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ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Tuesday, September 30, 2003. Faces of Culture Video: Patterns of Subsistence Food Foragers and Pastoralists. Groups in Video:. !Kung Bushmen in Kalahari desert Mbuti pygmy in Zaire in Africa Netsilik Eskimo in Alaska Nuer in Africa's Sudan
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ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural AnthropologyTuesday, September 30, 2003 • Faces of Culture Video: • Patterns of Subsistence • Food Foragers and Pastoralists
Groups in Video: • !Kung Bushmen in Kalahari desert • Mbuti pygmy in Zaire in Africa • Netsilik Eskimo in Alaska • Nuer in Africa's Sudan • Nepali sherpas (with their zomo) • Basseri in Iran
ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural AnthropologyThursday, October 2, 2003 • Faces of Culture Video: • Patterns of Subsistence • Food Producers
Groups in Video: • Yucatec Maya ("slash-and-burn”) • Melanesian farmers (land-diving )ritual • Khmer in Angkor • North Americans & the Dust Bowl • Taiwanese and wet rice cultivation • Balinese
Some points from video: • Technology of foragers is not “simple” - very sophisticated and demanding • little division of labor - people control technology rather than vice versa 2. economic processes embedded in rest of social life 3. interconnectedness of technology and other cultural features
Foraging • A subsistence technology • An adaptation • A mode of production • The ancestral condition of our species
Marx on the Mode of Production, part 1“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy • In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage in the development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Marx on the Mode of Production, 2“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy • The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Labor and social production • Universal in human societies • Unique to human societies
Marx on Labor, part 1 from Das Kapital • We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement....
Marx on Labor, part 2 from Das Kapital • The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments....
Marx on Labor, part 3 from Das Kapital • No sooner does labour undergo the least development, than it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements and weapons. In the earliest period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have been bred for the purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments of labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and shells.
Marx on Labor, part 4 from Das Kapital • The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making animal.
Marx on Labor, part 5 from Das Kapital • Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. (Marx 1867:179-180)
Marx on Labor, part 6 from Das Kapital • Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. (Marx 1867:179-180)
nature of the labor process • expenditure of energy • transformation of nature into use values • use and manufacture of tools • Social relations of production: cooperation, sharing, competition, property. • spatial and temporal separation of production and consumption • culture: technology and the concept of what is to be produced
relationships within culture • Relations among three elements of • sociocultural systems. Lenski, Human Societies (1970) p.102
Societal Typology of Morgan & Engels Civilization Barbarism Savagery
ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural AnthropologyTuesday, October 7, 2003 • Faces of Culture Video: • Economic Anthropology
Groups in Video: • !Kung - generalized reciprocity • Yanomamo of Venezuela - balanced reciprocity • Trobriand Islanders of the Western Pacific (kula) • Mendi of the highlands of New Guinea - both balanced reciprocity (bartering bride price in pearl shells), and redistribution (cassowary contest) • Assante women in Ghana - the market • nomads in Afghanistan - the market
definition of economy: • formalist - allocation of scare resources to unlimited ends • substantivist - process of production, distribution, and consumption • While academic economists usually use a formalist definition of “economic,” anthropologists favor the substantivist definition.
Patterns of economic flow: • Reciprocity (gift giving) • Redistribution (taxes) • Market Exchange (money, shopping) • Householding (one’s own use)
Social thermodynamics: • Social thermodynamics is a way of studying the social relations of production, distribution, and consumption, how the total labor time of society is used to provide the goods and services essential to the members of society. • It provides a set of conceptual tools for penetrating the essential thermodynamic substratum that underlies all human life.
Social thermodynamics: • Bioenergy system • Behavioral energy system • Auxiliary energy system
Energy flow: • When goods are produced, a definite amount of labor time becomes embodied in them; this labor time is consumed when the goods are consumed. Labor energy thus flows from producer to consumer.
