Economics 101 Meets Social Anthropology

A review of Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Routledge, 1974.

In a famous essay setting out the field, LSE economist Lionel Robbins explicitly recognized that, to use Marshall Sahlins' expression, "the genesis of Economics was the economics of Genesis." "We have been turned out of Paradise," Robbins wrote, "we have neither eternal life nor unlimited means of satisfaction. Everywhere we turn, if we choose one thing we must relinquish others which, in different circumstances, we would wish not to have relinquished. Scarcity of means to satisfy given ends is an almost ubiquitous condition of human behavior." He went on to define economics as "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Robinsonades

If mankind after the Fall provided neoclassical writers with a metaphor to introduce their discipline, the island world of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe offered another image to explore the outcome of the rational pursuit of self-interest by economic man. The individual as isolated hunter and fisherman, with which economics textbooks usually began, provided an easy target for Karl Marx's Outline of the Critique of Political Economy. "Production by an isolated individual outside society--a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness--is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other." According to Marx, the human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, a "zoon politikon" to use the Greek expression, and not the Homo economicus that economists bent on Latin and math formulae would have us believe.

Economics 101 no longer starts with a formal definition of economics (do physicists define physics?), and Robinsonades are no longer in fashion--although many imaginary figures in game theory are still called Adam. But economics teachers introducing the discipline to college students sometimes give the first chapter of Marshall Sahlins' Stone-Age Economics as a reading assignment. The class discussion usually begins with the opposition between Homo economicus and the primitive tribesmen as described by Sahlins. Then, having reviewed the anthropologist's argument, students are asked to offer competing explanations of the hunter-gatherer's behavior based on standard economic rationality. The class reading may be the only exposure that economists may have with social anthropology; and the discussion may only confirm them in their belief that anthropologists really obfuscate an argument that can easily be won on economics's own terms.

So let's start with Marshall Sahlins' own version of the "uneconomic man". The Original Affluent Society, as the first chapter is titled, starts with the most deprived and destitute specimen of humankind: the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert and the Aboriginal natives of Australia. Their societies are characterized by "affluence without abundance," or frugality amid plenty. These hunter-gatherers' material needs are easily fulfilled. The natural resources which they use to craft their tools and clothing--stones, bones, wood, skin--"lay in abundance around them." Their nomadic lifestyle prevents them to accumulate possessions: "of the hunter it is truly said that his wealth is a burden." They only accumulate what they can carry along with them. As Sahlins notes, "this modesty of material requirements is institutionalized: it becomes a positive cultural fact, expressed in a variety of economic arrangements." They make a virtue out of necessity: "want not, lack not". Bushmen don't cling to their possessions: as the first European explorers remarked, "they do not know how to take care of their belongings." They give away or discard things easily.

The Affluent Society

Nor is their life spent in an endless quest for subsistence. Social scientists have measured the time these hunters and gatherers spend in their various occupations. A surprising result is that they work considerably less than we do. Collecting food occupies them for no more than four or five hours a day. They spend the rest of their time chatting, resting, and day-dreaming. These results have been reproduced for other primitive societies in the Amazon or the Congo forest. These are the time-and-motion studies of anthropology. Other studies have described their dietary arrangement, which was found to be remarkably diversified and healthy. Food resources are both varied and abundant. When they think they have gathered enough food, these tribesmen simply stop and move to leisurely occupations. Why would they collect more than they can consume? They don't perceive the need to store food and accumulate reserves, because "nature has, so to speak, done considerable storage of her own." As Sahlins notes, "they are not worried by what the morrow may bring, because as far as they are concerned it will bring more of the same." Nature gives them each day their daily bread, and does not lead them into temptation.

Marshall Sahlins therefore subverts the vision commonly shared about primitive societies. They are not subsistence economies, living on a hand-to-mouth basis and in a state of mere survival, but economies of abundance, where work occupies only a modicum of the day. These are the facts which anthropology brings to the table. But the description of the original affluent society can lend itself to several competing explanations. One is offered by Pierre Clastres in the preface to the French edition of Sahlins' book. For Clastres, the primitive community aspires to autonomy. Its members want to stay masters of their destiny; they don't want to depend on other groups for their living. Their refusal to accumulate surplus and produce more than they need is not the result of carelessness or fatalism: it stems from their desire to protect their freedom. It is true that they can enter into complex relations of exchange and gifts with other groups. But commerce between primitive tribes or islanders has nothing to do with international trade. It follows another logic, as Marcel Mauss masterfully demonstrated in his Essay on Gift, and where the imperative to give is balanced by the obligation to receive and to give back in return.

The same attachment to autonomy and freedom prevents the emergence within the group of hierarchies and classes. The chief or "big man" is not a political leader in the strict sense of the word. He has no power to give orders and lead his people into doing things they do not want to do. His only privilege is to make speeches and to gain prestige through his generosity and selflessness. Everything he owns, he redistributes to the group, who is more than eager to benefit from his prodigality. As the French poet La Fontaine once remarked, "all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them." Pierre Clastres therefore bends Sahlins' argument into a political theory of society: the primitive society is a society that works against the state, and primitive economics is a wholly political affair. Clastres applies the notion of rationality not to persons but to systems: primitive societies "choose" not to accumulate surplus or devote power to the chief. They make the right decisions subjected to their objective of long-term survival. Or, as Jared Diamond put it in a provocative essay, perhaps inventing agriculture wasn't such a good idea: in fact, it may turn out to be "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."

The worst mistake in the history pf the human race

Even if the group makes the right decisions to preserve its autonomy and freedom, it doesn't follow that the individual follows the model of the economic man. For Clastres, the primitive man is not an entrepreneur or a profit maximizer because he is not interested in profit. He doesn't produce more than what is needed, not because he can't, but because he doesn't want to. In some parts of his text, Sahlins subscribes to this argument; but in other parts he doesn't, as when he notes that a "complex and subtle economic calculus seems to be at play" in the decision not to accumulate food: "the advantages of food storage should be considered against the diminishing returns to collection within the compass of a confined locale."

And indeed, Sahlins' descriptions of the primitive economy can easily be reconciled with neoclassical economics. Introducing transaction costs, information asymmetries, search costs, and the lack of insurance markets will usually do the trick. Economists from the Chicago School have specialized in this line of reasoning. Gary Becker, George Stigler, and their disciples have thus discussed the marital arrangements of primitive societies, including polygamy and brideprice, from an economic standpoint, or have adopted a rational actor model to shed light on communal land rights, gifts exchanges, and structures of authority in a nonmodern setting. Their work gave rise to what was referred to as the substantivism vs. formalism debate in the 1960s. Anthropologists from the formalist school (and their colleagues in economics) showed that a utilitarian framework could be a means of describing a nonmarket institutional context. For substantivists, the economy is an instituted process, embedded into the social fabric, and the approach of nonmarket economies should be resolutely anti-utilitarian.

So where does Marshall Sahlins stand in this debate? The fact is that Stone-Age Economics contains an eclectic mélange of formalism, substantivism, and structuralism. Whereas economic students rarely go beyond the first chapter, other parts of the book develop different arguments that are not always consistent or well organized. The "Domestic Mode of Production" draws heavily on Marxist anthropology as developed by Emmanuel Terray and Claude Meillassoux; the "Chayanov Rule" (the more household relatives each worker has to support, the more work each worker does) unearths the studies of an obscure Soviet agrarian economist; and a long chapter on "The Spirit of the Gift" offers a running commentary of Marcel Mauss' famous essay. In his last chapter, Sahlins confesses a "crass ignorance" of economics, by which he means neoclassical economics. His constant references to Marx proves that his perception of the discipline is heavily biased toward the anthropological school of thought that tried to adapt a Marxist framework to its terrains.

Karl and Groucho Marx

But the author of Das Kapital is not the only Marx that Marshall Sahlins' text conjures. With its constant quips and traits of humor, Stone-Age Economics stands between Karl and Groucho Marx, or evokes the hilarious comedy film in which a Coca-Cola bottle thrown out from a plane disturbs the life of tribesmen from the Kalahari. In "The Gods Must Be Crazy," the hero, a Bushman from the San ethnic group, goes on a journey to the end of the earth to get rid of the glass bottle apparently sent by the gods and that has brought misery to his people, exposing them to envy, anger, and frustration by their discovery of the hitherto unknown phenomenon of property. Similarly, Sahlins concludes his introduction by enjoining us to "cultivate our gardens, waiting to see if the gods will shower rain or, like those of certain New Guinea tribes, just urinate upon us."