ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Faces of Culture Video:

Patterns of SubsistenceFood Foragers and

Pastoralists

Groups in Video:

1. !Kung Bushmen in Kalahari desert

2. Mbuti pygmy in Zaire in Africa3. Netsilik Eskimo in Alaska4. Nuer in Africa's Sudan5. Nepali sherpas (with their zomo)6. Basseri in Iran

ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Thursday, October 2, 2003

Faces of Culture Video:

Patterns of SubsistenceFood Producers

Groups in Video:

1. Yucatec Maya ("slash-and-burn”)2. Melanesian farmers (land-

diving )ritual 3. Khmer in Angkor4. North Americans & the Dust Bowl5. Taiwanese and wet rice cultivation6. Balinese

Some points from video:

1. Technology of foragers is not “simple” - very sophisticated and demanding

2. little division of labor - people control technology rather than vice versa

2. economic processes embedded in rest of social life

3. interconnectedness of technology and other cultural features

Foraging

1.A subsistence technology2.An adaptation3.A mode of production4.The ancestral condition

of our species

Marx on the Mode of Production, part 1“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage in the development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Marx on the Mode of Production, 2“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Labor and social production

1. Universal in human societies

2. Unique to human societies

Animal Populations

Environment

Animal

Population

Direct and individual appropriation of natural use values

Natural

Use

Values

Energy Flow among Animals

Human Populations

Environment

Human

Population

Means of

Production

System of Production

Social Labor

Social

Product

Social production of use values through labor, access to the social

product according to socially established rules

Energy Flow among Humans

Marx on Labor, part 1 from Das Kapital

We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement....

Marx on Labor, part 2 from Das Kapital

The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments....

Marx on Labor, part 3 from Das Kapital

No sooner does labour undergo the least development, than it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements and weapons. In the earliest period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have been bred for the purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments of labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and shells.

Marx on Labor, part 4 from Das Kapital

The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making animal.

Marx on Labor, part 5 from Das Kapital

Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. (Marx 1867:179-180)

Marx on Labor, part 6 from Das Kapital

Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. (Marx 1867:179-180)

1. expenditure of energy2. transformation of nature into use

values3. use and manufacture of tools4. Social relations of production:

cooperation, sharing, competition, property.

5. spatial and temporal separation of production and consumption

6. culture: technology and the concept of

what is to be produced

nature of the labor process

relationships within culture

Relations among three elements of

sociocultural systems.

Lenski, Human Societies (1970) p.102

Civilization

Barbarism

Savagery

Societal Typology of Morgan & Engels

Goldschmidt’s Societal Typology

Lenski’sEvolutionary

Typology

Lenski: Societal Types & History

That’s all for today

ANTH 120 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Faces of Culture Video:

Economic Anthropology

Groups in Video:

1. !Kung - generalized reciprocity2. Yanomamo of Venezuela - balanced

reciprocity3. Trobriand Islanders of the Western Pacific

(kula)4. Mendi of the highlands of New Guinea -

both balanced reciprocity (bartering bride price in pearl shells), and redistribution (cassowary contest)

5. Assante women in Ghana - the market6. nomads in Afghanistan - the market

definition of economy:

formalist - allocation of scare resources to unlimited ends

substantivist - process of production, distribution, and consumption

While academic economists usually use a formalist definition of “economic,” anthropologists favor the substantivist definition.

Patterns of economic flow:

1. Reciprocity (gift giving)2. Redistribution (taxes)3. Market Exchange (money, shopping)4. Householding (one’s own use)

Social thermodynamics:

1. Social thermodynamics is a way of studying

the social relations of production,

distribution, and consumption, how the

total labor time of society is used to provide

the goods and services essential to the

members of society.

2. It provides a set of conceptual tools for

penetrating the essential thermodynamic

substratum that underlies all human life.

Social thermodynamics:

1. Bioenergy system

2. Behavioral energy system

3. Auxiliary energy system

Energy flow:

When goods are produced, a definite

amount of labor time becomes

embodied in them; this labor time is

consumed when the goods are

consumed. Labor energy thus flows

from producer to consumer.

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