re: Two Human Lifeways
This is a condensed and modified version of an article by Bob Brukaker titled “Community, Primitive Society and the State” which appeared in the July 1981 issue of Fifth Estate.
History cannot be summarized in the manner of Marx, as primarily “the production of material life.” The notion that production and culture are separate spheres, with the mode of production as ultimately determinant, dissolves once one accepts the interpretations of ethnographic evidence offered by anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Clastres, Jean Baudrillard, and Stanley Diamond.
This essay is intended to open up discussion about what constitutes community by examining societies worthy of the term. In a time when the last vestiges of the primitive are being rooted out and destroyed, an elementary self-education about what is being eradicated is crucial. A part of ourselves, a possible mode of being human, is being irrevocably lost.
The very concept of what community is has virtually disappeared, if we are to judge by the pronouncements of developmentalists and technocrats, whose vision is of life organized around a vast nexus of production and consumption. A world of cultural diversity is not anticipated by those imbued with the mystique of progress and technology, but rather is the province of those striving for community and the human scale.
It is necessary to take seriously Stanley Diamond’s “search for the primitive,” understood as an exploration and elaboration of a “pre-civilized cross-cultural human potential,” and employed as a standard by which to criticize modern existence. This search is not an effort to idealize any “golden age” to which we can return. What it entails, rather, is the identification of subtle human attributes which have been lost amid the cacophonies of civilization, and an assessment of their possible relevance to our lives.
What Gary Snyder called “the Old Ways” presents an alternate mode of living, in which community provides a context where social institutions do not escape the intentionality of the collectivity. Though aboriginal community is the focus of this essay, we will not limit our search to this realm.
The Myth of Original Scarcity
Life prior to civilization was, according to Hobbes’ well-known assertion, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Pierre Clastres, in Society Against the State, points out that this assumption of primitive scarcity runs as a thread through both the chronicles of early explorers and the work of modern researchers — this despite the frequent condemnations of the “savages” by European explorers as “lazy” and indifferent to work, lying about and smoking in their hammocks all day long. But clearly one cannot have it both ways: either subsistence was a difficult full-time occupation or the primitives did not live under the duress of a “struggle” against nature for survival.
The myth of primitive scarcity is “the judgment decreed by our type of economy,” writes Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics. It is the result of a projection of the processes of political economy onto all of history, and assumes the universality of such concepts as poverty and productivity, which are applicable to our society but not to the pre-Neolithic past.
It has been convincingly demonstrated that the assumption of primitive scarcity is seriously amiss. Sahlins describes hunter-gatherer communities as “on a sort of Zen road to affluence” whereby their wants are simple and their means, in relation, are plentiful. Recent ethnographic evidence regarding all types of aboriginal societies demonstrates that, whether nomadic hunters or sedentary agriculturists, primitive peoples spend an average of less than four hours a day in normal work activities. Their leisurely, and successful, acquisition of food belies the notion of subsistence at near-starvation levels. Concomitant with the successful securing of nourishment and comfort is a marked aversion to drudge work; Clastres argues that the refusal of such is a distinguishing feature of primitive society in general. This assertion is confirmed, for example, by Lizot’s experience with the Yanomami: “The Yanomami’s contempt for work and their disinterest in technological progress per se is beyond question.”
Technics and Aboriginal Communities
Clastres suggests that there is no reason to impute inferiority to their technics. Relative to their environment, he says, they were quite adequate to the task of meeting the community’s needs. Such might lead us to ask: What, then, is the advantage of complexification?
Technics actually played a relatively minor role in the makeup of primitive communities — a fact which has become obscured with the decisive role it has assumed in modern civilization. The image of the human being as a “tool-making animal,” perhaps understandable as a misreading of the archaeological record due to the predominance of tools as artifacts (made of enduring stone) is an exaggeration of a characteristic only secondary to human development.
The cultural system of aboriginal society excludes the possibility of a separable “mode of production,” of an attempt at or valuation of a proliferation of goods through a project of labor. Rather, it attributes meaning to sharing, reciprocity, and the destruction of the surplus which makes acquisitive accumulation an inconceivable act. Productivity, technics, the economic: these are not “limited” in some esssential sense by primitive society. They simply do not exist as autonomous activities, directed toward a fantasized end called “progress.” Meaning is situated in the present; time itself is fundamentally meaningful: its cycles provide order and stability to life. Only in civilization does time become directional history and the future an ever-receding goal without purpose.
The importance of a system of meanings and interpretations to the constitution of aboriginal society is suggested by Lewis Mumford’s discussion of the development of language. Mumford reasons that the complex development of language was prior and indispensable to the maturing of other human capacities and possibilities. Only within the larger, shared context provided by language could the latter have meaning. The original purpose of language, according to Mumford, “was not to convey specific information but to enable primitive people to infuse every part of their experience with significance and to cope with the mystery of existence . . . Through the command of words they increasingly embraced every aspect of life and gave it significance as part of a larger whole retained in the mind.” For Mumford, “the pursuit of significance crowns every other human achievement” (The Myth of the Machine).
The development of language and the “pursuit of significance,” one should emphasize, was a shared, collective experience. Language enabled people to create a common universe of meaning. The exchange of meanings through language is extended to include the exchange of meaningful objects. Sharing, reciprocity, and the gift are the “dialogue” carried on by the members of primitive communities in order to ensure social continuity as they interdependently sustain their lives together. Language and culture merge through this dialogue. The gift is thus understandable primarily as a symbolic, not a practical (or economic) phenomenon.
Reciprocity and Primitive Society
Whether as direct sharing, kinship dues, or exchange, reciprocity is at the heart of primitive society. This reciprocal relationship has a directly political aspect, as Clastres points out in his discussion of the role of primitive chiefs. Far from being any kind of despot, the chief, in Clastres’ view, is a “servant of the community.” By his obligation to be generous and in his appointed capacity as “peacemaker,” the chief ensures the maintenance of the reciprocal bond. His obligation to the law of exchange ensures that a separate Power will not arise in society.
In his discussion of Hawai’ian tribal society, Sahlins describes the consequences for those chiefs who would violate the norms of reciprocity. At times the chieftainship had begun to distance itself from the people. Tyrannical chiefs, who confiscated people’s goods and made too great a demand on their labor, were often put to death after an uprising by the outraged community. There was a sensed danger that the norms of reciprocity might be overturned and the kings obtain a real Power over the community. This the people would not allow.
Michael Taussig looks at the persistence of reciprocal relationships in pre-capitalist communities existing today. In his The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Taussig discusses the belief held by peasants and laborers in present-day southwestern Colombia, that the accumulation of money is unnatural, being a contract with the devil. It is considered such, writes Taussig, because it is “the most horrendous distortion of the principle of reciprocity” on which pre-capitalist society is based. Taussig sees the devil as an apt symbol of the pain and havoc brought by the plantations and mines. But it also shows that the people see the economy in personal, not commodity terms. Accustomed to the Old Ways in which the “economic” is merely a component of culture, they see as diabolic its emergence as an autonomous power set against them. Their beliefs are part of an attempt to preserve ancient cultural values which spell out a communitarian, personalistic, reciprocal relationship among people, as opposed to the abstract, detached, institutional relationships fostered by capitalism.
The dissolution of the reciprocal relationship between people and chief allows for a qualitatively changed situation to arise. Relations of command and obedience, the “mysterious emergence of the thing we know by the name of the State” (Clastres), describe a whole new era. State power directs itself at the kinship bond. In several “proto-states” cited by Stanley Diamond (in his In Search of the Primitive), the transition from kinship-based communities to a class-structured polity brings about a situation in which law and custom exist side-by-side. Diamond quotes a Vietnamese saying still popular: “The customs of the village are stronger than the laws of the emperor.” The state must undermine such sentiments. The rule of law is aimed at individuals, attempting to divert their “loyalty” from the reciprocal norms of the community to the laws of the state. The atomization of the individual, precondition of the growth of law, was recognized by Plato, who in The Republic recommended that children be taken from their parents and raised by the state. (The early Soviets recommended the same thing.)
The establishment of the statist-productivist complex is the negation of the kinship system and its reciprocal values. As Clastres puts it: “In primitive society — essentially an egalitarian society — people control their activity and control the circulation of the products of that activity. Everything is thrown into confusion, therefore, when the activity of production is diverted from its initial goal, when instead of producing for themselves, they are encouraged to produce for remote others, without personal exchange and without reciprocity.” At this point, where the “egalitarian rule of exchange ceases to constitute the ‘civil code’ of society,” it becomes possible to speak of labor.
With the inauguration of a project of labor, a breach is opened which permits the autonomization of an economic/technical sphere such as exists today. The primitive refusal of alienated work is overcome by conscripted labor; the “expressive musical movements of primitive communal work groups, where productive activity is sacred — a sport, a dance, a celebration, a thing in itself” (Diamond), is abandoned. Work takes on the character of a compulsive means, alienated, and wage-remuneration oriented.
Authoritarian Technics
The organization of labor by the state, its economy, and associated impersonal institutions involves the development of a new kind of organizational and technical apparatus — what Mumford calls the “megamachine” — which structures society as a vast productivity-obsessed social machine. This authoritarian technics, argues Mumford, is large-scale and system-oriented, reflecting the grandiose schemes of capital, development, and the state. It first appeared around the fourth millennium B.C., in a new configuration of technical innovation and centralized political control. This new technology meant the creation of huge labor, military and bureaucratic armies, where people were specialized, standardized, replaceable parts.
The vernacular economy of the still extant agricultural villages resisted incorporation into the new system. And as long as agriculture employed the vast majority of the population, authoritarian technics was confined largely to the cities. Only with the forcing of the bulk of the agrarian population from the land into the burgeoning factory towns at the beginning of industrial capitalism did they come under the sway of authoritarian technics. This marked a new, more complete suppression of pre-capitalist communities and their associated value systems, and the final ascendancy of the state-economic-technical complex. Marx, the ultimate modernist, viewed these early processes of capitalism as progressive. But such “development” disrupts and eventually empties communities of their content. Technology rushes in to fill the gap, in an endless spiral in which each disruption of vernacular lifeways causes the confusion and dissociation necessary for a new, more pervasive disruption.
The desire for community remains alive, however, and the struggle against the modern Leviathan is the struggle for its renewal.
