3.4: Exchange and Social Systems

This chapter covers two aspects of 'the economy' that interest anthropologists in particular. The first is modes of production or 'making a living.' This aspect of economics is all about subsistence, materials, and 'getting by' under various systems and social structures (be that hunting and gathering or complex market economies). The second is systems of exchange. This aspect of economics is all about how we construct value from a cultural perspective. Again, this covers a range of practices from feeling like you 'owe someone' when they do you a favor to the creation of wealth through charging interest. (For the purposes of this course, we will be much more interested in the everyday owing version of things!)

Someone has probably asked you the question, “So, what you want to do after you graduate?” When people ask about your plans post-graduation, they are asking about work. After you graduate, you will be faced with a similar question: “What do you do in life?” or “What do you do for a living?” It is one of the first things people ask when they meet someone new in our culture.

What do people mean when they ask what someone does for a living? Certainly, they are wondering what kind of work that person does in order to meet basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. But they are wondering more than just that. In some cases, the question of what a person does for a living is not just an individual matter but one for the whole society. In some societies, most people meet their basic needs by doing roughly the same thing (mechanical solidarity). And even in societies where different people play different roles (organic solidarity), there is a fundamental process for making and distributing things that people need and want. Economists and anthropologists agree that this is the most basic definition of an economy: the central way in which societies meet basic material needs and wants. More specifically, an economy is a system for making, circulating, and using things, including material goods, services, and information. Economic systems are shaped by ideas about the meaning and value of objects, actions, and people. In many economic systems, some groups gain control over the work and leisure of others, structuring relations of inequality that operate through techniques of discipline (in the realm of work) and persuasion (in the realm of consumption).

Definition: Economy

The central way in which societies meet basic material needs and wants; a system for making, circulating, and using things, including material goods, services, and information.

Like strangers at a cocktail party, anthropologists always want to know what people do for a living. Archaeologists are curious about how people in the past developed strategies for making a living in response to different environmental conditions and sociocultural pressures. Physical anthropologists are interested in how human biology evolved alongside ways of using the environment to meet basic needs. Cultural anthropologists study the social and cultural implications of different ways of making a living. And linguistic anthropologists focus on the roles of language, classification, and metaphor in shaping different strategies for making a living.

Economists tend toward universalism, which assumes that economic processes operate in much the same way all over the world. In fact, a central concern of economics is to discover the universal principles that govern economies anywhere and everywhere. Implicit in most economic analysis is the idea that most realms of society work like markets, responding to universal forces of supply and demand. Moreover, economists view people as self-interested, rational actors situated within the various market-driven realms of society. Economists use statistics rather than fieldwork to evaluate these market-driven activities, sometimes searching for best policies to encourage economic growth or discourage inequality. In contrast, economic anthropology is often about differences in how economies function in different cultures or societies. Further, anthropologists are often more interested in the 'messiness' of economies or economic behaviors—the situations when we do something because of our culture despite its seeming lack of rationality or serving our best interest. A good example is spending lavishly to carry out a ritual practice.

Modes of Subsistence

Anthropologists have a term for the way that people interact with their environments in order to make a living: mode of subsistence. There are four main modes of subsistence that have been used throughout human history: gathering-hunting, pastoralism, plant cultivation (often broken down into 'horticulture' at the smaller/gardening scale and 'agriculture' at the large/farming and distribution scale), and industrialism/post-industrialism. Each of these modes incorporates distinctive strategies for producing, exchanging, and consuming the things that people need to survive. At the most fundamental level are the basic necessities of food, shelter, and health. Modes of subsistence provide solutions to meet these needs by generating materials from the environment and developing techniques of labor and forms of technology to process those materials. Beyond these very important functions, modes of subsistence also organize society to get the necessary work done. Societies develop roles, groups, and institutions to divide up the workload of producing things. Modes of subsistence also entail specific ways of trading and circulating things within and beyond local groups. And finally, modes of subsistence emphasize certain ideals and values.

Definition: Modes of Production

Solutions to meet human wants and needs by generating materials from the environment, developing techniques of labor and forms of technology to process those materials, organize society to get the necessary work done, and ways of trading and circulating things.

Gathering and Hunting

Imagine that you were stripped of all possessions and transported to a grassland environment along with 30 or so other people. How would you begin to make a living? How would you find food and shelter? How would you keep your body comfortable and healthy? Throughout the millions of years of hominin evolution, those living in such environments practiced a strategy known as gathering-hunting. Some peoples still practice this flexible and congenial way of life. In gathering and hunting societies, people rely on the natural resources readily available in their environment. They gather fruits, nuts, berries, and roots and collect honey from wild bees. They hunt and trap wild animals, and they fish in rivers and lakes. Many gathering-hunting groups also engage in limited ways in other modes of subsistence.

You might be surprised to see the word gathering appear before hunting in describing this subsistence strategy. The word order reflects a key debate about this subsistence strategy. Some researchers object to hunting and gathering because it privileges hunting as the most important activity of such groups. Early interest in these groups focused on the hunting activities of men as the most prestigious and valuable subsistence practices. In fact, gathering—done by both women and men—provides the vast majority of calories in the diets of such groups. This chapter will refer to this subsistence strategy as gathering-hunting and the people who practice it as gatherer-hunters.

The Hadza: Gathering-Hunting as a Subsistence Strategy

The Hadza of northern Tanzania are a resilient example of the way of life of gathering-hunting peoples as well as the contemporary challenges facing such groups. Like most gathering-hunting peoples, the Hadza traditionally lived in semi-nomadic groups of 20 to 30 people, called bands. About one-third of contemporary Hadza still practice this way of life. Hadza bands settle temporarily to gather and hunt the resources of a particular area, then move on to other areas in seasonal migrations. Sometimes, groups agglomerate into camps of several hundred to take advantage of seasonal foods such as berries. On most days, both men and women venture out into the savanna to gather food. Men seek out meat, honey, and baobab fruit, while women gather tubers, berries, and greens. When work is assigned based on a person’s sex, anthropologists call this a sexual division of labor. In Hadza society, men and women do specialize in obtaining different foods, but the division is not hard and fast; sometimes men pick berries, and sometimes women gather honey.

Women of the Hazda cooking and socializing. The Hazda practice a traditional gathering-hunting lifestyle. (credit: “Day 5 - Time with the Hadza tribe” by sueomstead/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Like most gathering-hunting peoples, the Hadza are highly egalitarian, meaning that all people are considered equal and all resources are shared equally. Gathered foods brought back to the camp, including meat, are shared among all members of the band. Gathering-hunting groups deplore stinginess as the worst human fault, and people who refuse to share are met with gossip, ridicule, and even ostracism. Decisions are made through public discussions leading to group consensus. No person has any sort of leadership role. Rather, people with experience in certain areas of social knowledge provide their expertise as needed. In-group fighting is not common, but it does occur, sometimes leading to personal violence and even a split in the band if the conflict cannot be resolved. Violent conflict between groups is very rare among gatherer-hunters.

The Sociocultural Complex of Gathering and Hunting

Anthropologists have identified features of Hadza society as distinctive to gathering-hunting groups found all over the world. Groups such as the Martu and Pintupi in Australia, the Cuiva and Pumé in South America, the Paliyan and Kattunayakan in Asia, and the Inuit and Shoshone in North America have all constructed similar lifeways based on gathering and hunting. The social features of this way of life include mobility, sexual division of labor, egalitarianism, and vast knowledge of their environments.

The most common feature of gatherer-hunters is mobility. Such groups typically move in seasonal cycles over broad territories, regularly meeting up with other groups at specific spots such as water sources and patches of ripe vegetation. Bands tend to confine their subsistence activities to their own territories, but if faced with a scarcity of resources, they will commonly ask other groups for permission to gather and hunt in neighboring territories. These requests are facilitated by cross-band friendships and marriages that develop when bands camp together at certain times of the year. As a result, such requests are nearly always approved.

The second feature common to gatherer-hunter societies is the sexual division of labor. Often, men do most or all of the hunting, though recent archaeological evidence suggests that some women also hunted in the past. Both women and men gather, but they often gather different things, and women bring home the majority of gathered foods. The relative equality of women in gatherer-hunter societies is linked to their primary role in supplying calories to the gatherer-hunter diet. Hunting is a prestige activity, however, giving prominence to men who are particularly successful hunters.

A Hadza man returns from a successful hunt. Like other gatherer-hunter societies, the Hadza utilize a sexual division of labor, with women doing the bulk of the gathering and men doing most of the hunting. (credit: “Success” by Anja Pietsch/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The third feature of gatherer-hunters is a strong tendency toward egalitarianism. As they are so often on the move, gatherer-hunters do not typically own many material possessions, and those they have are circulated through the band on the basis of need. All gathered and hunted foods are shared among all members of the band. Generosity is praised and admired. People are considered equal and are actively discouraged from valuing themselves above others. Greed and excessive pride are stigmatized and punished with gossip and criticism. People who fight or refuse to share can be ostracized from the band.

These are broad generalities. The gatherer-hunter mode of subsistence commonly coordinates with these sociocultural features, but some groups do provide exceptions. In particularly productive environments, gatherer-hunters can settle down in one place for periods of time. The year-round availability of fish allows gatherer-hunter groups in coastal or riverine areas to form permanent or semipermanent settlements. Diet and labor patterns also vary. Closer to the equator, gatherer-hunter groups rely more on gathering because plants are plentiful year-round. Farther from the equator, in cooler climates, vegetation is scarce in winter, and gatherer-hunters rely more on hunting. Degrees of inequality and conflict also vary somewhat, often in association with the availability of resources. Situations of scarcity often generate social conflict. While one can describe a general mode of subsistence, it is important to acknowledge the diversity of strategies and features within this mode.

All gatherer-hunters, however, absolutely must possess deep knowledge of the plants, animals, and sources of water in their environments. Many gatherer-hunters can identify over a hundred sources of plant and animal foods in their environments, along with detailed information about where and when they can find each type. Often, they rely on a few staple foods that are readily available year-round. When the Dobe Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert cannot find other foods, they count on mongongo nuts, a highly nutritious, drought-resistant food. Eating 300 mongongo nuts (a hefty serving) supplies 1,200 calories and 56 grams of protein. At certain times of the year, mongongo nuts constitute nearly half of the diet of the Dobe Ju/’hoansi.

All contemporary gathering and hunting groups face economic and political pressures that threaten their way of life. Herders and farmers encroach on their territories, leasing or purchasing their lands and then forcibly evicting the original inhabitants. Local and national governments attempt to settle such groups in permanent villages in order to establish their own rule of law, collect taxes, provide education and medical care, and assimilate them as citizens. Often, gathering-hunting groups agree to settle and then, after a while, abandon the villages established for them and escape to their lands to resume a gathering-hunting lifestyle. Many remaining gatherer-hunter groups say they love living close to nature, making their own material culture, and working and resting at will, always on the move.

The Original Affluent Society: Comparing Ancient and Contemporary Foragers

In agricultural and industrial societies, people often assume that gathering-hunting peoples must live a hard life, oppressed by the struggle to find enough food and plagued by malnutrition and poor health. Archaeologists and cultural anthropologists who have studied gathering and hunting groups have found otherwise. Researchers have discovered that gatherer-hunters have stronger bones, lower blood pressure, and less heart disease than neighboring farmers. In his ethnographic work among the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, anthropologist Richard Lee found that they worked on average three to four days a week obtaining food and spent the rest of their time socializing and enjoying life. He described the Dobe Ju/’hoansi as fit, healthy, and free of nutritional deficits (1993). Indeed, some Hadza have remarked that the notion of famine is unknown to their culture. While Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith has referred to the wealthy industrial economy of the United States as “the affluent society,” anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes the gathering and hunting lifestyle as “the original affluent society.”

For some 95 percent of evolutionary history, humans and human ancestors relied on gathering and hunting to make a living. In evolutionary terms, it is only very recently that humans have established other modes of subsistence. Farming was invented around 12,000 years ago, far too recently to have shaped humans’ biological evolution very much. By contrast, hominins were practicing gathering and hunting for more than two million years. If humans have evolved to practice any lifestyle, it would be gathering-hunting. This suggests that humans’ brains and bodies might be best suited to the lifestyle described by ethnographers who study gathering-hunting groups: long walks in nature; a diet of mostly fruits, nuts, and vegetables; and plenty of leisure time to relax and talk. Maybe humanity’s ancestors were as robust and happy in their way of life as many contemporary foragers. Maybe.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that people today really don’t know what life was like for humanity’s gathering-hunting ancestors. The archaeological record of fossils and artifacts can reveal much about the diet and diseases of early hominins, but they tell very little about early social structures and cultural values. Some anthropologists have looked to contemporary gathering and hunting groups to understand the way of life of humanity’s ancestors. Maybe they, like contemporary gatherer-hunter peoples, lived in egalitarian bands with group decision-making and a flexible division of labor based on gender, valuing sharing and deploring stinginess. Certainly, they must have had impressive knowledge of the resources and dangers in their environments.

And yet it is a mistake to view the way of life of contemporary gathering-hunting societies as examples of the way of life of humans’ evolutionary ancestors. Groups such as the Hadza are not frozen in time, practicing a static lifeway of the deep past, but rather constantly changing and innovating, blending new ideas and practices with older ones just as farmers, herders, and industrialists do. Most contemporary gathering-hunting groups have lived side by side with farming and herding groups for centuries, often trading with those groups and even experimenting with their subsistence methods from time to time. Most gatherer-hunters have been forced to relocate to less advantageous lands due to the encroachment of these herders and farmers. The culture of many gatherer-hunter groups has been shaped by their incorporation as marginalized minorities in larger nation-states such as Tanzania. As the way of life of contemporary gatherer-hunters has changed so dramatically just in the past century, it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions about human evolutionary history based on their example.

Pastoralism

In many gathering and hunting societies, bands follow herds of wild game as they move in seasonal migrations. Researchers speculate that such hunting practices may have led to the development of a new subsistence pattern around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Relying on their expert knowledge of the behavior and biology of game animals, hunters might have begun to control the movement of wild herds, steering the animals to territories that might be especially rich in grazing resources or conducive to certain hunting strategies. These new practices may have been a response to the diminishing of key game species due to overhunting, prompting hunters to devise strategies to enhance the animals’ diet and reproduction.

This human-animal relationship may have deepened over time as people discovered the nutritional resources available from live animals, such as milk and blood. Rather than killing an animal for meat, early herders figured out how to benefit from live animals and guide their reproduction to enlarge the herds. They began to selectively breed the healthiest and heartiest animals in their herds. They learned how to process animal products such as milk, hides, and hooves for use as food, textiles, and tools, and some used dung to fuel their fires. This process is called animal domestication. Humans in different environments domesticated a wide range of prey animals, including sheep, goats, cattle, water buffalo, yaks, pigs, reindeer, llamas, and alpacas.

Pastoralism is the mode of subsistence associated with the care and use of domesticated herd animals. Pastoralism shares many features with gathering-hunting, in particular the practice of ranging over a broad territory in seasonal cycles. Indeed, as they move with their herds to optimal grazing lands, many pastoral peoples gather fruits and nuts or occasionally hunt small game. Unlike gathering and hunting, however, herding promotes a sense of ownership over resources, as families develop close relationships with specific herds. Rather than sharing resources as foragers do, pastoralists consider their herds to be family property. Herds associated with a family are passed down to subsequent generations, most frequently from fathers to sons.

Archaeologists believe that pastoralism was developed around the same time as farming. In many regions, the two subsistence strategies are practiced by neighboring groups in symbiotic relations of trade. Often, a group will combine pastoralism with farming. Where rain is plentiful and soils are rich for cultivation, farming is used to take advantage of these resources. Pastoralism is utilized in areas with more marginal soils or unpredictable rainfall, conditions not optimal for farming but able to support herd animals if they are moved regularly to newly grown pastures and freshwater sources. Pastoralists who don’t farm usually trade meat, milk, and other animal products for the grains and vegetables grown by neighboring farmers. Most contemporary pastoralists find it necessary to supplement their diet of animal products with the vitamins and carbohydrates in cultivated plant foods and are able to do so through small farming and trade.

The Bedouin: Flexible Pastoralism

Across the dry grasslands of Arabia and northern Africa live about three million Arab peoples collectively known as the Bedouin. Before the 20th century, Bedouin peoples made their living primarily by herding camels, sheep, goats, and cattle. Many still do, although they often cultivate crops or work as wage laborers as well. Among those Bedouin still devoted to herding, most specialize in one or two herd animals particularly suited to the climate and available pastures in their environment. In areas around Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, sheep and goats are preferred, while cattle are kept by Bedouin groups in southern Arabia and Sudan. In very dry regions such as the Sahara and the Arabian Deserts, Bedouin groups herd camels, hardy animals with scant need for water. Camels are valued as transport but also for their high-quality milk and tasty meat. Camel herding, though a prized tradition, is becoming increasingly rare among Bedouin. Bedouin supplement their camels’ diet with feed, and many have been forced to sell off their camels as the price of feed rises. Since the 1960s, trucks and cars have replaced camels as a means of transportation for the Bedouin, sometimes used to bring food and water to herds in arid regions.

A herd of goats relaxes at a Bedouin camp near Jericho, in what is now the West Bank. Bedouin peoples rely on herding animals – such as camels, sheep, cattle, and goats – for meat, milk, and fiber. (credit: “Bedouin Goats 1557” by James Emery/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Bedouin pastoralists have traditionally lived in small camps that are moved as frequently as needed to find fresh pastures for their herds, sometimes as often as every few days. This form of herding is called nomadism. Each camp consists of several tents, each one housing an extended family. Typically, a tent might house a married couple with their children and one or two siblings of the husband. Within the camp, several tents might house people who are related to each other, as sons marry and establish their own tents. For instance, a camp could comprise 70 to 100 people, including the families of several brothers, each tent housing the family of a brother, a son, or an elder. Often, the families of the camp move together during the summer months, then converge with other groups in larger camps during the winter months. Camps usually consist of 3 to 15 tents.

Bedouin tent in Jordan. Tents can be quickly constructed and easily transported, making them the perfect home for those practicing a lifestyle that requires frequent movement. (credit: “Bedouin Camp” by young shanahan/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Instead of ranging freely, other Bedouin have traditionally moved their herds between two permanent settlements, one for the summer months and the other for winter. This pattern of pastoralism is known as transhumance. In societies that practice this form of subsistence today, young children and the elderly often remain in permanent camps year-round, benefiting from government health care and schools. Some Bedouin use transhumance to combine herding with small farming. For instance, some Egyptian Bedouin plant barley in the fall and then move with their herds into the desert, leaving behind a few people to tend to the crops. In the summer, the mobile group returns to harvest the crops, and the entire group spends the summer together.

Stone houses have replaced tents in many permanent camps. Both tents and houses are rectangular, divided into two or three rooms. One area is for women, with a kitchen and storeroom. One area is primarily for men, where guests and relatives are entertained. Sometimes, a third area is devoted to the care of sick or young animals.

Like gatherer-hunters, pastoralists divide work according to a sexual division of labor. For the Bedouin, that division is determined by the types of animals herded by the group. When both large and small animals are kept, men take responsibility for larger animals, such as camels and cattle. Women herd, feed, and milk smaller animals, such as goats and sheep. But when only small animals are herded by a group, men usually do the herding, while women do the feeding and milking. Where sheep are kept, women spin the wool into yarn, then weave it into strips used to make tents.

A Bedouin woman working at a loom. Spinning and weaving are tasks typically assigned to women in Bedouin societies. (credit: “Weaving Demonstration” by Alan Kotok/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Unlike foragers, pastoralists strongly value private property, primarily in the form of their herds. The wealth of a family is judged by the size of their herds. Bedouin sons and daughters both inherit herd animals from their fathers, though sons receive more than daughters. Because women are barred from caring for large animals, if a woman inherits camels, she usually entrusts them to a brother or cousin. All property is shared among members of the family.

The Sociocultural Complex of Pastoralism

Pastoralism as a subsistence mode is characterized by four interconnected features that shape these societies. First, culture revolves around herd animals, which serve as measures of wealth and social status, provide essential resources like meat, milk, and leather, cement social relationships through gifting and sacrifice, establish family continuity through inheritance, and inspire rich traditions of music and oral poetry. Second, pastoralists are mobile because herding requires constantly moving large herds to fresh pastures in seasonal cycles over marginal rangelands, a lifestyle that discourages accumulating property beyond animals and thereby reinforces their central value. Third, these societies depend on gender- and age-based divisions of labor to manage the heavy workload: boys handle daily herding, older men manage water access, predator control, herd optimization, and family decisions, while women milk animals, process and sell dairy products, construct and maintain camps, gather resources, cook, and preserve medical knowledge about plants. Fourth, pastoralists possess extensive environmental and zoological knowledge, including intimate understanding of vegetation, water sources, medicinal and edible plants across their rangelands, animal anatomy and behavior, and strategic herd composition by species, sex, and age—knowledge that enables them to rotate herds sustainably across rangelands, contradicting earlier scholarly assumptions that pastoralism was environmentally destructive through overgrazing.

Contemporary Challenges to Pastoralism

Like many pastoralists, the Bedouin require large territories for grazing their herds, with families associated with defined lands they rarely exceed, yet the nation-states encompassing these territories deny Bedouin ownership rights, considering the land state-owned and implementing policies to settle them through schools and health clinics. Governments have seized Bedouin lands for development—Egypt's government, for example, bulldozed a Bedouin tourist camp in 1999 to build hotels, claiming Bedouin lacked rights to coastal areas, while Israel regularly demolishes Bedouin camps and villages for settlements and military zones, with tens of thousands displaced by such actions in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere. Pressured by regulations and military interventions, many Bedouin now live settled lives in villages and cities across North Africa and the Middle East, combining sedentary herding with small farming or working as taxi drivers, café managers, or campground operators, with some becoming wealthy through tourism investments while speaking nostalgically of their nomadic past.

A Bedouin Palestinian woman in front of the remains of her home, which was destroyed by Israeli law enforcement. Tens of thousands of Bedouin have been displaced by the nation-states that now encompass Bedouin territory. (credit: Eman/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

The Bedouin's predicament reflects broader challenges facing contemporary pastoralists: climate change has made rainfall unpredictable, threatening the sustainability of herding on marginal lands, while governments and global investors seek control over land for crop cultivation, tourist attractions, and conservation zones, with some governments formalizing land ownership that creates competition for collective rangelands and enables elite herders to seize control at small herders' expense. Some nomadic pastoral groups like the Wodaabe of West Africa have cultivated their distinctive cultural practices as protected heritage or tourist attractions, welcoming researchers and filmmakers who have produced over 17 documentaries and featured their elaborate geerewol and yaake dances—where young men compete for recognition as the most beautiful dancers by young women judges—in publications like National Geographic and performances for European tourists, though many anthropologists worry about cultural commodification and exploitation of marginal groups for Western audiences. While some question pastoralism's future viability and suggest transitioning to sedentary ranching, such transitions would require massive investments in fencing, feed supplements, veterinary care, permanent wells, trucks, mobile phones, and even airplanes, suggesting that if practiced in environmental harmony without these costly inputs, pastoralism may continue providing a sustainable way of life.

Cultivation: Horticulture & Agriculture

Many thousands of years ago, one of humanity’s ancestors might have spied a sprout emerging from a refuse pile of pits, nuts, and seeds. Perhaps it was a lightbulb moment: “Hmm, I wonder if I could do that on purpose....” Or maybe it was somebody who dug up a plant and moved it closer to camp: “Genius! Now I don’t have to walk so far!” Somehow, people discovered that they need not rely on the whims of nature to provide them with plants; rather, they could grow the plants they wanted in places more convenient to them. This basic manipulation of nature is called cultivation, and gather-hunters were experimenting with it for thousands of years before the development of farming.

The real revolution happened when people began to design their whole way of life around the sowing, tending, and harvesting of plant crops, depending primarily on those crops as sources of food. By planting the seeds of the most desirable plants, humans began to alter the features of those plants over generations of sowing and harvesting. This process of plant domestication first took hold around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, possibly spurred by the warming climate after the last ice age. As plants became bigger, tastier, more nutritious, and easier to grow, larger groups of people could be supported by permanent gardens with no need to migrate. Eventually, some people didn’t have to farm at all and could specialize in crafts such as pottery, metalwork, basketry, and textiles. Markets emerged as farmers, herders, and craftspeople became entwined in symbiotic relations of trade. Villages grew into towns and cities and, eventually, regional empires. This might all seems like a great leap forward in human development, and indeed it was a big transformation, but farming came with its share of drawbacks as well.

Archaeologists used to believe that agriculture was separately invented in three primary regions of the world: the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East (11,000 years ago), northern China (9,000 years ago), and Mesoamerica (8,000 years ago). Each of these regions featured the domestication of grains as carbohydrate sources. These grains were combined with lentils and beans as sources of protein, along with meat obtained through trade with neighboring pastoral groups. In the Middle East, wheat, barley, peas, and lentils were cultivated. In China, millet, rice, and beans were grown. It is now known that farming was independently invented in many other regions as well (Bellwood 2019). In addition to the three already mentioned, plants were domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa, India, New Guinea, South America, and the eastern woodlands of North America.

Extensive Horticulture and Intensive Agriculture

The first form of farming that humans developed is known as extensive horticulture. Before a plot of land can be cultivated for the first time, the trees and vegetation must be cleared away, an arduous task usually done by men. Sometimes, a strategy called slash and burn is used, which involves cutting down the trees and shrubs and burning the rest to the ground, then tilling the ash into the soil as fertilizer. Using digging sticks and hoes, horticultural farmers cultivate the top layer of soil before they sow. As seedlings sprout, they water them and feed them with natural fertilizers such as animal dung, and they weed the gardens regularly.

Horticultural societies plant not just one crop but many. They have learned that certain plants are “friends”—that is, they enhance one another’s growth—and so they plant these crops side by side. This is practice is known as intercropping. For instance, in Mesoamerica, squash, corn, and beans were planted closely together in flat-topped mounds, a combination known as the “three sisters.” Several corn plants were planted first, in the center of the mound. Once the corn seedlings were well established, squash and beans were planted at their base. As they grew, the corn plants provided stalks for the vining bean plants to climb. The bean plants contributed nitrogen to the soil, fertilizing the other two plants. The squash plants spread across the ground, blocking weeds and protecting the root systems of all three. Typically, societies practicing extensive horticulture have vast knowledge of such sustainable farming methods. These techniques are natural ways to optimize the health and yield of each plant while providing a variable and balanced diet throughout the year.

In a “three sisters” plot, corn, squash and beans are grown together. Each plant benefits the other. (credit: “Three Sisters” by GreenHouse17/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Incorporating organic methods of fertilization and pest control, horticulture is a sustainable form of farming. Over time, however, this method does deplete the nutrients in the top layer of soil. After a certain number of seasons growing crops on a particular plot, it becomes necessary to let that plot lie fallow. When horticultural farmers let a plot lie fallow, they stop cultivating it and let the grasses and brush grow in naturally, which promotes the accumulation of fresh nutrients in the soil. Plots can be left to lie fallow for as little as one season or as many as 20. While one plot regenerates, the farmer moves on to clear, till, and sow another plot for cultivation. Horticulturalists often have several plots of land in various stages of fallow and cultivation. This method of rotating crops over various plots of land is called extensive or shifting cultivation, as it involves multiple plots over large areas. Horticulture farmers usually have a variety of plots with distinctive soils and climate features, and they tailor specific farming strategies, including crop species, fertilizers, watering methods, and farming-fallow cycles, for each one.

Often in horticultural societies, land is not owned as private property but held in trust by family heads or village leaders who allocate plots of land to individuals. People have the right to use the land assigned to them but not to own or sell it, a practice known as usufruct rights. These rights to use certain plots are passed down through families, via either the father or the mother. When newcomers move into an area, they may approach the leader to ask for plots of land to farm. In many African societies, it is also common for people to loan out their plots to one another in gestures of friendship and mutual aid.

Extensive horticulture typically provides enough resources to support extended-family households, perhaps with a bit left over to sell in local markets. This amount left over after the needs of the family are met is called surplus. The modest surplus of horticulturalists is sometimes accumulated by families or village leaders in silos or other structures, held in safekeeping for community use in the lean months before the next crops can be harvested. Horticulture does not usually generate enough surplus to support groups of people who do not farm. Craftspeople, religious specialists, and group leaders must all carry on farming alongside these other important activities.

Extensive horticulture provides a good way to cultivate crops on land that is not particularly rich with nutrients. Tropical climates tend to have such soils due to the lack of winter dormancy. In temperate zones (23 to 66 degrees latitude), vegetation dies off in the autumn, depositing dead matter into the soil, which then decomposes into a rich substance called humus (hyoo-mus). Humus is essentially built-in fertilizer, feeding new plants as they grow in spring and summer. Because vegetation does not ever die off in tropical areas, tropical soils do not accumulate humus to the extent that temperate soils do. With less humus, it is more advantageous to use a plot of land a few times, then let the natural vegetation grow back. Slashing and burning regrowth is a way for tropical farmers to mimic the natural die-off of vegetation in temperate climates.

In climates with warm and cold seasons, the layer of humus-rich soil is much denser and thicker than in tropical regions. In these areas, it is advantageous to dig deeper to prepare soils for sowing, distributing the layer of humus into a thicker layer of soil to serve as a reservoir of nutrients for the new plants.

The seasonal deposit of nutrients in the soil also happens in areas surrounding large rivers that flood and recede in a yearly cycle. Along the Nile in North Africa and between the Tigris and Euphrates in the Middle East, ancient farmers were able to use the same soils over and over again as the rivers helpfully dumped organic matter onto their farmlands every year. Riverine farmers learned to control flows of water, creating systems of irrigation to continually water their crops. Sumerian farmers in the Mesopotamian crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates were the first to use the plow, using oxen to pull large blades through their garden plots. Plowing makes the soil even richer for planting.

A Sumerian plow. Sumerian farmers were the first to use the plow, making possible greater yields. (credit: “John Deere Plow” by Public.Resource.Org/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The use of a plow, the development of irrigation systems, and the continuous cultivation of the same plots are part of a way of farming called intensive agriculture. A good way to remember the difference between extensive and intensive cultivation is to think about how extensive farming involves farming multiple plots over extensive territory, while intensive farming involves applying intensive methods to the same plots over and over again. Intensive agriculture generates much greater yields than horticulture, supporting far larger populations. Greater yields mean greater surplus, which means that societies practicing intensive agriculture generate groups of people who don’t need to farm, such as specialists in craft production, trade, religion, and government.

Farmers who practice intensive agriculture focus on a small number of crops, frequently grains or legumes. They use the surplus generated from intensive methods to trade for other foods, tools, and material goods to meet the needs of their households.

Most people use the word agriculture to mean plant cultivation of any kind. For anthropologists, however, agriculture is just one form of plant cultivation—the kind involving intensive methods such as plows, draft animals, irrigation systems, and repeated use of plots. This chapter uses the term plant cultivation to refer to both extensive horticulture and intensive agriculture. References to specific types of cultivation use the terms extensive horticulture and intensive agriculture.

The Kayapó: Flexible Horticulture

In the eastern Amazonian rainforest beside the Xingu River, the Kayapó people have created a flexible way of life that carefully cultivates rainforest, savanna, and intermediate zone resources by mixing slash-and-burn horticulture with gathering, hunting, and some animal domestication. Like most farming societies, the Kayapó rely on staple carbohydrate crops including sweet potato, manioc, maize, and taro, clearing new garden plots every three to five years while actively managing fallow plots by planting fruit trees, medicinal plants, and other desirable vegetation to maintain productivity, and transplanting edible and medicinal plants along transit paths used for gathering-and-hunting expeditions that supplement farming during part of the year—women gather fruits, nuts, and berries while men hunt armadillos, deer, anteaters, and wild pigs, with both groups regularly harvesting honey and fishing with bows, arrows, nets, and plant-based poison, and occasionally slaughtering large numbers of tortoises for special festivals. Because they farm, the Kayapó live in villages most of the year, with extended-family houses arranged in a circle surrounding a central public space containing a men's house, and social activities coordinated by groups based on gender, age, and extended family through two men's societies (each associated with a women's society), where boys joining manhood choose a society (usually their intended father-in-law's), their future wives join the corresponding women's society, and each society has its own leader and meeting place.

A multiethnic celebration attended by the Kayapo and eight other ethnic groups. The celebration promotes the interaction of indigenous groups with each other and the public. (credit: “VI Aldeia Multiétnica no XV Meeting of Encontro de Culturas Tradicionais da Chapada dos Veadeiros” by Oliver Kornblihtt/Secretaria Especial da Cultura do Ministério da Cidadania/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Kayapó life is organized seasonally, with planting during the "low water" season followed by farming until harvest, then a "high water" hunting season when wild fruits ripen and attract game, followed by a leisure period of family activities and increased fishing before the new year begins, with a calendar of ceremonies and festivals marking these seasons and promoting subsistence success. The Kayapó possess deep environmental knowledge and work diligently to cultivate flora and fauna diversity across ecological zones, with village experts in soils, plants, animals, and medicines who identify numerous micro-zones between forest and savanna (each associated with distinct interrelated plants, animals, and soil types), attract game species by sowing specific plants, adjust soil moisture, shade, and temperature using ground cover materials, fertilize crops with ash from specific cleared vegetation, design gardens in concentric circles for optimal light and water distribution, and practice complex intercropping of mutually beneficial plants like "banana neighbors" including "child-want-not" (used by women to regulate fertility). In open areas, the Kayapó create apêtê or "forest islands" by spreading organic matter like termite nests, sowing useful trees and plant seeds in the nutrient-rich mounds, cutting center trees for better light distribution, and cultivating medicinal and edible plants that create shady rest areas, sometimes including vines producing potable water as traveling drinking fountains.

The nurturing of plant biodiversity is crucial to Kayapó medicine, as they identify and cultivate hundreds of plants for treating specific ailments (diarrhea, scorpion stings, snakebites) organized in complex classificatory schemes that distinguish 50 separate diarrhea types, each treated with a specific plant medicine. The Kayapó are also zoology masters who study animal anatomy and behavior for hunting and farming—deliberately planting smelly ant nests around gardens infested with leaf-cutting ants because the pheromones scare away the destructive ants, while crushed smelly ants can be inhaled as sinus medicine—and they keep many pets including birds, snakes, spiders, and various mammals (one village survey found over 60 pet species), encouraging children to observe pet behavior to maximize learning.

An arial view of the land of the Kayapó. The Kayapo are deeply knowledgeable about the ecology of their environment and have developed a number of horticultural practices designed to preserve and enhance the natural abundance around them. (credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

The Kayapó have developed a vast store of knowledge about their surroundings, and they use that knowledge to promote plant and animal biodiversity and nurture their environment. Some anthropologists suggest that industrialized societies could learn much about environmental management and ecological sustainability from horticultural groups such as the Kayapó.

The Sociocultural Complex of Plant Cultivation

Horticulture is often combined with gathering, hunting, and even pastoralism to form flexible, sustainable subsistence strategies, and as societies rely more on crops, they settle into permanent villages—frequently consisting of extended-family houses with central public areas, like the Kayapó—where several extended families each have their own leaders or elders, and as agricultural methods intensify, families cooperate in developing irrigation schemes, trade networks, and land allocation and protection, necessitating community leadership and group decision-making forms. Plant cultivation requires substantially more work than gathering-hunting, including the backbreaking tasks of clearing land, tilling, sowing, watering, weeding, controlling pests, harvesting, processing crops for market or meals, and making and maintaining tools like hoes, scythes, and plows, with draft animals requiring daily care, so agricultural societies rely on extended-family labor divided by gender and age: typically men clear land and tend tools and draft animals while women sow, weed, water daily, and process materials for home consumption (making pottery, baskets, clothing, and shoes until craftspeople take over), children help with chores like carrying water and scaring away scavengers, girls babysit younger children, and men usually assume public leadership positions while women often represent their interests in their own groups with their own leadership. The gendered arrangement of work varies—in some societies men market crops while in others women do, and frequently as cultivation intensifies with large cash crops like wheat and rice, men market cash crops while women sell garden vegetables—and cultivation work is structured by seasonal cycles, with social life organized into annual calendars featuring festivals, ceremonies, and rituals marking cultivation stages, such as "garden magic" spells to encourage good weather and manage anxieties of crop-dependent communities, and large harvest festivals with feasting, special songs and dances, and commemoration of gods and ancestors.

Successful plant cultivation requires extensive knowledge about plant and animal biology, soil composition, geology, and weather patterns, with many cultivators possessing deep understanding of soil-seed relationships—Sukuma farmers in Tanzania identify six soil types (five specific to rice, corn, sorghum, and two groundnut kinds, one for grazing), while Peruvian potato farmers know 35 potato varieties and match each to optimal soil and environmental conditions—and cultivators rely on environmental indicators like wild plant flowering and fruiting, bird migrations, and changing star patterns to determine planting and harvesting times, such as Indian farmers watching laburnum trees' yellow blossoms or the pied crested cuckoo's arrival to predict monsoons. Farming societies have various techniques for managing weeds and pests: some weeds provide food and craft materials, crop-attracted animals are hunted for protein (grasshoppers and locusts fried into treats, rodents trapped for meat), and specific plants repel weeds and pests (traditional Chinese farmers used thunder god vine root bark against caterpillars and aphids, while neem and mint protect harvested produce from insects). This vast natural knowledge is undergirded by value systems emphasizing environmental conservation and protection, with environmental knowledge often entwined with supernatural beliefs and cultural values preserved in songs, stories, legends, and rituals—ancient religious texts like India's Vedas functioned as records of environmental knowledge commanding humans to live in harmony with nature, revering valuable trees and plants associated with supernatural beings, protecting them with penalties for cutting them down, and typically plant cultivator cultures promote nature reverence and compel sustainable farming practices that protect soil and preserve biodiversity.

Intensive agriculture produces a much larger surplus than horticultural methods. As agricultural surpluses and human populations both grew, villages expanded into towns, which evolved into cities. Emerging about 7,000 ago, the city of Uruk, located in what is now Iraq, was the first large urban center in Mesopotamia and possibly the world (Nardo 2007; Wallenfels and Sasson 2000). At its peak population, it housed 50,000 to 80,000 people, with more living in the surrounding metropolitan area. Surrounding peoples practiced agriculture and herding and traded their surplus in the city markets. Within the city, a class of craftspeople supported themselves without doing any farming, prominent among them cloth makers and metalworkers. Uruk peoples traded widely with groups throughout Mesopotamia and what is now western Iran. The accumulation of wealth in the city supported the building of great temples and city walls by a class of construction workers (Pittman 2019). Such public buildings are called monumental architecture. Cuneiform writing was invented as a method of accounting, used to keep track of trade and inventory. Coordinating this complex economy was a centralized government headed by a king.

Like Uruk in Mesopotamia, the early cities of Abydos in Egypt, Harappa in the Indus Valley, and Anyang in China all emerged close to waterways, locations where intensive agriculture stimulated increases in population (Rizvi 2007). Cities provided sites for craft specialization, the organization of regional trade, the building of monumental architecture, the development of writing, and the centralization of power. With its large stone plaza, pyramids, and ball courts, the Zapotec city of Monte Albán emerged as an administrative capital in Mesoamerica around 4,000 years ago. With its own plaza and pyramids, the site of Caral in present-day Peru developed into a city around the same time as Monte Albán. Built on a base of agricultural surplus, all of these cities demonstrate urban planning, heterogeneous populations, regional trade, and monumental architecture.

Contemporary Challenges of Farming Societies

Communities relying primarily on extensive horticulture or intensive agriculture are generally able to meet their own subsistence needs. However, with the development of cities into regional empires, many cultivators became incorporated into larger structures of trade and government. Under pressure from these structures, farmers past and present were and are obliged to sell their surplus for cash in order to pay taxes and purchase agricultural inputs such as seed and fertilizer. As cities and states grow, they exert pressure on cultivators to produce ever higher yields to support greater populations and more elaborate state projects. As cultivators become incorporated into demanding states, they become a class of peasants. A peasant is a farmer with a small plot of land incorporated into a larger regional economy. Nearly all contemporary cultivators are part of a peasant class in their nation-states (Sillitoe 2018). Peasants are often marginalized and disadvantaged, reliant on economic and political structures they cannot control, and exploited by urban elites. Many farmers now make up a rural underclass.

Extensive horticulturalists such as the Kayapó require large areas of land in order to allow their fallow plots to regenerate before reusing them. Over the past 30 years, cattle ranchers, loggers, and miners have moved into Kayapó territory. Unlike the Kayapó, ranchers and loggers practice ecologically damaging methods, leaving large areas of barren wasteland in their wake. Early on, some Kayapó communities accommodated iron and gold mining operations, signing contracts that granted mining companies permission to operate in exchange for a small percentage of profits. However, mining practices polluted the rivers that the Kayapó rely on for drinking, bathing, and fishing. With the emergence of gold rush towns and the flood of foreigners into the area, the Kayapó began to see unwelcome changes in their communities, such as increases in disease and problematic alcohol use. Many Kayapó turned against outsiders, attacking loggers and miners to force them off of Kayapó land. As a further problem, the Brazilian government has proposed a series of large hydroelectric dams on Kayapó rivers to generate power in the Amazonian hinterlands. These dams would flood Kayapó territory, displacing more than 20,000 people. Recognizing these projects as threats to their culture and way of life, the Kayapó have joined with other Amazonian Indigenous groups in dramatic protests attracting global attention and support (Turner and Fajans-Turner 2006). The rock star Sting attended one such protest and later founded the Rainforest Foundation Fund to support the efforts of the Kayapó to protect their land.

Kayapo representatives are shown a map of mining concessions within their lands. Mining is just one of the threats to the Kayapo way of life and to the ecological health of their territory that has emerged in the recent decades. (credit: Beto Ricardo/Instituto Socio-Ambiental/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

You may have heard this story before—the story of Indigenous peoples who come to be surrounded and dominated by extractive capitalists and state officials. In their relations with Indigenous peoples practicing gathering-hunting, pastoralism, and horticulture, states often argue that such people are resisting inevitable progress. Indeed, American world history textbooks often represent the emergence of cities, the expansion of trade, and the creation of bureaucratic states as steps in the triumphal march of progress, key achievements in the development of civilization. But progress for whom? The more that is learned about life in nonindustrial, noncapitalist societies, the more questions are raised about these notions of progress.

Exchange, Value, & Consumption

Before moving ahead to discuss the last of the four major subsistence methods, it’s worth reviewing the ways in which goods circulate in societies in accordance with each mode of subsistence. The four subsistence strategies are defined primarily by their techniques of production—that is, the way people use materials from their environments to make the things they need, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medicines but there are also various methods of circulating things through social groups.

Most societies rely on one primary strategy for making a living, though they very often combine it with one or more others in flexible ways over time. If key foods become impossible to find, gatherer-hunters may take up farming for a few seasons. Many herding groups regularly hunt and sometimes plant crops along their nomadic routes, returning the next season to harvest the crops. Many farmers also keep domesticated animals. So it is with modes of exchange. Most societies practice not just one strategy but a combination of many, dominated by the form of exchange that dovetails with the main subsistence strategy.

Forms of Exchange & Reciprocity

There are three distinct ways to integrate economic and social relations and distribute material goods. Contemporary economics only studies the first, market exchange. Most economic models are unable to explain the second two, reciprocity and redistribution, because they have different underlying logics. Economic anthropology, on the other hand, provides perspective into how diverse modes of exchange shape, and are shaped by, everyday life across space and time. Anthropologists understand market exchange to be a form of trade that today most commonly involves general purpose money, bargaining, and supply and demand price mechanisms. In contrast, reciprocity involves the exchange of goods and services and is rooted in a mutual sense of obligation and identity. Anthropologists have identified three distinct types of reciprocity: generalized, balanced, and negative. Finally, redistribution occurs when an authority of some type collects economic contributions from all community members and then redistributes these back in the form of goods and services. Redistribution requires centralized social organization, even if at a small scale. As we will see, various modes of exchange can and do coexist, even within capitalism.

While early economic anthropology often seemed focused on detailed investigations of seemingly exotic economic practices, anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss used ethnographic research and findings to critique Western, capitalist economic systems. Mauss, a French anthropologist (and nephew of Durkheim) was one of the first to provide an in-depth exploration of reciprocity and the role that gifts play in cultural systems around the world. Mauss asked why humans feel obliged to reciprocate when they receive a gift. His answer was that giving and reciprocating gifts, whether these are material objects or our time, creates links between the people involved. This makes sense when we consider Durkheims ideas about 'feelings of force'—social forces. What Mauss was able to articulate was that the need to reciprocate 'gifts' (loosley defined) is one such cultural or social force.

Over the past century, anthropologists have devoted considerable attention to the topic of reciprocity. It is an attractive one because of the seemingly moral nature of gifts: many of us hope that humans are not solely self-interested, antisocial economic actors. Gifts are about social relations, not just about the gifts themselves. Giving a gift that contains a bit of oneself builds a social relationship with the person who receives it. Studying reciprocity gives anthropologists insights into the moral economy: the processes through which customs, cultural values, beliefs, and social coercion influence our economic behavior. The economy can be understood as a symbolic reflection of the cultural order and the sense of right and wrong that people adhere to within that cultural order.

Generalized Reciprocity

When we gift without reckoning the exact value of the gift or expecting a specific thing in return we are practicing generalized reciprocity. This form of reciprocity occurs within the closest social relationships where exchange happens so frequently that monitoring the value of each item or service given and received would be impossible, and to do so would lead to tension and quite possibly the eventual dissolution of the relationship. However, generalized reciprocity is not necessarily limited to households. Communities might cook and deliver meals for neighbors who have a new baby, a sick parent, or recently deceased relative. Similarly, at Halloween we give out handfuls of candy (sometimes spending $50 or more in the process)—the reciprocation here is ostensibly not getting egged, but the concept of 'trick-or-treat' has laregely lost the 'trick' component over the past several decades moving the practice closer to generalized reciprocity.

Balanced Reciprocity

Unlike generalized reciprocity, balanced reciprocity is more of a direct exchange in which something is traded or given with the expectation that something of equal value will be returned (usually within a specific time period). This form of reciprocity involves three distinct stages: the gift must be given, it has to be received, and a reciprocal gift has to be returned. A key aspect of balanced reciprocity is that without reciprocation, the exchange system will falter and the social relationship might end. Balanced reciprocity generally occurs at a social level more distant than the family, but it usually occurs among people who know each other. In other words, complete strangers would be unlikely to engage in balanced reciprocity because they would not be able to trust the person to reciprocate within an acceptable period of time.

Mwali from the Kula Exchange

The Kula ring system of exchange found in the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific is possibly the most famous example of balanced reciprocity. A Kula ring involves the ceremonial exchange of shell and bead necklaces (soulava) for shell arm bands (mwali) between trading partners living on different islands. The arm bands and necklaces constantly circulate and only have symbolic value, meaning they bring the temporary owner honor and prestige but cannot be bought or sold for money. Malinowski was the first anthropologist to study the Kula ring, and he found that although participants did not profit materially from the exchange, it served several important functions in Trobriand society. Because participants formed relationships with trading participants on other islands, the Kula ring helped solidify alliances among tribes, and overseas partners became allies in a land of danger and insecurity. Along with arm bands and necklaces, Kula participants were also engaging in more mundane forms of trade, bartering from one island to another. Additionally, songs, customs, and cultural influences also traveled along the Kula route. Finally, although ownership of the arm bands and necklaces was always temporary (for eventually participants are expected to gift the items to other partners in the ring), Kula participants took great pride and pleasure in the items they received. The Kula ring exhibits all the hallmarks of balanced reciprocity: necklaces are traded for armbands with the expectation that objects of equal value will be returned within a specific time period.

Negative Reciprocity

Unlike balanced and generalized reciprocity, negative reciprocity is an attempt to get something for nothing. It is the most impersonal of the three forms of reciprocity and it commonly exists among people who do not know each other well—because close relationships are incompatible with attempts to take advantage of other people. Gambling is a good example of negative reciprocity, and some would argue that market exchange, in which one participant aims to buy low while the other aims to sell high, can also be a form of negative reciprocity.

In the 21st century, one of the best known examples of negative reciprocity may be the use of malware, ransomware, or email phishing scams. The anthropologist Daniel Smith studied the motives and practices of email scammers who are responsible for approximately one-fifth of these types of emails that flood Western inboxes. He found that the common "Nigerian Prince" scams emerged in the largest African state in the late 1990s when there were few legitimate economic opportunities for the large number of educated young people who had the English skills and technological expertise necessary for successful scams. Smith spoke with some of the Nigerians sending these emails and found that they dreamed of a big payoff someday. They reportedly felt bad for people who were duped, but said that if Americans were greedy enough to fall for it they got what they deserved.

Redistribution

Redistribution is the accumulation of goods or labor by a particular person or institution for the purpose of dispersal at a later date. Redistribution is found in all societies. For example, within households we pool our labor and resources, yet we rarely distribute these outside of our family. For redistribution to become a central economic process, a society must have a centralized apparatus (political, religious, etc.) to coordinate and enforce the practice. Redistribution can occur alongside other forms of exchange. For example, in the United States everyone who works in the formal sector pays federal taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

Sometimes economic practices that appear to be merely reciprocal gift exchanges are revealed to be forms of redistribution after closer inspection. The potlatch system of Indigenous American groups living in the United States and Canadian northwestern coastal area was long understood as an example of functional gift giving. Traditionally, two groups of clans would perform highly ritualized exchanges of food, blankets, and ritual objects. The system produced status and prestige among participants: by giving away more goods than another person, a chief could build his reputation and gain new respect within the community. After contact with settlers, the excessive gift giving during potlatches escalated to the point that early anthropologists described it as a “war of property.” Later anthropological studies of the potlatch revealed that rather than wasting, burning, or giving away their property to display their wealth, the groups were actually giving away goods that other groups could use and then waiting for a later potlatch when they would receive things not available in their own region. This was important because the availability of food hunted, fished, and foraged by native communities could be highly variable; the potlatch primarily served a livelihood function by ensuring the redistribution of goods between groups with surpluses and those with deficits.

A potlatch in British Columbia in the 1890s. In potlach ceremonies, the power and wealth of a group was demonstrated not by what they acquired but by what they gave away. (credit: Edward S. Curtis/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Markets

The third way that societies distribute goods and services is through market exchange. Markets are social institutions with prices or exchange equivalencies. Markets do not necessarily have to be localized in a geographic place (e.g., a marketplace), but they cannot exist without institutions to govern the exchanges. Market and reciprocal exchange appear to share similar features: one person gives something and the other receives something. A key distinction between the two is that market exchanges are regulated by supply and demand mechanisms. The forces of supply and demand can create risk for people living in societies that largely distribute goods through market exchange. If we lose our jobs, we may not be able to buy food for our families. In contrast, if a member of a Dobe Ju/’hoansi community is hurt and unable to gather foods today, she will continue to eat as a result of generalized reciprocal exchanges.

While market exchange is generally less personal than reciprocal exchange, personalized transactions between people who have a relationship that endures beyond a single exchange do exist. Atomized transactions are impersonal ones between people who have no relationship with each other beyond the short term of the exchange. These are generally short-run, closed-ended transactions with few implications for the future. In contrast, personalized transactions occur between people who have a relationship that endures past the exchange and might include both social and economic elements.

To better understand the differences between transactions between relative strangers and those that are more personalized, consider the different options one has for a haircut: a person can stop by a chain salon such and leave twenty minutes later after spending $15 to have his hair trimmed by someone he has never met before, or he can develop an ongoing relationship with a hair stylist or barber he regularly visits. These appointments may last an hour or even longer, and he and his stylist probably chat about each other’s lives, the weather, or politics. At Christmas he may even bring a small gift or give an extra tip. He trusts his stylist to cut his hair the way he likes it because of their long history of personalized transactions.

Among strangers, market exchange is the most common form of transaction. In capitalist societies, market exchange is the default setting; if all else fails, pay for it. Market transactions are quick and easy, and the participants walk away relatively unencumbered by future obligation. If this is the advantage of market exchange, it can also be a big disadvantage. Without the relations of mutuality and trust established by forms of reciprocity, the participants in market exchange are motivated by the desire to get more than they give. A society dominated by market exchange is therefore dominated by the logic of self-interest and greed rather than cooperation and social well-being.

Money

While general purpose money is not a prerequisite for market exchanges, most commercial transactions today do involve the exchange of money. Money serves as a medium of exchange, a tool for storing wealth, and as a way to assign interchangeable values. It reflects our ideas about the generalized interchangeability of all things—it makes products and services from all over the world commensurable in terms of a single metric. In so doing, it increases opportunities for unequal exchange. Different societies have attempted to challenge this notion of interchangeability and the inequalities it can foster in different ways.

What is money? In the formulation of classical philosophy, money is defined by three functions: it serves as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Imagine that two friends from neighboring groups, one a pastoralist group and the other a horticultural group, meet in town. The pastoralist has a freshly slaughtered goat slung over their shoulder. The horticulturalist is carrying a small sack of vegetables. They decide they’d like to trade. The farmer wants all of the meat, but the herder wants only a small portion of the vegetables. Each person wants the trade to be equal; that is, they both want to give and receive the same value. How can they conduct this transaction? How do they know the value of the things they want to trade?

It seems natural to imagine these two trader friends attempting to negotiate some sort of barter. The swapping of goods on the spot, however, was never a dominant form of exchange in any culture in the past. Instead, many anthropologists argue that precapitalist peoples relied more on gift exchange, redistribution, and debt to circulate goods through society. When an uneven exchange was made, the one who benefited more would 'owe' the other. The other possible solution is money. If these two traders live in a society that uses some arbitrary other thing to enumerate value, they would know that all of the meat has the value of a number of shekels, cowrie shells, tally sticks, bones, animal skins, brass rods, gold coins, bank notes, or any other objects used as money. With some units of money, they can make the exchanges and walk away without entanglement.

Industrialism

All of the modes of subsistence previously discussed rely on human labor applied directly to environmental resources to produce relatively small batches of food, tools, and other goods. In the past 10,000 years, gathering-hunting, pastoralism, and agriculture all existed side by side, and most groups dabbled in more than one of these modes.

In these systems, most work is conducted by extended-family groups in the context of the household, whether settled or mobile. These family groups regulate their own work cycles and determine how goods are produced and distributed based on their own needs and strategies. In the 1700s in Europe, a new way of producing goods began to develop, slowly at first and then growing exponentially to sweep the globe. That mode of subsistence is industrialism: the use of wage labor and technological processes to mass-produce commodities. This mode of subsistence drew sets of people away from their households into factories where they performed repetitive forms of labor in return for regular wages. In the factory setting, workers have very little control over their own work cycles and no claim whatsoever on the goods they produce.

As a mode of subsistence, industrialism drew from and transformed other modes of production, such as pastoralism and agriculture. Industrialism did not supersede other modes but rather used them as sources of raw materials and labor. Gatherer-hunters, with no surplus to supply industry, are deemed useless to industrialism. Gatherer-hunter groups are thus marginalized by contemporary states, often being confined to reservations where their way of life is difficult or impossible to practice.

Cloth, Factories, and Slavery: The Rise of Industrialism

In the early 1700s, small-scale British sheepherders produced raw wool exported to European countries like the Netherlands for processing into cloth, but envious British manufacturers sought to expand local wool processing for export, driving up wool prices and prompting large landholders to evict small-scale peasants to expand sheep herds, while landless people flooded cities seeking work just as manufacturers needed cheap wage labor for new factories, with the drive to increase productivity while lowering costs prompting technological innovations (water mills, steam engines) and new labor management techniques (clock-regulated workdays, shop-floor discipline) that stimulated similar mass production shifts in cotton cloth, pottery, and metals, completely transforming England's economy by the mid-1800s into one dominated by factory-produced commodities for global export—a model that spread across western Europe, reshaping urban national economies in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and beyond.

As these industries outgrew local raw material supplies, they sought additional sources of cotton, sugar, tea, and tobacco, ultimately resulting in the creation and expansion of the African slave trade—using enslaved persons on New World plantations to supply English factories. European societies shifted to industrial production not because it provided better lives for most people but because it generated stupendous profits for large landowners, factory owners, and transnational traders—not progress for peasants forced into urban slums working 14-hour days under harsh shop-floor discipline, nor for enslaved persons abducted, shipped abroad, and worked to death under the lash, but perhaps seeming like progress to European consumers eager for fancy clothes and tasty foods, with the modern advertising industry invented during this time to stimulate consumption of mass-produced commodities and promote notions of progress and development that emerged in 19th-century Europe as rationales for new forms of conflict and domination demanded by the industrial economy.

Industrial weaving was often done by young women. Working long hours in a textile factory was a very difference experience from the weaving that these women’s mothers and grandmothers may have done at home. (credit: “The Bobbin Girl” by National Park Service/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Colonialism and Global Capitalism

The development of the industrial economy in Europe generated the global system of capitalism that exists today. After the European slave trade was abolished in the early 19th century, Europeans expanded their control over African, Asian, and New World territories, cultivating new sources of such raw materials as peanuts, cocoa, and palm oil to develop even more lucrative European industries. This expansion of control took the form of colonialism, the political domination of another country in the interest of economic exploitation.

Figure 7.18 Postcolonial countries of the world. Note the pervasive influence that European nations have had around the globe, with just a few isolated areas that have remained free of European influence or control. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, CC BY 4.0 license)

From the 1500s to the 1900s, European countries dominated much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas through colonialism involving violent rule, raw material extraction, forced labor, taxation, Christian missions, local culture denigration, disease introduction, and increased local conflict, with colonizers claiming a "civilizing mission" to bring progress benefits like hospitals and schools despite hardships and injustices far outweighing meager benefits for colonized peoples. Economically, colonialism was designed to extract raw materials supporting European industrial economies, so countries like Britain, France, and Germany sought valuable minerals and fertile land for cash crops—seizing fertile African regions and selling them to White settlers for tea and cotton plantations, relocating African peoples to less fertile lands and forcing them to work on White plantations to survive, recruiting African farmers to grow coffee and cocoa where tropical diseases like malaria made White settlement difficult, taxing colonial subjects to force mine and plantation work or cash crop cultivation, edging African businesspeople out of international trade, and curtailing colonial industrial development to protect European industry.

Most colonized countries gained independence in the mid-20th century, but colonial economic domination persists for most postcolonial countries whose economies remain dominated by few mining and cash crop exports, with wildly fluctuating global raw material prices making government budgeting difficult and eroding export value over time, forcing countries to export increasingly more just to maintain economies and making real economic growth nearly impossible.

Important!

Today, we can better understand this history. Importantly, we can also consider the role colonialist practices have had on shaping anthropology. In the past, ideas about "civilization" drove incorrect assumptions about linear cultural development, the existence of biological races, and so forth. Today, anthropology has an important role to play in better understanding these systems, their effects, and the importance of (and reasons for) cultural difference.

Modernity, the Sociocultural Complex of Industrial Societies

What happens when a country industrializes? Anthropologists have been interested in how processes of industrialism have unfolded in non-European contexts such as India, China, Brazil, and Mexico. Wherever this transformation occurs, certain other sociocultural conditions tend to follow. Social scientists refer to the complex of features that accompanies industrialization as modernity.

While anchored by a set of commonalities, modernity takes different forms in different contexts. Societies accommodate the changes of industrialism using their own cultural institutions, practices, and belief systems, informed by their own historical experiences. Some versions of modernity emphasize individualism and allow for vast amounts of inequality among people in different social categories. Other versions of modernity emphasize community well-being and equality. Some scholars use the term alternative modernity to describe versions of modernity that have developed outside of Europe.

Nevertheless, industrialism does entail a set of sociocultural forces that interact with local cultural features to produce these distinctive versions of modernity.

The first of these forces is urbanization. People are pushed or pulled into urban centers to find jobs when factories are established. Rural farmers must rely on unpredictable factors such as weather and volatile market prices for their goods.

The second notable feature of industrial society is regimented wage labor. In the other modes of subsistence, people are obligated to work to survive, but they maintain control over the conditions of their work, such as when they start and end their workday, when they take breaks, what tasks they perform that day, how they perform those tasks, and how much they produce in a given day. In the factory setting, the nature of work changes profoundly. Even as many industrialized societies have shifted to services as the basis of their economies, they have retained the fundamental structure of regimented wage labor for the vast majority of shop and office workers—even societies that value personal “freedom” require most people to work under authoritarian conditions.

Punching the time clock. Regimented wage labor is a defining feature of industrial societies. (credit: “Detroit, Michigan (Vicinity). Chrysler Corporation Dodge Truck Plant. War Workers ‘Punching In’ for Their Job of Helping to ‘Punch’ the Axis” by Arthur S. Siegel/Library of Congress)

A third feature of industrialism is the grouping of people into social classes. In other modes of subsistence, society is structured primarily by family groups, gender groups, age sets, and regional associations. In industrial societies, extended-family systems tend to be increasingly challenged and sometimes replaced by much more mobile nuclear families. Social identity is increasingly reckoned according to occupation. In non-Western contexts, class often combines with ethnic and religious identities to create complex cultural forms of inequality and conflict.

A fourth feature of industrial societies is an increase in commodity consumption. People of all classes in industrial societies buy, consume, and own an extraordinary amount of stuff. This is necessary, of course, because industrialized capitalist economies produce so much stuff. Food retailers throw away more than 45 billion tons of unsold food products every year. Many clothing companies shred or burn the clothes they cannot sell. Marketing and advertising have evolved to stimulate increased consumption by attaching specific meanings to commodities. Often, ads portray commodities such as perfumes or cars as powerful objects that possess the ability to transform their users. This association of commodities with magical powers is called commodity fetishism. People are encouraged to think that owning or consuming certain commodities makes them beautiful or enviable or gives them membership in a more powerful social class. In fact, commodities do not really have the power to transform people. Commodities are inert. Rather, it is people who have power—the power to transform materials into commodities.

Finally, as suggested by their patterns of commodity consumption, people in industrial societies often place a high value on individualism. Increasingly in industrial and postindustrial societies, people develop identities based on their personal tastes, attributes, experiences, and goals rather than those of their surrounding families or other social groups to which they belong. Rather than living with family, many people in US society live alone for years or even decades. On the one hand, this development provides people with opportunities to choose their own paths in life, to explore new identities and ways of living. On the other hand, individuals are increasingly expected to rely on themselves rather than cultivating relations of mutuality and reciprocity with others. In societies that emphasize self-reliance, people often face material and emotional hardship alone. Feeling isolated and cut off from social relationships, many experience a sense of what Max Weber called alienation.

Postindustrialism and Postmodernity

In the 1970s, Western economies shifted from manufacturing to services and information as companies relocated factories to developing nations like China, Brazil, and Mexico marking the rise of globalization and what theorists call postmodernity. This transition intensified rather than reshaped society's structures: work became more demanding, with professional elites securing benefits-laden jobs while former manufacturing workers competed for precarious service positions or gig work, creating widespread anxiety (in a social as well as psychological sense) and inequality across all classes. Meanwhile, pervasive technology and constant information flows produced what David Harvey termed "time-space compression"—a sensation of accelerating time and a shrinking world—as new media reshaped social identities and relationships while sociocultural polarization and nationalist identities resurged alongside growing precarity—a state of persistent insecurity with regard to employment or income.

Example: David Graeber

David Graeber (credit: Guido van Nispen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

David Graeber was born in New York and grew up in a working-class family steeped in radical politics. While in junior high school, he became fascinated by Mayan hieroglyphics and translated many glyphs that had only partially been translated before. He sent his translations to a Mayan scholar, who was so impressed that he helped Graeber get a scholarship to a prestigious prep school in Massachusetts.

Graeber earned his PhD from the University of Chicago after fieldwork in Madagascar observing self-governing communities. He became a leading critic of modern economic systems despite facing professional setbacks due to his radical activism, including losing his Yale position in 2005. His influential works—particularly Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2014), which traced debt as an inequality mechanism from ancient Sumer to modern America and advocated for debt jubilees, and Bullshit Jobs (2018), which argued that technological advances created meaningless white-collar work causing moral damage—established him as an innovative economic thinker who connected anthropological insights to contemporary crises.

As a political activist and Occupy Wall Street co-founder, Graeber championed direct democracy, debt cancellation, and social movements addressing inequality, working conditions, and environmental sustainability until his career at the London School of Economics.

While on vacation in Venice with his new wife in 2020, David Graeber died suddenly of necrotic pancreatitis. He was 59. The following year, David Wengrow, an archaeologist with whom Graeber collaborated published The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity the two use archaeological and cultural anthropological evidednce to describing the diversity of early human political organization. The book critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization.

Environmental Impacts of Industrial and Postindustrial Societies

Whether exacerbating existing global cycles or primarily on its own, there is no doubt industrialism has severely damaged environments through fossil fuel emissions causing climate change, water and soil contamination, and habitat loss from resource extraction. Increasingly, climatologists are convinced that industrialized practices are creating detrimental changes to the Earth's thermohaline circulation. Thermohaline circulation is a large-scale ocean current system driven by differences in water temperature and salinity (saltiness), which affect density. Also called "the global conveyor belt," it moves warm, less dense surface water toward the poles, where it cools, becomes saltier, and sinks to the ocean floor. This dense, cold water then flows back towards the equator in the deep ocean.

This process is critical for redistributing heat around the globe, with significant impacts on regional climates. The worst effects of both human actions like resource extraction and the resulting effects on climate occur or are most detrimental in poorer regions. Anthropologists studying these impacts through "climate ethnography" have documented how climate change is forcing subsistence farmers and herders in vulnerable areas like Papua New Guinea, Siberia, Bangladesh, and Alaska to abandon traditional livelihoods due to droughts, floods, and unpredictable weather, often migrating to cities for wage work.

Unlike gathering-hunting, pastoralism, and horticulture—which often sustain environments and can coexist as supplementary strategies—industrialism and postindustrialism form a globally dominant system that forces other subsistence modes into the capitalist market while depleting natural resources, making the loss of ecologically sustainable traditional practices both a cultural tragedy and environmental disaster.

Categorization of Political Systems

It is again tempting to mistake these descriptions of production and distribution as moving along a linear chain from gatherer-hunter to post-industrialization. While this is somewhat the case for the move from agriculture to industry to most-industry, there is nothing to say the move is 'better'—only different. Further, there is nothing innate about agriculture which 'causes' industrialization. So to say, had the 1800s in Europe gone differently, some other system of production, distribution, and political organization may have come about.

European colonizers in the late 1800s, seeking raw materials for their industrial economies, governed colonized territories based on ethnocentric stereotypes that non-Western societies were either tyrannical or anarchic. However, early 20th-century anthropologists working in African colonies discovered these assumptions were entirely wrong, culminating in the landmark 1940 book African Political Systems by Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, which documented that African societies had sophisticated political organizations including both centralized systems with formal rulers and acephalous ("headless") societies governed through kinship or village consensus. Using structural-functionalist analysis to demonstrate the stability of these precolonial systems, this research laid groundwork for later neo-evolutionists like Elman Service, who in the 1960s-70s proposed four evolutionary categories of social organization—bands (gathering-hunting), tribes (horticulture), chiefdoms (agriculture), and states (multiple subsistence modes plus conquest and trade)—each with distinct political systems linked to their subsistence patterns.

Contemporary political anthropologists reject both evolutionary schemes that rank societies from simple to complex and structural-functionalist approaches that portray non-Western societies as timeless, instead emphasizing each society's unique historical trajectory and equivalent political sophistication. Drawing on Max Weber's sociology, they analyze power—the ability to influence people and shape social processes—through three types of authority: traditional (priests, elders), charismatic (persuasive personal qualities), and rational-legal (coercive positions like president). While Service's four categories—bands and tribes (acephalous societies with dispersed power) and chiefdoms and states (centralized leadership)—provide a useful framework, anthropologists recognize political organization as a spectrum rather than discrete stages, acknowledging that most societies combine multiple forms of authority that intersect, interact, and sometimes contradict each other.

Cultural anthropologists thus focus on understanding particular histories of political practices rather than fitting societies into evolutionary typologies, though they remain mindful of these idealized categories when analyzing how power is distributed and formalized across different communities. We will round out this chapter by looking at several of the ways anthropologists describe societal structures.

Ancephalous Societies

Any group without an official leader is acephalous. Until the early 20th century, many Europeans believed that all humans were essentially selfish and would relentlessly pursue their own personal interests without the moralizing forces of civilization to force them to be more cooperative. They assumed that any non-Western society without formal leadership and codified laws would necessarily be a chaotic free-for-all of greed, coercion, and violence. Anthropologists discovered otherwise.

In such communities, power is not concentrated in any formal position of leadership but rather diffused throughout society. Elders or people with experience in certain areas may give valuable advice, but they do not have the power to enforce their judgments. Their authority is based on persuasive power—that is, their ability to convince others and build group consensus. Certainly in any group there will be some people who want to exert power or force their own ideas on others, but without a formal mechanism allowing such people to enforce their will, others can generally ignore or evade them. The result is a mostly cooperative social order rather than chaos and strife.

Fortes and Evans-Pritchard described three types of acephalous societies. The first corresponds to what we have called band societies, or gatherer-hunters living in small groups of 20 to 30 people. Such groups are strongly egalitarian, stressing equality, cooperation, and sharing. People make decisions through discussion and consensus. Those with knowledge and experience in particular areas may exert influence in those areas, but there are no formal positions of leadership.

Small-scale societies like gatherer-hunter groups make subsistence decisions through consensus rather than hierarchy.The Hadza, for example, actively resist attempts at authority by simply ignoring bossy individuals or moving to another camp to avoid them, a strategy they extend even to government officials and missionaries. This egalitarian approach demonstrates how power in acephalous societies remains dispersed among community members, with decisions emerging from collective knowledge and consensus rather than being imposed by leaders, reflecting a political structure where anyone attempting to exercise unilateral authority is effectively neutralized through social avoidance.

While band societies have no political structure whatsoever, a second type of acephalous society relies on extended family structures and/or councils to organize leadership, decision-making, and conflict resolution. Elman Service (1962) referred to these as tribal societies. Service’s “tribal” form of social organization is associated with modes of subsistence such as pastoralism and horticulture, in which extended families control certain resources such as animals or land. Such communities are typically larger than bands, living in groups ranging from a few hundred to several thousand people.

A cautionary note about the words tribe and tribal. Too often, the adjective tribal is used to describe seemingly irrational group loyalties and conflicts, particularly in non-Western societies.The word tribe carries connotations of primitive lifeways and collective groupthink. In fact, many contemporary conflicts that are attributed to “tribal” animosity occur between groups that got along just fine before the colonial period of European domination. Because the word has been so often misused, some anthropologists have replaced the term tribe with the term ethnic group to describe large collectivities based on a sense of common ancestry and shared culture. Many anthropology texts do continue to use the term tribal to refer to a specific form of sociopolitical organization based on extended family groups. Many Indigenous groups also use the term to refer to their social groups. It’s one thing for people in a group to use the term tribe to refer to their own social group and quite another to use the word to describe a whole category of social organization.

A lineage is a group of people related by a common ancestor through either the maternal or the paternal line. In lineage orders, communities consist of two or more lineage groups, each one with an elder or group of elders that plays a prominent role in establishing consensus and settling disputes within the lineage. Such leaders do not occupy formal positions of leadership, but rather exercise informal authority through their accumulated knowledge and their ability to persuade members of the lineage to follow their instructions. Like band societies, lineage orders tend to be fairly egalitarian. Some lineage societies are segmentary lineages. These consist of family units called minimal lineages, which are encompassed by larger groups called maximal lineages, which are subsumed by even larger groups called clans. Minimal lineages are groups that trace descent from a common great-grandfather. In disputes between minimal lineages, people can recruit allies from the larger groups of kin, though there are no leaders in these larger groups.

Another informal position of leadership, common to lineage-order societies in Melanesia and New Guinea, is the role of the big man. Although lineage orders are generally egalitarian, a man can distinguish himself through the accumulation of wealth, public acts of generosity, and the performance of verbal skills. Big men do not hold formal office and have no official power to enforce their will. Their power is persuasive, not coercive. By sponsoring feasts and helping young men pay bride wealth, big men attract loyal followers who respect their authority and follow their commands. Big men settle disputes within communities and represent local peoples in their dealings with outsiders. Though the accumulation of wealth and prestige is necessary to become a big man, far more important is the equitable distribution of wealth and service to the community. Greed and selfishness are abhorred and punished.

In some acephalous societies, communities are fundamentally organized through a system of age-related groups called age sets. An age set is a group of similarly aged people in a community who share a common social status with permitted roles, activities, and responsibilities. An array of age sets may be organized into a hierarchical age grade system, dividing members of the community into children, youths, adults, and elders (the term age set refers to the group, while the term age grade refers to the level in the hierarchy). Most often, age sets are gendered, with female and male versions of the same grade. In adolescence, males and females of similar ages are summoned at different times for initiation into the age set of their teenage years, either young men or young women. Strong lifelong bonds are formed through age sets, creating solidarities that cross lineage and clan boundaries in a community.

In addition to bands and lineage orders, a third and more atypical form of acephalous political organization is village democracy. Western students are often taught that democracy was invented in the ancient Greek city-state of Athens. Considering themselves heirs to the classical political tradition, Europeans who established colonial rule over African territories typically thought that they were bringing more enlightened ways of governing to African societies. But the Igbo of eastern Nigeria were already practicing a highly effective form of homegrown democracy before the arrival of the British. Indeed, many anthropologists reject the notion that democracy was invented by the Greeks. Lacking formal rulers, most acephalous societies practice forms of discussion and consensus-building that resemble democratic systems. In fact, the egalitarian and highly participatory form of democracy in such societies might be considered far more democratic than the form of representational democracy in large, Western societies, dominated by wealthy campaign donors and powerful lobbyists. In acephalous societies, a version of 'councils' are often the main arena of public decision-making, councils play a more advisory role in societies with centralized authority.

Centralized Societies

The process of agricultural intensification often results in the centralization of power. Big men or lineage elders acquire the authority to command the labor of others and control the storage and distribution of agricultural surplus. They take on the role of organizing regional trade. They oversee the construction of infrastructure such as roads and irrigation systems. They organize groups of local young people to protect the community. They perform important community rituals to ensure agricultural productivity and community prosperity. Over time, such leaders may seek to hand down their leadership roles to their own kin in subsequent generations. As leadership becomes inherited, one lineage in a community may emerge as a royal lineage.

Chiefdoms

Anthropologists refer to those with formal, inherited positions of community leadership as chiefs. Over time, a chief can expand their dominion to incorporate several towns and villages into a small chiefdom. Chiefs are leaders with formal, inherited positions who can expand their authority into hierarchical chiefdoms encompassing multiple villages, with powerful paramount chiefs at the apex of pyramidal systems that may include regional and village-level chiefs. When chiefdoms grow to control multiple ethnic groups in regional empires, their leaders become kings, as seen in diverse societies across Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Americas throughout history. The defining feature of chiefdoms is the fusion of economic, political, religious, and military power in a single office, illustrated by Mesopotamian Sumer where religious priests initially shared power with secular governors before these roles merged in the hereditary position of lugal, creating dynastic rule. Chiefs exercise power primarily through controlling economic resources—holding land in public trust, allocating farmland, commanding communal labor on their own plots, collecting agricultural surplus for redistribution during feasts or emergencies, regulating local and regional trade networks, and monopolizing production of prestige goods like royal textiles and precious metal ornaments.

Militarism is another common feature of chiefdoms throughout the world. While the power of leaders in acephalous societies depends on their ability to persuade others to do what they say, chiefs have coercive power to force people to carry out their commands. Also common to many chiefdoms is the promotion of moral and religious ideology that supports the legitimacy of their rule. Although they wield great power, chiefs are often bound by a morality that compells them to use resources such as land and gold for the good of the people rather than for private benefit.

States

Starting around 5,000 years ago, a new form of political organization emerged independently in many parts of the world, including Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, India, Mesoamerica, and South America. As some societies in these areas became more populous and hierarchical, their leaders developed modes of governance that combined forms of economic extraction such as taxation and tribute with mechanisms of social control such as law and policing. These governments used public revenues to build infrastructure and monuments. They developed extensive bureaucracies to interpret and enforce laws and maintain social order. Large military forces defended and expanded control over territory, resulting in multiethnic empires. The government asserted a monopoly on the use of violence, meaning that only the government was allowed to use extreme forms of violence to control or punish anyone. Societies with this form of political organization are called state societies.

Many of the features of states mentioned above are common to the political organization of chiefdoms, and indeed states have generally emerged from the increasing centralization of political power in large chiefdoms. This concentration of power happens gradually over time, stimulated by a variety of pressures, some very general and universal and others more particular to the context of specific societies. Population growth and increasing social stratification are among the more general pressures, while the militaristic threats of specific neighboring societies and the particular opportunities of regional trade affect societies in different ways. Attempting to explain the rise of the state, theorists emphasize two sets of forces that propel the process: integrative pressures and conflict pressures.

Integrative pressures arise from the need for greater coordination in order to satisfy the needs of a growing population. As the population increases, agricultural production must also be increased to meet subsistence needs and for trade. Leaders are compelled to organize more complex irrigation systems and forms of landscape management, such as terracing and raised fields. These complex systems are built and maintained using public resources and labor. Increasing trade also exerts an integrative force, as leaders strive to maximize the wealth of their societies by stimulating production of agricultural and craft goods and establishing local markets and regional trade opportunities. As agriculture and trade become more complex, power becomes more centralized in order to manage the necessary conditions and infrastructure for economic growth.

Conflict pressures arise from the need to manage both internal and external threats to the power of leaders and the integrity of their societies. Some theorists argue that political power becomes increasingly centralized as a leader builds a large military force and wages long-term warfare to defend and expand territory. Conquering neighboring societies allows leaders to command regular tribute. In addition to conquest, military forces provide leaders with large cadres of loyal, well-armed supporters. Other theorists argue that internal tensions are just as pivotal to the centralization of power. State societies are built upon a system of social stratification; that is, they feature class and caste systems with unequal access to wealth and power. With the emergence of a class of privileged elites governing over urban craft workers and rural peasantry, leaders face new forms of inequality and potential conflict. Systems of law and ideology are developed to command the cooperation of disadvantaged groups.

Ideology and Hegemony

People are often shocked to learn about the prevalence of state-sanctioned practices around the world (such as modern Korean compulsory military service, ancient Aztec human sacrifice, and countless examples of slavery through human history). We might wonder, how could people go along with such routine public violence conducted by representatives of the state? How did they not protest?

Every society develops a set of dominant ideas that frame the existing social order as the way things should be. These ideas form a narrative about the way the world works and the roles of different groups in promoting social harmony and collective prosperity. Typically, a society has many competing ideas about the way the world works, each one reflecting the perspectives and experiences of a particular group. The worldview of a particular group or class in society is called an ideology. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton (1991) describes ideology as an intertwined set of ideas, values, and symbols that can be either conscious or unconscious. When an ideology transcends one group to become the dominant way nearly all people in a society think about social reality, it becomes hegemony. Hegemony is a strategic set of “common sense” ideas that support the social order.

As a form of sociopolitical organization, the state requires the vast majority of citizens to lead lives of hard labor and sacrifice in order to support classes of artisans and nobles who live in great cities full of bustling trade, luxurious goods, and monumental architecture. Tearing the heart from a victim on a public altar may seem shocking, but the logic of sacrifice serves as a metaphor for the bodily sacrifice of commoners required to endure lives of hardship to support the well-being of the state. To manage the inequality of classes and ensure the cooperation of all groups, the Aztecs came to embrace the hegemonic notion that sacrifice was necessary to ensure the very existence of the world.

The wealth of all state societies, past and present, rests on the hardship of manual laborers at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The dominant ideas of any state are ways of justifying the inequality inherent to all states. These ideas are highly variable. Some societies emphasize religious ideologies of self-sacrifice or the dangers of eternal damnation. Others celebrate economic ideologies of economic growth and consumerism. In American society, for instance, some believe it is necessary to keep the minimum wage of workers very low in order to protect economic growth, an idea not so far removed from notions of bodily sacrifice. In recent decades, the American system has offset these low wages by supplying working-class people with a vast array of cheap consumer goods. The relentless stream of advertising pervading social life continuously reiterates the consumerist mantras of affordability and satisfaction. Ironically, however, those goods are cheap because American manufacturers have relocated their factories to parts of the world where they can pay workers even less than they would pay Americans. The dominant ideology of consumerism draws attention away from the conditions of work and production and toward the ideals of choice and leisure.

As both Aztec and American societies demonstrate, the economic and political systems of state societies are deeply entwined, and this relationship is often reflected in the dominant ideas of a society. Political economy is the study of the way political and economic realms frequently reinforce and sometimes contradict one another over time.

Conclusion

Anthropologists have identified forms of structural inequality in countless places around the world. As we will learn in the Public Anthropology chapter, anthropology can be a powerful tool for addressing the pressing social issues of our times. When anthropological research is presented in an accessible and easily understood form, it can effectively encourage meaningful public conversations about questions such as how to best disperse relief aid after natural disasters.

One of economic anthropology’s most important lessons is that multiple forms of economic production and exchange structure our daily lives and social relationships. As we have seen throughout this chapter, people simultaneously participate in both market and reciprocal exchanges on a regular basis. For example, I may buy lunch for a friend today with the idea that she will return the favor next week when she cooks me supper. Building on this anthropological idea of economic diversity, some scholars argue that in order to address the economic inequalities surrounding us we should collectively work to construct a community economy, or a space for economic decision-making that recognizes and negotiates our interdependence with other humans, other species, and our environment. J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy argue that in the process of recognizing and negotiating this interdependence, we become a community.

At the heart of the community economies framework is an understanding of economic diversity that parallels anthropological perspectives. The economic iceberg is a visual that nicely illustrates this diversity. Above the waterline are economic activities that are visible in mainstream economic accounts, things like formal wage labor and shopping for groceries in a supermarket. Below the waterline we find the wide range of people, places, and activities that contribute to our well-being. This conceptual tool helps us to explore interrelationships that cannot be captured through mechanical market feedback loops.

The most prevalent form of labor around the world is the unpaid work that is conducted within the household, the family, and the neighborhood or wider community. When we include these activities in our understanding of the diverse economy, we also reposition many people who may see themselves (or are labeled by others) as unemployed or economically inactive subjects. When we highlight these different kinds of labor and forms of compensation we expand the scope of economic identities that fall outside the narrow range valued by market production and exchange (employer, employee, or entrepreneur). Recognizing our mutual connections and the surplus possibilities in our own community is an important first step toward building an alternative economy, one that privileges community spheres rather than market spheres and supports equality over inequality. This also resonates with one of economic anthropology’s central goals: searching for alternatives to the exploitative capitalist relations that structure the daily lives of so many people around the world today.