Kinship and Economic Intensity

The kinship relations prevailing between households must affect their economic behavior. Descent groups and marital alliances of different structure, even interpersonal kin networks of different pat­tern, should differentially encourage surplus domestic labor. And with varying success, too, kinship relations counter the centrifugal movement of the DMP, to determine a more or less intensive exploita­tion of local resources. Here then is an idea in some ways banal, in others outrageous, but nevertheless indicative of the kind of problem worth further research: all else being equal, Hawaiian kinship is a more intensive economic system than Eskimo kinship. Because, sim­ply, the Hawaiian system has a greater degree of classification in the Morganian sense: a more extensive identification of collateral with lineal relatives.

Where Eskimo kinship categorically isolates the immediate family, placing others in a social space definitely outside, Hawaiian extends familial relations indefinitely along collateral lines. The Hawaiian household economy risks an analogous integration in the community of households. Everything depends on the strength and spread of solidarity in the kinship system. Hawaiian kinship is in these respects superior to Eskimo. Specifying in this way a wider cooperation, the Hawaiian system should develop more social pressure on households of greater labor resources, especially those of the highest c/w ratios. All other things equal, then, Hawaiian kinship will generate a greater surplus tendency than Eskimo. It will be able also to sustain a higher norm of domestic welfare for the community as a whole. Finally, the same argument implies a greater variation in domestic per capita output for Hawaiian, and a smaller overall variation in intensity per worker.

Besides, the Hawaiian system probably exploits a given territory at a higher level, closer to the technical capacity. For kinship is opposed to the underproduction of the DMP in another way, not just to the centripetal domestic concern for livelihood but to the centrifugal tendency of household dispersion, hence not only to the domestic underuse of labor but to the collective underuse of territory. Against the constituted dispersion of the DMP the system of kinship erects a peace of greater or less effect; so, a corresponding concentration of households and exploitation of resources. The Fijians, who as we have seen conceive a non relative as a stranger, hence as a potential enemy and victim, understand by their term "to be acquainted" (veikilai) also the meaning "to be related" (veiweikani); and they have no more common word for "peace" than "to live as kinsmen" (tiko vakavei-weikani). Here is one of several primitive versions of that contract lacking in the DMP, a modus Vivendi where the means of force and production remain segmentary and unalienated. But again different kinship systems, varying in their powers of attraction, must permit varying degrees of spatial concentration. They overcome the fragmen­tation of domestic production in different measure, and to that extent determine capacities of territorial occupation and exploitation.

Still, the kinship solidarities of primitive societies cannot be undif­ferentiated, given the inherent cleavages of the domestic mode of production. Even Hawaiian kinship is only formally a universal famil­iarity; in practice it continually knows invidious distinctions of social distance. The household is never entirely submerged in the larger community, nor are domestic ties ever free from conflict with wider kin relationships. This is a permanent contradiction of primitive socie­ty and economy. But it is not an apparent contradiction. Normally it is obscured, repressed by sentiments of sociability that extend to the far reaches of kinship, mystified by an uncritical ideology of reciproci­ty, above all dissimulated by a continuity of social principles from the family to the larger community, a harmony of organization that makes the lineage seem the household writ large and the chief father to his people. The discovery of the contradiction in the normal course of primitive society therefore takes an act of ethnographic will. Only occasionally comes a crisis, a crise revelatrice , to lay bare the structural opposition beyond any possibility of mistaking it. In the absence of that rare chance—or of close observation of the nuances of "reciprocity" (see Chapter 5)—one has recourse at first to certain ethnographic curiosities, proverbs for example, whose elliptical sa-gesse may put a construction of paradoxes on what seems otherwise a broad sociability.

Thus the same Bemba who define a relative as someone to whom you give food also define a witch as someone "who comes and sits in your house and says, 'I expect you are going to cook soon. What a fine lot of meat you have today,' or 'I expect the beer will be ready this afternoon,' or some such remark" (Richards, 1939, p. 202). Rich­ards reports the artful dodges often employed by Bemba housewives to avoid obligations to share: the concealment of beer upon the ap­pearance of an elderly visiting relative, then met with an, "Alas, Sir, we poor wretches. We have nothing to eat" (ibid.).¹⁰

10. In the same vein, among Ituri Pygmies: "When the hunt returns to camp there is immediate excitement as those who stayed behind crowd around for tales of all that happened, and maybe for a few tidbits of raw meat. In the confusion, men and women alike but particularly women, may be seen furtively concealing some of their spoils under the leaves of their roofs, or in empty pots nearby. For although there will have been some sharing on the scene, there is always more back in the camp, and family loyalty is not that subject to band loyalty that there is no cheating" (Turnbull, 1965, p. 120; cf. Marshall, 1961, p. 231).

For the Maori, the conflict between the household and larger inter­ests was current byword: a "squarely-faced opposition," Firth wrote in an early article on the Maori proverbs, a "direct contradiction between sayings which inculcate hospitality and the reverse, liberality and its opposite" (1926, p. 252). On one hand, hospitality "was one of the highest virtues of the native . . . inculcated into all and gained the greatest approval. On the practice of it depended to a large extent reputation and prestige" (p. 247). But Firth was also quick to note a whole set of popular dicta to the contrary. Here were proverbs that privileged an enlightened self-interest over concern for others, the retention of food over its distribution. "Raw food is still possessed," went the adage, "cooked it goes to another"—advising that food be eaten underdone on pain of being obliged to share it out. Or again, "Broil your rat [a favorite Maori dish] with its fur on, lest you be dis­turbed by someone." One proverb recognizes in the noble act of sharing a large residue of discontent:

Another says this of the irksome cadging of relatives:

—the man who during the winter planting season is only a distant relative suddenly becomes a son at the autumn harvest.

These contradictions of the Maori proverbial wisdom translate a real conflict of society—"two diametrically opposed principals of conduct working side by side. ..." Firth, however, did not pause to analyze them as such in their capacity as social facts. He adopted instead that kind of "naive anthropology"¹¹ conventional to Economic Science: it was at base an opposition between human nature and culture, between the "impulse of the individual to seek his own advan­tage" and "the expressed morality of the social group." Perhaps Levi-Strauss would say the model is after all the Maori's own, for proverb does hold that raw is to cooked as possession is to sharing—that is, nature is to culture as the refusal to share is to reciprocity. In any event, Firth's later detailed analysis of Maori economy (1959a) makes it clear why the opposition of principle was drawn specifically along the line distant relative/son. It was a conflict between extend­ed kinship and the homebred self-interest of the whanau, the house­hold, "the basic unit of the Maori economy":

The whanau held group-ownership of certain types of property, and also as a body exercised rights to land and its products. Tasks requiring a small body of workers and co-operation of a not very complex order were per­formed by the whanau, and the apportionment of food was largely man­aged on this basis. Each family group was a cohesive, self-contained unit, managing its own affairs, both social and economic, except as these affected village or tribal policy. Members of a whanau, on the whole, ate, and dwelt together in a distinct group (Firth, 1959a, p. 139)¹²

11. The phrase is L. Althusser's. See his discussion of "L'objet du Capital" (Althus-ser, Ranciere, et al; 1966, Vol. 2).

12. Firth's interpretation of the social conflict of interest as an opposition between the individual and the society unfortunately lends itself to the grand mystification now prevailing in comparative economics, for the elaboration of which anthropologists join with economists to prove that savages are often moved by a crass self-concern, even as businessmen are pursuing higher ends: hence people everywhere act on mixed "economic" and "noneconomic" motives, and, the classic economizing behavior being everywhere the same in principle, it is universally valid in analysis. On one hand, if the "native" engages in reciprocal exchange to no net material increment, still he may be looking toward a tangible utility, inasmuch as the gift given now when it can be afforded may be returned later on when it is most needed. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie have been known to contribute to charity and otherwise derive spiritual benefits from material profits. The objective returns to a given deployment of resources, whether to maximum material gain or some other use, are thus confused with the economic subject's own filial relation to the process. Both are called "utilities" or "ends." The de facto returns in this way confounded with the subjective satisfactions, and the motivations of the subject with the nature of his activity, one is permitted to ignore the real differences in the way goods are handled in favor of apparent resemblances in the satisfactions gained. The attempt of the "formalist school" to detach the principle of individual maximization from its bourgeois context and spread it around the world is fatally marked by this confusion. Cf. Burling, 1962; Cook, 1966; Robbins, 1935; Sah-lins, 1969.

The position of the household in these primitive societies is one of constant dilemma and continuous manoeuvre, temporizing always between domestic welfare and broader obligations toward kinsmen in the hope of satisfying the latter without menacing the former. Apart from the paradoxes of the proverbial wisdom, this tug of war does receive one general expression: in the nuances of traditional "reciproc­ity." For despite the connotation of equivalence, ordinary reciprocal exchanges are often unbalanced; that is, on the strictly material plane. Repayments are only more or less equal to the initial gifts, and they are only more or less direct in time. The variation is correlated notably with kinship distance. Balance is the material relation of distant kin­ship; closer to home, exchange becomes more disinterested; there is tolerance of delays or even of complete failure to reciprocate. To observe that kinship plays out in social force as it moves out in social distance is not a sufficient explanation or even a very logical one considering the wide extension of familial categories. More pertinent is the segmentary separation of economic interests. What gives this dissipation of kinship solidarity function and definition, makes meaningful such distinctions as "distant relative"/"son," is the eco­nomic determination of home as the place where charity begins. The first premise of "kinship distance" is the DMP. Thus, all the discus­sion of Chapter 5 on the tactical play of reciprocity can be taken as a case in present point.

Despite the constituted contradiction between the household and the larger kindred, instances of structural breakdown that reveal the conflict are few in the primitive societies. All the more valuable, then, Firth's succeeding work on Tikopia, especially the restudy (with Spil-lius) of 1953-54, when he chanced upon this people celebrated for their hospitality during a trial of famine (Firth, 1959b). Nature had dealt Tikopia a double blow: hurricanes struck in January 1952 and March 1953, doing great damage to houses, trees and standing crops. Food shortages followed, in severity varying from district to district and time to time; generally, the worst occurred between September and November 1953, a period the ethnographers describe as "fam-ine."Still, the people on the whole survived, as did the social system. Yet the first was not entirely due to the second. Kinship beyond the household held on in the formal code, but the code was being system­atically honored in the breach, so that even as Tikopian society man­aged a kind of moral continuity it showed itself founded on a basic discontinuity. It was a revealatory crisis. Firth and Spillius speak of "atomization," of the fragmentation of larger kin groups and "closer integration" of the household. "What the famine did," Firth wrote, "was to reveal the solidarity of the elementary family" (1959b, p. 84; emphasis mine).

Economic decomposition set in on several fronts, in property and distribution most notably. Even in planning for recovery after the first hurricane, it was (apart from the chiefs) every household for itself: "the use of resources was nearly in every case intended to safeguard family interests.... The range of calculation rarely went beyond this" (p. 64). Attempts were made to abrogate traditional kinship privileges of access to family garden areas (p. 70). Land held in common by close kinsmen became a cause of proprietary contention, sometimes pitting brother against brother, sometimes resulting in a definitive division and precise bounding of fraternal claims (Firth, 1959b; Spillius, 1957, p. 13).

The movement in the sphere of food distribution was more compli­cated. Exchange showed a predictable pulsation between an expan­sion of sociability and generosity under trial, and a reversion to domestic isolation as the trial turned into disaster.13

13. This pulsation is discussed further in Chapter S. It is controlled on one hand by the rule that generosity tends to be more widely extended when differences in wealth appear within the community, and on the other, by the ability of the social system, given its constituted solidarities, to support this exceptional generosity, an ability that de­creases as the general hardship increases.

At those times and in the places food shortage was less severe, the household econo­my would even efface itself: closely related families suspended their separate existences to pool supplies in a collective oven. But as the crisis deepened, an opposed tendency set in, made up of two comple­mentary trends: decrease in sharing and increase of theft.¹⁴

14. In the terms adopted in Chapter S, pooling and generalized reciprocity were now declining in the social sphere, as negative reciprocity extended its range.

Firth esti­mated that theft reached a level fivefold higher than its incidence during his first visit twenty-five years earlier, and where formerly it was restricted mainly to "semi-luxuries" now it was largely theft of staples—nor were ritual crops immune, or members of chiefly houses guiltless. "Nearly everyone was stealing and nearly everyone was robbed" (Spillius, 1957, p. 12). Meanwhile, after the initial wave of sociability, the frequency and social range of sharing progressively declined. Instead of food, visitors got only apologies, perhaps disin­genuous. Supplies were hidden from kinsmen, even locked up in boxes and someone left in the house to guard them. Firth describes such un-Tikopian behavior as this:

In some cases the kinsman would suspect there was food in his host's house; he would sit and chat and wait, hoping that the host would give way and use it. But nearly always the host would hold out until the guest had gone before unlocking the box and taking out the food (Firth, 1959b, p. 83).

Not that there was a war of every family against every family. The Tikopians remained polite. As Firth wrote, manners continued if morals degenerated. But the crisis did test certain structural toleranc­es. It exposed the weakness of that celebrated "We, the Tikopia" by the strength of the private household. The household proved a fortress of self-interest which in the crisis cut itself apart, raised its social drawbridges—when it was not engaged in sallies against the gardens of kith and kin.

The DMP has to be counteracted and transcended. This not simply for technical reasons of cooperation, but because the domestic econo­my is as unreliable as it is apparently functional, a private nuisance and a public menace. The greater kinship system is one important way it is counteracted. But the continuing hold of the domestic economy then leaves its mark on the whole society: a contradiction between the infrastructure and the superstructure of kinship that is never entirely suppressed but continues in subtle ways to influence the everyday disposition of goods, and under stress may surface to put the whole economy in a state of segmentary collapse.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1067