the hunting type, to have grown maize as well; or how the herding culture of the Zulu of South Africa could be super- imposed upon an agricultural subsistence economy.
One further point may be made here. If, in this chapter, in considering the basic economic problem of obtaining a living, attention has been centered on food, this is because food is the most essential single requirement for survival — even more than shelter, and certainly more than clothing, into whose production and use so many non-economic factors enter. Tools also fall in the category of economic essentials, but secondarily, and only when employed in producing basic needs. Other than these, the bewildering variety of goods produced by mankind is to be re- garded from an objective, though never from a psychological, point of view, as a kind of economic gloss on the basic preoccupa- tion with survival. This is especially true of cultures that do not have the machine, where, as has been seen, technologies are relatively simple and man is thus comparatively at the mercy of nature. It may be freely granted that these glosses, so to speak, once rooted in the traditions of the people who enjoy them, are not thought of as any the less indispensable. They may, in fact,
*" Forde (1934), 461.
GETTING A LIVING 87
of themselves become so important that given individuals may find existence literally unbearable without them.
Yet the economic concerns of nonliterate peoples, especially of those who live at or near the subsistence level, do in large measure reduce themselves to fundamentals of the kind discussed here, elementary as such preoccupations may seem from the point of view of the economic complexity of our machine society. We shall, however, turn to these other types of goods as we further consider the processes of production, and we shall find them con- stantly recurring as we later treat of questions that bear upon the manner of disposing of what has been produced. For, survival value aside, the needs of any people, considered in the light of their own desires, include the entire range of goods and services which, with the mechanisms that exist for their production and distribution, constitutes the integrated whole of any economic system that is a going concern.
CHAPTER V
PATTERNS OF LABOR
OPINION as to the amount of work done by "primitive" man, and his ability to concentrate on a given task, has been most fre- quently phrased in terms of what may be called the "coconut tree" theory. This is the point of view that holds the "savage" to be a man who, commonly living in a climate where his needs are bountifully provided by nature, neither is required to exert him- self nor is willing to do so when he can obtain even the necessary minimum to support life by abstaining from effort. Marshall's statement on this point may be taken as a typical example:
Whatever be their climate and whatever their ancestry, we find savages living under the dominion of custom and im- pulse; scarcely ever striking out new lines for themselves; never forecasting the distant future, and seldom making provision even for the near future; fitful in spite of their servitude to custom, governed by the fancy of the moment; ready at times for the most arduous exertions, but incapable of keeping themselves long to steady work.
The passage ends with this significant sentence: "Laborious and tedious tasks are avoided as far as possible; those which are in- evitable are done by the compulsory labour of women." l
This same point of view is stressed in the writings of Biicher. He states that ". . . man has undoubtedly existed through im- measurable periods of time without labouring," and, citing the natural growth in the tropics of the palm tree, the breadfruit tree, and similar plants, insists that "even modern research cannot dispense with the assumption that mankind was at first bound to
1 Marshall, 723-4.
88
PATTERNS OF LABOR 89
such regions. . . ."2 The assumption here, apparently, is that the patterns of refraining from effort that mark present-day "primitive" man were laid down in the early days of human existence, and have persisted to the present because of the inertia of "savages."
Yet quite aside from the fact that prehistoric men lived much of their existence in the difficult environment of the glaciated periods, such a statement finds no support in the lives of present- day peoples anywhere. Even those "primitive" folk who inhabit that most romantic area, the South Sea islands, work and work hard, despite the fact that here, almost uniquely in the world, man is furnished by nature with practically all his needs. This fact, furthermore, also refutes Biicher's further assertion that "primitive" man not only wastes potential resources in not utiliz- ing his environment to the full, but also wastes time — "the re- proach of inertia to which primitive man is universally suspect." 3
It is unnecessary here to argue a position of this nature, since to read any objective description of the life of peoples will show how much in error it is. Moreover, a number of effective answers have already been given to this assertion and others like it. Prob- ably the most telling of these is that of Leroy, who, in comment- ing on the dictum regarding the "laziness" of "primitive" man, refers to a passage from the writings of F. W. Taylor, whose study of motor habits of workers has been fundamental in speed- ing up production in our great industrial plants. The founder of the "Taylor system" is effectively quoted as speaking of "the natural instinct and tendency of men to take it easy, which may be called natural soldiering"; with the reminder that Taylor was not speaking of "savages," but the workers in our own mech- anized industries.4
As we have seen before, however, it is one thing to recognize that the need to refute an outmoded position no longer exists. But it is quite another matter to ignore the position, and thus risk not understanding how pervasive its influence has been, or how it may be present even in the thinking of those who agree with its refutation. Thurnwald furnishes an instance of this. He is entirely correct in his initial observation, regarding non- literate peoples, that "work is never limited to an unavoidable
2 Biicher, 7. * Leroy, 75-8.
8 Ibid., 19.
go ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
minimum," but that "owing to a natural or acquired functional urge to activity" more work than is essential for survival is always done. Yet a few pages later, in a passage reminiscent of Marshall, he maintains:
In spite of an activity which is frequently assiduous, the work of primitive peoples lacks that concentration and disci- pline which seems to be only acquired through working with more delicate machinery. They are quite ready to make an effort when the work requires it, but they soon relax, and as they are not compelled to make any consecutive effort to- ward overcoming this tendency, they yield to the feeling of fatigue.5
Yet knowledge of work-habits even in the most highly indus- trialized societies demonstrates that an ability to focus all effort on a task in hand when it is necessary to do so, to work hard when one must, and to relax when one is able, does not nec- essarily imply "lack of concentration and discipline," but rather a realistic sense of the physiological requirements of the human system. That concentration is possible where interest is aroused, and where it seems worth while to concentrate, is testified by many of those who have had contact with nonliterate folk.0
Actually, nonliterate peoples, like ourselves, do as much work as they feel they must to meet the basic demands of getting a living, plus as much more as their desire to achieve any given end not encompassed by these basic demands calls for. Unlike workers in a machine economy, however, they take their ease at their own pleasure. The Tenetehara of northern Brazil define the lazy man as "one who does not have food and necessities for himself and family." 7 In Southern Bougainville,
There are tribal standards of minimum and maximum work- ing hours. People who obviously spend little time in garden work are labelled "lazy.". . . It is considered a grave insult to be told: "Thy father's hand is clean; not a thing does he plant; he has no wealth in crops." And the charge of laziness is heard at a divorce hearing as often as is the charge of adultery. On the other hand, it is unusual for a native to
6Thurnwalcl (1932b), 209, 213. 7 Wagley and Galvao, 37.
6Cf. Boas (1938), 134.
PATTERNS OF LABOR Ql
spend more than seven hours a day at garden work. Some individuals, of course, do; and they are praised as "indus- trious workers" — but are not often imitated.8
We shall, therefore, at the outset attack the problem of labor in non-machine societies by drawing on quantitative data to answer the questions how much, and how hard, workers in these groups actually exert themselves in the process of producing the goods and services deemed essential in the respective cultures in which they live. For it is only through quantitative analyses of our problem that we can achieve proper perspective on these im- portant points.
THE ACCOUNT given for the Siang Dyak of Borneo was one of the first of this type. Like other Indonesian peoples, this folk possess an economy based on rice-culture — in this case, the non-irrigated variety — which, as the staple food, is supplemented by the wild pig and other products of the hunt, and by fishing and the gath- ering of wild fruits, roots, and honey. Iron-working is well de- veloped, so that they are self-sufficient as far as the manufacture of the iron tools they use is concerned. Their hardest work is clearing the jungle for rice fields.
In this setting, the amount of work done over a period of a month was recorded for several individuals — providing a state- ment of how much labor a given number of individuals in this society actually performed, how much they rested, and what kind of work they did. One of these records may be given in full. It is that of a man aged about fifty, married, with a wife and a grown son.
Date How Occupied
August 24-26 Working in his own ricefield
27 Working in Oeke's riceficld (handd) *
28-20 Working in his own riceficld
30 Home, resting (made strap for knife)
3 1 Working in his own riccfield
* "Pure labor exchange "
8 Oliver (1949b), 90-1.
Q2 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Date How Occupied
September 1 Ditto
2 Home, resting ; wife's uncle visiting from another village
3 Home in a.m., resting; his own field in p.m.
4 Home, resting, half day; his own field half day
5 His own ricefield
6 Sahadan's ricefield (haweti) f
7-12 No record (observer absent from village)
1 3 Home resting
14 Home; helped Renting make coffin for dead baby
15 Home; assisting Renting (other work taboo)
16 His own ricefield 17-18 Home, resting
19 Sahadan's ricefield (haweti)
20-21 His own ricefield
22 Half day his own ricefield; home resting half day
23 Half day his own ricefield ; home half day — sick
24 Home — sick with dysentery
25 Ditto
26 Ditto (on his mat in the long house all day) 9
f "Working Bee," a form of co-operative work where the beneficiary does not give any re- turn in kind for the labor done for him.
This man's efforts, and similar summaries of the activities of others for whom records are given, may be tabulated as follows:
Activity Number of days spent by
A B C D E F
Working in own ricefield 12J£ 4 1 3 5 11
Working in others' ricefields 341592
Hunting in jungle — 10 5 — 4 —
Gathering firewood in jungle — — — 1 — —
Acting as medicine-man * — — — 8J/2 — —
Traveling in Siangland — — 5 — 3 —
At home, working 3j^ 6 3J^ 2J/£ 2]/£ —
At home, resting 6 4 113/£ 7 3>£ —
Incapacitated or ill 3 — — — — (15) t
28 28 27 27 27 (28)
* Days or night.
t Not in original table; during these days this man was confined to his home because of an accident to his foot that did not permit him to work.
In this table, A is the one whose work for the month has been given above in detail. B was aged about forty, married, had a wife and a grown son, and was chief of the village. C was the
9 Table from Provinse, 96-7; the September 26 states: "Tatak died a note appended to this record for week later."
PATTERNS OF LABOR 93
assistant chief, about thirty-five years old, unmarried and living with an unmarried sister. D was a blian, or medicine-man, of about forty-five years, married; E a young man of twenty-three, married for three years, but with no children. The final case was of a man past fifty, married, whose wife, mother-in-law, and two sisters lived at his house. While this tabulation was being made, however, a falling tree so injured this man's foot that he was un- able to resume work during the time observations were being set down; hence during the period of his inactivity, indicated in parentheses, he is to be regarded as an industrial casualty.
Inspection of these figures strikingly shows the variation to be expected in the amount of work done by different individuals in a non-industrial society. It indicates, further, how in this tribe, at least, the workers were able to dispose of their time as best pleased them, within the limits set by the need for providing a living. If among the Siang all must work, all may also rest. If the chief of the village spent more time hunting wild pig than any other man of the group sampled, this merely means that he was directing his efforts more toward one type of labor than another. His assistant spent more days "at home, resting" than any other man, but the chief himself is second lowest in this regard. Though the professional duties of the medicine-man prevented his working in the ricefields as much as his fellows, he is seen spending a clay in the forest gathering firewood, and also, despite his other concerns, giving a day to co-operative labor. As is stressed in the original discussion of these schedules, the opera- tion of no taboos and other intangibles seemed to interrupt the rhythm of work. Thus while custom prescribes that no work must be performed for three days after the death of a child — or for seven days, if a closely related adult dies — yet one father whose child died during the period under observation proceeded to his field the day after the death without the breach of this regulation even occasioning comment, much less punishment.
The data may be combined in a single tabulation. If the fifteen days not given for F arc placed under the "at home, sick" head- ing, the total amount of time is seen to have been apportioned as indicated in the table on the next page.
The figures in this table, thus drawn on broad lines, afford some further documentation of general points that have been made. In drawing these generalizations, however, certain can-
94 ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
tions must first be indicated. Thus there is no assurance that this sample is representative of the total population. From the in- formation at hand, for instance, we cannot say how iron-workers spend their time, or whether one man out of every six is a medi- cine-man, or how many persons might be expected to spend fif- teen days out of twenty-eight as industrial casualties, or die in any given period of four weeks. Yet even with these reservations in mind, certain facts stand out clearly. We see how great a
Activity Number of days
Work in ricefields 60}^
working for