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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783718528 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/1997 |
| Series: | Anthropology, Culture and Society |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 544 KB |
About the Author
Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and past President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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CHAPTER 1
PRODUCTION
This chapter will begin by presenting what is often thought of as the most inescapably material and objective part of the production process: the environment. The argument will develop eventually into a critique of the naive ahistorical notions of a 'given' natural environment. I will support instead the perspective that the environment is always the product of social historical processes. A similar critique will be presented for 'technology', the very material mediation between humans and their environment. The last two sections of the chapter will focus on social relations that effect differentiation around 'production'. Here also I will try to show, for example, that gender-linked divisions of labour are not natural. The chapter will end with a long discussion about the concept and the realities of 'work' in contemporary societies. This will bring us unhesitatingly, I hope, to the conclusion that the bounded region of 'production' should give way to a more wide-ranging framework.
THE ECOSYSTEM
Space; resources; populations
Economic activities are those which are directed toward the satisfaction of material needs in human populations. This perspective presupposes the existence of a given 'natural' context, an environment, where human groups dwell, which is there to be acted upon and from which they can extract what is needed for a living. The environment in turn will respond to human action triggering feedback responses affecting in one way or another the different species that share a defined space. From this perspective humans are mainly treated as just one species interacting with other species in space and through time. Exchanges of energy are the link which relates living beings, and these occur in a certain, predictable way. The methodological framework is that of a system, where clearly distinguishable elements are related in what is meant to be a functioning totality. The underlying idea is that, left to itself, the system tends toward equilibrium, although not static equilibrium. It follows from this that the species adapts in the ecosystem to environmental changes brought about by the effective energy exchanges through time and the unpredictable catastrophes – discontinuities – that can befall any system. Adaptation to the changing environment leads to a renewed unstable equilibrium. Transformation is thus part of ecosystems. It is regular, however, because the effects of elementary exchanges can be described, and quantitative variations thereof may then have predictable results in the overall system. These assumptions should be thought of as the most materialistic pole of an approach to economic anthropology. It is both a useful starting point and a methodological device. We will see in the following chapter how, in fact, the context that constrains and is acted upon by human beings in their search for a livelihood is a social and historical one, where cultural and material forces are entangled in a dialectical process of continuous transformation.
From this human ecology perspective, then, the environment can be defined as a space where human and other species' populations exchange energy. For humans, this exchange becomes a matter of harnessing resources. What is understood as 'space' and 'resources' must be related to human populations, that is, social processes – as distinct from any other species' populations – if the ecological approach is to be meaningful in economic anthropology.
For human populations space is not so much a given objective material fact as a lived experience. Geographical barriers can become paths of communication with the use of certain technological knowledge. A river, for example, might either be an isolating obstacle or a waterway enabling transport over long distances. A chain of mountains is not the same sort of obstacle for a human society that masters aviation techniques as for one that does not. Distance in a flat country depends on the means of transportation available, etc. The material constrictions of space for human groups must be related to the knowledge and availability of technology (that is, material arte-facts derived from human intellect). For economic anthropology, therefore, space cannot be devoid of human interaction.
Something similar happens to resources: a resource is not one until it is known to be one by a human group. For example, the mere existence of some mineral in the inhabited realm of a human group does not make it a resource. First, its presence must be known, second, its useful aspects human life must be understood, third, the means to harness this aspect must be discovered and fourth, the social organisation of society must permit the exploitation of the resource. All of these conditions may not be present simultaneously in a human group. Moreover, probably they will not be shared homogeneously throughout the group and the differential access to resources will express political and economic differences. On the other hand, although resources are located in space and would therefore seem to be ascribed to the human populations inhabiting a particular space, this is not generally so. For example, we could consider the many instances in which Western industrial societies have exploited resources located in Thirld World countries. Once again, technological knowledge and relations between human societies, dwelling in different spaces but always mobile and interactive, must be taken into account. Demands on resources and stress on the limiting factors of an environment must therefore be approached as a complex political economic process.
Humans get energy from resources – other species and material elements in space – but humans also produce energy and might be themselves sought after as resources by other humans. The control of human labour is one of the main forces in the organisation of societies.
An important aspect of the ecological perspective is the influence of space and resources on human populations. A population can have different rates of growth or decline as a result of the availability of resources in a certain location. On the one hand, population growth may trigger the expansion of a human group into neighbouring areas when resources become scarce. This might encroach into some other group's established location and will result in conflict. However, if a human group is severely constrained by geographical barriers, population growth might lead to technological change in order to harness local but hitherto unattainable resources (Cameiro 1970). On the other hand, the availability of certain nutritional resources affects female fertility. A certain ratio of fat in body weight must be attained in order to get regular ovulation cycles. This will depend not only on the general amount of food intake but also on the proportion of fat to other nutrients in the diet.
Therefore we must account for variation in fertility rates among different societies but also within the same society, depending on differential access to food resources. This means we should explore political issues in order to understand much 'ecological' variation. Moreover, an important aspect of human populations is that growth might be consciously controlled in several ways. We must bear in mind that control might refer not only to practices restricting but also to those enhancing population growth. Among those restricting population growth, prolonged lactation periods after each birth seem to be a fairly common method. Two factors seem to contribute to decreased fertility during lactation: the lower ratios of fat to body weight and the presence of the hormone prolactine. Other restrictive methods include delaying marriage age for women; ritually prohibiting intercourse during prolonged periods; infanticide (especially female infanticide) and warfare.
Practices enhancing fertility include nutritional habits aiming at lowering the age of menarche; shortening lactation or suppressing it altogether through the use of food substitutes or wet nursing; early marriage age for women; certain forms of marriage such as monogamy (as opposed to polygyny) which increase the chances of intercourse occurring during the fertile period of ovulation cycles. Emphasis on prolonged lactation periods in many societies may also aim at increasing the chances of survival of babies in environments where substitute food is unavailable or scarce.
Human populations, then, respond to environmental factors such as scarce or bountiful resources but never in an 'objective' mechanical way. We must think in terms of a politics of populations which will take into account the structure of power influencing fertility, morbidity, mortality, migration, expressing differential access to local resources and the control of space.
Energy input/output; the question of productivity: ecological value vs. economic value
Human ecology seeks to explain the relations between resources and populations in a given space. The relation is expressed in terms of energy exchanges. The amount of energy that a human group spends in subsistence and other activities is balanced against the amount of energy obtained for subsistence and other social purposes. This has permitted quantitative studies measuring human energy input in subsistence activities against output retrieved among different societies, an interesting asset for comparative reasons. The detailed study of time allocation to diverse activities shows difference in work loads following gender and age lines within all societies, to which class, ethnic or national divisions must be added in some cases. Energy input/output analyses present, on the one hand, work energy expenditure in reference to the energy produced, showing thus if any definable group is more energy-efficient. On the other hand, work energy expenditure in reference to the energy allocated to different activities, and consumed and controlled by different groups of people (that is, adult male, adult female, elderly and youngsters, etc.) can be assessed. Measuring energy exchanges gives us interesting 'hard' data on a number of factors relating to the social organisation of economic processes in societies. Some drawbacks should be mentioned, however. In most anthropological studies the energy accounted for is only related to the obtaining of food, neglecting such crucial activities as food processing, shelter construction and maintenance, dress, pottery and other instrument manufacture, as well as infant care, which are necessary to the material reproduction of any human group.
One of the very interesting aspects of the human ecology energy exchange perspective has been to question the concept of productivity. It is a central theoretical concept in most economic models. Moreover, it has become the measure of economic development as expressed by increased productivity through technological innovation in Western industrial societies. This position might be questioned in the light of an 'energy' model. On the one hand, productivity of labour should be differentiated from land productivity in agricultural systems, for instance. Productivity is defined as an input/output ratio, but while produce – measured in energy or otherwise – is generally taken as the output unit, the input unit can be human energy or total energy, but also time, land or money (Jochim 1981:65–90). Increases of the input/output ratio will express alternatively rewards to average labour expended, total energy expended, or to the amount of time, land or money used. Different interpretations of economic relations will result from stressing efficiency in relation to different measure inputs. As a rule, 'people tend to work no harder than they have to at production unless constrained by overriding shortages of time, land or money' and, thus, labour efficiency seems to be 'a major decision objective when neither land nor time seem to be limited' (Jochim 1981:72).
On the other hand, if we think about energy productivity we will get a ratio of total energy spent (including human, chemical, mechanical energy) against total energy retrieved. Where 'classical' productivity indexes might point to an increase (of output per acre in agriculture, or product per work hour in industry), thus expressing 'economic development'; a total energy productivity index might show a sharp decrease, therefore implying an involution in the effective use of energy. For example, agriculture produces a higher output per acre when employing irrigation, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, specific genetically engineered species, etc. The resulting cost/benefit monetary value, that is, a strictly market-oriented definition of 'economic productivity', might improve, especially if long-term soil regeneration and water supplies are not included as costs and depletion of nonrenewable energy sources such as fuel are not taken into account. However, from an energy input/output viewpoint, where it is not the market value of energy inputs and output that counts (we must take into account that many energy inputs are not marketed) but the total energy balance (whatever its market value), the more technically 'developed' an agricultural system is, the lower its total energy productivity seems to be (Jochim 1981:34).
Productivity is a complex and ambiguous concept which appears strongly related to the idea of 'economic development', that is, the expression of a more efficient way of gaining access to material goods. For every account of 'development', however, we might ask a few questions: which input/output ratio is being stressed – time, money, energy – and why? Whose definition of material well-being is being used as the aim to be attained? Why should 'efficiency' – that is, getting to the goal with 'economy of means' – be posited as a universal drive at all? The ambiguity of the concept of productivity shows that it is highly loaded with political implications. The use of such a concept in a mechanical, abstract way obscures in fact the fields of power, local and global, within the community and between nations that construct the aims of a group of people as being those of all. A clear example of the problem of applying mechanical efficiency models to human societies can be seen in the concept of 'carrying capacity'.
Carrying capacity; technological efficiency
Human populations use resources localised in space. There is a relationship between populations, resources and space which is mediated by technology. The concept of carrying capacity tries to study that relationship and to point at factors specifically significant in a given society. The technological efficiency index tries to measure the energy input/output ratio for subsistence activities in societies using different technologies. Societies can then be compared from a human ecological perspective, seeking to understand the transformations of populations, resources and the use of space within a systemic model of energy exchange (Harris 1986:194 – 214, Ch. 11).
The capacity of the resources located in a given area to carry a maximum size of human population is the carrying capacity of that geographical space. Resources depend on technological achievement. When population increases above the carrying capacity of the area, resources are depleted and returns to labour diminish. Moreover, the environment is substantially transformed. Some resources are considered limiting factors because populations cannot survive if deprived of them below a certain limit, for a certain time. Water is such a limiting factor in many societies; protein resources or land for cultivation might be limiting factors in other environments. The minimum availability of limiting factors during the annual seasonal variation cycle sets the maximum population that an environment may carry given the technological achievement of the society considered.
Human populations will try to react when reaching the carrying capacity of their environment. Several strategies have been used, alone or in combination. Restriction of population growth through various techniques is one. Expansion into neighbouring spaces to increase the absolute amount of resources or the crucial availability of a limiting factor is another strategy. Temporary or definitive migration of some of the population is yet another possibility aiming at re-establishing the previous population/resources balance. Other options, however, seek to adapt to environmental transformation through technological innovation. This implies the use of old resources in a new way and the discovery of new resources in the old environment. Both these processes generally result in an intensification of labour and a different organisation of social relations. Historically, the adoption of slash and bum agriculture first, and later the intensification of agriculture through irrigation and manuring techniques, seem to be technological adaptations in response to population pressure on the carrying capacity of a given environment (Boserup 1965; Cohen 1977). The restriction of population mobility due to geographical barriers might have been a co-determining factor in the search for and adoption of more labour-intensive techniques. Technological innovation is thus related to the need to overcome a limiting factor in a given environment. However, as critiques of the carrying capacity concept point out, pressure over resources might be a result not of population increase but of production increase due to market demands (Martinez Alier 1992). Technological innovation should not be confused with greater technological efficiency.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "New Directions in Economic Anthropology"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Susana Narotzky.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Production
The ecosystem
Technological processes
Access to resources
The question of 'work' in western societies
2. Distribution and exchange
Forms of Reciprocity and Redistribution
Exchange
Circulation
Market culture or market system?
3. Consumption
Defining consumption
The consumption unit
What happens within the consumption unit?
Beyond the domestic group boundaries
Producing while consuming
4. Social reproduction
Production and reproduction
5. Conclusion
Local culture and economic models
The case study. Local processes in the construction of labour/ capital relations
Models of analysis for a 'New Economic Organisation'
Work experiences and labour/ capital relations
Rethinking proletarianisation and class
Bibliography
Index