Stone Age Economics

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STONE

AGE

ECONOMICS BY

MARSHALL SAHLINS

~~

w ···~···

ALDINE • ATHERTON, INC. CHICAGO & NEW YORK

The Author Marshall Sahlins is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1954 and has taught there and at the University of Paris at Nanterre. Professor Sahlins was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences in 1963-64 and in 1967-68 he held a Guggenheim Fellowship. His many contributions to the literature include Social Stratification in Polynesia, Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island, Tribesmen, and many articles in professional journals.

Copyright

© 1972 by Marshall Sahlins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published 1972 by Aldine • Atherton, Inc. 529 South Wabash Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60605 ISBN 0-202-01098-8 Library of Congress Catalog Number 75-169506 Printed in the United States of America

FOR JULIA, PETER, AND ELAINE

Acknowledgments

I thank especially two institutions, and the excellent staff associated with them, for the aid and facilities provided during critical periods of my research and writing. In 1963-64 I held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), in 1967-69 an office and the run of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale du College de France (Paris). Although I had no official position in the Laboratoire, M. Claude Levi-Strauss, the director, received me with a courtesy and generosity I should have difficulty reciprocating, were he ever in turn to visit my village. A John Simon Guggenheim fellowship during my first year in Paris (1967-68) and a Social Science Research Council Faculty Research Fellowship (1958-61) also contributed important support during the gestation period of these essays. That period has been so long and so full of beneficial intellectual encounters that it would be impossible to list all the colleagues and students who have, in one way or another, influenced the course of the work. Out of long years of friendship and discussion, however, I make three exceptions: Remo Guidieri, Elman Service, and Eric Wolf. Their ideas and criticisms, always accompanied by encouragement, have been of inestimable value to me and to my work. Several of the essays have been published in whole, in part, or in translation during the past several years. "The Original Affiuent Society" appeared in abbreviated form as "La premiere societe d'abondance" in Les Temps Modernes (No. 268, Oct. 1968, 641-80). The vii

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first part of Chapter 4 was originally published as "The Spirit of the Gift" in Echanges et communications (Jean Pouillon and P. Maranda, eds., The Hague: Mouton, 1969). The second part of Chapter 4 appeared as "Philosophie politique de l'Essai sur le don, "in L 'Homme (Vol. 8[4], 1968, 5-17). "On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange" was published first in The Relevance ofModels for Social Anthropology (M. Banton, ed., London: Tavistock [ASA Monographs, 1], 1965). I thank the publishers of all of the above for permission to reproduce these articles. "The Diplomacy of Primitive Trade," initially published in Essays in Economic Anthropology (June Helm, ed., Seattle: American Ethnological Society, 1965), has been entirely revised for the present book:

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii Xl

1 The Original Affluent Society

2 The Domestic Mode of Production: The Structure of Underproduction

41

3 The Domestic Mode of Production:

Intensification of Production

101

4 The Spirit of the Gift

149

5 On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange

185

6 Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade

277

Bibliography

315

Index

337

Introduction

I have written the several essays of this volume at various times over the past ten years. Some were written especially for the present publication. All were conceived and are here assembled in the hope of an anthropological economics, which is to say, in opposition to businesslike interpretations of primitive economies and societies. Inevitably the book inscribes itself in the current anthropological controversy between "formalist" and "substantivist"practices of economic theory. Endemic to the science of Economics for over a century, the formalist-substantivist debate seems nevertheless lacking in history, for nothing much seems to have changed since Karl Marx defined the fundamental issues in contraposition to Adam Smith (cf. Althusser et al., 1966, Vol. 2). Still, the latest incarnation in the form of anthropology has shifted the emphasis of discussion. If the problem in the beginning was the "naive anthropolgy" of Economics, today it is the "naive economics" of Anthropology. "Formalism versus substantivism" amounts to the following theoretical option: between the readymade models of orthodox Economics, especially the "microeconomics," taken as universally valid and applicable grosso modo to the primitive societies; and the necessity-supposing this formalist position unfounded-of developing a new analysis more appropriate to the historical societies in question and to the intellectual history of Anthropology. Broadly speaking, it is a choice between the perspective of Business, for the formalist method must consider the primixi

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tive economies as underdeveloped versions of our own, and a culturalist study that as a matter of principle does honor to different societies for what they are. No solution is in sight, no ground for the happy academic conclusion that "the answer lies somewhere in between." This book is substantivist. It thus takes on a familiar structure, as provided by traditional substantive categories. The first essays concern production: "The Original Affluent Society" and "The Domestic Mode of Production." (The latter has been divided for convenience into two sections, Chapters 2 and 3, but these make up one continuous argument.) The chapters following turn to distribution and exchange: "The Spirit of the Gift," "On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange/' "Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade." But as the exposition is at the same time an opposition, this sequence harbors also a more concealed strategy of debate. The lead chapter accepts battle on formalist terms. "The Original Affluent Society" does not challenge the common understanding of "economy" as a relation between means and ends; it 'only denies that hunters find any great disparity between the two. The follo'Ying essays, however, would definitively abandon this entrepreneurial and individualist conception of the economic object. "Economy" becomes a category of culture rather than behavior, in a class with politics or religion rather than rationality or prudence: not the need-serving activities of individuals, but the material life process of society. Then, the final chapter returns to economic orthodoxy, but to its problems, not to its probJematique. The attempt in the end is to bring the anthropological perspective to bear on the traditional work of microeconomics, the explanation of exchange value. In all this, the aim of the book remains modest: merely to perpetuate the possibility of an anthropological economics by a few concrete examples. In a recent issue of Current Anthropology, a spokesman of the opposed position announced with no apparent regret the untimely demise of substantive economics: The wordage squandered in this debate does not add up to its intellectual weight. From the beginning the substantivists (as exemplified in the justly famous works ofPolanyi and others) were heroically muddled and in error. It is a tribute to the maturity of economic anthropology that we have been

Introduction

xiii

able to find in what the error consisted in the short space of six years. The paper ... written by Cook (1966) when he was a graduate student neatly disposes of the controversy .... Social science being the sort of enterprise [I] it is, however, it is virtually impossible to down a poor, useless, or obfuscating hypothesis, and I expect the next generation of creators of high-level confusion will resurrect, in one guise or another, the substantive view of the economy (Nash, 1967, p. 250)·

How then to describe the present work, which is neither the second coming nor otherwise bears the slightest trace of immortality? One can only hope there has been some mistake. Perhaps, as with Mark Twain in a similar case, the reports of the death of substantivism have been grossly exaggerated. In any event, I refrain from the attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the form of methodological discussion. The recent literature of "economic anthropology" is already overinflated with talk at this level. And while many of the arguments seem models of good sense, the total effect has been to confirm everyone in his original prejudice. ("He who's convinced against his will/Is of the same opinion still.") Reason has proven a poor arbiter. Meanwhile the audience to the debate is rapidly declining, out of boredom, prompting even some of the main participants to now declare themselves ready to go to work. That too is the spirit of this book. Officially, as a participant in a discipline that considers itself a science, I would rest the case on the essays themselves, and on the belief they explain matters better than the competing theoretical mode. Such is the traditional and the healthy procedure: let all the flowers bloom, and we shall see which bear real fruit. But the official position is not, I confess, my deepest conviction. It seems to me that this tissue of metaphors on the natural sciences dressed up as "social science," this anthropology, has shown as little capacity for agreement on the empirical adequacy of a theory as on its logical sufficiency. For unlike mathematics where "truth and the interest of men oppose not each other," as Hobbes said long ago, in social science nothing is indisputable because social science "compareth men and meddleth with their right and profit," so that "as often as reason is against a man, a man is against reason." The decisive differences between formalism and substantivism, as far as their acceptance is at issue, if not so far as their truth, are ideological. Embodying the wisdom of native bourgeois categories, fonnal

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economics flourishes as ideology at home and ethnocentrism abroad. As against substantivism, it draws great strength from its profound compatibility with bourgeois society-which is not to deny, either, that the conflict with substantivism can become a confrontation of (two) ideologies. When the early physicists and astronomers, working in the shadow of established ecclesiastic dogmas, commended themselves to God and Sovereign, they knew what they were doing. The present work plays on the same contradiction: not in the illusion that the dogmas will prove flexible, but the gods just. The political-ideological differences between formal and anthropological thought may well be ignored in the writing, but that does not render them much less consequent to the outcome. We are told substantivism is dead. Politically, at least for a certain part of the world, it may be so; that flower was nipped in the bud. It is also conceivable that bourgeois economics is doomed, scheduled by history to share the fate of the society that nurtured it. In either event, it is not for current anthropology to decide. We are at least en~ugh of a science to know that is the prerogative of society, and of the academic sons of heaven who hold its mandate. In the meantime, we cultivate our gardens, waiting to see if the gods will shower rain or, like those of certain New Guinea tribes, just urinate upon us.

I

The Original Affluent Society

If economics is the dismal science, the study of hunting and gathering economies must be its most advanced branch. Almost universally committed to the proposition that life was hard in the paleolithic, our textbooks compete to convey a sense of impending doom, leaving one to wonder not only how hunters managed to live, but whether, after all, this was living? The specter of starvation stalks the stalker through these pages. His technical incompetence is said to enjoin continuous work just to survive, affording him neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the "leisure" to "build culture." Even so, for all his efforts, the hunter pulls the lowest grades in thermodynamics-less energyI capita/year than any other mode of production. And in treatises on economic development he is condemned to play the role of bad example: the so-called "subsistence economy." The traditional wisdom is always refractory. One is forced to oppose it polemically, to phrase the necessary revisions dialectically: in fact, this was, when you come to examine it, the original affiuent society. Paradoxical, that phrasing leads to another useful and unexpected conclusion. By the common understanding, an affiuent society is one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affiuent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means. For there are two possible courses to affiuence. Wants may be

Stone Age Economics "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty-with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behavior: their "prodigality" for example-the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own. Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he mighf have been, at least compelled Marx's agreement on the observation that "in poor nations the people are comfortable," whereas in rich nations "they are generally poor." This is not to deny that a preagricultural economy operates under serious constraints, but only to insist, on the evidence from modern hunters and gatherers, that a successful accomodation is usually made. After taking up the evidence, I shall return in the end to the real difficulties of hunting-gathering economy, none of which are correctly specified in current formulas of paleolithic poverty. Sources of the Misconception

"Mere subsistence economy" "limited leisure save in exceptional circumstances," "incessant quest for food," "meagre and relatively unreliable" natural resources, "absence of an economic surplus," "maximum energy from a maximum number of people"-so runs the fair average anthropological opinion of hunting and gathering. The aboriginal Australians are a classic example 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 .... A tabulation of the foodstuffs which the

The Original Affluent Society

3

aborigines of northwest central Queensland extract from the country they inhabit is instructive.... 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 (Herskovits, 1958, p 68-69).

Or again, in reference to South American hunters: The nomadic hunters and gatherers barely met minimum subsistence needs and often fell far short of them. Their population of 1 person to 10 or 20 square miles reflects this. Constantly on the move in search of food, they clearly lacked the leisure hours for nonsubsistence activities of any significance, and they could transport little of what they might manufacture in spare moments. To them, adequacy of production meant physical survival, and they rarely had surplus of either products or time (Steward and Faron, 1959, p. 60; cf. Clark, 1953, p. 27 f; Haury, 1962, p. 113; Hoebel, 1958, p. 188; Redfield, 1953, p. ·5; White, 1959).

But the traditional dismal view of the hunters' fix is also preanthropological and extra-anthropological, at once historical and referable to the larger economic context in which anthropology operates. It goes back to the time Adam Smith was writing, and probably to a time before anyone was writing. 1 Probably it was one of the first distinctly neolithic prejudices, an ideological appreciation of the hunter's capacity to exploit the earth's resources most congenial to the historic task of depriving him of the same. We must have inherited it with the seed of Jacob, which "spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north," to the disadvantage of Esau who was the elder son and cunning hunter, but in a famous scene deprived of his birthright. Current low opinions of the hunting-gathering economy need not be laid to neolithic ethnocentrism, however. Bourgeois ethnocentrism will do as well. The existing business economy, at every turn an ideological trap from which anthropological economics must escape, will promote the same dim conclusions about the hunting life. Is it so paradoxical to contend that hunters have affiuent economies, their absolute poverty notwithstanding? Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples. The apparent material status of the economy seems to be no clue to its accomplishments; something has to be 1. At least to the time Lucretius was writing (Harris, 1968, pp. 26-27).

4

Stone Age Economics

said for the mode of economic organization (cf. Polanyi, 1947, 1957, 1959; Dalton, 1961). The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity. 1 The entrepreneur is confronted with alternative investments of a finite capital, the worker (hopefully) with alternative choices of remunerative employ, and the consumer.... Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation. Bringing together an international division of labor,. the market makes available a dazzling array of products: all these Good Things within a man's reach-but never all within his grasp. Worse, in this game of consumer free choice, every acquisition is simultaneously a deprivation, for every purchase of something is a foregoing of something else, in general only marginally less desirable, and in some particulars mor~ desirable, that could have been had instead. (The point is that if you buy one automobile, say a Plymouth, you cannot also have the Ford-and I judge from current television commercials that the deprivations entailed would be more than just material.)3 That sentence of "life at hard labor" was passed uniquely upon us. Scarcity is the judgment decreed by our economy-so also the axiom of our Economics: the application of scarce means against alternative ends to derive the most satisfaction possible under the circumstances. And it is precisely from this anxious vantage that we look back upon hunters. But if modern man, with all his technological advantages, still hasn't got the wherewithal, what chance has this naked savage with his puny bow and arrow? Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance. 4 2. On the historically particular requisites of such calculation, see Codere, 1968, [especially pp. 574-575.) 3. For the complementary institutionalization of "scarcity" in the conditions of capitalist production, see Gorz, 1967, pp. 37-38. 4. It deserves mention that contemporary European-Marxist theory is often in accord with bourgeois economics on the poverty of the primitive. Cf. Boukharine, 1967; Mandel, 1962, vol. 1; and the economic history manual used at Lumumba University

The Original Affluent Society

5

Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to that end. 5 But still other ideas, these endemic in anthropological theory and ethnographic practice, have conspired to preclude any such understanding. ~ The anthropological disposition to exaggerate the economic inefficiency of hunters appears notably by way of invidious comparison with neolithic economies. Hunters, as Lowie put it blankly, "must work much harder in order to live than tillers and breeders" (1946, p. 13). On this point evolutionary anthropology in particular found it congenial, even necessary theoretically, to adopt the usual tone of reproach. Ethnologists and archaeologists had become neolithic revolutionaries, and in their enthusiasm for the Revolution spared nothing denouncing the Old (Stone Age) Regime. Including some very old scandal. It was not the first time philosophers would relegate the earliest stage of humanity rather to nature than to culture. ("A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself'[Braidwood, 1957, p. 122].) The hunters thus downgraded, anthropology was free to extol the Neolithic Great Leap Forward: a main technological advance that brought about a "general availability of leisure through release from purely food-getting pursuits" (Braidwood, 1952, p. 5; cf. Boas, 1940, p. 285). In an influC(ntial essay on "Energy and the Evolution of Culture," Leslie White explained that the neolithic generated a "great advance in cultural development ... as a consequence of the great increase in the amount of energy harnessed and controlled per capita per year by means of the agricultural and pastoral arts" (1949, p. 372). White further heightened the evolutionary contrast by specifying human effort as the principal energy source of paleolithic culture, as opposed to the domesticated plant and animal resources of neolithic culture. (listed in bibliography as "Anonymous, n.d."). 5. Elman Service for a very long time almost alone among ethnologists stood out against the traditional view of the penury of hunters. The present paper owes great inspiration to his remarks on the leisure oft he Arunta (1963, p. 9), as well as to personal conversations with him.

6

Stone Age Economics

This determination of the energy sources at once permitted a precise low estimate of hunters' thermodynamic potential-that developed by the human body: "average power resources" of one-twentieth horsepower per capita (1949, p. 369)-even as, by eliminating human effort from the cultural enterprise of the neolithic, it appeared that people had been liberated by some labor-saving device (domesticated plants and animals). But White's problematic is obviously misconceived. The principal mechanical energy available to both paleolithic and neolithic culture is that supplied by human beings, as transformed in both cases from plant and animal sources, so that, with negligible exceptions (the occasional direct use of nonhuman power), the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is the same in paleolithic and neolithic economies-and fairly constant in human history until the advent of the industrial revolution~ Another specifically anthropological source of paleolithic discontent develops in the field itself, from the context of European observation of existing hunters and gatherers, such as the native Australians, the Bushmen, the Ona or the Yahgan. This ethnographic context tends to distort our understanding of the hunting-gathering economy in two ways. First, it provides singular opportunities for naivete. The remote and exotic environments that have become the cultural theater of modern hunters have an effect on Europeans most unfavorable to the latter's assessment of the former's plight. Marginal as the Australian or Kalahari desert is to agriculture, or to everyday European experience, it is a source of wonder to the untutored observer "how anybody could live in a place like this." The inference that the natives manage only to eke out a bare existence is apt to be reinforced by their marvelously varied diets (cf. Herskovits, 1958, quoted above). Ordinarily including 6. The evident fault of White's evolutionary law is the use of"per capita" measures. Neolithic societies in the main harness a greater total amount ofenergy than preagricultural communities, because of the greater number of energy-delivering humans sustained by domestication. This overall rise in the social product, however, is not necessarily effected by an increased productivity of labor-which in White's view also accompanied the neolithic revolution. Ethnological data now in hand, (see text infra) raise the possibility that simple agricultural regimes are not more efficient thermodynamically than hunting and gathering-that is, in energy yield per unit of human labor. In the same vein, some archaeology in recent years has tended to privilege stability of settlement over productivity oflabor in explanation of the neolithic advance (cf. Braidwood and Wiley, 1962).

The Original AfJluent Society

7

objects deemed repulsive and inedible by Europeans, the local cuisine lends itself to the supposition that the people are starving to death. Such a conclusion, of course, is more likely met in earlier than in later accounts, and in the journals of explorers or missionaries than in the monographs of anthropologists; but precisely because the explorers' reports are older and closer to the aboriginal condition, one reserves for them a certain respect. Such respect obviously has to be accorded with discretion. Greater attention should be paid a man such as Sir George Grey (1841), whose expeditions in the 1830s included some of the poorer districts of western Australia, but whose unusually close attention to the local people obliged him to debunk his colleagues' communications on just this point of economic desperation. It is a mistake very commonly made, Grey wrote, to suppose that the native Australians "have small means of subsistence, or are at times greatly pressed for want offood." Many and "almost ludicrous" are the errors travellers have fallen into in this regard: "They lament in their journals that the unfortunate Aborigines should be reduced by famine to the miserable necessity of subsisting on certain sorts of food, which they have found near their huts; whereas, in many instances, the articles thus quoted by them are those which the natives most prize, and are really neither deficient in flavour nor nutritious qualities." To render palpable "the ignorance that has prevailed with regard to the habits and customs of this people when in their wild state,"Grey provides one remarkable example, a citation from his fellow explorer, Captain Sturt, who, upon encountering a group of Aboriginals engaged in gathering large quantities of mimosa gum, deduced that the" 'unfortunate creatures were reduced to the last extremity, and, being unable to procure any other nourishment, had been obliged to collect this mucilaginous.' " But, Sir George observes, the gum in question is a favorite article of food in the area, and when in season it affords the opportunity for large numbers of people to assemble and camp together, which otherwise they are unable to do. He concludes: Generally speaking, the natives live well; in some districts there may be at particular seasons of the year a deficiency of food, but if such is the case, these tracts are, at those times, deserted. It is, however, utterly impossible for a traveller or even for a strange native to judge whether a district affords an abundance offood, or the contrary ... But

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in his own district a native is very differently situated; he knows exactly what it produces, the proper time at which the several articles are in season, and the readiest means of procuring them. According to these circumstances he regulates his visits to different portions of his hunting ground; and I can only say that I have always found the greatest abundance in their huts (Grey, 1841, vol. 2, pp. 259-262, emphasis mine; cf. Eyre, 1845, vol. 2, p. 244fV In making this happy assessment, Sir George took special care to exclude the lumpen-proletariat aboriginals living in and about European towns (cf. Eyre,1845, vo1.2, pp. 250, 254-255). The exception is instructive. It evokes a second source of ethnographic misconceptions: the anthropology of hunters is largely an anachronistic study of ex-savages-an inquest into the corpse of one society, Grey once said, presided over by members of another. The surviving food collectors, as a class, are displaced persons. They represent the paleolithic disenfranchised, occupying marginal haunts untypical of the mode of production: sanctuaries of an era, places so beyond the range of main centers of cultural advance as to be allowed some respite from the planetary march of cultural evolution, because they were characteristically poor beyond the interest and competence of more advanced economies. Leave aside the favorably situated food collecters, such as Northwest Coast Indians, about whose (comparative) well-being there is no dispute.(The remaining hunters, barred from the better parts of the earth, first by agriculture, later by industrial economies, enjoy ecological opportunities something less than the later-paleolithic average] 8 Moreover, the disruption accomplished in the past two centuries of European imperialism has been especially severe, to the extent that many of the ethnographic notices that constitute the anthropologist's stock in trade are adulterated culture goods. Even explorer and missionary accounts, apart from their ethnocentric misconstructions, may be speaking of affiicted economies (cf. Service, 1962). The hunters of eastern Canada of whom we read in the Jesuit Relations were committed to the fur trade in the 7. For a similar comment, referring to missionary misinterpretation of curing by blood consumption in eastern Australia, see Hodgkinson, 1845, p. 227. 8. Conditions of primitive hunting peoples must not be judged, as Carl Sauer notes, " 'from their modem survivors, now restricted to the most meagre regions of the earth, such as the interior of Australia, the American Great Basin, and the Arctic tundra and taiga. The areas of early occupation were abounding in food'" (cited in Clark and Haswell, 1964, p. 23).

The Original Affluent Society

9

early seventeenth century. The environments of others were selectively stripped by Europeans before reliable report could be made of indigenous production: the Eskimo we know no longer hunt whales, the Bushmen have been deprived of game, the Shoshoni's pinon has been timbered and his hunting grounds grazed out by cattle. 9 If such peoples are now described as poverty-stricken, their resources "meagre and unreliable," is this an indication ofthe aboriginal condition-or of the colonial duress? [The enormous implications (and problems) for evolutionary interpretation raised by this global retreat have only recently begun to evoke notice (Lee and Devore, 1968). The point of present importance is this: rather than a fair test of hunters' productive capacities, their current circumstances pose something of a supreme test. All the more extraordinary, then, the following reports of their performance-]

''A Kind of Material Plenty" Considering the poverty in which hunters and gatherers live in theory, it comes as a surprise that Bushmen who live in the Kalahari enjoy "a kind of material plenty," at least in the realm of everyday useful things, apart from food and water: As the /Kung come into more contact with Europeans-and this is already happening-they will feel sharply the lack of our things and will need and want more. It makes them feel inferior to be without clothes when they stand among strangers who are clothed. But in their own life and with their own artifacts they were comparatively free from material pressures. Except for food and water (important exceptions!) of which theNyae Nyae/Kung have a sufficiency-but barely so, judging from the fact that·all are thin though not emaciated-they all had what they needed or could make what they needed, for every man can and does make the things that men make and every woman the things that women make. . . . They lived in a kind ofmaterial plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay·in abundance around them and which were free for anyone to take (wood, reeds, bone for weapons and implements, fibers for cordage, grass for shelters), or to materials which were at least sufficient for the needs of the population.... The /Kung could always use more ostrich egg 9. Through the prison of acculturation one glimpses what hunting and gathering might have been like in a decent environment from Alexander Henry's account of his bountiful sojum as a Chippewa in northern Michigan: see Quimby, 1962.

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Stone Age Economics

shells for beads to wear or trade with, but, as it is, enough are found for every woman to have a dozen or more shells for water containers-all she can carry-and a goodly number of bead ornaments. In their nomadic hunting-gathering life, travelling from one source of food to another through the seasons, always going back and forth between food and water, they carry their young children and their belongings. With plenty of most materials at hand to replace artifacts as required, the /Kung have not developed means of permanent storage and have not needed or wanted to encumber themselves with surpluses or duplicates. They do not even want to carry one of everything. They borrow what they do not own. With this ease, they have not hoarded, and the accumulation of objects has not become associated with status (Marshall, 1961, pp. 243-44, emphasis mine).

Analysis of hunter-gatherer production is usefully divided into two spheres, as Mrs. Marshall has done. Food and water are certainly "important exceptions," best reserved for separate and extended treatment. For the rest, the nonsubsistence sector, what is here said of the Bushmen applies in general and in detail to hunters from the Kalahari to Labrador--or to Tierra d~l Fuego, where Gusinde reports of the Yahgan that their disinclination to own more than one copy of utensils frequently needed is "an indication of self-confidence." "Our Fuegians," he writes, "procure and make their implements with little effort" (1961, p. 213).to In the nonsubsistence sphere, the people's wants are generally easily satisfied. Such "material plenty" depends partly upon the ease of production, and that upon the simplicity of technology and democracy of property. Products are homespun: of stone, bone, wood, skinmaterials such as "lay in abundance around them." As a rule, neither extraction of the raw material nor its working up take strenuous effort. Access to natural resources is typically direct-"free for anyone to take"--even as possession of the necessary tools is general and knowledge of the required skills common. The division of labor is likewise simple, predominantly a division of labor by sex. Add in the liberal customs of sharing, for which hunters are properly famous, 10. Turnbull similarly notes of Congo Pygmies: "The materials for the making of shelter, clothing, and all other necessary items of material culture are all at hand at a moment's notice." And he has no reservations either about subsistence: "Throughout the year, without fail, there is an abundant supply of game and vegetable foods" (1965, p. 18).

The Original Affluent Society

11

and all the people can usually participate in the going prosperity, such as it is. But, of course, "such as it is": this "prosperity" depends as well upon an objectively low standard of living. It is critical that the customary quota of consuniables (as well as the number of consumers) be culturally set at a modest point. A few people are pleased to consider a few easily-made things their good fortune: some meagre pieces of clothing and rather fugitive housing in most climates; 11 plus a few ornaments, spare flints and sundry other items such as the "pieces of quartz, which native doctors have extracted from their patients" (Grey, 1841, vol. 2, p. 266); and, finally, the skin bags in which the faithful wife carries all this, "the wealth of the Australian savage" (p. 266). For most hunters, such affluence without abundance in the nonsubsistence sphere need not be long debated. A more interesting question is why they are content with so few possessions-for it is with them a policy, a "matter of principle" as Gusinde says (1961, p. 2), and not a misfortune. Want not, lack not. But are hunters so undemanding of material goods because they are themselves enslaved by a food quest "demanding maximum energy from a maximum number of people," so that no time or effort remains for the provision of other comforts? Some ethnographers testify to the contrary that the food quest is so successful that half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves. On the other hand, movement is a condition of this success, more movement in some cases than others, but always enough to rapidly depreciate the satisfactions of property. Of the hunter it is truly said that his wealth is a burden. In his condition of life, goods can become "grievously oppressive," as Gusinde observes, and the more so the longer they are carried around. Certain food collecters do have canoes and a few have dog sleds, but most must carry themselves all the comforts they possess, and so only possess what they can comfortably carry themselves. Or perhaps only what the women can carry: the men are often left free to react to the sudden opportunity of the chase or the sudden necessity of defense. As Owen Lattimore ll.Certain food collectors not lately known for their architectural achievements seem to have built more substantial dwellings before being put on the run by Europeans. See Smythe, 1871, vol. I, pp. 125-128.

12

Stone Age Economics

wrote in a not too different context, "the pure nomad is the poor nomad." Mobility and property are in contradiction. That wealth quickly becomes more of an encumbrance than a good thing is apparent even to the outsider. Laurens van der Post was caught in the contradiction as he prepared to make farewells to his wild Bushmen friends: This matter of presents gave us many an anxious moment. We were humiliated by the realization of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything seemed likely to make life more difficult for them by adding to the litter and weight of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions: a loin strap, a skin blanket and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap up in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles. They had no sense of possession (1958, p. 276). A necessity so obvious to the casual visitor must be second nature to the people concerned. This modesty of material requirements is institutionalized: it becomes· a positive cultural fact, expressed in a variety of economic arrangements. Lloyd Warner reports of the Murngin, for example, that portability is a decisive value in the local scheme of things. Small goods are in general better than big goods. In the final analysis "the relative ease of transportation of the article" will prevail, so far as determining its disposition, over its relative scarcity or labor cost. For the "ultimate value," Warner writes, "is freedom of movement." And to this "desire to be free from the burdens and responsibilities of objects which would interfere with the society's itinerant existence," Warner attributes the l'v,turngin's "undeveloped sense of property," and their "lack of interest in developing their technological equipment" (1964, pp. 136-137). Here then is another e.c.onomic "~liari.ty"-1 will not say it is general, and perhaps it is explained as well by faulty toilet training as by a trained disinterest in material accumulation: some hunters, at least, display a notable tendency to be sloppy about their possessions. They have the kind of nonchalance that would be appropriate to a people who have mastered the problems of production, even as it is maddening to a European: They do not know how to take care of their belongings. No one dreams of putting them in order, folding them, drying or cleaning them, hanging

The Original Affluent Society

13

them up, or putting them in a neat pile. If they are looking for some particular thing, they rummage carelessly through the hodgepodge of trifles in the little bas~ets. Larger objects that are piled up in a heap in the hut are dragged hither and yon with no regard for the damage that might be done them. The European observer has the impression that these [Yahgan] Indians place no value whatever on their utensils and that they have completely forgotten the effort it took to make them. 12 Actually, no one clings to his few goods and chattels which, as it is, are often and easily lost, but just as easily replaced .... The Indian does not even exercise care when he could conveniently do so. A European is likely to shake his head at the boundless indifference of these people who drag brand-new objects, precious clothing, fresh provisions, and valuable items through thick mud, or abandon them to their swift destruction by children and dogs. . . . Expensive things that are given them are treasured for a few hours, out of curiousity; after that they thoughtlessly let everything deteriorate in the mud and wet. The less they own, the more comfortable they can travel, and what is ruined they occasionally replace. Hence, they are completely indifferent to any material possessions (Gusinde, 1961, pp. 86-87).

The hunter, one is tempted to say, is "uneconomic man." At least as concerns nonsubsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard caricature immortalized in any General Principles of Economics, page one[i-lis wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful)~onse­ quently he is "comparatively free of material pressures," has "no sense of possession," shows "an undeveloped sense of property," is "completely indifferent to any material pressures," manifests a "lack of interest" in developing his technological equipment. 1 [In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important point. From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are "restricted," desires "restrained," or even that the notion of wealth is "limited." Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and a struggle of the hunter against his own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a bourgeois construction-as Marcel Mauss said, "not behind us, but before, like the moral man." It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic "im12. But recall Gusinde's comment: "Our Fuegians procure and make their implements with little effort" (1961, p. 213).

Stone Age Economics

14

pulses"; they simply never made an institution of them. "Moreover, if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our [Montagnais] Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests,-! mean ambition and avarice ... as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealthj (LeJeune, 1897, p. 231). We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. "Their extremely limited material possessions relieve them of all cares with regard to daily necessities and permit them to enjoy life" (Gusinde, 1961, p. 1). Subsistence

When Herskovits was writing his Economic Anthropology {1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest," so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible." Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed-on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. Some of the substantiating evidence for Australia appears in early sources, but we are fortunate especially to have now the quantitative materials collected by the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Published in 1960, these startling data must provoke some review of the Australian reportage going back for ov.er a century, and perhaps revision of an even longer period of anthropological thought. The key research was a temporal study of hunting and gathering by McCarthy and McArthur (1960), coupled to McArthur's analysis of the nutritional outcome. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 summarize the principal production studies. These were short-run observations taken during nonceremonial peri-

The Original Affluent Society

15

HOURS 7

6

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Figure 1.1.

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4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

DAY

Hours per Day in Food-Connected Activities: Fish Creek Group (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960)

ods. The record for Fish Creek (14 days) is longer as well as more detailed than that for Hemple Bay (seven days). Only adults' work has been reported, so far as I can tell. The diagrams incorporate information on hunting, plant collecting, preparing foods and repairing weapons, as tabulated by the ethnographers. The people in both camps were free-ranging native Australians, living outside mission or other settlements during the period of study, although such was not necessarily their permanent or even their ordinary circumstance. 13 13. Fish Creek was an inland camp in western Arnhem Land consisting of six adult males and three adult females. Hemple Bay was a coastal occupation on Groote Eylandt; there were four adult males, four adult females,and five juveniles and infants in the camp. Fish Creek was investigated at the end of the dry season, when the supply of vegetable foods was low; kangaroo hunting was rewarding, although the animals became increasingly wary under steady stalking. At Hemple Bay, vegetable foods were plentiful; the fishing was variable but on the whole good by comparison with other (continued on p. 17)

HOURS 8~--~-------r--~--~--~~--r---,

6

5

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2 Figure 1.2.

3

4

5

6

7

DAY

Hours per Day in Food-Connected Activities: Hemple Bay Group (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960)

The Original Affluent Society

17

One must have serious reservations about drawing general or historical inferences from the Arnhem Land data alone. Not only was the context less than pristine and the time of study too brief, but certain elements of the modern situation may have raised productivity above aboriginal levels: metal tools, for example, or the reduction of local pressure on food resources by depopulation. And our uncertainty seems rather doubled than neutralized by other current circumstances that, conversely, would lower economic efficiency: these semi-independent hunters, for instance, are probably not as skilled as their ancestors. For the moment, let us consider the Arnhem Land conclusions as experimental, potentially credible in the measure they are supported by other ethnographic or historic accounts. The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being, which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic. In the event, a third characteristic of hunting and gathering onimagined by the received wisdom: rather than straining to the limits of available labor and disposable resources, these Australians seem to underuse their objective economic possibilities. The quantity of food gathered in one day by any of these groups could in every instance have been increased. Although the search for food was, for the women, a job that went on day after day without relief [but see our Figures 1.1 and 1.2], they rested quite frequently, and did not spend all the hours of daylight searching for and preparing food. The nature of the men's coastal camps visited by the expedition. The resource base at Hemple Bay was richer than at Fish Creek. The greater time put into food-getting at Hemple Bay may reflect, then, the support of five children. On the other hand, the Fish Creek group did maintain a virtually full-time specialist, and part of the difference in hours worked may represent a normal coastal-inland variation. In inland hunting, good things often come in large packages; hence, one day's work may yield two day's sustenance. A fishing-gathering regime perhaps produces smaller if steadier returns, enjoining somewhat longer and more regular efforts.

Stone Age Economics

18

food-gathering was more sporadic, and if they had a good catch one day they frequently rested the next. ... Perhaps unconsciously they weigh the benefit of greater supplies of food against the effort involved in collecting it, perhaps they judge what they consider to be enough, and when that is collected they stop (McArthur, 1960, p. 92).

It follows, fourthly, that the economy was not physically demanding. The investigators' daily journal indicates that the people pace themselves; only once is a hunter described as "utterly exhausted" (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960, pp. 150f). Neither did the Arnhem Landers themselves consider the task of subsistence onerous. "They certainly did not approach it as an unpleasant job to be got over as soon as possible, nor as a necessary evil to be postponed as long as possible" (McArthur, 1960, p. 92). 14 In this connection, and also in relation to their underuse of economic resources, it is noteworthy that the Arnhem Land hunters seem not to have been content with a "bare existence." Like other Australians (cf. Worsley, 1961, p. 173), they become dissatisfied with an unvarying diet; some of their time appears to have gone into the provision of diversity over and above mere sufficiency (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960, p. 192). In any case, the dietary intake of the Arnhem Land hunters was adequate-according to the standards of the National Research Council of America. Mean daily consumption per capita at Hemple Bay was 2,160 calories (only a four-day period of observation), and at Fish Creek 2,130 calories (11 days). Table 1.1 indicates the main daily consumption of various nutrients, calculated by McArthur in percentages of the NRCA recommended dietary allowances. Table 1.1. Mean daily consumption as percentage of recommended allowances (from McArthur, 1960) Calories

Protein

Iron

Calcium

Ascorbic Acid

HempleBay

116

444

80

128

394

Fish Creek

104

544

33

355

47

14. At least some Australians, the Yir-Yiront, make no linguistic differentiation between work and play (Sharp, 1958, p. 6).

19

The Original Affluent Society

Finally, what does the Arnhem Land study say about the famous question of leisure? It seems that hunting and gathering can afford extraordinary relief from economic cares. The Fish Creek group maintained a virtually full-time craftsman, a man 35 or 40 years old, whose true specialty however seems to have been loafing: He did not go out hunting at all with the men, but one day he netted fish most vigorously. He occasionally went into the bush to get wild bees' nests. Wi/ira was an expert craftsman who repaired the spears and spear-throwers, made smoking-pipes and drone-tubes, and hafted a stone axe (on request) in a skillful manner; apart from these occupations he spent most of his time talking, eating and sleeping (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960, p. 148).

Wilira was not altogether exceptional. Much of the time spared by the Arnhem Land hunters was literally spare time, consumed in rest and sleep (see Tables 1.2 and 1.3). The main alternative to work, changing off with it in a complementary way, was sleep: Apart from the time (mostly between definitive activities and during cooking periods) spent in general social intercourse, chatting, gossiping and so on, some hours of the daylight were also spent resting and sleeping. On the average, if the men were in camp, they usually slept after lunch from an

Table 1.2. Daytime rest and sleep, Fish Creek group (data from McCarthy and McArthur, 1960) Day I 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

d Average

9 Average

2'15" 2'45" 1'30" 1'0" Most of the day Intermittent Intermittent and most of late afternoon Most of the day Several hours 2'0" 2'0" 50" 50" Afternoon Afternoon Intermittent, afternoon 3'15"

3'15"

Stone Age Economics

20

Table 1.3. Daytime rest and sleep, Hemple Bay group (data from McCarthy and McArthur, 1960} Day

oAverage

9 Average 45"

2

Most of the day

3

1'0"

4

Intermittent

2'45"

Intermittent

1'30"

5 6

Intermittent

Intermittent

7

Intermittent

Intermittent

,

hour to an hour and a half, or sometimes even more. Also after returning from fishing or hunting they usually had a sleep, either immediately they arrived or whilst game was being cooked. At Hemple Bay the men slept if they returned early in the day but not if they reached camp after 4.00 p.m. When in camp all day they slept at odd times and always after lunch. The women, when out collecting in the forest, appeared to rest more frequently than the men. If in camp all day, they also slept at odd times, sometimes for long periods (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960, p. 193).

The failure of Arnhem Landers to "build culture" is not strictly from want of time. It is from idle hands. So much for the plight of hunters and gatherers in Arnhem Land. As for the Bushmen, economically likened to Australian hunters by Herskovits, two excellent recent reports by Richard Lee show their condition to be indeed the same (Lee, 1968; 1969). Lee's research merits a special hearing not only because it concerns Bushmen, but specifically the Dobe section of/Kung Bushmen, adjacent to the Nyae Nyae about whose subsistence-in a context otherwise of "material plenty"-Mrs. Marshall expressed important reservations. The Dobe occupy an area of Botswana where /Kung Bushmen have been living for at least a hundred years, but have only just begun to suffer dislocation pressures. (Metal, however, has been available to the Dobe since

The Original Affluent Society

21

1880-90). An intensive study was made ofthe subsistence production of a dry season camp with a population (41 people) near the mean of such settlements. The observations extended over four weeks during July and August 1964, a period of transition from more to less favorable seasons of the year, hence fairly representative, it seems, of average subsistence difficulties. Despite a low annual rainfall (6 to lO inches), Lee found in the Dobe area a "surprising abundance of vegetation." Food resources were "both varied and abundant," particularly the energy-rich mangetti nut-"so abundant that millions ofthe nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking" ( all references in Lee, 1969, p. 59).15 His reports on time spent in food-getting are remarkably close to the Arnhem Land observations. Table 1.4 summarizes Lee's data. The Bushman figures imply that one man's labor in hunting and gathering will support four or five people. Taken at face value, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II, when more than 20 percent of the population were engaged in feeding the rest. Confessedly, the comparison is misleading, but not as misleading as it is astonishing. In the total population of free-ranging Bushmen contacted by Lee, 61.3 percent (152 of 248) were effective food producers; the remainder were too young or too old to contribute importantly. In the particular camp under scrutiny, 65 percent were "effectives." Thus the ratio of food producers to the general population is actually 3 : 5 or 2 : 3. But, these 65 percent of the people "worked 36 percent of the time, and 35 percent of the people did not work at all"! (Lee, 1969, p. 67). For each adult worker, this comes to about two and one-half days labor per week. ("In other words, each productive individual supported herself or himself and dependents and still had 3-1/2 to 5-1/2 days available for other activities.") A "day's work" was about six hours; hence the Dobe work week is approximately 15 hours, or an average of 2 hours 9 minutes per day. Even lower than the Amhem Land norms, this 'figure however excludes cooking and the preparation of implements. All things considered, Bushmen subsistence labors are probably very close to those of native Australians. I 5. This appreciation of local resources is all the more remarkable considering that Lee's ethnographic work was done in the second and third years of "one of the most severe droughts in South Africa's history" (1968, p. 39; 1969, p. 73 n.).

Table 1.4. Summary of Dobe Bushmen work diary (from Lee, 1969) Week

Mean Group Size*

Man-Days of Consumption f

Man-Days of Work

Days of Work/ Week/Adult

Index of Subsistence Efforti

1 (July 6-12)

25.6 (23-29)

179

37

2.3

.21

2 (July 13-19)

28.3 (23-37)

198

22

1.2

.11

3 (July 20-26)

34.3 (29-40)

240

42

1.9

.18

4 (July 27-Aug. 2)

35.6 (32-40)

249

77

3.2

.31

4-week totals

30.9

866

178

2.2

.21

Adjusted totals§

31.8

668

156

2.5

.23

-

*Group size shown in average and range. There is considerable short-term population fluctuation in Bushmen camps.

t Includes both children and adults, to give a combined total of days of provisioning required/week. +This index was constructed by Lee to illustrate the relation between consumption and the work required to produce it: S =W/C, where W =number of man-days of work, and C =man days of consumption. Inverted, the formula would tell how many people could be supported by a day's work in subsistence. §Week 2 was excluded from the fmal calculations because the investigator contnouted some food to the camp on two days.

The Original Affluent Society

23

Also like the Australians, the time Bushmen do not work in subsistence they pass in leisure or leisurely activity. One detects again that characteristic paleolithic rhythm of a day or two on, a day or two off-the latter passed desultorily in camp. Although food collecting is the primary productive activity, Lee writes, "the majority of the people's time (four to five days per week) is spent in other pursuits, such as resting in camp or visiting other camps" (1969, p. 74): A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year. The hunters tend to work more frequently than the women, but their schedule is uneven. It is not unusual for a man to hunt avidly for a week and then do no hunting at all for two or three weeks. Since hunting is an unpredictable business and subject to magical control, hunters sometimes experience a run of bad luck and stop hunting for a month or longer. During these periods, visiting, entertaining, and especially dancing are the primary activities of men (1968, p. 37).

The daily per-capita subsistence yield for the Dobe Bushmen was 2,140 calories. However, taking into account body weight, normal activities, and the age-sex composition of the Dobe population, Lee estimates the people require only 1,975 calories per capita. Some of the surplus food probably went to the dogs, who ate what the people left over. "The conclusion can be drawn that the Bushmen do not lead a substandard existence on the edge of starvation as has been commonly supposed" (1969, p. 73). Taken in isolation, the Arnhem Land and Bushmen reports mount a disconcerting if not decisive attack on the entrenched theoretical position. Artificial in construction, the former study in particular is reasonably considered equivocal. But the testimony of the Arnhem Land expedition is echoed at many points by observations made elsewhere in Australia, as well as elsewhere in the hunting-gathering world. Much of the Australian evidence goes back to the nineteenth century, some of it to quite acute observers careful to make exception of the aboriginal come into relation with Europeans, for "his food supply is restricted, and ... he is in many cases warned off from the

24

Stone Age Economics

waterholes which are the centers of his best hunting grounds" (Spencer and Gillen, 1899, p. 50). The case is altogether clear for the well-watered areas of southeastern Australia. There the Aboriginals were favored with a supply of fish so abundant and easily procured that one squatter on the Victorian scene of the 1840s had to wonder "how that sage people managed to pass their time before my party came and taught them to smoke" (Curr, 1965, p. 109). Smoking at least solved the economic problemnothing to do: "That accomplishment fairly acquired ... matters went on flowingly, their leisure hours being divided between putting the pipe to its legitimate purpose and begging my tobacco." Somewhat more seriously, the old squatter did attempt an estimate of the amount of time spent in hunting and gathering by the people of the then Port Phillip's District. The women were away from the camp on gathering expeditions about six hours a day, "half of that time being loitered away in the shade or by the fire"; the men left for the hunt shortly after the women quit camp and returned around the same time (p. 118). Curr found the food thus acquired of "indifferent quality" although "readily procured," the six hours a day "abundantly sufficing" for that purpose; indeed the country "could have supported twice the number of Blacks we found in it" (p. 120). Very similar comments were made by another old-timer, Clement Hodgkinson, writing of an analogous environment in northeastern New South Wales. A few minutes fishing would provide enough to feed "the whole tribe" (Hodgkinson, 1845, p. 223; cf. Hiatt, 1965, pp. 103-104). "Indeed, throughout all the country along the eastern coast, the blacks have never suffered so much from scarcity of food as many commiserating writers have supposed" (Hodgkinson, 1845, p. 227). But the people who occupied these more fertile sections of Australia, notably in the southeast, have not been incorporated in today's stereotype of an Aborigine. They were wiped out early .If• The European's relation to such "Blackfellows" was one of conflict over the continent's riches; little time or inclination was spared from the 16.As were the Tasmanians, of whom Bon wick wrote: "The Aborigines were never in want of food; though Mrs. Somerville has ventured to say of them in her 'Physical Geography' that they were 'truly miserable in a country where the means of existence were so scanty.' Dr. Jeannent, once Protector, writes: 'They must have been superabundantly supplied, and have required little exertion or industry to support themselves.' "(Bonwlck, 1870, p. 14).

The Original Affluent Society

25

process of destruction for the luxury of contemplation. In the event, ethnographic consciousness would only inherit the slim pickings: mainly interior groups, mainly desert people, mainly the Arunta. Not that the Arunta are all that bad off-ordinarily, "his life is by no means a miserable or a very hard one" (Spencer and Gillen, 1899, p. 7).17 But the Central tribes should not be considered, in point of numbers or ecological adaptation, typical of native Australians (cf. Meggitt, 1964). The following tableau of the indigenous economy provided by John Edward Eyre, who had traversed the south coast and penetrated the Flinders range as well as sojourned in the richer Murray district, has the right to be acknowledged at least as representative: Throughout the greater portion of New Holland, where there do not happen to be European settlers, and invariably when fresh water can be permanently procured upon the surface, the native experiences no difficulty whatever in procuring food in abundance all the year round. It is true that the character of his diet varies with the changing seasons, and the formation of the country he inhabits; but it rarely happens that any season of the year, or any description of country does not yield him both animal and vegetable food .... Of these [chief] articles [of food], many are not only procurable in abundance, but in such vast quantities at the proper seasons, as to afford for a considerable length of time an ample means of subsistence to many hundreds of natives congregated at one place .... On many parts of the coast, and in the larger inland rivers, fish are obtained of a very fine description, and in great abundance. At Lake Victoria ... I have seen six hundred natives encamped together, all of whom were living at the time upon fish procured from the lake, with the addition, perhaps, of the leaves of the mesembryanthemum. When I went amongst them I never perceived any scarcity in their camps .... At Moorunde, when the Murray annually inundates the flats, fresh-water cray-fish make their way to the surface of the ground ... in such vast numbers that I have seen four hundred natives live upon them for weeks together, whilst the numbers spoiled or thrown away would have sustained four hundred more .... An unlimited supply of fish is also procurable at the Murray about the beginning of December. . . . The immber [of fish] procured ... in a few hours is incredible.... Another very favourite article of food, and equally abundant at a particular season of the year, in the eastern portion of the continent, is a species of 17. This by way of contrast to other tribes deeper in the Central Australian Desert, and specifically under "ordinary circumstances," not the times of long-continued dmught when "he has to suffer privation" (Spencer and Gillen, 1899, p. 1).

26

Stone Age Economics

moth which the natives procure from the cavities and hollows of the mountains in certain localities .... The tops, leaves, and stalks of a kind of cress, gathered at the proper season of the year ... furnish a favourite, and inexhaustible supply of food for an unlimited number of natives .... There are many other articles of food among the natives, equally abundant and valuable as those I have enumerated (Eyre, 1845, vol. 2, pp. 250-254).

Both Eyre and Sir George Grey, whose sanguine view of the indigenous economy we have already noted ("I have always found the greatest abundance in their huts") left specific assessments, in hours per day, of the Australians' subsistence labors. (This in Grey's case would include inhabitants of quite undesirable parts of western Australia.) The testimony of these gentlemen and explorers accords very closely with the Arnhem Land averages obtained by McCarthy andMcArthur. "In all ordinary seasons," wrote Grey, (that is, when the people are not confined to their huts by bad weather) "they can obtain, in two or three hours a sufficient supply of food for the day, but their usual custom is to roam indolently from spot to spot, lazily collecting it as they wander along" (1841, vol. 2, p. 263; emphasis mine). Similarly, Eyre states: "In almost every part of the continent which I have visited, where the presence of Europeans, or their stock, has not limited, or destroyed their original means of subsistence, I have found that the natives could usually, in three or four hours, procure as much food as would last for the day, and that without fatigue or labour" (1845, pp. 254-255; emphasis mine). The same discontinuity of subsistence of labor reported by McArthur and McCarthy, the pattern of alternating search and sleep, is repeated, furthermore, in early and late observations from all over the continent (Eyre, 1845, val. 2, pp. 253-254; Bulmer, in Smyth, 1878, vol. 1, p. 142; Mathew, 1910, p. 84; Spencer and Gillen, 1899, p. 32; Hiatt, 1965, pp. 103-104). Basedow took it as the general custom of the Aboriginal: "When his affairs are working harmoniously, game secured, and water available, the aboriginal makes his life as easy as possible; and he might to the outsider even appear lazy" (1925, p. 116).18 Meanwhile, back in Africa the Hadza have been long enjoying a 18. Basedow goes on to excuse the people's idleness on the grounds of overeating, then to excuse the overeating on the grounds of the periods of hunger natives suffer, which he further explains by the droughts Australia is heir to, the effects of which have been exacerbated by the white man's exploitation of the country.

The Original Affluent Society

27

comparable ease, with a burden of subsistence occupations no more strenuous in hours per day than the Bushmen or the Australian Aboriginals (Woodburn, 1968). Living in an area of "exceptional abundance" of animals and regular supplies of vegetables (the vicinity of Lake Eyasi), Hadza men seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game. During the long dry season especially, they pass the greater part of days on end in gambling, perhaps only to lose the metal-tipped arrows they need for big game hunting at other times. In any case, many men are "quite unprepared or unable to hunt big game even when they possess the necessary arrows." Only a small minority, Woodburn writes, are active hunters of large animals, and if women are generally more assiduous at their vegetable collecting, still it is at a leisurely pace and without prolonged labor (cf. p. 51; Woodburn, 1966). Despite this nonchalance, and an only limited economic cooperation, Hadza "nonetheless obtain sufficient food without undue effort." Woodburn offers this "very rough approximation" of subsistence-labor requirements: "Over the year as a whole probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent obtaining food" (Woodburn, 1968, p. 54). Interesting that the Hadza, tutored by life and not by anthropology, reject the neolithic revolution in order to keep their leisure. Although surrounded by cultivators, they have until recently refused to take up agriculture themselves, "mainly on the grounds that this would involve too much hard work." 19 In this they are like the Bushmen, who respond to the neolithic question with another: "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongomongo nuts in the world?" (Lee, 1968, p. 33). Woodburn moreover did fonn the impression, although as yet unsubstantiated, that Hadza actually expend less energy, and probably less time, in obtaining subsistence than do neighboring cultivators of East Africa (1968, p. 54).20 To change continents but not contents, the fitful economic 19. This phrase appears in a paper by Woodburn distributed to the Wenner-Gren symposium on "Man the Hunter," although it is only elliptically repeated in the published account (1968, p. 55). I hope I do not commit an indiscretion or an inaccuracy citing it here. 20. "Agriculture is in fact the first example of servile labor in the history of man. According to biblical tradition, the first criminal, Cain, is a fanner" (Lafargue, l9ll[l883], p. ll n.). It is notable too that the agricultural neighbours of both Bushmen and Hadza are quick to resort to the more dependable hunting-gathering life come drought and threat

28

Stone Age Economics

commitment of the South American hunter, too, could seem to the European outsider an incurable "natural disposition": ... the Yamana are not capable of continuous, daily hard labor, much to the chagrin of European farmers and employers for whom they often work. Their work is more a matter of fits and starts, and in these occasional efforts they can develop considerable energy for a certain time. After that, however, they show a desire for an incalculably long rest period during which they lie about doing nothing, without showing great fatigue .... It is obvious that repeated irregularities of this kind make the European employer despair, but the Indian cannot help it. It is his natural disposition (Gusinde, 1961, p. 27).l1

The hunter's attitude towards farming introduces us, lastly, to a few particulars of the way they relate to the food quest. Once again we venture here into the internal realm of the economy, a realm sometimes subjective and always difficult to understand; where, moreover, hunters seem deliberately inclined to overtax our comprehension by customs so odd as to invite the'extreme interpretation that either these people are fools or they really have nothing to worry about. The former would be a true logical deduction from the hunter's nonchalance, on the premise that his economic condition is truly exigent. On the other hand, if a livelihood is usually easily procured, if one can usually expect to succeed, then the people's seeming imprudence can no longer appear as such. Speaking to unique developments of the market economy, to its institutionalization of scarcity, Karl Polanyi said that our "animal dependence upon food has been bared and the naked fear of starvation permitted to run loose. Our humiliating enslavement to the material, which all human culture is designed to mitigate, was deliberately made more rigorous" (1947, p. 115). But of famine (Woodburn, 1958, p. 54; Lee, 1968, pp. 39-40). 21. This common distaste for prolonged labor manifested by recently primitive peoples under European employ, a distaste not restricted to eK-hunters, might have alerted anthropology to the fact that the traditional economy had known only modest objectives, so within reach as to allow an extraordinary disengagement, considerable "relief from the mere problem of getting a living." The hunting economy may also be commonly underrated for its presumed inability to support specialist production. Cf. Sharp, 1934-35, p. 37; Radcliffe-Brown, 1948, p. 43; Spencer, 1959, pp. 155, 196, 251; Lothrop, 1928, p. 71; Steward, 1938, p. 44. If there is not specialization, at any rate it is clearly for lack of a "market," not for lack of time.

The Original Affluent Society

29

our problems are not theirs, the hunters and gatherers. Rather, a pristine affluence colors their economic arrangements, a trust in the abundance of nature's resources rather than despair at the inadequacy of human means. My point is that otherwise curious heathen devices become understandable by the people's confidence, a confidence which is the reasonable human attribute of a generally successful economy.u Consider the hunter's chronic movements from camp to camp. This nomadism, often taken by us as a sign of a certain harassment, is undertaken by them with a certain abandon. The Aboriginals of Victoria, Smyth recounts, are as a rule "lazy travellers. They have no motive to induce them to hasten their movements. It is generally late in the morning before they start on their journey, and there are many interruptions by the way" (1878, vol. 1, p. 125; emphasis mine). The good Pere Biard in his Relation of 1616, after a glowing description of the foods available in their season to the Micmac ("Never had Solomon his mansion better regulated and provided with food ") goes on in the same tone: In order to thoroughly enjoy this, their lot, our foresters start off to their different places with as much pleasure as if they were going on a stroll or an excursion; they do this easily through the skillful use and great convenience of canoes ... so rapidly sculled that, without any effort, in good weather you can make thirty or forty leagues a day; nevertheless we scarcely see these Savages posting along at this rate, for their days are all nothing but pastime. They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry ... (Biard, 1897, pp. 8~85). 22. At the same time that the bourgeois ideology of scarcity was let loose, with the inevitable effect of downgrading an earlier culture, it searched and found in nature the ideal model to follow if man (or at least the workingman) was ever to better his unhappy lot: the ant, the industrious ant. In this the ideology may have been as mistaken as in its view of hunters. The following appeared in the Ann Arbor News, January 27, 1971, under the head, "Two Scientists Claim Ants a little Lazy": Palm Springs, Calif. (AP)-"Ants aren't all they are reported [reputed?] to be," say Drs. George and Jeanette Wheeler. The husband-wife researchers have devoted years to studying the creatures, heroes of fables on industriousness. "Whenever we view an anthill we get the impression of a tremendous amount of activity, but that is merely because there are so many ants and they all look alike," the Wheelers concluded. "The individual ants spend a great deal of time just loafing. And, worse than that, the worker ants, who are all females, spend a lot of time primping."

30

Stone Age Economics

Certainly, hunters quit camp because food resources have given out in the vicinity. But to see in this nomadism merely a flight from starvation only perceives the half of it; one ignores the possibility that the people's expectations of greener pastures elsewhere are not usually disappointed. Consequently their wanderings, rather than anxious, take on all the qualities of a picnic outing on the Thames. A more serious issue is presented by the frequent and exasperated observation of a certain "lack of foresight" among hunters and gatherers. Oriented forever in the present, without "the slightest thought of, or care for, what the morrow may bring" (Spencer and Gillen, 1899, p. 53), the hunter seems unwilling to husband supplies, incapable of a planned response to the doom surely awaiting him. He adopts. instead a studied unconcern, which expresses itself in two complementary economic inclinations. The first, prodigality: the propensity to eat right through all the food in the camp, even during objectively difficult times, "as if," LeJeune said of the Montagnais, "the game they were to hunt was shut up in a stable." Basedow wrote of native Australians, their motto "might be interpreted in words to the effect that while there is plenty for today never care about tomorrow. On this account an Aboriginal is inclined to make one feast of his supplies, in preference to a modest meal now and another by and by" (1925, p. 116). LeJeune even saw his Montagnais carry such extravagance to the edge of disaster: In the famine through which we passed, if my host took two, three, or four Beavers, immediately, whether it was day or night, they had a feast for all neighboring Savages. And if those people had captured something, they had one also at the same time; so that, on emerging from one feast, you went to another, and sometimes even to a third and a fourth. I told them that they did not manage well, and that it would be better to reserve these feasts for future days, and in doing this they would not be so pressed with hunger. They laughed at me. "Tomorrow" (they said) "we shall make another feast with what we shall capture." Yes, but more often they capture only cold and wind (LeJeune, 1887, pp. 281-283).

Sympathetic writers have tried to rationalize the apparent impracticality. Perhaps the people have been carried beyond reason by hunger: they are apt to gorge themselves on a kill because they have gone so long without meat-and for all they know they are likely to soon do so again. Or perhaps in making one feast of his supplies a man is

The Original Affluent Society

31

responding to binding social obligations, to important imperatives of sharing. LeJeune's experience would confirm either view, but it also suggests a third. Or rather, the Montagnais have their own explanation. They are not worried by what the morrow may bring because as far as they are concerned it will bring more of the same: "another feast." Whatever the value of other interpretations, such self-confidence must be brought to bear on the supposed prodigality of hunters. More, it must have some objective basis, for if hunters and gatherers really favored gluttony over economic good sense, they would never have lived to become the prophets of this new religion. A second and complementary inclination is merely prodigality's negative side: the failure to put by food surpluses, to develop food storage. For many hunters and gatherers, it appears, food storage cannot be proved technically impossible, nor is it certain that the people are unaware of the possibility (cf. Woodburn, 1968, p. 53). One must investigate instead what in the situation precludes the attempt. Gusinde asked this question, and for the Yahgan found the answer in the selfsame justifiable optimism. Storage would be "superfluous," because throughout the entire year and with almost limitless generosity the sea puts all kinds of animals at the disposal of the man who hunts and the woman who gathers. Storm or accident will deprive a family of these things for no more than a few days. Generally no one need reckon with the danger of hunger, and everyone almost anywhere finds an abundance of what he needs. Why then should anyone worry about food for the future! . . . Basically our Fuegians know that they need not fear for the future, hence they do not pile up supplies. Year in and year out they can look forward to the next day, free of care.... (Gusinde, 1961, pp. 336, 339).

Gusinde's explanation is probably good as far as it goes, but probably incomplete. A more complex and subtle economic calculus seems in play-realized however by a social arithmetic exceedingly simple. The advantages of food storage should be considered against the diminishing returns to collection within the compass of a confined locale. An uncontrollable tendency to lower the local carrying capacity is for hunters au fond des choses: a basic condition of their production and main cause of their movement. The potential drawback of storage is exactly that it engages the contradiction between wealth and mobility. It would anchor the camp to an area soon depleted of

32

Stone Age Economics

natural food supplies. Thus immobilized by their accumulated stocks, the people may suffer by comparison with a little hunting and gathering elsewhere, where nature has, so to speak, done considerable storage of her own-of foods possibly more desirable in diversity as well as amount than men can put by. But this fine calculation-in any event probably symbolically impossible (cf. Codere,l968)-would be worked out in a much simpler binary opposition, set in social terms such as "love" and "hate." For as Richard Lee observes (1969, p. 75), the technically neutral activity of food accumulation or storage is morally something else again, "hoarding." The efficient hunter who would accumulate supplies succeeds at the cost of his own esteem, or else he gives them away at the cost of his (superfluous) effort. As itworks out, an attempt to stock up food may only reduce the overall output of a hunting band, for the have-nots will content themselves with staying in camp and living off the wherewithal amassed by the more prudent. Food storage, then, may be technically feasible, yet economically undesirable, and socially unachievable. If food storage remains limited among hunters, their economic confidence, born of the ordinary times when all the people's wants are easily satisfied, becomes a permanent condition, carrying them laughing through periods that would try even a Jesuit's soul and worry him so that-as the Indians warn-he could become sick: I saw them, in their hardships and in their labors, suffer with cheerfulness. . . . I found myself, with them, threatened with great suffering; they said to me, "We shall be sometimes two days, sometimes three, without eating, for lack of food; take courage, Chihine. let thy soul be strong to endure suffering and hardship; keep thyself from being sad, otherwise thou wilt be sick; see how we do not cease to laugh, although we have little to eat" (LeJeune, 1897, p. 283; cf. Needham, 1954, p. 230).

Rethinking Hunters and Gatherers Constantly under pressure of want, and yet, by travelling, easily able to supply their wants, their lives lack neither excitement or pleasure (Smyth, 1878, vol. 1, p. 123).

Clearly, the hunting-gathering economy has to be revaluated, both as to its true accomplishments and its true limitations. The procedural fault of the received wisdom was to read from the material circum-

The Original Affluent Society

33

stances to the economic structure, deducing the absolute difficulty of such a life from its absolute poverty. But always the cultural design improvises dialectics on its relationship to nature. Without escaping the ecological constraints, culture would negate them, so that at once the system shows the impress of natural conditions and the originality of a social response-in their poverty, abundance. What are the real handicaps of the hunting-gathering praxis? Not "low productivity of labor," if existing examples mean anything. But the economy is seriously afflicted by the imminence of diminishing returns. Beginning in subsistence and spreading from there to every sector, an initial success seems only to develop the probability that further efforts will yield smaller benefits. This describes the typical curve of food-getting within a particular locale. A modest number of people usually sooner than later reduce the food resources within convenient range of camp. Thereafter, they may stay on only by absorbing an increase in real costs or a decline in real returns: rise in costs if the people choose to search farther and farther afield, decline in returns if they are satisfied to live on the shorter supplies or inferior foods in easier reach. The solution, of course, is to go somewhere else. Thus the first and decisive contingency of hunting-gathering: it requires movement to maintain production on advantageous terms. But this movement, more or less frequent in different circumstances, more or less distant, merely transposes to other spheres of production the same diminishing returns of which it is born. The manufacture of tools, clothing, utensils, or ornaments, however easily done, becomes senseless when these begin to be more of a burden than a comfort. Utility falls quickly at the margin of portability. The construction of substantial houses likewise becomes absurd if they must soon be abandoned. Hence the hunter's very ascetic conceptions of material welfare: an interest only in minimal equipment, if that; a valuation of smaller things over bigger; a disinterest in acquiring two or more of most goods; and the like. Ecological pressure assumes a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered. If the gross product is trimmed down in comparison with other economies, it is not the hunter's productivity that is at fault, but his mobility. Almost the same thing can be said of the demographic constraints of hunting-gathering. The same policy of debarassment is in play on

34

Stone Age Economics

the level of people, describable in similar terms and ascribable to similar causes. The terms are, cold-bloodedly: diminishing returns at the margin of portability, minimum necessary equipment, elimination of duplicates, and so forth-that is to say, infanticide, senilicide, sexual continence for the duration of the nursing period, etc., practices for which many food-collecting peoples are well known. The presumption that such devices are due to an inability to support more people is probably true-if "support" is understood in the sense of carrying them rather than feeding them. The people eliminated, as hunters sometimes sadly tell, are precisely those who cannot effectively transport themselves, who would hinder the movement of family and camp. Hunters may be obliged to handle people and goods in parallel ways, the draconic population policy an expression of the same ecology as the ascetic economy. More, these tactics of demographic restraint again form part of a larger policy for counteracting diminishing returns in subsistence. A local group becomes vulnerable to diminishing returns-sq to a greater velocity of movement, or else to fission-in proportion to its size (other things equal). Insofar as the people would keep the advantage in local production, and maintain a certain physical and social stability, their Malthusian practices are just cruelly consistent. Modern hunters and gatherers, working their notably inferior environments, pass most of the year in very small groups widely spaced out. But rather than the sign of underproduction, the wages of poverty, this demographic pattern is better understood as the cost of living well. Hunting and gathering has all the strengths of its weaknesses: Periodic movement and restraint in wealth and population are at once imperatives of the economic practice and creative adaptations, the kinds of necessities of which virtues are made. Precisely in such a framework, affluence becomes possible. Mobility and moderation put hunters' ends within range of their technical means. An undeveloped mode of production is thus rendered highly effective. The hunter's life is not as difficult as it looks from the outside. In some ways the economy reflects dire ecology, but it is also a complete inversion. Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present~ specifically on those in marginal environments-suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial

The Original Affluent Society

35

workers (unionized), who would surely settle for a 21-35 llour week. An interesting comparison is also posed by recent studies of labor costs among agriculturalists of neolithic type. For example, the average adult Hanunoo, man or woman, spends 1,200 hours per year in swidden cultivation (Conklin, 1957, p. 151); which is to say, a mean of three hours twenty minutes per day. Yet this figure does not include food gathering, animal raising, cooking and other direct subsistence efforts of these Philippine tribesmen. Comparable data are beginning to appear in reports on other primitive agriculturalists from many parts of the world. The conclusion is put conservatively when put negatively: hunters and gatherers need not work longer getting food than do primitive cultivators. Extrapolating from ethnography to prehistory, one may say as much for the neolithic as John Stuart Mill said of all labor-saving devices, that never was one invented that saved anyone a minute's labor. The neolithic saw no particular improvement over the paleolithic in the amount of time required per capita for the production of subsistence; probably, with the advent of agriculture, people had to work harder. There is nothing either to the convention that hunters and gatherers can enjoy little leisure from tasks of sheer survival. By this, the evolutionary inadequacies of the paleolithic are customarily explained, while for the provision of leisure the neolithic is roundly congratulated. But the traditional formulas might be truer if reversed: the amount of work (per capita) increases with the evolution of culture, and the amount of leisure decreases. Hunters' subsistence labors are characteristically intermittent, a day on and a day off, and modern hunters at least tend to employ their time off in such activities as daytime sleep. In the tropical habitats occupied by many of these existing hunters, plant collecting is more reliable than hunting itself. Therefore, the women, who do the collecting, work rather more regularly than the men, and provide the greater part of the food supply. Man's work is often done. On the other hand, it is likely to be highly erratic, unpredictably required; if men lack leisure, it is then in the Enlightenment sense rather than the literal. When Condorcet attributed the hunter's unprogressive condition to want of "the leisure in which he can indulge in thought and enrich his understanding with new combinations of ideas," he also recognized that the economy was a "necessary cycle of extreme activity and total idleness." Apparently what the

36

Stone Age Economics

hunter needed was the assured leisure of an aristocratic philosophe. Hunters and gatherers maintain a sanguine view of their economic state despite the hardships they sometimes know. It may be that they sometimes know hardships because of the sanguine views they maintain of their economic state. Perhaps their confidence only encourages prodigality to the extent the camp falls casualty to the first untoward circumstance. In alleging this is an affluent economy, therefore, I do not deny that certain hunters have moments of difficulty. Some do find it "almost inconceivable" for a man to die of hunger, or even to fail to satisfy his hunger for more than a day or two (Woodburn, 1968, p. 52). But others, especially certain very peripheral hunters spread out in small groups across an environment of extremes, are exposed periodically to the kind of inclemency that interdicts travel or access to game. They suffer-although perhaps only fractionally, the shortage affecting particular immobilized families rather than the society as a whole (cf. Gusinde, 1961, pp. 306-307). Still, granting this vulnerability, and allowing the most poorly situated modern hunters into comparison, it would be difficult to prove that privation is distinctly characteristic of the hunter-gatherers. Food shortage is not the indicative property of this mode of production as opposed to others; it does not mark off hunters and gatherers as a class or a general evolutionary stage. Lowie asks: But what of the herders on a simple plane whose maintenance is periodically jeopardized by plagues-who, like some Lapp bands of the nineteenth century were obliged to fall back on fishing? What of the primitive peasants. who clear and till without compensation of the soil, exhaust one plot and pass on to the next, and are threatened with famine at every drought? Are they any more in control of misfortune caused by natural conditions than the hunter-gatherer? (1938, p. 286)

Above all, what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by

The Original Affluent Society

37

force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The evolution of economy has known, then, two contradictory movements: enriching but at the same time impoverishing, appropriating in relation to nature but expropriating in relation to man. The progressive aspect is, of course, technological. It has been celebrated in many ways: as an increase in the amount of need-serving goods and services, an increase in the amount of energy harnessed to the service of culture, an increase in productivity, an increase in division of labor, and increased freedom from environmental control. Taken in a certain sense, the last is especially useful for understanding the earliest stages of technical advance. Agriculture not only raised society above the distribution of natural food resources, it allowed neolithic communities to maintain high degrees of social order where the requirements of human existence were absent from the natural order. Enough food could be harvested in some seasons to sustain the people while no food would grow at all; the consequent stability of social life was critical for its material enlargement. Culture went on then from triumph to triumph, in a kind of progressive contravention of the biological law of the minimum, until it proved it could support human life in outer space-where even gravity and oxygen were naturally lacking. Other men were dying of hunger in the market places of Asia. It has been an evolution of structures as well as technologies, and in that respect like the mythical road where for every step the traveller advances his destination recedes by two. The structures have been political as well as economic, of power as well as property. They developed first within societies, increasingly now between societies. No doubt these structures have been functional, necessary organizations of the technical development, but within the communities they have thus helped to enrich they would discriminate in the distribution of wealth and differentiate in the style of life. The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation-that can render agrarian

38

Stone Age Economics

peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. All the preceding discussion takes the liberty of reading modern hunters historically, as an evolutionary base line. This liberty should not be lightly granted. Are marginal hunters such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari any more representative of the paleolithic condition than the Indians of California or the Northwest Coast? Perhaps not. Perhaps also Bushmen of the Kalahari are not even representative of marginal hunters. The great majority of surviving hunter-gatherers lead a life curiously decapitated and extremely lazy by comparison with the other few. The other few are very different. The Murngin, for example: "The first impression that any stranger must receive in a fully functioning group in Eastern Arnhem Land is of industry... And he must be impressed with the fact that with the exception of very young children ... there is no idleness" (Thomson, 1949a, pp. 33-34). There is nothing to indicate that the problems of livelihood are more difficult for these people than for other hunters (cf. Thomson, 1949b). The incentives of th~ir unusual industry lie elsewhere: in "an elaborate and exacting ceremonial life," specifically in an elaborate ceremonial exchange cycle that bestows prestige on craftsmanship and trade (Thomson, 1949a, pp. 26, 28, 34 f, 87 passim). Most other hunters have no such concerns. Their existence is comparatively colorless, fixed singularly on eating with gusto and digesting at leisure. The cultural orientation is not Dionysian or Apollonian,but"gastric," as Julian Steward .said of the Shoshoni. Then again it may be Dionysian, that is, Bacchanalian: "Eating among the Savages is like drinking among the drunkards of Europe. Those dry and ever-thirsty souls would willingly end their lives in a tub of malmsey, and the Savages in a pot full of meat; those over there talk only of drinking, and these here only of eating" (LeJeune, 1897, p. 249). It is as if the superstructures of these societies had been eroded, leaving only the bare subsistence rock, and since production itself is readily accomplished, the people have plenty of time to perch there and talk about it. I must raise the possibility that the ethnography of hunters and gatherers is largely a record of incomplete cultures. Fragile cycles of ritual and exchange may have disappeared without trace, lost in the earliest stages of colonialism, when the intergroup relations

The Original Affluent Society

39

they mediated were attacked and confounded. If so, the "original" affluent society will have to be rethought again for its originality, and the evolutionary schemes once more revised. Still this much history can always be rescued from existing hunters: the "economic problem" is easily solvable by paleolithic techniques. But then, it was not until culture neared the height of its material achievements that it erected a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs.

2 The Domestic Mode of Production: The Structure of Underproduction This chapter is constructed on an observation in apparent contradiction to the pristine "affluence" I have just taken so much trouble to defend: the primitive economies are underproductive. The main run of them, agricultural as well as preagricultural, seem not to realize their own economic capacities. Labor power is underused, technological means are not fully engaged, natural resources are left untapped. This is not the simple point that the output of primitive societies is low: it is the complex problem that production is low relative to existing possibilities. So understood, "underproduction" is not necessarily inconsistent with a pristine "affluence." All the people's material wants might still be easily satisfied even though the economy is running below capacity. Indeed, the former is rather a condition of the latter: given the modest ideas of "satisfaction" locally prevailing, labor and resources need not be exploited to the full. In any event, there are indications of underproduction from many parts of the primitive world, and the first task of the essay is to give some sense of the evidence. Beyond any initial attempt at explanation, the discovery of this tendency-more precisely of several related tendencies of the primitive economic performance-seems of greater importance. I raise the possibility that underproduction is in the nature of the economies at issue; that is, economies organized by domestic groups and kinship relations. 41

42

Stone Age Economics Dimensions of Underproduction

UNDERUSE OF RESOURCES

The major evidence for underexploitation of productive resources comes from agricultural societies, especially those practicing slashand-burn cultivation. Probably this is a function of research procedures rather than a dubious special privilege of the subsistence type. Similar observations have been made of hunting and of herding economies, but anecdotally for the most part, and without benefit of a practicable measure. Slash-and-burn agriculture, on the other hand, uniquely lends itself to quantified assessments of economic capacity. And in almost all the cases so far investigated, still not numerous but from many different parts of the globe, especially where the people have not been confined to "native reserves," the actual production is substantially less than the possible. Slash-and-burn, an agriculture of neolithic origin, is widely practiced today in tropical fores~. It is a technique for opening up and bringing under cultivation a patch of forest land. The standing growth is first cleared by axe or machete and, after a period of drying out, the accumulated debris is burned off-thus the inelegant name, slashand-burn. A cleared plot is cultivated for one or two seasons, rarely more, then abandoned for years, usually with a view toward restoration of fertility through reversion to forest. The area may then be opened again for another cycle of cultivation and fallow. Typically the period of fallow is several times the period of use; hence, the community of cultivators, if it is to remain stable, must always hold in reserve several times the area it has under production at any given moment. Measures of productive capacity must take this requirement into consideration; also the period of garden use, the period of fallow, the amount of land required per capita for subsistence, the amount of arable land within range of the community, and the like. So long as these measures are careful to respect the normal and customary practices of the people concerned, the final estimate of capacity will not be utopian-that is, what might be done with a free choice of techniques-but only what could be done by the agricultural regime as it stands. Nevertheless, there are inescapable uncertainties. Any "productive capacity" so estimated is partial and derivative: partial, because the

The Domestic Mode of Production

I

43

investigation is restricted in advance to the cultivation of food, other dimensions of production left aside; derivative, because "capacity" takes the form of a population maximum. What research yields is the optimum number of people that can be supported by the existing means of production. "Capacity" appears as a determinate population size or density, a critical mass that cannot be surpassed without some change in agricultural practice or conception of livelihood. Beyond that point is a dangerous ground of speculation which daring ecologists, identifying the optimum population as the "critical carrying capacity" or "critical population density," all the same do not hesitate to enter. "Critical carrying capacity" is the theoretical limit to which the population could be taken without degrading the land and compromising the agricultural future. But it is characteristically difficult to project from the existing "optimum" to the persisting "critical"; such questions of long-term adaptation are not decided by the shortterm data. We have to be content with a more limited, if possibly defective, understanding: what the agricultural system as constituted can do. W. Allan (1949, 1965) was the first to devise and apply a general index of population capacity for slash-and-burn agriculture. Several versions and variants of Allan's formula 1 have since appeared, notably those of Conklin (1959), Carneiro (1960), and a complicated refinement fashioned by Brown and Brookfield for the New Guinea Highlands (1963). These formulas have been applied to specific ethnographic sites and, with less precision, to broad cultural provinces dominated by slash-and-burn production. Outside of reservations, in traditional agricultural systems, the results, although highly variable, are highly consistent in one respect: the existing population is generally inferior to the calculable maximum, often remarkably so. 2 Table 2.1 summarizes a certain number of ethnographic studies of 1. Following the slight rephrasing by Brown and Brookfield (1963), Allan's formula is: "carrying capacity" = 100 CLIP where Pis the percentage of arable available to the community, Lis the mean acreage per capita under cultivation and C a factor of the number of garden units needed for a full cycle, calculated as fallow period + cultivation period/fallow period. The result of 100 CLIP is the amount ofland required to support one person in perpetuity. This is then converted into a density per square mile or square kilometer. 2. This conclusion is framed for the population, globally considered, practicing a determinate form of agriculture; it does not preclude that localized subgroups (families,

t

Table 2.1. Relation of actual to potential population, swidden cultivators Population (size or density)

Group

Location

Actual

Potential Maxirrzu...m

Actual as Percentage of Potential

Naregu Chimbu

New Guinea

288/m:~,

453/m2

64

Tsembaga* (Maring)

New Guinea

204 (local pop)

313-373

55-65

Yagaw Hanaoo

Philippines

30/km2 (arable)

48/km 2 (arable)

63

Lamett

Laos

2.9/km2

ll.7-14.4/km 2

20-25

Izikowitz 1951

Iban

Borneo

23/m 2 (Sut Valley) 14/m 2 (Baleh)

35-46m2

50-66 (s) 30-40

Freeman 1955

Source Brown and Brookfield 1963 Rappaport 1967

Conklin 1957

Population (size or density)

Group

Location

Actual

Potential Maximum

Actual as Percentage of Potential

145 (village)

2041

7

Source

Kuikuru

Brazil

Ndembu (Kanongesha Chiefdom)

N. Rhodesia

3.17/m2

17-38/m2

8-19

Turner 1957

W. Lala:l:

N. Rhodesia

< 3/m 2

4/m 2

< 75

Allan 1965: 114

< 4/m2

10+/m 2

4 axes] but if 3 spears < 2 axes, 6 spears :. 7-8 spears= 4 axes; or c. 2:1] Round { 1-3 spears III (X is visitor) +------

2 axes

2 axes

< 4 axes

1-3 axes

reciprocal visits beginning with X's visit and initial gift to Y. After the first round, the two axes given by Yare understood generous in return for the three spears brought by X At the end of the second round, in which Y first compounded X's indebtedness by two axes and was then himself indebted by X's gift of six spears, the implication is that nine spears exceed four axes in value. It follows at this juncture that seven to eight spears equals four axes, or taking into account the indivisibilities, a rate of 2 : 1 prevails. There is of course no necessity to continually escalate gifts. At the end of the second series, Y is down the equivalent of about one spear. Should X bring one to three spears the next time and Yreciprocate one to three (or better, two or three) axes, a fair average balance is maintained. Note also that the rate is something each party mechanically agrees upon, insofar as each understands the current balance of credit and indebtedness, and if any serious misunderstanding does arise the partnership breaks downwhich likewise stipulates the rate at which trade must proceed. Considering the comparisons (perhaps invidious) of trade returns likely to be made with fellows of one's own side, these understandings of equivalence stand a chance of becoming common understandings. Comparison of trade returns are the nearest thing to implicit internal competition I am able to construe. Presumably, information thus

Stone Age Economics

306

gained might be applied next time against one's trade partner of the other community. There seems to be very little evidence on this point, however, or on just how precise is the available information of compatriots' dealings-in some instances transactions with outside partners are conducted privately and rather furtively (Harding, 1967). The example before us is specifically a simple model case, supposing reciprocal visiting and a standard presentation procedure. It is conceivable that different trade arrangements have some other calculus of exchange value. If, for instance, X of the simple model was a trader-voyager, always on the visiting side, and if the same etiquette of generosity held, the actual ratio would probably favor X's spears more, insofar as Y would be repeatedly obliged to be magnaminous. Indeed, if X consistently presented three spears, and Y consistently returned two axes, the same ratio could be maintained for four rounds without X being down after his initial gift, even though a rate of approximately 2 : 1 is calculable midway through the second round (Table 6.3). A 3 : 2 customary rate could in that event develop. Either

.

Table 6.3. Rate determination: one-way visiting X gives

Y gives

X's Calculable Debt

3 spears

Round I

2 axes (-?spears]

( :. 3 spears< 2 axes)

3 spears

Round

[ :. 6 spears > 2 axes :. 4-5 spears= 2 axes)

II

2 axes [ :. 6 spears < 4 axes :. 2 spears= 1 axe) 3 spears

Round

III Round

IV

[-2 spears)

(

[+1 spear] 2 axes

[-3 spears)

2 axes

[ -4 spears)

3 spears

[ :. 3 spears = 2 axes?)

[0 spears]

Exchange Value and Primitive Trade

307

way there are obvious advantages to the voyaging group-though they must bear all the transport, so that the gains over the rate for reciprocal visiting will parallel "supply-cost" differences. This second example is only one of many possible permutations of exchange rate determination. Even in one-way voyaging, the etiquette of presentation and counterpresentation may be more complicated than that supposed (for example, Barton, 1910). I bring the example forward merely to suggest the possibility that different formalities of exchange generate different exchange rates. No matter how complex the strategy of reciprocity by which an equilibrium is finally determined, and however subtle our analysis, it remains to be known exactly what has been determined economically. How can it be that a rate fixed by reciprocal generosity expresses the current average supply and demand? Everything depends on the meaning and practice of that capital principle, "generosity." But the meaning is ethnographically uncertain, and therein lies the major weakness of our theory. Only these few facts, not celebrated either for their repetition in the documents, are known: that those who bring a certain good to the exchange are related to it primarily in terms of labor value, the real effort required to produce it, while those to whom the good is tendered appreciate it primarily as a use value. That much we know from incidents to the Huon Gulf and Siassi trade, wherein the labor of manufacture was exaggerated by the suppliers but the product thereof depreciated by the takers-both sides in hopes of influencing terms of trade in their own favor (see above). From this steadfast devotion to the main chance, one has to work back by a kind of inverted logic to the possible meaning of "generosity." Supposing the necessity of reciprocal good measure, it would follow that each party has to consider, in addition to the virtues of the goods he receives, the relative utility to the other party of the goods he gives, and in addition to the labor he has expended himself, the work also of the other. "Generosity" has to bring use value into relation with use value,· and labor with labor. If so, "generosity" will bring to bear on the rate of exchange some of the same forces, operating in the same direction, as affect price in the marketplace. In principle, goods of higher real cost will evoke higher returns. In principle too, if goods of greater utility oblige the recipient to greater generosity, it is as much as saying that price is

308

Stone Age Economics

disposed to increase with demand. 17 Thus compensating efforts to the producer and utilities to the receiver, the rates set by tactful diplomacy will express many of the elemental conditions that are resumed otherwise in the economist's supply curves and demand curves. Into both would enter, and to the same general effects, the real difficulties of production, natural scarcities, the social uses of goods, and the possibilities of substitution. In many respects the opposite of market competition, the etiquette of primitive trade may conduct by a different route to a similar result. But then, there is from the beginning a basic similarity: the two systems share the premise that the trader should be satisfied materially, the difference being that in the one this is left solely to his own inclination while in the other it becomes the responsibility of his partner. To be a diplomatically satisfactory "price" however, the price of peace, the customary exchange ratio of primitive trade should approximate the normal market price. As the mechanisms differ, this correspondence can only be approximate, but the tendency is one.

Stability and Fluctuation of Exchange Rates Provisionally at least, we come to the following conclusion: the material conditions expressed familiarly by the terms "supply" and "demand" are likewise subsumed in the understandings of good treatment built into the procedure of Melanesian trade. But then, how do exchange ratios remain immune to short-lived changes in supplyI demand? Certain reasons for this short-term stability have already been mentioned. First, the customary rates have moral force, understandable from their function as standards of fair conduct in an area where tenuous intergroup relations constantly menace the peace of trade. 17. Further, it appears the empirical case that a discrepancy in labor values can be sustained by an equivalence in utilities (cf. Godelier, 1969). "Need" is matched to "need," perhaps at the real expense of one party-although, as we have seen, the norm of equal work may still be maintained by ideological ruse and pretense. This kind of discrepancy would be most likely where the goods traded belong to different spheres of exchange within one or both trading communities, for example, manufactured goods for food, especially where the craft goods are used also in such as bridewealth payments. Then the high social utility of a small amount of one good (the manufactured good) is compensated by a large quantity of the item of lesser status. This may be an important secret in the "exploitation" of richer areas by poorer (e.g., Siassi).

Exchange Value and Primitive Trade

309

And although moral practice everywhere may be vulnerable to expediency, it is usually not so easy to change the rules. Secondly, in the event of an unbalance of quantities on hand relative to demand (at the prevailing rate of exchange), partnership trade opens more attractive alternatives to cutting the "asking price" or raising the offer: better to find new partners for trade at old rates; or else to embarrass an existing partner by a large overpayment, obliging him to extend himself and later on reciprocate, again thus defending the usual rate. The last is not an hypothetical tactic of my own devising. Consider this Busama technique for encouraging a supply of pigs: The difference between the native method of doing business and our own was made plain by an exchange which took place early in 1947. The Sa1amaua area had suffered more damage than the northern settlements, most of which still had their pigs. On the resumption of voyages after the Japanese defeat, a man from Bukawa' had the notion of bringing a young sow to a Busama kinsman named Boya. The animal was worth about £ 2, but hints indicated that pots would be more acceptable than money. A collection of ten was required for a reasonable equivalent, and as Boya had only five to spare he informed his relatives that anyone prepared to assist would in due course receive a piglet. This invitation was accepted, and twenty-two pots were contributed, making a total of twenty-seven. All were handed over to the visitor, rather to his surprise, as he confessed to me in private. Yet such generosity was not as absurd as it may appear: by giving so much Boya imposed an obligation on his guest to bring across another sow (Hogbin, 1951, pp. 84-85). The success of Boya's manoeuvre was made possible only by the social qualitites of the trade relation. Partnership is not merely the privilege but the duty of reciprocity. Specifically it comprehends the obligation to receive as well as to repay. Some people may end up with more of a certain good than they needed, expected or bargained for, but the point is they did not bargain for it. A trade friend is prevailed upon to accept things for which he has no use; thereupon, he will have to repay~for no good "economic" reason. Father Ross of Mt. Hagen seems not to have appreciated the spiritual ethic involved: The missionary told the author that natives who have traded with him, and who are in needy circumstances at the moment, will come to the mission station with items possessing no material value and which have no utility to the missionary. The natives seek to trade these items in exchange for

310

Stone Age Economics

things they need. Upon his refusal the natives point out to him that his conduct is not proper, for according to their view he is their friend and should accept a thing which he does not need so as to assist them when they need such help. They will say to him, "You buy our food, we sell you our pigs, our boys work for you. Therefore you should buy this thing which you claim you do not want, and it is not right for you to refuse to purchase it" (Gitlow, 1947, p. 68). 1H

Working the same principle, the people of the hinterland above Sio (northeast New Guinea) may overcome their coastal partners' reluctance to trade: The Sios also, of course, frequently accept goods which they do not need at the time. When I asked one Sio man why he had four bows (most men have more than one), he replied: "If a bush [trade-] friend comes with a bow, you have to help him" (Harding, 1967, pp. 109-110).

Finally, a striking example of the same, appended by Malinowski to his description of fish-yam exchange (wasi) between different Trobriand communities. To this day, Malinowski noted, inland yam growers continued to insist on their coastal partners' obligation to receive, thus periodically teasing from the latter a supply of fish, and at the usual terms, though the fishing people could occupy themselves much more profitably diving for pearls. Money thus remained the servant of custom, and partnership the master of indigenous exchange rates: Nowadays, when the fishermen can earn about ten or twenty times more by diving for pearls than by performing their share of the wasi, the exchange is as a rule a great burden on them. It is one of the most conspicuous examples of the tenacity of native custom that in spite of all the temptation 18. The misunderstanding is cultural and economic, obviously independent of race and religion: " ... Nuer do not regard purchase from an Arab merchant in the way in which we regard purchase from a shop. It is not to them an impersonal transaction, and they have no idea of price and currency in our sense. Their idea of purchase is that you give something to a merchant who is thereby put under an obligation to help you. At the same time you ask him for something you need from his shop and he ought to give it to you because, by taking your gift, he has entered into a reciprocal relationship with you. Hence kok has the sense of 'to buy' or 'to sell.' The two acts are an expression of a single relationship of reciprocity. As an Arab merchant regards the transaction rather differently misunderstandings arise. In the Nuer way of looking at the matter what is involved in' an exchange of this kind is a relation between persons rather than between things. It is the merchant who is 'bought' rather than the goods.... " (Evans-Pritchard, 1956, pp. 223-224).

Exchange Value and Primitive Trade

311

which pearling offers them, and in spite of the great pressure exerted upon them by white traders, the fishermen never try to evade a wasi, and when they have received the inaugurating gift, the first calm day is always given to fishing, and not to pearling (Malinowski, 1922, p. 188 n). So acting to maintain the stability of exchange values, the trade partnership merits a more general and respectful interpretation of its economic significance. The primitive trade partnership is a functional counterpart of the market's price mechanism. A current supplydemand imbalance is resolved by pressure on trade partners rather than exchange rates. Where in the market this equilibrium is effected by a change in price, here the social side of the transaction, the partnership, absorbs the economic pressure. The rate of exchange remains undisturbed-although the temporal rate of certain transactions may be retarded. The primitive analogue of the business price mechanism is not the customary exchange rate; it is the customary exchange relation. Short-term consistency of exchange values is thus accomplished. Yet the same deflection of the pressure from the rate of exchange to the relation of partnership makes the latter all the more vulnerable to a sustained discrepancy of supply-demand. Suppose a continuing and/or widening disparity between the traditional exchange rate and the amount of goods actually disposable-due, it may be, to some new facility in the acquisition of one of the goods at issue. Then partnership trade increases the material pressure in the course of repeatedly resolving it. Holding steady the terms of exchange, the tactic of overpayment proves equitable and endurable only if the supply-demand unbalance is reversible. Otherwise, an inherent tendency to accumulate volume makes it unsupportable. For by an attack on a partner's obligation to receive, granted his possible delay in response, exchange proceeds always at the quantity sought by the most importunate party. In this respect, the inducement to production and exchange exceeds even the dynamic of the competitive market. That is to say, at any permutation of supply moving above or below demand at a certain price, the volume of exchange implied by partnership trade is greater than the analogous market equilibrium. Perhaps the available quantity of pigs is momentarily less than the quantity demanded at a rate of one pig= five pots; tant pis for the pig raisers: they will have to deliver more at the same rate, to the point that all

312

Stone Age Economics

the pots are exhausted. In the open market, the total quantity transacted would be lower, and on terms more favorable to the trade in pigs. Plain to view that, if the disparity persists between the going rates and the goods on hand, partnership trade must discover its limits as an equilibrating mechanism, always making a supply available to the demand and always on the usual terms. Taken at the social level, the trade becomes irrational: one group enters into economic development by pre-emption of another group's labor. Nor could the harassed set of partners be expected to indefinitely countenance the imbalance, any more than a society that tolerated the procedure could be expected to continue indefinitely. On the individual level the irrationality most likely presents itself as a disutility to accumulation, more concrete than the unrequited cost of production. There must come a moment, after a man is in possession of five bows, or perhaps it is ten, or maybe twenty, when he begins to wonder about the advisability of collecting all the stuff his partner seems intent on unloading. What happens then, when people become unwilling or unable to meet their trade obligations? If we knew, it would unlock the last of the mysteries empirically posed by Melanesian trade: the observed tendency of exchange values to adjust over the long run, if not over the short, to changes in supply/demand. For the apparent solution is to evaluate the rates. But how? By a relocation of trade, a revision of partnerships. We know, on one hand, what happens when a trade partner is disinclined to reciprocate. The sanction everywhere is dissolution of the partnership. For a time· a man can stall, but if he delays too long, or fails in the end to make the adequate return, the trade relation is broken off. In such an event, moreover, the volume of exchange declines, and the pressure to trade thus mounts. On the other hand, we also know (or we suppose) that the process by which exchange value is determined in the first place, i.e. through reciprocal good measure, incorporates current average supply-demand conditions. The solution, thus, to a persistent disconfirmity between exchange values and supply/demand would be a social process by which old partnerships are terminated and new ones negotiated. Perhaps even the network of trade will have to be modified, geographically and ethnically. But in any case, a fresh start, going through with new partners the traditional tactful manoeu-

Exchange Value and Primitive Trade

313

vres of reciprocal overpayment, restores the correspondance between exchange value and supply/demand. This model, if hypothetical, corresponds to certain facts, such as the social organization of the deflation experienced in Melanesian trade networks during the postcontact period. The indigenous trade continued for some time without the benefit of businesslike competition. But the same Europeans who brought excessive quantities of axes, shells or pigs also happened to impose peace. In the colonial era the sphere of Melanesian safe-conduct expanded, the social horizons of tribal communities widened. A significant reshuffling and extension of trade contacts became possible. And a revaluation of trade rates as well: as, for example, in the coast-hinterland trade of Huon Gulf, on the whole more recently opened up, and apparently much more sensitive to supply/demand than the traditional maritime trade (Hogbin, 1951, p. 86; cf. Harding, 1967). Which leads to a final suggestion: depending on the social qualities of the trade relation, the rates of exchange in differently organized trade systems are probably differentially sensitive to changes in supply/demand. The precise nature of the partnership becomes significant: it may be more or less sociable, so admitting of longer or shorter delays in reciprocation-trade-kinship, for example, probably longer than trade-friendship. The prevailing relation has a coefficient of economic fragility, and the entire system accordingly a certain responsiveness to variations of supply/demand. The simple matter of customary privacy or publicity may be similarly consequential; perhaps it is feasible (for all one knows) to secretly come to new terms with old partners. And what freedom is given within the system to recruit new partners? Aside from the difficulties of breaking paths into villages or ethnic groups previously outside the system, partnerships may be by custom inherited and the set of contacts thus closed, or perhaps more readily contracted and the exchange values thereby more susceptible to revision. In brief, the economic flexibility of the system depends on the social structure of the trade relation. If the process as outlined does truly describe long-term variations in exchange value, then at a high level of generalization and with a great deal of imperfection it is like business competition. Of course the differences are profound. In primitive trade, the path to economic equilibrium lay not across the play of autonomous individuals or firms

314

Stone Age Economics

fixing a price through the parallel contentions of buyers and sellers. It began rather from the interdiction of competition within the community of either, traversed a structure of institutional arrangements that with varying facility brought together partners mutually obliged to be generous, upon separating those not so inclined, to negotiate in the end an analogous "price." The similarity to market trade appears when abstraction is made of all this-and of the protracted space-time scale, perhaps in reality a changeover of decades from trade with one ethnic group to partnerships in another. Then the primitive system, globally considered, does bring those particular persons into relations of trade, and at those rates, as reasonably reflect the availability and utility of goods. But what is the theoretical status ofthis residual resemblance? First appreciated in its bourgeois form, does this make it the analytical private property of conventional Economics? One might fairly judge not, for in its bourgeois form the process is not general, while in its general form it is not bourgeois. The conclusion to this aspect of Melanesian trade will serve 'as well for the whole: a primitive theory of exchange value is also necessary, and perhaps possible-without saying it yet exists.

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Stone Age Economics

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