Ingold Ed Encyclopedia of Anthropology Part 3
Ingold Ed Encyclopedia of Anthropology Part 3
Ingold Ed Encyclopedia of Anthropology Part 3
OF ANTHROPOLOGY
COMPANION
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
ANTHROPOLOGY
EDITED BY
TIM INGOLD
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Preface IX
General introduction
Tim Ingold xm
The contributors xxm
PART 1: HUMANITY 1
1. Introduction to humanity
Tim Ingold 3
2. Humanity and animality
Tim Ingold 14
3. The evolution of early hominids
t tp . o tas
4. Human evolution: the last one million years
Clive Gamble 79
5. The origins and evolution oflanguage
Philip Lieberman 108
6. Tools and tool behaviour
Thomas ftYnn 133
7. Niche construction, evolution and culture
F.J. Odling-Smee 162
8. Modes of subsistence: hunting and gathering to agriculture
and pastoralism
Roy Ellen 197
9. The diet and nutrition of human populations
Igor de Garine 226
10. Demographic expansion: causes and consequences
MarkNCohen 265
11. Disease and the destruction of indigenous populations
Step hen J.Kunitz 297
V
CONTENTS
Vl
CONTENTS
Index 1067
Vll
PREFACE
This volume started life on the initiative of Jonathan Price, at that time
Reference Books Editor at Croom Helm. His idea was for an Encyclopedia of
Human Society whose subject would span the disciplines of anthropology,
sociology and archaeology. We first met to discuss the project in August 1986,
and it was then that he charmed me into agreeing to become the volume's
editor. It has been a big job, to put it mildly. In hindsight, it seems to me that I
must have been mad to take it on at all, let alone single-handed. No doubt my
motives were in part honourable, since I was strongly committed to the idea of
anthropology as a bridging discipline, capable of spanning the many divisions
of the human sciences. I wanted to prove that the possibility of synthesis
existed not just as an ideal, but as something that could be realized in practice.
o ou t, too, was motivate y a certam vamty: 1 a synt es1s was to e m t,
I wanted to be the one to build it, and to reap the credit! Seven years on, I am
both older and perhaps a little wiser-no less committed to the ideal of
synthesis, but a great deal more aware of the complexities involved, and rather
less confident about my own abilities to bring it about.
Following my initial meeting withJonathan Price, over a year passed before I
was able to begin serious work on the project, which we had decided to call
Humanity, Culture and Social Life. In October 1987 I drew up a prospectus for
the entire volume, which included a complete list of forty articles, divided
between the three parts spelled out in the title, and a rough breakdown of the
contents for each. Then, during the first half of 1988, I set about recruiting
authors for each of the articles. Meanwhile, Croom Helm had been subsumed
under Routledge, from whose offices J onathan continued to oversee the project.
My original schedule had been for authors to write their first drafts during
1989, allowing a further nine months for consultation and editorial comment,
with a deadline for final versions of September 1990 and a projected
publication date of April 1992. As always, things did not go entirely according
to schedule, and I soon found that I was receiving final drafts of some articles
while a pile of first drafts of others were awaiting editorial attention, and while
for yet others I was still trying to fill the gaps in my list of contributors. To my
great embarrassment, I found that I was quite unable to keep to my own
deadlines. The inexorable growth of other commitments meant that drafts,
IX
PREFACE
dutifully submitted by their authors at the appointed time, languished for many
months-and in some cases for more than a year-before I could get to work
on them. During the academic year 1990-1, pressures of teaching and
administration, coupled with my assumption of the Editorship of the journal
Man, grew so heavy that progress on the project more or less ground to a halt,
and my deadline for submitting the whole volume to the publishers-set for the
end of April, 1991-passed quietly by with most of the articles still at the first
draft stage.
The project was rescued by my good fortune in securing one whole year and
two subsequent terms of research leave from the University of Manchester.
The first year (1991-2) was made possible in part by a grant from the
University of Manchester Research Support Fund, for which I acknowledge
my profound thanks. The two following terms were taken as sabbatical leave,
and I should like to thank all my colleagues in the Manchester Department of
Social Anthropology for covering my teaching and administrative duties in my
absence. Shortly before his departure from Routledge to join the staff at
Edinburgh University Press, the ever-patient Jonathan Price was finally
rewarded for his forbearance. At noon on 14 October 1992, he arrived in my
office to collect the entire, edited manuscript, and to carry it off to London. I
had completed work on the manuscript only two hours before! But the editorial
introductions had still to be written, and it was not until well into the following
spring that they were eventually finished. Meanwhile, Mark Hendy was hard at
work on the Hercu ean task of su -e 1tmg the who e vo ume, whtch he
completed by the beginning of May. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his
efforts. Since Jonathan left for Edinburgh, responsibility for guiding the
volume through the press passed to Michelle Darraugh, who has been
wonderfully supportive, efficient and understanding. Most of all, however, this
book belongs to Jonathan, without whom it would never have been conceived in
the first place, and whose unflagging enthusiasm kept the project on the rails
even during the most difficult of times.
Looking back, I am surprised how closely the book, in its final form,
resembles the original plan drawn up so many years ago. Only four of the
projected articles have been lost, and the titles and ordering of the majority
have been changed little, if at all. There have been a few changes in the list of
contributors along the way: in particular, I should like to put on record the sad
loss of John Blacking, who died before he could begin work on his projected
article, 'Music and dance'; and I should also like to thank Anthony Seeger for
stepping into the breach at very short notice. There have also been some
changes in the volume's title. All along, I wanted it to be a book to be read, and
not merely consulted as a work of reference, and for that reason I was inclined
to relegate the phrase An Encyclopedia of Anthropology to the subtitle. In many
ways, the book is more akin to what might conventionally be called a handbook
or a reader, rather than an encyclopedia. Be that as it may, after much
discussion it was eventually decided to call it a Companion Encyclopedia, a
X
PREFACE
Tim Ingold
Manchester
September 1993
Xl
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
xm
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
XIV
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
XV
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
XVI
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
xvn
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
realities of life 'on the ground' in real human communities, has a vital
contribution to make in the alleviation of human suffering. Moreover, to an
increasing extent, anthropologists have involved themselves as advocates on
behalf of the peoples among whom they have worked-for example in the
struggle for recognition of indigenous rights to land-or as advisers or
consultants in various projects of development. In view of such involvements, it
has sometimes been suggested that a field of 'applied anthropology' should be
recognized, alongside those branches of the discipline that are already well
established.
If this suggestion has not met with wholehearted approval, the reason does
not lie in any desire to keep anthropology 'pure', nor does it indicate that
anthropologists prefer to wash their hands of the moral and political
entailments of their involvement with local communities. It is rather that in the
conduct of anthropological work it is practically impossible to separate the
acquisition of knowledge from its application. The distinction between pure
and applied science rests on a premiss of detachment, the assumption that
scientists can know the world without having to involve themselves in it. But
anthropology rests on exactly the opposite premiss, that it is only by immersing
ourselves in the life-world of our fellow human beings that we shall ever
understand what it means to them-and to us. Thus whatever else it may be,
anthropology is a science of engagement. Indeed it may be said that in
anthropology we study ourselves, precisely because it requires us to change our
conceptiOn of who we are, from an exc usiVe, Western we to an me usiVe,
global one. To adopt an anthropological attitude is to drop the pretence of our
belonging to a select association of Westerners, uniquely privileged to look in
upon the inhabitants of 'other cultures', and to recognize that along with the
others whose company we share (albeit temporarily), we are all fellow travellers
in the same world. By comparing experience-'sharing notes'-we can reach a
better understanding of what such journeying entails, where we have come
from, and where we are going.
xvm
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
XIX
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
XX
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
XXI
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
xxn
THE CONTRIBUTORS
BARBARA ADAM received her Ph.D. from the University of Wales, and is
currently Lecturer in Social Theory at the University of Wales, Cardiff. She is
the founder editor of the journal Time and Society. She has written extensively
on the subject of social time, and her book, Time and Social Theory (1990), won
the Philip Ab rams Memorial Prize in 1991, awarded by the British Sociological
Association for the best first book.
ALAN BARNARD is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the
University of Edinburgh. He was educated at the George Washington
University, McMaster University and the University of London, receiving his
Ph.D. in 1976. Before moving to Edinburgh in 1978, he taught at the
8). He has carried out fieldwork with the Nharo and other Khoisan peoples of
Botswana and Namibia and his research interests include kinship theory,
hunter-gatherer studies, and regional comparison. He is the author, with
Anthony Good, of Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (1984), and of
Hunters and Herders in Southern Africa (1992). He is co-editor of Kinship and
Cosmology (1989), and was editor of the journal Edinburgh Anthropology for
1988. Alan Barnard has published numerous articles on kinship, hunter-
gatherers and the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa, as well as a wordlist and
grammar of the Nharo language (1985) and a children's book on the Bushmen
(1993). His recent interests include the early history of social anthropology and
the relation between anthropology and popular literature.
NIKO BESNIER gained his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California
in 1986, and is now Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
Yale University. He has conducted research in various locations in Western
Polynesia and Melanesia, principally on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu. His
published works deal with literacy, emotional life and the cultural construction
of the person, political rhetoric, gossip, and the relationship between verbal
accounts and social action.
ANDRE BETEILLE is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi
where he has taught since 1959. He was Simon Fellow at the University of
xxm
THE CONTRIBUTORS
XXIV
THE CONTRIBUTORS
XXV
THE CONTRIBUTORS
XXVI
THE CONTRIBUTORS
(1994). With J.E.Levy, he has also published Indian Drinking: Navajo Practices
andAnglo-American Theories (1974), Navajo Aging (1991) and Navajo Drinking
Careers: a Twenty-five Year Follow-up (1994 ), as well as several articles on
population and health among the Navajo and Hopi Indians.
MARY LECRON FOSTER is a full-time researcher at the Department of
Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in
linguistics from that University in 1965, and has initiated and taught
programmes in social and cultural linguistics and in symbolic anthropology at
California State University, Hayward. She has carried out extensive research in
Mexico on indigenous languages and cultures, and has published grammars of
two Mexican languages and many articles on language evolution and aspects of
cultural symbolism. She is editor (with Stanley H.Brandes) of Symbol as Sense
(1980), and (with Lucy J.Botscharow) of The Life of Symbols (1990).
GILBERT LEWIS initially studied Medicine at the Universities of Oxford
and London, and held hospital medical posts in London between 1962 and
1965. He then went on to study Social Anthropology, and was Research Officer
at the London School of Economics from 1967-71. Following anthropological
fieldwork in West Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, in 1968-70, Lewis
gained a Ph.D. in 1972. He is presently Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the
University of Cambridge. His books include Knowledge of Illness in a Sepik
xxvn
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Society (1975) and Day of Shining Red (1980). Lewis is currently engaged in
medical anthropological research in West Africa (Guinea-Bissau).
PHILIP LIEBERMAN received his initial training in Electrical Engineering,
at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, but his Ph. D., completed in 1966,
was in Linguistics. He was Associate Professor in Linguistics and Electrical
Engineering, and subsequently Professor of Linguistics, at the University of
Connecticut, from 1967-74. In 1974, he joined the Faculty at Brown
University, where he is now the George Hazard Crooker University Professor
and Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. He has carried out
research on the perception and production of speech, and on the innate
foundations and evolution of human linguistic competence. He is the author of
Intonation, Speech and Language (1967), The Speech of Primates (1972), On the
Origins of Language (1975), Speech Acoustics and Perception (1976), The Biology
and Evolution of Language (1984) and Uniquely Human: The Evolution of
Speech, Thought and Selfless Behavior (1991), as well as of numerous articles and
reviews.
DANIEL MILLER studied archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and
received his Ph.D. in 1983. Since 1981 he has worked in the Department of
Anthropology, University College London, where he is now Reader in
Anthropology. His principal research interests are in material culture and mass
consumption, and he has carried out fieldwork in Indonesia, the Solomon
Is an s, In 1a, Lon on an , most recent y, Tnm a . He IS the author of
Artefocts as Categories ( 1985), Material Culture and Mass Consumption ( 1987)
and Modernity: an Ethnographic Aproach (1994). He is editor, with C.Tilley, of
Ideology and Power in Prehistory ( 1984 ), and with M.Rowlands and C. Tilley, of
Domination and Resistance (1989). He is also sole editor of Unwrapping
Christmas (1993).
HENRIETTA MOORE was educated at the University of Cambridge,
receiving her Ph.D. in 1983. She has taught at the Universities of Kent and
Cambridge, and is currently Reader in Anthropology at the London School of
Economics. She has carried out fieldwork in Kenya, Burkino Faso, Sierra
Leone and Zambia, and her major research interests include economic
anthropology and development, gender and feminist studies, and
contemporary issues in anthropological theory. She is the author of Space, Text
and Gender: An Anthropological Analysis of the Marakwet of Kenya (1986) and
Feminism and Anthropology ( 1988), as well as of numerous articles in books and
journals.
HOWARD MORPHY studied Anthropology at the University of London and
at the Australian National University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1977. He was
Lecturer and subsequently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Prehistory
and Anthropology, Australian National University, from 1978-86. He is
currently Curator of Anthropology at the Pitt-Rivers Museum and Lecturer in
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THE CONTRIBUTORS
XXIX
THE CONTRIBUTORS
XXX
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Factors in Urban Planning (1982). His work has been translated into many
languages, including French, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
SIMON ROBERTS studied at the London School of Economics, and first
taught at the Law School, Institute of Public Administration, near Blantyre,
Malawi. He subsequently carried out two years of field research in Botswana.
He is currently Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, and
General Editor of The Modern Law Review. He is the author or co-author of
Order and Dispute ( 1979), Rules and Processes ( 1981) and Understanding Property
Law (1987). He is presently engaged in a field study of a London divorce
counselling and mediation agency.
ROBERT A.RUBINSTEIN received his Ph. D. in Anthropology from the State
University of New York at Binghamton. He also holds a Master's degree in
public health from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has carried out
research in Egypt, Belize, Mexico, and in the United States. Robert Rubinstein
is currently Associate Research Medical Anthropologist with the Francis
!.Proctor Foundation at the University of California, San Francisco. He is eo-
chair of the Commission on the Study of Peace of the International Union of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. He is the editor or co-editor of
Epistemology and Process (1984), Peace and War (1986), The Social Dynamics of
Peace and Conflict (1988) and Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield
and Sol Tax (1991). With C.D.Laughlin and J.McManus, he is a co-author of
Science as ognitive Process 984 .
RICHARD SCHECHNER holds a Chair at New York University and also
teaches in the Performance Studies Department at the Tisch School of the
Arts. He is editor of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies. In 1967,
Schechner founded The Performance Group with whom he has directed many
plays, including Dionysus in 69, Mother Courage and her Children, Oedipus, The
Tooth of Crime and The Balcony. Since 1980, Schechner has staged works and
conducted performance workshops in several countries of Europe, Asia, Africa
and the Americas. In 1992 he founded and became artistic director of the East
Coast Artists, for which he directed Faust!Gastronome. Schechner's many
books include Environmental Theater (1973), Between Theater and Anthropology
(1985), Performance Theory (1988) and The Future of Ritual (1993). Schechner
is also editor of various books including (with M.Schuman) Ritual, Play and
Performance (1976) and (with WAppel) By Means of Performance (1990). He is
General Editor of the book series, Worlds of Performance. He has been awarded
numerous Fellowships and Prizes, and has lectured and taught at Princeton
University, Florida State University, Ball State University, and the School of
Art Institute of Chicago.
ANTHONY SEEGER received his BA in Social Relations from Harvard
University and his MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of
Chicago. His research has focused on the social organization, cosmology and
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xxxn
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Professor Tobias, and in 1987 he was awarded the Balzan International Prize
(the first time this prize had been given for achievements in Physical
Anthropology).
JAMES WEINER studied at the University of Chicago and at the Australian
National University, and gained his Ph.D. from the ANU in 1984. He held a
Lectureship in the Department of Prehistory and Anthropology, Australian
National University, from 1986-9, and from 1990 has been Lecturer in Social
Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England. Weiner has carried
out a total of two and a half years of fieldwork among the Foi people of Papua
New Guinea, on the basis of which he has published many articles and two
books, The Heart of the Pearlshell (1988) and The Empty Place (1991). He is also
the editor of Mountain Papuans (1988). He is currently working on a book on
Australian and Papuan myth, and is carrying out further work on Foi
Christianity.
PETER WORSLEY obtained his first degree in Anthropology and
Archaeology at the University of Cambridge in 194 7, and went on to read for
an MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. From 1956-64
he taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hull, and from
1964 until his retirement in 1982 he was Professor of Sociology at the
University of Manchester. He is now Professor Emeritus at that University. In
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THE CONTRIBUTORS
1955 Worsley received the Curl Bequest Essay Prize of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, and from 1971-4 he was President of the British
Sociological Association. He is the author of many books, including The
Trumpet Shall Sound (1957), The Third World (1964), Introducing Sociology
(1970, 1977), Marx and Marxism (1982) and The Three Worlds: Culture and
World Development (1984).
THOMAS WYNN received his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of
Illinois, Urbana, in 1977. His research has centred on the application of theory
in developmental psychology, especially that of Jean Pia get, to the
archaeological record of prehistoric artefacts. He has recently published The
Evolution of Spatial Competence ( 1989), and has written numerous articles for
professional journals, including Journal of Human Evolution, World
Archaeology, Man, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Journal ofAnthropological
Archaeology and American Anthropologist. He is currently Professor of
Anthropology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA.
XXXIV
3 SOCIAL LIFE
26
QUESTIONS OF SOCIALITY
Wherever people live, as they generally do, in the company of others, and act
with those others in mind, their mode of life may be called social. Questions
about social life have therefore to do with elucidating the dynamic properties of
human relationships, properties conveyed by such stock-in-trade
anthropological notions as kinship, exchange, power and domination. We may
ask how these features of human sociality are generated, maintained and
manage ; ow t ey are tmp tcate m t e 1 e- tstory o t e m IVI ua rom
childhood to old age; how they are represented and communicated in discourse;
how they structure-and are in turn structured by-the production and
consumption of material goods, and how they underwrite (or subvert) diverse
forms of moral or political order. These are the kinds of questions addressed in
the chapters making up the third part of this volume. They can, of course, be
posed on any number of different levels, from the minutiae of everyday life in
familiar contexts of face-to-face interaction to the trials and endeavours of
whole populations on a world-historical stage. Likewise the temporal scale on
which social processes are viewed may range from within a lifetime to the entire
span of human history. It is important to remember, however, that it is the
perspective of the observer that 'selects' the scale of the social phenomena
observed. When anthropologists claim that they generally study small-scale
societies rather than large-scale ones, this is not because the world of humanity
is objectively partitioned into social units of diverse size, of which the smaller
lend themselves more readily to anthropological investigation, but because
from a locally centred perspective, the horizons of the social field appear
relatively circumscribed.
The concept of society, moreover, is by no means neutral, but trails in its
wake a long history of controversy among Western philosophers, reformers and
statesmen about the proper exercise of human rights and responsibilities. In
this controversy, the meaning of 'society' has varied according to the contexts
737
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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
739
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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
741
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742
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
743
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BECOMING A PERSON
Traditionally, the project of social anthropology has been distinguished from
that of psychology in terms of a distinction between the individual and the
person. In this division of intellectual labour, the nature of individual self-
awareness, postte as a uman umversa , was to e stu te y psyc o ogtsts,
while anthropologists focused on the person as a social being, formed within
the normative framework of society and its relationships. Having thereby
excluded the self as an aspect of human nature from their field of inquiry,
anthropologists were able to turn their attention instead to issues of indigenous
psychology. In a move strikingly similar to the developments reviewed above in
the study of kinship and gender, they could claim that their concern was with
the diverse ways in which notions of the self can be brought to bear in the
cultural construction of personhood, rather than with the 'actual'
psychological foundations of the self as a centre of individual experience. This
move, however, leads to precisely the same impasse, in that the opposition
between the individual (the psychological self) and the person (the social
being), on which the logic of cultural construction depends, is itself constituted
within a specifically Western discourse on nature and society. And again, people
in non-Western societies seem to be telling us something quite different:
namely that as agentive centres of awareness and experience, selves become, and
that they do so within a matrix of evolving relationships with others.
Personhood, in other words, is seen not as the imprint of society upon the pre-
social self, but as the emergent form of the self as it develops within a context of
social relations.
In Article 30, Poole advocates an approach to understanding the
development of personal identity that would take this view as its starting point.
744
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
745
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746
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Besides learning to speak, people in all societies must also learn to work, and
this generally entails the acquisition of a specific set of practical skills, along
with an understanding of the appropriate contexts for their deployment.
Learning to work is thus one aspect of socialization, which Ortiz describes in
Article 32. Her principal thesis is summed up in the statement that work is as
much a social as it is a technological process. This point needs to be argued only
because people in Western industrial societies-including many economists
and social theorists-are inclined to believe that work is somehow excluded
from the domain of social life. The reasons for this, as Ortiz shows, lie partly in
the experience of industrialization itself, and partly in the way in which the
meaning of work has been framed within the modern science of economics,
whose concern is exclusively with the dynamics of commodity production. We
may note the following points: first, that under conditions of industrial
capitalism, workers labour not for themselves or their families but for
emp oyers w o comman ot t eu capacities to a our an t e mstruments
and raw materials needed for these capacities to be realized; second, that with
the automation of production, manual skills tend to be replaced (albeit never
completely) by the operation of machines; third, that in the mass production of
commodities, the objects produced cease to be identified in any way with their
producers; and finally, that with the separation of the 'workplace' from the
'home', the latter comes to be seen as a place of consumption rather than
production. This, in turn, leads to the perception of 'housework' as an
anomalous category.
Clearly in non-industrial societies, where these conditions do not obtain, the
significance of work will be very different. For one thing, people retain control
over their own capacity to work and over other productive means, and their
activities are carried on in the context of their relationships with kin and
community. Indeed their work may have the strengthening or regeneration of
these relationships as its principal objective. For another thing, work calls for
the exercise of specific skills which identify their possessors as belonging to the
communities in which they were acquired. But it is not only by their skills that
persons in non-industrial societies are identified; they are also known for what
they produce. Through making things, people define themselves. Moreover
there is no obvious criterion for distinguishing work from non-work. Many
non-industrial societies lack any general term whose meaning would overlap
with that of 'work' in the Western industrial context (and even in that context,
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SOCIAL LIFE
the term has manifold, often contradictory meanings). Instead, a host of more
specific terms are used to denote the various life-sustaining tasks that people
are called upon to perform. Thus work, in these societies, is embedded in social
life to the extent of being virtually indistinguishable from it. Our modern
tendency to see work as opposed to life, or to regard it as technological rather
than social, is the product of a particular history in the Western world.
This history has also given rise to the notion of the 'economy' as a domain of
activity separate from that of 'society', and operating exclusively on the basis of
market or market-like principles. The sub-discipline of economic anthropology
has emerged largely out of the attempt to show that where these principles do
not operate, the activities not only of production and consumption but also of
exchange, far from being external to society, are embedded in a social relational
matrix. However as Gregory shows in Article 33, neither of the two major
paradigms of Western economic thought-the 'commodity' paradigm of
nineteenth century political economy and the 'goods' paradigm of twentieth
century marginalism-was capable of addressing the questions raised by
anthropological work in societies where wealth is evaluated and transacted
according to principles other than those of the market. Classical political
economy distinguished between values in use and in exchange: the former
consist in the capacities of objects to fulfil human needs, the latter in the
amounts of labour that went into their production. But the distinction was
made simply in order to clear the way for an exclusive concern with exchange
va ue, as It IS revea e m contexts w erem o Jects are exc ange as mar eta e
commodities. The neoclassical economists, for their part, did away with both
these notions of value, replacing them with a single notion of utility, based not
in the objective properties of the wealth items themselves but in the subjective
preferences of individuals. This approach, apparently applicable to virtually
any kind of exchange, offered the prospects of building a deductive theory of
great generality and predictive power. Given a knowledge of individual
preferences, and of the means available for fulfilling them, one could predict
rational courses of action and their aggregate effects.
This theory, however, is quite indifferent to the particulars of social and
historical circumstance, and seemed to offer little to anthropologists more
interested in developing generalizations by induction, from a comparative
analysis of the ways in which wealth is evaluated and distributed in different
societies and periods. For them the commodity paradigm has always been more
attractive, and the gradual accumulation of ethnographic data from fieldwork-
based studies put them in the position of being able to address the questions
that it had left unanswered, particularly about the nature of non-commodity
exchange-ironically at a time when mainstream economists were abandoning
the commodity paradigm in favour of the abstract formalism of the theory of
goods. What made this possible, Gregory argues, was the development of a
positive theory of non-commoditized wealth as consisting in gifts. Gifts have
two crucial properties by which they may be distinguished from commodities:
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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
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FURTHER READING
Barnard, A. and Good, A. (1984) Research Practices in the Study of Kinship, London:
Academic Press.
Beteille, A. (1987) The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays, Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Carrithers, M., Collins, S. and Lukes, S. (eds) (1985) The Category of the Person:
Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collier, J. and Yanagisako, S. (eds) (1987) Gender and Kinship: Essays towards a Unified
Analysis, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Comaroff, J.L. and Roberts, S.A. (1981) Rules and Processes: the Cultural Logic of
Dispute in an African Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dumont, L. (1986) Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological
Perspective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Earle, T. (ed.) (1991) Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fortes, M. (1983) Rules and the Emergence of Society (RAI Occasional Paper, No. 39),
London: Royal Anthropological Institute.
Foster, M.L. and Rubinstein, R. (eds) (1986) Peace and War: Cross-Cultural
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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL LIFE
Schieffelin, B.B. and Ochs, E. (eds) (1986) Language Socialization across Cultures,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, D.M. (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Strathern, A.M. ( 1988) The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wallman, S. (ed.) (1979) Social Anthropology of Work, London: Academic Press.
Whiting, B.B. and Edwards, C.P. (1988) Children of Different Worlds, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, E.O. (1980) Sociobiology (abridged edition), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University (Belknap) Press.
Wolf, E.R. (1982) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Worsley, P. (1984) The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development, London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
1988). If we cannot do this reliably within a species, then the possibility that we
can do it between species (and the more so between those as distantly related as
geese and ourselves) becomes even more remote. One of sociobiology's
beneficial influences in this respect has been to shift the emphasis away from
analogical reasoning of this kind to give greater prominence to the specific
contexts in which particular animals or groups of animals find themselves. This
is not to say that there are no general principles that apply universally, but
rather to emphasize the fact that these principles are at a deep level: the same
universal principle may express itself in quite contrary ways in different
ecological or demographic contexts.
In this article, I summarize our current understanding of animal sociality
and ask what this can tell us about human sociality. I begin with the more
general problem of defining sociality, and then elaborate the theoretical
perspective that underlies all contemporary studies of animal behaviour. I go
on to consider the reasons why animals are social and conclude by attempting
to reassess the differences and similarities between animal and human societies.
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759
SOCIAL LIFE
sociologists (see for example Milardo 1988), and they do in fact function in
rather similar ways. An individual animal may belong to a number of different
networks in just the same way as a man or woman may belong to a set of
partially overlapping networks (e.g. networks of relations among work
colleagues, friends, kin, members of a political party or church, etc.).
Despite this emphasis on relationships, the grouping patterns of animals
remain none the less a central concern for biologists. It is not just the nature of
the relationships that one animal has with another that is interesting, but also
their number. Why should an animal have intense relationships with a dozen
other individuals and not just with one? Why do some animals prefer to live
alone, even though they have relationships with those living nearby? Groups
themselves are, after all, simply a reflection of the way certain kinds of
relationships cluster in space-time. Understanding why some groups are
manifested in this sense, but others not, is an important endeavour. In addition,
the size of the group in which an animal lives inevitably places constraints on
the number and frequency of other kinds of relationships that it can have. For
example, if ecological conditions limit groups to a maximum of two individuals,
then the animals concerned will not be able to form coalitionary relationships
with third parties vis-a-vis one another when disputes arise. Nor will it be
possible for one individual to play another off against a third. Thus,
understanding the factors that foster the development of groups of a certain
size and type remains fundamental.
T IS raises an Important Issue o e Imtwn. W en 10 ogists re er to
relationships, it is clear that they mean something rather informal and low-
level, little more than a consistent patterning in the interactions of a pair of
animals. When social anthropologists refer to relationships, they often mean
something closer to a rule-bound contractual arrangement between consenting
parties. A similar difference exists in the use of the term 'group'. To a biologist,
a group is simply a set of animals bound together in some way and occupying a
discrete segment of space-time: groups may be dispersed (when their members
do not physically live together) or they may be spatially concentrated.
Moreover, a single individual on its own may, for some purposes, be said to
constitute a 'group' of size one. There is nothing particularly odd about this
usage, but it will probably strike social anthropologists as perplexing because,
in general, they tend to regard groups as being the product of contractual
arrangements among a set of individuals: by definition, then, it takes two or
more to make a group.
These contrasting usages arise from the different explanatory interests of
biologists and social anthropologists. That humans organize their relationships
on the basis of verbally negotiated contractual arrangements is neither here nor
there for the biologist (even though it may be recognized as an intrinsically
interesting property of human behaviour). The evolutionary biologist's
concern is with the functional consequences of those contractual
arrangements, not with their immediate causes. At this level, the mechanisms
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
involved in their creation are immaterial. I draw attention to this point now
because it is important to appreciate that the same term may be used to mean
quite different things in the two disciplines of social anthropology and biology.
I have more to say about the implications of this in the following section.
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
wholly and only about evolutionary function. They are concerned with the
question: Why does a given trait persist in a population? As such, they do not
necessarily presuppose any genetic basis for a given behaviour. Indeed,
explanations about evolutionary function can, of themselves, tell us nothing at
all about the ontogenetic foundations of the trait in question: the mode of
inheritance might involve 'memes' (Dawkins's term for cultural replicators),
but it equally might involve genes.
This leads naturally to the consideration of a key feature of the social
behaviour of higher organisms (especially primates), namely its extraordinary
flexibility. The variety of social forms exhibited by different populations of
baboons, for example, makes nonsense of the assumptions about species-
specific behaviour patterns that characterized the classical ethology of the
1940s and 1950s. Even within a given social group, we may find individuals
pursuing radically different social strategies (see, for example, Dunbar 1982b,
Caro and Bateson 1986). These kinds of alternative strategies are inherent in
any biological system (see, for example, Maynard Smith and Price 1973,
Maynard Smith 1982). Indeed, evolution cannot occur within a biological
system unless there is variation in a character among the constituent organisms
that make up the population. This is not to suggest that species-typical
behaviour patterns do not exist: far from it-the smile, after all, is a human
universal. But such behaviours are, in themselves, rather uninteresting from an
evolutionary point of view: what is of interest is how these behaviours are used
m a strategic sense to ac teve unctwna y-re ate goa s.
Given this perspective, one obvious interpretation of social systems is that
they function as reproductive strategies. In other words, animals evolve the
social systems they do because these enable them to survive and reproduce
more effectively in the particular environments in which they live. In effect, a
group is a co-operative solution to one or more problems of mutual concern.
We can pursue this argument a little further by suggesting that the multi-level
societies discussed in the preceding section represent a series of such solutions,
each concerned with a different functional problem (Dunbar 1988, 1989a).
Finally, two caveats are in order.
First, it is important in this context to appreciate that evolutionary
functionalism has little in common with the functionalism that dominated
sociology and anthropology during the 1930s and 1940s. Structural-
functionalism in the social sciences concerned itself with the self-regulating
properties of whole societies and viewed the individual's place in the social
system as subservient to the perpetuation of the monolithic structures of the
system itsel£ In contrast to this top-down view, evolutionary biology adopts a
strictly bottom-up view: society as we perceive it is simply the outcome of the
series of decisions made by a set of individuals to associate with each other.
Even though the structural components of the system may impose constraints
on just what those individuals can do (they can, after all, only live in social
groups if they are prepared to compromise on their ideal strategies), the system
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764
SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
lactation), and they are proportionately more acute in primates than in other
mammalian taxa because of the prolonged periods of infant dependency that
characterize this group.
In primates, then, females may be expected to exert the most influence and
will thus distribute themselves around the habitat in the ways that are most
conducive to their successful reproduction, forming groups only when and if
these are advantageous. Males will then map themselves onto the distribution
pattern of the females in such a way as to maximize their own reproductive
success. In primates, at least, there is direct evidence to support this claim (e.g.
from releases of animals into new habitats: Charles-Dominique 1977).
Given that the animals in a population distribute themselves around the
habitat in groups of a particular size, what factors influence this size? In
biological systems, most questions of this kind turn out to have rather complex
answers that rest on a balance between the costs and benefits of a given strategy.
In principle, the benefits that would accrue to the individual from living in a
group, taken on their own, would be expected to result in 'runaway' selection in
favour of ever larger groups. However, the fact that organisms are systemic
entities means that evolutionary change along one dimension inevitably creates
costs along one or more of the system's other dimensions and these act to
counter-balance the evolutionary forces driving the system towards any one
extreme. Increased group size may have advantages in terms of territorial
defence, for example, but large groups impose greater costs on their members
ecause t e stze o terntory t at as to e e en e to provt et e group wtt
the resources it needs increases faster than the area the group can patrol
effectively. In most cases, the solutions that animals adopt turn out to be
compromises between the conflicting demands stemming from a number of
different considerations.
Biologists have suggested four main selective advantages to explain why
animals live in groups (see Wrangham 1983, 1987, Dun bar 1988). These are:
(1) improved care of young; (2) co-operative hunting; (3) defence of food
resources, and (4) protection against predators. Table 1 lists a selection of
species for which each of these explanations can plausibly be invoked.
In general, the advantages that accrue in terms of parental care are likely to
be restricted to species that are monogamous (i.e. those in which mating occurs
only between one male and one female who normally live alone as a pair).
Sharing of parental duties between both the male and the female is common
only in such species. Indeed, monogamy is exclusive to those species in which
male parental care is possible (Kleiman 1977). Of all bird species, for example,
90 per cent are monogamous, whereas monogamy is found in only about 5 per
cent of mammalian species. Male birds are just as competent at incubating eggs
and feeding the young as are female birds, but internal gestation and lactation
make it difficult for male mammals to contribute directly to the business of
reanng young.
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SOCIAL LIFE
Hypothesis Examples
However, even within the mammals there are marked differences between
taxonomic groups. Monogamy is ubiquitous, for example, among the canids
(the dog-wolf-jackal family), and in most of these species biparental care is the
norm. Lactation in these species is relatively brief and the male is able to feed
the female in the den by bringing meat back to her; once the pups are weaned,
both male and female are able to bring food back to the den for the pups to eat.
Monogamy is also typical of about 15 per cent of all primate species, though
here the distribution is very uneven. Most small New World monkeys (e.g.
marmosets, tamarins, titis) and all gibbons are monogamous, with monogamy
associated with male parental care in the marmosets and tamarins but not in the
titis or gibbons. By contrast, monogamy is extremely rare in all other groups of
pnmates. However, It seems un 1 e y t at parenta care can e a actor
promoting the evolution of monogamy in primates. Instead, it seems more
likely that the opportunity for paternal care is a by-product of monogamy
rather than its cause, with the evolution of monogamous mating systems having
more to do with the risk that females run of infanticide by other males (see van
Schaik and Dunbar 1990).
Carnivores may often gain considerable advantages from hunting in groups:
there is ample evidence to show, for example, that the size of prey caught
increases with group size in species that hunt co-operatively (e.g. lion: Schaller
1972; hyaena: Kruuk 1982). While the advantages of co-operative hunting
might be seen as relevant to the later hominids, they are unlikely to be relevant
to any non-human primates or to have been so to our early hominid ancestors
(e.g. the australopithecines) whose hunting skills appear to have been minimal.
There seems to be general agreement that primates live in groups either as a
defence against predators or in order to defend food sources against other
members of their own species (van Schaik 1983, Wrangham 1987, Dun bar
1988). It should be noted that defence against predators does not necessarily
imply that they are actively driven away, either by members of the group as a
whole or by one class of individuals from the group (e.g. adult males). Although
examples of male baboons driving leopards away have been documented, the
only unequivocal evidence for active deterrence of predators is that provided by
Busse (1977) for red colobus (where the presence of adult males does seem to
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
deter chimpanzees from preying on the smaller members of the group). There
is, however, an extensive literature, both theoretical and experimental, on the
advantages that prey species gain from living in groups: clumping of prey may
make it harder for predators to locate a group, more likely that a neighbour will
be taken rather than yourself, more likely that a predator will be detected before
it can approach close enough to the group to launch an attack and more likely
that a predator may become confused by prey fleeing in all directions (for a
general review, see Bertram 1978).
The hypothesis that primates group to defend food resources in the face of
intra-specific competition rests largely on the evidence that primate
populations, like those of many other organisms, are ultimately food-limited:
the amount of food available in the habitat sets the upper limit on a
population's capacity to increase its size. Whether this hypothesis specifies an
important determinant of group-living thus ultimately turns on the issue of
whether or not animals like primates are ever at such high densities that their
populations are close to the maximum that their habitats can sustain.
The primate literature is more or less evenly divided on the question of
which of these last two hypotheses-reduction of predation risk or defence of
food resources-is correct as a general explanation for group-living in
primates. Wrangham ( 1980, 1987), Dittus ( 1986) and Cheney and Seyfarth
(1987) favour the latter; van Schaik ( 1983), de Ruiter ( 1986) and Dun bar ( 1988)
favour the former. Where direct tests between the two hypotheses have been
posst e, owever, t ese ave ten e to come own m avour o t e re uctwn o
predation risk (van Schaik 1983, Dunbar 1988).
In Darwinian terms, no benefit can be viewed in isolation from the
corresponding costs. These costs increase with increasing group size and come
in two main forms: (1) direct costs in terms of increased competition over
specific items of food and other social stresses that ultimately influence an
individual's survival and/ or reproduction directly, and (2) indirect costs in the
form of disrupted time budgets and longer day journeys (because the group
needs to search an area each day that is proportional to its size). These effects
are well documented for primates (see, for example, Wrangham 1977, van
Schaik et al. 1983, Watts 1985, Stacey 1986), and in some cases the
physiological mechanisms that mediate them are well understood (e.g. Abbott
1984, French et al. 1984 ).
The sizes of the social groups in which animals live in a given habitat will
thus depend on a balance between the benefits and the costs. If there are few
predators in the habitat, little advantage will be gained from living in large
groups; the costs of doing so will therefore push group size towards a minimum
value. In habitats with many predators, the benefits of large groups will
outweigh the costs, and group size will tend to increase despite the
disadvantages incurred by the animals.
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SOCIAL LIFE
Primate groups differ from those of other animals in two important respects.
One is the intensity of their social bonding; the other is in the extent to which
alliances are used to minimize the costs of group-living.
Grooming is the main way of cementing social relationships in primates, and
monkeys and apes may devote up to 20 per cent of their total waking time to
grooming with each other. The actual amount of time spent on social activities
seems to be directly related to the size of the group: even within species,
animals that live in larger groups devote a higher proportion of their day to
social interaction than those that live in smaller groups. Although grooming has
an obvious hygienic function, individuals of the more social species groom one
another far more than is required to keep the fur clean and free of parasites.
Quite how grooming serves to maintain relationships is far from clear,
though it is now known that grooming increases the production of endogenous
opiates (the brain's own painkillers) (Keverne et al. 1989). Grooming may also
provide an excuse for animals to spend time in close proximity and thus to get
to know each other better. Familiarity is an important requirement for coalition
partners because the value of an ally in a conflict depends on his or her
reliability, and knowledge of another individual's reliability can only come
through repeated interaction.
Although coalitions are known to occur in other animals besides primates
e.g. wns: Pac er an Pusey ; swans: cott , most o t ese are
straightforward relationships based on immediate mutual advantage (for a
review, see Harcourt 1989). The coalitions of higher primates (monkeys and
apes) seem to differ from these in three key respects.
First, coalitionary relationships are established long before they are needed.
Whether grooming partners are more likely to become allies because they
spend so much of their time together or whether monkeys and apes deliberately
groom with those who might be the most profitable allies at some future time
remains uncertain. However, there is at least some evidence to suggest that even
juvenile baboons are aware of who the best allies are in that they actively seek to
establish grooming relationships with just those individuals (Cheney 1977).
Second, coalitionary relationships among primates are often directed
towards minimizing the costs of group-living rather than-as is usual among
other mammals-simply enabling animals to gain immediate access to a
resource. Among gelada baboons, for example, females form coalitions whose
primary function is to reduce the levels of harassment that they inevitably
suffer while living in groups (Dun bar 1980, 1989b). Coalitions make it possible
for the females to minimize these costs and thereby to remain together and gain
the primary advantage that groups are intended to serve (probably the
reduction of predation risk: Dunbar 1986).
Third, the coalitions of primates often involve the exploitation of third-
party power relationships, whereas those of non-primates tend to be based on
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
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SOCIAL LIFE
appears to lie in the brain's ability to process information (in this case,
specifically information about social phenomena). This in turn suggests that,
among primates, the evolution of larger group sizes under environmental or
other selection pressures was dependent on the evolution of the larger brains
necessary to service the relationships involved. (Note that the nature of the
relationships is crucial in this respect: antelope can form very much larger
groups, but these are unstable aggregations that are very different from the
highly structured congregations of the higher primates.)
If we use the regression equation derived from monkeys and apes to predict
group sizes in anatomically modern humans, we obtain a figure of around 150.
Evidence from hunter-gatherer societies does in fact suggest a level of grouping
of about this size, corresponding among sedentary peoples to the typical village
and among nomadic peoples to the regional band (Dunbar 1993). In addition,
there is considerable sociological evidence to suggest that, even in modern
Western societies, the number of people with whom an individual interacts on a
regular basis is such as to give rise to groups (or extended networks) of about
this size.
These observations have interesting implications for the evolution of
language. As we have seen, relationships in primate groups are cemented by
social grooming, and the larger the group, the greater the amount of time that is
spent grooming (Dunbar 1990). It is not entirely clear why this should be so,
and several different mechanisms have been suggested. What is clear, however,
IS t at t e e ort t at as to e mveste m socta groommg mcreases wtt group
size. If we use this relationship to determine the grooming time that would be
required for modern humans to service relationships within groups of the size
expected on the grounds of their neocortex volume we find that they would
have to spend more than a third of their waking hours in social grooming. For
organisms that also have to make a living in the world, this is not a feasible
proposition. Language is an ideal solution to the resulting problem of time-
budgeting as it allows an individual to engage in extensive time-sharing in ways
that are not possible with grooming. One cannot walk and groom at the same
time, nor can one groom more than one individual at a time, but it is possible to
walk and talk and to hold several interlocutors in conversation simultaneously.
Thus it looks as though the capacity for language might have evolved to solve a
problem of social bonding in the large groups in which our ancestors were
obliged to live by some (as yet undetermined) aspect of their ecology.
The question of why our ancestors should have been obliged to live in such
large groups remains unclear. Our current understanding is that primates live
in groups either to defend food resources or for protection against predators,
with the latter certainly being the more significant factor in the case of
terrestrial species inhabiting relatively open environments. However, no
primate species has a mean group size of more than about a hundred
individuals (much lower than that predicted for anatomically modern humans).
Since many of these live in habitats where the risk of predation is high, it is
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
difficult to see how primates as large as the later hominids could conceivably
have been so much more at risk from predators as to require groups that are
more than twice the size of most other open-country primates.
Whatever factor lay behind the evolution of very large groups in our
ancestors, it must clearly have been some feature of their ecology that is not
shared by other primates. Defence against other human groups under
conditions of rapidly rising population density has been suggested as one
possibility (e.g. Alexander 1989); another lies in the evolution oflarge-scale co-
operative hunting; a third possibility might have been the need to share access
to key resources (such as waterholes or dry-season foraging areas) when
individual foraging parties were otherwise obliged to disperse over very wide
areas. Of these, the hunting hypothesis can almost certainly be ruled out
because large-scale hunting is not observed in the archaeological record until
well after the evolution oflarge brain size (see also Wynn 1988).
What is certain, however, is that this increase in group size must have been a
relatively late development. Brain size for the australopithecines lies well
within the range for extant great apes, suggesting that australopithecines
probably did not have group sizes significantly larger than those observed in
modern chimpanzees (i.e. 50 to 100 individuals). Although there is an increase
in relative brain size with the appearance of the first members of the genus
Homo (i.e. Homo habilis and H. erectus), the real jump in brain size does not
come about until the appearance of our own species (Homo sapiens)
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
group in the first place. Even so, kin selection is just one of several evolutionary
forces that contribute to an individual's inclusive fitness. An individual will
often benefit more in terms of inclusive fitness by forming a coalition or living
in a group with an unrelated individual than by doing so with a relative. Thus,
male lions will sometimes form coalitions with non-relatives in order to gain
control over a pride of females (Packer and Pusey 1982).
In fact, the evidence suggests that, rather than responding automatically to
the call of kinship, higher primates (at least) weigh up the relative advantages of
kin and non-kin in a given social context. Cheney (1983), for example, has
shown that high-ranking vervet monkeys tend to form alliances with close
relatives; but low-ranking monkeys tend to prefer alliances with unrelated
dominant individuals to alliances with relatives. For an animal that is already
high-ranking, additional support from other high-ranking allies may be of
marginal benefit, and more may be gained through kin selection by supporting
relatives. For a low-ranking animal, by contrast, little is gained by an alliance
with a relative, since relatives are also likely to be low-ranking; much more is to
be gained by forming an alliance with a high-ranking individual who is likely to
have a significant impact on the ally's dominance rank within the group (and
hence directly on its own ability to reproduce).
The fact that animals do discriminate between relatives and non-relatives
naturally raises important questions about the mechanisms of kin recognition.
Even though animals may be unable to recognize relatives in any direct genetic
sense, m uect cues 1 e amt tanty wt usua y su ce to a ow m se ectwn to
work: evolutionary processes are statistical rather than deterministic and
simply require the balance of probabilities to work in favour of a particular
effect. Given that mammals have to spend time with their mothers and,
perhaps, siblings, it is not hard to see that a simple rule of thumb such as 'Be
altruistic towards more familiar individuals' will often have the same genetic
effect (and therefore be selected for) as the more direct rule 'Be altruistic
towards genetically more closely related individuals'.
There is, however, growing evidence that animals can sometimes recognize
genetic relatives independently of their familiarity with them. Species as
different as Japanese quail and rhesus monkeys have been shown to be able to
discriminate relatives from non-relatives, even though they were separated
from them at birth (Bateson 1983, Wu et al. 1980). Much of the interest in this
context has focused on smell and on the genes of the major histocompatibility
(MHC) complex that provide the basis for our immune system (Yamazaki et al.
1976, 1978). Even in humans, emphasis may be placed on identifying features
that might suggest genetic relatedness. In some cultures, relatives' comments
about newborn babies often emphasize inherited features ('Doesn't he have
Grandma's nose!' (Daly and Wilson 1982)). That newborn babies are, of
course, all but indistinguishable as far as most such features are concerned
makes the fact that such references invariably favour paternal relatives rather
than maternal ones all the more significant: among mammals, only the female
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SOCIAL LIFE
knows for sure that she is related to the infant. In cases where the father
normally makes a significant contribution to parental care, the need to convince
the father of his genetic relatedness to the offspring becomes important (and
becomes proportionately all the more important when there is a possibility of
doubt). Obviously, if the male does not invest heavily in his wife's offspring,
then the problem does not arise and we would not expect to find comments of
this kind that stress paternity. This, of course, is just what we see in those
societies where promiscuity is high, paternity certainty (the male's knowledge
of his biological fatherhood) low and the avunculate a common practice.
The question of whether, in humans, biological kinship is related to the ways
in which kin are culturally classified has long been a bone of contention.
Evolutionary biologists have been inclined to insist that such a relationship
does exist, mainly on the grounds that cultural kinship classifications are never
entirely arbitrary with respect to biological kinship. Given the statistical nature
of all biological effects, the fact that humans sometimes make some kinship
assignations that have no basis in biological kinship does not, in itself,
invalidate this claim. The question at issue is whether there is so much
misidentification of biological relatives that the evolutionary process would be
undermined.
By contrast, social and cultural anthropologists have usually insisted that
kinship terminology bears little or no relationship to any underlying biological
'reality' (e.g. Sahlins 1976, Bryant 1981; see also Barnard's discussion in the
o owmg arttc e . However, w ere spect tc cases ave een put orwar m
support of this claim, detailed investigation has invariably revealed that
biological kinship does, in fact, underwrite people's behaviour (e.g. Silk 1980,
Hughes 1988).
Hughes's (1988) analyses of many examples of human kinship-naming
patterns are particularly important in this context because he draws attention to
a misconception underlying many interpretations of sociobiological arguments
about kinship and kin selection-one of which even biologists have been guilty.
The key issue from an evolutionary viewpoint is not whom you are most closely
related to, but rather who is most likely to produce offspring that are most
closely related to you. Hence, we need to look at how coefficients of relationship
within a group of individuals map onto those individuals' own future
reproductive prospects. Hughes's mathematical analyses demonstrate that
genetic fitness is maximized not by allying with relatives in proportion to their
degree of relatedness, but by allying with those relatives who will produce the
largest number of most closely related descendants. These will not always be
the individuals who are most closely related to you in absolute terms; indeed,
they will seldom be the adults in the population. Rather, they will tend most
often to be the older members of the offspring generation (i.e. those
approaching or just past puberty). In an analysis of Bryant's (1981) own data
for a rural Tennessee community, for example, Hughes was able to show that
declared family allegiances (which genuinely bear little relationship to direct
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
genetic relatedness, as Bryant rightly noted) in fact fit rather closely to a pattern
of relatedness concentrating on twelve focal groups of siblings in the current
offspring generation.
Even though kinship classifications may be underpinned by genetic
relatedness in this way, focusing one's kinship allegiances on the offspring
generation creates a serious problem: the offspring generation is never the same
in two consecutive time periods, because offspring continuously age and join
the adult cohort. How, then, is one to establish kin group stability over time?
Hughes points out that the obvious solution is, in fact, to refer the kinship
group backwards to some ancestor, since the ancestor's status will always
remain constant through time, thereby providing a firm point on which to
anchor the pedigree. What is particularly interesting in this context is that it
makes very little difference whether the members of the kinship group are
themselves directly related to that 'ancestor' or not, since beyond about four
generations removed in time the coefficients of relationship between two
individuals are so low that they are, to all intents and purposes, unrelated.
Indeed, it makes little difference whether that ancestor actually existed or not:
the sun, the moon and Mother Earth are as functional in this context as one's
great-great-great-grandfather.
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SOCIAL LIFE
turn is founded on sets of rules that the animals use in order to identify the
most profitable social partners. It is these deep structural rules that turn out to
be universally true for all species, but the particular social pattern that a given
deep structural rule produces depends crucially on the context in which the
animals have to apply it. In different contexts, the application of the same rule
may yield completely contradictory expectations about the optimal behavioural
strategy. Thus, vervet monkeys appear to operate with the rule 'Form those
alliances that will allow you to maximize your chances of contributing to the
species' gene pool'. Which particular alliance partners best allow one to achieve
that goal is, however, very different for high-ranking and low-ranking
individuals (Cheney 1983). Similarly, gelada baboon females appear to operate
with a similar rule, but the choice of preferred alliance partner depends upon
who is available (Dun bar 1984). In part, this is a consequence of the fact that
what animals actually do is almost always a compromise between what they
would really like to do (in an ideal world) and what the demographic and
ecological context allows them to do.
Studies of animals can tell us a great deal about the underlying processes in
human societies. But, as biologists have long been aware, we cannot learn
anything useful by analogical reasoning: studies of non-human animals can tell
us little about the fine details of human social behaviour. Much of that may well
be culturally determined and owe its origins as much to cultural drift
(analogous to genetic drift, itself a perfectly respectable concept in evolutionary
10 ogy as to se ectwn an a aptatwn. However, e avwur ecomes
sociobiologically interesting as soon as it has some influence on the rate at
which the units of selection (either genes or their cultural analogues, 'memes',
in most real world contexts) replicate themselves. From an evolutionary point
of view selection on memes in the m emetic universe is no less interesting than
selection at the genetic level. Indeed, it is quite likely that many cultural
institutions actually comprise a number of facets that are subject to quite
different evolutionary processes. An example might be the need for a religious
system with an omnipotent deity. Belief in a deity of this kind may well help
individuals to survive and reproduce more effectively because it gives
coherence to an apparently chaotic world. Such a belief might be selected for at
the genetic level. But the particular choice of deity to fill this role may have
little or no genetic import: Allah, God, Zeus and the Great Spirit in the Sky
might all be equally good candidates. If they genuinely do not differ in their
consequences for the genetic fitnesses of those who hold them, choice of deity
will then be influenced at the memetic level by a process analogous to genetic
drift. Alternatively, they may be under memetic (but not genetic) selection for
their 'fit' in relation to other aspects of the cultural system: the meme 'Allah'
may not mesh well with key elements of the set of cultural institutions of which
it tries to become a part, and thus be selected against in favour of a more
compatible alternative.
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778
SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
--(1993) 'Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in the human
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French, J.A., Abbott, D.H. and Snowdon, C.T. (1984) 'The effects of social
environment on oestrogen excretion, scent marking and sociosexual behaviour in
tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)', American Journal of Primatology 6, 155-67.
Goodall, J. (1965) 'Chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream Reserve', in I.DeVore (ed.)
Primate Behavior, New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.
--(1986) The Chimpanzees ofGombe, Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hamilton, WD. (1964) 'The genetical evolution of social behaviour, I, 11', Journal of
Theoretical Biology 7:1-52.
Harcourt, A.H. (1989) 'Social influences on competitive ability: alliances and their
consequences', in V.Standen and R.Foley (eds) Comparative Socioecology, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hegner, R.E., Emlen, S.T. and Demong, N.J. (1982) 'Spatial organisation of white-
fronted bee-eaters', Nature, London 298:264-6.
Hinde, R.A. (1976) 'Interactions, relationships and social structure', Man (N.S.) 11: 1-
17.
Hughes, A. (1988) Evolution and Human Kinship, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Humphrey, N.K. (1976) 'The social function of intellect', in P.Bateson and R.Hinde
(eds) Growing Points in Ethology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huxley, J.S. (1942) Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, London: Alien & Unwin.
lngold, T. (1986) Evolution and Social Lift, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Kawai, M., Dunbar, R., Ohsawa, H. and Mori, U. (1983) 'Social organisation of gelada
a oons: soCia umts an e Imtwns , rtmates
Keverne, E.B., Martenz, N.D. and Tuite, B. (1989) 'Beta-endorphin concentrations in
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Lorenz, K. (1960) On Aggression, New York: Harcourt Brace and World.
Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games, Cambridge: Cambridge
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Maynard Smith, J. and Price, G.R. (1973) 'The logic of animal conflict', Nature,
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Milardo, R.M. (1988). 'Families and social networks: an overview of theory and
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Morris, D. (1967) The Naked Ape, London: Constable.
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SOCIAL LIFE
Moss, C. and Poole, J.H. (1983) 'Relationships and social structure of African
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van Schaik, C.P., van Noordwijk, M.A., Wasone, M.A. and Sitriono, E. (1983) 'Party
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Schaller, G. (1972) The Serengeti Lion, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Seyfarth, R.M. (1977) 'A model of social grooming among adult female monkeys',
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Skinner, B.F. (1938) The Behaviour of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, New York:
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Tierpsychologie 20:410-33.
Trivers, R.L. (1971) 'The evolution of reciprocal altruism', Quarterly Review of Biology
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de Waal, F. (1982) Chimpanzee Politics, London: Jonathan Cape.
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de Waal, F. and van Roosmalen, A. (1979) 'Reconciliation and consolation among
chimpanzees', Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology 5:55-66.
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SOCIALITY AMONG HUMANS AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
FURTHER READING
Alexander, R. (1979) Darwinism and Human Affoirs, Seattle, University of Washington
Press.
Chagnon, N.A. and Irons, W. (eds) (1979) Evolutionary Biology and Human Social
Behavior, North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press.
Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1982) Sex, Evolution and Behavior, North Scituate, Mass.:
Duxbury Press.
Dunbar, R.I.M. (1988) Primate Social Systems, London: Chapman & Hall.
Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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782
28
There was a time not long ago when kinship firmly commanded the highest
position among the theoretical realms of anthropology. This is probably no
longer true, but nor is it true that kinship is an idea with a past and no future.
Kms Ip remams as Important as ever as an e ement o uman society, an new
perspectives within the social and biological sciences offer opportunities to
reconsider some old arguments in a new light and to look forward to new
debates and new ideas.
The anthropological study of kinship has traditionally been divided into
three broad areas: group structure (including descent and residence), alliance
(relations through marriage), and the classification of relatives. Rules and
prohibitions are marked out within each of these areas, and the very existence
of such rules engenders an overlap between them, an overlap which is itself,
arguably, the very essence of 'social structure'. The purposes of this article are
first to highlight the significance of such rules and prohibitions in the
foundation of human society, and second to look at recent developments and
reconsider some common preconceptions about kinship, of which some but
certainly not all were inherent in the old debates. My focus is on topics which I
think have the greatest relevance for the future study of humankind, and not
necessarily on those most significant in the history of kinship studies. Thus, for
example, the transformational analysis of relationship terminologies is not
treated at all (for a review, see Borland 1979), 'prescription' and 'elementary
structures' will be treated only in passing, while the debate concerning the
meaning and applicability of biological notions of 'kinship' receives greater
emphasis.
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784
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Fourth, on a not unrelated point, the reason why anthropologists have been
especially prone to 'discovering' structural parallels and contrasts within the
realm of kinship is that kinship is the most transparently structured of all
realms of human life. It is not merely that kinship experts have devised complex
notation systems and other technical devices beyond the ken of, say, specialists
in religion or politics. The logical primacy of the genealogical grid in kinship
studies gives specialists a tool for cross-cultural comparison of a kind that is not
available in other fields. Not since the Romans first recognized the equivalence
of their gods and goddesses to those in the Greek pantheon have Western
minds come up with such a clear-cut datum point for structural comparison-
or, if one prefers, cultural 'translation'-as the notion of 'genealogical
relationship'.
Fifth, and to turn full circle, kinship studies have promoted a quasi-fallacy
that kinship is built on models that are more 'real' than those of religion, of
economics, of politics, or of law. In truth, kinship is no more real than these
other notions; it is rather that kinship structures are more apparent cross-
culturally than the structures identified and studied by specialists in religion,
economics and politics. The apparent cross-cultural 'reality' of kinship stems
from an erroneous equation of 'kinship' with 'biology'. Kinship, for virtually
all human societies, is built upon a putative biological foundation.
Nevertheless, this is a cultural phenomenon and not per se a biological one. The
incest taboo, the family, and the genealogical grid are substantive universals of
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786
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Gellner, Needham and Barnes. The debate was played out in a series of five
articles, originally published in the journal Philosophy of Science between the
years 1957 and 1963. I shall cite here from the reprints of Gellner's three
articles, which appeared, along with other relevant essays, in his book The
Concept of Kinship (1973:154-203), as well as from Needham's (1960) reply to
the first of Gellner's articles and Barnes's (1961) reply to the second. The
minutiae of attack and counter-attack need not concern us. Much more
important are the implications of the arguments, which hinge on the relation
between 'biological' and 'social' kinship.
Gellner's position is that social kinship is axiomatically bound to a
'biological' foundation (1973 [1957]:154-62). For Gellner, and indeed for the
other protagonists, the terms 'biological' and 'physical' were taken as essentially
synonymous and applied to the facts of reproduction. However, his purpose in
his original paper was less to explain kinship per se than to use 'kinship
structure' as a device with which to illustrate the operation of an 'ideal
language', as conceived by Wittgenstein and other early-twentieth-century
philosophers. The specific aspect of kinship structure which Gellner employed
was the relation between generations as constructed in a hypothetical 'naming'
system, in which children would bear the 'names' of their ancestors in a certain
logical order. For example, 'if Joan has three sons and Joan's name is J, their
names would beJlX,J2X, andJ3X where X conveys the necessary information
about their respective fathers or father and in turn their ancestry' (Gellner
7 : e ner was apparent y assummg t at mem ers o IS ypot ettca
society had much the same theory of procreation as members of his own society,
for a biological physical relationship is assumed to be recognized as a
preliminary to the naming of children.
Needham's attack centred on Gellner's apparent confusion of biological and
social relationships. For Needham, only the latter are of any significance at all
for the anthropologist, although he admits a degree of 'concordance' between
'biology' (here being defined as actual genetic parentage) and 'descent' (the
socially defined rules for stipulating the relations between members of different
generations). Gellner retorted that this latter admission on Needham's part
rules out any attempt to separate biology from descent. They are inextricably
bound together. What is important is that 'physical relationships' are used 'for
social purposes' (Gellner 1973: 170), to be enunciated or ignored by social
actors according to social customs and perhaps individual aspirations.
Barnes's position-which Gellner regarded as a 'refinement' of
Needham's-is that the social anthropologist should be concerned with
'physical relationships' but only in the form in which these are defined by
members of the society under consideration: the Trobriand Islanders, the
Nuer, the English, etc. Thus there are three possible levels of analysis: of true
genetic relationships between individuals, of 'biological' relationships (as
defined by people of the society in question), and of social relationships. For
Barnes, the first is irrelevant for social anthropology, while the latter two, and
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the relation between them, fall firmly within the subdiscipline's rightful
domain of enquiry. Gellner (1973: 198-200) counters this suggestion by
pointing out that social anthropologists themselves, in their ethnographies, do
indeed take for granted 'physical reality' as defined within their own
anthropological culture.
It seems to me that despite the apparent plausibility of Gellner's counter-
attacks, Needham and more particularly Barnes have got it more or less right.
Needham re-articulates the view, generally accepted both before and after
Gellner, that anthropology should not concern itself with the truth or lack of
truth in other people's belief systems (on this point, see Lewis in this volume,
article 20). Thanks to his recognition of a flaw in Gellner's argument-the
failure to distinguish between (1) true biological knowledge, or more
specifically the knowledge of genetic relationships and the facts of
reproduction, and (2) socially constructed 'biological' knowledge-Barnes has
given us a useful analytical insight. He has defined precisely what had earlier
lain implicit in anthropological understanding: the existence of three rather
than two levels of analysis. The interplay between the biological and the social
has a middle ground (socially constructed 'biological' knowledge), and the
terms of this middle ground are not universal but culturally specific.
Nevertheless, none of the contributors to the original debate tackled the final
problem alluded to by Gellner: the fact that there is something, which we call
'kinship', that is understood cross-culturally and is described by
ant ropo ogtsts m a way w tc presupposes certam umversa s.
Needham (1971) and Barnard and Good (1984:187-9) have commented on
the need for a polythetic definition of 'kinship'. Kinship is understood cross
culturally not because it has a single defining feature in all societies, but because
similar sets of features are found in every society, without any single feature
being necessary as the defining one. There are universals in kinship, but these
universals are the constructs of anthropologists rather than of informants.
Gellner's initial premiss was that human kinship systems are based on biology,
and his conclusion, seven years on in the debate, was that this must be true
because anthropologists themselves share a knowledge of certain biological
facts and use this biological idiom in their ethnographic descriptions. But does
the same biological idiom form part of the knowledge of all human societies? I
think not. There is no reason to suppose that Australian Aborigines, Bedouin
nomads, or Chinese peasants have the same notions of procreation that we have
in the West. Even Western scientists have only relatively recently-in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries-come to understand anything of the
mechanisms of ovulation and fertilization which educated Europeans now take
for granted (see Barnes 1973:65-6). The fact that scientific knowledge is itself
defined, not in nature, but according to the culture of science, is a further
complication.
Gellner's 'cultural universal' is neither true biological knowledge nor a
shared cultural knowledge of biology. It is the genealogical grid, a device
788
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
'Fatherhood'
The problems of defining biological fatherhood have been couched in terms of
the theoretical issues outlined above. True biology being irrelevant, the notion
of 'father' is supposed to encompass two basic elements which, in relation to
any particular child, may or may not specify the same individual. These
elements are ( 1) the indigenous recognition of having contributed something
by way of material substance to the child, and (2) the recognized conferral on
the child of a specific social identity with its attendant rights and obligations.
Drawing on a pair of Latin terms, the first element is said in conventional
anthropological accounts to specify the child's genitor, whereas the second is
said to specify its pater, or 'social father'.
However, the ethnographic situation is often more complicated than this
simple distinction implies. Consider the beliefs of the Trobriand Islanders.
Malinowski (1932 [1929]:140-78) reports that, when a person dies, that
person's spirit is believed first to go to the Island of the Dead and later to
return to eart to Impregnate a woman o Its own su c an. ImpregnatiOn IS sat
to be either through the head or through the vagina, but there is no suggestion
in Malinowski's account that the woman's husband is believed to be involved in
the contribution of genetic substance to the child. He simply 'opens up' the
woman for childbirth. Children are supposed to resemble their mothers'
husbands because of the close physical relationship between husband and wife,
not because of the implantation of semen.
In his account, Malinowski took these beliefs at face value, as a reflection of
the Trobrianders' alleged ignorance of the male role in conception. In their
rather different ways, Spiro (1968) and Leach (1968) argued against this
position, by appealing to the contrast between a public doctrine of the denial of
physiological paternity and a more matter-of-fact (according to Leach) or
repressed (according to Spiro) knowledge of the 'true' process of procreation
(see Barnard and Good 1984: 170-4). Yet whatever the Trobriand equivalent of
'genitor' might be, there is little doubt that the Trobrianders have a concept of
'pater' as both genealogical (mother's husband) and social father, at least
comparable to the Latin or English notion, though different in some respects.
The Trobriand word is tama, which is applied rather more widely than its Latin
or English equivalents (it denotes not only the father but also the father's
brother, father's sister's son, etc.). Some evidence that tama really is
genealogically, if not biologically, similar in definition to the notion of 'father'
in other languages, may be found in the fact that its reciprocal is also the
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SOCIAL LIFE
reciprocal of ina (mother): both 'parents' apply the word latu (child) to their
'children'. Further evidence is that the wife of any (classificatory) tama is called
one's ina, and the husband of any ina is called one's tama. Socially, we can
speak of those called tama as 'fathers' because of these genealogical
equivalences, but it is always worth remembering that the notion of 'fatherly'
attitudes and behaviour in one society may be quite different from that in
another. For the Trobrianders, the father is an indulgent figure more akin to a
favourite uncle in Western societies, whereas the Trobriand mother's brother is
just the opposite, a Freudian father-figure par excellence.
'Motherhood'
The concept of 'motherhood' is even more interesting. It actually entails three
distinct elements, each of which has potential for social recognition. We can
distinguish: ( 1) the culturally defined genetic mother, (2) the bearing or
carrying mother, and (3) the social mother. Following ancient Roman (Latin)
usage, modern anthropologists have generally conflated the first two, often
under the term genetrix, and distinguished the last by the term mater. Yet the
conflation of the former cannot be sustained, either on logical or on biological
grounds. Indeed the distinction, which ancient Romans and anthropologists
alike have failed to make, is not new within Western thought.
The culturally defined genetic mother is the female recognized by society as
avmg gtven matena su stance to t e c 1 . T IS su stance, o course, nee
not correspond to that which modern biological science deems to be definitive
of 'true' genetic motherhood. For example, the common belief, found in many
parts of the world, that the child's 'flesh' comes from its mother's 'blood', while
its 'bone' comes from its father's 'semen', reflects a notion of genetic
motherhood (and fatherhood) which differs from that of Western science. As
noted above, the true facts of genetics discovered by nineteenth- and twentieth-
century scientists are, as such, largely irrelevant for the anthropological study
of kinship; what are important are the indigenous theories. The peculiarity in
the study of Western kinship is that Western science itself, or aspects of it, form
part of our own folk knowledge.
The bearing or carrying mother is the person who gives birth to the child.
Of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is the same person as the
culturally defined genetic mother, but the concept is nevertheless distinct.
Consider three cases: the Orthodox Christian doctrine of the Virgin Mary as
Theotokos, the Aranda belief in 'conception clans', and the modern medical
notion of 'test-tube babies'. In each of these cases, the definition of the
'mother' is closely bound up with the relationship between this 'mother' and a
culturally designated 'father'.
Greek-speaking Christians recognized the distinction between the genetic
mother and the bearing mother as early as AD 4 31, when the Council of
Ephesus formally proclaimed the doctrine of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos
790
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
791
SOCIAL LIFE
the potential kinship ideologies and social relationships that may emerge from
putting them into practice are intricate and enigmatic. While some artificial
methods are both possible and realized (artificial insemination in utero,
fertilization in vitro, and ovum transfer), others are theoretically possible if not
yet practical or practised. Consider, for example, the possibility of a person
other than the genetic mother receiving a fertilized ovum or embryo, and where
neither this surrogate mother nor the genetic mother becomes the social
mother of the child, and where the sperm donor, too, is a different person from
the child's intended social father. This would give the child no less than two
'fathers' and three 'mothers'! This is only one, if the most complex, of a great
number of vexing possibilities (see Laborie et al. 1985: 14-16). The existence of
customs such as wet-nursing among the European upper classes of historical
times raises a further consideration, as in such cases the nurturing mother is yet
another category, and one with a biological as well as a social role.
Of course, knowledge flows both ways. Just as 'test-tube babies' have
important implications for kinship theory, so indigenous ideologies (such as
those of the Australian Aborigines) have much to add to Western
understandings of such medical practices and their social consequences. Yet, as
Riviere ( 1985) has pointed out, little note has been taken of the contribution
that anthropology can make in unravelling the cultural perceptions behind
biological 'facts'. Politicians, lawyers, doctors and moral philosophers, all new
to the problem, have had at least as much trouble explaining the relationship
etween genetics an parentage as ave t e urc Fat ers, t e ran a, or t e
anthropologists who have considered such issues. Peculiarly, the Committee of
Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology, which reported to the
British government in 1984 (Warnock 1985), included no anthropologists. For
the time being at least, the philosophers have been left holding the baby.
Social parenthood
Social parenthood is best defined as a culturally recognized relationship which
involves one or more of the following roles: nurturing and socialization (these,
of course, are not necessarily exclusive of biological input), obligations of
guardianship, and equivalent rights as a guardian (either in rem or in personam).
In particular cases, social parenthood may or may not coincide with any specific
kind of biological parenthood, but within a given society as a whole it is
generally expected that those designated as 'parents' will normally have
biological (in the sense of 'shared substance') or pseudo-biological ties, as well
as jural ties, to their 'children'.
This definition is clearly imprecise, but it is exactly this imprecision which
makes it more or less universally applicable to the great diversity of human
societies (cf. Barnard and Good 1984: 187-9). The nature of 'parenting', of
course, is extremely variable. As Malinowski (1966 [1927]:14-19) found, the
free and indulgent father-son relationship among the Trobriand Islanders
792
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
manifested a very different notion of fatherhood from that of his native Central
European experience.
Social parenthood is an outgrowth of the nuclear family, another commonly
cited human universal. The simple two-parent nuclear family is the statistical
norm in many Western and industrialized societies and serves as a basis for
family organization elsewhere. Yet two qualifying factors (among other
possibilities) deserve special mention: (1) the existence of alternative and more
complex domestic arrangements, and (2) the practice of acquiring children
from outside the nuclear family. The former is represented by such practices as
eo-residence of parents and adult children or of siblings, or polygamy and
concubinage, and the latter is exemplified by fostering and adoption. Let us
examine each in turn.
The classical formulation of the idea of the nuclear family as a universal may
be attributed to Murdock (1949:1-40), who argued that other human family
types can be identified as variations on the nuclear family theme, like atoms
'aggregated, as it were, into molecules' (1949:23). In such societies as have
them, these alternative forms often entail 'parental' obligations on the part of
other senior members of the domestic unit. Such family types include the
compound family (defined as a polygamous household, e.g. a man, his wives
and children), the joint family (involving a formalized collectivity of relatives,
e.g. a group of brothers, their wives and children), and the extended family
when defined as a domestic unit (usually understood as a less formalized
eo ecttvtty o re attves s anng t e same we mg pace . Event e one-parent
family is, arguably, a form of nuclear family-simply one that involves one
rather than the typical two parents.
The practice of acquiring children from outside the nuclear family is not
uncommon. Two ways in which children are brought into the family for
nurturing and socialization are 'fostering' and 'adoption'. The distinction
between them is commonplace in modern legal systems, especially in the West.
Fostering, or fosterage, involves nurturing and socialization without full social
parenthood (often as an initial step towards adoption), while adoption does
involve full social parenthood. However, this distinction is not always as clear-
cut in other societies as it may seem in ours, and finer distinctions are
sometimes called for. In West Africa, for example, there exists a complex of
fostering practices based upon notions of legal obligation within and between
kin groups, as well as upon the economic and political considerations of
particular families. Domestic help on the part of fostered girls, apprenticeship
and inherited clientship on the part of boys, even the 'pawning' of children
between creditors, have all formed part of West African fosterage in recent
times (E.N.Goody 1984).
A further word of caution: while in modern Western societies, 'adoption' is
most commonly thought of as a method of incorporating and legitimating
parentless children into a nuclear family, this is far from its original
significance. Nor does the term convey much information about the culturally
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varied practices which it is called upon to designate. The ancient Roman notion
of adoptio ('adoption' of a legal dependent), like the related concept of adrogatio
('adoption' of an independent), had much more in common with establishing
political alliance through marriage than it did with the upbringing of hapless
waifs. It had to do with the potential inheritance of wealth by one's chosen
'son'. The adopted 'son', more often than not an adult, would maintain filial
affection towards his original parents, while acquiring the legal status of'son' to
someone else (E.N.Goody 1971:340-2; cf. Rawson 1986:173-86.)
Rules of descent
In formal terms, there are six logical possibilities for the transmission of group
membership (or of other rights, as with the inheritance of property or
succession to office) from one generation to the next (N eedham 1971: 10).
These correspond to the traditional notions of patrilineal, matrilineal, double,
bilateral, parallel, and cross-descent. Patrilineal and matrilineal descent are
virtually self-explanatory, whereas the distinction between double and bilateral
descent tends to be more troublesome. The final two forms are in fact
opposites.
Double (or duolineal) descent comprises simultaneous patrilineal and
matrilineal descent: a child belongs to the patrilineal group of its father and the
matrilineal group of its mother, and patrilineal and matrilineal groups belong
to different sets. To take an imaginary example, the patrilineal groups may be
localized clans, say 'Alsace', 'Burgundy' and 'Bourdeau', while the matrilineal
groups are non-localized moieties, say the 'Whites' and the 'Reds'. If the
groups are exogamous, as ethnographically they often are, then a 'White Alsace'
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RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Rules of residence
There are some seven possible rules of postmarital residence, several of which,
w en coup e wtt ru es o escent, ave orma tmp tcatwns or group
structure. These possible rules include virilocal (in the natal locale of the
husband), uxorilocal (in the natal locale of the wife), avunculocal (with the
husband's mother's brother), amitalocal (with the wife's father's sister),
duo local (the separate residence of husband and wife), ambilocal (in either the
natal locale of the husband or that of the wife), and neolocal (in a new locale)
residence. Amitalocal residence-formally the inverse of avunculocal
residence-is ethnographically unattested, though it might be anticipated in a
strongly patrilineal, strongly female-dominated society, if such were ever
found.
Virilocal and amitalocal residence, when coupled with patrilineal descent,
have the logical propensity to foster the recruitment of de focto patrilineal
groups. Virilocal residence would keep the men of the group together, while
amitalocal residence would keep the women together. Uxorilocal residence and
avunculocal residence, when coupled with matrilineal descent, would similarly
foster the recruitment to matrilineal groups. Uxorilocal residence would keep
the women of the group together, while avunculocal residence would keep the
men together. Duolocal residence preserves the stability of existing residential
groupings but is generally unstable and, where it is found (as among the
Ashanti of West Africa), usually occurs only as an initial stage in married life
(see Fortes 1949). In contrast to all of these, ambilocal residence and neolocal
residence bear no formal relationship to potential unilineal groups. A
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RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
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RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
of his deceased brother (a woman to the brother of her deceased husband). The
latter term may also include cases, as among the Nuer of southern Sudan,
where the woman is taken in by the brother of her husband, but remains legally
married to her dead husband and may bear children in his name.
The Nuer are also anthropologically famous as exemplars of other, more
unusual forms of marriage (Evans-Pritchard 1951 :29-123). Apart from
leviratic marriage and 'normal marriage', in which bridewealth of cattle is paid
from the bridegroom to the family of the bride, there are two intriguing
varieties known as 'ghost marriage' and 'woman marriage'. Ghost marriage is
somewhat similar to leviratic marriage, except that it occurs when a man dies
childless, especially if the death is a result of fighting. The ghost of the man is
married to a woman and bridewealth is paid in his name. Children are fathered
on his behalf by one of his close kinsmen. Woman marriage occurs usually
when a woman is thought to be barren. She becomes socially 'male' and the
'husband' of another woman. The male kin of this female 'husband', or other
males, beget children on her behalf. The males are recognized as genitors of her
children, while she is defined as the pater.
Woman marriage is in fact found in other parts of Africa as well, perhaps most
notably among the Lovedu of South Africa, where historically it has had a
powerful impact on the political system. Since around 1800 the Lovedu have
been ruled by a line of biologically female, but socially male women, the remote
and mysterious 'Rain-Queens'. Ideally, each queen since that time has been
po ygamous y marne to ot er ema es m a pattern m w tc an actua not
classificatory) brother's daughter of each of the wives follows her father's sister to
the queen's harem. They may remain there to be impregnated by male members
of the royal house, or they may be redistributed to the queen's relatives or other
subjects elsewhere. This pattern maintains alliances between the royal house and
the people of scattered localities, each distant group proudly assenting to the
power of the queen, their kinsman (Krige 1975:249-52).
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the incest taboo proper. Among these, Westermarck ( 1891) contended that
humans have a natural abhorrence of mating with close kin, while Freud (1960
[1913]) suggested just the opposite. Other writers emphasized the relation
between incest regulation and marriage prohibitions. Chief among these was
McLennan who, in his famous Primitive Marriage ( 1970 [ 1865]), argued that
the basis of human society was exogamy, or 'marrying out', a term which he
invented. In McLennan's view, the prohibition of sex and consequently
marriage within the tribe was directly related to the development of the capture
of women, first as concubines, and later as wives. Indeed the symbols of
capture, of yielding, or of giving away the bride are still common throughout
the world in societies at all levels of social evolution. Problems like the relative
importance of nature and nurture, the relation between descent and alliance,
and the genesis of human society itself are also fundamentally related to the
origin of this supreme taboo (see Fox 1980, Arens 1986). While the precise
definition of an incestuous relationship is specific to each culture, the
prohibition of incest is virtually universal. For this reason, Levi-Strauss, in his
most profound book The Elementary Structures of Kinship ( 1969 [1949]: 12-25),
equated the incest taboo with the origin of culture itself.
More recently, exogamy has returned as a focus of serious interest. Knight, a
contemporary anthropologist in the nineteenth-century mould, has been
developing a theory of the origin of culture which hinges on the exchange of sex
(from dominant women) for meat (from male hunters). The intricacies of this
comp ex t eory are we eyon t e scope o t IS arttc e, ut t e mterestmg
point about it is that Knight has placed incest in the context of food exchange.
Central to the theory is the so-called 'own kill rule', according to which
individual hunters will not eat the animals they kill but will instead exchange
them (Knight 1986, see also Knight 1991 ). Among many hunting and gathering
and small-scale cultivating peoples, eating one's own kill is likened to incest,
and the exchange of food is likened to the exchange of women.
Of course, exogamy is only one side of the marital coin. Endogamy also
needs to be explained. 'Societies', 'tribes', and 'traditional communities' the
world over are largely endogamous, almost by definition, but frequently
marriage takes place within smaller units than these. While major reasons for
societal, tribal or community endogamy may be geographical proximity and
familiarity, the principal reasons for marriage to close kin may be more subtle.
One reason is the preservation of the kin group or kin line itself, perhaps
expressed symbolically by the notion of the 'purity of the blood'. A classic case
of this is brother-sister marriage in Ancient Egypt (Hopkins 1980). Another
explanation often encountered is that close kin marriage keeps property in the
family or acts to preserve its unity. The best-known case here is preferential
marriage to the father's brother's daughter, common in North Africa and the
Near and Middle East. In this latter case, the explanation may be made explicit
by informants, or, perhaps more commonly, may lie deep in the indigenous
kinship consciousness-in what Bourdieu (1977:30-71) calls the habitus, an
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RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Marital exchange
It would offend many in the field of kinship studies if I were to pass on without
a word about alliance theory and prescriptive marriage. As Maybury-Lewis
(1965:228) has written: 'To paraphrase Dr Johnson, a man who is tired of issues
such as these is tired of social anthropology'. Be that as it may, the theories and
debates surrounding this subject are too numerous and too complex for me to
review them in detail here (but see Barnard and Good 1984:95-118). Instead I
shall draw attention to just a few of the ideas which have sprung from the
copious writings on the subject.
Alliance theory is usually traced to Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures
of Kinship, published in French in 1949, though not translated into English
until 1969 from the French second edition (see also Levi-Strauss 1963 [1945]:
46-9). In contrast to descent theory, alliance theory concentrates not on the
formation of groups, but on the relations established between them through
marriage. Levi-Strauss distinguished 'elementary' from 'complex' structures,
the former characterizing societies which have a positive marriage rule (e.g. one
must marry someone of the category cross-cousin), the latter characterizing
societies which have a negative marriage rule (e.g. as in Western society, one
may marry anyone who is not close kin). Elementary structures are further
divided into those where there is direct or restricted exchange (normally,
marriage to the category of the first or second cross-cousin), those where there
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Morgan's discovery
M organ's discovery of the 'classificatory system of relationship' is, in my view,
the single most significant ethnographic breakthrough of all time. The idea that
different societies classified relatives differently had been noted before M organ,
notably by the eighteenth-century missionary among the Iroquois, Joseph
802
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Relationship terminologies
Morgan's own taxonomy of relationship terminologies included only two
types: 'descriptive' and 'classificatory'. Descriptive terminologies were defined
as those which distinguish direct relatives (direct ancestors and descendants of
ego, plus ego's siblings) from collaterals (all other consanguineal relatives).
Classificatory terminologies were defined as those which, at least from some
genealogical points of reference, fail to make such a distinction. For example,
the relationship terminology of the !Kung Bushmen would be regarded as
descriptive, because, as in English, father and father's brother are
terminologically distinguished (respectively, ba and tsu in !Kung; 'father' and
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804
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
805
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806
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
properties of kinship systems. Indeed Rivers looked forward to the day when
'many parts of the description of the social systems of savage tribes will
resemble a work on mathematics in which the results will be expressed by
symbols, in some cases even in the form of equations' (1914, I: 10). There is a
sense in which Rivers's prediction has come true. The form, if not the content,
of human kinship may share properties of algebraic systems, just as algebraic
systems in turn share properties with geometric ones. To some, alliance
structures are but patterns which can be created through actual or imagined
marriages between people belonging to actual or imagined groups or categories.
In recent years Australian Aboriginal kinship has been likened to the double
helix (Denham et al. 1979); twisted cylinders (Tjon Sie Fat 1983);
kaleidoscopic reflections, frieze patterns and wallpaper designs (Lucich
1987:1-150); and barn dances (Alien 1982). But building mathematical models
for the sake of it cannot be the answer.
On firmer ground, Levi-Strauss (1968:351) once suggested that in
presenting Aboriginal kinship in formal terms we might, unknowingly, be
'trying to get back to the older [indigenous] theory at the origin of the facts we
are trying to explain'. He had in mind the idea of a primeval 'Plato' or
'Einstein', who used kinship as a means of abstract expression. This idea was
ridiculed by Hiatt ( 1968), and most anthropologists today would probably
prefer Hiatt's sceptical empiricism to Levi-Strauss's conjectures. Von
Brandenstein ( 1970:49), in turn, has likened Aboriginal thought to medieval
a c emy an t e our- umour system o a en, w 1 e Turner o ers a
brilliant reanalysis of the Book of Genesis through Aboriginal spectacles. The
truth is that while wild ideas and grudging squabbles like these give
anthropology its purchase on the broader issues of Western philosophy and
social theory, at the same time they do as much to obscure as to reveal the
cultural systems whose properties and workings we set out to understand.
I believe that the future of kinship studies lies in two directions: first, in the
greater awareness of the importance of such studies in understanding our own
preconceptions, as they touch on such issues as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy,
and the law of incest; and second, in the continuing rediscovery that kinship is
good to think with. Travel in these two directions can be simultaneous, and by
doing so we shall not necessarily end up in two separate places.
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Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beattie, J.H.M. (1964) 'Kinship and social anthropology', Man 64:101-3.
Borland, C. H. (1979) 'Kinship term grammar: a review', Anthropos 74:326-52.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Brandenstein, C.G.von (1970) 'The meaning of section and section names', Oceania
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Collier, J.F. and Rosaldo, M.Z. (1982) 'Politics and gender in simple societies', in
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Denham, W. W., McDaniel, C.K. and Atkins, JR. ( 1979) 'Aranda and Alyawara kinship:
a quantitative argument for a double helix model', American Ethnologist 6: 1-24.
Dumont, L. (1975) Dravidien et Kariera: /'alliance de marriage dans l'inde du sud et en
australie, Paris/The Hague: Mouton.
Ember, M. and Ember, C. (1983) Marriage, Family, and Kinship: Comparative Studies of
Social Organization, New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1951) Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Fortes, M. (1949) 'Time and social structure: an Ashanti case study', in M.Fortes (ed.)
octa tructure:
University Press.
--(1969) Kinship and the Social Order: the Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
--(1983) Rules and the Emergence of Society, London: Royal Anthropological
Institute Occasional Paper no. 39.
Fox, R. (1967) Kinship and Marriage: an Anthropological Perspective, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
--(1975) 'Primate kin and human kinship', in R.Fox (ed.) Biosocial Anthropology,
A.S.A. Studies no. 1, London: Malaby Press.
--(1980) The Red Lamp of Incest: an Inquiry into the Origins of Mind and Society,
Notre Dame, lnd.: University of Notre Dame Press.
Freud, S. (1960 [1913]) Totem and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fuller, C.J. (1976) The Nayars Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fuller, S. (1936) Test Tube Baby, New York: God win.
Gellner, E. (1973) The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays, Oxford: Blackwell.
Good, A. (1981) 'Prescription, preference and practice: marriage patterns among the
Kondaiyankottai Maravar of South India', Man (N.S.) 16:108-29.
Goody, E.N. (1971) 'Forms of pro-parenthood: the sharing and substitution of parental
roles', inJ.Goody (ed.) Kinship: Selected Readings, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
--(1984) 'Parental strategies: calculation or sentiment? Fostering practices among
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the Study of Family and Kinship, Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press
and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de L'Homme.
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RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Goody, JR. (1969) Comparative Studies in Kinship, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
--(1976) Production and Reproduction: a Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain,
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--(1983) The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge:
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Goody, JR. and Tambiah, S.J. (1973) Bridewealth and Dowry, Cambridge: Cambridge
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Siidamerikas', Zeitschrifi for Ethnologie 63:85-193.
Knight, C. D. (1986) 'The hunter's own kill rule', paper presented at the Fourth
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September 1986.
--(1991) Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, New Haven and
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Krige, E.J. (1975) 'Asymmetric matrilateral cross-cousin marriage: the Lovedu case',
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Kuper, A. (1970) 'The Kgalagari and the jural consequences of marriage', Man (N.S.)
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Laborie, F., Marcus-Steiff, J and Moutet, J (1985) 'Procreations et filiations. Logiques
des conceptions et des nominations', L'Homme 95(xxv[3]):5-38.
Lafitau, J (1724) Moeurs des sauvages ameriquaines, comparie aux moeurs des premiers
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Leach, E.R. (1951) 'The structural implications of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage',
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--(1968) 'Virgin birth' [letter]. Man (N.S.) 3:655-66.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1963) Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books.
--(1966) 'The future of kinship studies', Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological
Institute for 1965:13-22.
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Lowie, R.H. (1928) 'A note on relationship terminologies', American Anthropologist 30:
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Armidale: Light Stone Publications.
McLennan, J.F. (1970 [1865]) Primitive Marriage. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
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Maddock, K. (1972) The Australian Aborigines: a Portrait of Their Society, London:
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Maine, H. (1861) Ancient Law, London: John Murray.
Malinowski, B. (1930) 'Kinship', Man 30:19-29.
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Routledge & Sons.
Maybury-Lewis, D.H.P. (1965) 'Prescriptive marriage systems', Southwestern Journal
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Morgan, L.H. (1871) Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family,
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through Barbarism to Civilization, New York: Holt.
Murdock, G.P. (1949) Social Structure, New York: Macmillan.
810
RULES AND PROHIBITIONS: HUMAN KINSHIP
Service, E.R. (1985) A Century of Controversy: Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960,
Orlando: Academic Press.
Spiro, M. E. (1968) 'Virgin birth, parthenogenesis and physiological paternity: an essay
in cultural interpretation', Man (N.S.) 3:242-61.
Strehlow, T.G.H. (1947) Aranda Traditions, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Tjon Sie Fat, F.E. (1983) 'Age metrics and twisted cylinders: predictions from a
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Trautmann, T.R. (1987) Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Turner, D. H. (1985) Life Before Genesis: a Conclusion, New York: Peter Lang.
Ware, T. (1984) The Orthodox Church, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Warnock, M. (1985) A Question of Life, Oxford: Blackwell.
Welter, V. (1988) Verwandtschaftsterminologie und Sozialorganisation: Einige
ethnosoziologische Interpretationen der Crow/Omaha-Systeme, Emsdetten: Andreas
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Westermarck, E. (1891) The History of Human Marriage (3 volumes), London:
Macmillan.
FURTHER READING
Barnard, A. and Good, A. (1984) Research Practices in the Study of Kinship, London:
Academic Press.
Bohannan, P. and Middleton, J. (eds) (1968) Kinship and Social Organization, Garden
Cit : Natural Histor Press.
Dumont, L. (1971) Introduction d deux theories d'anthropologie sociale, Paris and The
Hague: Mouton.
Fox, R. (1967) Kinship and Marriage: an Anthropological Perspective, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Goody, JR. (1969) Comparative Studies in Kinship, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
--(ed.) (1971) Kinship, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
--(ed.) (1973) The Character of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graburn, N. (ed.) (1971) Readings in Kinship and Social Structure, New York: Harper &
Row.
Heritier, F. (1981) L'Exercice de la parente, Paris: Gallimard.
Leach, E.R. (1961) Rethinking Anthropology, London: Athlone Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1966) 'The future of kinship studies', Proceedings of the Royal
Anthropological Institute for 1965:13-22.
--(1969 [1949]) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 2nd edn, London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode.
Morgan, L.H. (1871) Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family,
Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
Needham, R. (ed.) (1971) Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, A.S.A. Monographs no. 11,
London: Tavistock.
--(1973) 'Prescription', Oceania 42:166-81.
--(1986) 'Alliance', Oceania 56:165-80.
Schneider, D.M. (1980 [1968]) American Kinship: a Cultural Account, 2nd edn,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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This 'new vision' of the relationship between biology and behaviour, and the
revised view of biology on which it is based, have been relatively slow to
influence thinking in the social sciences because of the way in which social
scientists have been, and continue to be, haunted by the shadow of biological
determinism, especially in its most recent guise as sociobiology. It was, in part,
to try and combat biologically deterministic arguments that feminist
anthropologists in the 1970s emphasized the importance of distinguishing
biological sex from gender. The idea that the terms 'woman' and 'man' denote
Margaret Mead who, in Sex and Temperament (1935), had argued that
considerable cultural variability exists in definitions of femaleness and
maleness. This approach was extended and developed in the 1970s, and much
new ethnographic evidence for variability in what the categories 'woman' and
'man' mean in different cultural contexts demonstrates clearly that biological
differences between the sexes cannot provide a universal basis for social
definitions. In other words, biological differences cannot be said to determine
gender constructs, and, as a result, there can be no unitary or essential meaning
attributable to the category 'woman' or to the category 'man' (Moore 1988:7).
The distinction between biological sex and gender has proved absolutely
crucial for the development of feminist analysis in the social sciences, because it
has enabled scholars to demonstrate that the relations between women and
men, and the symbolic meanings associated with the categories 'woman' and
'man', are socially constructed and cannot be assumed to be natural, fixed or
predetermined. Cross-cultural data have been particularly useful in this regard,
providing the empirical evidence to show that gender differences and gender
relations are culturally and historically variable.
In spite of this work, however, the actual relationship between biological sex
and the cultural construction of gender has remained largely unexamined, since
this relationship has been assumed to be relatively unproblematic. Thus, while it
is acknowledged that gender constructs are not determined by biological sex
814
UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
differences, there has been a tendency, in much social science writing, to assume
that gender categories and gender meanings are cultural devices designed to
comprehend and manage the obvious fact of binary sex differences. These sex
differences, in turn, are taken to be clearly visible in the physical attributes of the
human body, and are recognized as crucial for the biological reproduction of
human populations. In short, there has been an implicit assumption that binary
biological sex differences underlie, even if they do not determine, gender
categories and gender relations (Yanagisako and Collier 1987: 15).
However, this point needs further clarification in the light of the arguments
of a number of anthropologists to the effect that some cultures do not
emphasize the biological-by which they appear to mean 'physiological'-
differences between women and men. In other words, differences between
women and men are said to exist in certain domains of social life, for example
with regard to spiritual potency, ritual efficacy or moral worth, but are not
thought to be derived from biological differences. In such instances, women
and men are often conceived to be essentially similar in their physical makeup.
This has led some writers to argue that biology does not, in fact, even underlie
gender constructs, let alone determine them:
Natural features of gender, and natural processes of sex and reproduction, furnish
only a suggestive and ambiguous backdrop to the cultural organization of gender
and sexuality. What gender is, what men and women are, what sorts of relations do
. . .
elaborate upon biological 'givens', but are largely products of social and cultural
processes. The very emphasis on the biological factor within different cultural
traditions is variable; some cultures claim that male-female differences are almost
entirely biologically grounded, whereas others give biological differences, or
supposed biological differences, very little emphasis.
(Ortner and Whitehead 1981:1)
There are two important points to be made about arguments of this kind. First,
they do still posit a radical distinction between (biological) sex and (culturally
constructed) gender. In fact, the distinction they suggest is even more radical
than in those arguments which assume that gender systems are cultural
mechanisms for managing sex differences and the problems of social and
biological reproduction. It is clear that such a radical distinction effectively rules
out altogether any possibility for the social sciences to address the relationship
between biology and culture. The primary difficulty here, as Errington ( 1990)
has pointed out, lies in how to understand human bodies. The meanings given to
bodies, and the practices in which they are engaged, are culturally and historically
highly variable. However, the experience of embodiment-whereby these
meanings and practices are incorporated as the enduring dispositions and
competences of real human agents (Bourdieu 1977:87-95)-is something which
could be said to be universal. Although the exact nature of that experience differs,
unless social scientists are prepared to consider the relationship between
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biological sex and gender-that is, between biological entities and social
categories-they will make no progress in understanding the manifold ways in
which culture interacts with biology to produce that most distinctive of human
artefacts: the human body (Errington 1990: 11-15).
It seems very probable that in coming years much new work will be done on
the question of embodiment and on the relationship between biology and
culture, but this depends not only on the willingness of social scientists to
rethink the radical distinction between sex and gender, but also on the
willingness of certain biologists to give up their outmoded ideas about
biological determinism.
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anthropological work in these areas has rested for far too long. Such an aim is,
in any case, firmly in line with feminist theorizing in anthropology which, from
the earliest days of its inception, has sought to deliver an internal critique by
unpacking the Western assumptions underlying many of the analytical
constructs most central to the discipline.
Errington's more radical critique of the Western concept of sex mirrors
other aspects ofFoucault's argument in The History of Sexuality, namely those
about the constructed nature of binary and exclusive sex categories.
Genitals ... along with invisible body fluids and substances of which they are believed
to be signs, are classed in this [Western] culture as part of the 'natural', 'objective'
realm, and humans are assumed to be 'naturally' divided into two categories without
the help of cultural ideas or social institutions-and the main raison d' etre of those two
categories is generally believed, whether by religious persons or by secular
evolutionary biologists, to be reproduction. I will call this the taxonomy of Sex, with a
capital 'S' ... By 'Sex' I mean to include the whole complex of beliefs about genitals as
signs of deeper substances and fluids and about the functions and appropriate uses of
genitals; the assignment of the body into the category of the 'natural' (itself a
culturally constructed category); and the cultural division of all human bodies into
two mutually exclusive and exhaustive Sex categories.
(Errington 1990:21)
While recognizing that 'Sex' is socially constructed, Errington nevertheless
attempts to distinguish between (in her terms) 'Sex', sex and gender. By 'Sex',
s e means a parttcu ar construct o uman o tes preva ent m Euro- menca,
while sex means the physical nature of human bodies, and gender refers to what
it is that different cultures make of sex. She criticizes Yanagisako and Collier for
collapsing the distinction between 'Sex' and sex, on the grounds that while we
can recognize that the Western understanding of 'Sex' is socially constructed, it
is also important to recognize that humans have bodies with distinguishing
genitals and that there is therefore a material reality-i.e. sex-which must be
taken into account when discussing the meanings which cultures give to bodies
and embodied practices-i.e. gender (Errington 1990:27-8).
The point Errington makes is an important one, but there are still further
confusions to be sorted out in this discussion about the relationship between
'Sex', sex and gender. While both Errington and Yanagisako and Collier
acknowledge that 'Sex' is an effect of a particular Western discourse for
comprehending and categorizing the apparent differences between women and
men-a discourse which underlies the analytic categories of anthropological
theorizing-they do not seem to acknowledge the point that sex is everywhere
'Sex'; in other words, that although the particular constitution, configuration
and effects of 'Sex' clearly vary between cultures, there is, in each case, no way
of knowing sex except through 'Sex'. The specific Western discourse of 'Sex'
may have influenced anthropological theorizing, but there are many other
discourses of 'Sex', and these discourses need to be specified through
anthropological analysis.
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UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
The fact that all cultures have ways of making sense of, or giving meaning to,
bodies and embodied practices, including physiological processes and bodily
fluids and substances, means that all cultures have a discourse of 'Sex'. In each
case, this discourse stands in a relationship of partial dependency and partial
autonomy with other discourses, including, very often, what anthropologists have
referred to as the discourse of gender. Gender discourses themselves are refracted
in many other discursive domains of culture, giving rise in some instances to
discourses of power, potency, cosmology, fertility and death which also appear
highly gendered. One example from Western societies of such a gendered
discourse is that of nature and culture. Conversely, and by virtue of that relation
of mutual constitution so well described by Foucault, the discourse of gender is
itself shot through with ideas about what is natural and what is cultural.
There is, in short, no way in any culture to approach sex except through the
discourse of 'Sex', and this must surely be particularly true of cultures which
have lacked, either now or in the past, the technological means for revealing the
true nature of the underlying physiological processes and substances, and thus
for distinguishing between sex and 'Sex'. What Errington and Yanagisako and
Collier do not seem to realize is that the notion of sex, of a biological property
or set of biological processes, existing independently of any social matrix, is
itself the product of the biomedical discourse of Western culture. There is a
fundamental sense in which, outside the parameters and spheres of influence of
this biomedical discourse, sex does not exist. In other words, in most cultures in
t e wor , w ere m tgenous or oca now e ge retgns supreme, t ere IS no sex,
only 'Sex'.
Anthropology has been very slow to grasp this point, partly because the
question is obscured, paradoxically, by an approach which posits a radical
separation of sex from gender, and, by extension, of biology from culture. The
question we have to ask ourselves for the future is whether it makes sense,
except where spurious biological arguments are being used to justify
discriminatory social practices, to insist upon separating sex from gender, when
the real issue is not sex, but 'Sex'. A further question, however, needs to be
posed: is it appropriate to separate 'Sex' from gender, when 'Sex' is understood
as the culturally specific discursive practices which make sense of body parts
and their relation, indexical or otherwise, to physiological processes and
substances, including those associated with human reproduction? This
question is the more difficult one, and involves a consideration of the problem
of binary sex categorization.
The determination, as I have already pointed out, of two mutually exclusive
and fixed categories of sex, the female and the male, is an effect of the Western
cultural discourse of 'Sex'. This discourse stands in a mutually constitutive
relation with biomedical discourse, such that the former becomes scientized,
while the latter is constructed according to a set of understandings about the
meaning of sex differences and about the relations to be established between what
is cultural and what is natural (Hubbard 1990). The difficulty with the Western
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SOCIAL LIFE
discourse on 'Sex', as Yanagisako and Collier point out, is that the 'naturalness' of
binary sex categorization is apparently reinforced by the fact that biological
females and biological males are required for human sexual reproduction.
However, we do not have to suppose that there are peoples around the world who
are unable to recognize the differences between female and male genitalia, or who
are unaware of the different roles which women and men play in sexual
reproduction, in order to question the assumption that biological differences
between women and men provide a universal basis for cultural categorizations
that assign every individual to one or other of two, discrete and fixed categories,
'female' and 'male', in the manner of Western discourse. There is ample
ethnographic evidence to show that this kind of binary categorization is culturally
specific, and that it does not arise automatically from the recognition of
differences in roles and in physical appearance.
This point is most apparent when we turn to consider theories about the
physical constitution of persons. In many societies it is believed that persons are
made up of female and male parts or substances. Levi-Strauss (1969) identified
what he called the flesh-bone complex for South Asian societies, in which bones
are inherited from the father and flesh from the mother. Marilyn Strathern
( 1988) has recently discussed the multiply gendered and partible nature of bodies
as they are conceived by the people of the Mount Hagen region in the New
Guinea Highlands. Hageners see gender as a process rather than as a category:
how one becomes rather than what one is. Likewise, according to Meigs (1990),
t e Hua-anot er Htg an s peop e-mcorporate m t etr vtew o gen er t e
idea that persons can become more female or more male depending on how much
they have been in contact with and have ingested certain bodily substances
thought to be female (e.g. menstrual blood, parturitional fluids and vaginal
secretions). Hua men take in these substances as a result of eating food prepared
by reproductively active women, as a consequence of sex, and through daily
casual contact (Meigs 1990: 109). This means of conceptualizing gender is a
processual and multiple one, and it exists in parallel with a mode of categorization
based on external genitalia. It is evident from recent ethnographies that many
societies have more than one way of conceptualizing and classifying gender, and
that this fact has been obscured by the reliance of the social sciences on a model of
gender which stresses the fixed and binary nature of sexual difference.
One difficulty which ethnographic data of this kind raise is how to establish,
and indeed whether it is possible to establish, the distinction between sex and
gender at all. If sexual difference is thought to exist within bodies as well as
between them, should we view this as a matter of sex or of gender (Moore
1993)? This question becomes particularly crucial in the light of the previous
argument that sex as well as gender must be understood as socially constructed.
The result is that the analytic distinction between sex and gender seems very
blurred. At least in the context of cross-cultural analysis, it seems that the
attempt to uphold a radical distinction between sex and gender will not
necessarily help us to gain an improved theoretical perspective.
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UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
However, one area in which a distinction between sex and gender has proved
very useful to the social sciences is the analysis of gender inequalities. The
immediate question raised by cross-cultural analysis has been how to account
for the enormous variability in local understandings of gender and gender
relations, in the context of what appears to be the universal subordination of
women to men (Moore 1988: eh. 2; see also Beteille in this volume, Article 37).
It seemed that there must be some cultural or sociological regularities which
would account for male dominance (Rosaldo 1974, Reiter 1975). The value of
enquiry into this question was that it drew the social sciences away from a
debate about the biological basis for gender inequality towards a discussion of
its cultural and sociological determinants. However, there are a number of
difficulties with the theoretical solutions which have been proposed to the
question of universal female subordination.
Sherry Ortner (1974) proposed that the universal devaluation of women is
connected to their symbolic association with the realm of nature, which is itself
viewed as subordinate to the realm of culture associated with men (Ortner 1974).
At the same time, Michelle Rosaldo (1974) suggested that it is women's
association with the domestic sphere, in contrast to men's dominance in the
encompassing public sphere of social life, which accounts for the universal
tendency for women to be subordinated to men. Ortner's account thus stressed
cu tura an sym o tc actors, w 1 e Rosa o s emp astze socw ogtca
considerations. Both these explanations have been widely criticized (Moore 1988:
eh. 2). A number of scholars have pointed out that the distinction between
women and men is not necessarily associated with the division between nature
and culture, and that concepts or notions of nature and culture vary greatly from
one society to another, if indeed they exist at all (MacCormack and Strathern
1980). The problem once again lies in the imposition of an analytic dichotomy
derived from Western thought in situations where it is not always appropriate. In
the case of the domestic-public distinction, Rosaldo made it clear that women's
identification with the domestic domain is a consequence of their role as mothers
(Rosaldo 1974:24). This view was strongly criticized by a number of writers, who
argued that a search for the universal causes of gender inequality inevitably ends
up implying some form of biological determination, even if the theory proposed
appears to offer a social or cultural explanation (e.g. Leacock 1978, Sacks 1979).
Rosaldo later modified her view and argued that the domestic-public distinction
could not provide a universal explanation for women's subordination because,
both analytically and sociologically, it is the product of historical developments in
Western society (Rosaldo 1980).
A variant of the domestic-public dichotomy emerged in Marxist feminist
writing on the position of women and the sexual division of labour. The
starting point for much of this debate was the distinction, first made by En gels,
between production and reproduction. Engels regarded the subordination of
821
SOCIAL LIFE
women as being linked to their exclusion from the sphere of production (Moore
1988:46-49). This debate was initially very ethnocentric in formulation and
tended to draw much of its theoretical inspiration from arguments about the
role of women's reproductive labour under conditions of capitalist production,
where such labour is situated inside the household-as opposed to productive
labour which is situated outside it. This is obviously an inappropriate model for
understanding production systems in which women are engaged in both
productive and reproductive labour within the household (Moore 1988: eh. 3).
There was also a tendency to assume that the nature of women's reproductive
labour does not change over time. Some writers conflated reproduction with
biological reproduction (Meillassoux, 1981 ), while yet others equated it with
women's domestic labour (Boserup, 1970). In spite of attempts to clarify the
notion of 'reproduction', and to include not only biological reproduction and
domestic work, but also social reproduction in the wider sense (Harris and
Young 1981), there has been a persistent tendency to link women's
subordination to their role in reproduction, and thus to their position in the
sexual division of labour.
However, gender relations cannot be understood as a simple reflection of the
sexual division of labour. Cultural representations of gender rarely mirror
accurately women's and men's activities, their contributions to society, or their
relations with each other (Ortner and Whitehead 1981:10). A number of
feminist scholars have suggested that women's position in society is
etermme y t e extent to w tc t ey contro t eu own a our an t e
products of their labour. But ethnographic analysis has revealed that even this
proposition is too straightforward. The difficulty with investigating gender
inequality is that one has to analyse not only the political and economic
contexts in which gender relations are operative, but also the cultural and
symbolic meanings accorded to gender differences.
Ortner and Whitehead have suggested a method for combining the symbolic
and the sociological approaches by focusing on what they call 'prestige
structures'. Prestige structures are understood as those lines of social
evaluation, positions and roles through which a given set of social statuses and
cultural values are reproduced (Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 13). As Yanagisako
and Collier point out (1987:27), it is not easy to grasp exactly what is meant by
this. Ortner and Whitehead, however, suggest that gender systems-that is
gender meanings and gender relations-are themselves prestige structures and
that they are correlated in many societies with other axes of social evaluation,
such as rational versus emotional or strong versus weak (Ortner and Whitehead
1981:16-17). This argument is compelling, in one sense, because it does help us
to understand why evaluative statements are so often rendered in gendered
terms, when what is actually being referred to are relations between people of
the same sex or between people of different classes, rather than relations
between women and men. Nonetheless, Ortner and Whitehead assume, rather
than demonstrate, that prestige structures are rooted in the male-dominated,
822
UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
public sphere of social activity, and that they encompass or dominate the
domestic sphere of social life (Ortner and Whitehead 1981:19). As Yanagisako
and Collier note, this means that the notion of prestige structures does little
more than replicate the problems inherent in the domestic-public distinction,
and that as such it simply assumes a priori what it should be seeking to
investigate (Yanagisako and Collier 1987:28).
The notion of a prestige structure is nevertheless useful because it directs
attention to the social evaluations of women's and men's behaviour, and to the
meanings given to the differences in their activities and roles. Marilyn
Strathern (1981) has used the idea of social evaluation to demonstrate that in
Hagen, pursuing socially valued goals ('acting like a man') and pursuing
individual interests ('acting like a woman') are types of behaviour open to both
women and men, and that although gender idioms are used to describe moral
qualities and socially valued behaviour, this does not determine how the actual
behaviour of individual women and men would be evaluated in any particular
context. The disparity between the cultural representations of gender and the
activities of individual women and men raises once more the questions of how
the status of women is to be evaluated in any given context, and of what kind of
information is necessary to be able to determine the nature and extent of
women's subordination to men.
For example, Keeler has pointed out for Java that although gender
differences can be used to make distinctions among individuals, differences
ase on sty e an status can a so e use to o t e same t mg Kee er
1990: 128-9). Keeler notes that while gender distinctions are relevant in
domestic and public life, they do not prevent women from exercizing control
within the household, and from managing their own money as well as their
husband's income. Women apparently participate fully in discussions about
children's education, business plans and marriage arrangements. Men do some
child care, and both women and men farm, and take part in business activities.
Many Javanese women enjoy positions of prestige and respect in public life, as
government officials and heads of schools, although the numbers holding high
office are not great (Keeler 1990: 129-30). Nonetheless, despite women's
activities and achievements, they tend to be described as lacking socially and
morally valued characteristics such as self-control, patience, spiritual potency,
sensibility and insight. Keeler links this overtly negative discourse to the fact
that women are believed to lack potency, which is related in Javanese thinking
to both prestige and status. However, as he points out, it would be a mistake to
assume that because women lack culturally defined prestige they are
automatically considered to be inferior in social life.
823
SOCIAL LIFE
as persons, together with the actual activities and roles of women and men, to
produce a single model of gender relations. It is similarly difficult to combine
these different types of data to arrive at some formulation of a single position
which women could be said to hold in society (Strathern 1987). For one thing,
gender is not the only axis of social differentiation within a society, and there
may be manifest differences between women due to class, race, religion or
ethnicity. This gives rise to a situation in which not all women are subordinate
to all men. For example, in the Javanese case, high-ranking women have low-
ranking men as subordinates, and in many contemporary societies, class and
race are significant axes of social differentiation which organize access to
resources, including education, employment and public office, in ways which
often cross-cut gender distinctions. However, recent work in anthropology has
emphasized that it is a mistake to imagine that societies have only one model, or
only one discourse, of gender and gender relations. The recognition of the
existence of multiple models and discourses, and the investigation of how those
models and discourses intersect in any given context, is providing a new
direction for the analysis of gender in anthropology.
Anna Meigs points out that until recently, anthropological work on gender has
been based on three assumptions: first, that there are two clear-cut and
monolithic categories, female and male; second, that female status is singular and
unitary, and third, that each society has a single gender model (Meigs 1990: 102).
The cross-cultural variability of the categories female and male, and the manifold
nature o ema e status, ave a rea y een tscusse . However, wtt re erence
again to the Hua people of Highland New Guinea, Meigs details three gender
models or discourses which exist simultaneously in their society. The first of
these emphasizes that female bodies are disgusting and dangerous to men, and
that women lack knowledge and insight. This model is enshrined in many rituals
and social institutions, especially male initiation. The second is quite contrary to
the first and concerns the Hua belief that the female body is superior to the male.
Hua men imitate menstruation and believe that they can become pregnant. This
second model is embodied in myth, local belief and ritual practices, including the
bloodletting which is an imitation of menstruation. The third model is egalitarian
and emphasizes that although female and male bodies are different, neither one is
more desirable than the other. This model emphasizes interdependency and
complementarity, and is connected to the respect which women and men show
each other in daily life (Meigs 1990: 102-3).
Meigs's work is useful because she emphasizes not only that societies will
probably have more than one gender discourse or model, but also that many of
these different ideas about gender, and about the nature of women and men,
will likely conflict with and contradict each other. She also points out that from
among these multiple models or discourses of gender, certain of them are more
appropriate to particular contexts, or to particular stages in the life-cycles of
individuals, than others. Thus, young Hua males at initiation are taught that
female bodies are dangerous, and they are forbidden to look at women or eat
824
UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
food from women's gardens or consume any of the foods which resemble the
female reproductive system. However, as they get older, these rules fall away,
and the ideal of sexual avoidance is replaced by one of relative egalitarianism
and co-operation (Meigs 1990: 103-4).
The recognition of the existence of multiple gender models in anthropology
has been stimulated by a transformation, over the last fifteen years or so, in the
anthropological understanding and definition of culture. Whereas culture was
once defined as an overarching set of beliefs and customs that were equally
shared by all members of a society, recent work in the social sciences has
emphasized the contested and contingent nature of culture. One result of this
has been a shift away from imagining culture and social life as based on rules
and rule-following to a view which emphasizes that they are constituted
through performance and practice (Ortner 1984). The current emphasis in the
cross-cultural study of gender on the way in which women's and men's
activities are informed by a multiplicity of discourses of gender and gender
relations, which are themselves produced and reproduced through those same
activities, is a consequence of this shift in the understanding of culture.
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SOCIAL LIFE
and to restructure the nature of gender relations, the result has not been
capitulation to external gender models. Even in the context of unequal and
coercive power relations, the Ilonggo have selectively absorbed and adapted
new notions of gender and, in the process, have creatively reworked many of
these new ideas. For example, Blanc-Szanton argues that in the 1970s, the
Ilonggo manifested a 'remarkable mixture of symbolic references to machismo
and virginity of both Spanish and Judeo-Christian origin, an awareness of the
new sexuality, but also an emphasis on the sameness and comparability of the
sexes' (Blanc-Szanton 1990:378). In her conclusion, she suggests that the
reason for the syncretic vitality of the Ilonggo gender system lies in the fact that
while the Spanish, the Americans and the modern state have each sought to
transform this system, they have never been able to undermine the
reproductive basis of the system itself. Ilonggo gender is based on a notion of
non-hierarchical comparability and equivalence which is enshrined in features
of social organization, including bilateral kinship, and, unless this principle is
undermined, the system will continue to respond syncretically and adaptively
(Blanc-Szanton 1990:381-2).
Aihwa Ong (1987, 1990) has examined young women's participation in
industrial production in Malaysia, and has investigated the ways in which
sexual symbolism and gender constructs are reinterpreted and transformed in
situations of rapid social change and power conflict. She argues that conflicts
over class and national identity are often constructed as conflicts over gender
an gen er meanmgs, t us trans ormatwns m gen er re atwns are t e ey to
understanding processes of social change. Ong also emphasizes the way in
which contradictory and competing discourses on gender can be produced as a
result of the different interests and struggles of social groups.
Old concepts of gender and gender relations can acquire new meanings and
serve new purposes under changed circumstances (Ong 1990:387). One notable
example of this last point is the way in which factory managers guarantee the
safety of young women workers, maintain control over their movements
between home and factory, and impress upon parents their concern for the
moral reputations of the young women. This system of surveillance accords
well with parental values and wishes, and while it has the added advantage of
ensuring an adequate supply of labour to the factory, it also provides the
management with a socially legitimate method for controlling women within
the factory, thereby contributing to the formation of a disciplined and docile
workforce. As Ong points out, the traditional moral authority of men in
domestic affairs has been transformed into a system for the industrial
exploitation of Malay women (Ong 1990:402-3).
On the factory floor, the regime is paternalistic, with male foremen
subjecting female workers to control, questioning and surveillance. This
situation is made worse by the public image of factory workers as morally loose
women who pay insufficient attention to family values and Muslim standards of
behaviour. Women workers daily try to resist the factory regime through such
826
UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
methods as making excuses to leave the factory floor for religious reasons or
'female problems' (Ong 1990:417). A new phenomenon, however, has been the
increase in episodes of spirit possession, which often result in women shouting
at and resisting male supervisors. The resistance to male control on the factory
floor is paralleled by a resistance to male control in the domestic sphere.
Working daughters often demonstrate their resistance to their fathers and to
the ethic of communal consumption by protesting against undesired marriages,
using their savings to plan an alternative career, engaging in premarital sex and
refusing money to parents who remarry. These forms of resistance, in the home
and the workplace, have to be understood in the context of the increased
control over young women's lives exercised through the discipline and
surveillance of the factory regime and through the increased vigilance of
Islamic state institutions. The result is a situation in which young women
actively resist, while simultaneously maintaining family loyalty, Islamic
asceticism and male authority as central values (Ong 1990:420). The struggle
over gender and gender relations is also the struggle over family, religious and
national identity in the context of political and economic domination.
The confusing nature of resistance and its ambivalent relation to
emancipation are well demonstrated by Abu-Lughod's (1986, 1990) work on
Bedouin women. Bedouin women have traditionally evaded male control
through the institution of the sexually segregated women's world, in which
they are able to avoid male surveillance and enjoy a degree of self-
etermmatwn. T ey ave a so exercise power an a certam amount o contro
through their resistance to undesirable marriages. Lyric poetry and other
subversive discourses provide a further medium through which dominant
discourses on gender and gender relations can be reinterpreted and resisted
(Abu-Lughod 1986). However, Abu-Lughod notes that these traditional forms
of resistance are being eroded. The poetry is becoming increasingly associated
with young men, who sing the songs, make money out of locally produced
cassettes, and use these poems to resist the power of older kinsmen (Abu-
Lughod 1990:325).
Sedentarization has led to a situation in which women's movements are
more closely controlled, and in which women spend more time veiled and less
time in the relative freedom of the desert camps. However, this has been
paralleled by the increasing consumer orientation of young women, as shown in
their purchase of items like face creams and lingerie, which has put them at
odds with their mothers and female kin. Young women are now less interested
in resisting marriage than in trying to secure the kind of marriage which will
provide them with access to consumer goods and fulfil their fantasies of a
romantic match with an educated and progressive man. Young women aspire to
be housewives in a way which their mothers would never have done, because
their own security and standard of living is dependent on the favour of
husbands in a situation in which everything costs money, but in which women
have no independent access to cash (Abu-Lughod 1990:326-7). Men's power
827
SOCIAL LIFE
over women now includes the power to buy things and to give or withhold these
things. Along with the desire for consumer goods goes a desire for Egyptian
music and soap opera, within which many of the new ideas about gender and
gender relations are encoded. Older Bedouin women and men try to resist these
forms of Egyptianization. As Abu-Lughod points out, although young women
are resisting their elders in taking up new patterns of consumption, they are
simultaneously becoming caught up in the new forms of subjection which these
patterns entail (Abu-Lughod 1990, 328).
All forms of social change involve the reworking of gender relations to
greater or lesser degrees. This is because changes in production systems involve
changes in the sexual division of labour; political conflicts involve the
reconfiguration of power relations within the domestic domain and beyond;
and gender as a powerful form of cultural representation is caught up in
emerging struggles over meaning and in attempts to redefine who and what
people are. This has nowhere been clearer than in the transformations in
gender relations which have been sought in many (formerly) socialist and
communist countries (Moore 1988: 136-49). That the policies pursued by these
countries have enjoyed only partial success demonstrates that politicians, like
social scientists, have yet to comprehend how and why gender relations might
be transformed in present-day societies and in those of the future.
828
UNDERSTANDING SEX AND GENDER
Hubbard, R. (1990) The Politics of Women's Biology, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Keeler, W. (1990) 'Speaking of gender in Java', in J.Atkinson and S.Errington (eds)
Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford
University Press.
Leacock, E. (1978) 'Women's status in egalitarian society: implications for social
evolution', Current Anthropology 19(2):247-5.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Boston: Beacon Press.
MacCormack, C. and Strathern, M. (eds) (1980) Nature, Culture and Gender,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mead, M. (1935) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York: William
Morrow & Co.
Meigs, A. (1990) 'Multiple gender ideologies and statuses', in P.Sanday and R.
Goodenough (eds) Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of
Gender, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Meillassoux, C. (1981) Maidens, Meal and Money, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moore, H.L. (1988) Feminism and Anthropology, Cambridge: Polity Press.
--(1993) 'The differences within and the differences between', in Tdel Valle (ed.)
Gender and Social Life, London: Routledge.
Ong, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in
Malaysia, Albany: State University of New York Press.
--(1990) 'Japanese factories, Malay workers: class and sexual metaphors in West
Malaysia', in J.Atkinson and S.Errington (eds) Power and Difference: Gender in
Island Southeast Asia, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
rtner, . eory m ant ropo ogy smce t e SIXties , omparattve tu tes tn
Society and History 26(1): 126--66.
--(1974) 'Is female to male as nature is to culture?', in M.Rosaldo and L.Lamphere
(eds) Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Ortner, S. and Whitehead, H. ( 1981) 'Introduction: accounting for sexual meanings', in
S.Ortner and H.Whitehead (eds) Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of
Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reiter, R. (1975) Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Rosaldo, M. (1974) 'Woman, culture and society: a theoretical overview', in M.Rosaldo
and L.Lamphere (eds) Woman, Culture, and Society, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford
University Press.
--(1980) 'The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-
cultural understanding', Signs 5(3):389-417.
Sacks, K. (1979) Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality, Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Strathern, M. (1981) 'Self-interest and the social good: some implications of Hagen
gender imagery', in S.Ortner and H. Whitehead (eds) Sexual Meanings: The Cultural
Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--(1987) 'Introduction', in M.Strathern (ed.) Dealing with Inequality: Analysing
Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--(1988) The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yanagisako, S. and Collier, J. (1987) 'Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship',
in ].Collier and S.Yanagisako (eds) Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified
Analysis, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.
829
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FURTHER READING
Atkinson, J. and Errington, S. (eds) (1990) Gender and Power in Island Southeast Asia,
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Bledsoe, C. (1980) Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford
University Press.
Caplan, P. (1985) Class and Gender in India: Women and their Organisations in a South
Indian City, London: Tavistock.
Collier, J. and Yanagisako, S. (1987) Gender and Kinship: Essays Towards a Unified
Analysis, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Herdt, G. (1987) Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Kendall, L. (1985) Shamans, Housewives and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean
Ritual Life, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Kondo, D. (1990) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese
Workplace, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lamphere, L. (1987) From Working Daughters to Working Mothers, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
di Leonardo, M. ( ed.) (1991) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Meigs, A. (1984) Food, Sex and Pollution, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Moore, H.L. (1986) Space, Text and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet
of Kenya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ong, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Ortner, S. and Whitehead, H. (eds) (1981) Sexual Meanings, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Redclift, N. and Sinclair, T. (eds) (1990) Working Women: International Perspectives on
Labour and Gender Ideology, London: Routledge.
Standing, H. (1990) Dependence and Autonomy: Women's Employment and the Family in
Calcutta, London: Routledge.
Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley: University of California Press.
830
30
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATI ON
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
PERSONAL IDENTITY
Fitz John Porter Poole
831
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article, however, my focus is on how, when, where, why, with whom, under what
circumstances, and with what individual significance and psychological force,
personal configurations of learning of the social and of the cultural occur, and
on how social and cultural forms and forces are intertwined in the process of
such learning. Thus, the distinction between socialization and enculturation is
predicated, in part, upon a further analytic distinction, between society as
consisting in pragmatically constituted, negotiated, co-ordinated, and
replicated patterns of interaction, and culture as consisting in socially
distributed and more or less shared knowledge (including knowledge of social
interaction) manifested in those perceptions, understandings, feelings,
evaluations, intentions, and other orientations that inform and shape the
imagination and pragmatics of social life from the imperfectly shared
perspectives of social actors. Somewhat controversially, this perspective instals
the individual as the focal locus of culture and as the significant agent in social
interaction, and thus calls for a 'person-centred enthnography' (Le Vine 1982).
Socialization
Socialization implicates those interactive processes-their structures, contents,
contexts, and actors-in and through which one learns to be an actor, to engage
in interaction, to occupy statuses, to enact roles, and to forge social
relationships in community life, as well as acquiring the competence, skills,
sensitivities, an IspositiOns appropnate to sue socia participatiOn. It IS
concerned with the character and condition of learning processes, entailed in
the learner's participation in social practices appropriate to particular
relationships, by which he or she becomes adapted to, integrated in, and
competent at those interactions involved in becoming or being an actor in
society. It is bound up with the social apparatuses, institutional arrangements,
or socio-ecological contexts, and with significant categories of persons, that
together define and exemplify the ranges of socially appropriate behaviours for
people having certain social identities and occupying particular statuses in the
varied situations of community life (Bronfenbrenner 1979, Le Vine 1969, 1977).
If, as Giddens (1979:251) maintains, some negotiation of mutual knowledge is a
necessary precondition for social interaction, then socialization is tied in with
the interactive processes that promote and facilitate such negotiation through
particular forms of 'interactional display of the socio-cultural environment'
(Wentworth 1980:68).
Studies of socialization not only focus on the character of the situations and
events in which learning occurs, but also attend to the organization of the
interactive processes that promote and facilitate learning of different kinds and
significance. It is generally agreed that social interaction both enfolds and
shapes the ways in which socio-cultural phenomena are encountered and
learned (Bruner and Bornstein 1989), although the manner and circumstances
in which this occurs, and its consequences, are highly variable. One of the most
832
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
Enculturation
Turning from socialization to enculturation, the focus is on those processes by
which one acquires understanding, orientation, and competence in the
ideational realm that constitutes a culture-schemata, scripts, models, frames,
and other images of the organization and contextualization of knowledge that
833
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834
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
835
SOCIAL LIFE
selfuood, and individuality, and that these will furnish a significant connection
between cultural and personal semantic networks (D' Andrade 1990, Quinn
1992 ). It is probable, then, that those schemata will be internalized that are
most closely bound up with schemata of personhood, selfuood, and
individuality. They may, too, be associated with identifications of significant
other persons who are involved with the learner in the acquisition, through
interaction, of these latter schemata.
836
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
837
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838
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
839
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840
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
841
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Personhood
Following Mauss (1938), Fortes (1973), and Harris (1989), the notion of
personhood refers to those culturally constituted and socially conferred
attributes, capacities, and signs that mark a moral career and its jural
entitlements in a particular society. An analytic concern with personhood
focuses on those cultural forms and social forces that together confer on the
individual a public presence, in the sense of a human nature which is socially
encompassed, and place him or her in an array of social positions that establish
the contexts, entitlements and emblems for the enactment and achievement of
particular kinds and degrees of social agency. Indeed, social personhood
endows the culturally recognized individual as a social being with those powers
or capacities upon which agency depends, makes possible and constrains his or
her proper actions, casts him or her as possessed of understanding and
judgement and, thus, of responsibility, and renders him or her accountable as
an actor in a socio-moral order.
Although the capacities of personhood may be anchored to the powers and
limitations of the human body, they consist fundamentally of the cognitive,
emotional, motivational, evaluative and behavioural abilities that are entailed in
becoming an actor in community life. Thus, the person is essentially a social
being with a certain moral status, is a legitimate bearer of rights and
obligations, and is endowed with those characteristics of agency that make
posst e socta actiOn. onverse y, certam cu tura y mar e a norma 1t1es or
deficiencies in capacity or in action, whatever their locally understood
foundations, may lead to the social denial or withdrawal of particular kinds and
degrees of personhood.
Yet a person also has, by cultural implication, a sense of self and of
individuality, and a notion of past and future. He or she can hold values,
perceive goals, experience motivations, recognize resources, acknowledge
constraints, make choices and, thus, adopt plans of action. Moreover, these
plans are attributable to him or her as a social being with the conscious,
reflective capacity to frame culturally appropriate representations of
phenomena and to have purposes, desires, and aversions that require
judgement and demand accountability. To be a person, or a moral agent, is to be
sensitive to certain standards of the socio-moral order of the community and to
suffer a sense of shame (or guilt) when a breach of this order may be attributed
to one's personal judgement and responsibility. Thus, personhood consists
generally in a conceptual adjustment of a culturally constituted sense of human
nature to a socially constituted jural and moral order, with entailments
concerning both selfhood and individuality.
Selfhood
In the tradition of Hallowell ( 1955, 1960), selfhood implicates a set of
842
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
Individuality
Whereas notions of person and self figure frequently in anthropological maps
of cultural landscapes, the notion of the individual has come to be seen as
problematic. Indeed, the question of how to take account of the individual in a
principled way in relation to the character, dynamics, and reproduction of
socio-cultural phenomena has long been recognized as a profound problem in
843
SOCIAL LIFE
anthropology (Emmet 1960, Evens 1977). Although people in all societies seem
to recognize the individual as an empirical agent, the ways in which any sense of
individuality is culturally inscribed in schemata of person, self, and the
activities of social life are enormously varied. With regard to the 'individualism'
of the West, Geertz notes that:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated
motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion,
judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both
against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however
incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the
world's cultures.
(1984: 126)
844
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
845
SOCIAL LIFE
genres of socio-cultural discourse in the West (cf. Dumont 1970, 1977, 1986;
see Beteille in this volume, Article 37). Referring to personally construed,
culturally recognized, and socially expressed personal differences, individuality
may involve various kinds and degrees of unity, separateness, exclusiveness,
boundedness, privacy, interiority, autonomy, naturalness, value, power, control,
agency, and other distinctive qualities. Nor does a notion of individuality
necessarily connote absolute qualities of uniqueness or idiosyncrasy; it may also
refer to relatively distinctive qualities that could, in principle, be plotted on an
ethnopsychological or ethnosociological map.
All of the intertwined senses of identity discussed above are essential to
social life because they enable members of a community to identify a particular
embodied being as human, normal, cognizant, sentient, intentional, in
possession of agential capacities, having a certain history and place in a system
of social relations, and bearing a certain responsibility and accountability for
action. Such interwoven senses of identity, as they are personally constituted,
in turn significantly affect an individual's understandings of, and participation
in, the activities of social life. As Le Vine and White (1986:38) note,
There are concepts of the person and the self in all cultures. Self-awareness and a
sense of one's continuity over time are universal in human experience, and all
human adults distinguish between actions of the self as opposed to those of another.
846
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
acquired schemata, of perhaps the greatest centrality and generality, and of the
greatest personal significance and psychological force. Consequently, it might
be expected that the processes of continually both perpetuating and
(re)constructing such senses of identity, and of interconnecting them with
other salient schemata, are channelled through socialization and enculturation
in critically important ways.
847
SOCIAL LIFE
848
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
of, socio-cultural phenomena beyond its realm. Indeed, the family often
provides a gateway for contact between a child and the wider community.
Although much attention has been focused on the importance of mother-child
attachments and interactions within the family, there is now greater realization
of the significance of the roles of fathers (Hewlett 1992, Katz and Konner
1981 ), of siblings (Dunn 1988, Mendelson 1990), and of other important
persons in early socialization and enculturation within the domestic-familial
realm of social life.
As infancy merges into early childhood, there is often a marked decline in
expressions of distress at separation, an expansion of exploration, and the
emergence of a more elaborated sense of a distinctive self in a world of other
persons. The child exhibits a growing sensitivity to social standards and a
greater capacity to judge actions, to influence others, and to control or modify
its own behaviour with respect to them, and such perceived standards become
inscribed in the scripts of play activities. Utterances reveal an incipient sense of
agency in self-descriptions, which are also increasingly elaborated in other
respects. The qualities of social interaction become not only more complex and
differentiated, but also more co-ordinated and sensitive to person, activity, and
context. Folk models of child development in many societies indicate a broad
recognition that the child is now on a threshold of new understandings and
competences in its expanding realm, and processes of socialization and
enculturation are often adjusted in consequence of such recognition.
In ear y c 1 oo rom a out two to our years , owever, mgmsttc
competence advances rapidly and, through its developing conversational
abilities, the child is increasingly able to encounter and to understand what is of
significance in the socio-cultural environment and to bring such
understandings to bear on its expanding realms of interaction. Yet linguistic
ability does not merely imply greater and more sophisticated access to cultural
knowledge. As Schieffelin ( 1990) demonstrates, acquiring a language is
profoundly affected by the process of becoming a competent social actor, which
in turn is significantly realized through language (see also DeBernardi's
discussion of this point in the next article). Conversational capacity, requiring
some recognition of distinctions between self and other, categories of other
persons, interactive contexts, and socio-linguistic patterns of interaction, is
established as early as the age of two.
This advance is marked in two especially significant ways in regard to the
child's understanding of personhood, selfhood, and individuality. First, as
Bates (1990) notes, a child's acquisition of the linguistic features of person-
marking and pronominal referencing illuminates some aspects of an emerging
self-concept in the transition from infancy to early childhood. By the age of
three to four years, the child appears to have learned to map certain
understandings of self onto a complex set of lexical and grammatical forms,
and to use these forms conversationally in socially appropriate ways
(Miihlhausler and Harre 1990). Second, as the mastery of speech proceeds, the
849
SOCIAL LIFE
850
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
Middle childhood
851
SOCIAL LIFE
CONCLUSION
Although these brief sketches of aspects of early through middle childhood
only partially portray the myriad complexities of this time of life in any culture
or society, they do indicate some of the largely untapped potential for an
ethnographic exploration of the formation of identity in processes of
socialization and enculturation. An approach to the anthropological study of
socialization and enculturation focused on the character of personal construals
of cultural schemata of personhood, selfhood, and individuality, as they are
852
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
853
SOCIAL LIFE
REFERENCES
Ainsworth, M.D.S. (1967) lnfoncy in Uganda, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Asher, S.R. and Gottman, J.M. (eds) (1981) The Development of Children's Friendships,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Astington, J.W., Harris, P.L. and Olson, D.R. (eds) (1988) Developing Theories ofMind,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bates, E. (1990) 'Language about me and you: pronominal reference and the emerging
concept of self, in D. Cicchetti and M.Beeghly (eds) The Self in Transition, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, 1., Camaioni, L. and Volterra, V. (1979) The
Emergence of Symbols, New York: Academic Press.
Bateson, G. (1972a) 'A theory of play and fantasy', in G.Bateson Steps to an Ecology of
Mind, New York: Ballantine Books.
--(1972b) 'Social planning and the concept of deutero-learning', in G.Bateson Steps
to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine Books.
Benthall, J. (1992) 'A late developer? the ethnography of children', Anthropology Today
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Bornstein, M.H. (1987) 'Sensitive periods in development: interdisciplinary
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855
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856
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
857
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858
SOCIALIZATION, ENCULTURATION AND IDENTITY
Schieffelin, B.B. (1990) The Give and Take of Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schwartz, T. (1976) 'Introduction', in T.Schwartz (ed.) Socialization as Cultural
Communication, Berkeley: University of California Press.
--(1978) 'Where is culture? personality as the distributive locus of culture', in
G.D.Spindler (ed.) The Making of Psychological Anthropology, Berkeley: University
of California Press.
--(1981) 'The acquisition of culture', Ethos 9:4--17.
Shields, M.M. and Duveen, G. M. (1986) 'The young child's image of the person and
the social world: some aspects of the child's representation of persons', in J. Cook-
Gumperz, W.A.Corsaro and J.Streeck (eds) Children's Worlds and Children's
Language, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Shweder, R.A. (1991) 'Rethinking culture and personality theory', in R.A.Shweder,
Thinking Through Cultures, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Shweder, R.A. and Bourne, E.J. (1991) 'Does the concept of the person vary cross-
culturally?', in R.A.Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Shweder, R.A. and Miller, J.G. (1991) 'The social construction of the person: how is it
possible?', in R.A.Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Sigel, I.E. (1985) 'Introduction', in I.E.Sigel, Parental Belief Systems, Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Spiro, M.E. (1982) 'Collective representations and mental representations in religious
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tern, e nterpersona or o t e n ant, ew or : as1c oo s.
Strauss, C. (1992) 'What makes Tony run? Schemas as motives reconsidered', in R.
D' Andrade and C.Strauss (eds) Human Motives and Cultural Models, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Super, C.M. (1981) 'Behavioral development in infancy', in R.H.Munroe, R.L.
Munroe and B. B. Whiting (eds) Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development,
New York: Garland STPM Press.
Super, C.M. and Harkness, S. (1986) 'The developmental niche: a conceptualization at
the interface of the child and culture', International Journal of Behavioral
Development 9:545-69.
Swartz, M.J. (1991) The Way the World Is, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Toulmin, S. (1981) 'Epistemology and developmental psychology', in E.S.Gollin (ed.)
Developmental Plasticity, New York: Academic Press.
Tuzin, D.F. (1990) 'Of the resemblance of fathers to their children: the roots of
primitivism in middle-childhood enculturation', The Psychoanalytic Study of Society
15:69-103.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wallace, A.F.C. (1970) Culture and Personality, 2nd edn, New York: Random House.
Weisner, T.S. and Gallimore, R. (1977) 'My brother's keeper: child and sibling
caretaking', Current Anthropology 18:169-91.
Wellman, H.M. (1990) The Child's Theory of Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Wentworth, W.M. (1980) Context and Understanding, New York: Elsevier North
Holland.
859
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FURTHER READING
Ainsworth, M.D.S. (1967) Infancy in Uganda, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Briggs, J.L. (1970) Never in Anger, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Chisholm, J.S. (1983) Navajo Infoncy, New York: Aldine.
Dunn, J. (1988) The Beginnings of Social Understanding, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Erchak, G.M. (1992) The Anthropology of Self and Behavior, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Field T.M. Sostek A.M. Vietze P. and Leiderman P.H. eds
Early Interactions, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hewlett, B.S. (1991) Intimate Fathers, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kelly-Byrne, D. (1989) A Child's Play Lift, New York: Teachers College Press.
Leiderman, P.H., Tulkin, S.R. and Rosenfeld, A. (eds) (1977) Culture and Infoncy, New
York: Academic Press.
LeVine, R.A. (1982) Culture, Behavior and Personality, New York: Aldine Publishing
Company.
Munroe, R.H., Munroe, R.L. and Whiting, B.B. (eds) (1981) Handbook of Cross-
Cultural Human Development, New York: Garland STPM Press.
Reisman, P. (1992) First Find Your Child a Good Mother, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticeship in Thinking, New York: Oxford University Press.
Whiting, B.B. and Edwards, C.P. (1988) Children of Different Worlds, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
860
31
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for example J.R.Firth ( 19 57) and Halliday ( 1978) ). The emergence of the
approach known as the 'ethnography of speaking' and its application to the
cross-cultural study oflanguage use was an important step in the establishment
of an interdisciplinary sociolinguistics, and gave impetus to the growth of both
ethnopoetics and 'dialogic anthropology'. Interdisciplinary interest in the
relationship between language, ideology, and power has also had a significant
impact in the field, and anthropologists have made important contributions to
research on the politics of language use.
While much recent work places theoretical emphasis on performance and
choice rather than system and code (Luong 1990), in practice the cross-cultural
analysis of language in society must explore the interaction between the
particular and the general. Thus Abu-Lughod (1986) interprets a Bedouin
poetic performance in the light both of the personal history of the singer and of
a shared cultural code governing the social expression of affect; Scotton (1988)
explains an instance of code-switching in Kenya in terms both of the strategic
aims of the speaker and of the shared social meaning of two linguistic varieties.
With this dialectic in mind, between individual circumstance and common
code, let me begin with a discussion of the social nature of the linguistic sign.
862
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
The Nuer have no expression equivalent to 'time' in our language, and they cannot,
therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes,
can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience
the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to co-ordinate activities with
an abstract passage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the
. .
logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system.
(1940:103)
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SOCIAL LIFE
it as their means of verbal expression. The view that language was essential to
the continuation of the unique identity and destiny of a group was fundamental
to the German Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries (Edwards 1985:23-7). Divorced from its evolutionist and nationalist
matrix, this perspective influenced the formation of Boasian anthropology,
with its emphasis on the mastery of American Indian languages (ironically, in a
period of widespread language extinction). In particular, the argument that a
language shapes its speakers more than its speakers shape language (that
'language speaks man' in Heidegger's felicitous expression) is one that recurs
repeatedly in studies of language and worldview. The emphasis given to
language by Boas and his students led to the establishment of 'linguistic
anthropology' in North American universities as one of the four basic subfields
of the discipline, together with cultural anthropology, archaeology, and
physical anthropology.
Sapir (1949a [1921], 1949b) and Whorf (1964) were among those who
developed a linguistic relativism based on the premiss that language shaped
worldview, while rejecting the assumption that the languages used by members
of technologically less advanced and non-literate societies were inferior vehicles
for conception. Sapir, for example, argued that:
Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite number of varieties may
be found spoken at any desired level of cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic
. . . . .
hunting savage of Assam.
(1949a [1921]:219)
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SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
865
SOCIAL LIFE
mythologies ( 1963, 1966, 1969a, b; see also Leach 1970). He claimed that
through these cross-cultural studies of structure, he could elucidate aspects of
the organization of the human mind. Ultimately, the theoretical base of his
model was cognitive, and it gave linguistic theory a new prominence in
anthropological analysis. However, with its focus on the analysis of abstract
structures, the theory did not address questions dealing with social action and
language use in context.
By contrast, recent studies of language in society emphasize social process
rather than structure, and performance rather than code. The development of
the interdisciplinary field of sociolinguistics was an important step in the move
from structure to process, and major theoretical and methodological
contributions include the works of Fishman (1986), Gumperz (1982),
Gumperz and Hymes (1986 [1972]), Hymes (1974), and Labov (1972a, b). The
'ethnography of speaking' (see below) laid stress on the cross-cultural study of
language use, and has contributed an important comparative dimension to the
formation of a socially constituted linguistics. The turn towards the study of
language use in social process has been given further impetus by an
interdisciplinary interest in 'discourse analysis', which seeks to interpret the
diversity of discursive practices in the light of unequal socio-economic
conditions.
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After stories and storytellers have served this beneficial purpose [to make the listener
think about his life], features of the physical landscape take over and perpetuate it.
Mountains and arroyos step in symbolically for grandmothers and uncles.
(1984:43)
868
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
869
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ETHNOGRAPHIC POETICS
870
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
Experience always seeks its 'best', i.e. most aesthetic expression in performance ....
Cultures, I hold, are better compared through their rituals, theatres, tales, ballads,
epics, operas than through their habits.
(Turner and Bruner 1986:13)
In this view, aesthetic expression is inseparable from social use, and art
becomes a window on the most fundamental values in a society (in Article 22 of
this volume, Schechner develops this idea at greater length).
DIALOGIC ANTHROPOLOGY
The turn towards an analytical focus on speaking and dialogue coincides with a
critique of totalizing concepts of culture (or ideology) that leave no place for
variation or the individual voice. Ideally, in a dialogic study many voices, both
This reworked concept of culture shifts the analytic focus away from system
and towards the study of the diversity of human practice. In addition, it takes
discourse and dialogue as keys to understanding human experience (see Bruner
1984).
The dialogic approach, with roots in Bakhtinian literary criticism and the
ethnography of speaking, has also had a pronounced impact on the writing of
ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986:67-73). The discourse of fieldwork has
itself become the object of critical analysis (Briggs 1986, Moerman 1988), and the
recognition that ethnographic knowledge is the product of a dialogue between
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872
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
873
SOCIAL LIFE
Spanish state. Castilian is the language of the nation, but it has been
marginalized in Barcelona owing to the social configuration of that urban
community, in which Castilian is the language of an emigrant working
population and Catalan the language associated with elite social standing
(Woolard 1989).
The restoration of a language in decline may also be undertaken as an aspect
of 'ethnic revival'. In Ireland, for example, English policies of settlement and
education (many of them begun as early as the mid-sixteenth century) led to
the decline of Irish. As language shift occurred, English became the language of
social prestige, while Irish became a language maintained primarily among the
poor. In the mid-nineteenth century an Irish nationalist movement emerged
that sought to encourage and revive the original language. This effort at
language restoration was part of a larger national movement, which culminated
in the founding of the Irish Free State (Edwards 1985:53-5).
With the founding of that state Irish became its first official language, and
support for its revival now exists in the form of compulsory education in the
language, the standard use of Irish in bilingual government publications, and
the establishment of a government board to promote its use (Edwards 1985:56-
9). Edwards observes that 'in daily Irish life there are places for the language
but almost all are either ceremonial or trivial, or exist only in tandem with
English' (1985:59-60). The effort to revive Irish as a spoken language has
failed, and Edwards concludes that the original language that romantic
natwna tsts so ar ent y e en e IS not, a ter a , essentta to t e mamtenance
of a strong Irish identity (1985:64).
For multi-lingual speakers, linguistic varieties may index aspects of identity,
and a number of close-grained studies of code-switching have demonstrated
that language choice is both systematic and socially meaningful (Breitborde
1983, Gall979, 1988, Gumperz 1982, Gumperz and Hymes 1986, Helier 1988,
Hill and Hill 1986, Urciuoli 1991 ). Code-switching often involves the use of
both the state-supported language (with associations of power and prestige)
and ones used by minority groups (perhaps stigmatized). The choice of code is
often strategic, and as Gal notes, it is used in conversation 'to establish, cross or
destroy group boundaries; to create, evoke or change interpersonal relations
with their accompanying rights and obligations' (1988:247).
In Kenya, for example, use of the official language indexes membership in a
multi-ethnic elite (Scotton 1988: 162). There are contexts, however, in which
minority languages have greater social value, and Scotton (1988: 169) describes
an interaction in Kenya in which a young woman switches from Swahili, an
ethnically neutral lingua franca, to a shared tribal language, in an attempt to
smooth over a minor conflict with the gatekeeper at her club. In this context,
the minority language is used to establish ethnic eo-identity and to negotiate a
different (more solidary) relationship. In multi-ethnic Kenya, minority
languages may also function to ensure privacy, excluding outsiders from
comprehension (Scotton 1988: 174-5).
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SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
Even within a national or regional language variation exists, which may range
from regional or local dialects to registers (varieties according to use), from
subcultural or social class or ethnic styles to gender differences. For many years,
of course, scholars have noted that any 'language' will vary in use, and what a
transformational grammarian might dismiss as idiosyncratic aspects of
performance, or 'free variation', is of central concern to those who study the
linguistic expression of social identity. As a technique of the body, language use in
this instance is an aspect of habitus, defined by Bourdieu as 'the system of
structured, structuring dispositions ... which is constituted in practice and is
always oriented towards practical functions' (1990:52). One practical function of
the linguistic habitus is the communication of identity through linguistic style. As
a form of 'linguistic capital', style may express and confirm the speaker's position
in society, and mastery of what Bourdieu terms the 'authorized language' may
yield a profit in terms of authority or distinction, since language 'represents,
manifests, and symbolizes authority' (1982: 103-5; see also Irvine 1985).
In the United States, for example, consistent use of the double negative ('He
don't know nothing') is characteristic of a linguistic variety termed 'black
English vernacular' (BEV), and associated with African American speakers. In
the 1960s, this linguistic form came to be stigmatized by educators as 'bad
grammar', or as an expression of illogicality, a judgement made from the
stan pomt o stan ar Eng IS . Wt tarn La ov, owever, as argue or t e
grammatical integrity of BEV, observing with characteristic acuteness that
although the double negative (termed by him 'negative concord') is employed
in Russian, Spanish, French, and Hungarian, those languages are not
stigmatized as 'illogical' (1972a:226). Bolinger sums up the situation thus:
Attitudes toward a form of speech are hardly other than attitudes towards the
speakers. Inferior people speak in inferior ways. Naturally. And the differences that
mark their speech tend to be stigmatized.
(1980:45)
Or as Halliday puts the matter: 'the conscious motif of "I don't like their
vowels" symbolizes an underlying motif of "I don't like their values'"
(1978:179).
There may be an objective basis for the social usefulness and prestige of a
language such as Standard English, which is a highly 'developed' language with
a wide range of functions (Halliday 1978: 194). However, advocates of the
standard language (and in America, proponents of an 'English-only' policy)
have often been ideologically driven. Silverstein observes (1987:3) that 'the
culture of Standard is aggressively hegemonic, dominating .. .linguistic
situations with an understanding of other linguistic usages as locatable only in
terms of Standard.'
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876
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
877
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IDENTITY IN INTERACTION
Social distinctions are also constructed and expressed in interaction through
the use of 'indexical' linguistic items. Indexicals are items that mark features of
the speaker's and/ or the hearer's identity, and they include pronouns, kinship
terms and titles, and the differential use of speech levels. In social use,
indexicals often create and sustain a relational social identity, and thus have a
performative function. As Silverstein notes, 'social indexes such as deference
vocabularies and constructions ... are examples of maximally creative or
performative devices, which, by their very use, make the social parameters of
speaker and hearer explicit' ( 1976:34 ).
The model developed by Brown and Levinson (1987) to discuss linguistic
etiquette is a useful starting-point. They approach politeness from the
878
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting of
two related aspects:
(a) negative face: the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-
distraction-i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition
(b) positive face: the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' (crucially
including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of)
claimed by interactants.
(1987:61)
Brown and Levinson assume that all competent adult members of society have
both 'face', and the rationality to devise means (including strategies of
politeness) to achieve their ends (1987:61 ).
While in the short run direct communication would be a more efficient way
to accomplish interactional work, it would threaten the 'face needs' of others by
imposing demands on them. Forms of politeness, however, communicate
through strategies of indirectness that invite the addressee to draw implications
from non-explicit speech. Brown and Levinson suggest that all languages
emp oy wo pnmary s ra eg1es o po 1 eness, w 1c mvo ve nega 1ve po 1 eness
(or respect and distance), and 'positive politeness' (or familiarity) (1987:2).
These strategies correspond to the axes of power and solidarity often
employed in analyses of pronoun use in European languages. In a classic
study, Brown and Gilman ( 1960) detailed the development and contemporary
use of pronouns in European languages that employ two forms of the second-
person pronoun 'you' (e.g., French vous and tu; Spanish, usted and tu;
German Sie and du). In these pairs of pronouns, the first (which is in fact the
plural 'you') is formal and distant, while the second is informal and familiar.
Use of the familiar form expresses solidarity with a peer, but will express
condescension when used to a social inferior, while use of the plural 'you'
marks respect to the addressee or social distance. When the forms are used
non-reciprocally, an asymmetric power semantic is set up in which the
higher-status speaker condescends to the lower-status hearer with the
familiar form, while the lower-status speaker shows respect to the higher-
status hearer with use of the plural form.
For Brown and Levinson, honorific forms, broadly defined to include such
linguistic phenomena as pronoun use, are a case of 'frozen conversational
implicature' (1987:23). In the case of the second-person pronoun, reciprocal
use of the familiar form marks an assumption of 'positive politeness', while
reciprocal use of the formal form implies the social distance of 'negative
politeness'. The power semantic established through non-reciprocal pronoun
879
SOCIAL LIFE
use implies a social difference: to borrow a Wolof expression, 'one person has
shame, the other has glory' (Irvine 1974:17 5).
The social structural assumptions embedded in such linguistic forms
surface when they are contested, as occurred when seventeenth-century
Quakers refashioned their linguistic practices to express radical social ideals.
The Quakers sought to replace the socio-religious dominance of Anglican
ministers with the authority of persons 'speaking in the light' of divine
revelation. In pursuit of this goal they eliminated mannered and polite ways of
speaking, and substituted 'plain speech', which for them was literal speech.
Use of the informal 'thee' replaced the asymmetric pronominal semantic of
'you' and 'thee', and they reasoned that use of the plural 'you' to address a
single person was untruthful. Against the backdrop of conventional norms, the
Quakers' use of 'thee' to address their social superiors was however interpreted
as insolent behaviour, and was considered deeply offensive (Bauman 1983). A
contemporary observer wrote in 1655 that:
880
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
While social hierarchy persists in China, the social system has nevertheless
changed dramatically, and terms of address such as 'Comrade' are one index of
this change. Halliday has observed that:
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SOCIAL LIFE
referred to their family members as 'slaves of slaves' when they addressed their
raja (Ghazali 1977:275).
In Thailand a palace language also existed, which was primarily derived
from Sanksrit (with some vocabulary from Khmer). As Wales describes the
Thai court, 'it was taboo to use words of the common language, or common
modes of address, when speaking to or about the King and princes' (1931:39).
The first-person pronoun used when addressing the King meant 'I, the slave of
the Lord Buddha'; the second-person pronoun meant 'the dust beneath the
sole of your august feet', meaning that the speaker did not dare to address the
king directly, and directed his comments instead to the dirt on the floor
(1931:40). A range of lexical items also had a court form, including terms for
body parts, articles used by royal persons, food and drink, kinship
relationships, verbs of bodily action, and names of certain animals, fish, fruit,
and flowers (1931:39-40).
In contemporary Javanese, the norms governing linguistic etiquette are basic
to correct language use, and Javanese provides a complex illustration of the use
of language in the construction of identity in interaction (Keeler 1984). Geertz
noted as follows:
Speech levels, however, are but one complex and nuanced aspect of Javanese
etiquette, an etiquette that governs not only speaking but also 'sitting, standing,
pointing, composing one's countenance, and so on' (Errington 1988:11 )-in
short, what Bourdieu would term the habitus of Javanese society.
In a study of the speech levels of the Javanese elite (priyayi), Errington cites
an elderly Javanese who instructed him thus:
Whenever two people meet they should ask themselves: 'Who is this person? Who
am I? What is this person to me?' (Here he held out his hands, palms up, as if they
were pans of a scale.) That's 'relative value' (unggah-ungguh).
(1988: 11)
Speakers of Javanese choose among lexical variants, and 'the system is based on
sets of precisely ranked, or style-coded morphemes that are semantically
equivalent but stylistically contrastive' (Wolfowitz 1991: 121). Most basic to the
system is the distinction between ordinary and polite vocabulary, but speakers
draw on these to create a continuum of stylistic mixes (Wolfowitz 1991: 123).
Also important is an honorific vocabulary referring to the 'possessions,
882
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
CONCLUSION
Anthropologists involved in the cross-cultural study of language use have
contributed to the formation of a socially grounded linguistics that has great
relevance for socio-cultural analysis. The structure of language and norms for
language use are basic to the matrix of social life, and a wide range of
anthropological questions cannot be addressed without taking account of the
data provided by linguistic form and function.
The analysis of 'discourse' holds a central place in contemporary
scholarship, comparable to that once held by structural analysis or
hermeneutics, and anthropologists have also made essential contributions to
interdisciplinary dialogues on this topic. For many scholars, the study of
discourse is closely linked to questions of social power and ideological control,
and those who study the 'political economy' of language use argue that
discourse is a fundamental means through which hegemonic ideas are imposed
or contested, and social differences reproduced (Eagleton 1991: 193-220). The
cross-cultural study of language use provides discourse analysis with essential
comparative insight into the conceptual and practical ordering of social life,
an un erscores t e Importance o t e unconsciOus 1 eo ogtca tmenswns o
language use. At the same time, however, the close focus on the relationship
between language and power should not be allowed to overshadow the other
manifold uses to which speakers put language, including (most notably) the
aesthetic.
Socio-cultural anthropologists of various theoretical persuasions have
explored the role of language in the construction of social thought and practice.
As demonstrated above, language use shapes the formation of the conceptual
systems shared by speakers of a language, and at the same time constitutes
diverse social identities in interaction. In speaking, these two aspects of
language use converge, as when metaphorically derived polite terms of address
simultaneously image hierarchy and index identity: the Thai noble who
addresses his comments to the dirt beneath his king's shoe is invoking a
cultural image of 'low' status, but he is also indexing relative identity in the
social interaction of discourse. Language is profoundly social, and language use
both constitutes shared worlds and realizes social diversity in practice.
REFERENCES
Abrahams, R.D. (1977) 'The training of the man of words in talking sweet', in
R.Bauman (ed.) Verbal Art as Performance, Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.
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884
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885
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886
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE
ofthe Second US. Japan Joint Sociolinguistics Conference, Tokyo: Japanese Society for
the Promotion of Social Science.
Keeler, W. (1984) Javanese: A Cultural Approach, Athens: Ohio University
Monographs in International Studies.
Keenan, E. (1974) 'Norm-makers, norm-breakers: uses of speech by men and women
in a Malagasy community', in R.Bauman and J.Sherzer (eds) Explorations in the
Ethnography of Speaking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W (1972a) Language in the Inner City, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
--(1972b) Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman's Place, New York: Harper & Row.
Leach, E.R. (1970) Claude Levi-Strauss, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
LePage, R. and Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985) Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to
Language and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1963 [1958]) Structural Anthropology, trans. C.Jacobson and
B. Grundfest Schoepf, New York: Basic Books.
--(1966 [1962]) The Savage Mind, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
--(1969a [1949]) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J.H.Bell, J.R.von
Sturmer, ed. R.Needham, Boston: Beacon Press.
--(1969b [1964]) The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology,
vol. 1, trans. J. and D.Weightman, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lucy, J.A. (1985) 'Whorfs view of the linguistic mediation of thought' in E.Mertz and
.. armentier e s emtottc e tatton:
Perspectives, New York: Academic Press.
Luong, H.V. (1990) Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings, Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lutz, C. and Abu-Lughod, L. (eds) (1990) Language and the Politics of Emotion,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lutz, C. and White, G.M. (1986) 'The anthropology of emotions', Annual Review of
Anthropology 15:405-36.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (1988) 'Language and gender' in F.J.Newmeyer, (ed.) Linguistics:
The Cambridge Survey, vol. 4, Language: the Sociocultural Context, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
--(1978 [1935]) Coral Gardens and Their Magic, vol. 2: The Language of Magic and
Gardening, New York: Dover.
Marcus, G.E. and Fischer, M.M.J. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, S.E. (1964) 'Speech levels in Japan and Korea', in D.Hymes (ed.) Language in
Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, New York: Harper &
Row.
Maurer, D.W (1964 [1955]) Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of
Pickpockets with Their Behavioral Pattern, New Haven: College and University
Press.
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888
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889
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FURTHER READING
Basso, K. (1990) Western Apache Language and Culture: Essays in Linguistic
Anthropology, Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Bauman, R. and Sherzer, J. (eds) (1974) Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1982) Ce que Par/er veut dire: l'economie des echanges linguistiques, Paris:
Fayard.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, R. and Gilman, A. (1960) 'The pronouns of power and solidarity', in T.A.
Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Edwards, J. (1985) Language, Society, and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell.
Fernandez, J.W. (1991) Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology,
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Friedrich, P. (1986) The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic
Indeterminacy, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Grillo, R. (ed.) (1989) Social Anthropology and the Politics of Language, London:
Routledge.
Helier, M. (ed.) (1988) Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives,
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hudson, R.A. (1980) Sociolinguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: an Ethnographic Approach.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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891
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892
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
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894
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
pubs and work along with the labourers as often as they can. In this way, farm
owners foster the loyalty, commitment and deference of their workmen, and
attempt to transform the contractual tie into a socially meaningful work
relation (Newby 1977:303).
The social significance of work extends beyond the conveyance of symbolic
information. Work involves the transformation of nature into objects which
then become identified with the people who produced them. As Marx long ago
observed, it is through labour, through the transformation of nature into
commodities, that human beings define themselves (see also Miller in this
volume, Article 15). The exercise of care and ability, as demonstrated by the
quality of workmanship, further enhances their stature. Well-tended fields,
smooth and delicious cubes of uncentrifuged sugar and tightly woven cloth all
bring prestige to a Paez Indian and many of them are willing to give up leisure
time to gain the recognition attained through such products. Some of these
carefully manufactured craft objects become so identified with the producer
that it is not easy to convince them to part with them (Ortiz 1979). Even in
societies where crafts are readily sold in the market the identification of the
object with the person who made it or designed it is retained (Annis 1987).
Much has been written about the existential significance of work, how and
when it serves to integrate a person, to give him or her a sense of satisfaction
and identity, or alternatively leads to a sense of insignificance and alienation.
Chinoy's classical study of automobile workers (Chinoy 1965) has set some
895
SOCIAL LIFE
896
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
the social context of labour, it is wrong to disregard the other meanings of work
alluded to in this section. To do so would render our explanations incomplete,
and our arguments only partial.
None of these meanings is intrinsic to work. Rather, the significance of work
is drawn from, and reflects, the social contexts of production and exchange. An
individual who sells his labour-power enters into a contract. It is the contract,
and the socio-economic relations implied by it, that gives to work its particular
tenor. Moreover, all of these diverse meanings are learned: workers must be
socialized, for example, into the experience of factory employment. Once
socialization is achieved, the experience becomes generalized and is often
reified as a code of work ethics and of job characterizations.
897
SOCIAL LIFE
convey what the effort is all about: the ability to care for a family. This ability,
in the view of the farmers themselves, is more clearly demonstrated by
bountiful dinners and feasts, than by individual expenditure of effort. Hence,
time accounting seems to them to be somewhat irrelevant. This finding
accords with those cited earlier, concerning the relative inaccuracy, in terms
of labour costs, of the evaluation of metates by Zapotec stone workers and of
salt blocks by Baruya. Time spent working becomes more crucial when the
effort is vested in planting cash crops, because the question then present in
the mind of a Paez farmer is whether the alternative of wage work may not be
a better solution to the problem of meeting his cash needs.
The introduction of time accounting (see Adam in this volume, Article 18)
does not automatically follow from the commercialization of labour, nor from
industrialization. 'Rather, time in relation to work has been continuously
shaped, defined and contested by workers and employers in the context of
changing structural pressures contained within the spheres of production and
social reproduction' (Whipp, 1987:211 ). Even as late as 1940, accounts of
labour costs in pottery production were not kept by most factories in Britain.
Instead of using time to regulate labour costs, the factory owner divided the
production process into tasks and paid by task completed. Whipp quotes a
moulder as saying: 'We have no set time for stopping and starting here, that is
in regard to moulded work, should any job be given out, a piece-work rate is at
once fixed on. So the Boss troubles no more about one's comings and goings'
W tpp 987:22 . In t IS way pottery emp oyees cou mtx omesttc wor
with productive work. The first was called play, the second work.
These uneven patterns of labour-time accounting in farming and industry
undermine the economists' attempts to evaluate the relative significance of
different factors of production. They can represent labour inputs by payments
made for labour, but only when the payments correspond to the quantity and
quality of effort vested in the production process.
Anthropologists should be even more careful when gathering estimates of
labour input in non-market economies. Data cannot be obtained through recall
of past events, but must instead be carefully adduced from daily observations
and time budgets. The field observer should not ask 'what work did the
informant carry out on that day?' but 'what did she or he do on that day?' In this
way one can avoid the risk of failing to attend to tasks that may be classed,
whether in the conventions of the observer or in those of the local people, as
other than work Oohnson 1975).
DIVISION OF LABOUR
In all societies there are some tasks that require training and experience. But
most other tasks could, in principle, be performed by just about anyone. Yet in
practice this is rarely the case. Tasks tend to be categorized as appropriate for
certain sets of individuals rather than others. Young men are often the warriors,
898
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
women the ones to prepare food, and older men are the political managers. To
some extent one can account for specialization and the division of labour as
responses to technical requirements and time constraints.
For example, some activities are very time-consuming and need exclusive
attention in locations distant from where other activities must be performed.
This and other conflicting demands can be resolved by differential allocation
of responsibilities among individuals who recognize their social
interdependence and who share the proceeds of work. Thus, it is most often
within households composed of close kinsmen that one can note task
specialization and interdependence. It is understandable, within this setting,
that women who must nurse children, and who are thus more limited in their
mobility, should take on tasks that can be performed within or near the
household. Tending the fire, processing staples, caring for domestic animals,
preparing the food and tilling nearby gardens are jobs often assigned to
women. These are tasks that can readily be combined with the responsibilities
of child care. Men can more easily assume responsibilities that take them
further away from their homes: going to war, hunting large animals that must
be followed for days, herding and trading in faraway territories. In fact,
women are likely to assume a major responsibility for agriculture in societies
where men are called away by war or must tend distant herds of livestock
(Ember 1983:297-99). This pattern is replicated when wage labour is
introduced and men must go away to work (Burton and White 1984:580). The
mtermtttent yet mtermma e at y tas o
left to children who have little else to do.
Long dry seasons, followed by short periods of rain, skew work rhythms in
ways that are difficult to manage. Agricultural tasks have to be completed
within short periods of time, while working very intensively. Men may be in a
better position to handle such work cycles (Burton and White 1984:579).
Alternatively, some of the agricultural activities that have to be completed
within a short period of time can be subdivided into tasks that are each
judiciously allocated to either men or women. By so doing, and by also taking
into account the domestic constraints on women, time pressures can be at
least partially resolved. When the Bemba have to clear a field before the rains
come, the men are assigned to pollarding the trees and cutting the
underbrush. The women pile the branches that men will later burn (Richards
1939:289-94).
The problems posed by uneven seasonal demands can also be resolved
through co-operation rather than specialization. The production of salt from
grasses, as practised by the Baruya of New Guinea, requires a number of
operations, some of which cannot be carried out by a single individual within
the short dry periods. The grass must be cut, transported, dried for two weeks,
and burned before the rains come. Baruya men with rights over grassland solve
their problem by enlisting the help of other kinsmen who lack such rights, or by
working co-operatively with other salt producers. Once the grass is burned, the
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ash residues have to be soaked and filtered, and the sediment extracted by heat-
induced evaporation of the water. This second stage requires much time but
only limited attention; it can be carried out by a single individual with free time
to spare-time he can make available to other salt producers. Altogether, the
production of one bar of salt requires 21 person-days, but this labour
requirement can be selectively distributed among a group of co-operating men
(Godelier 1971:55-8).
Work rhythms, however, are not simply dictated by the demands of growing
crops. Before cocoa farming was introduced into West Africa, important Beti
men were able to mobilize enough labour to clear large tracts ofland. They took
advantage of this opportunity to instigate not only an intensive period of land
preparation, but also a subsequent season of intensive planting. Women, clients
and junior men who lacked access to a large labour force had to content
themselves with cultivating land previously used; they also had to avoid
practices requiring peak labour periods (Guyer 1988:256). Even today, Beti
women are limited to growing crops that can be combined in such a way that
periods requiring intensive inputs oflabour are avoided (Guyer 1984:381).
Thus technological arguments, though relevant, cannot fully explain
seasonal work rhythms, nor can they explain why certain tasks, in specific
societies, are performed by women. If it is more rational and efficient for
women to concentrate on jobs that can be performed near their dwellings,
why is it that in New Guinea their gardens are often so far from the village?
ccor mg to a IS ury 9 2: 9- 2 , t e men go to t eu te s every t u
day and spend about four hours a week travelling, while women go every day
and spend twelve hours a week on their return trips. Technological
arguments also fail to explain why, among the Baruya of New Guinea, women
are allowed to help with the cutting and piling of the grass, yet they are
excluded from helping in the collective task of wrapping the salt bars. The
explanation, in this case, is cultural: women can pollute salt bars (Godelier
1971:56). Carlstein (1982:339) has depicted diagrammatically the daily
routine of members of a Gusii agropastoralist household in East Africa,
illustrating the imbalances in the time invested by husband, wives, daughters
and sons in their respective tasks, and the locations of such tasks (Figure 1).
Men spend more time around their dwellings than women do. Johnson
(197 5: 639) estimated that among the Machiguenga-slash-and-burn
horticulturalists in Peru-men spend hours daily in agriculture and foraging
and about 15 to 20 minutes helping with childcare and cooking. When other
productive tasks are included, men work a total of 6 hours per day. Women
spend more time on food processing and childcare, and less time in
agricultural and gathering activities, adding up to a total of 7.3 hours of work
per day.
To understand how labour is allocated among members of a household, and
how these allocations correspond to social categories (males, females, parents,
adolescents and younger children), one must consider the social as well as the
900
Time
(hours)
24-
--,
I
I
22- I
1 -Attending
beer part)
Sleeping- 1
I
20- ____ j
r
Eating- I
I
18- - L- -------y - - --Dusk
I
I -Local
.......................................... I litigation
16-
I
-grazing r ____ J
14-
cattle
I.-'·'-------------'
1- Yisiting
neighbours
············· ..L:
Grinding corn - [ Watering ~~ttl~ ·.:: ~ I
at power mill _I
12- .......! ·rl -Eating
:····························~·:..:_··.:.:.·:.:·:..:.; ·:· -Milking co" s
-grazing I -work in
10- cattle I coffee
I garden .
Cultivation- ............................1................. •..
I ::
8- I
L ___ l
I ::
6- I ; : -Eating
---- I::_- --Dawn
Fetching water- -.---=-=J ~ j
Elimination- ~;;
4- 1 ..
Sleeping - 1 ..
I ::
I
2- I"
Man - ;.......... Daughter
1
Woman--t ~ Son j--
1 ..
_ _ _ _ 1::
0-
Work Service Market Yard or Own Place of Others School
place place place garden dwelling meeting d11 elling
Figure 1 A reconstruction of the daily round of men, women and children among the
Gusii of Kenya (from Carlstein 1982:339).
SOCIAL LIFE
technical aspects of work. Since work can generate power and prestige,
establish relationships and symbolize status, the allocation of tasks is likely to
reflect both the prevailing social organization and the politico-economic
context within which the labour process unfolds.
If only some people are allowed, or are in a position, to produce an item
which is basic for survival, others must become dependent on those people.
When the goods produced can be used to gain other assets, the control so
conferred can yield significant political and economic power. Among the Lele
of West Africa, the elders reserve the right to produce the decorated bark cloth
that circulates as part of bridewealth payments (Douglas, 1963:54-61 ). When
new cash crops are introduced, it is often the men who reserve to themselves
the right to plant them, and by so doing they retain control over capital assets,
thus ensuring their own economic ascendancy.
However, the planting of staples can only bring power to producers when
they control the means of production. For example, in New Guinea, it is the
women who produce the yams. Their specialization in this activity has not,
however, enhanced their position because, while controlling the production of a
basic staple, they remain dependent on their husbands for the land on which to
plant the yams and for the clearing of their fields (Salisbury 1962:46).
For power to be gained through control over the production process, the
producer must not only control the means of production, but also be in
command of his or her own efforts. A Paez woman in Colombia may gain
const era e prestige y pro ucmg a we - estgne an ttg t y woven ruana or
poncho; in theory she could also make non-weavers dependent on her effort.
But before a wife sets a loom she must ask for her husband's permission. He
has a prior claim over her labour and may prefer that she works in the family
field, rather than remain at home weaving a blanket. More importantly, and
because he has a claim over her labour, the cloth she produces, even when she
uses the wool of her own sheep, has to be committed to a family member. Her
bargaining powers are, thus, limited.
The power and status that may potentially be achieved through
specialization can also be contained by controlling the distribution of
commodities. In Guatemala, women are often the weavers of blankets, but
seldom do they sell what they themselves produce. The explanation given is
that the markets, and tourist craft buyers, are too far away (Bossen 1984 ). The
question remains as to whether men are not also trying to link themselves to a
work activity that is profitable and that might, if left totally in the hands of
women, allow them to build considerable bargaining power within the domestic
circle. Thus power can only be gained by specialists when they have free access
to the means of production or to capital assets, total claim to their own labour
and the freedom to distribute what they produce.
Since producers are often identified with the fruits of their labours,
specialists can gain stature, as well as power, when their products are significant
luxuries or prestigious staples. In India, activities are ranked according to a
902
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
scale of religious purity, with professions at the top of the list and defiling
activities, like those of street sweepers, at the bottom-restricted to the lowest
untouchable castes. Any activity connected with dead things or bodily
emissions pollutes, and is reserved for the lowest castes and subcastes. But
other, less polluting occupations are also evaluated according to how degrading
it is to perform them and hence whether they should be avoided by higher-
ranked castes. Occupations thus serve as indices of the social rank of castes.
A more subtle illustration of occupational stratification is to be found with
the emergence of guilds and the nineteenth-century artisan societies. Elaborate
technologies do of course account for the institution of apprenticeship, through
which novices were enabled to acquire the required skills. However, the
training was often overly protracted in order both to limit entry and to enhance
the prestige of the trade. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers insisted that
for a man to be recognized as a member of the trade, he had to serve a five-year
apprenticeship. The knowledge thus acquired became the artisan's personal
capital, marking him as an adult, a special individual in society and a member
of a prestigious social group (McClelland 1987:191 ). Prestige rested not only
on the importance of the trade, but also on a well established code of behaviour.
A shipwright who came to work on Mondays unshaven and wearing a dirty
shirt was likely to be fined (McClelland 1987:193). A labourer who worked
alongside a mason was often physically chastised by being struck hard with the
mason's leather apron, as a way of symbolically humiliating him (Rule
987: 09 . In act, most tra es were ran e m terms o onoura e' or
'dishonourable' they were.
Because, as we have seen, work is an activity that links individuals to
commodities, services, communities and gods, and because it can create
relations of debt and power, it is a social as much as a technological process.
Hence, the division of labour must always be closely connected with political
structures and must lie at the heart of any process of stratification. Indeed,
Godelier argues that the division of labour emerges alongside social hierarchies
rather than being the prior cause of them (Godelier 1980).
With this in mind, we should re-examine Durkheim's visionary portrayal of
the evolution of societies from those of a simple and undifferentiated kind, held
together by shared values that were routinely obeyed, ritually reinforced and
communally sanctioned, to larger and more secular societies where
specialization prevailed, fostering social interdependence. He characterized the
former as integrated through mechanical solidarity, and the latter as integrated
through organic solidarity (Durkheim, 1933: 129-32). In Tikopia, for example,
the ritual cycle brings each clan together and links it to the three other clans.
Likewise, the feasts that end the labour parties of the Colombian Indians help
to reassert the significance of social bonds. In these and many other small-scale
societies, solidarity rests in the routinized performance of communal acts.
Once specialization makes interdependence a more constant and pervasive
reality, the ritual re-enactment of solidarity becomes less crucial. Societies
903
SOCIAL LIFE
become secularized, new codes of conduct are forged, and new sanctions are
established to ensure the smooth operation of society. The division of labour,
Durkheim argued, allows individuals to strive for equal opportunity, to have
greater autonomy and to be constrained not so much by tradition as by
contractual obligation (Durkheim 1933: 147-56).
Inter-caste exchanges illustrate how specialization can bring
interdependence and solidarity, much as Durkheim suggested. However, they
also highlight another point made by Durkheim: that specialization can lead to
hierarchical and exploitative social arrangements, and that religion can buttress
some of these unbalanced relationship. The exchanges of rice and services
between carpenters and landlord, for example, are fixed by tradition. At times,
these exchanges may be balanced, but the fact is that the carpenter cannot hold
land and that the landlord, who is a member of the dominant caste, controls the
distribution of rice and services. This is a right that is sanctioned by religion
and renders the landlord more powerful, despite his dependence on a number
of specialists (Dumont 1972: 138-48). It is important to note that, in this
example, it is not so much individuals who become interdependent as social
groups, which remain in such a position generation after generation.
It becomes clear that the emerging division of labour can be accompanied by,
and can consolidate, class stratification. Durkheim himself drew attention to
this in his admission that neither America nor Western Europe had achieved
true organic solidarity. He characterized these as transitional capitalist
societies, m w IC wor ers w o wou ot erwise e unemp oye are o ten
forced to enter into contractual agreements that benefit only industrialists, and
in which a state of anomie prevails. Only in societies that offer equal
opportunities to all, where entry to certain occupations is determined by ability
and capacity rather than by birth, can a division of labour generate organic
solidarity. In these (ideal) societies no hidden power structures determine how
people use their time and what occupation they can practise. The state is
supposed to protect individual freedoms and to ensure access to education and
other important resources for the acquisition of skills.
The division of labour has not yet given us the Utopian society that
Durkheim wished for. If anything, the consequences of this social process have
been more accurately described by Marx. Specialization, when one class retains
control over the means of production and circulation, often leads to
domination. Short of remaining unemployed, the factory worker has no choice
but to abide by the contractual terms imposed by the capitalist employer. His
occupation is specified by the technical engineer who designs the machinery
that he will operate, and is manipulated by the foreman who allocates tasks and
schedules times. Concerns other than those of mechanical efficiency are also
present in the minds of these designers and managers. These are concerns
about how to hold down the costs of production, either by controlling wage
payments, or by increasing the intensity of the labour process, or by
minimizing the possibilities of industrial action. Reorganizations of the
904
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
905
SOCIAL LIFE
adding that only certain industries had enough available capital to achieve
almost complete de-skilling. Eventually, these industries were the only ones
that could advance technologically and thereby increase productivity and
returns so as to be able to offer better wages. Other enterprises, constrained by
access to capital, were unable to achieve high productivity through
mechanization, and had to retain a labour force with lower wages. They had to
rely on a supply of workers who were socially rejected by the core industries:
above all, women and members of ethnic minorities. This process of
differentiation differs from the division of labour in that it does not categorize
prestige, quality of work and payment by the type of task, but by the type of
firm and the social type oflabourer it prefers to recruit. It has been given a new
label: the segmentation oflabour markets.
Neoclassical economists countered that there is no real segmentation of the
labour market. In free-market economies, specialization is a rational response
to both technical problems and management issues. Jobs are open to anyone
who is qualified, and remuneration is based on the cost of acquiring the
required skills, productivity and the supply of labour. The division of labour
within the market sector, they argued, is based solely on an open network for
achievement and promotion (Cain 1975).
While this may be the case for some sectors of the labour market, it is hard to
believe that social processes of differentiation, empowerment and stratification,
which had operated until the emergence of industrial society, would have
su en y cease to m uence t e orgamzatwn o t e economy. T e neoc asstca
argument also fails to explain certain historical patterns of recruitment and
wage rates. When the Dutch engine loom was introduced by large
manufacturers in 1815, only men were hired to operate them, relegating women
weavers to the more unskilled tasks of operating the single-hand looms. Neither
technology, nor mechanization, nor skill could explain this segmentation of the
labour market along gender lines. Women had worked in the weaving industry
and would have probably been perfectly able to work with the new looms, had
they been allowed to operate them. What probably kept women from these
looms was a combination of cultural notions about the kinds of work that are
appropriate to different categories of people (in this case, men and women), and
the wish to prevent the empowerment of women through their admission to
relatively prestigious and financially rewarding occupations. In fact women, off
and on, had alternately participated in, and then again been barred from, the
weaving trade in Spitalfield (Berg 1987). When they did participate in trades
along with men, as in nail manufacturing, they received much lower wages.
When women and ethnic minorities consistently concentrate on more marginal
industries, we may expect to find causes for this other than the requirements of
training, competence and scheduling. Given what has been said about the social
significance of work, it seems much more plausible that this segmentation is
akin to a gender division of labour.
More conscious subsequent resegmentations of the market, targeting
906
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
907
SOCIAL LIFE
Although in principle this shift has now been completed, a large part of the
agricultural produce consumed, or of manufactured goods purchased, in
modern societies is nevertheless not produced by individuals who work in
plantations, workshops or factories, and who enter freely into clearly defined
contractual agreements. Much food is still produced by self-employed farmers,
or sharecroppers, or labourers who offer their services either to repay a loan or
in exchange for access to land. Although some of these arrangements are not
necessarily exploitative, they are not always explicitly negotiated. Robertson
(1987), in a survey of sharecropping contracts in Africa, points out that the
terms of the contracts are often implicit, and are negotiated over a number of
occasions. Many informants, upon hearing Robertson's summary of his
findings, were struck by the unfairness of some of the contracts into which they
themselves had entered, and were inspired to drive a harder bargain on future
occasions. In the highly commercialized sector of Colombian coffee agriculture,
many labourers are not at present certain of what pay they are going to receive
at the end of the week. When negotiations are not open, wages cannot reflect
market conditions. They are more likely to reflect other capital costs of the
enterprise and the landlord's or manufacturer's perception of what is an
appropriate standard of living for the labourer. Such perceptions are coloured
by class and ethnic differences and are likely to perpetuate them. When
contractual agreements are unclear and negotiations not bureaucratized, a
labour market may be more readily segmented along social lines than along
tas -spect c mes. T us t e nature o t
nature of the wage negotiating process.
REFERENCES
Annis, S. (1987) God and Production in a Guatemalan Town, Austin, Tex.: University of
Texas Press.
Bossen, L. (1984) The Redivision of Labour: Women and Economic Choice in Four
Guatemalan Communities, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Berg, M. (1987) 'Women's work, mechanisation and the early phases of
industrialisation in England', in P.Joyce (ed.) The Historical Meanings of Work,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Braverman, H. (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Burton, M. and White, D.R. (1984) 'Sexual division oflabor in agriculture', American
Anthropologist 86:568-83.
Cain, G.G. (1975) 'The challenge of dual and radical theories of the labor market to
orthodox theory', American Economic Review 65:16--22.
Carlstein, T. (1982) Time Resources, Society and Economy, vol. 1, Pre-industrial Societies,
London: Alien & Unwin.
Chinoy, E. (1965) The Automobile Worker and the American Dream, Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday.
Cook, S. (1976) 'Value, price and simple commodity production: Zapotec stone
workers', Journal of Peasant Studies 3:395-428.
908
WORK, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND CO-OPERATION
909
SOCIAL LIFE
FURTHER READING
Bossen, L. (1984) The Redivision of Labour: Women and Economic Choice in Four
Guatemalan Communities, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Braverman, H. (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Burawoy, M. (1979) Manufocturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process Under
Monopoly Capitalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burton, M.L. and White, D. (1984) 'Sexual division of labor in agriculture', American
Anthropologist 86:568-83.
Gill, L. (1990) 'Painted faces: conflict and ambiguity in domestic servant-employer
relations in La Paz, 1930-1988', Latin American Research Review 25:119-36.
Guyer, J. (1984) 'Naturalism in models of African production', Man (N.S.) 19: 371-88.
Joyce, P. (ed.) (1987) The Historical Meanings of Work, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kahn .S. 1981 'Mercantilism and the emer ence of servile labour in colonial
Indonesia', in J.S.Kahn and R.Llobera (eds) The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist
Societies, London: Macmillan.
Newby, H. (1977) The Deferential Worker, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ortiz, S. (1992) 'Market, power and culture as agencies in the transformation of labor
contracts in agriculture', in S.Ortiz and S.Lees (eds) Economy as Process, Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America.
Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell.
Richards, A. (1939) Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, London: Oxford
University Press.
Robertson, A.F. (1987) The Dynamics ofProductive Relations, African Share Contracts in
Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rueschemeyer, D. (1986) Power and the Divisions of Labour, Stanford, Calif.: Standford
University Press.
Scott, J.W. and Tilly, L.A. (1975) 'Women's work and the family in nineteenth century
Europe', Comparative Studies in Society and History 17:36-64.
Thomas, R.J. (1985) Citizenship, Gender and Work: Social Organization of Industrial
Agriculture, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wallman, S. (1979) Social Anthropology of Work, London: Academic Press.
910
33
The concepts of 'exchange' and 'reciprocity' are closely related. This much is
clear from the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines exchange as 'the action,
or act of, reciprocal giving and receiving', and reciprocity as 'mutual action,
influence, giving and taking'. Indeed the words are often used as synonyms.
However, in the anthropological literature over the past century the term
'reciprocity' has acquired a special meaning, and a distinction between
exchange and reciprocity of great theoretical importance has arisen. The
tstmctwn turns on ne 1 erences m meanmg etween t e wor s mutua tty',
'giving', 'receiving' and 'taking', and to understand these nuances it is
necessary to situate the anthropological theory of exchange in the broader
historical and theoretical context from which it has emerged.
The general theory of exchange is concerned with analysing acts of
exchanging things, people, blows, words, etc. Exchange is a 'total social
phenomenon', to use Mauss's (1990 [1925]:3) famous expression, and, as such,
its study involves the fields not only of economics but also of law, linguistics,
kinship and politics, among others. Most anthropological theorizing about
exchange, however, has been restricted to exchanges of wealth. But what is
'wealth'? The answers to this question fall into three broad categories. For
economists of the nineteenth century wealth consisted in commodities, whereas
for those of the twentieth, it consists in goods. Either way, it is stuff which is
valued by the market. For anthropologists, on the other hand, wealth consists
above all in gifts, products that are valued according to the non-market
principle of reciprocity. The notion of reciprocity, then, is at the heart of
theoretical debates concerning the distinction between market and non-market
forms of valuation. But ethnographers have also found the principle of
reciprocity operating in tribal trading systems and peasant markets, and these
findings have led to a revision of the theory of commodity exchange itself
To understand the anthropological concept of reciprocity, it is necessary to
compare and contrast economic and anthropological theories of the exchange
911
SOCIAL LIFE
of wealth. I propose to do this under the following five headings. Under the
first, 'Commodities as wealth', I briefly discuss the nineteenth-century political
economy approach to exchange. This is followed, under the heading, 'Goods as
wealth', by a discussion of twentieth-century economic theories of exchange. In
the third section, 'Gifts as wealth', I provide an overview of the anthropological
notion of reciprocity. This is followed by a discussion of 'Barter and other
forms of counter-trade', in which I introduce some anthropological revisions to
the theory of the commodity. In the final section, on 'Market-place trade', I
show how anthropological work also requires certain revisions to the theory of
market exchange.
COMMODITIES AS WEALTH
'The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails', Marx (1954 [1867]:43) declares in the first sentence of Capital,
'presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.' This notion of
wealth was part of the conventional orthodoxy of eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century European thought, and all the leading theorists of the
time-Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo-developed their particular conceptions of
the principles regulating the market within this general paradigm. The truly
radical break came in the 1870s with the development of the theory of goods
and, with it, a new set of answers to the fundamental questions of market
exc ange: W at IS pro t. W at etermmes re attve pnces. W at etermmes
the level of wages? In this section I present, in very general terms, the answers
developed within the commodity-theory paradigm; in the next section these
will be set in contrast to the answers given by the goods-theory paradigm.
The notion of a commodity has its origins in the Aristotelian idea that a
product has two distinct values: a value in use and a value in exchange. Shoes,
for example, are useful because they protect one's feet when walking over rough
ground. This value is called 'use-value' and is quite distinct from the value
shown on the price-tag of a pair of shoes displayed in a shop window. The
price-tag value is called 'exchange-value', and it was value in this sense that
pre-twentieth-century commodity theorists sought to explain; the study of the
useful properties of objects, and that of the manner in which they satisfy
human wants, were regarded as falling outside the scope of political economy
(Marx 1954 [1867]:43). Within the overall commodity-theory paradigm many
different theories of exchange-value were formulated. Quesnay, the eighteenth-
century French physiocrat, found the answer in the natural productivity of
land; Adam Smith, the so-called father of economics, opposed this theory and
developed a labour theory of value in its place; this theory was developed, in
turn, by Ricardo and Marx, among others.
Marx's contribution to the theory of the commodity, though it hinged upon
the labour theory of value, gave it a new twist. Marx (1954 [1867]:53) claimed that
he was the first to point out that labour, too, possesses a use-value and an
912
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
913
SOCIAL LIFE
914
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
his theory on the opposition between wage-labour and capital. These class
relations of production were seen to be crucial because they gave exchange
relations their particular form and content. In other words, the classical
political economists conceptualized exchange as an expression of underlying
power relations.
GOODS AS WEALTH
Following the marginalist revolution of the 1870s, which saw the fall of the
theory of commodities and the rise to dominance of the theory of goods,
exchange came to be seen as an expression of the subjective preferences of
individuals rather than of underlying power relations. This change in thinking
was reflected in a new concept of wealth. The marginalists, or 'neoclassicals', as
they are sometimes called, no longer saw the unit of wealth as a commodity but
as a good whose magnitude was measured by its subjectively attributed 'utility'.
In other words, the concept of a commodity, with its distinction between use-
value and exchange-value, was replaced by the concept of a good with an
undifferentiated utility value.
This new concept of wealth quite literally affected the way people viewed
the world. Emphasis was placed on consumption and scarcity rather than on
reproduction, and on choice and subjective preferences rather than on
objective class relations of production. The new paradigm also provided a novel
conceptua ramewor or posmg, an answenng, t e o questiOns concernmg
wages, prices and profit. This can be seen by examining, in a little more detail,
the notion of a good.
Despite appearances to the contrary, the word 'utility' does not mean the
same as use-value. Use-values refer to the objective properties of things and are
a function of the technological and scientific knowledge available to a society at
a given point in its history. For example, the discovery of photography in the
nineteenth century meant that silver acquired a new use-value to complement
its other uses as a store of value, as jewellery, as cutlery, and so on. Utility, on
the other hand, refers back to the subjective preferences of an individual
consumer. A cup of tea, for example, has positive utility to a thirsty person, but
that utility will be less for each additional cup consumed. Thus the marginal
utility of the tea declines, until the point is reached when the consumer's thirst
is quenched and she desires no more; at this point the tea ceases to be a 'good'
and, logically speaking, becomes a 'bad'-although this term is rarely used.
The utility of a good, then, derives from its ability to yield subjective
satisfaction. It refers to individual psychological feelings about scarce objects
and not to the objective properties of different things. As Robbins (1932:47) has
noted, 'Wealth is not wealth because of its substantial qualities. It is wealth
because it is scarce.' This conception of wealth is obviously very different from
its classical precursor. Among other things it contains the paradoxical
915
SOCIAL LIFE
916
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
language of the theory of goods shares a common grammar and lexicon which
have nothing in common with those of the language of the theory of
commodities. The terms 'good' and 'commodity' epitomize this difference, the
etymology of the former suggesting a subjective approach to value, the latter an
objective approach.
The new language in which economists began to talk around the 1870s can
be likened to Esperanto, and the old language of the commodity theorists to,
say, German. This is not to say that one is better than another. Indeed, there is
no meta-theory by which they can be compared and evaluated. The two
paradigms have different consequences for understanding human life which
can only be evaluated in specific contexts. This implies some notion of
adequacy in relation to practical aims. To pursue the language analogy, do we
try to overcome the communication problems of the world by teaching people
Esperanto or do we try to learn some particular languages in order to develop
our general ideas from a comparative analysis of them? Needless to say,
anthropologists have tended to find the latter path more attractive, and few
have embraced the Esperanto of the theory of goods.
In this sense, then, anthropologists took up the implicit questions left
unanswered by the commodity theorists: What, in positive terms, does non-
commodity exchange mean, and by what principles is it governed? What
principles govern the circulation of commodities on the periphery of tribal
communities? Is commodity exchange the end of an evolutionary sequence?
Does It ave a corrosive m uence on ot er orms o exc ange.
the right questions to be asking anyway?
The fieldwork tradition pioneered by Malinowski, Boas and others has
provided us with the means to answer these questions. It is ironic that at the
very time that these means were becoming available-in the era of European
capitalist imperialism (1870-1914)-economists ceased to be interested in the
concrete problems posed by the theory of commodities and turned instead to
the abstract and formal problems posed by the new paradigm of goods. Many
of the theories formulated within the latter paradigm contained ill-considered
assumptions about the workings of tribal economies, and these provided
ethnographers such as Malinowski (1922) with easy targets to criticize in the
course of developing their own ideas. But fieldwork anthropologists, for the
most part, remained ignorant of the classical tradition of economic thought and
of the challenging questions that lay waiting to be answered. (It was not until
the 1970s, when neo-Marxist anthropology flourished, that anthropologists
took the theory of commodities seriously.) But it is now possible, with the
benefit of hindsight, to see that anthropologists have provided implicit answers
to the questions posed by the commodity theorists and, in the process, have laid
the foundations for a whole new approach to the theory of exchange of wealth
by posing many new questions.
917
SOCIAL LIFE
GIFTS AS WEALTH
Though the terms 'wealth' and 'valuables' are often used in anthropological
literature in the common dictionary sense of 'riches' and 'abundance', they also
take a more precise and anthropologically specific meaning. The word 'gift'
captures this meaning in a very general way and, like the words 'commodity'
and 'goods', it signifies a distinct paradigm (see Belshaw 1965, Sahlins 1972,
Gregory 1982, Strathern 1988 and Weiner 1992 for analytical overviews of the
literature).
The notion of gifts as wealth has assumed a variety of concrete forms, most
of which are now very familiar: the celebrated coppers and blankets of the
Kwakiutl, the armshells and necklaces of the Trobriand Islanders, the brass
rods and cowrie shells of the Tiv of Nigeria, the pigs and pearlshells of the
peoples of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, and so on. Many of these objects
are nowadays valuable in conventional money terms. In the Trobriand Islands,
for example, a vigorous trade in real and counterfeit (plastic) necklaces goes on
outside the tourist centres. However, the most highly prized shells are quite
literally priceless, and have remained in circulation in the kula ring throughout
the colonial period despite the attempts of outsiders to buy them (Campbell
1983). The reasons for this are complex, but it would seem that they have as
much to do with the intricacies of local-level politics as with subjective
preferences. What is clear, though, is that these objects, when exchanged as
gt ts, are va ue y transactors accor mg to a stan ar t at as qua tty rat er
than quantity as its basis.
Consider Campbell's (1983) discussion of the ranking criteria used for
Trobriand armshells (mwari). Five named categories are distinguished and
these are ordered according to their personal history, personal name, colour,
and size. Shells of the top category, mwarikau, have personal names and
histories; they have red striations and are the largest of all. Shells of the lowest
category, gibwagibwa, have neither names nor personal histories; they are white,
unpolished and small in size. Necklaces (vaiguwa) are ranked in a similar way.
The ranking system, then, is ordinal rather than cardinal.
Ordinal ranking systems are ethnographically widespread and their
character is commonly captured in anthropological literature by the expression
'spheres of exchange'. Bohannan (1959), for example, uses this expression to
describe the ranking system of the Nigerian Tiv. Among the Tiv objects are
classified as belonging to one of three spheres. The first, and lowest sphere, is
what the Tiv call yiagh. This includes locally produced foodstuffs, some tools,
and raw materials which are traded at the markets. The second sphere
comprises items of a kind that carry prestige (shagba) and whose transaction is
independent of the markets. Slaves, cattle, horses, white (tugudu) cloth, and
brass rods circulate within this sphere. The third sphere, considered 'supreme',
contains a single item: rights in human beings, especially women and children.
The theoretical significance of this distinction between quality and quantity
918
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
919
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920
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
921
SOCIAL LIFE
922
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
Remittance Admittance
Table 2
923
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Negative
reciprocity
Figure 1 Reciprocity and kinship residential sectors. (After Sahlins 1972: 199)
924
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
Aliens
(+barter)
(-theft)
Figure 2 Modified model of reciprocity and residential sectors. (After Ingold 1986:232)
925
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926
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
Marriage with the father's sister's daughter, the patrilateral rule, is consistent
with exchanges of this type, in which the direction of exchange is reversed
rather than repeated in each successive generation.
These three forms of exchange are all of the 'elementary' type. Levi-Strauss
sees in such elementary structures of kinship the basis for the gift exchange of
things. A bridewealth exchange, for example, is 'a process whereby the woman
provided as a counterpart is replaced by a symbolical equivalent' (1969 [1949]:
470). A transformation such as this can only occur, however, if the marriage is
of the generalized or delayed kind. All three elementary forms, in Levi-
Strauss's scheme, are then opposed to complex structures which leave 'the
determination of the spouse to other mechanisms, economic or psychological'
(Levi-Strauss 1969 [1949]:xxiii). Levi-Strauss's 'great divide', between
elementary and complex structures of kinship, can be mapped onto Polanyi's
between non-market and market exchange. The fit is by no means perfect, but
the degree of correlation is high.
These different forms of exchange, argues Levi-Strauss, are an expression
of the incest taboo, the 'supreme rule of the gift' (1969 [1949]:22). As he put it,
t e pro 1 1t10n o mcest IS ess a ru e pro 1 ttmg marnage wtt t e mot er,
daughter or sister, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be
given to others' (1969 [1949]:22). This is not only Levi-Strauss's answer to
Mauss's question about the basis of the obligation to give, it also underwrites
his theory of cultural evolution. Levi-Strauss argues (1969 [1949]: eh. 28) that
it was man's desire to maximize the kinship distance between himself and his
wife that saw society progress through different evolutionary stages of
development.
There is, in sum, a sense in which the theories of Mauss, Levi-Strauss,
Polanyi and Sahlins, taken together, provide a conceptual framework which is
the mirror image ofMarx's. Whereas the gift theorists begin their analyses with
the direct gift exchange of people and then progress through various mediating
forms to the generalized gift exchange of things, commodity theorists like Marx
begin with the direct commodity exchange of things and progress to the
generalized commodity exchange of labour (Gregory 1982:68). This method of
analysis is 'evolutionary' to the extent that it is making claims about actual
historical processes, but it can also be seen as a 'logical historical' method
(Meek 1967), a mode of reasoning employed in the process of developing an
abstract conceptual framework. This distinction is important because the
logical historical method makes no claims about actual historical processes.
Thus, an evolutionary theory can be rejected without affecting the legitimacy
of the logical historical method. The importance of this distinction should
927
SOCIAL LIFE
become clear in the course of the following discussion of barter and other forms
of counter-trade.
928
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
Malinowski's data for the economists' theory of barter and developed the
alternative thesis that gift exchange preceded commodity exchange. He
proposed a three-stage theory: first came the restricted exchange of gifts within
a tribe, next came generalized gift exchange, and finally the money economy
originated when the ancient Semitic societies 'invented the means of
detaching ... precious things from groups' (1954 [1925]:94).
It is interesting to note, in passing, that barter exchange is re-emerging in
the heartland of international financial capitalism as the hegemony of the
United States wanes and with it the value of the dollar. Barter has long been a
major component of international trade between East and West (i.e. on the
boundaries of United States power), but now many multi-national companies
are resorting to it to safeguard losses from deals involving a declining dollar;
within the United States the rise of computerized exchange, where debts can be
cancelled without the aid of money, has begun to worry the Internal Revenue
Service (Hart 1987: 197).
The ethnographic and historical evidence, then, does not support any
simplistic theory of the evolution of economic forms. This is not to say that the
logical historical method, which organizes concepts in a sequence from simple
to complex, is invalid. To the contrary, as the above discussion has shown, it has
underlain all the significant conceptual developments in the theory of exchange
over the past two centuries.
Let me now turn to consider the question of exchange-rate determination.
asstca po 1t1ca economy, as we ave seen, propose t e a our t eory o
value as the key to understanding the exchange-rate of commodities. It was
argued that two heterogeneous commodities can be equated in value because of
the equality of the labour time contained therein. Neoclassical economists, on
the other hand, proposed that scarcity and utility determine the prices of
goods. What contribution have anthropologists been able to make to this
debate?
The controversy has been uppermost in the minds of many ethnographers
as they observed and collected quantitative data on tribal systems of barter and
counter-trade. Godelier ( 1977), for example, explicitly addressed the debate on
the theory of value in his article on '"Salt money" and the circulation of
commodities among the Baruya of New Guinea'.
The Baruya are a people of the Eastern Highlands ofPapua New Guinea for
whom the production of sweet potatoes is the principal economic activity. They
are also specialists in the production of vegetable salt which is redistributed
among relatives within the tribe and bartered for various products and services
beyond its borders. The latter exchanges were conducted in pre-colonial times
by daring individuals who made contact with hostile neighbours and managed
to establish 'trade and protection' pacts with certain members of the host
groups. Trading partners would feed and protect their guests and do their best
to find the merchandise which the latter desired. Salt was a highly desired
prestige item which was stored above the hearth to be used on ceremonial
929
SOCIAL LIFE
is the reciprocal satisfaction of their need and not a well-kept balance of their labour
expenditure. For this reason, the inequality of exchange expresses the comparative
social utility of exchanged products, their unequal importance in the scale of social
needs and the diverse monopolist positions of exchange groups.
(1977:150)
labour because the skills required to produce salt are much more highly
specialized than those involved in making bark cloth. The labour theory of
value requires that differences of quality be reduced to those of quantity, and if
the reduction factor was such that three hours ofBaruya labour is equivalent to
one hour of Youndouye labour, then it could be argued that the exchange is
indeed equal.
The conclusion that both theories are valid is, perhaps, to be preferred,
because evidence such as this cannot resolve the fundamental problems of the
theory of value. What is at issue are different methods of apprehending the
world. If we conceptualize Baruya salt as a commodity certain implications
follow; if we conceptualize it as a good different implications follow. They are
incommensurable paradigms and, as such, no way of comparing them exists.
Furthermore, accurate accounting of utility value and labour value is
impossible, even in the Baruya's own terms. How does one reduce skilled
labour time to unskilled? How does one measure marginal utility and make
interpersonal comparisons? There are no satisfactory answers to these hotly
debated questions.
The labour-value and utility-value paradigms do not exhaust the universe of
possibilities, and there is room for other theories of value. Sahlins's essay,
'Exchange value and the diplomacy of primitive trade' (in Sahlins 1972), can be
seen as an attempt to develop an alternative. He begins by noting that the
930
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
931
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932
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
933
SOCIAL LIFE
examine some of the factors which have been used to explain the observed
patterns (such as the predominance of periodic market traders in the rural areas
of poor countries, of hierarchical markets in China, of C-M-C markets in
Central India, and so on), it is necessary to consider some of the many different
types of spatio-temporal organization found in periodic markets.
Periodicity concentrates the demand for a product to a certain place on a
specified day between set hours. A trader can, by repositioning him or herself at
regular intervals, tap the demand of a market area and obtain an income from
commerce that is adequate for survival. From the point of view of farming
households the periodicity of markets reduces the distance they must travel in
order to sell their produce and to buy goods for consumption. In effect,
periodicity disperses the central market-town throughout the countryside and
converts sleepy backwaters into thriving commercial centres for a few hours
each week. This pattern of dispersal is a function of the availability of
transport: for rich market-town traders there is a limit to how far they are
prepared to drive each day, and for poor farmers there is a limit to how far they
are prepared to walk.
The distribution of periodic markets over time and space poses a problem
that can be expressed in mathematical terms. Christaller's (1966 [1933]) classic
application of central place theory is one such expression that has proved very
influential with geographers and with some anthropologists (e.g. Skinner
1964-5). However, rather than elaborating on formal models of this kind, it is
more appropnate ere to gtve some m tcatwn o t e actua vanatwns oun m
the spatio-temporal organization of marketing systems.
In China market schedules are usually based on a ten- or twelve-day week.
This structure allows for the development of cyclical systems of great
complexity. For example, the 12-day cycle yields three regular cycles of 12-day,
6-day and 3-day market weeks; within these cycles many further possibilities
for scheduling are found. Six different schedules make up the 6-day week for
example: the first consists of the 1st and 7th day of the cycle, the second of the
2nd and 8th day, the third of the 3rd and 9th day, and so on. If town A chooses
the first schedule, town B the second, town C the third and so on, then it can be
seen that a farming household living equidistant from these three towns has 3
markets close by on 6 of the 12 days of the market week; towns D, E, F, G, etc.
will provide the household with a range of more distant markets to choose from
on the other days of the week.
In Central India the system is comparatively simple. The market week is a 7-
day one. The major market is held on Sundays at the central market town;
intermediate level centres hold their markets on Fridays, Saturdays and
Mondays; and small centres hold their markets on the remaining days. In West
Africa there is a standard market week of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 days in length, such
that all markets in a given locality are based on the same cycle.
In areas where vertical commodities predominate, space becomes ordered in
a hierarchical way with market centres of various sizes constituting the nodal
934
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
935
SOCIAL LIFE
notes, develop a social structure that enables them to bring informal sanctions to
bear on their members. In these localized power systems coercion and
collaboration create solidary relations which bring benefits to the in-group and
problems for the out-group. One of the greatest benefits to the in-group is access
to credit. This provides members of the in-group with initial capital and the
ability to accumulate more. Whereas debt can enchain a consumer, for merchants
it is their lifeblood, for without it they cannot expand their capital. It is obvious
that credit will not be extended where there is neither trust nor sanction and, in
periodic market systems, this marks the boundary between the in-group and the
out-group. Thus we find that credit for merchant capital expansion flows upon
the foundations laid by consanguinity and territoriality. Here, then, is an
important factor behind the observed hierarchies found in market places and,
when considered in the light of the particular history of a merchant class, it goes
some way towards explaining the wealth of some and the poverty of others.
Dewey's argument, for which a wide range of supporting evidence can be
marshalled, amounts to the claim that positive reciprocity asserts itself in unique
ways in the heartland of negative reciprocity, the market place.
This argument seems to contradict Sahlins's theory of positive and negative
reciprocity. However a distinction must be maintained between the analysis of
abstract principles of exchange and the analysis of exchange in concrete
situations. The theories developed by scholars such as Smith, Ricardo, Marx,
Malinowski, Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins are abstractions which must be
recogmze as sue an app te wtt cautiOn to t e ana ysts o concrete rea tty.
The message of Dewey's argument-and of the growing body of literature
concerned with applying the theory of the gift to European history (White
1988), literature (Hyde 1984), economy (Zelizer 1989) and culture (Agnew
1986)-is that concrete reality is riddled with contradictions. This means that
any attempt, say, to characterize the European economy as a commodity
economy and the Melanesian economy as a gift economy, is bound to fail
because positive and negative reciprocity is at work in both economies. The
notion of reciprocity, then, can be defined in the abstract but its real meaning
will always depend on the concrete political context.
REFERENCES
Agnew, J-C. (1986) Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American
Thought, 1550-1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Belshaw, C.S. (1965) Traditional and Modern Markets, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Bohannan, P. (1959) 'The impact of money on an African subsistence economy', The
Journal of Economic History 19:491-503.
Bohannan, P. and Dalton, G. (eds) (1962) Markets in Africa, Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Bromley, R. (1979) Periodic Markets, Daily Markets, and Fairs: A Bibliography
936
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
937
SOCIAL LIFE
FURTHER READING
Belshaw, C.S. (1965) Traditional and Modern Markets, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Bohannan, P. and Dalton, G. (eds) (1962) Markets in Africa, Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Dalton, G. (ed.) (1967) Tribal and Peasant Economies, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Geertz, C. (1963) Peddlars and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in
Two Indonesian Towns, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Godelier, M. (1977) Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gouldner, A. (1960) 'The norm of reciprocity: a preliminary statement', American
Sociological Review 25:161-78.
Gregory, C.A. (1982) Gifts and Commodities, London: Academic Press.
Gregory, C. A. and Altman, J. C. ( 1990) Observing the Economy ( ASA Research Methods
in Social Anthropology, 3), London: Routledge.
Humphrey, C. and Hugh-Jones, S. (eds) (1992) Barter, Exchange and Value: an
Anthropological Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leach, J. and Leach, E.R. (eds) (1983) The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
938
EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY
939
34
940
POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
Hunter- Band
gatherers (family level) Head man Egalitarian society
Farmers Tribe
(local group) Big man
- Ranked society
Simple
Chiefdom ~--·~""' ""
941
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942
POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
logic, Cohen ( 1977) argues that the origins of agriculture in different regions of
the globe resulted from sustained population growth that led to the peopling of
the world and pressed against the availability of wild resources in a hunter-
gatherer economy (see also Cohen's contribution to this volume, Article 10).
This is a classic chicken-and-egg debate: on the one hand, an inherent
growth in human technology is said to have permitted population growth
(Childe and White); on the other hand, inherent growth in human population
is said to have caused hardships that either limited growth (Malthus), or caused
technological and social innovations that permitted further growth (Boserup).
Most probably the two suggested prime movers-demographic expansion and
progressive technological innovation-are inexorably bound together Oohnson
and Earle 1987). The reproductive potential of human populations and the
cultural capability to enhance the productivity of environmental resources
together generate a growth-oriented system of a kind hitherto unknown. But a
further implication of this interpretation is that technological change did not
result in a 'better world' with higher per capita consumption; rather, the result
was simply a greater population.
The positive feedback between population growth and technological
innovation is linked to social modes of production which provide the material
basis for social differentiation. Marxist analyses of capitalism, for example,
describe how the ownership of industrial technology conferred control over the
productive process and exclusive rights to the profits derived therefrom.
evera recent evo utwnary se ernes, Marxist m conceptiOn, emp astze ow
the characteristics of the new technologies and economies affect the political
and social character of life. Major syntheses include those of Lenski (1966),
who distinguishes between hunting and gathering societies, simple
horticultural societies, advanced horticultural societies, agricultural societies,
and industrial societies; and Glassman (1986), who separates the stages of
democracy in hunting-gathering band society, democracy in hunting-
horticultural or herding-hunting tribal society, and despotism in horticultural
village society or nomadic herding society. On the basis of this separation into
stages, Glassman attempts to show how gender and political relations derive
from the way in which persons stand, vis-a-vis each other, with regard to their
respective labour roles in subsistence production.
Clearly, what is needed is a systematic way to link the processes of
technological elaboration and population growth with the development of more
complex societies. The next school of social evolutionary thought to be
considered deals with this linkage explicitly.
943
SOCIAL LIFE
944
POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
The state
State societies are complex and internally differentiated by class, economic
specialization, and ethnicity. The expansion in scale, in comparison to
chiefdoms, is connected to various institutions of integration: military,
religious and bureaucratic. As Wright (1984) emphasizes, the centralization of
leadership is based on the formalization of decision-making hierarchies. In
contrast to chiefdoms, in which a leadership stratum remains generalized, state
bureaucracies are internally specialized with a differentiation of decision-
making and control functions. Special characteristics of states may include
writing systems, which are important for record-keeping, and elaborate
systems of transportation and communication. The economies of states are
based either on a system of pooling and redistribution or on market exchange,
or on a combination of the two.
945
SOCIAL LIFE
The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society-the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and
to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production in material life determines the general character of the social, political
and spiritual processes oflife.
946
POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
947
SOCIAL LIFE
Egalitarian society
Equated with family-level integration and with local groups with headmen,
this has 'as many positions of prestige in any given age-sex grade as there are
people capable of filling them' (Fried 1967:33). These societies are structured
traditionally by kin relationships and by the universal criteria of age and sex.
Ranked society
Equated with Big Man polities and simple chiefdoms, this has a limited
number of positions of valued status such that 'not all those of sufficient talent
to occupy such statuses actually achieve them' (Fried 1967: 109). Local polities
have ritual and political leaders who acquire their positions on the basis of
traditional principles that rank individuals with respect to each other. Fried
believed that such positions were not based on economic power or privilege.
Leadership carried traditional rights of obedience and obligations to manage
economic projects such as the construction of irrigation systems and the
redistribution of specialized goods (compare Service 1962).
Stratified society
Equated loosely with complex chiefdoms, this 'is one in which members of the
resources that sustain life' (Fried 1967: 186 ). This stage is poorly defined
ethnographically, and its separation from that of ranked society seems to be
based only on the structural transformation from communal to private
property.
My impression, though disputed by some (Kristiansen 1991 ), is that ranked
and stratified societies are not qualitatively different. Rather, in both, leaders
attempt to maximize their political advantage, but their ability to do this varies
according to the available systems of control and finance; the outcome is
quantitative variation in the strength and extent of political centrality and in
the resulting developmental dynamics (Sanders and Webster 1978, Ear le 1989).
State society
This is identified as having 'specialized institutions and agencies ... that
maintain an order of stratification' (Fried 1967:235). Thus states simply
represent the expansion and institutionalization of the structural changes
underwriting the emergence of stratified society, and Fried explains the rarity
of the proto-typical stratified society on the grounds that once the critical
structural transformation giving rise to stratification has occurred, the state
will necessarily develop quickly to solidify it.
Friedman and Rowlands (1977) significantly expand on Fried's formulation
948
POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
949
SOCIAL LIFE
now been extensively criticized, and it has been shown that, by and large, the
adaptive advantage of central management, by contrast to other social solutions, is
unclear (see Earle 1987).
Zb The 'integrationist' schemes that invoke political processes emphasize that control
over populations is the basis for the development of more integrated systems. But
why would a political system expand in the first place, and why should different
political systems, all operated by equally sophisticated strategists, vary in their
capacity to expand and dominate?
3 The 'social structuralist' schemes emphasize that different social systems have
fundamentally different organizational structures and thus have contrasting
developmental dynamics and trajectories. But whence come these different
structures? Are they simply the outcome of historical differences?
A synthetic theory can draw on the strengths of each theoretical scheme, which
complement each other in many respects. To construct such a theory, we should
recognize that every human society depends on a conjunction of subsistence
economy and political economy (Earle 1978, Johnson and Earle 1987:11-15).
The differences emphasized in the 'social structural' schemes do not, I argue,
represent qualitative differences in society, but rather represent different
properties of the two economic spheres of subsistence and politics.
The subsistence economy meets the direct survival needs of a population. Its
character depends on the scale of these needs (reflecting largely the
population's size) and on the availability of resources in its environment which
may e trans orme y t e uman pro uctiVe process. T e ynamtc
relationship between technology and population growth underlies the gradual
expansion in the subsistence economy, subject however to environmental
constraints on technological intensification. Problems of survival may require
the establishment of social networks and group leaders backed by traditional
reciprocal rules of aid and support.
The political economy provides the finance to support emerging elites and
their related institutions. As I have argued for the Hawaiian case (Earle 1978),
unlike the subsistence economy, the political economy is inherently growth-
oriented. In essence, competition for positions ofleadership puts a premium on
the mobilization of resources used to support contending factions. Growth in a
political economy can be very rapid, constrained only by the ability to mobilize
resources from a commoner population. But what confers and limits this
ability? Local elites will actively seek to develop means of control, but control
can also be seen as derived fundamentally from the character of the subsistence
economy.
Long-term intensification of the subsistence economy, of a kind that might
require local management, also creates conditions of control in the political
economy (Johnson and Earle 1987). As Lenski (1966) argues, the
institutionalization of privilege that underlies social complexity derives from a
balance of power and need. Although state coercion never lies far below the
surface, stable systems of domination depend upon the ruling elite's ability to
950
POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
provide (or deny) essential products or services. To show how this works we
need to examine the varying sources of power in chiefdoms and states, and how
these sources offer potentially conflicting and complementary bases for control.
Sources of power
In this section, I argue that four sources of power exist: social, military,
ideological, and economic (compare Mann 1986, Earle 1987). A person's
political position depends on using one or more of these power sources. The
political process involves the selective application of power to control access to
these power sources and thus to weaken potential opposition.
Power relationships, either overt or thinly disguised, underlie the dynamics
of all societies; however, an ability to control access to power can be realized in
the mobilization of resources to finance those institutions of rule on which
complex societies rest Oohnson and Earle 1987). I shall first summarize briefly
the literature on the alternative sources of power and then go on to argue that
the economy is primary, in that it alone permits control over all other sources of
power.
Social power
Characterizing all societies, social power derives from the ability to draw
po 1t1ca support an resources rom c ose m, an most pro a y ta es Its
strength from the intimacy of such kinship bonds. In Yanomamo axe fights, for
example, when interpersonal confrontations arise, factions of close kin form
such that brothers and cousins side with each respective combatant (Chagnon
1983). Similarly, in the political machinations of Big Men, critical to a man's
initial success is the size of his immediate kindred on which he can rely for
support (Oliver 1955). In their model of tribal society, Friedman and Row lands
( 1977) emphasize its kin-based character and the chiefs political strategy to
extend his power through marriage. Each marriage unites a leader with an
affinal group from which he can draw politically. Among the Trobriand
Islanders, the wives that a chief takes enable him to collect affinal gifts which
become a rudimentary form of tribute Oohnson and Earle 1987:216-23; see
Malinowski 1935). Webster (1990) offers a recent review of power relations in
the chiefdoms of Africa and prehistoric Europe, which also emphasizes their
personal, kin-based nature.
Military power
Military power is based on might and intimidation. Gilman ( 1987)
characterizes this as a protection racket in which commoners must give to the
elites what they demand, or face reprisal. Certainly military might both
maintains and extends political control. In the complex Hawaiian chiefdoms, a
951
SOCIAL LIFE
military cadre was supported by the paramount chief, who used it to conquer
new lands and peoples and to retain control internally (Earle 1978). The
warriors of the Polynesian chiefdoms (Sahlins 1958), and of European
medieval society, were the most direct instruments of oppression. Control over
the manufacture and ownership of the weapons of war could form a basis for
political domination (Childe 1951 ). Traditional African chiefdoms and states,
for example, show how control over the technology of war can translate into a
monopoly offorce (Goody 1971).
Ideological power
Another important source of power is a society's ideology. Chiefs and kings
maintain domination through perpetuating the belief that their superiority is
part of the natural order, sanctioned by superhuman powers and authority.
This is done by hosting ceremonies that present the legitimate ascendancy of
the leaders, frequently grounding that ascendent position in history and
genealogy. For example, in the Merina state of Madagascar (Bloch 1989) and
the Mapuche chiefdoms of Chile (Dillehay 1990), leaders use ceremonial
occasions at burial monuments to proclaim the legitimate genealogical basis for
their rule. One is drawn to the parallels in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe,
where the monumental burial grounds of chiefs dominated both the physical
and the political landscape. In the complex Hawaiian chiefdoms, rulers were
not stmp y ea ers; t ey were go s w o ru e y re tgwus y sanctwne
authority (Earle 1978, 1991). Through dress and ceremony, chiefs identified
their status with that of the gods. Most impressively, in chiefdoms and states,
ceremonial and political spaces were organized according to a cosmic order that
created a celestial stage on which leaders acted out their sanctified roles (see
Krupp 1983). This theme is exemplified in Geertz's (1980) notion of the
nineteenth-century Balinese state as a theatre, and by Fritz's (1986) analysis of
spatial organization in a medieval Indian capital. Individuals thus ruled not by
might but by their sanctified place in a universal order.
Economic power
Economic power derives from control over the production and distribution of
necessary goods. These goods may be either staple supplies or valuables.
Staples, such as food and clothing, are goods required by all for subsistence;
by contrast, a society's valuables, such as the items used in marriage
payments or political displays, are necessary for establishing personal (and
group) standing.
The actual sources of economic power are quite variable, depending on how
control is exercised by a ruling elite. In the establishment of institutions
supporting political integration, leaders must assemble the goods needed to
compensate political supporters and others who work for them. Essentially this
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a senior line, when the expansion of the latter structurally undermined the
former's rank and political position. Consequently, it was common for a junior
line to break away and to form its own polity (Sahlins 19 58, Ear le 1978). It is
difficult to see, then, how kinship could form the bedrock of a stable
arrangement of political power.
Military power, in its application, is manifested as naked force. Although no
complex society can exist without it, military force is inherently difficult to
control. As proverbial wisdom has it, 'He who lives by the sword dies by the
sword.' The military cadre on which a leader depends is often his greatest
threat because its force can be quickly turned against him. What gives a
monopoly of force and allows that force to be controlled?
Ideological power derives from an accepted notion of order,
characteristically backed by religious sanction. But what limits access to
esoteric knowledge and religious sanctity? Cannot anyone-a new shaman,
priest, prophet, or a man on a soapbox-claim to have direct communication
with the gods and create a new religious order? Tradition may constrain what
can be done and said, but in this respect it can be used as much against
centralizing power as to support it.
Power can be an equalizing force. It is used not only to dominate, but also to
resist domination. Complex societies are especially complicated because the
competing sources of power are continually dissolving centralization (Mann
1986). Modern state society may actually 'devolve' as the multiplicity of the
sources o power ma es po 1t1ca centra tzatwn tmpracttca .
The evolution of complex social systems, while certainly encompassing
complicated and conflicting power relationships, is fundamentally based on
control over material conditions, which in turn permits control over the other
sources of power. Economic power alone provides the stability that allows for
the creation and extension of politically centralized societies. It does this
because of the ease with which economic processes can be controlled and used
to control the other sources of power.
Economic forces can be controlled by restricting access to the means of
production and distribution. In evolutionary development, the intensification
of production increases the ease with which control can be established, by
gradually replacing labour with technology as the critical limiting factor. For
example, with a shift to irrigated agriculture, improved lands become centrally
important, and access to these improvements can be regulated by an emerging
elite (see Earle 1978). Economic power becomes increasingly centralized as
income from owned facilities is used to finance further economic development
with the construction of agricultural facilities, the attachment of specialists,
and the development of transport technology.
The products of the economic system can also be reinvested materially in
control over the other sources of power. A chiefs kinship network is extended
by polygamous marriages secured through rich gift exchanges (Friedman and
Rowlands 1977). Military forces are controlled by providing material support
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POLITICAL DOMINATION AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION
to the cadre and by control over the manufacture and importation of their
weaponry (Goody 1971 ). Ideological power is controlled by the substantial
capital required to finance religious institutions and the spectacular ceremonies
of legitimation.
The primary dynamic in the evolution of complex society lies in an intensely
competitive political arena (Earle 1978, Johnson and Earle 1987). Survival in
that arena depends on astute strategies on the part of individual leaders in
manipulating their investments in the alternative sources of power and in
mechanisms for establishing control. Thus within the political arena there is a
social process of leadership selection; at times a leader's success centralizes his
polity, but miscalculation can as quickly lead to collapse.
Chiefdoms are characteristically cyclical. For example, the prehistoric
Mississippian chiefdoms of the South-eastern United States were never stable;
they expanded and declined rapidly as different localities rose and fell from
political dominance (Anderson 1990). The different bases of political power
were continually tested and the ability to maintain and extend domination
formed the foundation for political development. With the emergence of states,
the frequency of cycling may be reduced by increasingly centralized and
institutionalized control; nevertheless the rise of states anticipates their
eventual fall (see, for example, Khazanov 1984 ).
Elites must continuously seek out mechanisms of domination. These may
include the establishment of a police force and of religious institutions. The
economy may e systemattca y mampu ate to mcrease t e epen ency o t e
peasantry. However, stability in control may equally be the outcome of long-
term changes in the subsistence economy that make commoners dependent on
the ruling elite for necessary goods and services that cannot be obtained
independently.
Successful systems of domination are characterized by the intertwining of
the sources of power and control. Income from a growth-oriented political
economy is invested in economic expansion, political alliances, military
support, and religious extravaganzas. Thus economic dependence, social
relationships, naked force, and sacred legitimacy are continually bound up with
one another. The binding thread is the economic flow of resources. Material
wealth begets both more wealth and political control.
NOTE
1 Major syntheses abound, including Morgan (1977), Marx (1904), Engels (1972 [1884]),
Spencer (1967), Childe (1936, 1951), Steward (1955), Service (1962), Wittfogel (1957),
Lenski (1966), Cameiro (1970), Fried (1967), Harris (1977), Glassman (1986), Mann
(1986), and Johnson and Earle (1987). Some excellent histories of social evolutionary
theory are also available, among them Lenski (1966), Harris (1968), Service (1975,
1978).
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REFERENCES
Anderson, D. (1990) 'Political change in chiefdom societies: cycling in the late
prehistoric Southeastern United States'. PhD dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, University of Michigan.
Bloch, M. (1989) Ritual, History and Power, London: Athlone Press.
Boserup, E. (1966) The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: the Economics of Agrarian
Change Under Population Pressure, Chicago: Aldine.
Bradley, R. (1991) 'Ideology and economy in the prehistory of Southern England', in
T.Earle (ed.) Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Braun, D. and Plog, S. (1982) 'Evolution of "tribal" social networks theory and
prehistoric North American evidence', American Antiquity 43:504-25.
Brumfiel, E. (1976) 'Regional growth in the eastern Valley of Mexico: a test of the
"population pressure" hypothesis', in K.Flannery (ed.) The Early Mesoamerican
Village, New York: Academic Press.
--(1980) 'Specialization, exchange and the Aztec state', Current Anthropology 21:
459-78.
Brumfiel, E. and Earle, T. (1987) 'Introduction', in E.M.Brumfiel and T.K.Earle (eds)
Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Burton, R. (1975) 'Why do the Trobriands have chiefs?', Man (N.S.) 10:544--58.
Carneiro, R.L. (1970) 'A theory of the origin of the state', Science 169:733-8.
--(1981) 'The chiefdom as precursor of the state', in G.Jones and R.Kautz (eds) The
Chagnon, N. (1983) Yanomamij; the Fierce People, New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
Childe, V. G. (1936) Man Makes Himself, London: Watts.
--(1951) Social Evolution, London: Watts.
Cohen, M.N. (1977) The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of
Agriculture, New Haven: Yale University Press.
D' Altroy, T. and Earle, T. (1985) 'Staple finance, wealth finance, and storage in the Inca
political economy', Current Anthropology 26:187-206.
Dalton, G. ( 1977) 'Aboriginal economies in stateless societies', in T. Earle and J. Ericson
(eds) Exchange Systems in Prehistory, New York: Academic Press.
Dillehay, T. (1990) 'Mapuche ceremonial landscape, social recruitment and resource
rights', World Archaeology 22:223-41.
Drennan, R. (1991) 'Prehispanic chiefdom trajectories in Mesoamerica, Central
America, and Northern South America', in T.Earle (ed.) Chiefdoms: Power,
Economy, and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Durkheim, E. (1933 [1893]) The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Free Press.
Earle, T. (1977) 'A reappraisal of redistribution: complex Hawaiian chiefdoms', in T.
Earle and J.Ericson (eds) Exchange Systems in Prehistory, New York: Academic Press.
--(1978) Economic and Social Organization of a Complex Chiefdom: the Hale/ea
District, Kaua'i, Hawaii, University of Michigan, Anthropological Papers, vol. 63,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
--(1987) 'Chiefdoms in archaeological and ethnohistorical perspective', Annual
Review ofAnthropology 16:279-308.
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Krupp, E.C. (1983) Echoes ofthe Ancient Skies: the Astronomy of Lost Civilizations, New
York: Harper & Row.
Lee, R.B. and DeVore, I. (eds) (1968) Man the Hunter, Chicago: Aldine.
Lenski, G.E. (1966) Power and Privilege: a Theory of Social Stratification, New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Maine, H.S. (1861) Ancient Law, London: John Murray.
Mair, L. (1962) Primitive Government, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Malinowski, B. (1935) Coral Gardens and their Magic: a Study ofthe Methods of Tilling the
Soil and ofAgricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands, New York: American Book Co.
Malthus, T. (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population, London: Johnson.
Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, vol 1: A History of Power from the
Beginning to A.D. 1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1904) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N.I.Stone,
Chicago: Charles H.Kerr.
Mauss, M. (1954) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies,
London: Cohen & West.
Meggitt, M. (1974) 'Pigs are our hearts!: the te exchange cycle among the Mae Enga of
New Guinea', Oceania 44:165-203.
Morgan, L.H. (1877) Ancient Society, Chicago: Charles H.Kerr.
Oliver, D.L. (1955) A Solomon Island Society: Kinship and Leadership Among the Siuai of
Bougainville, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation, New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Richards, A.I. (1939) Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, London: Oxford
University Press.
a Ins,
Press.
--(1963) 'Poor man, rich man, big man, chief: political types in Melanesia and
Polynesia', Comparative Studies in Society and History 5:285-303.
--(1968) Tribesmen, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
--(1972) Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock.
Sanders, W.T. and Webster, D. (1978) 'Unilinealism, multilinealism, and the evolution
of complex societies', in C.L.Redman, M.J.Berman, E.V.Curtin, WT.Langhorne,
Jr, N.M.Versaggi and J.C.Wanser (eds) Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and
Dating, New York: Academic Press.
Service, E. (1962) Primitive Social Organization: an Evolutionary Perspective, New York:
Random House.
--(1975) Origins of the State and Civilization: the Process of Cultural Evolution, New
York: Norton.
--(1978) 'Classical and modern theories of the origins of government', in R.Cohen
and E. Service (eds) Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Political Evolution,
Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Spencer, H. (1967) The Evolution of Society: Selections from Herbert Spencer's Principles
of Sociology, ed. R.L.Carneiro, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steward, J. (1955) Theory of Culture Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
--(1977) 'The foundations of Basin-Plateau Shohonean society', in ].Steward and
R.Murphy (eds) Evolution and Ecology, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Webster, G. (1990) 'Labor control and emergent stratification in prehistoric Europe',
Current Anthropology 31:337-66.
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White, L. (1943) Energy and the evolution of culture, American Anthropologist 45: 335-56.
--(1959) The Evolution of Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Williams, B.J. (1974) 'A model of band society', Society for American Archaeology
Memoirs no. 29, Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology.
Wittfogel, K. (1957) Oriental Despotism, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wright, H. (1984) 'Prestate political formations', in T.Earle (ed.) On the Evolution of
Complex Societies, Malibu: Undena Publications.
Yellen, J. and Harpending, H. (1972) 'Hunter-gatherer populations and archaeological
inference', World Archaeology 4:244--53.
FURTHER READING
Carneiro, R.L. ( 1981) 'The chiefdom as precursor of the state', in G.Jones and R.
Kautz (eds) The Transition to Statehood in the New World, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cohen, R. and Service, E. (eds) (1978) Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Political
Evolution, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Earle, T. (ed.) (1991) Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fried, M.H. (1967) The Evolution of Political Society: an Essay in Political Economy,
New York: Random House.
Friedman, J. and Rowlands, M. (eds) (1977) The Evolution of Social Systems, London:
Duckworth.
Glassman, R. (1986) Democracy and Despotism in Primitive Societies: a Neo-Weberian
Approach to Political Theory, New York: Associated Faculty Press.
Goody, J. (1971) Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Johnson, A. and Earle, T. (1987) The Evolution ofHuman Societies: from Foraging Group
to Agrarian State, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.
Kirch, P.V. (1984) The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lenski, G.E. (1966) Power and Privilege: a Theory of Social Stratification, New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, vol 1: A History of Power from the
Beginning to A.D. 1760, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sahlins, M. D. (1972) Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock.
Service, E. (1962) Primitive Social Organization: an Evolutionary Perspective, New York:
Random House.
--(1975) Origins of the State and Civilization: the Process of Cultural Evolution, New
York: W.W.Norton.
Steward, J.H. (1955) Theory of Culture Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Upham, S. (ed.) (1990) The Evolution of Political Systems: Sociopolitics in Small-Scale
Sedentary Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Webster, G. ( 1990) 'Labor control and emergent stratification in prehistoric Europe',
Current Anthropology 31:337-66.
White, L.A. (1959) The Evolution of Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Wright, H. (1984) 'Prestate political formations', in T.Earle (ed.) On the Evolution of
Complex Societies, Malibu: Undena Publications.
961
35
INTRODUCTION
A sociology of those specialized, differentiated arrangements which we would
unambiguously label 'law' in the contemporary West is in itself problematic.
Law lays claim to a dual character: it furnishes the normative 'map' informing
the life-world of a society's members as they experience it; and it provides one
of the central means through which government exercises a steering role.
Hence a sociology of law must be concerned with commonly accepted
stan ar s an wtt Impose regu atwn, wtt t e omams o or er' an o
'domination'. Thus the ambition must be to keep these domains analytically
distinct, without losing sight of the strands which undoubtedly connect them.
Whatever these difficulties, law's robustly self-defined character at least
provides the 'folk' categories upon which a sociological analysis of 'norms' and
of 'government' can be brought to bear. But this quality at once poses a
problem when we try to imagine what an anthropology of law might be. The
very concept of 'law', with its claimed separation of the cognitive and
normative domains, its identification with a discrete sphere of the 'ought', may
not always find counterparts in the small-scale and technologically simple
societies which anthropologists have traditionally studied. The institutional
arrangements which we associate with law in the West-the differentiation of
legal norms; a specialized judiciary within a compartmentalized, self-conscious
governmental structure; the emergence of a legal profession-are all specific to
a particular socio-political context. Even in functional terms, law's almost
inextricable identification with 'government', the exercise of a steering role,
raises problems as soon as we move beyond the bounds of the sovereign state.
These concerns, which are surely of a different order from those associated
with marking out such broad, general categories as kinship, politics, economics
and religion, have not inhibited the growth of legal anthropology. Despite an
important shift in perspective, the interest of nineteenth-century scholars in
'primitive law' survived the transition into modern anthropology through
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Maine and Morgan on the one hand, and modern social anthropology on the
other. They posed a 'problem of order' in terms which are recognizably the
same as those in which it was addressed by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski.
But they remain remote in that their central interest, like that of their
predecessors, was in understanding modernity; the past, along with
contemporary examples of the primitive, was still invoked in the project of
getting to grips with the present. They are also remote in their partly concealed
presupposition, reinforced by the poor quality of the ethnography then
available, that governmental action is an inevitable concomitant of life in a
social world.
In opposing 'mechanical' and 'organic' solidarity in De la Division du travail
social (1893), Durkheim purports to elucidate the different ways in which
traditional and modern societies hold together rather than to examine the
nature of governmental action. But the use he makes of law in this discussion
reveals a conflation of the problems of order and of domination. In arguing that
the predominance of 'repressive' sanctions can provide us with a criterion for
identifying societies characterized by mechanical solidarity, and by similarly
linking 'restitutive' sanctions with organic solidarity, primitive societies were
credited with regimes of criminal law, and hence with mechanisms of
adjudication and coercive governmental action.
In his Economy and Society (1978 [1917]) Weber invokes an opposition
between tradition and modernity primarily at the level of government, rather
t an at t e eve o society. T IS oppositiOn IS use to e uci ate t e I erent
kinds of legitimacy claims made by traditional and modern (rational-legal)
authorities, and in an examination of the underpinnings of traditional and
modern forms of adjudication. For Weber, 'law' was a creature of the modern
world, linked to the application of general rules, and served to differentiate
bureaucratic government and specialized, rule-based adjudication from their
'traditional' forerunners.
Although an assumption that developed law is an achievement of the
modern world is implicit in a great deal of English legal anthropological
writing, explicit interest in legal evolution had fallen away by the 1920s. In
North America, on the other hand, this interest was sustained in such works as
Hoebel's Law of Primitive Man (1954), Redfield's influential essay on
'Primitive Law' (1967) and Newman's Law and Economic Organisation (1983).
All three works search through the ethnographic record for the pre-legal and
the proto-legal, mapping out with anthropological findings the path along
which law has evolved.
While processes of state formation have now become a source of renewed
interest among social theorists (see Giddens 1986, Mann 1986), 'law' has not
yet found a prominent place in these discussions. It is perhaps surprising that
no one has pursued in detail Maine's tantalizing aside, in his Dissertations on
Early Law and Custom, to the effect that the origins of adjudication are
intimately linked to those of kingship (1883:160). But Bloch's recent account of
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Looking back, it does seem that The Cheyenne Way is vulnerable to the
criticism that Llewellyn's lawyerly preoccupation with superior court litigation
obtruded too strongly into this attempt to understand conflict in another culture.
There must be some question as to just how much of Cheyenne culture survived
accommodation within the format of an American law school text. But that kind
of criticism cannot be made of the rich and wide-ranging studies which followed.
These made advances in at least four important directions: freedom from a rigid
adjudicatory model of decision-making; escape from a narrow view of conflict as
necessarily pathological and linked to rule breach; progress towards a more
sophisticated understanding of the relationship between rules and outcomes; and
rejection of an inflexible 'law-war' dichotomy.
In Ancient Law and in subsequent writings, Maine had treated third-party
decision-making as the basic means of resolving disputes across all known
societies. From the old patriarchs who stood at the head of the earliest social
groups to Victorian High Court judges, he saw the mode of resolution as one of
imposed decision; it was just that as different stages of civilization were
reached, different kinds of people made the decisions and new criteria
underpinned their judgments. Today, now that we recognize the possibility of
'order' without 'command', and are thus no longer constrained to invoke the
necessity of the king and the judge (although in the West still expecting to find
them somewhere in the picture), it becomes possible to characterize the range
of dispute-processing institutions in a far less restricted way.
n t e asts o t e et nograp tes o tspute w tc appeare m t e Os
and 1960s a number of tentative typologies of dispute institutions were put
forward (Gulliver 1963, Abel 1974, Koch 1974). These emphasized various
features, such as the presence or absence of third-party intervention, or the
form which such intervention might take in those cases where it was to be
found. A measure of agreement also began to emerge as regards the essential
range of variation which empirical studies disclosed. At the heart of these
variations appear to lie three basic forms which settlement-directed discourse
may take: the disputants may feel their way towards a settlement through
bilateral negotiation; they may try to resolve the matter with the help of a
neutral mediator; or they may submit the quarrel to an umpire for decision. My
discussion of these alternatives in the following paragraphs conforms closely to
Roberts (1979:69-71).
Bilateral negotiation represents the least complex form of settlement
process. Here the rival disputants approach each other without the intervention
of third parties and try to bring the dispute to an end through discussion. No
intermediaries or supporters are involved; the achievement of communication
and the subsequent process of settlement lie in the hands of the two parties
alone. A variation of this mode of settlement occurs when partisans align
themselves in support of one or other of the disputants; but while the 'strength'
of the respective sides may be altered by this procedure, the structural form of
the encounter remains unchanged.
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move away from small-scale, relatively egalitarian cultures, at least three broad
categories of dispute have to be distinguished:
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entirely recent manufacture. Lastly, there must be doubt as to how far 'colonial
customary law' was successfully transmitted into, and assimilated within, the
life-worlds of most colonized peoples.
First, while it was important, as a counter to the consensus implied in earlier
writings, to reveal the extent and nature of colonial domination, this is by no
means the whole story. Even if we freely concede the coercive nature of local
government in the colonial period, and the ideological quality of what passed
for 'customary law', an exclusively one-way, top-down view of the colonial
encounter would be misleading. There is no need to repeat here the now well-
articulated and generally accepted concerns about placing too literal a reliance
upon a conception of 'sovereign' power (Foucault 1984 ). 'Power' resides at
different levels, takes on diverse forms, and runs in all directions (Giddens
1985). Thus while 'customary law', in the sense of the repertoire of rules
applied in the colonial courts, did provide an instrument of rule, it also offered
avenues of escape and resistance for the ruled. Similarly, 'customary law' in the
different sense of the meanings and commitments which furnished the life-
worlds of indigenous peoples, while subject to covert penetration and eo-option
(de Sousa Santos 1980), also provided the means to achieve qualified autonomy.
The insistence of scholars like Chanock, Snyder and Ranger that 'customary
law' is of recent manufacture, a creature of the colonial period rather than the
pre-colonial past, is helpful in a number of ways. It is essential to recognize that
the relationship between contemporary and past forms is, at the very least,
pro emattc. Moreover t e associatiOn etween custom' an a suppose y
egalitarian context must be questioned. Further, the specific idea of 'invention'
restores and gives prominence to a conception of agency, the essential notion
that custom is linked to the affairs of living men and women-that it is both at
the root of action and the product of it. But there are difficulties in pressing
this view of customary law too far. First, it risks conflating two separate, if
interlinked spheres: the 'customary law' of the colonial and post-colonial
courts, and that which furnishes the everyday life-world of local people.
Second, the connotation of novelty, of a clean break, which 'invention' carries,
draws attention away from crucial aspects of what was happening. The very
strength of customary law, the source of its supposedly coercive power, lay in
the links it could claim with a past, established and approved state of affairs.
Foreign novelties do not lay claim through existing commitments; yet that-if
anything-is what custom does. Thus we should be looking not for novelty but
for the exploitation of an existing repertoire, or the artificial sustaining of
ancient forms, with detrimental, constraining effects upon the ruled.
The idea of an 'invented' tradition seems also to imply an impoverished and
grossly simplistic understanding of the operation of ideology. It calls up a
vision of the manufacture, transmission and assimilation, intact, of some new
world view, and the corresponding destruction of the pre-existing cognitive and
normative foundations of the life-world. Much more persuasive is an account
of ideology as working with what is already to hand, covertly upon and within
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PLURALISM
The shift to a focus on the operation of law in the colonial context brought with
it a number of important gains. First, it reinforced the recognition that law had
a political dimension, in the sense of its implication in processes of domination.
Thus, 'power' remained in the centre of the picture, to which it had already
been drawn in the more sophisticated discussions of dispute processes (Starr
and Collier 1989:1-25). As a result, attention inevitably moved to the role
which 'the rule of law' and the process of adjudication might play in the
legitimation of particular forms of government. Accordingly, the ideological
aspects of law achieved a new prominence, as did the nature of legal ritual.
Secondly, the focus upon the operation of law in the colonial context forced
scholars to give much more careful thought to the nature of indigenous
governmental arrangements and normative understandings in the pre-colonial
world, and to the transformation which these subsequently underwent (for an
important example, see von Benda-Beckman 1979). In this respect, the process
of incorporation of the 'traditional authorities' into regimes of colonial and
post-colonial government was of central interest (Mann and Roberts 1991).
All of this posed some troubling questions, which ultimately resolved
themselves into a single problem: with the imposition of a national, formally
dominant legal order upon the diversity of pre-colonial indigenous
communities, how can we best conceptualize the relationship between what was
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going on at the centre, in 'the secretariat'; and what was happening on the
periphery, in the localities? One way of looking at this is in terms of what
Kidder (1979) has vividly called 'the static hypodermic model'. This involved a
vertical, top-down, command view of the operation of law in the colonial
world. Rules enacted by government at the centre were transmitted to the
localities, where they produced direct, matching changes in behaviour,
resulting in 'development' or progress towards modernity. 'Law', made at the
centre, superseded existing 'customary' regimes.
Pospisil, in his early work, Kapauku Papuans and their Law (1958), rejected
this extreme positivism. 'Law' should be located at different points in the social
world, wherever 'authorities' could be found imposing normatively based
decisions. Accordingly, whether you looked at the developed West, or at the
territories then undergoing colonial encapsulation, 'law' should be seen as
residing at a number of hierarchically ranged, more or less discrete, 'legal
levels'. In so far as these levels were connected, the linkage was still seen to be
vertical, with change being transmitted down from the top. Most important,
perhaps, was Pospisil's rejection of an exclusive focus upon state law, allowing
as much attention to be given to other normative fields. Why, he asked, should
national law be privileged: should we not treat as 'law' the normative
understandings prevailing within local groups at any level? For Pospisil, norms
operative at the village level were just as much 'law' as those enacted at the
centre.
more ex1 e approac was propose y Moore m er semma essay, Law
and change: the semi-autonomous social field as an appropriate area of study'
(1973). Here, Moore substitutes the concept of 'social field' for that of 'legal
level'. Normative orders, including that presented by the national legal system,
are best seen as partially discrete, but nevertheless overlapping and
interpenetrating social fields, within which meaning is communicated on a two-
way, interactive basis. The social field is identified in terms of its 'semi-
autonomy', by 'the fact that it can generate rules and customs and symbols
internally, but ... is also vulnerable to rules and decisions and other forces
emanating from the larger world by which it is surrounded' (Moore 1978:55).
Moore was not talking exclusively about 'law', but rather about 'normative
fields' in general; nevertheless her approach proved immediately congenial to
legal anthropologists. She depicted change as a fluid, interactive process, full of
imponderables and unintended consequences.
Pospisil's insistence that in examining the 'legal' we should not focus on the
level of national law alone, and Moore's lead in turning attention to the
relationship between coexisting normative fields, together constituted the
principal agenda and approach for the anthropology of law during the latter part
of the 1970s and the 1980s. Under the label of'legal pluralism' the anthropology
oflaw virtually became the study of how several normative regimes may coexist in
the same social field. Legal anthropologists formed themselves into a professional
association under the grandiose title of the 'Commission on Folk Law and Legal
977
SOCIAL LIFE
Pluralism'; the journal African Law Studies re-emerged as the Journal of Legal
Pluralism and Unofficial Law, a conference was held at Bellagio in 1981 to
inaugurate this movement, and a large literature emerged which sought to re-
present the anthropology of law as legal pluralism and to delimit this new field
(see specially, Griffiths 1986, Merry 1988, Allott and Woodman 1985). Following
Moore's lead, societies of the West became as much a focus of attention as did
those of the post-colonial world.
In retrospect, this new anthropology of law brought important insights.
First, the move away from 'legal centralism' (Griffiths 1986), from according
privileged attention to national law, and from treating it as unproblematically
determinative of social forms, represented something of a release for legal
scholars. Equally significant was the way in which the relationship between
adjacent, semi-autonomous fields came to be perceived-as fluid, interactive
and imponderable. The very focus of lawyers' attention on a wider slice of the
social world, which legal pluralism implied, was in itself welcome; as was a new
openness to social and anthropological theory.
But there are also costs entailed in 'melting it all together as "law"' (Moore
1978:81 ). As Merry notes (1988:878), to extend the term law to forms of
ordering that are not state law may lead to a loss of analytic rigour. Depending
upon the focus of analysis, while 'recognizing the existence of and common
character of binding rules at all levels, it may be of importance to distinguish
the sources of the rules and the sources of effective inducement and coercion'
Moore 7 : ). T e tstmctiVe c aracter o state aw m t e West enves rom
its implication in the growth of a particular form of government; this
provenance accounts for crucial differences between it and other normative
orders. Correspondingly, in labelling other normative orders as 'law', it is
important to avoid the trap of investing them with the attributes of state law.
This seems to be exactly the trap into which Pospisil himself had fallen.
Insisting that 'Kapauku law' takes the form of norms derived from legal
decisions, which have to enjoy the attributes of 'authority' and 'intention of
universal application' in order to have a legal quality, he imputes an
adjudicative, command character to Kapauku processes which seriously
distorts their nature. While most advocates of the approach of legal pluralism
are entirely conscious of the hazards of distorting non-state processes through
investing them with a framework derived from Western law, the designation of
the approach as one of legal pluralism should perhaps sound a warning note.
It is significant that the field of the anthropology of law has become almost
exclusively occupied by lawyers rather than anthropologists. Until the 1960s it
was occupied almost entirely by anthropologists, with lawyers showing
relatively little interest; but since then the position has been entirely reversed.
And because it has been colonized by lawyers, it has inevitably been treated as
an area of 'legal' scholarship. Overall, it is difficult to avoid the impression that
the invocation of 'legal pluralism' has more to do with the entrenchment of an
academic discipline than with the struggle to understand the social world.
978
LAW AND DISPUTE PROCESSES
CONCLUSION
Why is it so difficult to find a word for nonstate law? It is clearly difficult to define
and circumscribe these forms of ordering. Where do we stop speaking of law and
find ourselves simply describing social life? Is it useful to call these forms of
ordering law? In writing about legal pluralism, I find that once legal centralism has
. . .
confounds the analysis. The literature in this field has not yet clearly demarcated a
boundary between normative orders that can and cannot be called law.
REFERENCES
Abel, R.L. (1974) 'A comparative theory of dispute institutions in society', Law and
Society Review 8(2):218-347.
Allott, A.N. and Woodman, G. (eds) (1985) People's Law and State Law, Dordrecht:
Foris.
979
SOCIAL LIFE
Althusser, L. (1977) 'Ideology and the ideological state apparatus', in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, London.
Bailey, F. G. (1960) Tribe, Caste and Nation, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
von Benda-Beckmann, F. (1979) Property in Social Continuity: Continuity and Change in
the Maintenance of Property Relationships in Minangkabau, West Sumatra. The
Hague: Nijhoff.
Bloch, M. (1971) 'Decision-making in councils among the Merina of Madagascar', in
A.Richards and A.Kuper ( eds) Councils in Action, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bohannan, P. (1957) Justice and Judgment among the Tiv, London: Oxford University
Press for the International African Institute.
--(1967) 'Introduction', in P.Bohannan (ed.) Law and Warfore, New York: Natural
History Press.
Cain, M. and Kulcsar, K. (1981) 'Thinking disputes: an essay on the origins of the
dispute industry', Law and Society Review 16:375-402.
Chanock, M. (1985) Law, Custom and Social Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Comaroff, J.L. and Roberts, S.A. (1981) Rules and Processes: the Cultural Logic of
Dispute in an African Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cotterrell, R.M.B. ( 1983) 'The sociological concept oflaw', Journal of Law and Society
10:241-55.
de Sousa Santos, B. (1980) 'Law and community: the changing nature of state power in
late capitalism', International Journal of the Sociology of Law 8:379-97.
Durkheim, E. (1893) De la Division du travail social, Paris: Alcan.
es ormes e ementatres e a vte re tgteuse, ans: can.
Fallers, L. (1969) Law Without Precedent, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fitzpatrick, P. (1992) The Mythology of Law, London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1984) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Giddens, A. (1985) The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge: Polity Press.
--(1986) The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gluckman, M. (1955) The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Griffiths, J. (1986) 'What is legal pluralism?', Journal of Legal Pluralism 24:1.
Gulliver, P.H. (1963) Social Control in an African Society, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
--(1971) Neighbours and Networks, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hobsbawm, E.J. and Ranger, T.O. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hoebel, E.A. (1954) The Law ofPrimitive Man, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Kidder, R.L. (1979) 'Toward an integrated theory of imposed law', in S.B.Burman and
B.Harrell-Bond (eds) The Imposition of Law, New York: Academic Press.
Koch, K.F. (1974) War and Peace in Jalemo, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Llewellyn, K.N. and Hoebel, E.A. (1941) The Cheyenne Way, Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Maine, H.S. (1861) Ancient Law, London: John Murray.
--(1883) Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, London: John Murray.
980
LAW AND DISPUTE PROCESSES
Malinowski, B. (1926) Crime and Custom in Savage Society, London: Kegan Paul,
Trench & Trubner.
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Mann, K. and Roberts, R. (eds) (1991) Law in Colonial Africa, Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Merry, S.E. (1988) 'Legal pluralism', Law and Society Review 22:869-96.
Moore, S.F. (1973) 'Law and change: the semi-autonomous social field as an
appropriate area of study', Law and Society Review 7:719-46.
--(1978) Law as Process, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Nader, L. (1969) Law in Culture and Society, Chicago: Aldine.
Newman, K. (1983) Law and Economic Organisation, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pospisil, L. (1958) Kapauku Papuans and their Law, New Haven: Yale University
Publications in Anthropology no. 54.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1922) The Andaman Islanders, Cambridge: Cambridge
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--(1933) 'Primitive law', in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 9:202-6. New York.
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--(1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London: Cohen & West.
anger, . . e mventwn o tra ItiOn m co oma nca , m . o s awm an
T.O.Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rappaport, R.A. (1967) Pigs for the Ancestors, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Redfield, R. (1967) 'Primitive Law', in P.Bohannan (ed.) Law and Warfore, New York:
Natural History Press.
Roberts, S. (1979) Order and Dispute, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Schapera, I. (1938) A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom, London: Oxford
University Press.
Snyder, F. G. (1981) 'Colonialism and legal form', Journal of Legal Pluralism 19: 49-90.
Starr, J. and Collier, J.F. (eds) (1989) History and Power in the Study of Law, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Teubner, G. (1992) 'The two faces oflegal pluralism', Cardozo Law Review 13: 1443-
62.
Turner, V. (1957) Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Weber, M. (1978 [1917]) Economy and Society, trans. and ed. G.Roth and C.Wittich,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weyer, E.M. (1932) The Eskimos, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Woodman, G.R. (1983) 'How state courts create customary law in Ghana and Nigeria',
in H.W.Finkler (compiler) Papers of the Symposia on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism,
XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Vancouver,
Canada, 19-23 August 1983.
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SOCIAL LIFE
FURTHER READING
Abel, R.L. (1974) 'A comparative theory of dispute institutions in society', Law and
Society Review 8(2):218-347.
Bohannan, P. (1957) Justice and Judgment among the Tiv, London: Oxford University
Press for the International African Institute.
Cain, M. and Kulcsar, K. (1981) 'Thinking disputes: an essay on the origins of the
dispute industry', Law and Society Review 16:375-402.
Fallers, L. (1969) Law without Precedent, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gluckman, M. (1955) The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Griffiths, J. (1986) 'What is legal pluralism?', Journal of Legal Pluralism 24:1.
Gulliver, P.H. (1963) Social Control in an African Society, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Hamnett, I. (ed.) (1977) Social Anthropology and Law, New York: Academic Press.
Hoebel, E.A. (1954) The Law ofPrimitive Man, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Koch, K.F. (1974) War and Peace in Jalemo, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Llewellyn, K.N. and Hoebel, E.A. (1941) The Cheyenne Way, Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Malinowski, B. (1926) Crime and Custom in Savage Society, London: Kegan Paul,
Trench & Trubner.
Merry, S.E. (1988) 'Legal pluralism', Law and Society Review 22:869-96.
982
36
983
SOCIAL LIFE
The article is divided into four general sections. First I present a brief
overview of some of the concerns that anthropologists have traditionally
brought to the study of violence and security. This first section is highly
schematic, intended simply to indicate the range of approaches that
anthropologists have taken, and to direct the interested reader to the relevant
literature. The second section describes the tenor of contemporary discussions
of collective violence and security. The assumptions underlying the dominant
forms of analysis are presented and some examples are given to illustrate the
results of applying these assumptions. The third section focuses on how the
introduction of anthropological materials forces us to enlarge our
understanding of two key concepts: 'power' and 'collective violence'. The
fourth discusses how anthropology can directly contribute to avoiding,
managing, and resolving collective violence by attending to cultural aspects of
negotiations.
It is more than probable that the destructive intensity of the aggression drive, still a
hereditary evil of mankind, is the consequence of a process of intraspecific selection
which worked on our forefathers for roughly forty thousand years, that is,
throughout the Early Stone Age. When man reached the stage of having weapons,
clothing, and social organization, and so overcoming the dangers of starvation,
freezing and being eaten by wild animals, and these dangers ceased to be the
essential factors influencing selection, an evil intraspecific selection must have set
in. The factor influencing selection was now the wars waged between hostile
neighbouring tribes.
This view of the biological basis of human aggression has been widely
criticized as based on faulty inference, and especially on inappropriate and
984
COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
It really does not matter whether or not one assumes an innate drive toward
aggression. History and comparative anthropology show that people fight not
because they need to satisfy some instinct, but because their interests clash with
culturally defined.
(Koch 1974:52-5)
985
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986
COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
and Foster 1988, Turner and Pitt 1989), and I focus on these in the remainder
of this article.
987
SOCIAL LIFE
that inform most discussions of world affairs. Thus, for example, interviews
with Polish personnel have been used to reveal the cultural basis of Soviet
negotiation strategies (Checinski 1981 ), and Middle Eastern negotiation styles
are portrayed as deriving from the haggling behaviour sometimes observed in
bazaars (Binnendijk 1987).
In discussions of collective violence and security in the Third World, the
local-level concerns that motivate less powerful nations and local groups tend to
fall from view. Instead, a privileged position is accorded to the interests and
interpretations of the superpowers, and diplomatic and military initiatives are
treated from the perspective of ideological, political, and economic superpower
contests. A recent study of constraints on United States policy in relation to
Third World conflicts (Hosmer 1985; see also Record 1985) reflects this
excessively narrow-minded view of global affairs. This report considers United
States involvement in the Third World almost entirely from the perspective of
military concerns. It treats that involvement primarily in relation to the Soviet
Union, for the most part ignoring the specific interests and concerns of Third
World countries and groups. This preoccupation with East-West relations, to
the exclusion of numerous regional concerns around the world, is revealed in
the fact that in his study, Hosmer makes explicit reference to the Soviet Union
on no fewer than 90 of the monograph's 130 pages, and on those pages where
he does not do so, it is only because he dwells instead on Chinese communist
interests or actions.
T IS m o et nocentnsm contmues to o sway esptte t e recent
superpower detente, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. An otherwise
instructive, recent three-volume analysis of the Lessons of Modern War
examines wars fought mainly in and by Third World actors principally from
the perspective of relations with great powers outside the Third World, and
by emphasizing military technology. Local-level political, social and cultural
factors are neglected, being considered 'only to the extent necessary to
understand military events' (Cordesman and Wagner 1990:xv). This neglect
is remarkable because, especially during the last decade, many
anthropological studies have appeared which show how analyses that ignore
cultural and symbolic factors are bound to fail (Foster and Rubinstein 1986,
Worsley and Hadjor 1987, Rubinstein and Foster 1988, Turner and Pitt
1989). To the extent that attention has been paid to the human arrangements
underlying the formulation and implementation of policy, it has largely been
by resort to formal, econometric or game-theoretic models of behaviour,
decision-making, and negotiation (Brams 1985, Ball and Richelson 1986).
And for the most part, the socio-cultural processes which qualify the
application of these models have not been considered (Rubinstein 1988a:23-
31 ). Worsley's ( 1982, 1986, 1987) discussions of the Third World, and of the
consequences of excluding cultural considerations from analysis, provide a
more general perspective on this issue.
988
COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
When it comes to rationality, the realist approach assumes that both decision-
making and action are mechanical processes: once a group has the 'objective
facts' at its disposal, it (through its leaders) will act rationally, according to the
predictions of formal models. For a typical example, we could cite the philosophy
and methods used by the RAND Corporation Strategy Assessment Center. The
work of the Center is based on automated war games in which rule-guided
decision models for managing behaviour and for co-ordinating responses are
substituted for human decision-makers. RAND representatives argue that
the power of the approach is due in large part to its emphasis on realism (relative to
more standard approaches) and to the use of artificial intelligence and force
modelling techniques that make behaviour rules and other key variables transparent
and interactively variable.
(Davis and Winnefeld 1983:vii)
989
SOCIAL LIFE
The rationality implied here is of a purely 'technical' kind, which excludes any
consideration of substantive cultural and social influences (Simon 1983). It
might perhaps be more appropriately described as logical rather than rational.
A corollary of the realist approach is that decisions and actions are attributed
to corporate groups, and especially in the last twenty-five years or so these have
generally been taken to be nation states. As a result, local or indigenous views of
intergroup relations are simply disregarded (Rubinstein and Foster 1988).
Anthropological analyses, to the contrary, are most often concerned with
interactions below the level of the nation state. In one such analysis, Beeman
(1986, 1989) demonstrates how United States foreign policy decisions
regarding the Middle East operate on the assumption that the world consists
only of nation states, and he shows that this leads analysts to ignore crucially
relevant information.
In general, political realism presents us with a telling example of what can
happen when the original reasons for adopting particular approaches, forms of
evaluation, or indices of measurement are ignored or forgotten, such that these
techniques become ends in themselves, regardless of their applicability in
actual contexts of human affairs. When this takes place in any field of inquiry,
the result is to narrow the perspective to the point at which it must ultimately
fail to yield a convincing account (Rubinstein et al. 1984 ). Yet it is just this kind
of process that has characterized discussions of power, violence and security.
Power
Discussions of the relationships among political groupings often focus on
disparities in access to advanced military technologies. For the most part, power
is taken in these discussions to refer to the range of measurable military,
technological or other such outcomes that can be effected by one group in its
relations with other groups (cf. Thibault and Kelly 1959, Cordesman and
Wagner 1990). In this sense, power is the ability to coerce other individuals or
groups to change their behaviour in some intended direction (Dahl 1969,
Zartman 197 4). The result of this kind of reasoning is that power has come to
be measured in terms of such indicators as concession rates, economic or
military pay-offs, and the like.
When policies are developed on the basis of such realist assumptions,
groups that control the disposition of material resources tend to be regarded as
powerful. Groups that do not control these resources are taken to be powerless.
Only physical and material resources are included in calculations of relative
power. Kim (1983:9) notes that 'the concept of "power" in mainstream realism
is excessively narrow and limited. This realism respects only material and
physical power and is contemptuous of "normative power" .... It denies the
existence of the world normative system.' By taking power as resting only on
material strengths, the domain of activities that are considered legitimately to
represent power is artificially restricted. This narrow view is indeed thoroughly
990
COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
More generally, this power can be said to accrue to a person through the
expenence o ea mg a mora y goo 1 e, w tc IS mar e y ea mg wtt ot er
people through social relations that are considerate and mutually respectful. It
is the process of living according to principle, not material force, that produces
power. 'To live according to one's laws is to be powerful' (Wahrhaftig and
Lukens-Wahrhaftig 1977:231).
The hardships experienced by Native Americans in the United States as a
result of military defeat, disease, external political control, and other kinds of
disasters and deprivations have been accompanied by material powerlessness.
In the face of such material hardships the focus of Indian groups on how things
are done rather than on what is done has allowed them to retain a sense of the
continuity of their ways of life and thus to retain their normative power. As the
case of the Cherokee demonstrates in particular, this normative power has
consequences in the political arena. It is their concept of, and respect for,
normative power that has enabled the Cherokee to build autonomous social,
political, and economic institutions, despite the repeated exercise of secular,
material power by whites (Gearing 1958, Wahrhaftig and Lukens-Wahrhaftig
1977). Indeed, normative power is rarely the inconsequential factor that it is
sometimes made out to be. To the contrary, normative power is an important
force which must be understood and counted in any reckoning of the 'balance
of power'.
Anthropological descriptions of normative power and its consequences show
that actions based in such conceptions of power can successfully challenge
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SOCIAL LIFE
materially more powerful groups. For example, the Dene (Kehoe 1988) have
successfully opposed uranium mining and other nuclear-related actions, and
the Cherokee have successfully resisted their economic and cultural extinction
(Rubinstein and Tax 1985). The Palestinian intifoda is also an example of the
force of such non-materially based power (Schiff and Ya'ari 1990). The intifada,
like the actions of the Dene, the Cherokee, and of other indigenous peoples, or
of people in Iran (Bateson 1988; see also Beeman 1986) and China (Potter
1988), shows how power grounded in non-material, symbolic, normative
aspects of social and cultural life can achieve very real effects which, although
they cannot be neatly estimated by some quantitative index, make a significant
difference in the political arena.
Collective violence
Just as conceptions of power are culturally patterned, so conceptions of
collective violence have been channelled by cultural understandings, both lay
and professional. For the most part, discussions of collective violence have
focused on observable acts of violence launched by one group against another,
on the size and relations of military forces and on technological aspects of
fighting capabilities. Collective violence is described in terms of its intensity as
this is defined by battlefield deaths or the military technology used in a dispute.
Thus, for example, in deciding what to consider as 'war', only those conflicts in
w tc some cnttca num er o eat s uect y resu ts rom corn at are me u e
(Cohen 1986). The 'Correlates ofWar' Project undertaken at the University of
Michigan, for instance, defines a conflict as war only if it involved at least 1,000
battlefield deaths. And a 'conflict spectrum' (Sarkesian 1986: 116) has been
defined in terms of the destructive capabilities of the armaments employed or
in terms of the number of deaths directly resulting from combat.
It is obvious, however, that collective violence extends well beyond the range
of military aggression. War and violence, as contemporary political realities, are
nowadays very different from the conventional wars of other eras of human
history. Combat between opposing armies is now infrequent. In its place, 'war
is focused on the Third World, and pits guerrilla insurgencies against state
governments and states against indigenous nations' (Nietschmann 1987:1 ). The
direct killing and maiming of combatants is the unfortunate goal of war. But
civilians also die: in the Middle East, for example, since the Second World War
1.1 million deaths have resulted directly from wars and civil conflicts in the
regwn.
A less obvious effect is of the loss of this human power for society-the loss
of teachers, engineers, and manual workers to carry on the daily business of
keeping a society going. In the aftermath of war the society must support and
care for disabled veterans, and suffers the effects of angry men in its midst who
have been trained to kill. Some researchers have suggested that people
maturing in a society at war may suffer a form of moral and social retardation.
992
COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
993
SOCIAL LIFE
performing medical duties; 61 health units were destroyed and 37 others forced
to close due to Contra activity. Because of the reduced availability of health
services, immunization, sanitation, nutrition and other health programmes
have been curtailed, and the health, especially of the rural peasants, has
suffered.
That the devotion of a disproportionate share of a nation's economy to
maintaining a military effort has negative effects on human services and on
social supports in that nation has been well documented (Melman 1965, 1986,
Pinxten 1986). Furthermore, the devotion of resources to the procurement of
arms has worldwide effects, causing distortions both within and between
national economies. Indeed, much of the inability of Third World countries,
and even some industrialized countries, to provide a basic level of food,
housing, and health care to their peoples can be traced directly to the distorting
effects of military expenditures.
Wars and civil conflicts over issues of ethnicity, self-determination, access to
resources and equity directly involve massive civilian populations. Violent
disruptions in a society disproportionately affect the most vulnerable: the poor,
women, and children. Like most pathogenic conditions, for every mortality
there are many more who are injured or suffer permanent disability. War affects
people, perhaps especially children, directly through death, disabling injury,
and psychological stress; indirect effects are disruption of health services and
education, impeded food distribution, family disruption and displacement,
estructwn o ousmg, water an samtatwn act 1t1es, an
funds for military needs (Zwi and Uglade 1989).
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COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
Studying negotiation
ommumcatmg wtt ot ers m or er to arnve at a reso utwn o 1 erences IS
the essence of negotiation. It 'is a basic means of getting what you want from
others. It is a back-and-forth communication designed to reach an agreement
when you and the other side have some interests that are shared and others that
are opposed' (Fisher and Ury 1981 :xi). Like many other processes that are
ubiquitous in social life, negotiation ranges from the mundane and taken-for-
granted to the elaborately formal and institutionalized.
The process and patterns of various kinds of negotiations have been studied
in some depth. In general, such studies have had two very different emphases.
The first is most evident in analyses of institutionalized forms of negotiation,
like bargaining in the context of labour relations or in arms control talks. These
analyses have tended to study negotiation through one or more of three general
strategies: ( 1) through laboratory experiments, (2) in terms of abstract
mathematical decision and game theoretic models, or (3) through qualitative
analysis of the recollections of participants in particularly important
negotiations, like the Cuban Missile Crisis Oanis 1983) or the Camp David
negotiations (Raiffa 1982). Especially when laboratory analyses and
mathematical modelling have been used, this approach to the study of
institutionalized negotiations has sought to describe their formal
characteristics.
The second and less commonly adopted approach examines the implicit
negotiations in daily life. The aim of these studies is to understand how
995
SOCIAL LIFE
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COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND COMMON SECURITY
private; and (7) how agreements reached through the negotiation will be
enforced (Raiffa 1982: 11-19).
For instance in the context of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,
neither of the parties can be taken to be single actors. Each represents a diverse
constituency and any negotiating team contains internal divisions.
Furthermore, there are variations among Palestinians in their perceptions of
the land of Palestine and the possibilities for satisfactory settlement, and these
run along the lines of regional and religious-ideological identity (Lesch and
Tessler 1989, Grossman 1988). Between Palestinians living in the Occupied
Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, Arabs living within Israel and
Palestinians living in Jordan, there exist differences in the perception of the
nature of the 'problem' and possible solutions to it. Shehadeh ( 1982), who
chose to remain in the West Bank as a samid-one who resists Israeli
occupation by leading a life of principled non-co-operation and non-
acquiesence in Israeli authority-describes how his perceptions of political
action and of his attachments to the land came to differ markedly from those of
his cousin residing in Jordan, and how he felt almost alienated from Arabs in
Acre (Shehadeh 1982:7-11, 20-3). In addition, there are ideological loyalties
that cross-cut and confuse this variation: the scorn of the freedom fighter and
political prisoner for the samidin is keenly felt, as is the frustration felt by the
samidin in response to the romanticization of the conflict by Palestinians living
abroad (Shehadeh 1982:23-6, 56-8).
T e Israe 1 commumty IS s1m1 ar y IVI e m opmwn an perceptiOn,
depending upon religious-ideological and regional factors. Views on the nature
and possible resolution of the 'problem' of the Occupied Territories are shaped
by political affiliations, religious commitments, and personal experience,
among other factors. Benvenisti ( 1989) describes the range of these variations,
and Shavit (1991) describes the variety of reactions to military service in a Gaza
Strip internment camp. The divisions internal to Israeli society are evident in
the diversity of political parties, both religious and ideologically based, and of
social movements like Peace Now and Gush Emunim (the latter of which seeks to
develop Israeli settlements in the West Bank).
Under such circumstances, presenting a united front in negotiations is an
extremely difficult task for each party. Privately and in public, both must
negotiate among themselves in order to arrive at bargaining positions that can
be put forward, and considerable intra-group negotiation is needed in order to
arrive at responses to proposals made by their interlocutors. These intra-group
negotiations, moreover, may themselves be explicit or tacit, conducted in public
or in private. In addition, negotiators must continually touch base with their
constituencies. All of these tasks are difficult, and failure in either group's
internal negotiations may place in jeopardy the possibilities and potentials for
intergroup negotiations (Fahmy 1983, Maksoud 1985, Eban 1985, Grossman
1988, Friedman 1989, Schiff and Ya'ari 1990, PASSIA 1991, Alternative
Information Centre n.d.).
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Separate the people from the problem. Focus on interests not positions. Generate a
variety of possibilities before deciding what to do. Insist that results be based on
some objective standard.
The method of principled negotiation has been put to very good use. Its
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which people construct and enact meaning (Kertzer 1988). One of the most
salient symbolically based aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the way in
which the devotion to the land of Israel/Palestine has become invested with
multiple meanings and emotions. Both Palestinian and Israeli interlocutors
bring to their discussions a symbolic understanding which frames their
discourse. The Palestinian concept of 'the preserving' (samid), and the Israeli
conception of a special homeland (moledet) exert powerful emotional and
cognitive influences on those who hold them (Shehadeh 1982, Benvenisti
1989).
Successful cross-cultural negotiation depends, therefore, upon integrating
the results of formal studies of negotiation with contextual information about
the role of culture in mundane negotiation processes. The following section of
this article considers the importance of intra-cultural variability and the role of
symbols in political discourse.
It takes time to learn to deal with the Soviets and understand their tactics. For
example, the Russian negotiator never answers 'da' (yes) at the outset. The answer is
always 'niet'. Often the first 'niet' means 'da', but at other times 'niet' is 'niet.' The
problem is to learn to tell the difference. Once I learned, I enjoyed tremendously
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negotiating with the Soviets. It was always tough, but they could be outmanoeuvred
once their tactics were understood.
Yet during the period in which Minister Fahmy was dealing with the Soviets,
their interests in the region shifted many times, as did the constraints on their
actions. As even the record of missed opportunities and misunderstandings
reported in his own memoirs shows, Fahmy's view that once understood, Soviet
negotiators could henceforth be handled with aplomb, was in fact a chimera.
Beeman ( 1986, 1989) and Bate son ( 1988), for example, describe how the
assumptions of United States negotiators about Iranian political styles proved
inaccurate, precisely because they failed to be aware of cultural heterogeneity.
Bateson and her colleagues (see Bateson 1988) isolated two distinct forms of
political discourse in Iran-the opportunistic and the absolute. At the time of
the Iranian revolution public rhetoric and public policy changed in ways that
baffled United States analysts. Yet, Beeman and Bateson argue, when it is
recognized that contrasting themes generally coexist in any culture, these
events are more readily understandable. As Bateson (1988:39) puts it,
Iranian public policy and public rhetoric, both domestically and internationally,
went through an apparent radical change at the time of the revolution into a style
that appeared totally different and therefore unpredictable, but we would argue that
the two styles-and more significantly the tendency to think of them as alternatives
. . . . .
Understanding that opposing styles exist in any society, and being aware of
which styles are ascendant in a particular situation, requires that the analyst be
aware of the different contexts in which negotiators frame their work, and
further requires them to understand how the give-and-take of social process in
these situations keeps the cultural matrix in which actions are situated in a
constant state of flux. Indeed, 'the truth of the matter is that people have mixed
feelings and confused opinions, and are subject to contradictory expectations
and outcomes, in every sphere of experience' (Levine 1985:8-9).
In sum, it is as misleading to attend exclusively to autobiographical
recollections of formal negotiations as it is to rely on laboratory simulations or
on the mathematical modelling of decision-making processes. Studies that rest
on such analyses direct our attention towards a limited number of
characteristics of negotiations, and away from other less easily explained or
measured, but nevertheless equally critical, aspects of the negotiation process
(Rubinstein 1989).
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as Sadat hoped at that point, anxious to avoid isolation in the Arab world-Egypt
had to be ready to sign a peace treaty with us [Israel] even if she were not joined by
others.
Boutros-Ghali was profoundly shocked by Dayan's ill-timed proposal of a
separate peace, as was Sadat when it was reported to him. At issue was not the idea
itself, which was based on an objective analysis of the situation .... It was the
unsubtle directness of the approach that was utterly repellent to the Egyptian
minister. This first conversation with an Israeli leader rankled in Boutros-Ghali's
mind for years afterward.
The value placed on directness is not the only communicative expectation over
which Egyptians (and other Arabs) and their Israeli counterparts diverge.
Israeli negotiators often appear to be immediately concerned with working out
the details of an agreement. By contrast, Arab diplomats have tended to seek
frameworks for solution, leaving aside the details. For the Israeli actor attention
to the precise wording of an agreement is considered an expression of good
faith, whereas for the Egyptian negotiator good faith is displayed by agreement
to a broad conceptual framework; the details are left to be worked out at a
future time (see Carter 1982:342, Fahmy 1983:285-308).
Raymond Cohen (1990) traces these and other obstacles to negotiations
between the Israelis and the Egyptians, and other Arabs. Such obstacles all
belong outside the structural character of formal negotiations. Indeed, both the
Israeli and the E tian ne otiators understand and seek to adhere to the
structural features of negotiations, as these are understood by the international
diplomatic community. The stumbling blocks that remain are the result of
conflicting metacommunicative expectations.
CONCLUSION
Expectations about what is proper and good are cultural, and they are encoded
in a society's symbolic forms. Most importantly, symbols are ambiguous in that
they may have several meanings-being often imprecisely defined-and they
may invoke emotional responses. As Abner Cohen (1979:89; see also Kertzer
1988) notes, cultural symbols have great political impact because they allow
political relationships to be 'objectified, developed, maintained, expressed, or
camouflaged by means of symbolic forms and patterns of symbolic action'.
Such symbolic forms include, among other things, the repetitive, ritual
organization of negotiations (Rubinstein 1988b ), the public rhetoric of political
leaders (Cohen 1990:45-8), and the literature of resistance (Lesch and Tessler
1989: 125-39). Because symbolic forms have both an ambiguous cognitive
component and a strong emotional load they are powerful factors in structuring
political perceptions.
Such cultural factors affect the patterning of collective violence both direct
and indirect, and of conceptions of power and security. Moreover, the cultural
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Preparation of this article was supported in part by a grant from the
Ploughshares Fund, which I gratefully acknowledge. I thank Mary LeCron
Foster and Sandra D.Lane for comments on an earlier draft. Many colleagues
responded to my circular letter requesting references to pertinent literature. I
am grateful for their helpful replies. Much of the substance of this article is
drawn from my earlier published papers, especially Rubinstein 1988a, 1989,
and 1992.
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FURTHER READING
Beer, F. (1981) Peace Against War: The Ecology of International Violence, San Francisco:
WH.Freeman.
Bramson, L. and Goethals, G. (eds) (1964) War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology,
Anthropology, New York: Basic Books.
Cohen, R. (1990) Culture and Conflict in Egyptian-Israeli Relations: A Dialogue of the
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Coser, L. (1956) The Functions of Social Conflict, New York: Free Press.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1979) The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals, and Aggression,
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Falk, R. and Kim, S. (eds) (1980) The War System: An Interdisciplinary Approach,
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Ferguson, R.B. (ed) (1984) Warfore, Culture and Environment, New York: Academic
Press.
Foster, M.L. and Rubinstein, R. ( eds) (1986) Peace and War: Cross-Cultural
Perspectives, New Brunswick: Transaction Books.
Fried, M., Harris, M. and Murphy, R. (eds) (1967) War: The Anthropology of Armed
Conflict and Aggression, Garden City: Natural History Press.
Kertzer, D.I. (1988) Ritual, Politics and Power, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Koch, K.-F. (1974) The Anthropology of Warfare, Addison-Wesley Modules in
Anthropology no. 52, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Nettleship, M., Givens, R.D. and Nettleship, A. (eds) (1974) War: Its Causes and
Correlates, The Hague: Mouton.
Nordstrom, C. and Martin, J.-A. (eds) (1992) The Paths to Domination, Resistance and
Terror, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Otterbein, K. (1970) The Evolution of War, New Haven: HRAF Press.
Riches, D. (ed.) (1986) The Anthropology of Violence, Oxford: Blackwell.
Rubinstein, R.A. and Foster, M.L. (eds) (1988) The Social Dynamics of Peace and
Conflict: Culture in International Security, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
Turner, P. and Pitt, D.(eds) (1989) The Anthropology of War and Peace: Perspectives on
the Nuclear Age, Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Harvey.
Turney-High, H. (1971) Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts, Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press.
Viiyrynen, R. (ed.) (1987) The Quest for Peace, London: Sage.
Worsley, P. and Hadjor, K.B. (eds) (1987) On the Brink: Nuclear Proliferation and the
Third World, London: Third World Books.
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latter would probably concede that it is possible to attain only what Tawney
(1964 [1931]) described as 'practical equality' rather than absolute or perfect
equality.
Those who argue that in spite of the wide prevalence of inequality,
egalitarian societies are in fact possible, have sought to demonstrate either that
such societies have existed in the past or that they can be constructed in the
future, or both. Characteristically, the faith in the possibility of constructing
such a society in the future has been sustained by the belief that equality and
not inequality was the original condition of human life.
Among modern social and political philosophers, Rousseau was one of the
first to argue that equality or near-equality was the original or natural condition
of humanity, although Hobbes and Locke had put forward similar arguments
before him (Beteille 1980). Rousseau did not deny the existence of natural or
physical inequalities, but he believed these to be slight or insignificant. The
inequalities that really mattered were political or moral inequalities which,
being based on a kind of convention, could in principle be abolished or at least
diminished by a different convention. Rousseau's views were considered
radical in his time and they left a lasting impact on succeeding generations,
both in Europe and elsewhere. 1
The writings of Marx and Engels gave rise to the doctrine that the first stage
of social evolution was one of 'primitive communism' and that the final stage
would also be one of communism, both stages being marked, despite many
1 erences, y t e a sence o c asses. However, t ere was a 1 erence m
approach and method between Rousseau and the nineteenth-century
proponents of the theory of primitive communism. Rousseau constructed his
model from first principles, observing, 'Let us begin then by laying facts aside,
as they do not affect the question' (1938 [1762]:175). Marx, and more
particularly Engels (1948 [1884]), on the other hand, turned to the available
evidence from primitive societies to demonstrate that classless societies existed
in reality.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the new
science of ethnography, based largely on accounts of primitive societies by
explorers, missionaries, traders and administrators. A whole new world was
opened up for systematic enquiry. The early ethnographers were enthusiastic
advocates of the comparative method, by which contemporary primitive
societies were likened to those that were supposed to have existed at earlier
stages in the development of more advanced civilizations, and they used it to
construct ambitious evolutionary schemes. Perhaps the most famous among
these, and one which had a lasting influence in the Soviet Union, was
formulated in 1877 by Lewis Henry Morgan (1964). According to Morgan, the
first stage of evolution, designated as 'savagery' and represented by a number of
surviving primitive societies, was marked by an absence of inequality and class.
The theory of primitive communism aroused great interest in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inevitably, the discussion turned
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The pattern of human history, when plotted against the axis of equality, displays a
steady progression towards increasing inequality, up to a certain mysterious point in
time, at which the trend goes into reverse, and we then witness that equalisation of
conditions which preoccupied Tocqueville.
(Gellner 1979:27)
This view of the course of human history is very widely held, and it merits a
brief discussion.
Implicit in the evolutionary scheme outlined above is a classification of
societies into three broad types: (1) primitive societies, (2) agrarian
civilizations, and (3) industrial states. Primitive societies, including bands,
segmentary tribes as well as tribal chiefdoms, are small in scale and relatively
undifferentiated; though few of them are egalitarian in every sense, they are
generally not divided into distinct classes or strata. Agrarian civilizations of the
kind that prevailed in Europe, India or China are or were hierarchical both by
design and in fact; their characteristic divisions were into castes or estates
whose boundaries were relatively clear and acknowledged by custom and law.
Industrial states, whether of the capitalist or the socialist type, have a formal
commitment to equality rather than hierarchy; their characteristic divisions are
classes and strata 2 which must accommodate themselves to the ideals of
democratic citizenship and equality of opportunity. It is not that inequalities
are unknown or even uncommon in industrial societies, but rather that they
In running over the pages of our history, we shall scarcely find a single great event of
the last seven hundred years that has not promoted equality of condition.
And again,
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INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
inequality in modern societies (Hayek 1960: eh. 6, E ysenck 1973 ). Such a view
reveals a bias in favour of methodological individualism, seen most commonly
in writings on inequality by economists and psychologists.
Methodological individualism, or the procedure which treats the individual
as the basic and irreducible unit in social analysis, faces many difficulties in the
study of variation and change in patterns of inequality. It can perhaps account
for the ranks assigned to individuals on a given scale, but it cannot as easily
account for the scale itself. An issue that all students of social inequality must
face is what may be called the passage from difference to inequality. It is a
truism that not all differences count as inequalities. Why, then, do only some
differences count as inequalities, and not others? Do the same differences count
as inequalities in all places, at all times? What is actually involved when a set of
differences is transformed into a system of inequalities? These questions
cannot be addressed without considering some of the constitutive features of
human society and culture.
The majority of sociologists and anthropologists take as their point of
departure not the individual agent, but the framework of collective life within
which he acts (Bendix and Lipset 1966, Helier 1969, Beteille 1969). Every
individual acts within a framework of society and culture which both provides
him with facilities and, at the same time, imposes constraints. The language he
speaks, the technology he uses, the division of labour within which he works,
all exist to some extent independently of his exertions. The regularities
governmg anguage, tee no ogy an tvtswn o a our are o a 1 erent m
from those governing individual action.
Language provides us with a convenient example of the place of collective
representations in human life. Without language, human life as we know it
would be impossible, and human language, in its turn, would not exist in the
absence of collective life. But collective representations include much more
than language. They consist of the full range of beliefs and values shared by
individuals as members of society. At this point it will be enough to say that
collective representations include both cognitive and evaluative elements-
which are, moreover, closely intertwined-so that the individual members of a
society share not only common modes of thought but also common standards
of evaluation. Indeed, it is difficult to see how collective life would be possible
in the complete absence of shared beliefs and shared values.
Durkheim stressed the contrast between the fullness and variety of the
collective representations of a society and what it is possible for any individual
mind to create or comprehend on its own. Subsequent investigations by
anthropologists in the field have fully confirmed the truth of Durkheim's
insight. People with a simple Neolithic technology, such as the Bororo or the
Nambikwara Indians of the Amazon basin, show a richness and complexity in
their collective representations that seem to surpass what even Durkheim
might have expected. The luxuriance of expressive life commonly encountered
in the primitive world at the level of cosmology and taxonomy can scarcely be
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Thus, it is clear that what transforms differences into inequalities are scales
of evaluation. A scale of evaluation is not a gift of nature; to speak in the
language of Rousseau, 'it depends on a kind of convention, and is established,
or at least authorized by the consent of men' (1938:174). Even while invoking
the name ofRousseau, however, it is important to guard against the dangers of a
constructivist argument. The conventions by which human beings rank each
other-their qualities and their performances-are rarely the outcome of
conscious design. Most people use these scales as they use language, without a
clear awareness of their structure.
Once we realize that scales of evaluation are not usually the products of
conscious design and are not always clearly recognized for what they are, we
have to turn to consider the coexistence of a multiplicity of scales and the
problem of their mutual consistency. It is a common experience that where A
ranks higher than B in scholastic ability, B may rank higher than A in athletic
ability, leaving open the question of the overall rank of A in relation to B. Some
occupations are more remunerative, others permit greater freedom of
individual action; how are they to be ranked in relation to each other? How
complicated the general problem is may be seen from a glance at the
voluminous literature that has grown around so specific a topic as the social
grading of occupations (see Goldthorpe and Hope 1974).
To assign a central place to evaluation in the explanation of inequality is not
to deny that different values coexist in the same society. One can go further and
argue t at 1 erent va ues ten to pre ommate m 1 erent sectors o t e same
society. Manual workers and professionals may not rank occupations in the
same way; blacks and whites may not assign the same significance to colour in
social ranking; and men and women may show different kinds of bias in the
personal qualities they value. While this is true, it should not lead to the
conclusion that there can be as many scales of evaluation as there are individual
members of society, for no society can endure without some coherence in the
domain of values.
Advocates of the so-called 'structural-functional' approach in social theory
tend to stress the integration of values in the societies about which they write
(Parsons 1954). One form of the functionalist argument is that, although there
may be different scales of evaluation in the same society, these scales themselves
can be arranged in a hierarchy, since every society has a 'paramount value'
which determines the alignment of all its other values (Dumont 1980, 1987).
This is a tendentious argument which should not be allowed to divert attention
from the empirical investigation of the actual extent to which different values
reinforce or subvert each other in concrete historical situations.
Where there are competing or conflicting values in a society, each associated
with a particular section of it, they do not always rest in a state of stable
equilibrium. Of course, the discordance may be reduced through reflection,
argument and self-correction, and accommodation may be achieved on the
plane of beliefs and values itself. But this is not the only or even the most
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typical way in which the problem of value conflict is resolved. Differences that
cannot be resolved on the plane of values are typically resolved on the plane of
power. Or, to put it plainly, 'Between equal rights force decides' (Marx 1954
[1867]: 225).
The resolution of conflict (including the disagreement over values) through
the exercise of power brings to our attention a second important source of
inequality in collective life. The importance of force (as against common values)
in maintaining order and stability in society has been noted by many, and there
are some who would say that it is not only important but decisive (Dahrendorf
1968). This is particularly true of those who deal with the place of the state in
human affairs. As Hobbes wrote in his Leviathan of 1651, 'And Covenants,
without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all'
(1973:87).
The state provides the most striking example of inequalities in the distribution
of power, but by no means the only one. Such inequalities are commonly found in
many domains, including the domestic domain, that are a part of society but not,
strictly speaking, of the state. No doubt it can be argued that where the state exists
it provides sustenance to inequalities of power in every domain and that with the
collapse of the state, those inequalities should also collapse. This has been a
familiar argument among Marxists who have found support for it in a work
published by Engels a century ago (Engels 1948 [1884]). At that time it was hoped
that the argument would be confirmed by the imminent collapse of the bourgeois
state. T e ourgems state, owever, as co apse many times over, ut t e en o
the inequality of power is nowhere in sight.
There is, besides, plenty of evidence for inequality of power in what are
commonly described as 'stateless societies' (Tapper 1983; see also this volume,
Article 34). There are, firstly, the chiefdoms, varying greatly in size and degree
of organization, with tribal or clan chiefs who might exercise considerable,
though intermittent authority in organizing people for collective activities.
Much depends on the scale and importance of the collective activities that have
to be organized. Pastoral tribes have leaders whose voice carries considerable
authority in matters concerning the movement of people and animals, and in
conducting and coping with raids.
There are then the segmentary systems proper-segmentary tribes as
against tribal chiefdoms, to follow the terminology of Sahlins (1968)-which
do not have chiefs in the accepted sense of the term. Here the system works not
so much through a hierarchical distribution of power as through the balance of
power between groups at different levels of segmentation (see Evans-Pritchard
1940 for a classic account). Two kinds of groups are especially significant in
such societies: descent groups and local groups. Where descent groups are
corporations-whether among the patrilineal Tallensi (Fortes 1945, 1949) or
the matrilineal Truk (Goodenough 1951 )-the senior male members have a
decisive say in the disposal of the productive and reproductive resources of the
corporation, mainly land, livestock and women. This is particularly true at the
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1021
SOCIAL LIFE
1022
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
The whole subject has now been thrown open once again, mainly through
the recent spate of feminist studies (see, for example, Leacock 1978). New
dimensions have been brought to light which were not perceived by even the
most acute minds among the earlier anthropologists. These studies have
implications, only now beginning to be explored, for understanding not just the
disparity between the sexes but inequality in general. I here merely touch upon
two such issues, one relating to power and the other to values.
Those who have stressed the subordination of women to men have tended to
dwell mainly upon the politico-jural domain rather than the domestic domain.
Clearly, in even the most strongly 'patriarchal' societies, women sometimes play
an important, not to say a crucial, role in domestic affairs. They may play the
major part in everything concerned with food, health and nurture, and exercise
independent initiative in all these regards. As against the 'jural' inferiority of
the wife to the husband or the sister to the brother, there might be a
'psychological' dominance of the son by the mother. A contemporary Indian
psychologist has indeed argued with regard to his own society, which is to all
appearances strongly patrilineal, that 'the Indian lives in his inner world less
with a feared father than with a powerful, aggressive and unreliable mother'
(Nandy 1980: 107; see also Kakar 1978). All this, however, would require a
reconsideration of the concepts of power and dominance as conventionally
used in the social sciences to an extent that would take us far beyond the scope
of the present article.
Just as It may e unreasona e to assume t e existence o a smg e
homogeneous domain in which some individuals invariably exercise power over
others, it may also be unrealistic to assume the existence of a homogeneous
conceptual or moral universe whose categories of classification and evaluation
are accepted in the same way by all. The important contribution of women's
studies has been to draw attention to the existence of alternative beliefs and
values whose implications for the social ranking of persons have yet to be fully
explored.
Distinctions of race, though also marked by physical or biological traits,
differ significantly from those of gender. They are less clear and less fixed, and
are not universally present. Only some societies have or recognize them while
others do not. Within a given society racial differences exist and are
perpetuated because they have cultural significance. If people simply ignored
those distinctions in their social interactions and married without any regard
for them, the distinctions themselves would cease to exist or become
substantially different (Beteille 1977, eh. 5). The same can hardly be said about
gender.
There is a very wide range of variation of physical features in the human
species, much wider than in most other animal species. However, variation by
itself does not give us distinct races; the variation has to be clustered in a
particular way for races to become visibly apparent. That can happen in either
of two ways: when populations are territorially dispersed to an extent which
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SOCIAL LIFE
practically rules out interbreeding; or when, though sharing the same territory,
they are prevented or discouraged from interbreeding by law, custom and
convention. The continued presence of distinct races in a society and their
social segregation are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin.
Racial discrimination in its characteristic modern form is a feature of
societies that owe their origin to historical circumstances of a particular kind.
These are circumstances of sudden and violent encounter between populations
differing sharply in physical appearance, language and material culture,
associated with the European conquest of Africa and the New World (and to a
much lesser extent of Asia). This is not to say that the violent penetration by
people of one physical type into the territories of another never took place in
the past. But the European penetration of Africa and the New World in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was unique in its global character, in its
swiftness and violence, and in the scale on which it led to the dislocation of
populations (Wolf 1982).
We find today two distinct patterns of racial inequality, both involving
whites and blacks, one in the United States and the other in South Africa
(Beteille 1977). In the United States racial inequality survives under a liberal
democratic regime which has shown some commitment to affirmative action; in
South Africa it holds its own under a minority racist regime committed to a
policy of apartheid (i.e. 'apartness'). 3 Apart from differences in constitutional
history and background, there is an important demographic difference
etween t e two countnes. In t e Umte tates t e w ttes are not on y
politically dominant, they are also in a majority, having overwhelmed other
races on account of their superior firepower, the devastating impacts of
introduced diseases on indigenous populations (see Article 11 ), and sheer
strength of numbers. In South Africa the whites are politically dominant but
numerically in a minority, being surrounded, moreover, by states which are
totally hostile to white-minority rule. What is notable in the United States is
the ambivalence of the blacks, whereas what is striking in South Africa is the
anxiety of the whites.
Even where two distinct races are initially brought together by the use of
force, and are then kept at least partially segregated also by the use or the threat
of force, their coexistence over successive generations can lead them to share
certain common values. To be sure, these 'common' values are largely the
values of the dominant race, but the point is that they tend to be internalized, at
least to some degree, also by the subordinate race. A striking example of this
may be found in the extent to which upwardly mobile blacks in the United
States have internalized white values and standards in regard to personal
beauty, elegant dress and refined speech (Frazier 1957). Where, on the other
hand, the subordinate race fails or refuses to internalize the 'common' values of
the dominant race, we have an unstable and a potentially explosive situation, as
exists in South Africa.
We have seen that the inequality of races is, in the typical case, established by
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INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
the exercise of power and maintained by the hold of a common culture which
assigns higher values to the traits characteristic of one race as against those
characteristic of another. There is nothing 'natural' about either of these
processes. Indeed, if the present population of either the United States or
South Africa were allowed to revert to its 'natural' state, all distinctions of race,
or at least those distinctions now considered significant, would disappear with
the passage of time. This is quite apart from the fact that no matter what we
might think of 'domination', evaluation cannot in any meaningful sense be
regarded as a natural phenomenon.
Caste and race are sometimes considered together as they are both regarded
as extreme forms of rigid social stratification maintained by strict rules of
endogamy. Both Lloyd Warner, who pioneered the empirical study of social
stratification in the United States (Warner 1941 ), and Gunnar Myrdal, who
conducted a monumental study of the blacks in the same country (Myrdal
1944, 1: eh. 31 ), found it convenient to use the concept-and not merely the
metaphor-of caste in analysing stratification by race. They both pointed out
that neither the blacks nor the whites were a race in the scientific sense, that the
whole system rested on social conventions, and that, therefore, to represent it in
a biological idiom was misleading. They also felt that the barriers separating
blacks and whites were qualitatively different from those between classes within
each of these populations. Thus, the choice of the term 'caste' was to some
extent dictated by negative considerations, since neither 'race' nor 'class'
seeme appropnate.
But other anthropologists, too, have pointed to certain fundamental
similarities between the Indian caste system and the colour-caste system of the
United States (Berreman 1960, 1966). One of these similarities relates to
attitudes towards women. Both white males in the United States and upper-
caste males in India have shown an obsessive concern with the 'purity' of their
own women while engaging freely in the sexual exploitation of black or
untouchable women. All of this can be related to ideas about bodily substance
and the conditions appropriate for its exchange. The general importance of
these ideas in American culture has been stressed by Schneider (1968), and in
the Hindu caste system by Marriott and Inden (1974). In other words,
inequalities of caste are illuminated in the same way as those of race by a
consideration of gender (Beteille 1990).
There are of course differences between caste and race, and the tendency
among contemporary anthropologists is to stress the differences more than the
similarities (Dumont 1961, de Reuck and Knight 1968). At any rate, the Hindu
caste system is a sufficiently important historical example of inequality to
deserve attention in its own right. Recent writers on caste, notably Dumont
(1966), have seen in it the most complete example of a hierarchical society, one
which in its traditional form was hierarchical not only in fact but also by
design, and in which the hierarchical principle animated every sphere of life.
Viewed in this light, the Hindu caste system had its analogue in the European
1025
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1026
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
social distance had to be maintained between the Brahmans at one extreme and
the Harijans or Untouchables at the other.
The ranking of jatis differs, and has always differed, from the ranking of
varnas in a number of important ways. There is no clear linear order of jatis as
there is of varnas. It is no doubt true that the Brahmans are at the top and the
Harijans at the bottom, but each of these two categories is made up of a number
of distinct jatis, which themselves cannot be readily placed in a linear order.
This ambiguity has always left some room for mobility among castes and
subcastes (Srinivas 1968). An upwardly mobile jati not uncommonly phrased
its claim to superior status in the idiom of varna.
While there is general agreement that the ranking of jatis is very elaborate
and, compared with other systems of social ranking, also very rigid, there is
considerable disagreement about the sources of caste rank. The actual ranks
enjoyed by the different castes arise from a variety of factors, although the
idiom in which caste ranking is phrased is typically a ritual one, more
specifically the idiom of purity and pollution. This had led some observers to
exaggerate the importance of ritual factors, giving the system an appearance of
mechanical rigidity without any room for freedom of action.
Despite the impressive stability and continuity of the caste structure, Hindu
ideas behind the ranking of persons are fluid and complex, and perhaps
heterogeneous. Varna, which may loosely be rendered as 'order' or 'kind',
provides an overall framework, but it does not stand by itself Besides the four
varnas etat e m t e D armas astras, t ere are t e t ree gunas or qua 1t1es
discussed elsewhere, particularly in the Samkhya texts (Rege 1984, 1988,
Larson and Bhattacharya 1987). The three gunas are: sattva (signifying light,
purity, intellect), rajas (energy, valour), and tamas (darkness, inertness). The
gunas enter as constituents into the make-up of different persons. In addition to
guna, there is also karma, which refers to action or works: what a person does
rather than what he or she is.
Guna and karma are commonly discussed in relation to persons rather than
groups, although they may also be linked more or less explicitly to the four
varnas. In the Bhagavadgita, Lord Krishna declares, 'caturvarnyam mayam
sristam, guna-karma-vibhagasah' ('the four varnas did I create, dividing (or
distributing) the gunas and the karmas')(Zaehner 1969:4/13). Some modern
interpreters of the Gita, including the great nationalist leaders B. G. Tilak and
M.K.Gandhi, have tried to argue that it represents an activist philosophy;
however, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that throughout the long course
of Indian history individual action has been severely constrained by the social
framework of caste.
Some contemporary anthropologists (e.g. Dumont 1964) have overstressed
the hierarchical completeness of Hindu society in order to bring out the
distinctive features of their own. Modern societies do indeed have a number of
distinctive features, both in their organizational structures and in their value
patterns. These features stand out when we contrast the modern West not only
1027
SOCIAL LIFE
with traditional India but also with its own medieval past (Beteille 1986,
Dumont 1987).
In the context of our present theme, perhaps the most striking feature of
modern societies is the notion of equality before the law. As an explicit principle
governing the relations between persons, it has found its fullest expression only
in modern times. It developed first in the West, in England, France and the
United States, and came to be widely adopted in the present century so that
there are very few parts of the world today where it is not acknowledged. The
far-reaching implications of this should not be overlooked, for equality before
the law requires equality not only between the rich and the poor or the high-
and the low-born, but also between blacks and whites and between men and
women. Medieval European society and, to an even greater extent, traditional
Indian society, was a society of privileges and disabilities; by contrast we now
have a society of citizens entitled to, if not actually enjoying, the equal
protection of laws.
The acceptance in principle of equality before the law or of equality of
opportunity does not mean, of course, that inequalities of status and power
have ceased to exist. There is a vast body of sociological literature showing
beyond a shadow of doubt that such inequalities do exist in all modern
industrial societies (Bendix and Lipset 1966, Helier 1969, Beteille 1969). There
is, as one would expect, a polemical side to this. Socialist writers from the
Soviet Union and from East European countries have argued that since such
mequa 1t1es enve pnman y rom t e pnvate owners tp o property, t ey are to
be found in their most extreme form in capitalist countries, notably the United
States. Liberal writers from the West, on the other hand, have asserted that the
truly oppressive forms of inequality are those arising from the monolithic
concentration of power in the apparatus of state and party, as exemplified in
countries like the Soviet Union. 4
We might begin on neutral ground with a consideration of the occupational
structure of modern societies. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance
of that structure in industrial societies, whether of the capitalist or the socialist
type. Occupations have become highly specialized, and the occupational system
has become more elaborate, more complex and more autonomous than in any
society previously known to history. Industrialization is accompanied not only by
a new attitude to work but also by a new organization of work (see this volume,
article 32). Much of a person's adult life is spent in his or her occupational role,
and early life is largely a preparation for it.
The hundreds of named occupations present in an industrial society are
classified and ranked. The principles of occupational ranking have been
discussed even more exhaustively by sociologists than have those of caste
ranking by anthropologists (Goldthorpe and Hope 1974). Studies in the
United States have shown that, although new occupations displace old ones
with great rapidity, the structure of occupational ranking shows a high degree of
stability. Moreover, comparative studies of occupational ranking in different
1028
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
industrial societies, of the capitalist as well as the socialist types, have shown
that this structure is not only remarkably stable but also relatively invariant
(Hodge et al. 1966a, b).
In general, non-manual occupations rank higher than manual ones, not only
in the United States, but also in the Soviet Union in spite of official theory
which assigns pride of place to manual work in the creation of value in the form
of material products. Doctors rank higher than typists, not only in the United
States where they are independent professionals, but also in the Soviet Union
where, like typists, they are state employees. Soviet attempts to level out
differences of income between occupations had limited success, despite strong
pressures from the state. They eventually had to be abandoned, and were later
condemned by Stalin (Lane 1971 ).
The question of why some occupations are consistently ranked higher than
others is in some ways as difficult to answer as the question of why some castes
are always ranked higher than others. It no more suffices to say that space
scientists rank higher than plumbers because they receive higher earnings, than
it does to say that Brahmans rank higher than Oilpressers because they have
greater purity. One might just as well ask why the space scientist should earn
more than the plumber. Various kinds of explanations, none of them very
satisfactory, have been offered, in terms of 'scarcity', 'function' and so on
(Bendix and Lipset 1966). It is quite clear, as Parsons (1954) consistently
stressed, that occupational ranking is governed by the value system of a society,
an t e more u y a gtven occupatiOn em o tes or expresses Its core va ues, t e
more highly it is likely to be ranked. There are only two qualifications to be
added: first, occupations alone do not express the core values of a society; and
secondly, their ranking is also governed, at least in part, by considerations of
power which are different from those of esteem.
Although occupational ranking may be as elaborate as caste ranking, the
nature of occupational status differs from that of caste status. Caste status is
ascribed whereas occupational status is, at least in principle, achieved. There is
no guarantee that an individual will have the same occupation, or even the same
occupational level, as his father, and the same individual may in fact move
considerably from one occupational level to another in his own lifetime.
Therefore, sociologists who study occupational structure and occupational
ranking also study occupational mobility. Indeed, the enormous literature on
the social grading of occupations has grown largely in response to the problems
of describing, analysing and measuring occupational mobility (Goldthorpe
1980: eh. 1).
The literature on occupational mobility in industrial societies is not only
very large but in parts highly technical (Blau and Duncan 1968), so that casual
inferences drawn from it are likely to be misleading. But some of the studies
have come to conclusions that at first sight appear surprising. In a pioneering
study made in the 1950s, Lipset and Bendix emphasized at the outset that 'the
overall pattern of social mobility appears to be much the same in the industrial
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SOCIAL LIFE
societies of various Western countries' (Lipset and Bendix 1967: 13). They
found their own conclusions 'startling' in view of the universal assumption that
the United States had much higher rates of mobility than European countries
like Britain and France. The earlier studies operated with such broad
differences of level as between 'manual' and 'non-manual' workers; more
refined analyses have naturally revealed variations in rates of mobility within
the same overall pattern.
An important issue in the study of social mobility relates to its implications
for the formation and stability of classes (Goldthorpe 1980). Sociologists who
deal with this question tend to approach it from two different points of view.
There are those who maintain that the multiplicity of occupational levels
together with high rates of individual mobility renders the formation of
distinct and stable social classes difficult if not impossible in advanced
industrial societies. Blau and Duncan (1968) argued in an influential book that
high rates of mobility make most individual positions impermanent to such an
extent that few individuals are likely to develop a lifelong commitment to any
particular class. 'Class' then becomes a statistical construct rather than a
socially significant category.
The second approach is a Marxian one. Marxists have traditionally held an
ambivalent attitude towards individual mobility. On the one hand, they have
questioned whether capitalist societies have high or even rising rates of
mobility. On the other hand, they have maintained that rates of mobility have
1tt e, 1 anyt mg, to o wtt t e po anzatwn o c asses-w tc t ey see as an
historical tendency generated by contradictions within capitalism (Poulantzas
1976). A reasonable position would seem to be that, while rising rates of
individual mobility do alter the context of class conflict, they do not abolish
class identity as such, certainly not the identity of the working class
(Goldthorpe 1980).
Marxists, as is well known, contrast class with occupation (Dahrendorf
1959: pt. I), and assign far more importance to the former than to the latter, at
least in the analysis of capitalist societies. The importance that we assign to
class in industrial societies in general, as against the capitalist variant alone, will
depend on what we mean by class. In the Marxian scheme, the inequality of
classes is much less a matter of status and esteem than of unequal power in the
economic domain. The inequality of power is itself seen to be rooted in the
particular historical institution of private property. Thus, in this scheme,
although inequalities of power are crucial and quite large in capitalist societies,
they can, at least in principle, be greatly reduced, if not eliminated, by the
abolition of private property.
Others argue that property is only one of the bases of power, and that power
has other bases that would survive the abolition of property and might even be
strengthened in consequence. These writers also tend to subordinate esteem or
status to power in their analytical schemes, but in a way that is different from
that of the Marxists (Dahrendorf 1968). In their view power is a universal and
1030
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
1031
SOCIAL LIFE
1032
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
subjective and arbitrary, and that the ideal of equality cannot be tested against
any preconceived model of distribution. This being so, substantive equality is a
kind of mirage whose pursuit is bound to be self-defeating. More importantly,
it can subvert the ideal of formal equality, or equality before the law, which in
this view is where the essence of equality lies (Hayek 1960: eh. 6, Joseph and
Sumption 1979).
If we now look back on the transition from the 'aristocratic' to the
'democratic' type of society, or from the 'hierarchical' to the 'egalitarian' type,
we realize how complex the issues are. When we look at that transition in
Europe, and also elsewhere, we cannot but be struck by the crucial part played
in it by the forces of the 'self-regulating market'. These forces broke down old
barriers and created new cleavages. In Europe the old distinctions of estate,
guild and parish yielded before the expanding forces of the market to the extent
that the latter took less account of social origin than of individual ability.
However, the market did not dissolve all the old distinctions, some of which
survived, although in altered forms, and accommodated themselves to it. First
of all, there are countries like India where market forces have not penetrated far
enough and where so-called 'semi-feudal' arrangements, based on caste and
patronage, are still well entrenched. It can of course be argued that what
survives from the past will inevitably decay as and when the market takes full
command. But this argument loses much of its force when we see that
distinctions of race and ethnicity, and sometimes marked disparities based on
t em, ouns even m sue a mature captta 1st society as t e Umte tates.
The market also sharpens old distinctions, and creates new ones, the most
important being the distinction between capital and labour. The widening gap
between capital and labour, and the simultaneous enrichment of the few and
impoverishment of the many in mid-nineteenth-century England, were noted
not only by Marx and Engels but also by many others who witnessed the
expansion of market forces at first hand. It is true that the worst excesses of this
phase of capitalism have to some extent been corrected, at least in the advanced
capitalist societies, but it is not true that they have all been corrected solely by
the 'self-regulating market'. Few of those who are witnessing the expansion of
market forces and the accompanying rise in economic disparity in India and
other Third World countries can seriously believe that they should wait for the
market itself to correct these disparities in the long run.
The belief that the inequalities inherited from the past and those being
generated at present can and should be corrected by some form of social
intervention is widely, if not universally, held in countries like India, and is also
held by varying and fluctuating sections of society in countries like Britain and
the United States. Of course, such intervention can be of many different kinds,
and opinion is naturally divided on who should intervene, to what extent and in
which areas of social life. A certain consensus on these issues, however fragile
and momentary, was embodied in the institutions of the welfare state created in
a number of West European countries in the wake of the Second World War.
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SOCIAL LIFE
Given the full range of historical possibility and experience, the welfare state
of post-war Western Europe appears as a relatively mild instrument for the
containment of inequality. Far more powerful apparatuses of state and
government have been devised in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, at least in
part with the objective of reducing inequality. Nor should we underestimate
their achievements. There were notable successes in controlling
unemployment, in giving workers a better deal and in reducing income
differentials between 'mental' and 'manual' workers. Some advances were also
made since the Bolshevik Revolution in reducing disparities between the
different ethnic groups and nationalities, but many disparities still remain, as is
becoming evident in the rising tide of ethnic conflicts.
The notable gains in equality mentioned above were achieved at some cost,
which, by any reasonable account, was at times exceedingly high. A
consideration of this cost at once reveals one of the paradoxes of equality. The
very attempt to regulate and reduce inequality through direct intervention in
social and economic processes led, some would say inevitably, to a tremendous
concentration of power in the apparatuses of state and party. In other words,
the instruments for the suppression of inequality are not neutral, but generate
their own inequalities. One could then ask whether, in moving from the
inequalities of estate prevalent until the eighteenth century to the inequalities
of class about which Marx wrote, and from those again to the inequalities of
power of the twentieth century, any real or demonstrable gain was made in the
ac tevement o equa tty.
A monolithic structure of power imposes constraints on the realization not
only of equality but also of other social values, notably liberty. It may be
possible in principle to envisage an ideal world where liberty and equality
would complement rather than contradict each other; but such an ideal world is
not yet within reach, and perhaps for most, not even within sight. Libertarians
do not question the principle of equality before the law, or even of equality of
opportunity to the extent that it is consistent with the former. But they do
question the 'legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater
equality of material condition' (Nozick 1980:232), whether in the name of
distributive equality or of 'fair equality of opportunity'.
The stress on distributive equality may be viewed as a threat not only to
liberty but also to efficiency. Few people would place efficiency on the same
plane as equality and liberty in their hierarchy of values. It is nevertheless true
that efficiency has a central place in the economic ideology that dominates
much of modern life. Some of the most crucial debates in the realm of social
and economic policy relate to the comparative advantages of market and plan as
two alternative forms of rationality (Dahrendorf 1968). A major test of these
advantages, even for those who believe that the two alternatives cannot be
mutually exclusive, is the degree of efficiency attainable under each, either
singly or in combination with some elements of the other.
1034
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
Modern egalitarians have always argued that an order that tolerates extremes
of inequality is not only socially unjust but also economically wasteful and
inefficient. But the considerable experience now available of centrally-regulated
economies has shown up the other side of the coin. In the socialist countries,
the market was for decades held responsible for both generating and sustaining
economic inequality, and one of the main objectives of centralized planning was
precisely to restrict that role. If the market is viewed with less suspicion in these
countries today, it is not because its role in sustaining inequality has been
completely lost to sight, but rather because people are now a little better
prepared to accept some economic inequality as a price to pay for the efficiency
guaranteed by a measure of competition.
Thus, although equality is undoubtedly an important value in modern
societies, there is a considerable distance between a minimal definition of it as
equality before the law and a definition that also tries to take into account the
distribution of income, wealth and various social services, such as health and
education. One must always keep in mind that there are not only strong
advocates of equality in these societies but also critics of it (Letwin 1983).
These critics point not only to the high political and economic costs of realizing
equality, but also to the conceptual ambiguity inherent in the very idea of
equality. 'The central argument for Equality', a contemporary political
philosopher has written, 'is a muddle' (Lucas 1965:299). And even of the more
specific ideal of 'equality of opportunity', a distinguished American
e ucatwmst as wntten, seemmg y m espair, t at It IS a a se I ea
1973:135).
Perhaps equality is not so much a false ideal as one which cannot be
meaningfully conceived in an historical vacuum. It can only make sense in the
context of, and in response to, the specific challenge that a given society
presents to its reflective members. Sometimes the challenge comes from an
order established by age-old religious tradition, such as that of caste;
sometimes it comes from a recklessly competitive economic system such as that
of free-enterprise capitalism; or again, it may come from a monolithic political
apparatus itself designed to solve the problem of inequality once and for all.
Equality is today too powerful an idea to be set aside simply because it cannot
be precisely defined. It is like the djinn which, once released from the bottle,
cannot be put back into it again.
NOTES
1 To take an example from outside the West, Rousseau influenced the great nineteenth-
century Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, who published a tract on
equality entitled Samya in 1879; for an English translation, see Haldar (1977); see also
Ganguli (1975).
2 Soviet writers have generally preferred the term 'strata' to 'classes' to describe the
characteristic divisions of their own society which, according to them, was marked by an
absence of 'contradiction' or, at least, of 'antagonistic contradiction'.
1035
SOCIAL LIFE
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Durkheim, E. (1982 [1893]) The Division of Labour in Society, London: Macmillan.
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Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1963 [1903]) Primitive Classification, London: Cohen &
West.
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Moscow: Progress Publishers.
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Eysenck, H.J. (1973) The Inequality of Man, London: Temple Smith.
Fortes, M. (1945) The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, London: Oxford
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Frazier, E.F. (1957) Black Bourgeoisie, New York: Free Press.
Ganguli, B. N. (197 5) Concept of Equality, Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Gellner, E. (1979) 'The social roots of egalitarianism', Dialectics and Humanism 4: 27-
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Goldthorpe, J.H. (1980) Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, Oxford:
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Goodenough, WH. (1951) Property, Kin and Community on Truk, New Haven: Yale
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Haldar, M.K. (1977) Renaissance and Reaction in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta:
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Hobbes, T. (1973 [1651]) Leviathan, London: Dent.
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Huizinga, J. (1924) The Waning of the Middle Ages, London: Edward Arnold.
Joseph, K. and Sumption, J. (1979) Equality, London: John Murray.
Kakar, S. (1978) The Inner World, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kane, P.V. (1974) History of Dharmasastra, vol. 2, pt. 1, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute.
Kuznets, S. (1955) 'Economic growth and income inequality', American Economic
Review 45(1).
Lane, D. (1971) The End of Inequality? Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Larson, G.J. and Bhattacharya, R.S. (eds) (1987) Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophy:
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Leacock, E. (1978) 'Women's status in egalitarian societies', Current Anthropology
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Lenski, G. (1966) Power and Privilege, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Letwin, W (ed.) (1983)Against Equality, London: Macmillan.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
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SOCIAL LIFE
Lingat, R. (1973) The Classical Law of India, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lipset, S.M. and Bendix, R. (1967) Social Mobility in Industrial Society, Berkeley:
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Lowie, R. (1960 [1921]) Primitive Society, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lucas, JR. (1965) 'Against Equality', Philosophy 40(154):296-307.
MacCormack, C. and Strathern, M. (eds) (1980) Nature, Culture and Gender,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marriott, M. (1959) 'lnteractional and attributional theories of caste ranking', Man in
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Structure and Change in Indian Society, Chicago: Aldine.
Marriott, M. and lnden, R.B. (1974) 'Caste systems', Encyclopaedia Britannic a
(Macropaedia), vol. 3.
Marx, K. (1954 [1867]) Capital, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1968) The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Mead, M. (1963 [1935]) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York:
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Morgan, L.H. (1964 [1877]) Ancient Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
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Myrdal, G. (1944) An American Dilemma, New York: Harper.
Nandy, A. (1980) At the Edge of Psychology, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Nozick, R. (1980) Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford: Blackwell.
Parsons, T. (1954) Essays in Sociological Theory, New York: Free Press.
Poulantzas, N. (1976) Les Classes sociales dans le capitalisme aujourd'hui, Paris: Seuil.
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Rege, M.P. (1984) Concepts of Justice and Equality in the Indian Tradition, Pune:
Gokhale Institute.
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Rivers, WH.R. (1924) Social Organization, London: Kegan Paul.
Rousseau, J-J. (1938 [1782]) The Social Contract and Discourses, London: J.M.Dent.
Sahlins, M.D. (1968) Tribesmen, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Schneider, D. M. (1968) American Kinship, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Sen, A. (1973) On Economic Inequality, Oxford: Blackwell.
Srinivas, M. N. (1962) Caste in Modern India and Other Essays, Bombay: Asia Publishing
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Srinivas, M.N. (1968) 'Mobility in the caste system', in M.Singer and B.S.Cohn (eds)
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Tapper, R. (ed.) (1983) The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan, London:
Croom Helm.
Tawney, R.H. (1964 [1931]) Equality, London: Unwin.
Warner, W.L. (1941) 'Introduction', inA.Davis, B.B.Gardner and M.R.Gardner, Deep
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Wolf, E.R. (1982) Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Wood burn, J. (1982) 'Egalitarian societies', Man (N.S.) 17:431-51.
Zaehner, R.C. (ed.) (1969) The Bhagvad-Gita, London: Oxford University Press.
1038
INEQUALITY AND EQUALITY
FURTHER READING
Bendix, R. and Lipset, S.M. (eds) (1966) Class, Status and Power, New York: Free Press.
Beteille, A. (1977) Inequality Among Men, Oxford: Blackwell.
--(1987) The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays, Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1985) Distinction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Duby, G. (1980) The Three Orders, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dumont, L. (1980) Homo hierarchicus, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eysenck, H.J. (1973) The Inequality of Man, London: Temple Smith.
Franklin, J.H. (ed.) (1968) Color and Race, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Goldthorpe, J.H. (1980) Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Jencks, C. (1973) Inequality, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Leach, E.R. (1970) Political Systems of Highland Burma, London: Athlone Press.
Letwin, W. (ed.) (1983) Against Equality, London: Macmillan.
Marshall, T.H. (1977) Class, Citizenship and Social Development, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ossowski, S. (1963) Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Sen, A. (1973) On Economic Inequality, Oxford: Blackwell.
Strathern, M. (ed.) (1987) Dealing with Inequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Tawney, R.H. (1964) Equality, London: Unwin Books.
Academic Press.
Tumin, M.M. (1985) Social Stratification, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Wesolowski, W. (1979) Classes, Strata and Power, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
1039
38
1040
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
1041
SOCIAL LIFE
Stateless societies
By no means all of the world penetrated by Europeans was inhabited by
populations living in states, let alone empires. Large parts of Amazonian South
America and virtually all of North America, as well as Australia and many other
parts of the globe, were occupied by societies without a state apparatus. The
social and political institutions of 'stateless' societies, however, were very
varied. There were societies with chiefs and hereditary aristocracies, even with
slaves, as well as societies where age and sex were the primary bases of status,
1042
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
rank and authority (see Article 34). Using such political criteria, societies of
this kind have often been called 'tribes' or 'bands', and on the grounds of
techno-economic criteria, these have been associated respectively with
'agricultural' and 'hunting and gathering' economies. Whichever criteria are
adopted, whether political or techno-economic, such designations ignore the
profound differences between peoples around the world whose cultures are as
dissimilar as the languages they speak.
Terms such as 'stateless', or 'acephalous', are in any case only negative,
residual categories; they tell us what these societies are not. In an attempt to
provide a positive designation of their common attributes, Wolf has called them
societies based on a 'kin-ordered' mode of production (Wolf 1982:88-100).
Kinship systems, he accepts, may be of many kinds; moreover kinship is neither
equally salient in all stateless societies, nor does it fulfil the same functions. But
in so far as it is used to regulate descent and marriage, it does affect the
deployment of economic and political power.
However exiguous the material equipment of such peoples, their systems of
religious belief are rich and complex, and the empirical knowledge they possess of
their environments, in particular of the plants and animals on which they
depend, is both wide-ranging and intellectually highly organized (Waddy 1988).
In such societies, it is people and their knowledge, rather than things or capital,
that are the crucial social resource: their labour-power, their skills and, in the case
of women, their capacity to produce more people. They are not, as nineteenth-
century et no ogtsts t oug t, pnmtttve commumsts : t ere IS mstttutwna tze
differentiation, particularly of sex and age, which recurs generation after
generation-inequalities, for instance, as between the original settlers of the land
and newcomers, or between senior and junior lines of descent (see Article 37).
Even stateless polities, lacking kings or chiefs and specialized military forces,
were capable of co-ordinated and steady campaigns of resistance or aggression
against neighbouring peoples. For example, the segmentary lineage
organization of such tribal peoples as the Nuer of the southern Sudan was
preadapted to a process of what Sahlins ( 1961) has called 'predatory
expansion'. Such polities were also capable of radical political innovation. The
arrival of British colonial forces in Nuerland, for instance, resulted in the rise
of religious prophets who were able to mobilize very large numbers of people
(Evans-Pritchard 1937). Similarly, in Melanesia, individuals and communities
who believed in the other-worldly source of material commodities, and in a
future apocalypse, followed prophets who foretold the imminent end of the
world-one in which the whites would be defeated and their goods would fall
into the hands of the natives (Worsley 1957).
The establishment of European rule was not necessarily accomplished
suddenly, as in South America. In North America, the struggle between Britain
and France for control of the fur trade and for political domination of the
region sucked different Amerindian peoples into a succession of wars. In the
process, institutions which had brought separate groups together, often for
1043
SOCIAL LIFE
1044
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
1045
SOCIAL LIFE
realistic. Between 1245 and 1253, no less than four missions were sent to the
Mongol Khan by the Papacy alone, visits which were reciprocated by Mongol
embassies to Rome (Southern 1962:39-65).
But the dream of breaking the power of Islam only began to seem realizable
after the Arabs had been driven out of the Iberian peninsula and following the
conquests in America. Spanish confidence now knew no bounds. Muslim
resistance, some thought, could be broken by diverting the Nile to the Red Sea
or by raiding Mecca and seizing the Prophet's body; five thousand Spaniards, it
was even suggested, could take China. Thus inspired, Spanish and Portuguese
'discoverers' set out on voyages that were to end with the unification of the
entire globe. The central purpose of these expeditions was unambiguous:
Magellan's first round-the-world voyage, westwards, was an expedition to
reach the Spice Islands; the eastwards route, round the Cape, was aimed at
securing the sources of pepper on the Mala bar Coast.
1046
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
grant of 'letters of marque'-was often hard to perceive. Such was the continuing
wealth of the Americas, though, that in the mid-seventeenth century, the
prostitute-filled silver centre ofPotosi could boast 14 dance-halls, 80 churches, 36
gaming-houses and seven or eight hundred professional gamblers. On his round-
the-world voyage of 1770-4, Anson captured only one large Spanish silver vessel.
But 32 wagon-loads of Spanish treasure were conveyed in triumphant procession
to the Tower of London (Spate 1983:256-65).
In the process, the indigenous population was decimated: partly worked to
death, but in the main succumbing to disease (see this volume, Article 11 ). The
population of Mexico declined from some 25 million in 1519 to 5.3 million in
1548 and 1.05 million by 1605; in Peru, from possibly 7 million to 1.8 million
by 1580.
The imperial connection also proved fatal for the Spanish economy,
intensifying the relative economic backwardness and the social ossification of
that country vis-a-vis its more dynamic northern neighbours. The abundance
of bullion inhibited investment in manufacturing industry and encouraged
costly wars of expansion. Eventually, the Spanish empire became chronically
bankrupt, the Spanish imperial system little more than a mechanism for
transferring the wealth of America to pay for the manufactured goods it had to
buy from northern Europe. By the end of the sixteenth century, only 3.8 per
cent of the goods carried to the New World in Spanish ships were products of
Spain (Spate 1983:335). Portugal became a client state of England.
W ere go an st ver were a sent or ecame wor e out, sugar ecame t e
major source of colonial profit. During the Crusades, the Christians had
become acquainted with sugar and with the technology which the Arabs had
developed to produce it. Arab production, and the industry which the
Portuguese and the Spaniards implanted on their new Atlantic island
possessions off the West African coast, had been based on a mixture of free
labour, indentured labour and slave labour. Slavery had not been the dominant
form of labour, nor-as the world 'slave', derived from the name 'Sclavus'
('Slav'), indicates-had slavery been confined to Africans. But in the New
World, production came to be organized entirely on the basis of plantations
worked by African slave labour (Mintz 1986:28-32). The sugar plantation was
an agro-industry, in which centralized discipline and a concern to achieve
maximum economy in the use of time constituted in many ways the prototype
for the factories of the subsequent Industrial Revolution (Patterson 1982).
England and France now came into head-on conflict for control of the sugar
trade in the Caribbean. By the end of the century, William Pitt the Younger
estimated that four-fifths of British overseas income derived from the West
Indies, while two-thirds of French external commerce was with one island,
Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Holland exchanged New York for the far more
important sugar-fields of Surinam, while France let Britain have Canada rather
than lose Guadeloupe.
1047
SOCIAL LIFE
Whichever power ran the plantations, new and larger supplies of slave
labour were needed. A whole continent, Africa, was converted into the major
source of supply. Thirty-six million people died without reaching the
Americas; perhaps twelve millions got there: together, nearly fifty million
human beings were transported. In the process, the indigenous economies of
Africa were destroyed; powerful kingdoms were broken or converted into
machines for capturing slaves, and new slave-raiding and slave-trading states
were brought into being.
1048
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
political economy was introduced even in the Spanish Empire: free trade
within and between the Spanish colonies, and with the metropolis. In 1790, the
Casa de Contrataci6n, in Seville, which had controlled trade with the Americas
since the Conquest, was abolished. The consequent increase in both the
production and the trade of the colonies resulted in a new realization that the
economic interests of the colonies were not necessarily identical with those of
Spain. It led, in other words, to the strengthening of a sense of nationalism.
In 1830, the Dutch replaced the system under which the Dutch East India
Company had managed trade with the Indies for over two centuries with a new
'Culture [Cultivation] System'. This established incentives designed to
stimulate peasant production for the market: those who produced export crops
on a fifth of their land had their taxes remitted. Java was soon transformed into
a 'mammoth state plantation' (Geertz 1963:53) for the production of coffee and
sugar; 'a whole people ... converted into a nation of... estate coolies, with their
own natural aristocracy reduced to the position of foremen and
superintendents' (Panikkar 1959:88).
Despite the measures taken by the Dutch to preserve their monopoly of
spices, they failed. In any case, spices and sugar were fast becoming less
important as the major sources of colonial wealth. The monopoly over the
plants themselves was broken by British 'botanic imperialism', as seedlings of
cocoa, tea and rubber plants, and of cinchona (for the production of quinine),
were smuggled, often by agents of the British, including diplomats, from the
East In tes, Brazt an Peru, an tssemmate rom Kew ar ens to new
colonial Botanic Gardens in Kingston Oamaica), Peredeniya (Ceylon) and
Raffles Gardens (Singapore), where they became the bases of new and
immensely profitable tropical agro-industries (Brockway 1979).
The struggle between Britain and France for control of North America and
India had left India as the jewel in Britain's crown. One major consequence of
the subsequent desperate attempt to throw off the British yoke, the 'Mutiny' of
1857, was the final abolition of the (by then) weakened British East India
Company, and its replacement by a regime of direct control of both the polity
and the economy by the colonial state.
Agriculture and industrial revolution in the West now led to a new pattern of
economic relations between the metropoles and the colonies. In India,
traditional industries, notably shipbuilding and textiles, were destroyed. In
their place, a new division of international labour arose: Indian agriculture
supplied the raw material for Lancashire's new cotton mills, whose products
were then exported back to India. The wealth extracted from the colonies thus
went to fuel the British agricultural and industrial revolutions. Liverpool, the
world's leading slave port, survived the ending of the trade by converting itself
into a centre of international commerce and industry.
There was also a revolution in consumption: a near-doubling of wages in
Western countries after the middle of the nineteenth century stimulated a mass
demand for tropical commodities like sugar and fruits which had once been
1049
SOCIAL LIFE
1050
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
West Africa, for instance, an army of 1,200 men, most of whom were Africans,
had defeated 30,000 of their enemies at Sokoto. Colonial troops from countries
outside Africa were also used.
The consolidation of military victory entailed the construction of new states
that were entirely subordinate to the mother state back in Europe.
Administration was designed to cost as little as possible. Sir Harry Johnston
governed Nyasaland with his own salary plus £10,000 a year, one British officer
and 75 Indian soldiers. Lord Lugard had an annual budget of just over
£100,000, five European administrators and one African regiment to govern
ten million people. Hence administration necessarily depended on eo-opting
indigenous political authorities and dividing any possible indigenous
opposition. The Dutch in the East Indies, likewise, governed with only a small
European administrative staff.
'Divide and rule' involved more than the elimination of any potentially
threatening physical force that might have remained in the hands of others. In
India, the British organized their army recruitment on the basis of obsessional
divisions of the population not only into castes and subcastes, but even into
sub-subcastes, in their racist search for uncontaminated 'martial' stock (Mason
1974:350-61).
In post-Mutiny India, a cultural offensive was launched to persuade the
conquered that their future lay in joining the British in building a new imperial
order. The Queen now became monarch of both Britain and India, and in 1877
s e was resty e Empress o In ta. In tan pnnces an nota es were won over
not just by showering them with material rewards, but by the award of honours
and an elaborate series of durbars in which an act of incorporation was the
central ritual.
New 'traditions' were invented to incorporate and divide India's old
aristocrats and new civil servants. Competition and division between the
princes was instilled by creating fine distinctions according to their new
positions in the imperial hierarchy: distinctions of title; of clothing and
uniform; in the numbers of retainers and soldiers that princes were allowed,
and so on. A whole array of new orders, escutcheons, armorial bearings, robes,
banners, etc. was created-a bizarre iconic mix of 'Victorian feudal', Mughal,
Hindu, imperial Roman, Sikh and Rajput elements (Cohn 1983:165-209).
'Indirect rule' was much older than Lugard's subsequent formulation of the
idea; it had been used for centuries in territories where populations were
numbered in tens, even hundreds of millions, and it continued to the end of the
colonial epoch. On the eve of the Second World War the Dutch East Indies
were divided into directly administered areas and areas of indirect rule with
269 'native states'; India's constitution was similarly heavily weighted in favour
of the princely states.
The principal task of the colonial authorities in India was the collection of
taxes to pay for the costs of administration, as the title of the Indian
administrative official-the 'Collector'-indicated. In the sphere of
1051
SOCIAL LIFE
production, the promotion of capitalism was the major economic priority. The
pioneer transformation of colonial land-holding and taxation systems was the
Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal, whereby 3,000 zamindars and
jaghirdars who, until then, had possessed rights over labour and the products of
that labour on lands granted to them by the Moghuls, were made absolute
owners of the land-which they had never been before. Their loyalty was
assured by allocating to them one-tenth of the taxes collected.
The same basic principles informed policy a century later, in a quite
different kind of colony. In Kenya, a white settler colony, Africans were forced
to become wage-labourers on lands allocated to Europeans. Even so, in 1914
more than 70 per cent of exports were still coming from African peasant
smallholdings. European farmers were now given a vast range of government
services-railways, roads, schools, hospitals, extension services, etc.-together
with subsidies built into the customs tariffs. Africans were forced to pay head
and hut taxes, in cash, and each individual had to carry a kipande which
recorded their tax payments and labour-history, and which had to be presented
on demand by employers and officials. A Masters and Servants Ordinance
bound the African to serve out a contract on pain of imprisonment. For those
Africans who stayed on lands allotted to white settlers, the Resident Labourers
Ordinance permitted them a small subsistence plot, on condition that they put
in 180 days of work a year for the settler-owner. By 1920, more than half of the
men of the Kikuyu and Luo, the largest agricultural tribes, were working for
Europeans. T ese economic measures were rem orce y a co our- ar
excluding Africans from legislative and other public bodies and prohibiting
African trade unions, together with a whole social apartheid of separate
schools, separate residential areas, exclusive access for whites to hotels and
recreational facilities, and 'whites only' seats in buses and public places (Leys
1975:30-4).
1052
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
of the state. Schools run by missions, not by the state, were the main vehicles
for the dissemination of European culture. But even where paganism was
stamped out, as in Latin America, and Christianity became the religion of the
people, it was still informed by indigenous ideas (Wachtel 1971 ). The
quintessence of European culture, it seemed, was religious rather than secular.
In a society where all positions of power and wealth were monopolized by
whites, the missions were often the only available avenues of social mobility
open to the more enterprising and ambitious individuals. Some-whom Asians
called 'rice Christians'-'converted' in order to learn to read and write, or
because the missionaries provided them with free health services or food in
times of scarcity. Innovators and entrepreneurs seeking to carve out a place in
commerce and market agriculture found the Protestant ethic as attractive as did
their European predecessors during the Reformation (Long 1968).
For those who resented white authority, interpretations of Christian
doctrine which emphasized fraternity, hope and charity, and the righteousness
of the meek and the humble as against the arrogance of the mighty, provided a
'critical' ideology of social dissent. The more radical found Biblical authority
for deviant, even apocalyptic ideas, or developed syncretic mixtures of
Christianity and indigenous belief, organizing their followers into new
churches independent of white missionaries. In South Africa, where blacks
were kept out of even Christian churches, the formation of their own, 'Zionist'
and 'Ethiopian' separatist churches was one of the principal outlets for the
mte tgent an t e am Itwus. T ese c urc es were a so extraor man y
fissiparous, since would-be leaders constantly broke away from the parent body
to found their own sects (Sundkler 1948).
A tiny minority, normally sons of the aristocracy, went on to higher levels of
European education designed to fit them for positions of responsibility in
systems of indirect rule, or, in the economic field, as supervisors on estates or as
managers in urban business. But for the vast majority without capital, there was
little hope of rising above the level of the small farm or the small shop, and even
these niches were often occupied by people from immigrant business cultures,
such as Ismaili Muslims in East Africa (Morris 1968).
An even tinier minority had access to literature which was critical of
European society or informed them about the values and institutions of their
own pre-coloniallegacies. Given their socially privileged backgrounds, most of
them were not disposed to respond to such ideas.
But eventually, secularism, liberalism and nationalism did filter through:
first the Enlightenment ideas of Rousseau, Locke and Voltaire, and later the
positivism of Comte and Saint-Simon and the liberalism of Mill and Spencer.
The classical cultures of Mediterranean antiquity had inspired the thinkers of
the Enlightenment in Europe; a century later, they still inspired pioneer
Egyptian nationalists like Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. Others, like Ram Mohan
Roy in India, struggled to modernize their own cultural traditions by
combining elements of Hinduism and of Western thought. Early nationalists
1053
SOCIAL LIFE
were also naturally inspired not only by philosophers, but also by their
counterparts in Europe: liberal, positivist, radical, revolutionary, and Utopian
political activists from Mazzini and Cavour to Tolstoy, Kossuth and Parnell.
Today, at a time when it is uncritically assumed that what is labelled
'fundamentalism' (in fact, modern interpretations of Muslim belief) is the
authentic and immanent essence of Islam, it is worth remembering that
nationalists in Turkey, for instance, had been predominantly secularist since as
far back as the epoch of the Tanzimat (1839) right through into the period when
Ataturk abolished the Caliphate in 1924 (Zubaida 1989).
But a religious heritage going back thousands of years and deeply imbricated
in the institutions of everyday life, especially in rural areas, was not to be
overthrown by secularist modernizers, even less by a few European
missionaries. In particular, the great religions rendered believers impervious to
the message of Christianity. The priority of the colonizing state, however, was
not the saving of souls but the exploitation of the colonies in the interests of the
Motherland. Whatever the degree of cultural resistance and persistence,
therefore, the colonial impact could not be prevented from transforming
secular life.
ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
The colonial powers crushed early attempts by non-European states to develop
mo ern Western-sty e m ustnes, especta y armaments m ustnes. Peno tc
requests from Ethiopia, from 1520 through to the nineteenth century, for the
technology with which to manufacture European-style swords, muskets,
textiles and books, were refused. Other African projects-to import foreign
tailors, smiths and carpenters into Dahomey in the 1720s; to develop cotton
production among the Fante; to establish sugar refineries in Calabar-were all
blocked. In Egypt, Mohammed Ali was more successful in developing the
cultivation and processing of cotton, and he used the profits to set up state
factories for the manufacture of cotton, woollen, silk and linen textiles, as well
as sugar, paper, glass, leather, sulphuric acid, and guns and gunpowder.
Palmerston thereupon invaded Egypt and imposed a 'capitulation' treaty under
which Egypt's internal trade was opened to foreigners, the state monopolies
were abolished, and Egyptian finances were plundered (Stavrianos 1981:118-
19, 215-16).
Even after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire-as a result
not only of the growth of Abolitionist sentiment in Europe and the growing
costs of slavery, but also of the major armed slave rebellions in Saint Domingue
and Jamaica (Blackburn 1988)-slavery continued to expand in the USA,
Brazil and Cuba. Nor did the abolition of slavery mean the end of the
plantation system. Rather, it became the main method of organizing the
production of tea, coffee, sisal and rubber, involving the transporting of large
populations, often overseas, to plantations where the intensity of work and the
1054
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
1055
SOCIAL LIFE
1056
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
1057
SOCIAL LIFE
1058
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
1059
SOCIAL LIFE
NATION-BUILDING
In 1960 alone, seventeen new African countries appeared on the world scene.
Most of them were colonial constructs, entities such as 'Nigeria' or 'Kenya',
much less than a century old. Within (and sometimes across) their boundaries,
people commonly identified much more strongly with their ethnic group-an
1060
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
1061
SOCIAL LIFE
primary goods remained buoyant, as they did in the 1960s and 1970s, the
problem of repaying the debt was deferred. But when export prices fell,
increased output often proved insufficient to service interest payments, let
alone to pay off the capital. Even those countries which had aimed at self-
reliance found that they were at the mercy of large corporations, since the latter
could charge high prices for manufactured goods. On the other hand, demand
for Third World commodities was inelastic, or could be undercut by
competitors, or even eliminated by substituting man-made materials. More
importantly, the 'impersonal' power of the market was such that it was
controlled, collectively, by the giant corporations which produced what the
Third World needed and which purchased Third World commodities.
In 1974, it seemed that there was one major exception to all this, when the
OPEC oil cartel raised its prices to the outside world. This looked like a model
which could be applied across the board: all that was needed was for the
producers to act in concert, and the West could be held to ransom. Even with
such a strategic commodity as oil, however, the panic created resulted in the
rapid development of alternative modes of energy use in the West, and to a
consequent reduction in world demand for petroleum relative to its increased
production. The economies of non-oil states in the Third World itself also
suffered severely. And when attempts were made to create a banana producers'
cartel, for example, they failed: in part because the West did not need bananas
as much as it needed oil; in part because it was easily able to break the solidarity
o t e supp ters.
Before the 1950s, there had been no such entity as the 'Third World'. But
the common interests of the new ex-colonies increasingly brought them
together, firstly in a series of regional conferences in Asia and Africa, then in
Afro-Asian conferences, of which the Bandung Conference of 1955 was the
most important, and culminating in the establishment of the Non-Aligned
Movement. Initially, its major preoccupations were with political
decolonization, both domestically and in the remaining colonies, and-as the
name of the Movement indicates-with the attempt, in the epoch of the Cold
War, to create a global grouping which would not itself be a bloc, but would be
independent of both superpowers. But by the 1980s, the major problems had
turned out to be economic ones: unequal terms of trade on the world market,
and the rising tide of debt. It was Third World pressure which forced the
United Nations to establish the UNCTAD conferences on trade and
development.
The Third World also found that it had to deal not just with the political
power of foreign states, but also with the economic power of giant multinational
corporations, which were now organized on the basis of a global division of
labour (Henderson 1989). Within this 'new international division of labour',
even some Third World countries-notably the 'four little tigers' (South
Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore), Mexico, Brazil and other states-
1062
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
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University Press.
Anderson, P. (1973) Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: New Left Books.
Belshaw, C.S. (1954) Changing Melanesia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Bendix, R. (1960) Max Weber: an Intellectual Portrait, New York: Doubleday.
Blackburn, R. (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, London: Verso.
Brockway, L.H. (1979) Science and Colonial Expansion: the Role of the British Royal
Botanic Gardens, New York: Academic Press.
Chesneaux, J. (1971) Secret Societies in China in the 19th and 20th Centuries, London:
Heinemann.
--(1973) Peasant Revolts in China 1840-1949, London: Thames & Hudson.
Chi Ch'ao-ting (1936) Key Economic Areas in Chinese History as Revealed in the
Development of Public Works for Water-Control, London: Alien & Unwin.
Cohn, B.S. (1983) 'Representing authority in Victorian India', in E.Hobsbawm and
T.Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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De Kiewiet, C.W. (1941) A History of South Africa-Social and Economic, Oxford:
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1063
SOCIAL LIFE
Elvin, M. (1973) The Pattern of the Chinese Past, London: Eyre Methuen.
Epstein, A.L. (1958) Politics in an Urban African Community, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937) The Nuer: a Description of the Modes of Livelihood and
Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fuller, C.J. (1984) Servants of the Goddess: the Priests of a South Indian Temple,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geertz, C. (1963) Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia,
Berkeley, University of California Press.
Geiger, W (1986) The Mahava?sa or the Great Chronicles of Ceylon, New Delhi, Asian
Educational Services.
Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell.
Goffman, E. (1968) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other
Inmates, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Greenberg, S. and Ortiz, E.L. (1983) The Spice of Life, London: MichaelJoseph.
Gunawardana, R.A.L.H. (1979) Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in
Early Medieval Sri Lanka, Tucson, Arizona: Association for Asian Studies.
Harris, N. (1987) The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the
Decline of an Ideology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Henderson, J. (1989) The Globalization of High Technology Production: Society, Space
and Semi-conductors in the Restructuring of the Modern World, London: Routledge.
Hobsbawm, E.J. (1969) Industry and Empire, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hughes, R. (1988) The Fatal Shore: a History of the Transportation of Convicts to
Australia 1787-1868, London: Pan Books.
onescu, . an e ner, . e s opu tsm, ts
Characteristics, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
James, C.L.R. (1963) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L 'Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution, New York: Vintage Books.
Kehoe, A.B. (1981) North American Indians: a Comprehensive Account, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lenin, V.I. (1915) Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (many editions),
van Leur, J.C. (1955) Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Social and Economic
History, The Hague: van Hoeve.
Leys, C. (1975) Underdevelopment in Kenya: the Political Economy of Neo-colonialism,
1964-1971, London: Heinemann.
Lipset, S.M. (1964) The First New Nation: the United States in Historical and
Comparative Perspective, London: Heinemann.
Long, N. (1968) Social Change and the Individual: a Study of the Social and Religious
Responses to Innovation in a Zambian Rural Community, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Mason, P. (1974) A Matter of Honour: an Account of the Indian Army, its Officers and
Men, London: Cape.
Mintz, S.W (1986) Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Morris, H.S. (1968) The Indians in Uganda, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
van Onselen, C. (1976) Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1933,
London: Pluto Press.
Panikkar, K.M. ( 19 59) Asia and Western Dominance, London: George All en & Unwin.
1064
COLONIALISM AND THE WORLD ORDER
Patterson, 0. (1982) Slavery and Social Death: a Comparative Study, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Redclift, M. (1978) Agrarian Reform and Peasant Organization on the Ecuadorian Coast,
London: Athlone Press.
--(1984) Development and the Environmental Crisis: Red or Green Alternatives?,
London: Methuen.
Roberts, B. (1978) Cities of Peasants: the Political Economy of Urbanization in the Third
World, London: Edward Arnold.
Sahlins, M. (1961) 'The segmentary lineage: an organization of predatory expansion',
American Anthropologist 63(2):332-45.
Scott, J.C. (1976) The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia, London: Yale University Press.
Skinner, G.W (1964-5) 'Marketing and social structure in rural China', Journal of
Asian Studies 34(1-3):3-43, 195-227, 363-99.
Southall, A. (1956) Alur Society: a Study in Processes and Types of Domination,
Cambridge: Heffer.
Southern, R.W (1962) Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Spate, O.H.K. (1979) The Spanish Lake, London: Croom Helm.
--(1983) Monopolists and Freebooters, London: Croom Helm.
Stavrianos, L.S. (1981) Global Rift: the Third World Comes ofAge, New York: Morrow.
Sundkler, B. G. M. (1948) Bantu Prophets in South Africa, London: Lutterworth Press.
Tambiah, S.J. (1970) Buddhism and Spirit Cults in North-east Thailand, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
m er, ew ystem o avery: t e xport o verseas,
1830-1920, Oxford University Press.
Wachtel, N. (1971) La Vision des vaincus: les Indiens du Perou devant la Conquhe
espagnole, Paris: Gallimard.
Waddy, J.A. (1988) Classification of Plants and Animals from a Groote Eylandt Aboriginal
Point of View, 2 vols, Darwin: Australian National University.
Weber, M. (1956) The Sociology of Religion, London: Methuen.
--(1961) General Economic History, New York: Collier.
Wolf, E.R. (1982) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Womack, J. (1969) Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Worsley, P. (1957) The Trumpet Shall Sound: a Study of 'Cargo' Cults in Melanesia,
London: MacGibbon & Kee.
--(1964) The Third World: a Vital New Force in International Affoirs, London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
--(1984) The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson.
Zamosc, L. (1986) The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia:
Struggles of the National Peasant Association, 1967-1981, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Zubaida, S. (1989) Islam, the People and the State: Essays on Political Ideas and
Movements in the Middle East, London: Routledge.
1065
SOCIAL LIFE
FURTHER READING
Blackburn, R. (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, London: Verso.
Brockway, L.H. (1979) Science and Colonial Expansion: the Role of the British Royal
Botanic Gardens, New York: Academic Press.
Cohn, B.S. (1983) 'Representing authority in Victorian India', in E.Hobsbawm and
T.Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geertz, C. (1963) Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia,
Berkeley: University of California.
Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, London: Blackwell.
Hughes, R. (1988) The Fatal Shore: a History of the Transportation of Convicts to
Australia, 1787-1868, London: Pan Books.
Kehoe, A.B. (1981) North American Indians: a Comprehensive Account, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lenin, V.I. (1915) Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (many editions).
van Leur, J.C. (1955) Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Social and Economic
History, The Hague: van Hoeve.
Mason, P. ( 1974) A Matter of Honour: an Account of the Indian Army, its Officers and
Men, London: Cape.
van Onselen, C. (1976) Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1933,
London: Pluto Press.
Pannikar, K.M. ( 19 59) Asia and Western Dominance, London: George Allen & Unwin.
Redclift, M. (1978) Agrarian Reform and Peasant Organization on the Ecuadorian Coast,
London: Athlone Press.
1066
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1067
INDEX
1068
INDEX
1069
INDEX
1070
INDEX
1071
INDEX
1072
INDEX
1073
INDEX
1074
INDEX
1075
INDEX
1076
INDEX
1077
INDEX
1078
INDEX
1079
INDEX
1080
INDEX
1081
INDEX
1082
INDEX
1083
INDEX
essentialism ethnomusicology
social life 738 anthropological theory 331
ethics comparative study 687
spatial organization 481 technological development 690, 692
ethnic categories ethnopoetics
nationalism 709 language 862, 870-1
ethnic election ethology
politics 712-13 animality /humanity comparison 22
ethnic minorities definition 480
division of labour 907 displacement activities 622
industrialization 906 primates 440
ethnicism etic models
politics 709-10 built environment 463, 481
ethnicity etiquette
cultural significance 346--8 language 879, 881-2
dissolution 711-13 euphoria
politics 706-28 music 696
survival 711-13 Europe
ethnie see also Old World
lateral/ vertical 713-17 colonial expansion 1041-2, I 044--5
modern nations 721-5 colonization 4, 297-9
politics 709-10 evolution debate 79-80
ethnoarchaeology Neanderthals 84--5
spatial organization 481 Upper Palaeolithic 92, 94
ethnocentrism evaluation
art analysis 655, 656 scales of 1019
1084
INDEX
1085
INDEX
1086
INDEX
1087
INDEX
1088
INDEX
1089
INDEX
1090
INDEX
1091
INDEX
1092
INDEX
1093
INDEX
1094
INDEX
1095
INDEX
1096
INDEX
1097
INDEX
1098
INDEX
1099
INDEX
marginalism massacres
political economy 748 ethnicity 714
wealth 916 Matenkupkum cave (Pacific)
markets fossil records 94
classification 931-6 material culture
social order 752-3 aesthetics 673
trading 9 31-6 art analysis 656
weaving902 definition 334-5, 398-9
Marquesas freedom 414
double-headed club 662, 663 gender 404
marnage mass consumption 405-6
definition 798-803 material resources
gift exchange 925-8 inequality 1010
housework 892 normative power 990--2
lateral ethnie 714 materialism
prescriptive 801-3 subsistence patterns 197
templates 379 materiality
Marshack, A. 99 artefacts 406--8
Martin, Debra 283 maternity
Marx,Karl gender 743
belief systems 583 mating
division of labour 904 dialects 127
equality 1011 reproduction 764
fetishism 931 matriarchy
forces of production 141 social evolution 1022
hierarchy 1031 matrices
industrial revolution 442 landscape ecology 486-7
inequality 1020, 1030--1 temporality 508
instrumentalism 707 matrilineal descent
labour 895-6 belief systems 571-2
modes of production 204 inequality 1020--1
non-commodity exchange 920 residence rules 796--7
religion 632 rules 794--5
small-scale societies 416 Mauer (Germany)
social evolution 941, 942, 946 mandible 84
technology 143,441 Maurer, David 878
wealth 912-15,922,928 Mauss, Marcel
Marxism artefacts 416
structural 949 belief systems 57 5-6
Marzke,M. 145,440 collective representations 1018
masks exchange 911,927,929
art analysis 663, 666--7, 676 food behaviour 253, 256
structuralist study 40 I gifts 893, 919-20, 925
Mason, O.T. 423, 446 music 687
mass consumption social evolution 94 7
freedom 414,417 socialization 842
material culture 405-6 technology 422, 423, 424--5, 449
Mass Observation 411-12 Maxwell, R.J. 503
mass production Maya
political economy 747 population collapse 266
1100
INDEX
1101
INDEX
1102
INDEX
1103
INDEX
1104
INDEX
1105
INDEX
1106
INDEX
1107
INDEX
1108
INDEX
phenotypes planning
definition 162 tool-use 150
extended 17 5 planning depth
genetic inheritance 163-4 hunting debate 86--8
multiple-level evolution 181-2, 183, language 101
184-5 plant cultivation
organism-environment eo-evolution origins 207-9
176, 177, 178, 179, 180--1 plant domestication
selection procedure 187-8 Neolithic 267
self-induced natural selection 165- social evolution 942
6 plantation system
species variation 18 colonialism 1055
Philippines plants
sex 826 husbandry, food production debate 10
Philistines resources
ethnicity 714 exploitation 4
philosophy nutritional significance 4
state institutions 7 50 spatial colonization 467
technology 421-2 taxonomy 374
temporality 514 play
Phoenicians concept of 343
religion 716 hunting 621-2
phonation imitation 382
human speech 112, 114 performance 620--2,638-9, 640,641
phonemes Pleistocene
structuralism 374 climacteric events 72
phonemic alphabets cultural traditions 98
literacy 529 domestication 209
phonology glaciation cycles 80-1
structuralist approach 374 palaeosoils 82
photography pluralism
technological development 690 law 751
physicality legal 976--9
artefacts 407-8 modern world 724
physics poetics
temporality 520 ethnographic 870--1
physiology Polanyi, K. 920, 921,922-3, 925,927,947
dance, music 696--8 polio
social 963 Amazonia 308
Piaget,Jean 148, 150,383 politeness
pictographs language 879, 881-2
literacy 528-9 political economy
Pilbeam, D. 40 anthropological study 346
Piltdown social evolution 950
early hominid evolution 37 social life 747-50
Pithecanthropus political evolution
see also Homo erectus collective violence 986
early hominid evolution 36, 37 political geography
Trinil82 definition 480
Pitt-Rivers, A.Lane Fox 142, 143, 432, 435 political realism
1109
INDEX
1110
INDEX
1111
INDEX
Prosimii occupational1029
hominid evolution 35 typology 948
protein requirements Rapoport, Amos 337, 460-97
human populations 229 rate of exchange
proto-cultural phenomena labour 896
bird behaviour 166-7, 168 Rathbun, Ted 283
prototype theory rational nationalism
componential analysis 374 typology 717
psycho-archaeology rationality
technology 440 belief 563-87, 580--2
psychological space rats
definition 479 social transmission 352
psychology Ravindram, DJ. 545
belief systems 578 reading
child development 745 learning 535
culture 332-3 realism
development 744 political 987, 989
individualism 1017 reality
literacy 533 belief systems 565-6, 581
technology 440 language 861
public health specialists 227 nature of 448
puritanism social592
food behaviour 245, 256 reason
Pygmies anthropological study 332
hominid evolution 34 behaviour 563
human uniqueness debate 4-5, 26-
~zfeh (Israel) 8
burials 97 nature of 504-5
fossil records 93 reciprocal altruism
vocal tracts 126 social evolution 164
Quakers reciprocity
language 880 exchange 911-36
Quesna~F.912,914 law 966--7
Quiatt, D. 139-40 negative 922, 923-4
positive 922, 923-4
racial inequality reconstruction
comparative study 1024-5 symbolic behaviour 387-9
racial stratification record-keeping
class structure 1014 social evolution 945
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 861 recordings
belief systems 564 archives 700
food taboos 246 technological development 690, 692
kinship 784 Redfield, R. 965
law 963, 965, 967 redistribution
Raleigh, Waiter 1042 reciprocity 921
ranching reference
classification 212 symbolism 377, 381
Ranger, T.O. 975 reflexivity
rank temporality 504--5
gifts 918 refuse heap model
subsistence mode transition 208
1112
INDEX
1113
INDEX
1114
INDEX
1115
INDEX
1116
INDEX
1117
INDEX
1118
INDEX
1119
INDEX
1120
INDEX
1121
INDEX
1122
INDEX
1123
INDEX
1124
INDEX
1125
INDEX
1126
INDEX
1127