STONE AGE ECONOMICS

Revolutionary changes have today invaded all spheres of life: the productive forces, science with its gigantic field of practical application, technology, politics, ethnic relationships, intellectual life in general. Man himself is changing. What is the essence, the cause of these changes that are spreading across the world and affecting the most diverse aspects of human life? In what way do the various aspects of the revolutionary process that has gripped the planet interdepend? What consequences will the scientific and technological revolution have for the nations of the world? Are we not witnessing and participating in a profound crisis of our whole civilisation? What are we to do about elevated human ideals when we are confronted with a threat to the very existence of life on earth?

For several centuries people hopefully observed the development of technology on the assumption that taming the forces of nature would bring them happiness and plenty, and that this would be enough to allow human life to be arranged on rational principles. Mankind has achieved a great deal, but we have also made "a great deal of mess". For how long and on what scale can we go on accumulating the waste products among which modern man has to live? Here we need a clear and philosophical view of history. Why, because of what contradictions, do the forces created and activated by human brains and hands turn against man himself and his mind? Why is the world so constructed that more of its gifted minds are bent on destruction instead of creation? Is this not a profound social and philosophical problem? The advent of the atomic age was marked by horrifying annihilation and mass murder. For how long will the menacing shadow of the atomic bomb hang over all human joys and hopes?

These and other great questions of our time cannot be answered by the supreme science of physics, by mathematics, cybernetics, chemistry, biology, or by natural science as a whole, great though their discoveries have been. These questions, which exercise the minds of all mankind and relate to life today and in the future, must be answered by scientific philosophy.

Naturally, the solution of all the pressing problems of our time depends not only on a rational philosophical orientation. It also depends on the political orientation of nations and statesmen, which in turn is related to the nature of the social structure.

Scientific activity is not only logical, it also has moral and socio-political implications. Knowledge arms man with the means to achieve his ends. There can be no doubt that modern natural science is a powerful "motor" of technical advance.

In a fierce ideological struggle the specialised scientists who lack any scientific world-view or methodology sometimes turn out to be helpless grown-up children in the face of reactionary ideology and some of them fall into its clutches.

4. List of literature:

1. Dialectical Materialism (A. Spirkin)

2. Philosophy and Science - https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin

3. The philosophy of science - http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/philosophy

STONE AGE ECONOMICS

By MARSHALL SAHLINS

The Author

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

1972 by Marshall Sahlins

First published 1972

For Julia, Peter, And Elaine

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Original Affluent Society

2 The Domestic Mode of Production: The Structure of Underproduction

3 The Domestic Mode of Production: Intensification of Production

4 The Spirit of the Gift

5 On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange

6 Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I thank especially two institutions, and the excellent staff associated with them, for the aid and facilities provided during critical periods of my research and writing. In 1963-64 I held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), in 1967-69 an office and the run of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale du College de France (Paris). Although I had no official position in the Laboratoire, M. Claude Levi-Strauss, the director, received me with a courtesy and generosity I should have difficulty reciprocating, were he ever in turn to visit my village.

A John Simon Guggenheim fellowship during my first year in Paris (1967-68) and a Social Science Research Council Faculty Research Fellowship (1958-61) also contributed important support during the gestation period of these essays.

That period has been so long and so full of beneficial intellectual encounters that it would be impossible to list all the colleagues and students who have, in one way or another, influenced the course of the work. Out of long years of friendship and discussion, however, I make three exceptions: Remo Guidieri, Elman Service, and Eric Wolf. Their ideas and criticisms, always accompanied by encouragement, have been of inestimable value to me and to my work

Several of the essays have been published in whole, in part, or in translation during the past several years. "The Original Affluent Soci­ety" appeared in abbreviated form as "La premiere societe d'abon-dance" in Les Temps Modernes (No. 268, Oct. 1968, 641-80). The first part of Chapter 4 was originally published as "The Spirit of the Gift" in Echanges et communications (Jean Pouillon and P. Maranda, eds., The Hague: Mouton, 1969). The second part of Chapter 4 ap­peared as "Philosophic politique de I'Essaisur le don, "in L'Homme (Vol. 8[4], 1968, 5-17). "On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange" was published first in The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology (M. Banton, ed., London: Tavistock [ASA Monographs, 1], 1965). I thank the publishers of all of the above for permission to reproduce these articles.

"The Diplomacy of Primitive Trade," initially published in Essays in Economic Anthropology (June Helm, ed., Seattle: American Ethno­logical Society, 1965), has been entirely revised for the present book.

Introduction

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

No solution is in sight, no ground for the happy academic conclu­sion that "the answer lies somewhere in between." This book is sub-stantivist. It thus takes on a familiar structure, as provided by traditional substantive categories. The first essays concern prod­uction: "The Original Affluent Society" and "The Domestic Mode of Production." (The latter has been divided for convenience into two sections, Chapters 2 and 3, but these make up one continuous argu­ment.) The chapters following turn to distribution and exchange: "The Spirit of the Gift," "On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange,³* "Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade." But as the exposition is at the same time an opposition, this sequence harbors also a more concealed strategy of debate. The lead chapter accepts battle on formalist terms. "The Original Affluent Society" does not challenge the common understanding of "economy" as a relation between means and ends; it only denies that hunters find any great disparity between the two. The following essays, however, would definitively abandon this entrepreneurial and individualist conception of the economic object. "Economy" becomes a category of culture rather than behavior, in a class with politics or religion rather than rationality or prudence: not the need-serving activities of individuals, but the material life process of society. Then, the final chapter returns to economic orthodoxy, but to its problems, not to its problematique. The attempt in the end is to bring the anthropological perspective to bear on the traditional work of microeconomics, the explanation of exchange value.

In all this, the aim of the book remains modest: merely to perpetuate the possibility of an anthropological economics by a few concrete examples. In a recent issue of Current Anthropology, a spokesman of the opposed position announced with no apparent regret the untimely demise of substantive economics:

The wordage squandered in this debate does not add up to its intellectual weight. From the beginning the substantivists (as exemplified in the justly famous works of Polanyi and others) were heroically muddled and in error. It is a tribute to the maturity of economic anthropology that we have been able to find in what the error consisted in the short space of six years. The paper . . . written by Cook (1966) when he was a graduate student neatly disposes of the controversy. . . . Social science being the sort of enterprise [I] it is, however, it is virtually impossible to down a poor, useless, or obfuscating hypothesis, and I expect the next generation of creators of high-level confusion will resurrect, in one guise or another, the substantive view of the economy (Nash, 1967, p. 250)-

How then to describe the present work, which is neither the second coming nor otherwise bears the slightest trace of immortality? One can only hope there has been some mistake. Perhaps, as with Mark Twain in a similar case, the reports of the death of substantivism have been grossly exaggerated.

In any event, I refrain from the attempt at mouth-to-mouth resusci­tation in the form of methodological discussion. The recent literature of "economic anthropology" is already overinflated with talk at this level. And while many of the arguments seem models of good sense, the total effect has been to confirm everyone in his original prejudice. ("He who's convinced against his will/Is of the same opinion still.") Reason has proven a poor arbiter. Meanwhile the audience to the debate is rapidly declining, out of boredom, prompting even some of the main participants to now declare themselves ready to go to work. That too is the spirit of this book. Officially, as a participant in a discipline that considers itself a science, I would rest the case on the essays themselves, and on the belief they explain matters better than the competing theoretical mode. Such is the traditional and the healthy procedure: let all the flowers bloom, and we shall see which bear real fruit.

But the official position is not, I confess, my deepest conviction. It seems to me that this tissue of metaphors on the natural sciences dressed up as "social science," this anthropology, has shown as little capacity for agreement on the empirical adequacy of a theory as on its logical sufficiency. For unlike mathematics where "truth and the interest of men oppose not each other," as Hobbes said long ago, in social science nothing is indisputable because social science "compar-eth men and meddleth with their right and profit," so that "as often as reason is against a man, a man is against reason." The decisive differences between formalism and substantivism, as far as their ac­ceptance is at issue, if not so far as their truth, are ideological. Embodying the wisdom of native bourgeois categories, formal economics flourishes as ideology at home and ethnocentrism abroad. As against substantivism, it draws great strength from its profound compatibility with bourgeois society—which is not to deny, either, that the conflict with substantivism can become a confrontation of (two) ideologies.

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

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1318