Anthropology of Unequal Society

Discussion

Historical treatment by Keith Hart:

"Following Locke’s example, the 18thcentury Enlightenment was animated by a revolutionary desire to found democratic societies to replace the class system typical of agrarian civilisation.

How could the arbitrary social inequality of the Old Regime be abolished and a more equal society founded on the basis of what all people have in common, their human nature? The great Victorian synthesisers, such as Morgan, Engels, Tylor and Frazer, were standing on the shoulders of Enlightenment predecessors motivated by a pressing democratic project to make world society less unequal. Seen in this light, the first work of modern anthropology is not Kant’s, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754).

Here Rousseau was concerned not with individual variations in natural endowments which we can do little about, but with the artificial inequalities of wealth, honour and the capacity to command obedience derived from social convention which can be changed. In order to construct a model of human equality, he imagined a pre-social state of nature, a sort of hominid phase of human evolution in which men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all free.

This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal: original human beings had free will, they were not subject to rules of any kind and they had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to what Rousseau calls ‘nascent society’, a prolonged period whose economic base can best be summarised as hunter-gathering with huts. This second phase represents his ideal of life in society close to nature. The rot set in with the invention of agriculture or, as Rousseau puts it, of wheat and iron. Cultivation of the land led to incipient property institutions whose culmination awaited the development of political society.

- The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

The formation of a civil order (the state) was preceded by a Hobbesian condition, a war of all against all marked by the absence of law, which Rousseau insisted was the result of social development, not an original state of nature. He believed that this new social contract was probably arrived at by consensus, but it was a fraudulent one in that the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity.

From this inauspicious beginning, political society then usually moved, via a series of revolutions, through three stages:

- The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second, and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy.

One-man-rule closes the circle.

It is here that all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, here where subjects have no longer on the proliferating mass of young people out there. Kinship needs to be reinvented too." any law but the will of the master… For Rousseau, the growth of inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency, Kant’s principal concern and mine. This subversive parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality which could well serve as a warning to our world.

It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities.

Lewis H. Morgan drew on Rousseau’s model for his own fiercely democratic synthesis of human history, Ancient Society. If Rousseau laid out the first systematic anthropological theory and Kant then proposed anthropology as an academic discipline, what made Morgan’s work the launch proper of modern anthropology was his ability to enroll contemporary ethnographic observations made among the Iroquois into analysis of the historical structures underlying western civilisation’s origins in Greece and Rome. Marx and Engels enthusiastically took up Morgan’s work as confirmation of their own critique of the state and capitalism; and the latter, drawing on Marx’s extensive annotations of Ancient Society, made the argument more accessible as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels’s greater emphasis on gender inequality made this strand of ‘the anthropology of unequal society’ a fertile source for the feminist movement in the 1960s and after.

The traditional home of inequality is supposed to be India and Andre Beteille (eg, Inequality among men) has made the subject his special domain of late, merging social anthropology with comparative sociology. In the United States, Leslie White at Michigan and Julian Steward at Columbia led teams, including Wolf, Sahlins, Service, Harris and Mintz, who took the evolution of the state and class society as their chief focus. Probably the single most impressive work coming out of this American school was Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History. But one man tried to redo Morgan in a single book and that was Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. We should recall that, in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss acknowledged Rousseau as his master. The aim of Elementary Structures was to revisit Morgan’s three-stage theory of social evolution, drawing on a new and impressive canvas, ‘the Siberia- Assam axis’ and all points southeast as far as the Australian desert.

Lévi-Strauss took as his motor of development the forms of marriage exchange and the logic of exogamy.

The ‘restricted reciprocity’ of egalitarian bands gave way to the unstable hierarchies of ‘generalised reciprocity’ typical of the Highland Burma tribes. The stratified states of the region turned inwards to endogamy, to the reproduction of class differences and the negation of social reciprocity. Evidently, the author was not encouraged to universalise the model, since he subsequently abandoned it, preferring to analyse the structures of the human mind as revealed in myths.

My teacher, Jack Goody has tried to lift our profession out of a myopic ethnography into a concern with the movement of world history that went out of fashion with the passing of the Victorian founders. Starting with Production and Reproduction, he has produced a score of books over the last three decades investigating why Sub- Saharan Africa differs so strikingly from the pre-industrial societies of Europe and Asia; and latterly refuting the West’s claim to being exceptional, especially when compared with Asia. Goody found that kin groups in the major societies of Eurasia frequently pass on property through both sexes, a process of ‘diverging devolution’ that is virtually unknown in Sub-Saharan Africa, where inheritance follows the line of one sex only. Particularly when women’s property includes the means of production – land in agricultural societies – attempts will be made to control these heiresses, banning premarital sex and making arranged marriages for them, often within the same group and with a strong preference for monogamy. Direct inheritance by women is also associated with the isolation of the nuclear family in kinship terminology, where a distinction is drawn between one’s own parents and siblings and other relatives of the same generation, unlike in lineage systems. All of this reflects a class basis for society that was broadly absent in Africa.

The major Eurasian civilizations were organized through large states run by literate elites whose lifestyle embraced both the city and the countryside. In other words, what we have here is Gordon Childe’s ‘urban revolution’ in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, where …an elaborate bureaucracy, a complex division of labour, a stratified society based on ecclesiastical landlordism…[were] made possible by intensive agriculture where title to landed property was of supreme importance.

The analytical focus that lends unity to Goody’s compendious work is consistent with an intellectual genealogy linking him through Childe to Morgan-Engels and ultimately Rousseau. The key to understanding social forms lies in production, which for us means machine production. Civilization or human culture is largely shaped by the means of communication – once writing, now an array of mechanized forms. The site of social struggles is property, now principally conflicts over intellectual property.

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Kant’s achievement was soon overthrown by a counter-revolution that identified society with the state.

This was launched by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right and it was only truly consummated after the First World War. As a result, the personal was separated from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. Twentieth-century society was conceived of as an impersonal mechanism defined by international division of labour, national bureaucracy and scientific laws understood only by experts. Not surprisingly, most people felt ignorant and impotent in the face of such a society. Yet, we have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities who make a difference. That is why questions of identity are so central to politics today." (http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/new/Journal_files/journal_02.pdf)