Introduction:

Beyond Economic Anthropology

Susana Narotzky

First, a word of caution. This is not a book on the History of Economic Anthropology. It is not an exhaustive presentation of the theoretical perspectives that have been associated with the 'economic' field of study within the academic discipline of Anthropology (for a view on these see Ortiz 1983, Clammer 1985, 1987, Kahn & Llobera 1981, Moniot 1976, Roseberry 1988). Most theoretical perspectives will be clarified along the route, however.

This book intends to be a journey. It wants to bring closer to a wider public the main concepts, debates and questions that have been relevant to the understanding of how people organise themselves for the production and reproduction of the material goods and services that make life possible. Its aim is threefold: first, to provide the conceptual tools necessary to follow most of the 'economic' anthropology debates; second, to present some of these debates; third, to put forward my view of what the present challenges are in 'economic' anthropology.

In this chapter I will try to define, briefly, the scope of the term 'economic' in anthropology as it has developed in academic discussions during the last fifty years. This will be followed by an attempt to narrow the area of discussion to a context where local and global material processes are embedded in historical concrete social relations. More specifically, the subject of this book will be presented as the drive toward an all-inclusive approach to material, life sustaining processes, through the use of the concept of 'social reproduction'. The reasoning behind the emphasis on social reproduction is that it contributes to bridge dualisms such as those in between micro and macro approaches, material and cultural perspectives, and, more generally, in between 'economy' and 'society'. Indeed, these dualisms have become a major obstacle to social scientists' understanding of life sustaining processes.

But first let us try to get a quick idea of how anthropologists have been trying to deal with realities encountered in the field, realities that relate to the material facts of living in any society and to how these are organised through social relations in a regular although changing way.

The domain of 'economic anthropology' and the definition of the 'economy' by anthropologists has generated much debate for over fifty years. For R.Firth (1970) economic anthropology focuses primarily on resource allocation and product distribution and rests on the 'acceptance of the view that the logic of scarcity is operative over the whole range of economic phenomena'. Moreover, 'while the material dimension of the economy is regarded as a basic feature, the significance of the economy is seen to lie in the transactions of which it is composed and therefore in the quality of relationships which these transactions create, express, sustain and modify' (1970:4). This view of the scope and method of economic anthropology termed 'formalist' has been criticised on the grounds that it applies theoretical criteria developed from the analysis of capitalist societies (scarcity of resources, alternative allocation processes, marginal utility motivation) to all societies all over the world, past and present. Although relationships between individuals are highlighted as the significant aspect of the economy to anthropologists, these are conceived in a 'transactional' mode (Blau 1982). The basic problem of this perspective is that social relations are perceived as an exchange of social 'values' or, alternatively, as attributes of exchange acts, being therefore treated as 'utilities' to be maximised in the same framework of scarcity and alternative allocation as any other resource.

Another view of what economic anthropologists should focus on is suggested by Polanyi (1957) and his followers. They propose two distinct meanings of the concept of 'economy'. One is the 'formal' meaning which is a theory of rational action involving choice between alternative uses of scarce resources (Firth's definition). For them, however, this meaning can only be applied in a society where the market mechanism is the dominant means of allocating land, labor and goods. The real (or substantive) concept of economy should be meaningful for any society, whatever its form of allocation (or distribution) is. Accordingly, in the 'substantive' sense the economy can be defined as

This definition remains within a means-ends/ wants-satisfaction logic which seems to refer implicitly to an abstract demand/ supply motivation for economic activity and this renders 'universal' and 'natural' --not historical and social-- the conditions of production, distribution and consumption of material goods and services. It presents, however, several interesting points: first the focus on material needs and means; second, the idea of the economy as a process that sustains social continuity; and third, that this is done in an institutionalised and therefore socially structured way. Moreover, Polanyi and his followers pointed to the fact that in non-market integrated societies, the economy is embedded in other social institutions and cannot be analysed as a separate realm.

Godelier takes over most of the substantivists' propositions and redefines them within a Marxist framework. The economy is defined then as a series of social relations present both in a specific domain of activities --that of the production, distribution and consumption of material goods-- and as a 'particular aspect of all human activities that do not belong in themselves to that domain but the functioning of which involves the exchange and use of material goods' (1974:140).

In Godelier's view, it is the social structure of a society, the 'logic of its social relations', the 'realisation of the socially necessary ends', 'the better functioning of all social structures, kinship, politics, religion, etc.' that sets material 'needs' and the means of 'satisfaction' in a concrete social ground. The historical conditions of emergence of a particular social context are not explicitly integrated in his theory, however (Khan & Llobera 1981:299). Social relations become the center of economic analysis within a context of social reproduction.

However, although in Godelier's view all sorts of social structures might have an 'economic' aspect, the economy should be analysed starting from the social relations obtaining in the properly economic domain of production, distribution and consumption (1974:151).

Critiques of Godelier's view (Kahn & Llobera 1981; Asad 1974) have pointed out several problems with his approach. First, it is claimed that history is not taken into account. The concrete conditions of production of an existing social structure, the way in which present 'bundles of relationships' relate to past ones has no place in his theory. Second, their critique underlines a problem concerning anthropology more generally: that is, the assumption of the universal relevance of some categories such as 'economy' 'kinship' 'politics' 'religion' that have become bounded domains of study of the academic discipline. This leads to the assumption that 'a distinct field of social activity which can be carved out of the totality of social relations' exists and can be studied in isolation (Kahn & Llobera 1981:309), later to be related to the other categories in a 'structured', 'organic' or 'systematic' way. One of the perennial issues in anthropology is unquestionably the discussion about the status of the categories that social scientists have forged in the course of academic debate as confronted to other 'common sense' categories that they encounter or to the real lived relationships that they must explain. The last critique might appear as a paradoxical formulation of the former ones; that is, Godelier's relativism (Asad 1974:214) where each society is conceived as an autonomous system setting its needs and hence organising economic activity in a manner unrelated to other societies' logics. This is particularly relevant because as Wallerstein (1974, 1980), Frank (1967), Wolf (1982) and others have shown, the logic of accumulation that originated in Europe and set forth the organisation of economic activities in specific ways reached directly or indirectly all over the world and profoundly transformed whatever social structures or economic systems might have existed previously and whatever relations might have obtained between relatively distinct polities or groups.

Other French Marxist anthropologists have been more preoccupied by the reality of the impact of Western capitalist economies in non-capitalist societies through colonial and neocolonial processes (Meillassoux 1982 [1975], Rey 1971). Their view is that in these social formations (that is, concrete historical realities) several modes of production (that is, abstract structured totalities) are articulated in a hierarchical way: the capitalist mode of production subordinates the non-capitalist modes.

The main theoretical question which arised revolved around the status of autonomy of the distinct socially organised life-sustaining processes (termed 'modes' or 'forms' of production) that were articulated in a concrete 'social formation' (that is, a real, complex, historical society). Put simply, the question was whether the different modes or forms of production retained an autonomous distinct path for organising their continuity, or whether their articulation implied necessarily a common, interdependent and mutually transforming path of social reproduction. As I will briefly point out later, the debate was embedded in a broader philosophical argument dealing with abstract models and concrete realities of society, and with the interface between the abstract and the concrete.

Two aspects of the French Marxists' debates should be highlighted here. On the one hand I want to stress their increasing theoretical preoccupation with social reproduction or 'laws of motion' of social totalities. On the other hand, the problem of thinking in the abstract concrete historical social realities continues to be, in my opinion, an unresolved methodological issue. The fascination with abstract models is directly related to Althusser's reading of Marx (Althusser 1969, 1974; Balibar 1969) in a structuralist fashion where a mode of production's structure is a set of fixed connections between agents of production and means of production which can be defined as relations of production. In order to exist in the concrete, the structure requires a superstructure of political and ideological relations. But because these relations are deemed necessary to the concrete existence of the structure they also have to be accounted for in the abstract model. There is then an opposition between the abstract and the concrete expressed in the base/ superstructure model and in the need of an abstract predefinition of a concept of 'the economic' as an autonomous instance (or level) of any social structure.

The model poses beforehand a set of predefined social relations (economic, political, ideological) that appear as conceptual objects, and thus it achieves the reification of 'localised' and 'bounded' regions (levels, instances). These 'levels' are subsequently, but necessarily, articulated in a totality which is historical (Althusser 1969:192-3). Althusser and his followers, however, also felt strongly the need to transcend this fragmentation through the emphasis on 'reproduction' of the totality (Balibar 1969:282-3, 289). I do not wish to enter more deeply here into the Althusserian debate. I will just point to its influence in Marxist anthropology on the one hand through its excessively theoretical emphasis on abstract structures which are then treated as objects; on the other hand, paradoxically, through its idea of the fundamental role of 'overdetermination' by non-economic instances (ideological, political, etc.) in all concrete historical formations (Althusser 1974:112-113, 240-1). And, following Banaji I will propose that:

Thus, I am more interested in highlighting social reproduction, the movement through which a concrete historical social reality sets the conditions for its continuity and contains tranformations within the limits of a dominant logic.

Up to this point I have briefly presented the main debates that shaped the field of economic anthropology: the formalist/ substantivist debate and the debate within Marxist anthropology. Now I will focus on the basic ideas that form the context where my own theoretical perspective is embedded.

I want to briefly present two currents of thought that will be more fully dealt with in Chapter 4. The first current centres around the work of E.P. Thompson and R. Williams who developed a certain strand of Marx's and Gramsci's thoughts. Their emphasis on human experience and agency points to the materiality of consciousness, to the importance of culture and of the personal environment in the construction and transformation of the social relations that make life-sustaining processes possible.

The second current deals with the tension between local and global material processes. In this respect it should by now be clear that a capitalist logic of accumulation has reached the farthest corners of the world. How, in this several centuries long process, it has transformed the ongoing local and regional logics should be the main interest of present day 'economic' anthropology. From this perspective the dispute about whether exchange relations in a world wide context (Frank 1967; Wallerstein 1974, 1980) or production relations in a local context (Laclau 1971) are the key to conceptualising 'capitalism' and thus asserting the degree of penetration of the capitalist logic in a social formation, seems to me now a vain and casuistic exercise. Moreover, capitalist relations of production might find expression in multiple concrete forms drawn to capital accumulation but different from the 'classical' free wage labour relation (Goodman & Redclift 1982:54) and this should also be understood as part of the concrete processes (creative and/ or resistance forms) that take place. As Wolf (1982) has shown in Europe and the People without History, we must think both globally and locally if we want to understand what happened all over the world, we must think historically. Wolf says of his book that:

And this is what I think 'economic' anthropologists should deal with in the concrete cases they study (C.Smith 1983:344-7).

What, then, is the framework I propose for this 'economic' anthropology? On the one hand, the rejection of the idea of a separate economic level or bounded region of economic social relations or activities seems to me a first and necessary step. On the other hand, I feel it is useful to narrow the scope of the 'economic' to the social relations involved in the production and reproduction of material life, through the organised interaction of humans and nature. And last, I would want to put forward the idea that for human populations material relations cannot be theoretically separated from their cultural expressions which, in turn, are materially produced and embodied.

I propose, then, to take a somewhat paradoxical route that will start with the 'classic' analytic division of the economic process into the distinct moments of production, distribution and exchange, and consumption, and will end in the all-encompassing field of social reproduction. At every point I will present the concepts and issues that have been addressed in 'economic anthropology' and I will try to show how the original self-enclosed categories break down and give way to one another in concrete historical social processes.

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