Like other anthropological subspecies of its kind, each having to do with a distinct subdivision of a cultural order—political anthropology, legal anthropology, medical anthropology, etc.—the field of economic anthropology has changed almost beyond recognition since the appearance of Stone Age Economics in 1972. So many and diverse are these changes, it would require another book rather than a new preface to reflect upon them; hence I confine myself here to certain issues and societies of the kind that were central to the original edition. In this connection the changes in the subdiscipline have seemingly been negative, if not fatal, as witness to the fact that general university courses offered under the title “Economic Anthropology” are becoming increasingly quaint and correspondingly rare. Something similar could be said for “Political Anthropology” and “Legal Anthropology,” and for similar reasons. Not that the interest in the many social varieties of material or political life has slackened, so much as what had been confidently called “the economy” or “the political system” is being rethought as “the culture.” Rather than a separate sphere of existence, economic activity is perceived as encompassed in cultural order. Hence it needs to be understood in the relative terms of a given mode of human existence: as the expression, in a material register, of the values and relations of a particular form of life. Here is “the economic” as a function rather than a structure—let alone the all-determining infrastructure. So Stephen Gudeman, Richard Wilk, and other leading scholars of the old school are bringing us into a new era of “cultural economics.” I would like to think of Stone Age Economics as an early contribution to that desirable end.
Although it cannot be claimed even now that the revolution has been accomplished, the three decades since the first edition of this book have been witness to many worldly and intellectual realizations of the cultural constitution of material practice. Paradoxically, something good to that effect came out of the perverse role attributed to “culture” in undoing the best laid plans of modernization and economic development experts. As the saying goes, developing countries, with American help, never develop. Almost always the usual suspect is the local “culture.” The people’s culture is what’s the matter with them: an “impediment” to (bourgeois) economic rationality and progress—thus to becoming happy and good, just like us. (The alternative, rarely contemplated except by the local people, would be to define economic development as the material security and enrichment of their own way of life.) But then, economic anthropology had its own built-in ethnocentrism, likewise amounting to a structural contradiction, as it insisted on analytically separating out “the economy” in societies where there was none. In traditional Fiji or Tierra del Fuego there was no differentiated, self-regulating economic domain: no purely pragmatic sphere of relationships on the (ideal-typical) model of the capitalist-market system. By supposing more or less by definition that there was such a thing, economic anthropology was burdened from the beginning with an ethnographic category mistake. But the real imperialism that involved imposing our cultural system on Fijians and others proved to be bad enough; we need not duplicate it in the form of anthropological theory.
The traditional economic terms of Fijians were not what our economic science would recognize as such. Their economic terms were “chiefs” (the recipients of tributes and dispensers of largesse), “sister’s son” (a specially privileged relative), “be of good heart my kinsmen” (a near-imperative solicitation of material help), “sea people” (specialized clans of fishers and sailors), “whale teeth” (the preeminent valuables), “border allies” (contracted by gifts), “war god” (subject of lavish offerings), etc. Such were the famous relations of production, distribution, and consumption, organizing the exploitation of nature and the provisioning of society according to the meaningful values of persons and the objects of their existence. By this cultural praxis, the material forces and circumstances were given specifically Fijian effects. How to understand the division of labor by sex in the coastal regions of the Fiji Islands—a significant aspect of the relations of production? Start with the symbolic proportion that men are to women as sea is to land and exterior to interior. In local terms, it follows that the farming of the bush and the fishing of the deep sea are men’s work; the gathering (as of firewood) around the village and netting fish in the lagoon are women’s domains. If I had the space and readers the patience, it could be shown that the values thus organizing production were encoded throughout the culture, from cosmogonic myths to the rituals of kingship and the structures of domestic space. Production is an onto-logic of people, places, and things that brings to bear the entire cultural scheme on the most elementary material activities. Yet the distinctively Fijian organization of their islands is hardly the only one possible. And however prudently Fijians as individuals operate with the values of their cultural scheme, it can hardly be argued that their values—the superiority of the sea, the divinity of the chief, the rights of the sister’s son to his maternal uncle’s goods, the material benefits from providing and consuming human sacrifices—that their values themselves represent a maximization of the material utilities. Rationality operates within a relative cultural order which for its part has its own reasons.
Still at the present moment, marked by the triumphant global advance of neoliberal ideology, the understandings of a “cultural economics,” like the cultural understandings of the peoples concerned, have to make headway against the strong counterclaims of pecuniary utility and market rationality. There seems to be a growing neo-Durkheimian agreement in the academy, including many anthropologists who ought to know better, to perceive the traditional non-Western economies as some hybrid mixture of individual rationality on the one hand and socio-cultural order on the other. Human beings are double and divided, said Durkheim, composed of the egocentric desires inherent in their own nature and the moral constraints they derive from society. (Society as the diffuse suppression of the libidinous subject: you can see where Foucault and Freud were coming from.) In the same way, economic life is too often understood as a contest between self-satisfaction and social constraint, or in other words, economizing within the local rules of the game. The explanation has the advantage of being fairly foolproof, since the economically rational and the cultural cum irrational are contradictory, so that in some combination or other they can explain anything and everything. If you’re not maximizing material utility, you must be satisfying some other, purely social value. The problematic even has the added advantage of presenting its self-contradictions in the persuasive form of tautologies.
But the modern consensus integrating the cultural and the rational only appears to do so. In practice, the cultural order is subsumed in practical rationality inasmuch as everything is reduced to the bourgeois-like strategizing of self-interested subjects—the cultural conditions only coming into the account in the traduced form of personal satisfactions. The hybrid problematic has been in trouble from the beginning because of its attachment to solipsisms of ancient memory. It wants to define the economic object of study—in its origins, materials, and institutional forms, a thoroughly social phenomenon, and accordingly social in its individual expressions—from the thoroughly bourgeois standpoint of how individuals go about acquiring and disposing of the material means of their personal existence. How then to involve the culture in the rational allocation of scarce means against alternative ends so as to derive the greatest possible satisfactions? The problem is that the rational and the cultural belong to incommensurable orders of discourse: the one a practical calculus of individual action, the other referring to social forms such as matrilineal clans, ritual obligations, relations of hierarchy, of family, of devotion, or whatever is organizing the provisioning of the society. The only way they can be brought together under the description of rational action is to translate the cultural conditions into so many desires and preferences of the self-satisfying subject. The cultural thus disappears as such, in its attributes of matrilineal descent or chiefly dues, to reappear as motives in the possession of the individual, as though he or she were their author as well as their master.
Indeed this mode of intellectual production would be good for any cultural content. The Trobriander who gives away half his yam harvest to his sister’s husband and counts on receiving half the crop of his wife’s brother is acting prudently under the circumstances, inasmuch as he would be worse off socially if he did otherwise, even as he is doing well for himself by acquiring a certain moral esteem at no great material expense. Thus does the specific form of matrilineal affiliation in the Trobriands reappear as a universal disposition of rational choice. True, Trobriand culture gets lost in the translation, but in compensation the economizing formula will work just as well for the Fijian chief who allows himself to be pillaged of European trade goods by his uterine nephew, the Hawaiian chief who hoards up foreign goods to the point of conspicuous waste, or the Kwakiutl chief who distributes such stuff as generously as possible. All are acting with an eye to their own advantage under the cultural circumstances. The only difference among them is the cultural circumstances—and accordingly the several economic outcomes. But the several cultural logics that would have to be examined to account for these outcomes have already been assumed and mystified as the subjective dispositions of the rational actors. Thus is the anthropology of it all recuperated by a classic economism—that had always considered culture to be an “exogenous factor” in any case. For too long, economic science has been getting away with categorizing the cultural forms that order the economy as “non-economic.”
Anyhow the sclerotic opposition of economic rationality and culture, and worse yet the aged conceit that the West functions freely on the basis of the former while the Rest are in thrall to the latter, are self-congratulatory mystifications—with the undeniable virtue of upholding civilization and education as we know them. They are mystifications not only because other peoples are prudent enough with their material resources, but because our rationality is grounded in equally relative and nonutilitarian schemes of cultural value. True, the round-robin circulation of yam harvests in the Trobriand islands to no net material change except the losses in time and energy would seem irrational by our economic lights. But the so-called returns in social values to one side, even in the strong utilitarian sense of realizing material benefits from the expenditure of time and energy, the Trobrianders (like everyone else) are surely acting advantageously all things considered; for if their irrational culture had them running at a net loss in such respects, they would not have lived to become the prophets of such religion.
On the other hand, the commodification of everything in our (capitalist) existence, requiring us to submit all that we do and want to a pecuniary calculus, only disguises the fact that this material rationality is dependent on a vast system of logico-meaningful attributes of things and relationships of people. Much of this cultural order is indeed subconscious, a matter of habitus: the way that shoppers in the supermarket make (rational) choices between different meats, poultry, or fish according to such criteria as the necessity of having something “different” than last night’s dinner—“difference” being determined from a complex typology of main dishes and forms of food preparation; or again, the way one chooses to buy prime rib rather than spare ribs, or a rack of lamb rather than hamburger, because tonight happens to be a special occasion not an outdoor barbecue. It is not nutritional utility either that associates certain cuts of beef with some social situations and certain cuts of pork with others. It is the large (largely unconsidered) code of motivated relationships between men and animals prevailing among the Western natives. Nor would the material utilities of clothing govern the differences in styles of dress that mark the social distinctions between men and women, holidays and ordinary days, businessmen and policemen, work and leisure, Farwesterners and Middlewesterners, adults and teenagers, debutante balls and discos—think of all the ways clothes signify. Granted that the producers are always looking to invent new differentiations for their own profits; all the more reason that they have to operate on the same cultural wavelengths as the consumers.
In a different way but to the same effect as the material practices of the Fijian or Trobriand Islanders, the capitalist system of pecuniary rationality is the implementation of a larger system of cultural value. In the West as in the Rest, rationality is an expression of the culture, of its meaningful sysem of utilities, not the antithesis. To understand our economy requires the same kind of anthropological sensibility we bring to the study of others. We are one of the others.
Forget economic anthropology. We need a truly anthropological economics.
Marshall Sahlins 2003