Economic Anthropology

James G. Carrier

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788214322
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Conventional economic thought sees the economy as the sum of market transactions carried out by rational individuals deciding how to allocate their resources among the various things on offer that would satisfy their desires. Economic anthropologists see things differently. For them, the focus is the activities, relationships and systems through which objects are produced, circulate among people and ultimately are consumed, which take different forms in different societies and even in different parts of the same society. In this way, economic anthropology takes the rational market actors of conventional economic thought and places them in the world of people, relationships, systems, beliefs and values that begins with production and ends with consumption. This accessible and authoritative introduction to the field of economic anthropology offers students a fresh and fascinating way of looking at the economic world.

1

Production and what is produced

Greedy work is work that is greedy of your time. In his novel The Firm, John Grisham describes it when he writes of the life of Mitch McDeere, a new member of a large law firm, working 12 or 14 hours at a stretch, 16 or 18 in crunch times, when all you can do at the end of the day is have a cold dinner and maybe sleep in the office. Jack Ma, the head of Alibaba, extols it, in the form of a 9–9–6 work culture: work from nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week. For a lot of people who work in WeWork premises, the slogan is “Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you are done”. Work is where we produce things, and in greedy work it seems as if a lot is being produced. For Mitch McDeere it might be wills or contracts. For people at Alibaba it might be a functioning cloud computer. For freelance people at WeWork it might be pieces of computer code or podcasts.

Seeing work as being about the production of things and services is the conventional view. Governments and economists track the productivity of a country’s workforce, the monetary value of what the average worker produces in a year; when companies try to make their workforce more productive they are trying to get their workers to produce more monetary value per person. Automation increases productivity when it replaces some workers with machines so that the same amount is produced by fewer people. Jack Ma does this simply by having the people at Alibaba work longer each day.

We recognize another way that work is about production. It is motivated, in the sense that it expresses an intent to achieve a goal, and the act of production and what is produced help to achieve it. For organizations such as Mitch McDeere’s law firm and Jack Ma’s Alibaba, the things produced are intended to be sold; when they are sold they generate money income, some of which goes to Mitch McDeere and Ma’s employees as pay. Of course, money income is not the only reason that people work to produce things. For instance, the people who left the cities of the East Coast to settle the American plains in the nineteenth century worked to produce a house that they could live in and a barn to hold their livestock and store their crops.

A little reflection, however, shows the limitation of this view of work and production. Yes, people work to make a product, whether wills and contracts, cloud computer systems or computer code and podcasts. Like the settler’s house and barn, however, what people work to produce often is something beyond the concrete product itself. One purpose of the work, that is, is to build a successful future for the worker, however that may be defined. For those whose aspirations are less lofty, or whose position is more tenuous, work is where they produce an income for themselves to get them through another week, and they may count themselves lucky to do so, even if they have to work 9–9–6: they need food to eat, clothes to wear and a place to sleep.

This view of production focuses on the things that are produced and the people directly involved: those doing the producing and, perhaps, those who employ them. Nevertheless, it excludes a lot of the people, ideas, relationships, processes and motives that are linked to what goes on. Approaching production in the way that most economic anthropologists do, which means paying attention to production’s social context, helps make these things visible.

One way to get at that approach is to take a view of production that extends beyond what is produced, the people doing the producing and the immediate intentions that motivate their activities. For one thing, the activities can be shaped by forces and factors external to them, in which case the activities will reflect those things and help make them seem self-evident, so that they become taken for granted, even if they are not what the producers intended or thought much about. A simple, imaginary example will illustrate what I mean.

A married couple with a young child living in, say, Baltimore or Liverpool have a number of demands on their time. They need to support themselves financially, keep house and look after their child, who is just starting school. If both parents are working for reasonable employers, they may be able to do all these things. If both are involved in greedy work, however, at, perhaps, a law firm and an architecture firm, they almost certainly will not.

They look at their situation, decide that something has to change and rearrange their lives accordingly. One of them loves the law and wants to stay at the greedy job and try to make it to partner in the firm. The other may decide that a future at a high-powered architecture firm is not that appealing, switch to a part-time job at a small and less demanding firm and take on the bulk of the responsibilities for their household and child. This rearrangement is a product of their work as surely as are the contracts produced by one of them and the building elevations and floor plans produced by the other. It is not, of course, something that either of them planned when they started to work or that either of them was hired to do but, rather, is an unintended consequence.

This couple are likely to see the rearrangement of their work and lives as a decision made freely by the two of them, one that reflects their individual skills and desires, their relationship and its history, their personalities and their sense of what they want. It is; but the two adults involved did not grow up in a vacuum, and they do not live in one. Rather, they were shaped by the society in which they live, which means the social arrangements, practices, beliefs and values in which they are immersed. As a consequence, their decision about rearranging things also is shaped by those factors.

That shaping does not mean that our couple blindly follow the common pattern. It does, however, increase the chance that their personal arrangement will echo it. Like many men in Baltimore and Liverpool, our imaginary husband has been brought up to value striving, achievement and the rewards that they can offer. Like many women in those places, our imaginary wife has been brought up to value as well personal relationships and caring for people. So, he stays in his job at the law firm and she moves to that part-time job. In any event, she noticed that there were few women at the top of the firm that she left, so she figured that she probably did not have much of a chance to get there.

As a consequence, their work produces something that has, on its face, nothing to do with contracts and architectural plans. That is, it produces specific gender relations, in which the male is more oriented to work outside the house and the female is more oriented to the house and work that goes on within it. In producing this in their own lives, their rearrangement helps to reproduce or recreate the social world around them, in which men strive to achieve at work while woman are more oriented to the household – a world in which women are fairly uncommon in the upper reaches of firms and professions. And in reproducing that world they make those gender positions and relations more common, to the point that they may become taken for granted and even seem natural.

I have pointed to some of the things that are not easy to see if we approach production in terms of which things of what monetary value are made, their making and the people directly involved. As I suggested, they are easier to see if we approach it in the way that economic anthropologists do, which means putting the production, or any other economic activity, and the people who do it in the relations, values and beliefs that are their larger social context. With this, we can begin to see people and their activities in terms of their relationship with other people and the things that they do and think, and begin to see what difference those relationships might make.

In the next few pages I want to show some of what this can mean in practice. I shall do so by describing aspects of the productive activities of people in three different places. Those people all need to produce in order to survive, and in technical terms the ways that they produce are likely to seem fairly straightforward. The social contexts in which they produce are different from each other, however, and from what is common in Western societies. Thus, they help to show how people in different settings can do things differently from what we might expect.

I said that I would describe people in three different places. One relates to villagers on a small island called Ponam, in Papua New Guinea. Another relates to peasant households in the uplands of Colombia. The third relates to coastal fishers in Negril, in Jamaica. Those people and places are of varying familiarity, so I describe them in varying detail. In addition, I describe them avoiding the “ethnographic present”, long common in much anthropological work – the use of the present tense in ethnography, the description of the people and places of the researcher’s fieldwork. Rather, I use the past tense, to avoid giving the impression that the practices and the people I describe are timeless and unchanging.

Ponam fishing

Ponam lies a short distance off the north-central coast of Manus, a large island some 270 kilometres or 170 miles to the north of the main island of New Guinea, itself just north of Australia. Ponam Island is small, only about 200 metres or 220 yards from the south shore to the north in its western part, which is where people lived when Achsah Carrier and I were there. Although the island is small, it is surrounded by a very large, shallow lagoon. Ponams spoke their own language, about as different from that of nearby people as English is from French. There were about 300 Ponams living on the island, and about 200 more were living in other parts of Papua New Guinea, overwhelmingly urban employees and their families or students (descriptions of Ponam are in Carrier & Carrier 1991; Carrier & Carrier 1989). Islanders’ main productive activity was fishing, and they thought of themselves as sea people. Every household had at least two or three canoes of different sizes, wooden outriggers that could be sailed, paddled and poled. Equally, in every household someone was likely to go fishing every two or three days.

I want to describe a common form of Ponam fishing, lawin, and I shall approach it first conventionally, attending only to the people who are working, the tasks that they are doing and the things that they are producing. People would undertake a lawin expedition when a school of fish was sighted in the lagoon or when they were running short of fish. An expedition involved anywhere from 15 to 50 people on seven to ten canoes, each one of which carried a pair of wood-framed nets, each net being about 20 feet or 6 metres wide and about 12 feet or 3.6 metres high. Fishermen (and lawin fishers overwhelmingly were men) paddled or poled their canoes and the nets that they carried out to where the school had been sighted or to an area of the lagoon where they thought that there were likely to be a lot of fish. They would get into the water with their nets and array them in the shape of a large semi-circle, which they walked through the water to gather the fish within it. They then closed the semi-circle into a circle and collapsed its sides to form two parallel lines of nets with the fish trapped between them. They lifted the nets from the water, extracted the fish trapped in them and put them in the canoes that had carried the nets. At the end of the expedition the canoes returned to the island, each canoe’s catch was divided equally among those involved with it and people took their share home.

It appears that lawin is a fairly simple way of producing food that is not very interesting. Broadening our view of it, however, reveals complexities. For one thing, people who wanted to produce fish could not just get canoes and nets and go. Rather, they needed the right to go, and that right depended on a person’s position in the kinship system, as was the case in many other forms of Ponam fishing. In principle that meant being a descendant through the male line of the person who first had the right to bring a net on an expedition. That person usually was at least two or three generations before the current holder of the right, and the right bore that ancestor’s name.

That “in principle” is important. There were four varieties of lawin, with seven to ten net rights in each, and not every right holder in the past had a son who had a son of his own, and so on. In other words, not every previous right holder had patrilineal descendants linking that holder to the present generation. The result was that occasionally in previous generations it was decided to pass net rights on to the descendants of daughters or to nephews, cousins or relatives who were even further afield. This meant that knowing who had the right to bring a net on an expedition required extensive knowledge of people’s genealogical relationship with the ancestors whose names were borne by the different rights.

To make matters worse, there were not all that many adult men living on the island and interested in fishing using lawin; they had other ways to get fish and other things to do with their time. In some cases this meant that the person who exercised the right to bring a net on an expedition did not actually possess the right, but was acting with the consent of the right holder. Moreover, the limited number of interested, adult men meant that the people who paddled or poled the canoe that carried the net and who walked the net through the water were not what they ideally should have been: descendants in some way or another of the ancestor whose name was attached to the net right. Rather, crew members often were linked to the person who had exercised the net right through marriage links in the present or previous generations.

On Ponam, then, this way of producing food was carried out in terms of kinship, the births and marriages that linked those ancestors, the individual islanders who claimed to hold the net rights in the present and those they recruited to help them. Further, those claims and that recruitment made visible and important the kin relationships between people, and so reaffirmed them, just as being involved in a lawin expedition reaffirmed one’s position in the kinship system and one’s identity as a kinsman. This meant that the fish that an individual took home after the expedition were an expression of that person’s identity in a web of identities in the kinship system. That production, in other words, did not just reflect the web of kin relations and identities; it also reproduced it.

In their productive activities, Ponam fishers and our imaginary married couple both reproduce aspects of the social life in which they are embedded: kinship in the case of the fishers and gender in the case of that couple. They differ, however, in important ways.

The couple saw their rearrangement of their lives and work as their own, voluntary decision, and it is unlikely that they consciously decided to conform to conventional gender expectations. There was nothing voluntary, however, in the way that Ponams saw the kinship relationships that justified people’s claim to be able to bring a net on an expedition. Rather, those relationships sprang from what people saw as the objective history of who married whom and had which children. So, in no way was adhering to the consequences of that history a person’s private decision. Attempting not to adhere would have produced laughter; repeated attempts would have produced outrage.

This points to another difference with our married couple. Although their decision about their lives and work may have reproduced conventional gender expectations, it is most unlikely that they saw their decision in terms of what they thought was right and proper for husbands and wives to do. On the other hand, islanders consciously espoused and obeyed, and so reproduced, that set of kin relationships and their importance in people’s identities and lives.

It is true that people in Europe and North America can enact and reproduce kinship and other social ties and identities in their productive work. David Halle (1984) describes this among those who worked in a chemical plant in the United States that he calls Imperium. He says that, of 121 blue-collar workers, 37 per cent were close relatives: “[T]‌here are twenty-three brothers and seven brothers-in-law. Ten men are cousins, twelve fathers or sons, and six uncles or nephews” (Halle 1984: 5). For the people he describes, then, kin relations and identities can be important for shaping people’s participation in production. For Halle’s workers, however, and unlike Ponams and their fishing, kinship confers no right to produce, for that arises elsewhere. Rather, links between close kin were the route through which information passed: information about a vacancy at the plant and the nature of the work, as well as information to the boss about the nature of the relative who would be applying for the job (this is described in Grieco 1987; an early, influential analysis is Granovetter 1973).

In technical terms, Ponam fishing is pretty simple. Viewed more anthropologically, however, it illuminates the nature of social relations and identities in Ponam society and how they affect people’s productive activities and are reproduced by them. This illumination in turn encourages us to ask if there is something similar in more familiar settings, such as Halle’s workers at Imperium. Similarity is there, but not identity, and the differences point to how different sorts of social relations can influence productive activity in different ways in different social systems.

Colombian peasants

Peasant production in upland Colombia is described in Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera’s Conversations in Colombia (1991). Agriculturalists in the eastern Andes worked land that ranges from relatively fertile fields at lower altitudes to fairly barren areas higher up. Whatever the altitude, their staple crop was potatoes. In addition, they were likely to own some forest land that they used for firewood, as well as livestock: cows for their milk and meat, oxen for ploughing. As with Ponam fishing, the technical aspects of their productive activities were fairly straightforward and likely to be familiar to people in the West, even if they know about them only from watching movies. Those peasants planted and harvested potatoes, tended livestock and cut trees. Like Ponam, however, the social context and organization of these peasants’ activi...