• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 586 0

satirises the attitude thus: ‘We engage in exchanges to make some sort of profit; they do so in order to cement social relationships; we trade commodities; they give gifts.’ Like Shennan, I think this is patronising bunk. I think people respond to incentives and always have done. People weigh costs and benefits and do what profits them. Sure, they take into account non-economic factors, such as the need to remain on good terms with trading partners and to placate malevolent deities. Sure, they give better deals to families, friends and patrons than they do to strangers. But they do that today as well. Even the most market-embedded modern financial trader is enmeshed in a web of ritual, etiquette, convention and obligation, not excluding social debt for a good lunch or an invitation to a football match. Just as modern economists often exaggerate the cold-hearted rationality of consumers, so anthropologists exaggerate the cuddly irrationality of pre-industrial people.

The ‘kula’ system of the south Pacific is a favourite case history of those who like to argue that markets were unknown to pre-industrial people. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, the people of fourteen different island groups exchanged armshells for necklaces in such a way that the armshells travelled in an anti-clockwise circle around the entire island group, while the necklaces went clockwise. After two years or more, an item might have returned to its original owner. To describe such a system as a market is plainly absurd: the exchange itself, not profit, must be the point. But look closer and kula becomes less peculiar. It was only one of many kinds of exchange practised in these islands; the fact that Westerners give each other cards and socks at Christmas speaks to the importance in their lives of the social meaning of exchange, but does not mean they do not also seek profits in markets. An anthropologist from the South Pacific might study Western Christmas and conclude that an utterly pointless and profitless but frantic midwinter commercial activity, inspired by religion, dominates the lives of Westerners. Pacific islanders were and are acutely aware of the importance of getting a good bargain when trading with a stranger. In any case, further research since the days of Malinowski has demonstrated that he had rather exaggerated the circular nature of the system, which is a mere side effect of the fact that traders who are exchanging useful items also like to give each other useless but pretty gifts that then sometimes end back where they started.

Ignoble savage?

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Neolithic Revolution was interpreted by Gordon Childe and his followers as a bettering of the human condition, which brought obvious benefits: stored food with which to survive famines; new forms of nutrition close at hand, such as milk and eggs; less need for exhausting, dangerous and often fruitless treks through the wilderness; work that the unfit and injured could still do; perhaps more spare time in which to invent civilisation.

In the last third of the twentieth century, a prosperous yet nostalgic time, farming came to be reinterpreted as an invention born of desperation rather than inspiration, and perhaps even ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’. The pessimists, led by Mark Cohen and Marshall Sahlins, argued that farming was a back-breaking treadmill that brought a monotonous diet deficient in nutrients to a people plagued by pollution, squalor, infectious diseases and early death. More people could now live upon the land, but with unchecked fertility, they would have to work harder. More babies were born, but more people died young. Whereas extant hunter-gatherers such as the Dobe !Kung seemed to have ample leisure and to live in ‘the original affluent society’ (Sahlins’s phrase), limiting their reproduction and so preventing overpopulation, skeletons of the first farmers seemed to show wear and tear, chronic deformity, toothache and short stature. Meanwhile, they would catch measles from cattle, smallpox from camels,