ANG 6930 – Hunter-Gatherers

K. E. Sassaman

Fall 2001

Class 12 – Production and Politics

Relationship between domestic economy and political economy; how does political economy affect domestic economy? Or, the difference between individual (immediate) labor and socially or politically-obligated (surplus) labor

Hxaro (Weissner 1982) – system of reciprocal exchange

• As risk reduction, mistakenly viewed as simple flexible means of linking everyone together across region to alleviate risk from environmental failure
• Actually, the apparent flexibility of organization is actually a structured system of social relations operating according to certain rules
• Land tenure: n!ores: piece of land traditionally big enough to sustain a band throughout its seasonal rounds in a given year.
• N!ores are more diverse than usually acknowledged, and have become even more diverse in recent years as resources of nonforaging peoples were introduced

• Individuals generally hold rights to two n!ores, one each inherited from each parent
• Through life the individual tends to regard one of the inherited n!ores as “theirs” and this is one passed down to offspring (akin to miosis?)
• Individuals will not use the n!ores of others without correct ties (in other words it is not haphazard, or simply a de facto result of kinship, consaguinal or affinal)

Hxaro is one way that these ties are made and managed

• Key to establishing networks that are effective at alleviating risk is to select hxaro relations that are spread out over several n!ores of diverse value
• Pathways of hxaro exchanges carry obligations and rights that extend individual exchanges to others in links of exchange (ones along pathways that an individual only indirectly relate to are a different kind of social alliance [“friend,” but not “partner”]
• Hxaro relations “activate” potential relations based on kin, allowing certain possibilities to be “cultivated” and others “ignored”
• Most occur with immediate kin and coresident members

Production for hxaro – socially situated

• Involves utilitarian and nonutilitarian items (70% of what a person has is from hxaro)
• Effect on work is that it adds many hours to subsistence schedule

Recent changes:

• More partners tied to individuals with n!ore rights to locations with jobs, clinics, stores, herds, farms, etc.
• Hxaro becoming means to alleviate tension of increasingly sedentary and unequal population
• Thus, intensification is situated in efforts to avoid social change?

Intensification

Defined sometimes as process of increasing productivity of a fixed resource (e.g., land)

Boserup (1965) population growth is the independent variable (more mouths to feed)

· Intensification results when people adopt innovations, resources, or labor arrangements that serve to increase the production per unit of land

· Importantly, Boserup demonstrated that each step toward increased production came at a higher per unit costs (i.e., less efficient)

· Thus, this is not a change for the better, and people ought not to embrace it lightly

Hidden costs of production are seen in the example we just covered (that domestic economy of Kalahari cannot exist independent of “political economy” of hxaro,

If it did, we might find that storage, farming, and other innovations would be used to alleviate risk

So “social intensification” precedes or drives subsistence or technological intensification in this case, and it was precipitated by involvement in larger scales of interaction

What do Lourandos and Ellen articles say about this?