APOLOGIES FOR GENERALITY

In a confrontation with a particular ethnographic case of underpro­duction, no abstract explanation can be as satisfactory as an account­ing of the specific forces in play: the existing social and political relations, rights of property, ritual impediments to the deployment of labor, and the like.²⁵

25. Of the Lele, for example, nothing said here will be as satisfactory as Mary Douglas's excellent analysis (1960).

But insofar as the several forms of underproduc­tion noted earlier are generally discovered in the primitive economies, no particular analysis of them will satisfy either. For then they belong to the nature of the economies at issue, and in that capacity must be interpreted from equally general conditions of economic organization. Such is the analysis attempted here.

Yet the general only exists in particular forms. So the well-known methodological reservation of a well known social anthropologist re­mains pertinent: what is the use, he asked, of putting into comparison a society you have not first thoroughly understood? To this a col­league of mine once replied, as we walked along a dim academic corridor: "How can you understand a society you have not first compared?" This unhappy conjuncture of truths seems to leave an­thropology in the position of a railroad engineer in the state of Con­necticut, where (I am told) there is a law on the books to the effect that two trains moving in opposite directions along parallel tracks must, when they meet, come to a complete stop, and neither one may start up again until the other has passed out of sight. Undaunted anthropologists adopt cunning devices to break the impasse; for exam­ple, generalization by means of the "ideal type." The "ideal type" is a logical construct founded at once on pretended knowledge and pretended ignorance of the real diversity in the world—with the mys­terious power of rendering intelligible any particular case. The solu­tion has a dignity equal to the problem. Perhaps then it will excuse this chapter, which is written in the genre.

But how to justify certain other tactics even less respectable? From time to time the discussion will take clear leave of "reality," ignoring the apparent facts for what it is pleased to consider "the permanent fact." Penetrating beyond kinship, ritual, chieftainship—in sum, the main institutions of primitive society—it claims to see in the house­hold system the first principles of economic performance. Yet the domestic economy cannot be "seen" in isolation, uncompromised by the greater institutions to which it is always subordinated. And even more reprehensible than this analytic arrogance, although in a way its inevitable result, the argument will be discovered on occasion in a scandalous flirtation with the state of nature—not exactly the latest anthropological approach. Philosophers who have examined the foun­dations of society, Rousseau said, have all felt the need to return to the state of nature, but none of them ever got there. The master thereupon proceeded to repeat the failure, but so magnificently this time as to leave the conviction that is really was useful to speak of things "that no longer exist, that perhaps never existed, that probably shall never exist, and yet of which it is necessary to have correct ideas in order to better judge our present condition."

But then, even to speak of "the economy" of a primitive society is an exercise in unreality. Structurally, "the economy" does not exist. Rather than a distinct and specialized organization, "economy" is something that generalized social groups and relations, notably kin­ship groups and relations, do. Economy is rather a function of the society than a structure, for the armature of the economic process is provided by groups classically conceived "noneconomic." In partic­ular, production is instituted by domestic groups, these ordinarily ordered as families of one kind or another. The household is to the tribal economy as the manor to the medieval economy or the corpora­tion to modern capitalism: each is the dominant production-institu­tion of its time. Each represents, moreover, a determinate mode of production, with an appropriate technology and division of labor, a characteristic economic objective or finality, specific forms of proper­ty, definite social and exchange relations between producing units— and contradictions all its own.²⁶

26. "Mode of production" is here differently employed than by Terray (following Althusser and Balibar) in his important work Le Marxisme devant les societesprimitives (1969). Apart from the obvious difference in attention to superstructural "instances," the main contrast concerns the theoretical importance accorded various forms of cooperation, that is, as constituting corporate structures in control of productive forces over and against the domestic units. Such an importance is here refused, and from this divergence follow many of the others. Nevertheless, in spite of these significant differ­ences, it will be obvious that the present perspective joins with Terray's on many points, and also with that of Meillassoux (1960; 1964), which was the basis for Terray's work.

In brief, to explain the observed disposition toward underproduction in the primitive economies, I would reconstruct the "independent domestic economy" of Karl Bucher and earlier writers—but relocated now somewhat chez Marx, and redecorated in a more fashionable ethnography.

For the domestic groups of primitive society have not yet suffered demotion to a mere consumption status, their labor power detached from the familial circle and, employed in an external realm, made subject to an alien organization and purpose. The household is as such charged with production, with the deployment and use of labor-power, with the determination of the economic objective. Its own inner relations, as between husband and wife, parent and child, are the principal relations of production in society. The built-in etiquette of kinship statuses, the dominance and subordination of domestic life, the reciprocity and cooperation, here make the "economic" a modali­ty of the intimate. How labor is to be expended, the terms and prod­ucts of its activity, are in the main domestic decisions. And these decisions are taken primarily with a view toward domestic content­ment. Production is geared to the family's customary requirements. Production is for the benefit of the producers.

I hasten to add two reservations, which are also two final apologies for generality.

First, the convenient identification of "domestic group" with "fam­ily" that I allow myself is too loose and imprecise. The domestic group in the primitive societies is usually a family system, but this is not always so, and where it is, the term "family" must cover a variety of specific forms. Households of a community are sometimes morpho­logically heterogenous: apart from families, they include other kinds of domestic units composed, for example, of persons of a given age-class. Again, although it is also comparatively rare, families may be completely submerged in domestic groups the dimensions and struc­ture of a lineage. Where the household is a family system, still the forms vary from nuclear to extended, and within the latter category from polygynous through matrilocal, patrilocal, and a variety of other types. Finally, the domestic group is internally integrated in different manners and degrees, as may be judged by the patterns of daily cohabitation, commensality and cooperation. Although the essential qualities of production to be discussed—dominance of the sexual di­vision of labor, segmentary production for use, autonomous access to productive means, centrifugal relations beween producing units-appear to hold across these formal variations, the proposition of a domestic mode of production is surely a highly ideal type. And if one is nevertheless permitted to speak of a domestic mode of production, it is always and only in summary of many different modes of domes­tic production.

Secondly, I do not suggest that the household everywhere is an exclusive work group, and production merely a domestic activity.

Local techniques demand more or less cooperation, so production may be organized in diverse social forms, and sometimes at levels higher than the household. Members of one family may regularly collaborate on an individual basis with kith and kin from other houses; certain projects are collectively undertaken by constituted groups such as lineages or village communities. But the issue is not the social composition of work. Larger working parties are in the main just so many ways the domestic mode of production realizes it­self. Often the collective organization of work merely disguises by its massiveness its essential social simplicity. A series of persons or small groups act side by side on parallel and duplicate tasks, or they labor together for the benefit of each participant in turn. The collec­tive effort thus momentarily compresses the segmentary structure of production without changing it permanently or fundamentally. Most decisive, cooperation does not institute a sui generis produc­tion-structure with its own finality, different from and greater than the livelihood of the several domestic groups and dominant in the production process of the society. Cooperation remains for the most part a technical fact, without independent social realization on the level of economic control. It does not compromise the autonomy of the household or its economic purpose, the domestic management of lahor-power or the prevalence of domestic objectives across the so­cial activities of work.

These apologies offered, I pass to the description of the principal aspects of the domestic mode of production (DMP), with a view fixed to the implications of this mode for the character of the economic performance.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 937