Lecture 8: Economics, the Base of Culture

Question 1

The Base of Culture

Answer 1

• the base of culture is the economy
• human survival cannot exist unless:
  
  • you provision people with “goods” (i.e. food, clothing, etc.), valuables that can be distributed in society
  • you have ways to change the environment so it can support human life (e.g. building cities, tilling fields)
• to accomplish this, people work in groups
• how it’s accomplished by groups is studied by (anthropological) economics (i.e. economic anthropology); e.g. families, large groups

Question 2

Economics: “Regular” and Anthropological

Answer 2

• anthropologists aren’t interested in large-scale rules (i.e. macroeconomics)
  
  • more interested in very small (or small-ish) interactions, and they do this through field work (i.e. how they behave in real-life)
  • they use the ethnographic method (i.e. intensely observing and describing real life)
• the results are less generalizable in anthropology (vs. actual economics) because we don’t aim to find what’s valid for all of humanity; but it’s more true to life

Question 3

The Base and the Superstructure

Answer 3

• Karl Marx (1818-1883): economist, socialist, revolutionary socialist; father of the modern left
• a classic Marxist model features a triangle:
  
  • the base is the economy; i.e. means of the production and relations of production
  • the top is the superstructure (e.g. government, religion, education, culture, etc.)

Question 4

Means of Production

Answer 4

• natural resources; e.g. oil
• capital; e.g. tools, mines, factories, offices, etc.
• infrastructure

Question 5

Relations of Production

Answer 5

• the social relationships required by the economy
• coworker, lord/serf, employer/employee
• different relations of production in different economic systems
• Refer to Assigned Reading: Eller, Chapter 7

Question 6

History of Economic Systems

Answer 6

(Refer to Assigned Reading: Eller, Chapter 7)

• the first type of system we know of is foraging (i.e. hunting and gathering)
• next is pastoralism (e.g. herding, nomadism)
• then horticulture (e.g. slash and burn)
• and then (intensive) agriculture
• and industrialism; e.g. using large factories that create goods on a large scale and are distributing to a large population
• and next time, we’ll talk about post-industrial society; this is supposedly where we are today
• the important thing to know is that all of these systems co-exist, conflict, but still exist today

Question 7

Foraging

Answer 7

economic base:

• there’s not much manipulation of nature
• Upper Paleolithic (50-40k years ago): herd hunting, larger groups
• modern examples: Inuit, Australian aborigines

superstructures:

• egalitarian; not even formal chiefs exist
• rudimentary (mainly gender) division of labour
• sexual “freedom”
• informal authority
• little surplus to save and distribute
• the religion is nature-oriented (e.g. the ground, the wind, etc.); all of their livelihood is based off of nature, so they have a great respect for it
• natural objects may be imagined as living (i.e. animus)
  
  • e.g. the story-telling stone of the Ojibwa
  • e.g. rocks in Inuktitut

Question 8

Horticulture

Answer 8

economic base:

• began about 10k years ago
• there’s a greater interaction with the environment
• what used to be known as slash-and-burn
• practiced in Central and South American rain forests, and the Appalachian Mountains and the USA (historically); “tribal” Indians (in Northeastern India);
• and in Indonesian forests; this is controversial because these horticulturalists are being blamed for the destruction of the forests, when in fact it’s the loggers

superstructures:

• chiefs and hierarchy; the society’s less egalitarian than the foragers
• there’s a focus on natural cycles/seasons due to the success of their practices being dependent on the seasons
• harvest rituals, like in intensive agricultural practices
• fertility cults; you want the piece of land you’re farming to be fertile, so it’s an important issue for the land, and translates into importance for people too
• knowledge; they are starting to have knowledge of astronomy and solstices and maybe a calendar

Question 9

Pastoralism

Answer 9

economic base:

• Neolithic (12-10k years ago)
• these people are called the nomads, moving over a large territory (usually grasslands or desert)
• it’s probably older than horticulturalism, but it’s superstructures are more complex
• they depend on domesticated animals (e.g. sheep, goats, oxen, camels, yaks, etc.)
  
  • horsemanship; people rode around on horses to get around
  • Kokpar; it’s a sport where people in teams on horseback take a dead goat and try to drop it into a cement hole (the goal)
  • this game is still played in areas across Hungary to China where pastoralist roots are deeply entrenched
• because of the surplus that this way of life generates, it was possible to create larger settlements (societies), and therefore more hierarchy
• men own more of the means of production (e.g. animals, land to graze on)

superstructures:

• it is male dominant; this is where patriarchy developed
• unequal social status
• may have chiefs or even states and empires (e.g. the Mongols, Genghis Khan; the Ottomans or “Turks”)
• conflicts with neighbors; the animals are owned, but the land borders are not clearly drawn so you don’t know where yours ends and begins, and if the land can’t support you then you have to travel through someone else’s land when you’re moving
• powerful god(s) are often imagined in the sky
  
  • e.g. Abraham was a pastoralist god
• e.g. the Plains Indians (Sioux)

Question 10

(Intensive) Agriculture

Answer 10

economic base:

• began about 5-6k years ago
• (horticulture is already a type of agriculture, but intensive agriculture involves more tools and these settlers have the intention of staying)
• the means of production include a lot more tools than horticulture
• it radically changes the environment
• produced unprecedented surpluses
• centralized accumulation of wealth; the surplus accumulates in the hands of the people who control the distribution
• allows for concentrations of people unprecedented in size

relations of production:

• urban center(s) and periphery; most of the wealth comes to the urban centers and then distribution to the peripheries
• towns (cities): could have the court and noble residences, artisans, traders, priests, art workshops, theatre, musicians, and schools
• country: this is the periphery (rest of the land that’s not the city); land-owner lords, peasants (are a great majority of the population, >80%)
• market towns; people can go to the city to buy and sell goods
• feudalism and vassalage: this is a hierarchy of power; e.g. there’s a king or emperor who oversees all of the different lands (the vassal is under the king/emperor; the emperor is the king of kings), who has nobles (who are the vassals to the king), who has soldiers, etc.; this type of society is called a feudal society
• slavery or serfdom
• different forms of peasant ownership, including peasant cooperatives
• craft specialization; e.g. smiths, artisans
• development of long-distance trade (because there’s so much surplus)

superstructures:

• writing; large public buildings; (what we would now call) science; official art styles; full-time religious specialists (church power usually related to but different from state power); marriage changes and is more focused on family property and alliances (e.g. arranged marriages)

Question 11

Agriculturalists vs. Pastrolists

Answer 11

• they generally didn’t get along; if the pastoralists were having a bad year, their animals would come in and eat the agriculturalists’ corn (so to speak)
• there was a lot of conflict over land; they had very different ideas of land ownership
• but there’s also a cooperative exchange of products
• e.g. the Mongol Empire; the pastoral Mongols dominated agriculturalists along the Silk Road

e.g. the Tutsis and Hutus; conflict between these two groups in Rwanda and Burundi (two countries, originally one Belgian colony)

• originally probably pastoralists (Tutsis) and agriculturalists (Hutus)
• historically, there was cooperative exchange, with mild Tutsi domination
• when the Belgians came, they thought that the Hutus and Tutsis were two different people; the Belgians were said to be really tall, and were favored by the Belgians
• in reality, they were the exact same peoples (ethnically/racially)
• this mistake may have been due to the Bible, since there was a civilization like the Tutsis who wandered in from Egypt and seemed more civilized; the Belgians wanted to align themselves with the local power group
• the Hutus were seen as “typical black Africans”
• the recent legacy of this is that after a period in which the Tutsis were privileged, the Hutus revolted and there are wars/fights that still go on in the Eastern Congo