Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 1. February 2017

Front and back cover caption, volume 33 issue 1 Front cover COOPERATION & COMPETITION In May 2010, we paid a visit to our friend Aurora';s grandparents in Valea Mic? (Moldova). They greeted us and agreed to pose for this photo at the family house. Aurora presented them with a small gift and we were served sweet bread and pálinka (the traditional homemade spirit based on plums). They spoke with us in Romanian, but they also speak Csango, a Hungarian dialect used by most of the Catholic minority in this part of Moldova. They had lived through dramatic changes: having grown up in a peasant community, they were forced to become ‘agricultural workers’; during the Socialist regime, after which they became peasants again, harvesting part of their former lands. This vignette illustrates how, behind the cultural diversity that can be found in every corner of the world, some basic principles are pervasive: the norms of etiquette to welcome guests accompanied by the exchange of food and gifts. Such token exchanges are a common characteristic of humanity: the tendency to cooperate and initiate and maintain relations through reciprocity. In this issue, J.L. Molina et al. review how different disciplines respond to the question of why humans cooperate. While contributions from sister disciplines tend to explain cooperation as an adaptive response to competition, social anthropology studies cooperation and competition simultaneously through the basic mechanism of reciprocity, or deferred mutual exchanges. This mechanism is present in hunter‐gatherer societies, where generalized reciprocity dominates; in prestige economies, where valuables are exchanged in specific spheres or given away in agonistic institutions; and also in peasant communities, where cooperation and competition coexist but never at the cost of putting at risk the reproduction of the community itself. Back cover ZOMIA Daily scene of agricultural life in the highlands of the Sino‐Vietnamese borderlands. The village, San Sa Ho, is located in Sa Pa District, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam. In May 2010, adults and children – in this case belonging to Hmong Leng ethnicity (Miao‐Yao language family) – transplant rice shoots from nurseries into recently flooded paddy fields. The extended family joins forces for such periods of intensive farming, bartering labour along a balanced reciprocity model involving all levels of economic and ritual life. Rice is the staple crop, supplemented by maize, cassava, and a few vegetables. The limestone geology and rough landscape of western Sa Pa district is unforgiving and farmers have to work extremely hard for modest results. Cash crops are uncommon in this region, even if opium had been a mainstay until the state forbade its production and sale in the early 1990s. This important loss in cash income has hit local farmers very hard and is only partially compensated today by the cultivation and sale of black cardamom, illegal logging, and poachng of wildlife. Vietnam is still under a communist regime but the agrarian transition and the economic turn towards a market economy are now decades old and nearing completion in the crowded lowlands. However, in these remote mountains – which are part of James C. Scott's Zomia – its reach is slowed down by the cultural resistance of egalitarian societies and world views not entirely compatible with the capitalist model. In this issue, Jean Michaud looks at certain limitations in Scott's model.     

Totem and Transaction: the Objectification of ‘Tradition’ Among North Mekeo

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post‐contact change have presumed that objectifications of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation‐state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre‐colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as ‘possessions’ that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of ‘property’: ‘private property’ and the logic of ‘possessive individualism’ in the post‐contact era; and ‘trading and gift‐exchange systems’ or ‘prestige economies’ in pre‐contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as ‘possessions’ and the notions of ‘property’ that he sees as key to the cultural objectification in both pre‐ and post‐colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre‐contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about ‘commodity exchange’ and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post‐contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre‐ and post‐contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.     

Food for all: An agent-based model to explore the emergence and implications of cooperation for food storage

Abstract

A consistent access to food is paramount for humans at individual and group level. Besides providing the basic nutritional needs, access to food defines social structures and has stimulated innovation in food procurement, processing and storage. We focus on the social aspects of food storage, namely the role of cooperation for the emergence and maintenance of common stocks. Cooperative food stocks are examined here as a type of common-pool resource, where appropriators must cooperate to avoid shortage (i.e. the tragedy of commons). ‘Food for all’ is an agent-based model in which agents face the social dilemma of whether or not to store in a cooperative stock, adapting their strategies through a simple reinforcement learning mechanism. The model provides insights on the evolution of cooperation in terms of storage efficiency and considering the presence of social norms that regulate reciprocity. For cooperative food storage to emerge and be maintained, a significant dependency on the stored food and some degree of external pressure are needed. In fact, cooperative food storage emerges as the best performing strategy when facing environmental stress. Likewise, an intermediate control over reciprocity favours cooperation for food storage, suggesting that concepts of closed reciprocity are precursors to cooperative stocks, while excess control over reciprocity is detrimental for such institution.     

Using network expectations to identify multiple exchange systems: A case study from Postclassic Sauce and its hinterland in Veracruz,Mexico

Exchanges of material objects often play a pivotal role in the trajectories of political, social, and economic development for ancient societies, but the study can be challenging because of the complexity of exchange. Multiple forms of exchange co-exist in ancient societies including market exchange and social exchange such as gift-giving. A further complicating factor is that different exchange systems such as redistribution and central place market exchange can result in the same regional spatial patterning of artifacts. Recent innovations in identifying exchange systems use network expectations for spatial, contextual, and distributional information to help distinguish between social exchanges such as gift-giving versus market exchange using household inventories. I introduce a Monte Carlo computer simulation to evaluate network expectations for alternative exchange mechanisms, using a case study of decorated ceramics from 65 residential inventories from the center of Sauce and its hinterland during the Middle Postclassic period (1200–1350 A.D.) in southcentral Veracruz, Mexico. Using these new tools, I identify the coexistence of several exchange systems operating simultaneously. The methods developed here demonstrate the potential of using network expectations to refine existing methods to identify different exchange systems that can be applied to other complex ancient economies.     

Mamihlapinatapai: Games People (Might) Play

With a focus on Melanesia, game theory is used to model the logical structure of strategic interactions between actors who engage in exchange transactions and to identify paradoxes, opportunities and uncertainties that confront those actors. It is argued that these exchanges are of three types which are named sharing, barter‐trade and prestige‐service. The first has the form of the classic game known as Prisoner's Dilemma and the expectation of non‐cooperation inherent in this game is resolved by trust. The second has the form of a game known as Chicken and the high risk inherent in this game is resolved by social manipulations that transform the payoff structure into Prisoner's Dilemma. The third is always an n‐person game. It has the form of a prestige game with an unconventional logical structure that is contingent on the existence of a parallel set of service games, each having the form of Chicken. The paper concludes by attempting to restore some realism to models that were over‐simplified abstractions. Some reinterpretations of conventional understandings are suggested.     

Ideas around prehistoric societies (Idéer omkring f⊘rhistoriske samfunn)

This book does not aim at documentation of the ideas around prehistoric societies launched. It is just intended as a guiding pointer for future studies. In this respect it has been necessary to give a critical evaluation of the ‘New Archeology’ which has based itself on logical empiricism which is obsolete in modern philosophical thinking. Instead the book claims the complementarity of science and art. Otherwise the problem of social groups is considered all the way from human palaeontology of. Interdisciplinary studies on a wide scale is strongly recommended, the writer himself having one foot in prehistory and the other one in socio‐cultural anthropology. But if archaeology shall be able to reach a truly holistic view, which is considered absolutely necessary, inter‐disciplinarity must be still more comprehensive, including ecology, history of religions, early historical sources, etc.

The socio‐cultural distinction between the older hunting‐fishing economy and the slow process of Indo‐Europeanization is stressed, and the following emphasis in patrilinearity in the upper social strata, whereas bilaterality may have continued to exist in the lower and dependent strata.

Being a study claiming the necessity of a holistic theory ecological studies cannot be confined to the exploitation of material resources but must be extended to social organization, and, in fact, even to Cosmos. Modern students of religion claim that in non‐Western societies religion is not considered an autonomous category but is a completely integrated part of the whole socio‐culture. The immigration of various Indo‐European groups from Middle‐ or late Neolithic times of are pointed out, the latest from the 3rd to the 5th centuries A.D., and the political consequences these may have involved.

An Epilogue considers archaeology's relation to the modern ‘action anthropology’ pointing to the fact that we all have responsibility for people, not only for our small scholarly community, but for humanity as a whole. Archaeology scarcely can come to be ‘action anthropology’ proper, but indirectly it may contribute to “action anthropology’ by demonstrating certain basic trends in Western civilization, such as warlikeness, the basic background for our organizations, etc.     

2005 Cultural Heritage Legal Summary

Abstract

Archaeologists studying ancient state societies often divide political economic models into separate prestige goods and subsistence goods systems. For the Maya during the Late Classic period (ca. A.D. 600–900), scholars have suggested that the elite centrally controlled the production and circulation of prestige goods while local communities and households were responsible for subsistence goods manufacture and exchange, which operated in a largely decentralized fashion. We examine an alternative to this dichotomous system through a festival market model that postulates a wide array of social groups engaged in material goods exchange during ceremonial events and public festive gatherings. This model is investigated using modal, petrographic, and Instrumental Neutron Activation analyses (INAA) of Late Classic ceramic figurines from the Motul de San José region, Petén, Guatemala. Ceramic figurines are frequently associated with household affairs because of their presence in household middens. We find that paste types crosscut different household status groups and communities within the region and argue that figurines were exchanged within the context of festival markets. This exchange pattern has important implications for linking households to larger political and regional spheres of social and economic life.     

LABOUR AND LANDSCAPES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LANDESQUE CAPITAL IN NINETEENTH CENTURY TANGANYIKA

In a long‐term and global perspective irrigated and terraced landscapes, landesque capital, have often been assumed to be closely associated with hierarchical political systems. However, research is accumulating that shows how kinship‐based societies (including small chiefdoms) have also been responsible for constructing landesque capital without population pressure. We examine the political economy of landesque capital through the intersections of decentralized politics and regional economies. A crucial question guiding our research is why some kinship‐based societies chose to invest their labour in landesque capital while others did not. Our analysis is based on a detailed examination of four relatively densely populated communities in late pre‐colonial and early colonial Tanzania. By analysing labour processes as contingent and separate from political types of generalized economic systems over time we can identify the causal factors that direct labour and thus landscape formation as a process. The general conclusion of our investigation is that landesque investments occurred in cases where agriculture was the main source of long‐term wealth flow irrespective of whether or not hierarchical political systems were present. However, while this factor may be a necessary condition it is not a sufficient cause. In the cases we examined, the configurations of world‐systems connections and local social and economic circumstances combined to either produce investments in landesque capital or to pursue short‐term strategies of extraction.     

The Production and Exchange of Marine Shell Prestige Goods

Marine shell ornaments have several characteristics that make them significant for archaeological analysis. Made from a raw material valued by cultures throughout the world and imbued with water, life, health, and fertility symbolism, shell objects have functioned as prestige goods. Shell prestige goods circulated between individuals, groups, and societies and materialized interpersonal relationships, making them valuable for archaeologists shifting focus from objects to the people in past societies. Shell ornaments had multiple roles, including ornamentation, wealth, marking status, and as ritual paraphernalia, and had varying symbolic associations even within a society. The rich ethnographic literature on shell use provides a source for archaeological model building. Marine shell artifacts often moved between societies and across long distances, offering a way for archaeologists to explore regional relationships and the interactions between ancient societies. To do this requires using several scales of analysis to investigate archaeological residues of a system that includes marine shell ornaments, the social organization of their production and exchange, and the people who made, displayed, and circulated them.     

Caring at a distance: gift theory,aid chains and social movements

This paper takes as its starting point recent work on caring for distant others which is one expression of renewed interest in moral geographies. It examines relationships in aid chains connecting donors/carers in the First World or North and recipients/cared for in the Third World or South. Assuming predominance of relationships between strangers and of universalism as a basis for moral motivation I draw upon Gift Theory in order to characterize two basic forms of gift relationship. The first is purely altruistic, the other fully reciprocal and obligatory within the framework of institutions, values and social forces within specific relationships of politics and power. This conception problematizes donor–recipient relationships in the context of two modernist models of aid chains—the Resource Transfer and the Beyond Aid Paradigms. In the first, donor domination means low levels of reciprocity despite rhetoric about partnership and participation. The second identifies potential for greater reciprocity on the basis of combination between social movements and non‐governmental organizations at both national and trans‐national levels, although at the risk of marginalizing competencies of states. Finally, I evaluate post‐structural critiques which also problematize aid chain relationships. They do so both in terms of bases—such as universals and difference—upon which it might be constructed and the means—such as forms of positionality and mutuality—by which it might be achieved.     

Anthropology in the world: Limits and unity (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This editorial anticipates the conference Anthropology in the World by reflecting upon the influence of anthropology, and its limits, arguing that it is only by knowing where these limits are that we can be sure where and how it can best be judged. It is too, a call for unity, suggesting that in seeking to influence the external world, anthropology should unite across its sub‐disciplines, and in doing so a mutually‐beneficial exchange of practice, ideas and methodology will emerge.     

Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

The making of a mushroom people: Toward a moral anthropology of psychedelics beyond hype and anti-hype

As regulatory agencies have put psychedelics on an expedited path to market approval, North Americans and Europeans might turn away from their repression and join the subset of cultures that have institutionalized the use of hallucinogenic drugs. What is the place of anthropology in this psychedelic renaissance? More specifically, how should anthropology relate to the cycles of hype and anti-hype, which have been identified as a recurrent pattern in the careers of new drugs as psychedelics have entered a second round of cultural enthusiasm and critique? This article suggests extending ethnographic studies of the psychedelic renaissance from medical to moral anthropology. The case of psychedelics is especially interesting for moral anthropology because these drugs frequently induce mystical-type experiences, which can play an ethically irritating role as mysticism challenges a strict moral order enforced through disciplinary practices. What cultural consequences would the spread of mystical experiences have for contemporary European and North American societies?     

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL METABOLISM

The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non‐human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a “system” with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic‐cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social‐metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of “persons” in a physical‐biological sense and “culture” in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social‐metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems – an open and blind non‐orthogenetic evolutionary process.     

Violent memories/memory violence

This review takes up three works that represent recent approaches to the anthropology of memory and affect. Echoing themes in Holocaust literature, a central issue here is the role of violent memory in forging collective identifications and sentiments. Taken together, these volumes suggest a continuing evolution of efforts to theorize the remembrance of violence and the social and bodily practices that mediate its reproduction. In particular, these studies demonstrate the value of ethnography in tracing the social career of violent memory as it is variously projected, suppressed, and transformed in moral communities and across generations.     

Exotica in Context: Reconfiguring Prestige,Power and Wealth in the Southern African Iron Age

Prestige goods, in various combinations and permutations, feature prominently in anthropological and archaeological templates of the emergence of social inequality and early state formation in premodern societies. In Africa, discussion of the contribution of prestige goods to the evolution of cultural behaviours such as class distinction and statehood has been conducted primarily through theoretical lenses that allocate significant weight to the proceeds of external long distance trade. The major outcome is that archaeologists have rarely paused to evaluate not just the definition of prestige goods but also the congruity between global ‘universals’ and African ‘particularities’. Using empirical evidence from the southern African historical and archaeological records, this paper seeks to evaluate the concept of prestige goods and to assess their contribution to the evolution of Iron Age (AD 200–1900) communities of different time periods, from locally centred positions. It reveals that the distribution, use and deposition of exotic imports in southern Africa is not compatible with the pattern suggested by the prestige goods model, and points towards their valuation as embedded within situational contexts of meaning. In fact, hinterland elites controlled neither the source nor the distribution of exotic goods from producer regions, making them a volatile source of power and prestige. While local elites used exotic imports when available, and imposed taxes on their citizens—payable in both local and external goods—land, cattle, religion and individual entrepreneurship were far more predictable and stable sources of prestige, wealth and power. This provides the basis for reassessing the development of complexity in the region and potentially contributes towards global debates on the impact of long-distance trade in the development of complex states.     

Towards a self‐reflecting archaeology: Vágar,Vågan and Reidar

Sámi sacrificial sites that have been investigated in Lapland, northern Sweden, all show an increase in deposited metal objects, for example arrowheads, coins and pendants, in late Iron Age and early Medieval times (ca. 700 ‐ 1400 A.D.). The origins of these artefacts suggest there was an active gift exchange taking place between the Sámi hunters and Finno‐Ugrian settlers to the east, in the context of the fur trade. The presence of wealth objects in sacrificial sites is interpreted as a form of “potlatch”, i.e. the result of decisions by local groups (sijdda) to preserve social stability by removing from the society the possibility for an accumulation of wealth and prestige. This interpretation is consistent with the archaeological evidence of settlement patterns, seasonal mobility and a lack of social hierarchy in the interior of northern Sweden. Rituals at sacrificial sites thus helped to maintain a Sámi hunting society that was based on religious principles of animal ceremonialism, social principles of general reciprocity, and an economy centred on cooperative activities, despite the potential of the fur trade to disrupt this society, for example by enhancing the prestige of successful individuals. In this way the egalitarian character of the Sámi sijdda was maintained right up until the transition to reindeer pastoralism in the 16th‐nth centuries.     

Recent Trends in Theorizing Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies

Theoretical frames for modeling prehispanic Mesoamerican economies have been informed mostly by political economy or agency approaches. Political economy models examine the ways in which power is constructed and exercised through the manipulation of material transfers, mainly production and distribution. Research along these lines emphasizes regional redistribution, wealth and staple finance, debt and reciprocity, and regional integration through core/periphery relations. Agency models, on the other hand, explore the social aspects of manufacture, circulation, and consumption to infer the processes by which power is negotiated and contested. Work using this framework focuses on the manner by which meaning and value are assigned to, and become fixed in, social valuables, as well as the moral and emotional dimensions of allocation and consumption. Political economy and agency approaches are converging in Mesoamerican research to forge a new, hybrid theoretical construct, “ritual economy,” which strikes a balance between formalist and substantivist views by considering the ways that belief systems articulate with economic systems in the management of meanings and the shaping of interpretations.