Re: Love Hurts

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joan Cameron:
>We may surmise from all of the above that early societies were anything
>but the bucolic, pastoral Edens so often posited in dreams of a Golden Age
>in the distant past. Any subsistence level economy is bound to be fraught
>with anxiety around resource security, an anxiety that is only partly
>mitigated by the rules of kin-based sharing and obligation. This
>free-floating anxiety would express itself in a constant jockeying for
>status, since to status accrues worth and resource access. In turn, to
>status accrues obligation to redistribute excess wealth, as in the
>potlatch mentioned above. One effect of this distribution is the
>strengthening of the corporate identity of the community as a whole.
>Recall that the birth order obligations of an individual are to his
>kin-based affiliates in his immediate lineage group, clan, or phratry, not
>to his tribe as a whole.  Ceremonial feasting provided an important
>mechanism through which to reduce social tensions, encourage social
>bonding, and forge the corporate identity of the tribe.

Joan, I appreciate the hard work that you put into this essay but it
appears utterly unfamiliar with the work of such important anthropologists
as Marshall Sahlins, who viewed huntering and gathering societies as
anything but places where "constant jockeying for status" went on.

The very best explanation of the ethos of such societies is given by
Marshall Sahlins in the first chapter of "Stone Age Economics," titled "The
Original Affluent Society":

"The hunter, one is tempted to say, is 'uneconomic man.' At least as
concerns nonsubsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard
caricature immortalized in any General Principles of Economics, page one.
His wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently he
is 'comparatively free of material pressures,' has 'no sense of
possession,' shows 'an undeveloped sense of property,' is 'completely
indifferent to any material pressures,' manifests a 'lack of interest' in
developing his technological equipment.

"In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important
point. From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say
that wants are 'restricted,' desires 'restrained,' or even that the notion
of wealth is 'limited.' Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and
a struggle of the hunter against his own worse nature, which is finally
then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation
of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of
desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a bourgeois
construction-as Marcel Mauss said, 'not behind us, but before, like the
moral man.' It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their
materialistic 'impulses'; they simply never made an institution of them.
'Moreover if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our
[Montagnais] Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and
torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests,--I
mean ambition and avarice . . . as they are contented with a mere living,
not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.'

"We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they
don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as
free. 'Their extremely limited material possessions relieve them of all
cares with regard to daily necessities and permit them to enjoy life.'"

You talk about "organic intellectuals" a lot, but you have a long way to go
before you achieve this status. You write boneheaded posts about the
wonders of chemical fertilizers without exhibiting even the slightest
awareness of the environmental side-effects. You blithely cite bourgeois
anthropology as if this field wasn't set up in the 19th century to control
"savage" peoples and turn them into eager consumers of cotton goods made in
Birmingham and avid church-goers. You make it seem that tribal people were
practically liberated by the colonists. I am afraid that despite yourself,
you are a social Darwinist.

My suggestion to you is to read a little bit. You don't need money to go to
a local library and find out what radical anthropologists or
environmentalists think. Right now you are just embarrassing yourself with
these retrograde posts that have a thin veneer of Marxist jargon.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.