POOLING

The domestic segregation constructed into production and property is completed by an inner-directed circulation of the household prod­uct. An inevitable consequence of production at once specialized by sex and oriented to collective use, this centripetal movement of goods, differentiates the household economy from the world even as it reit­erates the group's internal solidarity. The effect is magnified where distribution takes the form of eating together, in a daily ritual of commensality that consecrates the group as a group. Usually the household is a consumption unit in this way. But at the least, house-holding demands some pooling of goods and services, placing at the disposition of its members what is indispensable to them. On one hand, then, the distribution transcends the reciprocity of functions, as between man and woman, upon which the household is established. Pooling abolishes the differentiation of the parts in favor of the coher­ence of the whole; it is the constituting activity of a group. On the other hand, the household is thereby distinguished forever from oth­ers of its kind. With these other houses, a given group might eventual­ly entertain reciprocal relations. But reciprocity is always a "between" relation: however solidary, it can only perpetuate the separate eco­nomic identities of those who so exchange.

Lewis Henry Morgan called the program of the domestic economy "communism in living." The name seems apposite, for householding is the highest form of economic sociability: "from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs"—from the adults that with which they are charged by the division of labor; to them, but also to the elders, the children, the incapacitated, regardless of their contri­butions, that which they require. The sociological precipitate is a group with an interest and destiny apart from those outside and a prior claim on the sentiments and resources of those within. Pooling closes the domestic circle; the circumference becomes a line of social and economic demarcation. Sociologists call it a "primary group"; people call it "home."

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1160