Feminization of Poverty or Consumption and Globalization

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Chapter Outline

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain the role of culture in the definitions of commodities and economic value.

2. Explain the roles of use rights and the ownership of resources in the process of economic production.

3. Discuss the concept of division of labor.

4. Explain the existence of common gender pat- terns in the division of labor.

5. Discuss the economic differences among the U.S. social classes.

6. Relate the forms of economic distribution to the four societal types.

The Economic System 9

9.1 The Definition of Economic Systems

• The Cultural Definition of Commodity • The Cultural Definition of Value

9.2 Production: The Control and Use of Resources

• Use Rights • Ownership • Division of Labor

9.3 Distribution

• Reciprocity • Redistribution • Markets

9.4 Consumption

• Subsistence Economies • Status Income

• Race and Poverty in the United States • The Feminization of Poverty

9.5 Social Agents of Economic Control

• Community Control of Production • Kin Control of Production • Association Control of Production • Corporation and Government Control of

Production • Social Class and Production

9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

• Subsistence Adaptations and the Environment • Foraging • Food Production • The Trend Toward Food Domestication

7. Compare and contrast subsistence economies and consumer economies.

8. Define status income and explain its economic functions.

9. Discuss the relationships between race, gender, and poverty in the United States.

10. Relate the four systems of economic control to the four societal types.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.1 Definition of Economic Systems

In this chapter, we will discuss how economic systems work in different societies and natural environments. We will first examine how cultures define what they value as potential economic commodities. We will consider how the relative values of commodities may vary from culture to culture as well as how different cul- tures handle production, distribution, and consumption. Finally, we will discuss ways in which societies have adjusted to different conditions by using the resources available in their environments.

9.1 Definition of Economic Systems

The system by which people obtain or produce, distribute, and consume valued material goods and services is called economics. An economic system includes the subsistence customs most concerned with the production of needed goods as well as the rules that govern what is then done with those goods and how they are used. In this chapter, we will examine in more detail how people organize themselves socially to facili- tate the production, exchange, and use of goods and services. For instance, considerations other than the motive of strict material gain are required to explain why human beings commonly engage in charitable acts.

The Cultural Definition of Commodity In many ways, people all around the world strive to maximize the material goods they obtain while minimizing the effort to do so. Although few would argue with such a prin- ciple in general, it alone is not sufficient to account for the diversity of things that people endow with economic value throughout the world. An overzealous application of the principle would imply that people would rely on the minimum number of food types nec- essary to meet their nutritional needs. Nowhere do people do so, however, except where they are forced to by dire circumstances. We seek variety in our diets and even expend extra effort on special occasions to obtain and prepare unusual delicacies.

Cultures differ in what they define as useful or valuable, that is, as commodities. People work to produce food, provide themselves with shelter, and defend and reproduce them- selves in all cultures. However, as was pointed out in the discussion of culture in Chapter 2, the specific goods and services by means of which people obtain food and shelter differ from society to society, and nowhere do people make use of every potential resource. For instance, milk and dairy products were unacceptable foods for adults in traditional East Asian cultures, while North Americans reject the use of dog or snake meat, both of which are eaten in various parts of Asia. In studying the diet and work patterns of one band of Dobe Ju/’hoansi in the Kalahari desert of Botswana and Namibia, Richard Lee (2003) found that the drought-resistant and highly nutritious mongongo nut comprised 31% and meat 28% of their diet by weight. The remainder of their diet was made up of only 20 or so of the 105 species of plant foods they classified as edible (p. 40). They didn’t routinely eat the rest of these potential foods simply because they didn’t really like them. In times of hardship, when they couldn’t afford to be so fussy, they would eat the less desirable foods.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.1 Definition of Economic Systems

Cultural differences are even greater when we consider the range of varia- tion that exists in pleasurable activi- ties that are not mandated by survival needs. Consider, for instance, art, rec- reation, and religion. Although each category is a cultural universal, and even though the psychological prin- ciples that guide people’s behavior in each category may also be univer- sal, the specific behaviors and objects people find beautiful, sacred, or fun are not readily predictable.

Cultural variation in the definition of commodities to be produced, exchanged, and consumed is not lim- ited to tangible things. Intangibles, too, may be defined as commodities. Navajos, for example, consider the sacred chants used in their curing ceremonies to be personal property, and an individual must pay an appropriate price to be taught a chant known to another. Northwest Coast Indians of North America considered titles of nobility to be a form of property, the ownership of which had to be validated by gift giving. North Americans also assert ownership over the expression of ideas and songs in their copyright laws. That peoples around the world are now vigorously asserting their intellectual prop- erty rights is evidenced by the 1993 passage of the Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In addition to asserting their rights, the conference left it to each people to decide for itself what consti- tutes its intellectual and cultural property, a clear recognition that what may be important to one culture may not be to another.

The Cultural Definition of Value Cultures do not simply differ in what they consider a commodity. They also differ in how much value they place on any commodity. The same things are not of equal worth every- where. The sacred zebu cow of Hindu India would not command a high price at a North American cattle auction, and the dogs that so many North Americans esteem as house- hold pets are seen as too dirty to be pets by Iranians.

Supply and Demand as a Cultural Construct Supply and demand is widely discussed in U.S. commerce as if it were a law of nature. Such a view of supply and demand overlooks the fact that the value of a commodity is culturally defined. Sahlins (1976), for instance, has pointed out that cut for cut, meat in U.S. culture is valued and priced higher the less closely the animal from which it comes is

iStockphoto/Thinkstock Markets develop with the rise of specialization, and societies begin to identify items as commodities, or items for sale.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.2 Production: The Control and Use of Resources

symbolically associated with human beings. For example, dogs are named and live within the house like one of the family, so the eating of their meat, though perfectly nutritious, is tabooed. Horses, too, are named, but they live outside the house and work for people like servants instead of living with them as kin. Americans somewhat grudgingly admit that horses are edible, but they are not commonly eaten in the United States. Pigs and cattle are clearly defined as foods, but the pig, which lives closer to the human domain as a barnyard animal and scavenger of human food scraps, usually commands a lower market price than the cow. Such symbolic influences certainly don’t explain fluctuations in pric- ing at different seasons or over years because factors such as changes in availability may influence pricing. Nonetheless, the underlying idea that the desirability of an animal as food is inversely related to its symbolic closeness to humans still applies, at least generally, to most food tastes in the United States. The importance of examples such as this is that they illustrate that such concepts as supply and demand must not be taken to refer to a set of principles that operate in isolation from culture. “Demand” is not simply controlled by some intrinsic value of a commodity such as nutrition. Rather, it is a cultural construct that can be highly influenced by the arbitrary effect of a culture’s symbolism.

The Profit Motive as a Cultural Construct In the United States, people often speak of the profit motive as a basic economic incentive. Indeed, one theme of this text has been that material benefits are important elements in shaping customs. However, the profit motive concept is often used to imply that material benefit is the sole motivator in economic transactions. This extreme view, common in U.S. society, overlooks the important role of culture in defining value. Efforts to obtain valued commodities are not limited to the acquisition of material things. People also work to obtain intangible goods. For instance, people may willingly accept material loss for spiri- tual merit or for increased social honors such as prestige, respect, admiration, personal honor, mana, luck, or a reward after death. Any view of the profit motive as nothing more than the principle that people will always try to maximize their immediate material gain in any exchange of goods is much too narrow.

9.2 Production: The Control and Use of Resources

Just because a resource is available does not mean that everyone in the society has the right to use it. The right to exploit resources is divided among the members of a society based on concepts such as use rights and ownership. Differences in the right to use or own resources can be linked to status differences such as gender or age and to social inequality based on such things as social class membership.

Use Rights Use rights, or the right to use a resource, may be held by individuals or groups. For instance, according to Allan Holmberg (1950), the Sirionó of eastern Bolivia, who were a nomadic hunting people before they adopted a sedentary lifestyle based on agriculture, marked wild fruit trees with a notch as a sign that their finders had claimed the right to harvest the fruit for at least the current season. The Waorani, who are horticultural villagers in Ecua- dor, have more complex customs concerning the ownership of wild trees. They value the

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.2 Production: The Control and Use of Resources

fruit of the wild chonta palm, but the trunk is impossible to climb because it is ringed with spiky thorns. When a wild chonta palm is discovered, its finder claims it by planting a cecropia tree next to it. Years later, when the cecropia is large enough, the owner harvests the chonta fruit by climbing the cecropia. The fruit is shared with other members of the village, but the chonta is considered to be owned by its finder and is even inherited by the descendants of its original discoverer.

The right to use a resource may also be based on such social status char- acteristics as rank, age, or sex. Use rights may be allocated by rules such as “first come, first served.” This is

common, for instance, among semi-nomadic peoples who survive by fishing and gath- ering wild plant foods (see the discussion of foraging in Section 9.6: The Diverse Forms of Human Economies). In such cases, it is often more efficient for each group to simply begin obtaining food in a location that is not already being used than to compete with others already working in a particular area. Another example of use rights is the treatment of beaches on the East Coast of the United States, where only those who own or rent a cot- tage on or near the shore have the right to use the adjacent beach.

Ownership The simultaneously held right to use and to deny use rights to others is called owner- ship, a right that is held even when it is not being exercised. Thus, people are expected to obtain permission to use property owned by others. Ownership can be transferred from one person to another by being given away, bought, or sold. The concept of ownership is most often applied either to easily transported goods (such as one’s own clothing or small objects of high value) or to fixed property (such as farms) that is the basis of one’s abil- ity to produce needed things such as food. In groundbreaking ethno-historical research, Eleanor Leacock (1954) demonstrated that the Montagnais hunters of Labrador had no concept of private property ownership prior to the introduction of the fur trade. As long as hunters were only hunting for furs and food for their own use, land was communally held. When pelts became commodities that could be exchanged in market transactions for other desired goods, their value increased, as did the value of the lands upon which the fur bearing animals were to be found. Only then, according to Leacock, did private property concepts develop.

Division of Labor Production is never accomplished by requiring everyone to perform the same work. In all societies that anthropologists have visited, the labor of production is divided up by age

Maria Stenzel/National Geographic Stock The dispersal of economic resources can have far reaching consequences. Here, a woman of the Kenyan Rendille tribe covers a shelter with old boxes and burlap.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.2 Production: The Control and Use of Resources

and gender. How this is done is referred to as the society’s division of labor. In horticul- tural and pastoral societies (discussed later in the chapter), one also finds the beginnings of occupational specialization by age, gender, and group. Specialization becomes increas- ingly important the larger and denser the local groups become; it is particularly important in large industrialized societies throughout the world today.

Age and Gender Where specialization is limited to age and gender differences, the various productive forms of work are thought of as simply roles that males and females of particular ages play as members of their families and local groups. Work as an activity is not divorced from one’s family or community relationships and is not thought of as a specialized activ- ity to be done for hire. Children are socialized to help the adults in their productive activi- ties and are gradually given more and more responsibility in these tasks until they achieve adult proficiency. In most societies, the contributions of children add to the total produc- tive resources of the family. The most productive years tend to be from puberty until the beginning of old age, when intensive work efforts are often replaced by more organiza- tional and managerial roles.

It is common in societies throughout the world for gender differences in the division of labor to be based on the expectation that routine and domestic labor will be done by women and the heavier and nondomestic labor will be done by men. For example, men are more often expected to hunt larger game animals, fish in offshore waters, herd large animals, clear the land in preparation for planting, do the heavier work of house construc- tion, and manufacture stone and metal implements, as well as goods for trade. Women frequently cooperate in communal hunts of smaller game, gather aquatic foods near the shores, herd smaller animals, weed and harvest gardens, take primary charge of domes- tic chores such as cooking and childrearing, weave textiles, and make pottery. However, these common ways of dividing up the work of men and women are certainly not the only conceivable ones, and they are not necessarily rigidly enforced in societies where they are the usual ones. There are many societies that assign individual activities to women and men differently than most others do. For instance, among the Toda of southern India, men prepare the meals; among the Dani of New Guinea, men are the weavers of household textiles; and among the Great Basin Shoshone, where men were nominally called the hunt- ers, women actually did most of the work during the communal rabbit hunts. So although common physiological differences such as those associated with a woman’s reproductive capacity and a man’s ability is exert greater strength in short spurts may often play a part in defining the roles of men and women, it is clear that biology does not control the gender division of labor in any fixed or necessary way.

Occupational Specialization In societies without domesticated food resources, work tends to be unspecialized except by age and gender. Limited specialization exists but only to the degree that certain indi- viduals devote more of their time than others to tasks such as basket making or weaving. The products of their labor are then exchanged for other things that they need. Domesti- cation typically brings greater control over the food supply, allowing local groups to be larger and more sedentary than those of societies that survive by foraging for wild foods. Societies with domestication tend to have additional specialized roles besides that of food

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.2 Production: The Control and Use of Resources

producer, including such roles as potters, political specialists, warriors, religious special- ists, and traders. In societies where food production has been industrialized, the percent- age of persons involved in food production can be quite small, and the number of types of occupational specialization tends to be large.

Occupational specialization can be quite elaborate in the most technologically complex and industrialized societies, in which occupation is typically linked to social class and income differences. In these societies, labor is treated as a commodity, and the difference between selling one’s labor and buying the labor of another can be linked to exploitation that grows out of the greater bargaining power that is often available to those who buy labor rather than sell it. Elites such as ruling classes who have greater control of economic surpluses are particularly advantaged in these cases.

Specialization by Group In food-producing societies, entire groups may also specialize in producing crops indig- enous to their environment, which they then exchange for other foods they need. Thus, in the Andean empire of the ancient Inca civilization, villagers who lived between sea level and 11,000 feet grew maize and potatoes. Between 11,000 and 14,000 feet, potatoes were the primary crop. Above 14,000 feet, villagers specialized in raising llamas, alpacas, and quinoa, a protein-rich grain capable of growing at high altitudes. The specialized crops of different altitudes could be easily transported from one part of the empire to another with the aid of llamas as pack animals. Such symbiotic relationships also exist between differ- ent groups. For example, the forest-dwelling Mbuti foragers of Zaire have long traded forest products for foods produced by their farming neighbors, to the mutual benefit the farmers and the foragers (Hart & Hart, 1986).

Social groups such as families or age mates may also work together in some specialized productive activity. For example, among the pig-herding Tsembaga Maring of Papua New Guinea, children and young adults specialized in tending the pigs, while adults worked the fields to produce root crops such as sweet potatoes. In his research among the Betsileo of Madagascar, Conrad Kottak (1980) found that the division of labor in rice cultivation was by age and gender. Different tasks were assigned to men and women by age. Young men, for example, were responsible for driving the cattle into the fields to trample soil and water into mud in preparation for transplanting the rice seedlings, a task undertaken by adult women but only after senior men had finished breaking up the remaining clods of earth. Other tasks were assigned to other age and gender groups.

Occupation Based on Social Class An important measure of one’s position within contemporary nation-states is one’s occu- pation. Which occupations are available to individuals is greatly influenced by the social class to which they belong, and the social class to which they belong can be influenced by the kind of occupation they have. Thus, different forms of employment can be ranked in terms of both the income they command and the social class with which they are associated.

The least prestigious and least well paid of the economic statuses in class-stratified societ- ies are unskilled laborers. They usually are paid by the hour or by the quantity of goods

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

that their work produces. Unskilled laborers are often hired for part-time or seasonal work, such as food bagging at supermarkets, waiting on tables at restaurants, and har- vesting crops on farms. Many of these jobs are held by young people who are not yet economically self-sufficient, by a disproportionate percentage of ethnic minorities, and by migrant workers.

In societies that have economically advantaged social classes, the low bargaining power of unskilled laborers has, at times, been somewhat enhanced by bonding together in unions so that the collective bargaining power of the group is strengthened. Historically, unions have also offered training to their members that can enhance their upward social mobility. On the other hand, unions themselves are not egalitarian organizations because union leaders typically have greater power than do their individual members within the organization. The differential influence on group policies that is held by leaders can lead to policies that undercut the ideal goal of restraining exploitation. For instance, unions sometimes foster a differential labor market not always based on skill, but on the unions’ power to restrict nonunion labor’s access to the market. They do so as a means of strength- ening their own collective bargaining power.

Blue-collar workers are manual laborers other than farm workers. Although they com- mand little prestige, some of these statuses have access to above-average incomes due to the economic importance of the commodities and services that they control. Examples of blue-collar workers are garbage collectors, dockhands, factory workers, taxicab and bus drivers, janitors, and supervisors of manual laborers.

White-collar occupations are clerical workers, sales workers, technical workers, manag- ers, and administrators. Their work is primarily the providing of services. Although many of these occupations are fairly prestigious and relatively well paid, over the years many white-collar offices have become more and more like factories in the repetitive nature of the routine work.

Professionals are typically providers of services whose work generally requires a gradu- ate-level university degree. They may be employed for the services they perform within an organization, but they may also be self-employed. Included in this category are the most prestigious nongovernmental occupations such as medical doctors, lawyers, scien- tists, and university faculty. These highly ranked positions, as well as highly ranked gov- ernmental positions, have generally been dominated by men.

9.3 Distribution

The movement of resources or goods from where they are found or produced to where they will be used is referred to as distribution. There are three major principles that control distribution: reciprocity, redistribution, and markets. All three of these may coexist within the same society, but reciprocity is the primary mechanism of distribution within the socially simplest societies. Middle-range societies have both reciprocity and redistribution, and all three forms coexist in nation-states.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

Reciprocity The system of exchange in which goods or services are passed from one individual or group to another as gifts without explicit contracting for specific repayment is called reciprocity. Unlike buying and selling, reciprocity does not involve bargaining over what is to be given in return. There is merely an understanding that the sharing is mutual and will eventually be evenhanded, except in the case of negative reciprocity (as discussed later in this section).

Reciprocity is the primary form of economic distribution in bands and tribes, where the small number of people in each local community makes gift giving a sufficient proce- dure to meet everyone’s economic needs. The mutual sharing of surpluses in the form of reciprocal gift giving within the local community equalizes wealth and helps mitigate the impact of lean times for individual members. The valued trait of generosity, so char- acteristic of band peoples, is actually a very effective economic device for ensuring the survival of the entire group. When a hunter shares excess food after a successful hunt, for example, it is a kind of insurance against future times of need. Every hunter is bound to experience some periods of poor luck in the chase. Those with whom a hunter has shared food or other useful goods in the past will make return gifts of their own later surpluses to ensure the continuation of his goodwill in the future and to maintain their own stand- ing in the community by complying with the social norms. In the long run, the economic system of reciprocity maintains a balance in the distribution of goods. No one prospers at the expense of others, but neither does anyone need fear the specter of starving alone during the inevitable periods of personal failure or illness when hunting is not possible. Indeed, as Kathleen Mooney (1978) and Asen Balikci (1970) found among the foraging Coastal Salish and Netsilik Inuit, respectively, food sharing may actually increase during times of scarcity, although Mooney noted that during times of extreme hardship it may be restricted to the family.

The enforcement of reciprocity is based primarily on the desire of the participants not to be excluded, rather than on formal sanctions. So long as everyone involved participates to everyone else’s satisfaction, the rules of the exchange do not even need to be discussed. However, a group or individual that fails to engage in a fair share of gift giving may be censured or excluded by the others. In economically more complex societies, reciprocity is found within families and among acquaintances, and it typically involves symbolic goods and services such as holiday greeting cards or parties. In very simple societies, the gifts that are shared may be life-sustaining ones, such as food. In such cases, participation is likely to be self-enforcing even if it is not mandatory, as exclusion from the system may be life threatening. Sometimes reciprocal gift exchanges perform multiple functions, as in the case of the giveaway ceremonies of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians studied by Mary Jane Schneider (1981). She found that the Mandan and Hidatsa giveaways—ceremonies in which large quantities of food, star quilts, other material goods, and even cash are distrib- uted amongst audience members—serve both economic and social functions. They create new social ties and acknowledge or reaffirm old ones while at the same time redistribut- ing wealth. As noted by Sahlins (1972), reciprocity takes three basic forms: generalized reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

Generalized Reciprocity Gifts given with no expectation of immediate exchange, as in the case of the Mandan and Hidatsa giveaway ceremonies, are classified as generalized reciprocity. The persons involved are most likely to be motivated by a sense of obligation toward the welfare of the others. For instance, in families, goods and services are provided for children by their par- ents even though the children may not reciprocate in kind even later in life. Generalized reciprocity may also be exemplified by the care that is given to elderly or incapacitated people who are unable to respond with a return of goods or services of equal value.

The feeling of obligation that minimizes an expectation of an immediate return of favors can be based on a sense of community as well as on the bonds of kinship. In foraging soci- eties such as the Dobe Ju/’hoansi studied by Richard Lee (2003), generalized reciprocity is the basic economic mechanism for ensuring that everyone within the local community, nonrelatives included, is provided for. Where generalized reciprocity is practiced, gener- osity is likely to be an expected characteristic of normal behavior. Thus, for example, in the language of the foraging Shoshone of the intermountain region of the United States, the word dzaande meant both good and generous. The good human was a generous person, and because generosity in sharing was understood to be a natural attribute of the normal person rather than an unexpected or surprising behavior, no word or phrase existed that was equivalent to the English “Thank you!” In cases like this where sharing is a normal and expected part of everyday life, to say “thank you” for a gift of food might strike the gift giver as odd or even offensive, as Robert Dentan discovered in his research among the Semai foragers of Malaysia (1979).

Balanced Reciprocity Between persons who lack a sense of kinship or obligation to help one another with no expectation of return, but who each have something that the other would like to have, balanced reciprocity, in which a return gift is expected within a relatively short time, is likely to occur. Although the bond between the two parties is not so great as is present where generalized reciprocity is practiced, the desire to maintain good relations is great enough that haggling over the exchange is not necessary, as both parties try to respond with something of equal value. Balanced reciprocity is commonly practiced by members of neighboring communities that each specialize in the production of different goods or that control different resources. Even without direct bargaining, balanced reciprocity may be maintained to the benefit of both groups. At appropriate opportunities, each group gives what it has in surplus to recipients known to desire such a commodity. Although no immediate return is demanded, the gratefulness of the recipients and their continued interest in the commodity will ensure that they will reciprocate within a reasonable time with gifts of their own.

Balanced reciprocity may include the exchange of services as well as goods. For instance, the Quechua-speaking peoples of the South American Andes in pre-Spanish times had a concept of reciprocal work obligations between communities known as the mink’a. Mem- bers of a mink’a group cooperated in performing difficult work such as harvesting, canal repair, or house building. American barn raisings and harvest bees of frontier days were a similar form of balanced reciprocity of services.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

Probably the most organized example of balanced reciprocity of both goods and services in a complex society operated within the caste system in India. In each local community, individuals were organized into a system of occupations deemed appropriate to members of the various castes. This jati system provided for the economic needs of all members of the community because each person was obligated to provide goods or services to every- one else. The miller ground grain for all of the farmers, while the farmers provided some of the food they produced to all members of the community. The barber cut hair, and the weaver gave gifts of fabric to other members of the community. Each occupation benefited others without direct and immediate payment, and so long as everyone received as well as gave, the needs of all could be met.

One of the most interesting examples of balanced reciprocity that has been noted by eth- nographers is a form called silent trade. In this kind of exchange, there need be no direct interaction between the trading partners once the relationship is established. Each simply leaves surplus goods known to be of use to the other at a place where they will be found. Each occasionally checks the cache site to see if anything has been left and, if it has, leaves something near the offered goods. The original party may consummate the exchange by tak- ing the goods left near the offered commodities, or may refuse to do so to indicate that the amount left by the second party was insufficient. In the latter case, the second party may add to the goods left behind or may simply retrieve them to call off the transaction. The Mbuti Pygmy foragers of the Ituri Forest carried out trade of this kind with horticultural villagers who lived outside the forest. In return for garden produce, iron knives, and pots, the Mbuti partner would leave game and other forest foods. Similar silent trade has been noted in a variety of other cultures in different parts of the world, such as the Semang foragers and Malay farmers of the Malay Peninsula. Silent trade was a particularly useful form of recipro- cal exchange among neighboring groups that did not speak a common language.

Sometimes goods of symbolic rather than subsistence value are exchanged. A classic exam- ple of this type of exchange is the kula ring described by Bronislaw Malinowski (1920). The kula ring was a trading network that connected the islands east of New Guinea. Cus- tomary trading partners would exchange red shell necklaces called soulava for white shell armbands called mwali. The necklaces moved from island to island in a clockwise direc- tion and the armbands exchanged hands in a counterclockwise direction. Although of no monetary value, over the years individual necklaces and armbands amassed symbolic value. A man’s status could be enhanced by coming into possession of a valuable arm- band or necklace, but he could not hang onto it indefinitely. He had to eventually pass it on to a trading partner down the line in the appropriate direction. Moreover, after the req- uisite length of time had lapsed, he had to reciprocate its receipt with a return gift of equal value or risk losing face. Exchanges of subsistence goods and other material items accom- panied the balanced exchanges of the kula ring. Some of those exchanges were balanced, but negative exchanges in which one person tried to get the best deal possible weren’t out of the question. These subsidiary exchanges made goods produced or foodstuffs found on one island available to people from other islands.

Negative Reciprocity When at least one group or individual in a reciprocal exchange system attempts to get more than it gives, we speak of negative reciprocity. Negative reciprocity varies from simple miserliness or “Yankee shrewdness” on the part of one participant through deceit in bargaining, to outright theft. This form of reciprocity is most common among strangers

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

within the same communities or members of different communities, especially those that differ in cultures. The traditional Apache raiding of their more sedentary neighbors exem- plifies a pattern of negative reciprocity in which the neighboring groups were viewed not so much as enemies to be exterminated as a kind of resource to be exploited.

Redistribution The second major economic system for the distribution of goods and services is redistribu- tion, where commodities are contributed by all members of the social group to a common pool from which they are then distributed to where they will be used. While reciprocity is a two-party affair involving givers and receivers, redistribution requires an intermediary, a third party who coordinates the process and exercises control over the flow of goods and services. The mediating individual or group is likely to gain both prestige and power from the position of control over whatever is exchanged in this economic system. Examples of systems of economic redistribution in complex societies include taxation, social security, retirement funds, unemployment compensation, and insurance. The economic systems characteristic of socialist nation-states, such as Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, and com- munist nation-states, such as Cuba, rely heavily on stately redistribution.

Redistribution, like reciprocity, is an economic practice within families around the world, occurring when their members save for a common goal. However, as a major societal mechanism within the economic system beyond the family, redistribution is not present in all societies. How does it arise? It has been suggested that a phenomenon known as “bigmanship” plays a central role.

Bigmanship The economic entrepreneurs of many horticultural societies are men and women who engage in bigmanship, economic overproduction and lavish gift giving to achieve public recognition and respect. These “Big Men” and “Big Women” are not true officials who have power to demand the cooperation of others; rather they are prominent individu- als within their community, charismatic leaders who encourage relatives and other com- munity members to follow their lead in the production of surplus goods. Then a festive gathering of conspicuous generosity and hospitality that promotes the prestige of the host group and its entrepreneur is held for followers of other economic leaders.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris (1974) argued that redistribution requires the presence of food domestication and that yearly differences in productivity are the central cause of its development. When productivity varies significantly from year to year (for instance, as a result of unpredictable differences in rainfall or pest infestations), the survival chances of a community are greater if productive efforts are aimed at being sufficient in even the least productive years. This results in the production of surpluses in better years, surpluses that form the basis of a redistributive economy. Big Men and Big Women act as production managers who encourage food growers to work hard enough to survive in the leanest years, and these production managers then become influential as redistributors of the sur- plus goods that are produced in the better years. The underlying payoff in such a system comes in lean years when climatic conditions or other crises lead to poorer-than-expected harvests. Furthermore, neighboring communities are not always affected by the same dif- ficulties and may lend a helping hand at such times, if they have been beneficiaries of the suffering community’s previous redistributive investments.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

Big Women in the Trobriand Islands

When Annette Weiner (1988) studied the Trobrianders, she found that women as well as men obtain prestige and social power through the production and distribution of wealth. Men carve, garden, and fish; women manufacture and control red skirts and banana-leaf bundles that are important forms of wealth.

According to Weiner, “Skirts and bundles have economic value, and their major use as payment to mourners after a death directly incorporates the wealth of men” (p. 28). Men provide their sisters with yams from their gardens that economically benefit the sisters’ husbands because yams are a form of wealth used by Trobriand men to achieve status. A man’s entire kin group is obligated to repay this debt to his wife’s family when he dies in the form of gift giving which consists of skirts and banana-leaf bundles owned by the dead man’s kinswomen, items that symbolize the wealth and status of his relatives. Thus, the giveaways that are sponsored by women are even more important than those of men.

Weiner described vividly the first women’s bigmanship competition she observed:

As we entered the village, no one paid attention to yams or even to the men who were cooking. All the excitement was being generated by the activities coming from the central plaza, where hundreds of women sat or stood surrounded by as many baskets; I saw that the baskets were filled with something I had never read or heard about—banana-leaf bundles.

Women were completely involved in sorting out their bundles and arranging piles of red fiber skirts. One woman seemed to be in charge, and she continually took bundles into the center, threw them on the ground, and called out someone’s name. Other women rushed to the center, adding their bundles to the pile. Finally, another woman gathered them all up and carried them to her own basket. The same throwing and retrieving went on for hours. Sometimes the pile was small, with only about thirty bundles; at other times several hundred were given, with ten or so skirts thrown on top. A few women insisted that I throw down some bundles myself, and I was told, “Our bundles are just like your money.”

. . . Although men did not participate in any of the action in the center of the vil- lage, they remained in the village throughout the day, sitting on the house veran- das and casually watching the proceedings. When the distribution finally was over, however, they then entered the plaza to give yams to those women who now stood with empty baskets. (pp. 29–30)

(continued)

Those who manage the redistribution of goods and services are typically rewarded with prestige and sometimes with power and wealth. Anthropologists have been particularly interested in two kinds of redistribution managers found in societies of middle-range complexity: charismatic entrepreneurs and chiefs. Big Men and Big Women are charis- matic entrepreneurs.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

Big Women in the Trobriand Islands (continued)

The importance of women’s bigmanship activities is indicated by the fact that the wealth acquired by Trobriand men is subordinated to their obligation to help their wives amass women’s wealth, which has no utilitarian value. Its only function is to enhance the reputation of women’s relatives. Yet, if their husbands do not satisfy their wives’ kin by spending much of their wealth on the accumulation of women’s goods for their wives, the brothers-in-law reduce their economic support in the form of yams to their sisters. When an important member of a woman’s kin group dies, she may need to use all of her husband’s yams to pay for the production of skirts and banana-leaf bundles that she will give away at her relative’s funeral. If her husband refused to support her bigmanship participation at such an occasion, he would be insulting her relatives, and they would decrease contributions of yams to his wife. In the long run, his ability to participate in male competitions would be under- mined. So women’s production of the wealth by which they achieve rank takes priority over the accumulation of men’s wealth by their husbands.

From Weiner. The Trobianders of Papua New Guinea, 1E © 1988 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

Chiefs In somewhat larger horticultural or agricultural societies in which social ranking is impor- tant, the role of Big Man merges with that of the chief. The chief is a person of authority and prestige who is the major political official and economic manager of the local com- munity. Unlike the leaders in bigmanship activities, the chief does not generally partici- pate in the productive work of the redistributive economy. Instead, the chief is a full-time political official whose duties include coordination of the redistributive practices.

In chiefly redistribution, festive occasions may still be celebrated using goods stockpiled in the chief’s warehouse. A more important function of redistribution, however, emerges in this system: the use of centrally controlled goods to finance public works and services. A significant portion of the redistributive economy is channeled into such activities as building and maintaining irri- gation projects, supporting a local police force or militia, and similar undertakings that enhance the general welfare of the community.

A redistributive economy that is controlled by full-time officials clearly lends itself to potential abuse. It is true that the ability of chiefs to siphon off redistributive goods for their own use allows the chiefs and their relatives in many such societ- ies to form a social elite with special prerogatives and a higher standard of living than that of other members of society. But there is a surprisingly

Dean C. Worcester/National Geographic Stock Chiefs are the heads of redistribution systems. This chief from the Bagobo tribe in the Philippines wears clothing that signifies he has killed a man.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

large number of cases in which prestige comes to the chiefs and their families only in proportion to how well they use the goods they control for the benefit of others. In these groups, chiefs may expend more than they take in and live in poverty but receive great respect in return.

In state societies, redistribution takes the form of taxation in which government lays claim to a percentage of what is produced by individuals, local groups, and corporations, and then redistributes that tax income both in support of a governmental bureaucracy and in projects and services that benefit individuals and local areas within the country. The decision-making process concerning how governmental income is redistributed tends to be a major political issue in all nation-states (see Chapter 8).

Markets Market exchange is the third major approach to distribution, one that has become the dominant economic force in the industrialized societies of the world, nearly all of which have market economies. A market is a place where direct exchanges of commodities can occur. Markets make it possible for exchanges to take the form of buying and selling as opposed to mutual gift giving of valued items or services. Markets bring together a large number of sellers of different commodities and provide buyers with the opportunity to make a choice among sellers. In market economies, the value of goods and services is set according to a common currency, and exchanges are impersonal transactions between buyers and sellers.

Market exchanges are most developed in sedentary societies in which the large number of people involved makes it convenient to establish traditional marketplaces to carry out exchanges. Especially in larger societies where marketplaces may bring together strangers and persons who see each other infrequently, market exchange, like negative reciproc- ity, may place little emphasis on mutual obligation, as each party becomes responsible for his or her own welfare in the transaction. Thus, self-interest rather than generosity is most often the guiding principle. This, of course, is moderated, particularly in small- scale societies, and even smaller communities within larger societies, by the fact that mar- ket exchange may be part of a long-term relationship between the parties. Mary Whelan (1993), in her research of Eastern Dakota involvement in the 19th-century fur trade, found that the Dakota worldview and the social norms that governed their economic behavior shaped interactions between Dakota hunters and trappers and the Euro American traders who bought their furs. And it was often the case that the traders had deep marital and friendship ties within the Native communities, which curbed the play of self-interests in such exchanges (Lansing, 2000).

Having specialized locations at which consumers can obtain the commodities they need or desire separates the processes by which commodities are produced from the exchange process in which the consumer obtains them more dramatically than is the case when exchange is based on reciprocity. Thus, in economies that are dominated by market exchange, consumers may have little knowledge of the social relations involved in the production of the commodities they buy. For instance, North American consumers may have little knowledge about the manner in which the clothing they buy in stores is manu- factured or of the working conditions in the factories where those clothes are manufac- tured. Young Americans are likewise oblivious to the fact that many of the components

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

in their cherished electronic devices are made by young Malaysian women working long hours for low pay and with few fringe benefits under the supervision of a domineering male boss (Ong, 1987). And how many newlyweds know, or care to know, where the dia- monds in their wedding and engagement rings came from and how they were acquired? Many diamonds in circulation today were mined under brutal conditions in Sierra Leone and then sold to support the bloody war that, as described above, so recently ripped Sierra Leone and neighboring countries apart (Campbell, 2012).

Barter In smaller societies that have market systems, exchanges may be primarily the trading of one object or service for another, a form of exchange called barter. In barter, a potter and a farmer might exchange a water vessel for a bag of grain, or an itinerant worker might chop firewood in return for a meal and night’s lodging. In such cases, the rate of exchange is usually negotiated on the spot. Very recently, however, ordinary people struggling to make ends meet in Greece, a modern industrialized country with a market economy, have developed a well-organized barter system as an adaptive strategy under the severe aus- terity measures gripping their country (see the feature The New Greek Barter Economy).

The New Greek Barter Economy

When confronted with changing conditions, people worldwide usually adapt by altering their social, economic, or political arrangements. Sometimes they build upon existing structures, sometimes they come up with entirely new ideas and practices, and sometimes they return to and update previous, but long abandoned, arrangements. The new barter economy that has emerged in Greece since 2008 illustrates just how creative and resilient people can be.

The 2008 global economic crisis impacted Greece and a handful of other EU countries particularly badly. In 2010, worried that Greece’s sky-rocketing public debt was threatening the stability of the entire Euro Zone, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union joined together to force the Greek government into agreeing a strict austerity plan in exchange for an economic bail-out aimed at saving both the Greek economy and the Euro itself. The cuts in public sector salaries and social services and the tax hikes imposed by “austerity,” as the plan came to be known, had disas- trous consequences for ordinary Greeks. Between 2008 and 2013, the Greek economy shrank by more than 20%, the cost of living shot up, and public services were slashed, including spending on healthcare and education. By November 2012, the unemployment rate had risen from the preaus- terity rate of 9% to a record-breaking 27% overall; more than 61.7% of all young people were out of work; and the largest labor union in the country was predicting that a third of all Greeks would be in poverty by the year’s end. The minimum wage had already dropped by 20% and was expected to be cut even further, those public sector workers lucky enough to still have jobs had seen their wages cut by 30% in the past year (if they were getting paid at all), and projections had the overall unemploy- ment rate continuing to climb to 30% or more by the end of 2013. This not only severely impacted the quality of life of ordinary Greeks, but it also pressed many people to seek out new strategies for survival as their disposable incomes dropped by as much as 40% Gatopoulous and Becatoros (2013).

(continued)

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Distribution

Money When the goods that people need are produced close at hand, barter can be the basic form of exchange, but when this is not the case or when goods and services must be obtained from many different specialists, the concept of money may be employed to obtain goods. Since money is fundamentally a symbol of value, in order to transform anything into money, the parties involved only need a mutual agreement that a particular item will be a designated standard of value. It is usually best for the common medium of exchange to be both rare and portable; it should not require less effort to obtain money than to produce the goods and services for which it is exchanged. Gold and jewelry have these characteristics, but even printed paper, electronic bits of data, or the Trobriand women’s banana-leaf bundles described above will work. The key is simply that people agree to accept the paper, electronic signals, or another item in lieu of the commodities they wish to exchange. Additionally, something of value in its own right may be used as money. For instance, in many parts of the world, salt or spices have been used as money. But their utilitarian value in such cases, their ability to make transactions possible when one person has nothing to barter that the other needs at the moment, is merely an enhancement of their real value.

The New Greek Barter Economy (continued)

Many newly unemployed Greeks fled the cities for rural areas where they once lived and still had family or property. More and more families reunited to pool resources and labor in hopes of being able to make ends meet. Those who could started or increased the size of their gardens, and grow- ing numbers joined a reemerging and refashioned barter economy. From farmers to the lowest-paid manual laborers to doctors and teachers, everyone in Greece was affected by “austerity” and, if the mass media and protesters had gotten it right, they all blamed “Europe” for their problems.

One of the more interesting economic coping strategies that emerged was the new Greek barter economy, which was partly based on the ancient Greek barter system. In middle class communities across Greece, like the eastern port city of Volos described here, people formed barter networks as a means of coping with the decline in income and services caused by the austerity measures (Donadio, 2011). In communities like Volos, people began using a Local Alternative Currency, or TEM in Greek, as a medium through which to exchange goods and services. One TEM was valued at one Euro. Part barter system and part monetary system, the TEM enabled people to exchange, for example, garden produce for computer repairs or mathematics lessons with other members of a barter network by logging onto a members-only online list and offering their goods and services for exchange. The sys- tem then recorded their barter transactions and kept a running tally of their available TEM credits. Some networks, like one established in Volos, even allowed members to take out small, short-term loans. People also received books of TEM vouchers that could be exchanged at participating busi- nesses for goods, services, or discounts. By 2013, the Volos barter network had grown to 1,300 members (Smith, 2013), and similar barter networks had cropped up across Greece. At that point, an online platform designed to connect people with barter networks and otherwise facilitate smooth operation of the barter system was also up and running (Barters Closet, 2013).

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.4 Consumption

9.4 Consumption

In foraging bands there is little difference in the wealth and lifestyle of individuals from one local group to another because they all engage in the same basic productive activi-ties. There are few specialized economic activities that supply goods to only some indi- viduals, and reciprocity tends to level out even temporary wealth differences that may arise from time to time due to fluctuations in productivity of a local environment. But with the development of food domestication and the occupational specializations that gener- ally arise with it, opportunities increase for some individuals, families, and local groups to consistently control more wealth than others in the same society. It is axiomatic that the more complex and productive a society’s economy is, the more opportunities arise for dif- ferences to develop in consumption, the final use of goods and services.

Subsistence Economies People regularly consume most of what they produce in a subsistence economy. This is the usual economic form in foraging societies and in simple food-domesticating tribes because not enough surpluses are produced for a permanent exchange of goods to obtain what is needed. Rather, each family produces goods for its own consumption. Any sur- plus, which will be relatively small, is exchanged or sold in order to acquire the few things that it does not produce itself. That which is exchanged for needed commodities is called subsistence income. Thus, in subsistence economies, there is little need for trade and per- manent differences of wealth are unlikely to be found.

Status Income When surplus goods are consistently available, the Big Men or chiefs who control the distribu- tion process are able to use that control to acquire a high social rank. The use of income to acquire goods over and above subsistence needs is called status income. In the case of Big Men, most of such wealth is given as gifts to other groups in return for the prestige such gift giving brings. Both the redistribution of wealth to the needy within a local community and the channeling of some of the surplus to host neighboring groups as a way of enhancing the chief’s prestige is also a practice in many chiefdoms. However, chiefs sometimes use part of this surplus wealth to raise their own standard of living and that of their rela- tives above that of their subordinates. In such cases, the actual consumption of surplus goods by the elite becomes a symbol of their high stand- ing. The use of status income as a display of social rank, a practice called conspicuous consumption, is found in many chiefdoms and is a characteristic of the elite in all societies in which market econo- mies predominate. The high standard of living

iStockphoto/Thinkstock Although conspicuous consumption is the overutilization of resources, it does have the advantage of creating an endless demand for goods in capitalist systems dependent on supply and demand.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.4 Consumption

enjoyed by the British Royal Family, the European “Upper Ten Thousand,” or the U.S. “jet set”—and, more recently, “the one percent”—typifies the use of income as conspicuous consumption. However, like so much else, conspicuous consumption must be viewed in its specific sociocultural context. For example, despite the very wide gap between the 1% and the 99% (The Economist, 2012) in the United States, Americans are all the 1% compared to much of the rest of the world (Blair, 2012).

Race and Poverty in the United States The U.S. economy is stratified racially, and wealth is unequally distributed within each race. For instance, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median U.S household income in 2011 was $76,063 for (non-Hispanic) White families; $52,352 for Hispanic families; and just $47,255 for Black families (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2012). The differences are par- ticularly pronounced below the poverty line. In 2011, only 9.8% of Whites had incomes below the poverty level, while the figure was 25.3% for Hispanics and 27.6% for Black families (Macarntney, Bishaw, and Fontenot, 2013). Economic differences are not limited to income. For instance, Whites own much more fixed property than do other racial groups, as illustrated by a comparison of home ownership. As of 1997, 70.3% of Whites owned their own place of residence, while for Blacks the figure was only 46.2%, and only 42.8% of Hispanic Americans owned their own homes (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999). Since the banking crisis sent the American economy into a tailspin, that gap has only increased. As of 2009, White families enjoyed 20 times more wealth than Black families, and Black fami- lies were twice as likely to lose their homes to foreclosure, with some advocacy groups estimating that as many as 25% of all African Americans who owned their own homes prior to the recession may lose them (Kellogg, 2011). Native American families have the added problem that many are geographically isolated on reservations where employment opportunities are extremely limited. Typically, half or more tribal members on Indian res- ervations are unemployed. For instance, the unemployment rate of the Navajo Nation was about 48.5% in 2012 (Navajo Nation Tourism Department, 2013). In 2005, the largest Sioux tribe in South Dakota had an unemployment rate of 89%, a figure that includes those tribal members living both on and off the reservation (BIA, 2005).

The Feminization of Poverty However poverty is measured, women comprise a major and growing proportion of the world’s poor today. This trend is known as the feminization of poverty. Poverty is espe- cially a problem among older women and younger women with children. Worldwide, a third of all households are headed by women. Because women receive less income than men in all countries, and because they are so much more likely than men to have to bear the expenses of childrearing alone when a family is headed by one parent, it is not surpris- ing that women are generally poorer than men.

In the United States, the trend toward the poor being primarily women and children began after World War II. According to information from the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2009, over 55% of all people living in poverty in the United States were female. This is largely due to the fact that single-parent households are overrepresented among the poor and are much more likely to be headed by women than by men. The problem of poverty in single-parent families is particularly acute, as childcare responsibilities often mean choosing between

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.5 Social Agents of Economic Control

daycare expenses that make employment unprofitable and low-paid, part-time work that is more compatible with less expensive ways of organizing childcare, such as pooling work and babysitting with friends or relatives. For many women, neither of these options proves successful, and the circumstances of single-parent life force them into dependence on the welfare system. Currently, about half of all women in poverty are more or less permanently reliant on public welfare or on the support of friends or relatives. As govern- ments cut back on welfare benefits and other social services in their efforts to address the problem of soaring public debt, poor women are being hit much harder than other seg- ments of society.

9.5 Social Agents of Economic Control

Economic processes such as decision making about what to produce, what resources to use, and who will do the work are controlled by various people in various ways. In small-scale societies such as bands and tribes, control over productive work may be vested in the community as a whole, in kin groups, or in special associations. In tribes and chiefdoms, the redistributive decision makers include individuals whose influence is based on prestige and power. In complex societies, decision-making power over produc- tion and distribution is often in the hands of members of the upper social classes but is exercised indirectly through their control of corporations or governmental bureaucracies.

Community Control of Production In foraging bands in which the local groups are quite small and consist of members of only a few different families, decisions about the produc- tion and allocation of needed goods are sometimes a matter of discus- sion by the entire local group. This is especially true among foragers such as the Arctic Inuit, the Great Basin Shoshone, and the Yahgan and Ona of Tierra del Fuego, all of whom spend much of the year forag- ing in very small local groups. It is also common among groups such as the Andamanese Islanders or Mbuti Pygmy, in which the local commu- nity of 20 or 30 persons functions like an extended family.

Kin Control of Production The local kinship group is the most common institution for controlling production and allocation of goods among most foragers, horticulturalists, and pastoralists. Among for- agers, this is merely a matter of the members of the nuclear family making decisions about

Richard Olsenius/National Geographic Inuit hunters work together to butcher whale meat for their tribe.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.5 Social Agents of Economic Control

their daily needs and how best to fill them. Among pastoralists and horticulturalists, who typically have larger local populations than foragers, it is often the extended family that exerts ownership over the basic means of livelihood such as the fields and herds. Thus, for instance, among the horticultural Hopi of the southwestern United States, gardens were owned by kinship groups rather than by the individual woman who managed them from day to day. Although she controlled the produce of her allotted plot, she could not dispose of the land without permission of her kinship group.

Association Control of Production In many tribal societies, associations that cut across family groups and residential areas within a community may control important parts of production. For instance, the Chey- enne bison hunters of the North American Plains relied heavily on sudden kills of large numbers of migrating bison during seasonal cooperative hunts. A single hunter who began to shoot too soon could frighten the herd, causing it to scatter, and thus spoil the success of the hunt for the entire community. To prevent that from happening, control of the hunt was vested in one of the Cheyenne military associations, which assumed respon- sibility for policing the hunt and its periphery and punishing any hunters that did not abide by the rules governing the bison hunt. The Tahitian islanders in Polynesia used sev- eral specialized associations or guilds for the production of expensive commodities such as chiefs’ houses and boats. Chiefs’ houses were built on a grand scale and could attain a length of nearly 400 feet. While a house was being erected, the carpenters of the guild were fed by the chief who was having the house built. Each guild was governed by its own chief, and the builders were respected specialists who were divided into ranks based on their training and experience. Each guild had special emblems, deities, and ceremonies that set it apart from others, and different guilds competed with one another to achieve prestige and social recognition for the quality of their work.

Corporation and Government Control of Production An association of employers and employees that produces goods or provides services and that is legally entitled to act as a single person with rights of ownership is a corporation. Corporations can outlast the lifetimes of their individual members, so they can produce more than any individual and can develop tremendous economic power as their pro- ductive properties increase. Corporations may be privately or governmentally owned, but in either case those who make decisions about what corporations produce and at what prices they sell their goods and services are members of the higher social classes. As such, they have tremendous political and economic clout. The treatment of corporations as persons with the same rights as individuals is an ideologically shaped cultural con- struct that makes it much more difficult to prosecute corporate wrongdoers. That is one of the reasons why a growing number of people in the United States today are advocating that corporations be stripped of their personhood. One man recently drew attention to the issue by driving solo in a commuter lane and then, when stopped and ticketed by law enforcement personnel, whipping out his incorporation papers and claiming in his own defense that because corporations are persons, there was actually another person in the car with him. The case went to court and, although he lost, it attracted national attention to the issue of corporate personhood, which was his objective all along (Baker, 2013).

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

The balance of power between governmental officials and private individuals in the con- trol of the means of production varies among complex societies. In some cases, the eco- nomic decision making of private owners of corporations is only loosely regulated. This allows the owners to play a major role in the economic life of such societies. One common outcome of this way of organizing economic decision making is a competition between corporations for sales. If the basic needs of consumers are being met by the system of production, competition in the marketplace may increase for nonessential items. In such a consumer market, the economic focus is on convincing consumers to purchase nonessen- tial goods and services that enhance their standard of living rather than simply meet their basic needs. Such goods make life easier and more comfortable. Nonessentials, especially those that do not improve consumers’ standard of living, may still be marketed success- fully because the buyers gain higher status by demonstrating their ability to purchase them. In its extreme, buyers may engage in conspicuous consumption, the use of goods merely as a display of their wealth.

Social Class and Production Social class also plays a role in controlling the production and distribution of goods in complex societies. Commonly, members of the higher social classes have the greatest con- trol over the means of production—the tools, resources, and labor necessary for the cre- ation of commodities—as well as the locations in which they are used. They also receive the greatest share of the goods produced and tend to be the ones sitting on corporate decision-making boards. They also have greater influence than do other persons on gov- ernment policymakers, to the benefit of their corporations.

Ideologically, people in the United States have not traditionally viewed their society as one made up of separate classes. Yet as in other industrialized societies, the people of the United States do not all have equal access to the goods or services produced by its labor force. For instance, in 2009 the mean income of the wealthiest 5% of U.S. households was $180,001, while that of the poorest 20% was $18,180 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). U.S. society, in other words, is socially stratified into classes that differ in their share of the country’s wealth and in influence on decisions about the production of commodities. The U.S. class system is somewhat ill-defined, in that the U.S. ideology itself has traditionally denied the very existence of a class system as a formal structure. Polls have indicated that some 80% of people in the United States claim membership in the middle class. Interest- ingly, this figure includes some persons who by technical standards would be considered members of the lower class and others who are technically of upper-class background. The traditionally high level of social mobility within the class system has made it easier for people in the United States not to recognize that distinct classes exist.

9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

As the effects of industrialization continue to spread around the world at the expense of technologically less complex ways of life, the cultures of the world are becom-ing more and more economically and politically interdependent. In many places, established economic patterns have been forced to change by external political forces or internal environmental factors. In this broader context, our future depends on what hap- pens abroad as well as at home. Our relations with developing nations are likely to remain

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

in a continuing state of flux as industrialization spreads and new power blocs and coali- tions develop with the goal of ensuring the political and economic self-interest of devel- oping nations. How we shall fare in this process will depend largely on a recognition that our own national self-interest is not likely to be furthered in the long run by a narrowly ethnocentric view of the other cultures with which we share the world. Forms of human economies are shown in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1: Forms of human economies

Different forms of human economies exist throughout the world, though some are more prevalent than others.

Subsistence Adaptations and the Environment The study of subsistence is the study of how people obtain the necessities of life, par- ticularly food, from their environment. It is in the study of food getting that we see most clearly how the forces of nature set limits and provide possibilities for human social and cultural life and how human subsistence technologies, the tools and techniques for obtain- ing food, help people adapt to different environments around the world.

Foraging Pastoralism Horticulture

Intensive Agriculture

Industrialization

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

Foraging The oldest, simplest, and least specialized of human subsistence technologies is foraging, a food-collecting system based on fishing, hunting wild animals, and gathering wild plant foods. Foraging lifestyles predate the evolution of completely modern forms of Homo sapi- ens in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens spread from there through the Near East into South Asia 50,000 years ago and into Western Europe by about 43,000 years ago. Eventually, they carried their foraging lifestyle into all of the world’s continents except Ant- arctica. It is clear that, although survival by foraging is all but extinct today, it has a longer history as a basis for human survival than any other means of subsistence. Foraging was the only way in which people obtained food until about 10,000 years ago, when the first experimentation with plant and animal domestication began in the Near East.

The principal subsistence tools in those few remaining cultures that still live by foraging are digging sticks; clubs; spears; bows and arrows; fishing devices; traps and snares; fire; and containers for storing, cooking, and transporting food. Tools are general purpose and few in number, as they must be made on the spot when needed or transported as the peo- ple move from place to place in the quest for food. According to Alan Lomax and Conrad Arensberg (1977), who surveyed the subsistence systems of 1,308 societies, “The emphasis is on hand skills rather than tools” (p. 668). Because individual skill is critical to success in the quest for food, foragers generally socialize their children to be independent and assertive and to rely on their own initiative rather than to be compliant to the demands of others. Many of the games foraging children play prepare them for adult subsistence roles. Small Crow Indian children, for example, play-acted the roles they would assume as adults and, in doing so, developed skills they would need then. At a very young age, boys practiced shooting arrows at birds, small animals, and stationary targets and sneaking up on mock foes and mock game animals. As they grew older, they engaged in foot races and other competitive games that developed strength and stamina. Little girls played with dolls and tended to the needs of their make-believe families in their make-believe homes.

Because hunting-and-gathering technologies rely on naturally occurring wild foods, for- agers are unable to live year-round in groups as large as those supported by food domes- tication. Therefore, social mechanisms more complex than the family are not necessary for organizing the political and economic lives of foragers. They lack formal governments and warfare and tend to be highly mobile, especially when hunting provides a major por- tion of their food supply.

Considering the small size of their social groups, it is hardly surprising that foragers gen- erally have been less politically powerful than food domesticators, and when in competi- tion with them, foragers have usually been at a disadvantage. As a result, foragers that continued to exist until recently did so primarily in those areas of the Earth of marginal interest to the plant and animal domesticators: the arctic wastes, tundras, deserts, and tropical rainforest environments.

Today, there are few peoples left who rely primarily or entirely on foraging. Some of the Inuit of the Canadian arctic have returned to a tradition of self-sufficient hunting after a period of acculturation. Despite the European intrusion, many of the !Kung San (now more commonly referred to as the Ju/’hoansi San) people of the southwestern African desert maintained a foraging lifestyle until the 1970s outside South Africa, where they are no longer found. But especially since the mid-1970s, the Ju/’hoansi San have undergone

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severe acculturation, as governmental policies have aided the expansion of cattle herd- ing into some of their traditional lands and turned others into game reserves (Lee, 2003). Most Ju/’hoansi San have been forced to find new ways to survive, such as working as herders for neighboring cattle owners. There are about 62,000 Ju/’hoansi San in the desert of Botswana, Namibia, and Angola. Of these, only between 2,000 and 5,000 might still be called foragers. About 4,000 aboriginal Australians have managed to maintain a semino- madic foraging way of life within nationally established reserves. Some tropical forest foragers, such as the Agta of northeastern Luzon, can still be found in the Philippines. Several tropical forest peoples of South America, such as the Ach of eastern Paraguay, still forage periodically despite efforts of the government to introduce them to agriculture. The Mbuti and other Pygmies of Africa’s Ituri Forest are among the most numerous for- agers today, numbering about 40,000 persons. Their ability to retreat into the forest has kept their traditional lifestyle viable, but it, too, is threatened as logging makes inroads into their territory. Logging has threatened the homelands, resources, quality of life, and health of foraging peoples throughout the tropical rainforests in the Philippines and South Pacific, the central equatorial belt of Africa, and the Amazon Basin in South America, as well as in the boreal forests of northern North America (Bodley, 2008).

Foraging forms the subsistence base of a societal type known as the band. Due to the reliance on wild food resources, bands are typically small groups based on kinship, with labor divided only by age and sex, sharing of resources, temporary leadership roles, mate- rial possessions limited by nomadism, and ideals reflecting these features. Wild foods are a sparse resource for people with no other means of survival. The poor environments occupied by foragers in recent times are unable to support more than about one person per five square miles, and in some places as few as one person per 500 square miles.

Nomadism and Material Culture Without a domestication technology, people must follow their food supply. This semi- nomadic pattern has an influence on the nature of a band society’s material technology. Band-level peoples cannot afford to have as many different kinds of specialized tools as are commonly found among more sedentary peoples. Each tool must be able to serve many different functions and be easily carried to a new hunting ground. For instance, the Australian boomerang served not only as a throwing weapon used in the hunt but also as a flat working surface when making other tools—for example, a digging tool, a club, a scraping tool, and a percussion musical instrument.

Group Structure According to Julian Steward (1955) and Elman R. Service (1962), the hunting-and- gathering technology places certain functional demands on the social organization of the band-level culture. Permanent social groups cannot be very large. The local group that works and lives together averages about 50 people in contemporary band societies and rarely exceeds 100 people. The local groups of band cultures may have been somewhat larger in earlier times, when bands occupied areas with more abundant resources than are now found in the marginal areas to which they have been restricted by the expansion of more powerful societies. Nevertheless, wild food resources cannot maintain large local groups except in very lush environments, as the larger the group is, the farther individu- als must travel from their base of operations in their quest for food.

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As a general rule, in the small, local groups of band cultures, most individuals are related, either by descent, which is commonly traced through both men and women, or by mar- riage. This community is the basic institution in a band society for organizing the educa- tion of children; social etiquette; and economic, political, military, and judicial practices.

Division of Labor The only specialization of labor in a band culture is that based on differences of gender and age. In a band society supported by the sparse resources of wild foods, the most economical division of subsistence labor usually assigns the work of hunting to the men, while the gathering of wild plants near the camp is done by the women and older chil- dren. This specialization of labor is an adaptation to pregnancy in the female and the need for prolonged nursing of infants, a practice that also serves to control population growth by spacing out births. Although these two biological facts might hinder her as a hunter, the woman still can be an important provider of plant foods gathered locally during peri- ods of pregnancy and lactation. In some foraging societies, however, women snared or hunted small animals close to the camp. Elman R. Service (1962), R. B. Lee, and Ivan DeVore (1968a), and J. Tanaka (1977) have estimated that women sometimes provide as much as 80% of the calories in the diets of people who survive by hunting and gathering. However, in circumstances where a rigid differentiation is not important for the survival of the group, men, women, and children may play overlapping roles. In hunting-and- gathering societies in areas with plentiful wild foods, men may often gather wild plants as well as hunt; and men, women, and children may frequently work together in cooperative hunting activities.

The relative emphasis that each foraging group places on plant gathering, hunting, and fishing depends on the nature of each local environment. These differences influence the gender relationships within foraging societies. Ernestine Friedl (1975) has suggested that the division of labor by gender in foraging societies takes one of four major forms, depending on the subsistence adaptation of the foraging groups to their specific envi- ronments: individual foraging, communal foraging, plant-focused foraging, and animal- focused foraging.

Individual Foraging Subsistence based on individual foraging is common in environments in which meat is a relatively unimportant resource. In individual foraging, both men and women are expected to gather their own plant foods, but men provide primarily for themselves while women forage for themselves and their children. Only a small amount of time is devoted to hunting in this subsistence pattern. Men and women are typically equal in social power and prestige in these foraging societies.

Communal Foraging In environments where the major meat resource is fish or small game, and plant foods are most easily collected by cooperative labor, communal foraging is common. Hunting is usually accomplished by driving animals toward nets where they are killed by the men

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of the group. In communal foraging, the game is normally divided at the site among all the families who participated, so no particular prestige is gained by men from their role in hunting. The joint participation of women and men in the subsistence activities of com- munal foraging societies usually results in a relative equality between them.

Plant-Focused Foraging Societies in environments where plant resources can readily supply the majority of the food from areas nearby engage primarily in plant-focused foraging. Groups that emphasize plant collecting are usually the least rigid about separating the roles of men and women. While men are occupied with hunting larger animals that may have to be pursued for long distances over a period of days, women gather plant foods near the camp, an activity that typically provides between 60% and 70% of the group’s food. Nevertheless, men’s social prestige and power are often high when compared with women’s because whenever they bring more meat to camp than their own families can use, they share the surplus with the hunters of other families and are given high status by their neighbors as a result. In con- trast, the plant foods that women provide to their own families are the basic staple of life. They are readily available to all, so there is no need for women to share the fruits of their labor outside their own families. Thus, women lack access to a means of raising their sta- tus in the way men can. Parallels in North America that illustrate how income produced for consumption within the family does not translate as readily into social power or pres- tige outside the domestic setting are kitchen gardens and food canning. While these may be sources of personal pride or even respect among a small circle of neighbors, they do not have the same impact on a woman’s wider public influence as a high salary, part of which may be spent on such things as hosting parties for colleagues. In this unbalanced system, when men share food with nonrelatives by hosting parties or buying colleagues drinks or dinner, their status rises in a way that emphasizes the dependence of women on men for the important resource that men provide.

Animal-Focused Foraging Environments that offer little in the way of plant foods may be occupied by foragers when fish and animal life are abundant enough. In animal-focused foraging, fish and large game hunted by men are the basic food. In this subsistence system, women do not contribute directly to the food supply but bear domestic responsibilities, including the processing of the meat and skins brought in by the men. Often in those societies, men make the tools that women use. Especially where the meat resources are large game ani- mals, the pursuit of which can encourage high levels of competitiveness and aggression in hunters, the economic dependence of women on men can result in low social status for women. The Arctic Inuit, who subsisted almost exclusively on meat obtained by men through hunting, were animal-focused foragers. Traditionally, Inuit women—whose main roles were processing meat and skins, childcare, and household chores—had very low status relative to Inuit men (Balicki, 1970). Among Plains Indian bison hunters such as the Crow, Cheyenne, and Lakota, women contributed more to the diet because there were more locally available plants foods, including nutritious tubers, berries, and fruits. Although their status was lower than that of the men in their societies, it was still higher than that of the Inuit women.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

Food Production It is easy to be ethnocentric about the advantages available to a society that produces its own food. Such societies tend to have larger populations, and their many specialists pro- duce commodities what were unavailable before food production developed. However, why people made the transition from foraging to food production is not simple to explain. After all, foraging has its advantages, too. Foraging meets the needs of people. Popula- tion density is generally low among foragers, and the communities of cooperating indi- viduals are never very large. Under these circumstances, it is simple for the local group to move quickly from place to place. As a result, food shortages are rare among hunters and gatherers. In addition, nomadic or semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, unlike sed- entary peoples, do not live amidst their own refuse. This factor, plus the low popula-

tion densities that are characteristic of foragers, means that the epidemics that often plague peoples who live under crowded conditions are also rare. Furthermore, as Marvin Har- ris (1977) has pointed out, foragers have a much shorter workweek than do food domesticators. For instance, the southern African !Kung foragers need to work only about 3 hours a day to obtain a nutritious diet (Lee, 1984), even though their desert envi- ronment is not nearly so lush as most of the areas occupied by hunting- and-gathering peoples before the rise of farming. So when and why did some people adopt the more sed- entary life of producing food rather than searching for it?

The Trend Toward Food Domestication Between 10,000 and 18,000 years ago, the lifestyle of the foragers of southwest Asia began to change. Along the hilly flanks of the mountains of the Near East, there was sufficient rainfall for abundant wild grains to grow without cultivation. Foragers in these zones were able to gather a variety of wild foods in different seasons and preserve them in stor- age pits for off-season use. Food storage made a more sedentary life possible even while exploiting wild cereal crops that were native to the area. These wild cereals could be har- vested easily by lightly beating the stems so that the seeds would break loose and fall into a basket. After grinding with stone tools, the tough seeds could be prepared for eating in a variety of ways. The use of these wild grains resulted in a more sedentary life and popula- tion growth, and laid the foundation for the eventual domestication of plants and animals.

The rise of population that may have led to food domestication can be accounted for by the interplay between human fertility and sedentarism (a settled rather than nomadic life- style). Following the birth of a child, a woman will not begin ovulation again so long as less

TongRo Images/Thinkstock With the introduction of the plow and agriculture, women were excluded from the means of production and, in some cases, land ownership.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

than 20% to 25% of her body weight consists of fat (Frisch & McArthur, 1974; Frisch, 1975). This figure represents the approximate amount of calories that a fetus needs to develop to full term. That is, before a fertile woman will be able to conceive, her body must store enough calories of energy to nourish a developing fetus for a 9-month pregnancy. In active nomadic populations, this threshold of body fat is more difficult to achieve than in sed- entary populations, as the foragers burn more food energy themselves and their diets are likely to be lower in carbohydrates and higher in protein. Because nursing one child takes about 1,000 calories a day, it is unlikely that a woman will become pregnant as long as she is nursing if she lives in a semi-nomadic hunting-and-gathering society. Because nursing is likely to continue for the first 3 years of an infant’s life in most societies, the level of fer- tility is, on the average, much lower in hunting-and-gathering societies than in sedentary societies using domesticated foods. The span of childbearing years is also shorter, for the onset of menstruation occurs later in hunting-and-gathering societies because a hunting- and-gathering diet is rich in protein. In demonstration of these theories, Richard B. Lee (1972) and Gina B. Kolata (1974) have reported growth in fertility and population among those !Kung hunter-gatherers who abandoned their native semi-nomadic way of life for a more sedentary food production economy.

Esther Boserup (1965) argued, on the other hand, that population growth may have been a cause for the food domestication. It would have created pressure for more effective control over the food supply than was possible with the simple gathering of wild plants. Robert Sussman (1972) pointed out that population growth eventually made it necessary for people to move into less productive areas around the margins of the zones where wild grains grew in natural abundance, and Lewis Binford (1968) and Kent Flannery (1969/1971) believe that it was in these marginal zones that people found it necessary to seek more direct human control over their food supply. People began to keep near to the home base a few animals such as sheep, goats, dogs, and cattle, which had previ- ously been hunted. This practice ensured a steady supply of meat as well as other useful products such as hides, milk, and milk products. By experimenting with how to plant seeds, people acquired grains as dietary supplements in areas where they had not been common previously.

The process that led to the domestication of plants and animals that began as early as 13,000 years ago. It is not possible to place a precise date on its origins, as the shift to food domestication was a gradual process. There is even some debate about where the earli- est center of food domestication was. Some archaeological evidence has suggested that it may have occurred in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the process is best documented in the Near East. Because the distinction between the remains of wild and domesticated plants and animals is subtle, what are considered earlier materials simply may represent plants and animals in the process of being domesticated. It is safe to say, however, that by 9000 BCE, goats and sheep had been domesticated in the Near East, and barley and wheat were domesticated by 7000 BCE in the same area. Cattle and pigs also were under human control by 7000 BCE. The domesticated grains differed from their wild relatives in that the crop domesticators favored larger seeds. As the seeds evolved to a larger size under human influence, the grain became more firmly attached to the stems and could no longer be harvested easily by shaking the stems over a basket. Thus, the domestication of grains required the simultaneous evolution of a new technology for use in the harvest, includ- ing knife blades and sickles for cutting bunches of stems. Such tool kits were in use in the ancient Near East by 7000 BCE.

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Simple Food Domestication The simplest form of food production is horticulture, a form of gardening that involves only the planting, weeding, harvesting, and storage of foodstuffs. There is no use of the plow, draft animals, fertilization of the soil, or crop rotation, all of which are characteristic of more complex agricultural technologies. Techniques for irrigating gardens are simple and do not include large-scale irrigation canals that require more heavy labor to build or maintain than can be performed by close relatives. The most common hand tools used in labor-intensive horticultural tribes are the digging stick and the hoe. Most horticultural- ists have some domestic animals with which they supplement their diets, but animals are never the source of the bulk of their diet. And while some may allow their pigs, for example, to root around in their gardens at certain times, which helps loosen the soil, they never use their animals as draft animals.

A horticultural technology provides more food per capita and produces more food per acre than does a hunting-and-gathering technology, so peoples with horticultural tech- nologies live in larger communities than do foragers. Their denser populations give them correspondingly greater political power than foragers have, so horticultural societies are much more widespread. Four hundred years ago, they were found in the tropical forest areas of South America, in many parts of North America, in most areas of Africa, through- out the islands of the Pacific, and in some of the Asian mainland. Nevertheless, the simple tools of horticulturalists give them relatively little control over the productivity of the land they cultivate. Horticulturalists cannot control such factors as the weather and insect infestations that can severely impact their crop production, so they experience occasional food shortages, and there are natural limits on their distribution throughout the world. Horticultural communities were typically found in areas with warm or temperate climates favorable to the domestication of plants.

The simpler forms of horticulture are known as extensive cultivation (or shifting cultiva- tion) because they use the same gardens for only a few years, afterward letting the land remain idle, or lie fallow, for several years to renew its fertility. Because gardens must be shifted to new plots, horticultural work is extended to plots farther from home than would be required if the same plots could be reused perpetually. Tribal societies that rely on shifting cultivation are only semi-sedentary, as entire communities may have to be moved to new locations occasionally to open up new gardening lands.

Depending on the characteristics of the natural environments in which it occurs, exten- sive cultivation may take one of two forms: slash-and-burn horticulture or dry-land gar- dening. Slash-and-burn cultivation, also known as swidden horticulture, is common in tropical forest environments and in savannas, where clearing the land requires heavy labor. The trees and vegetation that are cut away are left to dry and then burned before a crop can be planted. Garden plots are cultivated for several years, during which they may become less and less productive as their nutrients are depleted. Then the fields are allowed to lie fallow for a period of up to 9 or 10 years before they are cleared and worked again. Typically, gardeners who use the slash-and-burn technique have several gardens, each of which has been cultivated for a different length of time, so that each year the old- est may be abandoned to nature while another, abandoned previously, is again prepared for use. Ultimately, after several cycles of use and abandonment of plots, the soil will have

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

become so depleted that the forest does not grow back, and entirely new gardens must be prepared. Eventually, gardens may be so far from the original village that an entire settle- ment of several hundred people may relocate to a more convenient area. Peoples in such distant parts of the globe as the Yanomamo of the Brazilian and Venezuelan rainforest, the Tsembaga Maring of the Highlands of New Guinea, and the Bemba of Zaire have prac- ticed slash-and-burn horticulture.

Dry-Land Gardening The form of production known as dry-land gardening is carried out in arid environments. The major problem in dry-land gardening is getting sufficient water to the crops. Some small canals or even walls may be used to channel available water resources such as the seasonal runoff of rainwater from higher land to the gardens, or the gardens themselves may be strategically positioned to take advantage of any runoff. However, in the absence of major, reliable water sources such as rivers, large irrigation projects that require heavy cooperative labor are not a part of this system. In drier periods water may have to be hand-carried to individual plants in gardens. Dry-land gardening was common among the Pueblos of the American Southwest and in the arid and semi-arid regions of the Mid- dle East, where it is still practiced today.

In nonforested regions where cereal crops predominate, the settlements of horticultural- ists may be more permanent than those of tropical forest farmers. Particularly in drier cli- mates, horticulturalists may engage in some hand-watering of plants or limited irrigation of fields, but irrigation is not so common or complex as in agriculturally based societies.

Horticultural Tribes When hunting-and-gathering subsistence technology gave way to sedentarism and the domestication of plants and animals, a more complex societal type arose called the tribe. In tribal societies, population may approach 100 people per square mile. Local groups must maintain more or less permanent residence near the planted gardens from which they draw their food. These groups can grow to be quite large in comparison with the local groups of hunting-and-gathering peoples. According to Marshall D. Sahlins (1960), the communities of contemporary horticultural societies have up to 250 residents. While the local groups in bands may comprise anywhere from one to a dozen families that are loosely interrelated by ties of marriage, a tribal community may consist of as many as 20 residential families. Often, these families may be grouped into a number of larger kin groups that are united to one another by ties of common ancestry. These kinship groups are the basic units of tribal government.

Control over the food supply allows horticulturalists to live in larger local groups than foragers. Several hundred people may live together in villages throughout the year. Hous- ing is more permanent and house construction more elaborate than are the temporary shelters of foragers. Village life necessitates greater accommodation to the presence of others, so childrearing necessarily emphasizes compliance and responsibility over inde- pendence and assertiveness in children. Family organization tends to be more elaborate among horticulturalists than among foragers, as a large number of family members may reside in the same location over many generations.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

The authority of the family organization in the lives of its individual members is great because the family is the basic governing institution in horticultural villages. Each family may be a politically autonomous component of the village except in matters that affect the common welfare. Such matters tend to be dealt with by a council of family leaders from the entire village, who seek to achieve a consensus on how to handle the problem. The greater numbers and more complex social organization of horticulturalists and the need for control of the land as a source of income make warfare a common element of life in horticulturally based societies. The Iroquois are one such tribal society, or, more accu- rately, closely related confederacy of tribal societies. Like many other tribal peoples reli- ant on their gardens for subsistence, they were sedentary and lived in large, permanent towns. These towns could have as many as 2,000 residents distributed among 20 or more large long-houses occupied by matrilineages (Snow, 1996; Morgan, 1851b; Fenton, 2003). Iroquois society was organized around matrilineal clans. Each clan was headed by senior clan member, usually a male, and community-wide decisions were made by a council composed of all the senior clan leaders. The women tended fields they owned, growing corn, beans, squash, and other subsistence crops while the men hunted and went on raids against other groups. Women controlled the distribution of resources and, although they did not sit on the council, they exerted a tremendous degree of political influence.

Pastoralism A more specialized form of domestication technology is pastoralism, which focuses on animal husbandry as the major source of food. Pastoralism is the predominant means of subsistence in environments such as deserts, grasslands, savannas, and mountains, which are unable reliably to sustain horticultural or nonindustrialized agricultural production. The marginal nature of pastoral environments suggests that pastoralism is probably of more recent origin than horticulture. Indeed, it is commonly argued that pastoralism in most parts of the world developed as farming peoples expanded into environmentally less productive zones and adjusted by relying more heavily on domestic animals as their basic source of income. Most pastoralists do supplement their diets with food grown in simple gardens, but plant growing is always subordinated to the demands of their animal husbandry. Consequently, some pastoralists prefer to supplement their diet with foods obtained through trade with farming neighbors. Pastoralism typically requires large areas of land and a somewhat migratory way of life.

Not all pastoralists are migratory in the same way. Some follow a way of life called pastoral nomadism, in which the entire local community moves from place to place within a large territory that they consider their home. Pastoral nomads may trek for hundreds of miles each year, moving in a yearly geographical cycle that is governed by seasonal changes that influence where the best forage is available for their herds. The Basseri sheep and goat herders of what is now Iran followed a fixed and tightly scheduled migratory route, called an il-rah. The il-rah was determined by the quality of seasonally available grazing lands and water at various altitudes and the movements of other pastoralists. This well- orchestrated migration pattern prevented conflicts over resource use from erupting between different tribal groups, as well as overexploitation of the scarce resources (Barth, 1961). The second pattern of pastoral migration is called transhumance. In this pattern, most members of each local community maintain a home base throughout the year, but those members of the group who are most responsible for the care of the herds move the animals between at least two different primary foraging areas at different elevations in

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

different seasons. An interesting example of such movements is found in the Swiss Alps, where some people practice “vertical” transhumance between the valley floor, where they maintain permanent homes and fields, and high alpine meadows, where shepherds spend the summer months with their livestock. This pattern of movement allows them to take advantage of the good forage available at higher altitudes in the summer and yet cultivate crops for food for themselves and harvest hay to feed their animals in the winter (Cole & Wolf, 1999). This arrangement is particularly adaptive in environments that permit the fixed community to produce some income through horticulture.

There are several types of pastoralism that occupy somewhat different environments, depending on the animal that is the primary subsistence resource. Cattle herding was most common throughout sub-Saharan Africa, particularly throughout equatorial and east Africa, southern Africa, and parts of Madagascar. Cattle herding was also found in limited areas in the northern part of South America among the Goajiro, a people of mixed Native American and African origins. Many of the cattle-herding peoples combined pas- toralism with some plant cultivation. Camels were the basis for pastoralism throughout northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Reindeer herding was particularly impor- tant among various peoples of the far north, including the Lapps of the northern Scandinavian subarctic and various peoples in Siberia. Yak herd- ing was limited to the high mountain regions of the Himalayan area. A sim- ilar, geographically limited form of pastoralism was found in the Andes of South America, where llama herd- ing in combination with agricultural production was important for societ- ies such as the Inca, who dominated the area at the time of European con- tact. Mixed pastoralism, the predom- inant type throughout western Asia north of India, combined a variety of animals such as sheep, goats, horses, and cattle.

Because they occupy territory that is often marginal and unproductive, many pastoralists are unable to produce everything they need. Therefore, they must obtain some goods from neighboring horticultural or agricultural peoples. This is often accomplished by trade, but sometimes it is more profitable to raid their more sedentary neighbors.

Especially when the animals they keep, such as horses or camels, give them great mobil- ity, these peoples can carry out their raids rapidly with little warning and leave quickly afterward.

Since the herds of pastoralists are vulnerable to theft, pastoralists must constantly be with their herds and live in perpetual readiness for conflict. Warfare is a prominent fact of life in many pastoral tribes. Thus, childrearing emphasizes obedience, deference to authority figures, and a competitive and socially dominant role for male warriors.

iStockphoto/Thinkstock Pastoral or herding people have the advantages of food production, yet lead a nomadic lifestyle.

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Extensive Versus Intensive Cultivation In extensive cultivation, gardens cycle between years of cultivation and years of idle- ness. In contrast, intensive cultivation involves a smaller number of fields that are used year after year. Intensification has a variety of causes. Crops available in some environ- ments may lend themselves to more intensive use of the same fields. For instance, fruit trees that bear year after year may make it possible to utilize the intensive cultivation of some gardens while fields used for other crops are still being cultivated extensively. New food-growing techniques can also bring about more intensive use of fields. For instance, food growers may intensify their cultivation techniques by the addition of more complex irrigation methods or crop rotation. The increased productivity allows communities to become completely sedentary and local populations to reach larger levels characteristic of chiefdoms, societies that support full-time governmental authorities and even hierar- chies of political authorities that unite many communities under the same government (see Chapter 8).

Intensive cultivation forms a continuum of increasing productivity. The most productive levels, referred to as agriculture, include the use of such tools and techniques as animal fertilizers, crop rotation, draft animals, and the plow. Agriculture is much more recent than horticulture, being a scant 6,000 years old, but it has proven to be a very success- ful form of subsistence. Agricultural societies have become the largest, most widespread, most dominant peoples in the world and occupy the most productive parts of the Earth’s surface. An important feature of the social changes brought about by agriculture is the development of true states, societies with cities, large populations, true social classes, and full-time governments that monopolize all legal authority.

The simplest form of agriculture is nonindustrialized (or traditional) agriculture. In this form, the major tools are hand implements such as the hoe, shovel, and animal-drawn plow. Crops are grown for local consumption, but the use of the plow, animal-derived fertilizers, and irrigation results in greater productivity than is usual in extensive cultiva- tion, so that market crops may also be produced. Use of the plow and animal or human fertilizer to enhance the productivity of the soil makes agriculture more land intensive than labor intensive. While horticulturalists can expand their populations only by open- ing new land to cultivation, land-intensive agriculture can allow farmers to support popu- lation growth by increasing the output of their fields. The populations of towns occupied by agricultural peoples commonly number in the thousands or tens of thousands. Such large groups require a high degree of specialization and the presence of a system of gov- ernment that is not based solely on the authority of the family organization. Because of the large urban populations that agriculture can support, agricultural societies frequently have class distinctions with inherited differences in political power and wealth within the local communities.

Industrialized Agriculture The form of food production that relies most heavily on technological means for harness- ing energy, such as fossil fuels and hydroelectric power rather than human or animal

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.6 The Diverse Forms of Human Economies

labor, is industrialized agriculture. Currently, its toolkit includes motorized equipment such as tillers, tractors, and harvesters. Chemical fertilizers are used to enhance the pro- ductivity of the soil, herbicides are used to minimize unwanted plants that compete with crops for water and soil nutrients, and pesticides play an important role in minimizing crop destruction by insects. Industrialized agriculturalists not only irrigate their fields but also may employ various techniques for modifying the effects of adverse weather conditions—for instance, by shading crops or artificially maintaining higher temperatures around their plants during periods of cold weather.

Industrialized agricultural techniques create high yields with relatively little investment of human labor. On the other hand, these techniques are very inefficient in terms of the ratio of energy used to produce food to the number of calories yielded. By comparison, in hor- ticulture, human labor is intense, but it represents almost the entire investment of energy for producing food. In nonindustrialized agriculture, human labor is supplemented by the work of draft animals such as oxen whose upkeep, along with the costs of manufac- turing tools such as the plow, results in a much greater investment in producing each year’s crop than does horticulture. Industrialized agriculture carries this to an extreme. In addition to human labor on the farm, it requires the work of specialists who manufacture and maintain farm equipment; petroleum products such as gasoline and oil to fuel the equipment; and chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to increase yields. There are also costs in transporting produce to factories, in packaging the food, in delivering the packaged goods to markets, and in marketing them. Susan Brown and J. Clair Batty (1976) estimated that the energy to produce, process, package, transport, market, purchase, pre- pare, and eat a single can of corn that contained 269 calories of digestible food energy could easily require the expenditure of 5,384 calories of energy by the time the dishwasher finished running. Thus, industrialized agriculture is tremendously productive, in that a small number of people are able to provide enough food to support a large population, but extremely inefficient, in that it requires much more energy to produce per calorie than production systems that rely on human and animal labor. Industrialized agriculture also has other costs in its long-term impact on the environment. For instance, pesticides can migrate from the fields to which they are applied into the groundwater and neighboring streams, where they can adversely affect humans and other animals. Industrialized farm equipment can also cause faster loss of topsoil than nonindustrialized farming.

High-yield production techniques, coupled with an industrialized system of transporta- tion to carry the produce over great distances, have made possible the rise of farms of tremendous acreage. Industrialized agriculture nevertheless operates at great costs, when one measures the amount of energy required to produce food. But it is so productive that in the United States, only about 1.5% of the labor force is now involved in food produc- tion. Societies whose subsistence technology is industrialized agriculture invariably sup- port sufficiently large populations that they must be organized by full-time governments that monopolize political power. The populations commonly number in the millions or hundreds of millions. Indeed, individual cities in industrialized societies may number in the tens of millions.

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CHAPTER 9Discussion Questions

Chapter Summary 1. Cultures differ in what they define as useful or valuable and in how much worth

a given commodity may be thought to have. 2. Commodities may include intangible things such as sacred stories or titles of

nobility. 3. Economic systems in all cultures are constructed out of the same rules that gov-

ern the production, distribution, and consumption of valued goods and services. 4. Producing or obtaining commodities involves concepts of use rights, ownership,

and a division of labor. 5. Societies such as the United States where production is industrialized are charac-

terized by an unequal distribution of wealth and status. 6. Distribution involves some combination of reciprocal exchange, centralized

redistribution of goods, and markets. 7. Patterns of consumption depend on how much the producers use themselves,

how commodities are used in increasing the prestige of some members of society through different levels of status income, and conspicuous consumption.

8. All societies have ways of controlling the economic system. Control may be divided between members of the community; may reside in the kinship group; or may be affected by associations such as guilds, corporations, or groups of gov- ernmental officials.

Discussion Questions 1. Illustrate the role of culture in determining what is considered to be a commodity

and in determining the value that a commodity has. 2. What are the five categories of economic statuses that make up the U.S. system of

economic classes? 3. Explain the differences between a subsistence economy and an economy that

produces status income. 4. What are the four basic means that human societies have used for controlling

their economic systems? Which type of society (i.e., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, or states) is associated with each mechanism?

5. Describe the different ways in which government and private corporations may interact in a market economy.

6. How did the development of food production alter the lives of human beings in terms of the size of their local communities and the length of their workweeks?

7. How do horticulturalists differ from foragers in their approach to government and family organization?

8. Why did pastoralists frequently have a militaristic lifestyle?

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CHAPTER 9Key Terms

agriculture The form of intensive cultiva- tion that uses tools and techniques such as irrigation, animal traction, and fertilization of the soil.

animal-focused foraging Fish and ani- mal life provide basic food supply where plants are scarce.

balanced reciprocity Gift given with expectation of a return gift shortly.

barter Form of exchange of goods by trading.

bigmanship Economic entrepreneurship by persons in horticulture societies who encourage economic production and gift giving in their communities to achieve public recognition and respect.

blue-collar workers Manual laborers other than farm workers.

chief Presiding redistributive and political official of a chiefdom society or of a subdi- vision of a chiefdom, whose legal authority extends in at least some areas over mem- bers of families other than his or her own.

commodities Goods, services, and intan- gible items that are determined to be use- ful or valuable in a particular culture.

communal foraging Cooperative food gathering where fish and small game are meat resources and plants are easily collected.

conspicuous consumption The acquisi- tion and use of a surplus of goods as a way of competitively demonstrating one’s suc- cess and prestige.

consumer market Market in which basic needs of consumers are met by the system of production, and competition for sales may focus on nonessentials.

consumption The final use of goods and services.

corporation An association of employers and employees that is legally entitled to act as a single person to produce goods or provide services.

distribution Movement of resources or goods from where they are found or produced to where they will ultimately be used.

division of labor The rules that govern how the day-to-day work of life is divided among holders of various statuses.

dry-land gardening Horticulture that is carried out in arid environments with aid of simple supplemental watering techniques.

economics The system by which people obtain or produce, distribute, and consume valued material goods and services.

extensive cultivation Horticulture that involves the use of land for short periods followed by periods of letting the land stand idle for several years.

feminization of poverty The trend in which women comprise a major and grow- ing proportion of the world’s poor today.

generalized reciprocity Gift given with no expectation of immediate exchange.

horticulture Cultivation of crops using simple hand tools such as the hoe and digging stick and without fertilization of the soil, crop rotation, and often without irrigation.

individual foraging Men and women each gather their own plant foods, with women providing for the children.

Key Terms

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CHAPTER 9Key Terms

industrialized agriculture The form of food production that relies most heavily on technological means for harnessing energy, such as fossil fuels and hydroelectric power rather than human or animal labor.

intensive cultivation The use of food- growing techniques that permit permanent use of the same fields.

market A place where direct exchanges of commodities can occur.

means of production The tools and resources necessary for the creation of commodities and the locations in which they are used.

money Standard medium of exchange that has a mutually agreed-upon value.

negative reciprocity One group or indi- vidual in a reciprocal exchange system attempts to get more than it gives.

nonindustrialized (traditional) agriculture Intensive cultivation using simple tools such as hoes, shovels, and animal-drawn plows.

ownership The right to use property and the right to deny use rights to others as long as one owns the property.

pastoralism A subsistence technology based on animal husbandry.

plant-focused foraging Gathering of plant resources that are readily available, allow- ing hunting expeditions far from campsite.

professionals Typically self-employed providers of services whose work gener- ally requires a graduate-level university degree.

reciprocity Sharing of surpluses with the understanding that the party receiving the gift will respond in kind in the future.

redistribution Contribution of commodi- ties by all members of a group to a com- mon pool from which they will be distrib- uted to those who will use them.

slash-and-burn cultivation (swidden horticulture) A form of farming in which the land is prepared by cutting and burning the natural growth and in which several plots, in various stages of soil depletion, are worked in a cycle.

status income Use of income to acquire goods over and above subsistence needs.

subsistence economy Economy in which people consume most of what they produce.

subsistence income Goods produced by each family for its own consumption.

swidden horticulture See slash-and-burn cultivation.

transhumance A form of pastoralism in which only a part of the group moves with herd; some stay in villages and grow crops year round.

unskilled laborers Low-paid workers, including part-time or seasonal workers, who are usually paid by the hour or for the quantity of goods they produce.

use rights The right to use a resource.

white-collar occupations Service-pro- viding occupations such as clerical, sales, managerial, and administrative jobs.

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