Intimations of the ‘Informal Economy’
In the Work of Henry Mayhew, P T Bauer and Richard Salisbury

John D Conroy¹
Australian National University

© 2012 John D Conroy

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Abstract

This paper considers the idea of informality in market exchange, as introduced into the economic development literature by Keith Hart in the 1970s. In addition to Hart (1971, 1973) it will discuss three writers who may be considered his intellectual forerunners. Each, to a greater or less degree, anticipated the idea of informal economic activity and described it in a particular historical period and place. They are the mid-Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew (London, c.1850), the libertarian economist P. T. Bauer (British West Africa, c.1948) and the economic anthropologist R. F. Salisbury (colonial New Guinea, c.1952-1963). The principal texts relied upon are Mayhew’s monumental London Labour and the London Poor (4 vols, 1851-61), Bauer’s Economics of Under-Developed Countries (1957) and Salisbury’s From Stone to Steel (1962) and Vunamami: Economic Transformation in a Traditional Society (1970).

Keywords: informal economy, informal sector, Keith Hart, Henry Mayhew, P. T. Bauer, Richard Salisbury

Table of contents

1. The Idea of the Informal Economy
2. Keith Hart and the Informal Economy in Newly-Independent Ghana
3. The Informal Economy in History and Literature: Henry Mayhew
4. P T Bauer and the Transition from Subsistence to Exchange
5. Richard Salisbury and Services as ‘Leading Sector’
6. Conclusion
7. Bibliography

Outline of the project

This paper forms the introductory part of a monograph in which Papua New Guinea (PNG) is the main case study. It will also include a section on ‘original’ or ‘subsistence affluence’, along with another on traces of an informal economy in the pre-contact and colonial anthropological literature of New Guinea, and in the limited economic history material available. The question there is why the evidence of urban informal economic activity was so limited at the time of the Development Strategy report (the Faber Mission) in 1972-73, on the eve of Independence.

The final section will deal with the Faber Mission and the reception of its recommendations on the informal sector. It will review such evidence as I can find that it was (in that respect) of any continuing influence. Primarily, however, it will deal with the emergence of informal economic activity in the intervening 40 years, during which population almost trebled and a lot of other changes took place. These included the impoverishment of large sections of population despite periodic injections of mineral wealth. Subsistence ‘affluence’ has diminished progressively, urban populations have become more entrenched (‘trapped’) and less connected with rural origins, the State has developed the full apparatus of grand and petty corruption, social differentiation (‘class formation’) has proceeded a long way in both urban and rural areas, while ‘national capitalism’, such as it is, consists largely of rent-seekers rather than genuine entrepreneurs.

And yet the PNG informal economy is still ill-developed and marked more by violence than creativity. My study will look for explanations of this phenomenon by harking back to anthropology and history to understand the limited precedents for any fine-grained division of labour in a PNG informal sector, and consider the extent to which the continuation of colonial attitudes and policies by the national elite offers some explanation of what has occurred.

1. The idea of the informal economy

This paper is concerned with economic activity, seen in terms of ‘formality’ and ‘informality’, in the context of market exchange². The growth of market exchange is associated with the emergence of bureaucracy, which creates rules to give form to its own activities and to those of the regulated. In this way market activity becomes enumerated, and the status of being enumerated is a crucial marker of ‘formality’. By contrast, ‘informal’ activities occur outside the strictures of bureaucracy and indeed may transgress its requirements. Informal activities may avoid certain obligations but must also forgo at least some of the benefits of conformity with the requirements of bureaucracy.

This study commences with a discussion of the pioneering account of an informal economy, in early-independent Ghana (c. 1966), by the British anthropologist Keith Hart (1971, 1973). It will then focus on informality in market exchange, as described historically in a number of other ‘emerging’ economies. These are mid-Victorian London (c.1850) and the late-colonial dependencies of British West Africa (c.1948) and Papua New Guinea (c.1960). The paper will consider the forms associated with market exchange in these disparate settings, and the deviations from form, asimplied by the term ‘informal economic activity’, occurring in each. Some incongruity is apparent among the three ‘cases’ offered for comparison with Hart’s work, which are widely separated in time and space. Nonetheless, their authors, respectively, Mayhew (1851, 1861), Bauer and Yamey (1951, 1957) and Salisbury (1971), have strong claims to be regarded as forerunners of Keith Hart’s informal economy. They are almost certainly not the only such. Hart has himself acknowledged Mayhew, together with Clifford Geertz (1963) and Oscar Lewis (1966), among his precursors, citing, in particular, the latter’s concept of the ‘culture of poverty’ (Hart 2010, 143).

Whatever about the contributions of earlier scholars, the idea of the ‘informal economy’, as it has developed now over a period of some 40 years, originated with Keith Hart. In a recent account of its intellectual history he noted that

‘The informal economy (or informal sector) became current in the early 1970s as a label for economic activities that escape state regulation. It arose in response to the proliferation of self-employment and casual labour in Third World cities; but later the expression came to be used with reference to industrial societies, where it competed with similar epithets – the ‘hidden’, ‘underground’, ‘black’ economy, and so on’. The social phenomenon is real enough and of some antiquity, but its definition remains elusive (Hart 2010, 142).

This paper focuses on Hart’s original conception of the informal economy, and deals only incidentally with the subsequent elaboration of it by him and others in the context of ‘de-industrialization’ and globalization³. This more narrow focus is adopted because in its original form the idea has proved influential among development economists and policymakers. For example, in terms of theory it led to the re-examination of propositions in the classic paper by Arthur Lewis, Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour (Lewis 1954) as well as in Michael Todaro’s influential model of rural-urban migration (Todaro 1969). In terms of policy it was taken up by international agencies (including ILO and the World Bank) as a remedial measure for urban unemployment (see, for example, ILO [1972]). It continues to condition perceptions of the processes of urbanization, employment and income distribution in developing countries and may still be applied fruitfully to them. Nor has Hart modified his original conception in any way that would discourage its application to current conditions of development and underdevelopment.

As an introduction to Hart’s ideas it may be useful to consider his views on bureaucracy, since bureaucratic activity substantially determines the character, and designation, of economic activity as either formal or informal. Hart noted Hegel’s contention that ‘Society … should be managed by an educated bureaucratic elite in the national interest’, and that Max Weber had ‘recognized such a synthesis in Germany’s historical experience of the alliance between Rhineland capitalists and Prussian bureaucracy’ (Hann and Hart 2011, 30). For Hart, bureaucracy is an essentially positive construct, ‘invented as part of a democratic political project to give citizens access to what was theirs by right’, although in practice it is often seen to operate as ‘the negation of democracy’ (Hart 2004).

When Hart arrived in Ghana in the mid-60s, he was influenced by Arthur Lewis’s dualistic model of developing economies. As he recounted, ‘the conceptual pair ‘formal/informal’ grew out of [my] attempt to figure out what happened to agricultural labour when it migrated to cities whose markets were only weakly organized by industrial capitalism. The formal and informal aspects of an economy are linked of course, since the idea of ‘informality’ is entailed by the institutional effort to organize society along formal lines … [Thus] “form” is the rule, an idea of what ought to be universal in social life; and for most of the twentieth century the dominant forms have been those of bureaucracy, particularly of national bureaucracy, since society has become identified to a large extent with nation-states’ (Hann and Hart 2011,114-15, emphasis in original).

Another source of Hart’s formal/informal duality was found in the work of Clifford Geertz, in which national bureaucracy again played an important role. In Pedlars and Princes,

‘Geertz identified two economic ideal-types in a Javanese town. The majority were occupied in a street economy that he labeled “bazaar-type”. Opposed to this was the “firm-type” economy consisting largely of western corporations who benefited from the protection of state law. These had form in Weber’s sense of “rational enterprise” based on calculation and the avoidance of risk. National bureaucracy lent these firms a measure of protection from competition, thereby allowing the systematic accumulation of capital. The “bazaar” on the other hand was individualistic and competitive, so that accumulation was well-nigh impossible’. (Hart 2004)

The commercial impotence of petty ‘bazaar’ entrepreneurs, notwithstanding they ‘were rational and calculating enough to satisfy Max Weber on ideological grounds’, was due to their being ‘denied the institutional protection of state bureaucracy’. In consequence of this exclusion, ‘their version of capitalism remained stunted at birth’ (Hann and Hart 2011, 113). The duality of the formal and informal was produced by bureaucratic action impacting actors differentially. Hart developed these ideas in the setting of early-independent Ghana, where the state’s reach ‘only extended so far into the depths’, creating a situation in which economic activity was indeed ‘individualistic and competitive’, and accumulation difficult.

2. Keith Hart and the Informal Economy in Newly-Independent Ghana

During fieldwork in Ghana over the period 1965-68 Hart worked in Nima, a slum district of Accra where 40 per cent of active males and fully 95 per cent of females were ‘not touched by formal employment’ (Hart 1973, 63). Intending to prepare an orthodox ethnography of the Frafra ethnic group, he found himself caught up in their precarious economic existence and opted instead to document their livelihoods. As rural-urban migrants, generally with little Western education and limited formal skills, most Frafra ‘got by’ on wages from unskilled jobs, earnings from self-employment and ‘transfers’.

Hart’s observations stressed high levels of ‘unemployment’ among the Frafra (in the then conventional sense of non-participation in regular ‘waged’ jobs), the inadequacy of earnings in such jobs, the consequent incidence of multiple job-holding (‘moonlighting’) among waged workers, and their frequent resort to additional, non-wage, sources of income.Those Frafrawithout access to ‘formal’ employment (as we now think of it) subsisted on earnings from casual employment and by self-employment in the production of a wide variety of goods and services. Most people in the local economy of Nima, and in similar neighbourhoods of Accra, actively sought out multiple sources of income. Many benefited from ‘transfers’ received by virtue of ethnicity and/or membership of social networks (as well as incurring their own responsibility to make such transfers). Resort to credit was pervasive and frequent, serving to smooth consumption and to meet contingencies, but impelling many into a downward economic spiral, leading to desperation and the disruption of lives. Hart (1973, 65) described their situation memorably:

‘[F]aced with the impossibility of making ends meet, the urban worker of 1966 often ran up considerable debit accounts, used some of his pay to settle a few bills, went on a short-run binge until penniless, and spent the majority of the month in penury and increasing debt, relying on extended credit facilities and a wide range of putative kin and friends to provide occasional meals, and even lodging, if necessary. The pattern of everyday economic life for these workers was thus a hand-to-mouth existence characterised by unevenness of expenditures over a pay period, flexibility of consumption units, and the proliferation of credit in all commodities. Haushalten (budgeting), one of Max Weber’s two types of rational economic activity, is not widespread in places like Nima’.

Hart stressed the unreliability of non-wage incomes in Nima rather than their inadequacy. Returns to non-wage employment varied widely from period to period, around mean levels often higher (and occasionally much higher) than unskilled wages. Because of this unreliability, men were often reluctant to surrender low-paying waged-employment, opting instead to juggle the demands of such work with the opportunistic, though sporadic, activities of the informal economy. The latter he grouped in a classification distinguishing between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ activities, with the notion of ‘legitimacy’ being ‘derived essentially from Ghana’s laws … coincid[ing] with the morality of “respectable” Ghanaians’. Such notions were, however, not necessarily congruent with the mores of the residents of Nima, a district ‘notorious for its lack of respectability, for the dominance of a criminal element, and for the provision of those goods and services usually associated with any major city’s “red-light district”’ (Hart 1973, 74).

Among ‘legitimate’ activities Hart distinguished numerous categories of primary (including urban agriculture), secondary (petty manufactures, artisanship) and tertiary activities, conducted by an ‘urban proletariat’ (Hart 1971) or ‘sub-proletariat’ (Hart 1973). The latter included activities at the apex of the informal economy, requiring relatively large capital inputs (‘transport operators, landlords, cornmill owners, commodity speculators’). There was a profusion of small scale distributive roles, distinguished by whether operators were itinerants from ‘upcountry’ or resident in the city, by the locus of their trading (‘market stalls, roadside booths, hawking’), by the commodities traded, and by position in the distribution chain. Traders differed in terms of their time-input and scale of operations but were typically flexible in response to opportunity. ‘Petty traders, brokers, wholesale merchants, commission agents, and occasional dealers – all these roles are played in varying degrees by large numbers of the urban sub-proletariat’ (Hart 1973, 72).

Concerning ‘illegitimate’ activities, Hart (1973, 68) noted that ‘a consideration of income opportunities outside formal employment must include certain kinds of crime. The incidence of illegitimate activity in Nima was, to my knowledge, all-pervasive’. His classification (1973, 69) of criminal ‘income opportunities’ may be summarized as follows:

1. Services: hustlers, spivs, receivers, usurers and pawners at illegal interest rates, drug-dealers, prostitutes, procurers, smugglers, bribe-takers, influence pedlars and protection men
2. Transfers: thieves, larcenists, peculators and embezzlers, confidence tricksters, gamblers

In considering the formal/informal distinction,‘[t]he key variable is the degree of rationalisation of work – that is to say, whether or not labour is recruited on a permanent and regular basis for fixed rewards. Most enterprises run with some measure of bureaucracy are amenable to enumeration by surveys and – as such – constitute the ‘modern sector’ of the urban economy’. The unenumerated, those who were self-employed or casual workers, constituted the informal economy (Hart 1973, 68). Yet there were multiple relationships between the formal and informal economies. For example, in terms of ‘legitimate’ goods and services, the informal economy provided a very large proportion of the daily needs of the residents of Nima and other such suburbs, but it was also a substantial ‘exporter’ of goods and services to middle class neighbourhoods. Similarly, in regard to ‘illegitimate’ goods and services, one might distinguish between the thriving local market within Nima and its dealings with the ‘bourgeois’ world of greater Accra, which was the willing recipient of many services as well as the unwilling source of certain ‘transfers’ (owing to theft and burglary, for example). Urban crime was thus a powerful agent of redistribution⁴.

Hart’s account of Nima demonstrated that, taking the legitimate with the illegitimate, ‘income and expenditure patterns are more complex than is normally allowed for in the economic analysis of poor countries’. In this early work Hart felt unable to resolve the issue with which he had commenced his research: whether ‘informal economic activities possess some autonomous capacity for generating growth in the incomes of the urban (and rural) poor’. Only the application of more refined tools of analysis would enable economists to understand the structure and dimensions of the urban economy and how much the informal economy, in both its legitimate and illegitimate manifestations, was contributing to it (Hart 1973, 61, 89)⁵.

Finally, it will be useful to relate Hart’s observations of Nima to his understanding of Weberian bureaucracy. The poor in Accra were not ‘unemployed’, in the sense this term was understood at the beginning of the 1970s. Rather,

‘[t]hey worked, often casually, for erratic and generally low returns; but they were definitely working. What distinguished these self-employed earnings from wage employment was the degree of rationalization of working conditions. Following Weber (1981), I argued that the ability to stabilize economic activity within a bureaucratic form made returns more calculable and regular for the workers as well as their bosses. That stability was in turn guaranteed by the state’s laws, which only extended so far into the depths of Ghana’s economy. The ‘formal sector’ consisted of regulated economic activities and the ‘informal sector’ of all those, both legal and illegal, lying beyond the scope of regulation. I did not identify the informal economy with a place or a class or even whole persons. Everyone in Accra, but especially the inhabitants of slums like Nima where I lived, tried to combine the two sources of income’ (Hart 2004).

Hart contended that the stabilization of economic activity within a bureaucratic framework, assuring a degree of certainty to both labour and capital, occurred only in the upper reaches of the economy of Accra. This observation may be taken as a motif for the workings of the economy of mid-Victorian London, as observed by Henry Mayhew, in which uncertainty and insecurity marked the lives of a multitude⁶.

3. The informal economy in history and literature: Henry Mayhew

Henry Mayhew was a Victorian journalist whose three volume study London Labour & the London Poor⁷, was published over the decade from 1851.To read Mayhew’s reports is to be reminded that the early period of industrialization in Britain involved much the same phenomena – urbanization and population movement, technological change and social dislocation – as are at work in the contemporary developing world. Victorian London had a significant and complex informal economy, supporting (as the novelist’s biographer tells us) ‘that toiling mass which we may briefly glimpse in the pages of Dickens but which he could not present in all its enormity’ (Ackroyd 1990, 678). ‘It was all there before [Dickens], on every corner in every street; and perhaps what is more remarkable still is the extent to which the poor represented not so much an underclass as a state within a state’. For Mayhew’s London was not part of that England of the ‘two nations’ depicted by Disraeli (1845). The ‘state within the state’ contained an underclass denied even such protection as the Factory Acts afforded the industrial worker or the Master and Servant Act the domestic. This was a ‘sub-proletariat’ sharing many characteristics with Hart’s Frafrain Nima⁸. In hindsight, both factory workers and servants should, by virtue of employment contracts and legislation, be regarded as ‘formal economy’ workers, while those denied protection by legislation were ‘informal’. Formal sector workers were only incidentally the subjects of London Labour and the London Poor.

Others had also remarked this aspect of London society. A contributor to the Quarterly Review commented in 1855 that

‘the most remarkable feature of London life is a class decidedly lower in the social scale than the labourer, and numerically very large, though the population returns do not number them among the inhabitants of the kingdom, who derive their living from the streets … for the most part their utmost efforts do little more than maintain them in a state of chronic starvation’ (cited by Jones 1971, 12).

Why this class existed in London (and essentially only in London among English towns and cities) is clarified by a reading of Outcast London, a study of the period by Gareth Stedman Jones (Jones 1971). Industrialisation and the factory system had emerged in northern cities and towns, whereas London was a commercial and financial hub and ‘a “national emporium” at the heart of the transport and distribution network’ (Jones 1971, 20). High rents in the city and its distance from coalfields rendered large-scale factory production increasingly uncompetitive, with London actually experiencing a degree of de-industrialization during the first half of the nineteenth century, although technical change enabled certain industries to survive, and even to thrive. ‘The invention of the sewing-machine in 1846 and the band-saw in 1858, and the adoption of mass sewing and cutting from 1850 provided the technical pre-conditions for a large scale ready-made clothing industry’, while ‘the use of steam power in sawmills from the end of the 1840s enormously accelerated furniture production’ (Jones 1971, 107).

Such innovations set the stage for ‘sweated’ production, maintaining competitiveness by economizing on wages and rents (the latter through rapid expansion of home-working). Innovation in management, and the control of trades by large wholesalers, facilitated ‘vertical disintegration’, breaking down production into multiple tasks suitable for semi- and unskilled labour. This gave greater flexibility to entrepreneurs and facilitated sub-contracting by ‘small masters’, although at the cost of the casualization and impoverishment of much of the remaining industrial workforce, for:

‘Once the technical problems had been solved … and the conditions of mass demand for cheap ready-made goods had been established by rising working class prosperity, manufacturers were able to take advantage of a cheap, overfilled, unskilled labour pool of women and immigrants who were prepared to work at sub-subsistence wages’ (Jones 1971, 22).

Manchester at mid-century, by contrast, was described as having been ‘the great symbol of the hopes and fears of the age’. Social thinkers had expectations for ‘the new society being forged by the Industrial Revolution’, in which much was expected of a ‘new northern factory proletariat’, among whom were emerging ‘working-class institutions embodying self-help, sobriety, and religious dissent’ (Jones 1971, 11). For comparison with London Jones quoted Beatrice Webb. She spoke of the industrial north and of ‘the other side of the process through which bad workmen and bad characters are attracted to the large town’. Webb saw this as due to an ‘outcasting force’, for ‘there are no odd jobs in a small community which depends on productive industries. Unless a man can work regularly he cannot work at all. Then a bad character is socially an outcast, the whole social life depending on the chapel and the co-op’. Jones concluded that ‘[t]he extensive survival of small-scale production in Victorian London determined that its economic structure, its social and political character, and its patterns of poverty remained largely distinct from those of other nineteenth-century industrial regions’ (Jones 1971, 32). For whereas industrialization, regulated by Victorian bureaucracy, had fostered a modern, formal labour force in the north, in London ‘the effect of the Industrial Revolution … was to accentuate its “pre-industrial” characteristics’ (Jones 1971, 26).

The world’s largest city, with over 2 million people in 1851, London was about twice the size of Paris. Its concentration of unemployed and casual labour was unprecedented. Seasonality of economic activity underlay the casualization of labour, contributing to ‘the glut of unskilled labour for which the capital was renowned’. In the ‘sweated’ trades a large part of the workforce ‘existed in ‘a casualized limbo, filling in its time between short periods of employment by invading an already overfilled general unskilled labour market’ (emphasis added). Some higher skills were transferable; for example the unemployed piano maker might turn to cabinet making, ‘but the marginal cabinet-maker could only turn to street-selling, firewood chopping or the docks’ while for the unemployed docker ‘the only solutions were either some form of casual employment, reliance upon his wife’s wages, or in the last resort, charity and the poor law’ (Jones 1971, 42-3).

In peopling his novels with the poor of these classes, Dickens ‘had no desire gratuitously to alienate his largely middle-class public, and took care to retain the social and sexual proprieties of the period’. There were ‘some things that could not be said’. That was left to Mayhew, whom Dickens knew personally and on whose work he may occasionally have drawn for colour and authenticity. As Ackroyd remarks, ‘there were terrible stories in Mayhew’s account, stories of the poor and desperate … more terrible than anything described by Dickens himself’ (Ackroyd 1990, 677). Certainly, there were degrees of desperation and poverty among the London poor and some identifiable groups were relatively better off. Upward mobility is one theme of the narrative, just as, in Nima, Hart was able to describe individuals who had accumulated capital and become relatively large operators in Accra’s informal economy.

Mayhew was more than a chronicler; he was a humanely engaged and analytical observer. He described six ‘distinct genera’ among the working poor of the streets. These included ‘sellers’, ‘buyers’ and ‘finders’. Then there was a diverse group of ‘performers, artists and showmen’ (with ‘many of the characteristics of the lower class of actors’) as well as ‘artisans or working pedlars’. These were described as ‘struggling men, who, unable to find any regular employment at their own trade, have made up a few things, and taken them to hawk in the streets, as the last shift of independence’. Finally, there was an army of ‘labourers’, engaged for the performance of a single service, or by the hour or the day, but all beyond the jurisdiction of Master and Servant legislation (Quennel 1984, 29-31).

Each of these six categories is sub-divided in extraordinary detail, showing the human diversity and ingenuity, as well as the desperation, to be found in the street economy of mid-century London. Mayhew practiced a kind of political arithmetick, attempting, in an age before social surveys and random sampling, to estimate the numbers of the poor sustained by one wretched occupation or another, calculating their earnings and contribution to gross output, cataloguing literally hundreds of trades and occupations in the process, often with wry humour. Thus a buyer of hare and rabbit skins, reflecting on the seasonality of his trade, tells Mayhew that ‘hareskins is in … from September to the end of March, when hares, they says, goes mad’ (Quennell 1984, 284). But rather than smiling at the quaintness of Mayhew’s descriptions, the modern reader might instead reflect on the spirit of inquiry and originality of thought that underlay his observations and calculations.

Mayhew has come, on the left at least, to be regarded as a kind of proto-ethnographer (Swift 2011). No doubt this evaluation owes as much to his sympathy for the underdog as to his analytical qualities. But Mayhew’s curiosity is certainly that of the social scientist. Consider, for example, his speculations concerning the origins of human occupations; in effect, a research agenda:

‘It would be … a curious inquiry to trace the origins of the manifold occupations in which men are found to be engaged in the present day, and to note how promptly every circumstance and occurrence was laid hold of, as it happened to arise, which appeared to have any tendency to open up a new occupation, and to mark the gradual progress, till it became a regularly-established employment, followed by a separate class of people, fenced round by rules and customs of their own, and who at length grew to be both in their habits and peculiarities plainly distinct from the other classes among whom they chanced to be located (Quennell 1984,317)’.

This passage, drawn from Mayhew’s discussion of the Thames ‘dredgermen’, shows an appreciation of what Hart calls ‘form’. The working lives of Mayhew’s dredgers did not conform with the emerging requirements of the industrial economy, bound by a legal and increasingly bureaucratic framework, and quite different from the ‘rules and customs’ distinguishing dredgermen as a group. These rules were of their own making, the result of historical evolution and the physical environment of the river, where particular skills and knowledge, together with some minimum capital requirements, acted to establish their conventions and limit their numbers. Unlike many others among the poor, the dredgers were not new arrivals but rather descendants of generations of watermen. They had adapted their traditional way of life to the exigencies of a new age and were as yet imperfectly incorporated into its ‘forms’.

Dredgers originated among fishermen and some still fished seasonally. As shipping and commerce on the river increased they attached themselves to the margins of this trade, using dragnets to dredge for coal and other saleable items lost or thrown overboard (‘barges are often sunk in the winter and on such occasions they make a good harvest’). Mayhew estimated that, in response to advertised rewards, as many as a hundred boat-owners between Putney and Gravesend vied to search for lost valuables. Upon intelligence of accidents or suicides, their boats would congregate in search of corpses. For recovering the dead dredgers were paid ‘inquest money’, sometimes also a reward, as well as seeking ‘other chances’, for ‘no body ever recovered by a dredgerman ever happens to have any money about it, when brought to shore’ (Quennel 1984, 323).

Of its nature opportunistic and irregular, the dredging trade brought highly variable returns, though its practitioners enjoyed greater autonomy and higher incomes than many members of the London labouring poor. On the river banks and mudflats, ‘mudlarks’ pursued more meagre livelihoods. Like the dredgers they also escaped official regulation, perhaps because society could not provide for them or because they feared society’s remedy. Many mudlarks were children or the very old, the former supplementing family earnings and the latter desperate to avoid the workhouse, together searching for scraps of coal and other salvageable items.

There were numerous other occupations described by Mayhew in which economic change and the increasing reach of the State impinged more directly upon livelihoods. These influences took many forms; some groups found their status to be defined by reference to parallel occupations, conducted within the fold of formality and yielding higher returns. For an example, consider‘the cabinet-makers … [who] consist, like all other operatives, of two distinct classes, that is to say, of society and non-society men … those whose wages are regulated by custom and those whose earnings are determined by competition’ (Quennell 1984, 546). ‘Society-men’ were employed in formal establishments under the Master and Servant Act, by masters who maintained standards (and earnings) by restricting numbers. Mayhew recorded that ‘as a general rule … I find the society-men of every trade comprise about one-tenth of the whole’. This ‘artisan aristocracy’ (Jones 1971, 338) resisted the competitive pressures for ‘sweated’ production.

Those outside the fold of guilds such as the cabinet society were ‘slop-workers’, ‘the cheap men or non-society hands – who constitute the great mass of paupers in this country’ (Quennell 1984, 548). They were employed at subsistence wages by ‘garret-masters’, described as ‘a class of small “trade-working masters”, supplying both capital and labour’. Cashflow problems, typically requiring the immediate sale of products, left them at the mercy of the ‘slaughter-house men’. This latter group was a new breed of distributors and diversified shop-keepers, emerging during the transition from an age of craftsmanship to an era of mass production for a growing middle and lower-middle class market, whose members were perhaps more price-sensitive and less discriminating. ‘Small-master’ tradesmen were obliged to ‘scamp’ their work, for ‘the slaughterers cared only to have them viewy and cheap’ (Mayhew III, Ch 7). They also felt compelled to employ growing numbers of young apprentices, displacing higher-paid tradesmen and sending many into the street occupations for survival.

Other occupations were characterized by vulnerability to the arbitrary actions of authorities, no doubt struggling to cope with the demands of change and burgeoning urban populations. For example, street people might suffer from opaque enforcement of regulations. The ambiguous legal status of street sellers (the first of Mayhew’s six ‘distinct genera’), was among the causes of the famous antagonism held for the police by Costermongers, a major and readily identifiable subgroup of the street-folk⁹. In London, as Mayhew observed, legal tensions surrounding the operations of street traders dated back to Elizabethan times. Traders were, in principle, free to hawk their wares through the streets, but the operations of street markets were cloaked in ambiguity; in this uncertainty lay the source of traders’ informal status. Municipal law held that no market for provisions could be held within seven miles of The City, but certain markets were nonetheless tolerated ‘by custom and usage’. Mayhew commented that ‘the right to sell provisions from stands in the streets of the metropolis … is merely permissive’. In practice, police tolerated trading from fixed stands in the absence of complaints from shopkeepers. Where ‘injury and nuisance’ to shopkeepers could be demonstrated, police closed markets and moved traders on, causing them considerable loss. Mayhew asked, rhetorically, ‘whether any particular body of householders should, for their own interest, convenience, or pleasure, have it in their power to deprive so many poor people of their only means of livelihood’. However, as he pointed out, such actions sometimes proved a double-edged sword. In the case of Leather Lane market, when shopkeepers secured its removal, the decline in their own trade persuaded them to petition its return, following which their takings were restored. As seen in many cities even today, synergy may exist between formal and informal, such that people drawn to a street by its informal trade will also patronize its shops.

To return to the notion of Mayhew as ‘proto-ethnographer’, this title may be justified by his detailed accounts of the character and habits of three notable groups in the London street economy. These were Costermongers, Jews and the Irish (with some members of the latter two groups accepted as Costermongers). Among the Costers, ‘one-half of the entire class are costermongers proper, that is to say, the calling with them is hereditary, and perhaps has been so for many generations; while the other half is composed of three-eighths Irish, and one-eighth mechanics, tradesmen, and Jews’. Others of the Irish, newly arrived from their famine-stricken homeland, were among the poorest (though better able to fend than orphans or the aged and infirm among the native English). Their desperation set an upper limit on returns in some street trades, causing them, for example, to displace Jewish traders from the low end of the used clothing and footwear markets. Many Jews in informal occupations were relatively young or newly arrived in England. These did not usually identify as Costers, nor were they accepted as such. Members of a community with a high degree of trust, the poorer and less-educated among them might make their start in relatively open and accessible branches of the street trades before taking up more promising opportunities. In Sketches by Boz (1836), Charles Dickens described such a scene:

‘The coach-office is all alive, and the coaches which are just going out, are surrounded by the usual crowd of Jews and nondescripts, who seem to consider, Heaven knows why, that it is quite impossible any man can mount a coach without requiring at least sixpenny-worth of oranges, a penknife, a pocket-book, a last year’s annual, a pencil-case, a piece of sponge, and a small series of caricatures’.

But by mid-century, after the street-Jews had been undersold by Irish traders in the vending of oranges, Mayhew’s inquiries yielded the intelligence that

‘even when the orange and hawking trade was at the best, the Jews rarely carried it on after they were twenty-two or twenty-three, but that they then resorted to some more wholesale calling, such as the purchase of nuts or foreign grapes, at public sales. At present, I am informed, they are more thickly than ever engaged in these trades, as well as in two new avocations, that have been established within these few years – the sale of the Bahama pineapples and of the Spanish and Portuguese onions’ (Mayhew I, Ch.5).

Costermongers, particularly those of the ‘hereditary’ class, were genuinely a ‘tribe’, with their own dress, argot and customs. In passages reminiscent of Hart’s description of the erratic Weberian haushalten of the improvident denizens of Nima, Mayhew provides an account of the Costermonger equivalent. Feckless by middle-class standards, intemperate, promiscuous, pugnacious and antagonistic to authority, they were not ‘capitalists’. Indeed, ‘not more than one-fourth of the entire body trade upon their own property. Some borrow their stock money, others borrow the stock itself, others again borrow the donkey-carts, barrows or baskets, in which their stock is carried round, whilst others borrow even the weights and measures by which it is meted out’ (Quennell 1984, 76).

But while Costers were frequently in debt, some were capable of improvement and became community leaders. There are strong parallels between the descriptions of upward mobility in Mayhew and Hart. Mayhew reported that ‘many of the better-class costers have risen into coal-shed men and greengrocers, and become settled in life’, a process sometimes facilitated by marriage outside the group. As an informant put it, ‘some marry the better kind of servants – such servant-maids as wouldn’t marry a rag and bottle shop, but doesn’t object to a coal shed’. For the most part, however, Mayhew observed that Costers ‘have generally no foresight’ and that ‘only an exceptional few are provident’. For such a Coster, the combination of thrift and industry

‘enables him in some few cases to become “a settled man,” … He perhaps gets to be the proprietor of a coal-shed, with a greengrocery and potato business attached to it … He may too … have a sum of money in the savings’-bank, or he may invest it in the purchase of a lease of the premises he occupies, or expend it in furnishing the rooms of his house to let them out to single-men lodgers; or he may become an usurer, and lend out his money to his less provident brethren at 1040 per cent per annum; or he may purchase largely at the markets, and engage youths to sell his surplus stock at half profits’ (Mayhew I, ‘Of the providence and improvidence of Costermongers’).

Compare this with Hart’s description (1973, 71) of upward mobility among the inhabitants of Nima. While debt and chronic insecurity were the lot of most,

‘Entrepreneurial activities in the services sector – transport operators, landlords, cornmill owners, commodity speculators, and so on – represent the apex of informal economic opportunities to the sub-proletariat. Their essential characteristic is that they are frequently part-time roles, entered by individuals who have accumulated savings by some other means and, in the absence of an advanced capital market, re-invest income under their own management in taxis and lorries, accommodation, bulk purchases of maize, and the like. Successful performance … [requires] specialised ‘know-how’ and the ability, through diversification of investments and delegation of tasks, to accommodate the considerable risks attendant on these one-man enterprises. Though income from such activities may be very high, they are often combined with a formal job’.

Hart does not mention money-lending here, though we know it to have been pervasive in Nima. It is difficult to imagine his entrepreneurs succeeding without deploying capital shrewdly through the provision of credit, as was done by Mayhew’s successful Costers. The patterns are similar, as are the activities pursued. In both, the successful draw on social networks for custom and support. One difference is the reliance on formal employment to underpin the successful Frafra entrepreneur. But perhaps, in Accra, growth of government employment in the decade after Ghana’s independence offered opportunities not available to the entrepreneurial poor in mid-Victorian London.

Mayhew’s investigations led him to conclude that the number of street people in London was some 40,000, including about 30,000 working Costermongers, of whom some 12,000 were men, while women and children numbered 6,000 and 12,000, respectively. Thus many children were economically active; Mayhew noted that ‘every coster trading through the streets with a barrow is accompanied by a boy, who helps in selling and moving the stock. In this way they learn the trade and usually become independent by the age of 16’. In addition to the Costermongers there were ‘2000 Street-Sellers of “Green-Stuff,” as Watercresses, Chickweed, and Groundsell, Turf, &c.; 4000 Street-Sellers of Eatables and Drinkables; 1000 selling Stationery, Books, Papers, and Engravings in the streets; and 4000 other street-sellers vending manufactured articles, either of metal, crockery, textile, chemical, or miscellaneous substances’ (Mayhew II, ‘Introduction’).

Mayhew believed his estimates were more accurate than the official data, claiming that street people had been grossly under-enumerated in the census of 1841. This recorded ‘only 2,045 “hawkers, hucksters, and pedlars,” in the metropolis, and no costermongers or street-sellers, or street-performers at all’. This inaccuracy was due to ‘not one in twenty of the costermongers, or of the people with whom they lodged, troubl[ing] themselves to fill up the census returns – the majority of them being unable to read and write, and others distrustful of the purpose for which the returns were wanted’ (Mayhew I, Of the number of Costermongers and other street folk). As in Nima in the 1960s, the non-enumeration of a significant class of the urban population was a marker of the informality of their economic activities. Mayhew drew attention to the ambiguity inherent in their status: They were ‘a body numbering thousands … allowed to live in the prosecution of the most ancient of all trades, sale or barter in the open air, by sufferance alone … [and] classed as unauthorized or illegal and intrusive traders, though they “turn over” millions in a year’ (Mayhew II, ‘Introduction’).

Here Mayhew was making a case for the valuable contribution of ‘hawkers, hucksters and pedlars’ to the needs of the formal economy. But, as in the case of Hart’s account of livelihoods in Nima, with its division between ‘legitimate and ‘illegitimate’ activities, he accepted also a responsibility to describe the underbelly of the economy of the London poor. There is a difference of approach, however. Hart was not censorious in his account of activities offensive to the morality of ‘respectable’ Ghanaians. He was making a serious point about the diverse source of livelihoods in Nima, the understanding of which should not be clouded by normative considerations. By contrast, Mayhew was, enlightened observer or not, nonetheless a Victorian and an ‘improver’. Hart was playing a longer game; for him the sources of inequality and injustice were to be found in ineluctable historical forces. But whatever about Mayhew’s moral stance, he was able to convey a sense of the importance of ‘illegitimate’ practices and sources of livelihood to at least some of the poor. These sources were by definition informal.

Sharp practice and adulteration abounded in the street trades, from the collection of cigar-ends by the destitute for sale and re-incorporation into the stock of ‘best Havannahs’, to the procurement of used tea leaves for resale, after drying and even (in the case of green tea) dyeing, to the use of bogus weights and measures to defraud the unwary. A persistent theme in Mayhew’s many accounts of street business is that traders, held to the meanest of margins in a brutal commerce, were apt to pass on their disadvantage. The ‘improvident’ coster, along with hiring his barrow, might also rent a ‘slang’ quart pot, containing one and a half pints rather than two. He would pay a higher daily rate than for the genuine article, as a premium ‘for the risk’ of its being detected and traced to the owner (Quennell 1984, 77). Such practices did not begin in mid-Victorian London, of course. But perhaps the ‘formality’ involved in the policing of weights and measures became more difficult to maintain in a rapidly-changing and growing metropolis.

While not as comprehensive or systematic as Hart’s catalogue of ne’er-do-wells, Mayhew’s gallery of miscreants and ‘lurkers’ is full of interest. Mayhew subjects them to the same scrutiny, and occasional humour, as marks his records of the law-abiding. For example, he gives an account of the stealers, ‘finders’ and restorers of dogs. Perhaps because of the eminence of some of the owners thus put upon by the ‘dog appropriators’ (Mayhew records ‘royalty, foreign ambassadors, peers, courtiers and ladies of rank’ among the aggrieved) the trade occasioned a Commons committee in 1844, and subsequent legislation (Quennell 1984, 229-237). Along with the earnings of the thieves, pickpockets, burglars and receivers described by Mayhew, much of this income amounts to what Hart (1973, 86) has described as the ‘transfer’ or ‘redistribution’ (within Accra) of ‘static wealth lying idle in the homes of the bourgeoisie’.

As well as being the unwilling source of such transfers, elements of ‘respectable’ society were avid, if discreet, clients of the substantial demi-monde of Victorian London, whose members were largely drawn from the ranks of the poor. Though Mayhew discusses prostitution and crime only incidentally in his initial volumes, these still contain abundant evidence of the importance of activities classified by Hart as ‘illegitimate’, as well as numerous categories of people living on their wits (for example, Mayhew’s ‘patterers’, ‘screevers’ and ‘cheap johns’, analogous to Hart’s ‘conmen’ and ‘spivs’). This paper has already referred to Mayhew’s Coster ‘usurers’, and the resort to ruinously expensive credit was a pervasive theme in his narrative.

The political fixers and ‘influence peddlars’ who feature in Hart’s pages are not prominent in Mayhew’s account, however. Whether this was a step too far for Mayhew (for his method required citing the testimony of informants and might have risked legal action or other censure) or whether London was less subject than Nima to such abuses, is open to conjecture. Peter Bauer, whose work will be discussed at length below, remarked on ‘the pervasive significance of the politicization of economic life in LDCs [less developed countries]’, an aspect of ‘the general politicization of life’ in such countries’. After Independence, many new governments moved to increase the role of the state in economic affairs, with measures such as ‘state monopoly of major branches of industry and trade’ and ‘the establishment of many state-owned and state-operated enterprises’, shoring up political support through the creation of public sector jobs (Bauer 1984, 142).

In sum, though, while making allowances for differences in context, there are indisputably strong parallels between these two ‘case studies’. ‘Illegitimate’ or illegal activities were of great importance in the informal economies of both Nima and mid-century London. As for ‘illegitimate’ informal activity, so for the legitimate; the parallels between 1960s Nima and 1850s London are persuasive and their respective chroniclers were concerned with essentially the same phenomena. Hart took the discussion further by providing a framework of analysis which continues to influence research and policy formation. For example, international institutions, which in the 1970s saw merit in encouraging the informal economy as a palliative for unemployment, now devote their energies to ‘formalizing the informal’. ‘Formalization policies’ include measures to facilitate small firms in meeting bureaucratic requirements for registration and incorporation¹⁰. Mayhew also offered policy prescriptions intended to improve the lot of people in the London informal economy and to recognize their contribution to the broader economy and society; some of these appear startlingly relevant to contemporary concerns.

Finally, Mayhew saw the importance of seasonality in the London labour market, and the connection between seasonal and casual labour, noting that both were exacerbated by the small-scale system of production and the sweating of labour. Stedman Jones concluded that ‘[i]n embryo at least, Mayhew provided a theory of the specificity of the London economy which in turn made intelligible the economic behavior of the London poor’ (Jones 1971, 263). Mayhew’s prescience is evident from his identification of themes which continue to inform our understanding of the ‘development’ process. These include the impact of technical innovation on traditional occupations, of the modernization of retailing on patterns of trading and opportunity for the poor, of the importance of informal sector production in meeting the consumption needs of the poor (as well as members of more ‘respectable’ society) and of the impact of changing legislation and regulation on patterns of informal activity.

4. P T Bauer and the Transition from Subsistence to Exchange

We now turn to the emergence of the idea of the informal economy in the specialist economic literature, and consider a relatively isolated figure among early post-war development economists. The term ‘isolated’ is appropriate, since the minutiae of ‘grassroots’ economic activity among colonial peoples were then an unusual focus of research for orthodox economists¹¹. A widely-prevailing assumption, that neoclassical economic theory could be applied to analysing the broad range of human societies, appeared to render unnecessary any close study of the specifics of particular cultures or indigenous economic systems. However Bauer’s interest in the transition from subsistence to wider exchange led him to document processes unnoticed or ignored by others. Walter Elkan (1982, 247) would later claim that Bauer’s early work ‘foreshadowed the discovery of the “informal sector”’ while Bauer’s collaborator Basil Yamey (1987, 22) also believed that ‘[Bauer] was the first economist to recognize the extent and economic significance of what has come to be known as the informal sector’.In what follows his work will be examined with a view to assessing the significance of his contribution.

Bauer was isolated also in being a notable contrarian, placing himself in the classical or Smithian tradition during the heady post-war days of interventionist development planning. Deepak Lal (2002, 75) described him as having been ‘virtually a pariah in his chosen sub-discipline – development economics’, because of his opposition to the ‘fashionable planning and dirigisme of the 1950s and 1960s’, which employed a kind of ‘priceless economics’. Lord Bauer (he was later ennobled by Mrs Thatcher) has now, a decade or so after his death, achieved the status of libertarian ikon in such circles as the Cato Institute, the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies¹².

Some of Bauer’s work of relevance to the informal economy was published jointly with Basil Yamey. In retrospect, Bauer acknowledged the importance of this partnership, although, by his customary use of the first person singular he may have encouraged some to think otherwise. This perception was reinforced by Yamey’s habitual self-effacement. The original fieldwork in late-colonial territories and the observations stemming from this (essential to my account of the emergence of the ‘informal economy’) appear to have been Bauer’s sole responsibility. Yet the principal documents relied on here also bear Yamey’s name (Bauer and Yamey 1951, 1957). Yamey’s contribution may be sufficiently evident from the text and footnotes in this study and from their separate accounts of the relationship (Bauer 1984), (Yamey 1987, 2002, 2005). Peter Bauer was eventually recognized by inclusion in the first World Bank volume on the history of development economics, Pioneers in Development (World Bank 1984), to which he made a characteristically pungent contribution. Indeed one might say of Bauer that he parlayed a relatively small corpus of empirical work into a lifelong career, and that with each retelling his description became more polished, his conclusions more emphatic and his barbs more sharp. It is also necessary to say that his anecdotes grew more familiar.

Bauer is included in this study for two primary reasons. The first is the importance of his pioneering studies of internal trade and entrepreneurial activity among the people of colonial West Africa and Malaya in the early postwar years (Bauer 1948, 1954). The second is his contestation of propositions on the occupational distribution of labour during the course of economic growth (Bauer and Yamey 1951, 1957), derived from William Petty (1690) by way of A G B Fisher (1933) and Colin Clark (1940). Insofar as this concerned the role of the service sector in development it is highly relevant to the informal economy. Bauer’s setting was late-colonial, with particular reference to British West Africa (especially contemporary Ghana and Nigeria) and, to a lesser degree, British Malaya. Colonial governments played a major role, in administration and as providers of formal employment, while European trading houses, often with plantation interests, dominated large-scale economic activity. As in other such situations, a subsidiary class of ethnic-minority traders (for example, Chinese, Indians, ‘Levantines’) acted as intermediaries with the broader population. Bauer pointed to the spontaneous and substantial expansion of smallholder plantings of export crops, especially rubber and cocoa, in West Africa and Malaya, occurring due to the enterprise and energy of native peoples. Such agricultural investment was accompanied by intensive trading and other service activities and this indigenous economic complex was his primary focus. Bauer’s study of the indigenous economy and its interaction with the national and international economies has provided an account of an intricate and fascinating set of phenomena. In hindsight, we may now choose to characterize this as an ‘informal economy’, though whether he had in mind so clear-cut a distinction is doubtful.

Bauer’s concern was to document the entrepreneurial capacities and energy of some colonized peoples and to expose the ‘hollowness’ of popular ‘stereotypes’ concerning their incapacity for planning, capital accumulation and entrepreneurship. This project was subject to caveats however; for example, economists needed to take account of such matters as ‘the effects of different systems of land tenure, or of family obligations, on agricultural productivity and the supply of labour in non-agricultural occupations’. These were issues beyond the purview of neoclassical theory, which operated at a level of abstraction such that ‘the principal long-term determinants of income and growth, such as the factors underlying the growth of capital, the size of population, the attitude towards work, saving and risk-bearing, the quality of entrepreneurship and the extent of markets, were considered as institutional forces or as facts given, as data, to the economist’ (Bauer and Yamey 1957, 10).

The indigenous economy of British West Africa was indisputably ‘other’ than that of the government, the trading houses and the ethnic intermediary class which comprised the ‘official’ economy. But it was not the degree of ‘otherness’ implied by dual-sector models, conceived in terms of widely-divergent ‘capitalist’ and ‘subsistence’ sectors. In his review of W Arthur Lewis’ (1955), Theory of Economic Growth, Bauer (1956, 633) criticized the Lewis model for its ‘too sharp’ distinction between ‘stagnant’ agricultural and dynamic capitalist sectors. This characterization, he believed, neglected the capacity for capital accumulation in the subsistence sector (evidenced, for example, by smallholder investment in commercial cropping). Similarly, it is difficult to imagine Bauer’s being sympathetic to any ‘too sharp’ distinction between formal and informal economic activity (just as Hart had emphasized the propensity for individuals to operate in both, playing a variety of roles). Bauer might perhaps have accepted the formal/informal labels as names for the end-points on a continuum, but not as ‘sectors’ on either side of a dichotomy. His colonial economy was an organic entity, amenable to analysis using a set of ‘versatile general-purpose tools’. These were ‘the basic elements of supply and demand analysis … the theory of inflation, the concepts of substitution at the margin, and of the complementary or competitive relationship between factors of production’, which would prove ‘equally enlightening whether used to elucidate events and circumstances in advanced or in under-developed countries’ (Bauer and Yamey 1957, 8).

Intimations of the informal economy are unmistakable, nonetheless, in a controversy concerning the sectoral distribution of labour, initiated by Bauer and Yamey in 1951. Commencing with a paper in the Economic Journal and elaborated in their book The Economics of Under-developed Countries (Bauer and Yamey 1951, 1957)¹³, they challenged a proposition associated with Colin Clark’s Conditions of Economic Progress (1940) and AGB Fisher’s Economic Progress and Social Security (1945). What came later to be known as the ‘Clark-Fisher hypothesis’ had earlier origins, in William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (Petty, 1690). Colin Clark (1984), writing in Pioneers in Development, acknowledged

‘That agriculture should show a decline in its relative importance in employment and in national product, with manufacturing showing first a rise and then a decline in favour of services, was a generalization (emphasis added) first made as long ago as the seventeenth century by Sir William Petty’.

Bauer and Yamey (1951, 741) disputed the proposition that (as they phrased it) ‘economic progress is generally associated with certain distinct, necessary and predictable changes in occupational distribution, in particular with a relative increase in the numbers engaged in tertiary activities’. They contended that a combination of data deficiencies and inadequate observation underlay this hypothesis, charging that it could not bear empirical scrutiny and indeed reflected a degree of economic determinism. Later they described the Clark-Fisher hypothesis as challenged by two characteristics of developing country labour markets. These were the ‘imperfect specialization’ of individual workers – a concept acknowledged as originating from Adam Smith – and their ‘occupational fluidity’ (Bauer and Yamey 1957). These elements contributed to a greater allocation of labour to tertiary or ‘service’ occupations during the early stages of development than was anticipated by the Clark-Fisher hypothesis. This proposition appears to have had considerable influence on the research of Richard Salisbury, who appears below as another ‘forerunner’ of Hart’s informal economy.

Imperfect specialization of labour was masked by the unreliability of conventional census data concerning occupations. In practice, however, the phenomenon was apparent from simple observation of the livelihoods of people in agriculture. ‘Many of the so-called farmers (emphasis added) spend a large part of their time in small-scale transport, porterage and trade both during the farming season and much more so outside the season. They may trade not only in the goods they themselves have produced, but also in goods purchased by them for resale’. Occupational specialization should be termed ‘imperfect’ because such people operated in both the agricultural and service sectors. Further, imperfect occupational specialization was not confined to agriculture, anymore than it was confinedtorural areas or low-status individuals. Doctors, lawyers and traditional chiefs often had trading interests alongside their primary occupations, as did government employees and the domestic servants of Europeans. Like Keith Hart, Bauer observed ‘moonlighting’ in early post-war West Africa, with wage-earning individuals also active in the informal economy.

‘Fluidity of occupations’ was cited as a second stumbling block for the Clark-Fisher hypothesis. As with ‘imperfect specialization’, this characteristic is not easily captured in official data. It was the result of easy entry to many service tasks requiring only low levels of skill and capital for their performance. Mirroring the situation of some street trades in Mayhew’s London, ‘people can generally move with little sacrifice or difficulty within a wide range of occupations in accordance with changes in prospective net advantages. These activities include various forms of small-scale trading, the supply of the less-mechanized forms of transport service, and the provision of personal services generally. Many farmers are at no disadvantage in small-scale trading provided they have the small amount of capital which is required in this relatively unskilled activity’.

Because of imperfect specialization and fluidity in occupational choice, ‘the economic activity of many people in under-developed countries is better described as the performance of a number of different tasks than as the pursuit of a definite occupation’. Yet this rich and diverse set of ‘subsidiary’ activities was typically not captured by census data even though they constituted a large share of aggregate labour time, just as ‘the trading activities of children and of many wives are not likely to find their way into the statistical tabulations’. Recording such people as employed in agriculture led to substantial under-enumeration of the service sector.

Bauer and Yamey (1957, 42) took flourishing tertiary sector employment in West Africa and some other contemporary developing economies as an instance of ‘a well known theme in economic history’, that is, ‘the crucial role of trade and transport in quickening the process of economic growth and in extending the money economy’. As for an explanation of the importance of service occupations in the aggregate allocation of labour time during that ‘quickening’, they observed that what resources are used in trade, transport and other service industries, at a given level of techniques, depends on relative costs and scarcities. ‘In an economy such as West Africa, where capital is scarce and expensive and unskilled labour abundant and cheap, the large volume of resources in distribution and transport consists very largely of labour. This tendency … permeates West African trading arrangements’ (1951, 745).

Thus, ‘once the level of economic activity has risen from that of a subsistence economy to that of an emerging exchange economy … the task of distribution may require a substantial volume of resources’. In such an economic environment ‘the indispensable tasks of assembly, bulking, transport, breaking of bulk, and dispersal’ may require a significant proportion of available labour power. Conditions in West Africa (‘dispersed farmers and holdings, poor natural communications and long distances, and the difficulties of prolonging storage in the open’) suggested also the need for substantial resources to be applied to transport (1951, 743). They invoked Adam Smith to explain ‘imperfect specialization’ in terms of the narrowness of markets. Markets were limited due to the poverty of consumers, but also to the relative poverty of traders, much of whose behavior was explained by scarcity of capital. Traders faced high transport costs and lacked capital to finance the accumulation and storage of stocks. Cheap labour was substituted for expensive capital in transporting commodities as well as by economizing on the costs of storage (‘which in effect is transport through time’). More recently, such calculation has underpinned the adoption of ‘just in time’ processes in modern manufacturing.

But if traders lacked capital, this constraint bound many consumers as well. The possession of even a tiny amount of capital offers a trading opportunity for some, in offering services to the poor which higher-income consumers would provide for themselves. Petty traders, in effect, hold inventory for the poor by dealing from a small stock in minute quantities, just as coal-dealers in poor neighbourhoods of Mayhew’s London broke down fuel into small parcels for use over a day or two. Examples, which remain valid in some twenty-first century contexts, include ‘the West African petty retailer selling perfume by the drop or cigarettes by the piece, the woman spending a full day selling a dozen mangoes in a Caribbean market, and the woman selling paraffin in small quantities from door to door in a Thai village’. Bauer and Yamey explained these as ‘examples of an intermediary performing the functions of proximate stockholder, which in a wealthier country would be performed by each consumer for himself’. Proximate stockholding might also extend to modest items of capital equipment which were, nevertheless, beyond the resources of individuals to buy for themselves. Reminiscent of Mayhew’s ‘improvident’ Costers, hiring the tools of their trade day by day, bicycles might be offered for hire to transport people or goods, or even the services of bicycle pumps, enabling petty entrepreneurs to conserve working capital.

Bauer and Yamey (1951, 745) gave other examples demonstrating the importance of services provided by ‘imperfectly specialized’ labour. These included trading in empty containers (manufactured items such as petrol drums, tins, cans, bags and bottles, as distinct from traditional containers) which had been reconditioned for re-use. These might become household utensils or other commodities, though most often they were re-used in the storage and movement of goods. In a reminder of Mayhew’s Rag and Bottle shops, ‘[t]hose who seek out, purchase, carry and distribute second-hand containers maintain the stock of capital. They prevent the destruction of the containers, usually improve their condition, distribute them to where they can best be used, and so extend their usefulness, the intensity of their use, and their effective life’. Such recycling activities were ‘highly economic in substituting superabundant for scarce resources; within the limits of available technical skill nothing is wasted in West Africa’. Neither was there much waste obvious in Mayhew’s London, where a ragged army of ‘finders’ and ‘buyers’ sought out a wide range of materials for reprocessing and re-use.

The same logic applied in agriculture: for peasant agriculturalists the scarcity of capital ‘is reflected in the absence of suitable storage facilities and of cash reserves’. This had consequences for trade and distribution. Thus, ‘each producer has to dispose of small quantities of produce at frequent intervals as they become available during and immediately after the harvesting season. This postulates a large number of intermediaries who … employ methods of transportation using relatively little capital and much labour. Donkey and bicycle transport are examples, while in some cases there is still head loading and human porterage, especially in the short-distance movement of local crops. The available transport equipment is used continuously with the assistance of large quantities of labour (subject to frequent breakdowns owing to poor roads and low technical skill)’.

Notwithstanding the importance of ‘imperfect specialization of labour’, some specialization did occur even at relatively early stages in the emergence of exchange, and in forms perhaps surprising to observers from high-income countries. Thus, ‘in many under-developed countries narrowness of markets, which discourages occupational specialization, is found together with a more elaborate or minute division of labour in certain economic activities than is usual in richer countries. Some services which in richer countries are usually performed by consumers for themselves are … provided commercially, often in large volume in the aggregate’. For example, because personal services, such as those of tailors, barbers and beauticians were relatively cheaper in such countries, ‘the better-off people of the poor country are likely to buy more of these services than their counterparts in richer countries’. For this same reason domestic servants were seen as ‘conventional necessaries for all but the poorest’ in poor countries. Again, where particular skills or training were scarce, the holders of such skills could convert them into an income-earning opportunity (as with illiteracy, where letter-writers and readers were in demand, often offering their services in marketplaces).

As development proceeds, however, ‘occupational specialization generally becomes more marked, and at the same time the fluidity of labour between occupations is reduced. Markets are extended with improvements in transport and increased purchasing power, so that specialization becomes more profitable. Moreover the increase in capital requirements and the improvements in techniques of production limit the movement of people between economic activities’. Such changes represent incremental steps away from occupational fluidity.

In terms of the occupational distribution of labour, the particular interest of Bauer and Yamey’s observations lay in pointing to the importance of ‘tertiary’ employment at very early stages of economic development, rather than at later stages as suggested by the Clark-Fisher hypothesis. It must be pointed out that their ‘tertiary’ activities were of a different order from those which Clark saw as becoming predominant with the progress of development. In summary, however, Bauer and Yamey asserted that tertiary sector employment, far from being the consequence of economic development, was a necessary element in the transition from subsistence to exchange, because:

‘in West Africa, as in other emerging economies, the indispensible task of commodity distribution is expensive relatively to available resources … the multiplicity of traders is the result of the mass use of unskilled labour instead of capital in the performance of the task of distribution. There is an extensive demand for the services of intermediaries, and there is a large section of the population available to perform these services at a low supply price in terms of daily earnings’.

Thus, pace Clark and Fisher, Bauer and Yamey concluded (1951, 747) that ‘there are severe limitations and qualifications to the view that a high proportion of labour in tertiary production is both a consequence of and a pointer to a high standard of living’. The qualification they offered to this view was based on an examination of occupational distribution during relatively early stages of the transition to market exchange – an observation of importance to our understanding of the informal economy, but scarcely a refutation of the Clark/Fisher hypothesis as a long-run proposition. In hindsight, their qualification of Clark/Fisher has not proved influential and contemporary research continues to explore the causal mechanisms of ‘the shift to services employment’ rather than the direction of that shift¹⁴. For this reason neither the brief debate in the 1950s on the Bauer and Yamey thesis, nor the considerable literature since accumulated, is explored here.

For the purposes of this paper, the importance of Bauer and Yamey’s intervention does not lie in its attempt to challenge a well-established generalization concerning growth and structural change, but rather in its pioneering account of indigenous trading and service activities. While these are observed with a sharp eye for social and cultural context, Bauer does not deal with what Hart termed ‘illegitimate’ activity. This major feature of life in Nima is entirely absent from Bauer’s account. References to petty manufacturing and the varieties of ‘transfer’ documented by Hart are also few. Bauer’s account of the informal economy appears to some degree unbalanced by his preoccupation with the role of trade and transport in the transition from subsistence.

Bauer’s argument in his discussion of occupational specialization turned on the difficulties of enumeration; this is a central criterion in defining informal economic activity. In Bauer’s analysis, increasing specialization tended to lead to what we would now see as more formalized occupational roles. Bauer’s ‘imperfect specialization’ and ‘occupational fluidity’ of labour also emerged strongly in Mayhew’s account of the ‘casualized’ labour market of Victorian London. Bauer also emphasized the potentially-multiple activities of people in situations of ‘occupational fluidity’. This emphasis was consistent with Hart’s account of people performing multiple occupational roles. Bauer, like Hart, detected a high incidence of ‘moonlighting’ among those with formal waged employment, though Hart’s emphasis on the importance of the reliability of income streams was lacking in Bauer’s account.

Whereas Hart’s narrative dealt almost exclusively with an urban informal economy, Bauer’s story gives more attention to informal activity in the rural sector, as well as dealing with the role of trade in creating rural-urban economic linkages. Bauer’s account gives rather more attention than Hart’s to the economic activities of women (leaving aside the ‘red light’ elements in Hart’s narrative). On the other hand, Mayhew provided considerably more information on the economic activities of women than either of them. Mayhew’s work, like Hart’s, dealt largely with the urban economy, though he had numerous examples of rural-urban interactions, dealing (for example) with seasonal labour and itinerant trading.

Hart’s emphasis on transfers within social networks as an urban reflection of traditional relationships, while not entirely absent from Bauer’s narrative, suggested the former’s anthropological perspective. Bauer’s application of ‘versatile general purpose [economic] tools’ provided us, for those aspects of informal activity which interested him, with a fine-grained explanation of non-agricultural livelihoods. Bauer was more positive than Hart about the economic value of informal employment (though here again his selective attention to trade and services should be remembered). Hart’s more limited economic analysis stressed interactions between formal and informal ‘sectors’, couched in terms of ‘export’ and ‘import’ transactions. Bauer’s account dealt with the colonial economy as a more organic entity – a continuum of economic activity ranging from (as we might now style it) the ‘formal’ to the ‘informal’ – but all amenable to a common framework of analysis. Much later in his career Bauer (1984, 38) was happy enough to accept Walter Elkan’s encomium, that he had ‘foreshadowed’ the ‘discovery’ of the informal sector. But while Bauer was certainly a forerunner of the idea, Elkan was correct to imply that he was not indeed its ‘discoverer’.

5. Richard Salisbury: Services as ‘Leading Sector’

In 1972, the (then) Territory of Papua and New Guinea was among the earliest states in which Keith Hart’s idea of an urban informal economy was introduced into policy discussion. Hart brought the idea to Papua New Guinea (PNG) as a member of a consulting team, the ‘Faber Mission’. This had been commissioned by UNDP, to advise on economic policy for a soon-to-be self-governing PNG (Overseas Development Group 1973). On arrival, Hart was taken aback to find that informal economic activity appeared conspicuous by its absence in PNG’s few small urban centres. His recommendation that its growth should be encouraged found a receptive audience among economic nationalists, and the idea of the informal ‘sector’ achieved a degree of influence, at least at the level of rhetoric, on early planning priorities and in the constitution of the new State. This was drafted with several clauses implying the duty of government to support and encourage informal economic activities (Papua New Guinea 1975).

Papua New Guinea will, coincidentally, figure in this narrative as the country in which another forerunner of the informal economy developed his ideas, before the advent of Hart and the Faber Mission. On the basis of anthropological fieldwork in two contrasting and widely-separated districts of PNG, Richard Salisbury came to the view that service, or tertiary, activities could play the role of ‘leading sector’ in the transition from subsistence agriculture to market exchange. This paper will examine his work to consider whether, and in what fashion, he anticipated the idea of the informal economy, particularly in his account of the economic development of the Tolai people of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain.

At the time of Salisbury’s work with them, some ten years before the visit of Keith Hart, the Tolai were possibly the most prosperous and progressive population group in PNG. For reasons to be explained, they had achieved a relatively high degree of intra-regional trade and exchange and a number of non-traditional sources of income. Conditions for a flourishing informal economy were probably more favourable on the Gazelle Peninsula than elsewhere at the time. It will be useful to consider the extent to which informal economic activity had indeed developed there in the late-colonial period and, if so, the degree to which Salisbury appreciated its significance. First, however, it is necessary to introduce the two studies on which Salisbury’s ideas were founded.

The Siane people of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea and the Tolaiof the Gazelle Peninsula, on the island of New Britain, both experienced rapid social and economic change after the Pacific war. Salisbury lived among the Siane in the period 1952-53, quite soon after the introduction of steel tools had revolutionized aspects of their agriculture and social relations. The Siane were at an early stage of transition from a ‘pure’, non-monetized subsistence economy (Salisbury 1962), whereas the Tolai, with whom he worked between 1961 and 1963, were further along that transition path, with an agricultural system combining subsistence and export crops. Tolai experience of international trade and the monetized economy, colonialism and Christianity had begun much earlier, during the 1870s (Salisbury 1970).

The introduction of the steel axe to the Siane released labour-time, which ‘was used for politicking, ceremonials, legal disputes, and fighting’. These proved to be elements in a process of ‘political consolidation’ which occurred, for reasons specific to each case, among both the Siane and the Tolai. In each of these societies, larger social groupings coalesced around emergent leaders exercising more effective political control. This in turn led to ‘organizational innovation’ and ‘the development of new consumer demands’ (Salisbury 1970, 10-11). In his view, increasing levels of political activity, combining with capacity to make decisions at the local level, produced in each of these societies a socially-beneficial consolidation of political authority, from which further economic progress could flow.

In a little-known paper published in 1971, Salisbury drew together findings from his 1962 Siane study (From Stone to Steel: Economic Consequences of a Technological change in New Guinea) and his 1970 Tolai publication (Vunamami: Economic Transformation in a Traditional Society). The 1971 paper shows some congruence with the ideas of other ‘forerunners’ of the informal economy and with those of Hart himself. Titled Development through the Service Industries, it contended that ‘under certain conditions [the service industries] may be the dynamic sectors of an economy’. Salisbury explicitly rejected the view that ‘following Colin Clark’s schema of development’, services ‘are looked for … as properly emerging only after primary and secondary industry have achieved certain levels of production’. In fact, in both of his PNG cases, ‘service industries have proved the leading sector, in the Tolai case for almost one hundred years’ (Salisbury 1971, 57). These views echoed Peter Bauer who, as we have already seen, rejected the ‘Clark-Fisher hypothesis’, contending instead that services were crucial from the very beginning, ‘in quickening the process of economic growth and in extending the money economy’. In the very last sentence of From Stone to Steel, Salisbury (1962, 213) offered his Siane study as a building block towards understanding ‘the complex mechanisms which Bauer and Yamey have called the Economics of Under-developed Countries’. This may fairly be taken as acknowledging an intellectual debt.

Nor was this the only such debt. Salisbury commenced his anthropological career as an unabashed formalist, crediting the influence of the neoclassical economist and methodologist Lionel Robbins (1935). In the spirit of Robbins, Salisbury (1962, 3-4) set out to describe activities ‘in which [the Siane] appear to organize their behavior in terms of a rational calculation of the quantities of goods or services produced, exchanged or consumed, in such a way as to allocate scarce means to meet competing ends’. Keith Hart, himself no formalist, would later comment that Stone to Steel had demonstrated ‘that a formalist premise was not incompatible with rich and nuanced ethnographic arguments’ (Hann and Hart 2011, 68).

In his 1971 paper Salisbury attempted a theoretical model of the role of the service sector in development, to generalize the empirical findings of his Siane and Tolai studies. The model is described as emerging from ‘a social evolutionary perspective’, a branch of social theory given to identifying ‘stages’ in the course of human progress. Many writers, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, and from Lewis Henry Morgan to Walt Rostow, have discerned such stages. From the work of Marshall Sahlins (1958), Salisbury drew the observation that ‘in generally undifferentiated subsistence societies the first full-time specialist occupations to occur are political and religious ones’. Further, in such societies, ‘the actual proportion of the labour force employed in service production would be much higher than the figures of full-time specialists would indicate because of part-time involvement in politics and religion’ (Salisbury 1971, 57). This sounds very much like Peter Bauer’s explanation of errors in colonial labour force data resulting from ‘imperfect specialization’.

Salisbury concluded that, if trading or gift-exchange were also regarded as tertiary activity, the proportion of subsistence ‘manpower’ employed in services among the Siane may have been as much as 20 percent. Ceremonial gift-exchange is a means by which aspirants to political leadership in Melanesia strive for status and prestige. Such exchanges were a thoroughly traditional element in the process of Salisbury’s ‘political consolidation’. For the Siane and the Tolai, increased levels and frequency of gift-exchange were a culturally-appropriate means of enjoying the additional leisure time made available by labour-saving innovation. While a 20 percent allocation of labour-time to this and other ‘services’ might seem high in a subsistence agricultural economy, Bauer and Yamey would not have been surprised by such a finding. It was substantially greater than the share of ‘manpower’ engaged in manufacturing, including craft-goods (Salisbury 1971, 57).

Salisbury compared his case-study data for services with statistics for the historical growth of service sectors in a number of industrial economies. He interpreted these to support an argument that ‘in a context of social welfare … the volume of services generally available within the society is a better measure of “real development” than is an index based on money or on quantities of goods’ (Salisbury 1971, 58). From this assertion he developed a somewhat convoluted and eclectic argument, derived from the ‘development of under-development’ school of political economy, and incorporating the ‘agricultural involution’ of Clifford Geertz. In Salisbury’s view, ‘under-development’ occurs when subsistence economies are diverted from what is, in some sense, the ‘normal’ (that is, organic or correct) path of development. An extended quotation here may be the best way to convey the flavour:

‘[U]nderdevelopment is itself a process that takes something away from non-developed countries like New Guinea or nineteenth century Africa (e.g., Frank 1967). Such countries absorb, or are absorbed by, complex technologies and political structures but undergo a reduction in the local provision of services. The process of under-development is one that makes simple but labour-efficient agriculture more labour-intensive (c.f., Geertz 1963b), absorbing a larger proportion of the labour force, but taking the provision of services away from the rural or poorer areas, and centralizing them in either capital cities or metropolitan countries. This centralization … retards the “normal” pattern of development and differentiation within rural or colonial areas’ (Salisbury 1971, 58).

So the Siane and Tolai would, in the absence of the centralizing forces of ‘under-development’, proceed along a ‘normal’ (that is, decentralized) path in which village ‘services’ (whose definition we shall shortly examine)form the leading sector. Political consolidation and the retention of decision-making authority at the local level are crucial elements in this scenario. But, if made subject to centralizing forces, Tolai and Siane would likely fall prey to what Clifford Geertz, writing of Java, had described as ‘agricultural involution’. So bald a paraphrase probably does rough justice to Salisbury’s argument, but further comment will be withheld until his application of it to Papua New Guinea has been discussed.

One of the more interesting aspects of Salisbury’s work was his detailed measurement of Siane and Tolai labour use. By preparing ‘time budgets’, he was able to measure how people who might otherwise be regarded simply as subsistence cultivators actually apportioned their time between various activities. Such an approach, had it been employed by Peter Bauer in West Africa, could have illuminated his discussion of the ‘imperfect specialization’ of labour and the dangers of using official data as a guide to its sectoral distribution. Salisbury was able to show (1971, 59) that among the Tolai most subsistence cultivators (and especially men) ‘usually work part-time, often voluntarily and without pay, at what may be called service activities, providing entertainment, education, organization and assistance to their neighbours where specialized agencies to provide them do not exist’. This is an important clue to Salisbury’s understanding of the ‘service’ sector. It was clear from Salisbury’s time budgets that official data tended to ‘overestimate the proportion of labour self-employed in agriculture’ and ‘underestimate the proportion of service work performed’ (1971, 59).

For the Siane, whose subsistence production was non-monetized, Salisbury collected relatively straight-forward time budget data (measured as ‘labour cost’ in terms of time). For the Tolai his task was more complicated, though also more illuminating, due to their use of traditional ‘shell-money’ currency. This circulated alongside Australian currency, but (1971, 59) ‘with different implied rates of exchange in different spheres of trade’. This carried the advantage that ‘subsistence production consumed locally can be compared either quantitatively or by cash value with store-bought foods. Imputed wage rates (in shell-money) can be calculated for traditional service activities’ (1971, 59). He was able not only to measure Tolai time inputs as between various activities, but also to establish approximate income differentials between subsistence, service and other forms of employment.

Salisbury’s vision of the role of services in a subsistence economy undergoing transformation, and the nature of the services he had in mind, is further clarified in his conclusion to the 1971 paper:

‘In countries where there is an approximate internal self-sufficiency in foodstuffs, encouragement of local (and particularly rural) self-help projects in education, marketing, artistic endeavour, housebuilding, athletics, or leisure generally, service industries may well turn services into a leading sector, may absorb unemployment, provide incentives to labour-saving innovations in productive activities, encourage entrepreneurship, facilitate investment and make changes in the average standard of living in such societies, without the need for large additional outside investments. Development through service industries can be a pattern for grass-roots development’ (1971, 65).

Salisbury envisaged many of these services being provided by local government- and church-related entities, as a dividend of the ‘political consolidation’ process, and flowing from the energies of political and community organizers. At the local level, ‘the process of economic development can be seen as involving both technological improvement and the desire by the people to provide increased services for themselves’ (1970, 351). This process occurs in an emerging public sphere, based on newly-created local institutions. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Vunamami is replete with instances of private, for-profit informal enterprise, whether based on groups or individuals. Moreover, his Tolai local government enterprises often had more the character of informal public-private partnerships than a corporate form recognizable to Western eyes. With the exception of the Tolai Cocoa Project, to be discussed below, such activities generally lacked the element of formality bestowed by bureaucratic intervention.

The role of services in the transition from subsistence is a major theme of Vunamami. The Tolai experienced four successive instances of labour-saving agricultural change over the period 1875-1960 (Salisbury 1971, 60). Each of these permitted either the production of a given quantum of output with less labour input, or the expansion of output for the same level of labour input. The four changes were presented as ‘sequences’, a term used by Salisbury in both his Siane and Tolai studies, and equivalent to ‘stages’, as commonly found in the social evolutionary literature. Indeed Salisbury (1962b, 338) explicitly compared his sequences with Rostow’s ‘stages of growth’. In the first sequence, commencing about 1875, Tolai took the opportunity to exchange surplus coconuts for trade goods with Europeans. In the second, commencing during the 1890s, they began to expand their plantings of coconut palms for this trade. In the third, from the late 1930s, Tolai adopted the hot-air copra dryer to add value to their crop. Fourth, and most recently before Salisbury’s arrival, from the late 1950s they adopted cocoa as a new export crop, together with associated mechanized processing. The effect of each of these changes was, broadly speaking, to release a larger proportion of labour inputs to be applied to service activities.

Rather than the discrete movement of individuals from one occupation to another, it is more accurate to think in terms of changes in the proportions of aggregate labour input,as individuals adjusted their own labour inputs between multiple activities. Labour-saving change, occurring in a situation where (apparently) there was little demand for increased material output, would have produced ‘technological unemployment’ if workers had not been able to diversify, spending more time productively in service activities. While there was some increase in the ownership of material goods, the most notable effect was non-material. ‘“Prosperity” was evidenced more by greater leisure and a varied quality to social life than the ownership of material goods, although this did increase also’ (Salisbury 1971, 60). In this context, ‘leisure’ appears to have included engagement in group activities, such as ceremony and exchange, in local government, and in church and community affairs (described above as the dividends of political consolidation). While these may not be regarded as ‘leisure activities’ in a Western individualistic sense, their potential for building social capital suggests their value in the social systems of the Siane and the Tolai.

As Salisbury explained in Vunamami, this shift to leisure ‘would occur only if existing demand for food and subsistence requisites were already met – in other words, in a relatively affluent society’ (1970, 11). Labour was not unlimited in supply; in fact it was scarce, relative to the natural resource endowment and productive potential of the Tolai lands. Salisbury’s data for land-use and labour inputs in Vunamami supported the contention that the Tolai were ‘affluent’ in subsistence terms. Thus, for 1961, he reported that ‘Vunamami, thanks to its women, still is … virtually self-sufficient in food crops, at a cost of only fifteen and a half acres of land and 11 percent of the labour of its farmers’, while ‘the remaining agricultural labour of Vunamami, and the remaining acreage, were about equally divided between copra and cocoa, between planting [ie, expansion of commercial crops] and cropping’ (Salisbury 1970, 146).

That activities, deemed unprofitable at the margin by Tolai, were abandoned when more rewarding opportunities arose was attributed by Salisbury to their ‘employment situation’. ‘With an elastic demand for labour (even self-employed labour) in service activities, which absorbed available labour, and no local shortage of food supplies, people were happy to forgo drudgery where they could’ (1971, 60). This situation encouraged investment in, and the movement of labour to, activities for which demand was elastic. In terms of proportions of aggregate labour input, measured by time-budgets, there was a movement of Siane labour from subsistence agriculture to services (Salisbury 1962, 152). Demand for ‘self-employed’ labour is derived from demand for the output of self-employed service workers. In referring to an ‘elastic’ demand for self-employed labour, Salisbury appeared to mean there was no shortage of relatively remunerative outlets for the energies of any workers ‘displaced’ from subsistence activities by technical change. He contrasted this fortunate situation with a more constrained case, that of land shortage where unemployment and food shortages exist. In such situations, ‘workers can always be found to move into relatively unproductive or low-paying jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile workers. Under these conditions technological innovation does not restructure the whole economy but merely adds a new sector to an old-style one’. In this case, new and more productive economic activity is simply superimposed on a stagnating traditional sector beset by Geertzian ‘agricultural involution’.

Salisbury concluded (1971, 60) that ‘full employment and self-sufficiency in food supplies’ are ‘pre-conditions’ for the applicability of his model. Under the ‘affluent’ circumstances of the Tolai, labour tended to flow from primary production to service industries, where returns were higher. Salisbury’s data for income relativities revealed the incentives underlying these shifts. Taking the wage on expatriate-owned plantations as a base, a Tolai farmer drying and selling his copra earned about two and a half times the cash wage of the labourer (suggesting why few Tolai worked on plantations). Even the least skilled ceremonial dancers or clerical workers earned about double the plantation cash wage, while members of Tolai fishing crews earned about as much as the plantation wage, though in more congenial circumstances. At the other end of the scale, ‘the richest men in both shellmoney or cash are top-flight artists, or political and financial organizers’ (Salisbury 1971, 61).

Salisbury (1971, 61-2) contrasted the situation of the Tolai, in an affluent mixed economy of subsistence and cash-cropping,undergoing transition to market exchange, with that occurring in some cash-cropping peasant societies. These were typified by monocrop export production systems and reliance on imported food staples. This was a situation of ‘over-specialization’, characterized by ‘steadily declining wage-rates, lack of local services, extreme vulnerability of the local economy to changes in world-market prices for its product, and an inability to innovate or to diversify the economy….’ Such circumstances led to agricultural involution, which Salisbury believed might be avoided if local service activity could be maintained, and with it the flexibility necessary to diversify economic activity.

Salisbury’s discussion of involution and its application to PNG is not entirely satisfactory. The agricultural involution described by Clifford Geertz derived from the particular conditions of ‘wet-rice’ cultivation in colonial Java and Bali, where peasant farmers grew irrigated rice on land they were also forced to lease, in a system of periodic rotations, to large commercial sugar plantations. This rice cultivation system was distinguished by ‘its marked tendency (and ability) to respond to a rising population through intensification … absorbing increased numbers of cultivators on a unit of cultivated land’. Geertz specifically ruled out the possibility of such involution in shifting agriculture, such as Tolai subsistence gardening: ‘such a course is largely precluded to swidden farmers … because of the precarious [ecological] equilibrium of the shifting regime’ (Geertz 1963b, 32).

Nonetheless Salisbury saw a kind of agricultural involution as an ever-present threat to the Tolai, should their path to development become blocked by ‘centralization’ and an inability to continue transferring labour into productive service activities. The Gazelle had been in danger of succumbing during a stagnant period from 1921 to 1935, when ‘increasingly direct administration from Australia and a lack of technological innovation brought Tolai society into an incipient phase of involution. Both technological and political change were needed to reverse the process’ (Salisbury 1971, 65n). Adopting cocoa as a new export crop and investing in fermentaries for post-harvest processing provided the necessary escape. Complementary political development also occurred, as Tolai became involved increasingly in a broad range of community activities, creating local-level institutions and building social capital. Absent such beneficial change, however, and with continuing population growth, the ‘precarious’ ecological equilibrium of Tolai subsistence agriculture would have been disturbed. Conditions on the Gazelle would guarantee a quite short road to over-population and falling incomes for the Tolai, unless significant innovation in food crop production became possible.

Salisbury saw a further dire possibility (1971, 64). He warned of the simultaneous dangers of ‘agricultural involution in rural areas and service development in the capital’. Urban centralization of services was inimical to progressive rural communities and was, in his analysis, causal in the emergence of what he understood as agricultural involution. But declining rural living standards would also cause service provision to become ‘low-productive and technologically involuted’. For the idea of an ‘involution of services’ Salisbury acknowledged discussions with a colleague, the economist Benjamin Higgins (himself a colleague of Geertz in Indonesia in the 1950s). Paraphrasing Higgins, Salisbury noted that ‘service industries of low productivity in many under-developed countries absorb large proportions of the manpower, but disguise under-employment without removing it. They then create what might be called “an involution of services” – taking in each other’s washing – leading to increasingly labour-intensive technologies, and none of the economically stimulating effects described in this paper’ (Salisbury 1971, 65n).

Courtesy of Ben Higgins, Salisbury had now identified two forms of involution. He had also distinguished two informal service sectors, one rural and productive, the other urban and marked by a degree of poverty and disguised unemployment. The former could, under the right conditions, flourish in a society unconstrained by shortage of land for subsistence. The latter would emerge from an increasingly land-short subsistence economy from which people were forced to migrate to urban areas. But this was a warning rather than a prediction of outcomes. Aside from the community-level services which provided the dynamic of his model, he gave numerous examples of private informal economic activity among the Tolai, none of which appears to have developed involutionary characteristics by 1961. Rather, these activities enabled many people to profit from rising income levels in their own communities and to benefit from proximity to the thriving urban centre of Rabaul. This could be done while retaining security of access to one’s own land and resources, although some peri-urban populations (in particular in the village of Matupit) were beginning to experience land shortage and were adopting new sources of livelihood in consequence (A L Epstein 1963).

Although the scale was much smaller, there were some parallels between the late-colonial economies of Salisbury’s Gazelle and British West Africa, as described by Bauer and Yamey (1957). In both the native peoples had been quick to take up opportunities for export cash-cropping (though large, foreign-owned plantations were relatively more important on the Gazelle). Large expatriate trading houses dominated the formal economies of both, while a subsidiary class of traders (in the case of the Gazelle, the Chinese) acted as intermediaries with the local population. A relatively large expatriate population in Rabaul (at the time, the second-largest urban centre in PNG) provided market opportunities for the Tolai. Early informal economic opportunities had arisen from the rich agricultural base, and in particular from product specialization due to the ecological diversity of the Gazelle region. Even in pre-contact times this had fostered a system of trade and marketplaces, multiplied by external influences from the 1870s on. Subsistence households on the Gazelle engaged in a substantial trade in traditional foodstuffs, initially based on seasonality and the availability of different varieties of staple foods from a range of sources. By 1961 Salisbury’s observations led him to the conclusion that this ‘earlier interdependence of different ecological areas’ was being replaced by a new set of relationships at the Rabaul and other markets. For example, people in peri-urban villages of Rabaul were increasingly reliant on wage-labour and the purchase of food crops, while rural villages had ‘individuals who specialized in producing bulk crops for the market, and who themselves purchased from other producers the vegetables they needed for subsistence’. Thus, if peri-urban villagers could be classed as ‘proletarians’, some rural villagers had become ‘commercial farmers’ (Salisbury 1970, 214).

In Salisbury’s account of Vunamami, women were dominant as sellers in the marketplaces of the Gazelle though sales by individuals were typically small and (underlining the ‘affluence’ of the Tolai subsistence economy) market attendance was valued as much for the opportunity to socialize as for profit earned. Transactions between Tolai were largely conducted in shell money, and since this could be exchanged for a wide range of traditional commodities and services, it seems legitimate to classify such trade as informal economic activity. Typically, much of vendor earnings was spent immediately, to buy other varieties of food for household consumption. Transactions made with Europeans, Chinese and other non-Tolai yielded cash, and since the production of vegetables for profit was ‘normally a male affair’ this cash would usually be surrendered to husbands.

Men were in general more profit-oriented than women, often initiating plantings of subsistence and introduced crops for market. Some entrepreneurs contracted for the bulk supply of foodstuffs to commercial plantations and institutions (schools, missions, hospitals), bulking up consignments from individuals and trucking produce on commission. They performed intermediary functions which appeared still to be lacking from the marketplace trading of women. Outside the markets, there was some street trading in Rabaul while at public occasions such as sporting events, vendors selling cigarettes, buns, soft drinks and sweets were active.

Other informal economic activities were traditional, and usually conducted for shell money. These included hiring traditional specialists (composers of songs and dances, canoe builders, makers of musical instruments, also ritual specialists who performed rituals of benefit to communities and were paid by them. Mortuary rites had become larger in scale, as had ceremonial associated with male cults. Specialists in magic and ritual, including the workers of spells, may also have continued to operate in 1961, though Salisbury’s informants were reticent on this subject.

Tolai entrepreneurs had established processing facilities for the export crops, copra and cocoa. While the bulk of Tolai cocoa was processed in the fermentaries of the Tolai Cocoa Project (itself a dividend of the ‘political consolidation’ on which Salisbury laid such store), some plants were owned individually and by small groups. Established with government assistance, the Cocoa Project had formal governance and access to commercial bank funding. Due to the bureaucratic intervention which had made these facilities available, the Project had the characteristics of ‘formal’ enterprise. On the other hand, private fermentaries were informal in character, as were the more numerous private copra dryers, for which capital and technical requirements were less onerous. In addition to processing their own produce, owners allowed other growers to use these for a fee. Trucking was tried by many individuals and groups; ownership of vehicles conferred prestige and the hope of profit, though typically inadequate provision was made for capital replacement. Nonetheless, as in Hart’s Nima, some men succeeded in maintaining their vehicles and operating profitably. Small carpentry contracting was a widespread private business, relatively lucrative though sporadic and combined with agriculture and other activities. Contractors normally preferred to quote construction costs using the client’s own materials, limiting their investment to tools and the hire of labour. Pig raising had become a commercial activity, with most customers from among the Chinese community, while many households raised a few chickens for sale. Small ‘trade’ stores were common, though often short-lived or spasmodic in operation, with maintenance of working capital and credit control the principal problems. Beer was obtained and re-sold illegally and a local banana liquor was distilled. Commercial pati (parties) were frequent events, with music and drinking, and could be quite profitable for a shrewd entrepreneur.

Despite this modest profusion of informal ‘micro and small enterprise’ (to use present-day jargon) there was little evidence in 1961 of progress to larger-scale operations. Salisbury (1970, 275) commented that the ‘lack of avenues for productive investment’ was an important deterrent to business growth in Vunamami. ‘The progression of an entrepreneur from petty marketing, to copra-drying, to truck ownership, was one that was readily achievable – so much so that an oversupply of trucks had already occurred and an oversupply of drivers seemed imminent’. But market forces did not appear to force people to branch out; ‘savings remained tied up in inactive bank accounts … or were employed in duplicating facilities used only by the local community’. The stimulus for a new sequence of Tolai economic growth had not yet become apparent. Salisbury thought it might lie in the development of new and larger investment vehicles (of which the Tolai Cocoa Project was an instance), operating over extended markets and mobilizing capital from wider groupings of Tolai. This would depend on the bureaucratic capacity to devise and regulate new forms of business entity which could ‘give shareholders security of investment equal to that which they currently obtain by their informal powers of sanctioning [local] managers’ (Salisbury 1970, 276).

The capacity of the Tolai to accumulate capital had been demonstrated in their first three growth sequences, during which innovations were self-financed from subsistence resources and earnings from employment in the monetary sector. This achievement reminds us of a persistent theme in the writings of Peter Bauer, the capacity of subsistence agriculturalists to finance their own investment (Bauer and Yamey 1957, especially pp131ff). Salisbury (1971, 62) provided convincing evidence for this claim, calculating that ‘for Tolai net investment is about 20 per cent of total output in all its various forms – labour for planting of cash-crop trees, labour and cash for construction, cash for machinery, cash and stocks for working capital, shell money, cash and taxes for social infrastructure, etc’. Even so, the planting and processing of cocoa beans in the fourth sequence required the Tolai to find external finance, for which the patronage of colonial bureaucracy was required. As Salisbury reported, ‘only the last stage required large-scale cash investments, for which bank credits became available when local savings were exhausted’ (1971, 60).

There can be little doubt that Salisbury recognized early manifestations of the informal economy phenomenon, occurring in and around Rabaul in the early 1960s, and was able to explain their emergence. Insofar as Salisbury discerned an informal economy in Hart’s sense of the term, it was primarily a rural informal economy. Moreover, unlike Hart’s urban informal sector, it was not driven by the spur of rural poverty. For reasons of geography (proximity to Rabaul) and infrastructure (the well-developed road system of the Gazelle) this rural informal economy was quite well articulated with the urban centre. There is a strong sense in Salisbury’s account of a thriving set of rural-urban relationships in which the informal economy is an important element. Further, Salisbury should be credited with having recognized the possibility of a future ‘involution of services’ (as suggested by Ben Higgins). In Salisbury’s view, consistent with the centralizing processes which would bring this about, such an informal economy would occur primarily in urban areas, (and would be driven increasingly by the threat of poverty).

Salisbury saw private, for-profit service activities among the Tolai as an element in their economic progress, moving from subsistence agriculture with limited intra-regional trade based on ecological diversity, to mixed subsistence and export-cropping with an emergent service or tertiary sector. True, Salisbury’s attention was directed primarily to communal (that is, politically-inspired) service provision as the dynamic element in his model, while his discussion of the private informal economy had something of the character of obiter dicta. Considered simply as a listing and description of informal economic activity among the Tolai at the time, the study of the peri-urban village of Matupit by A L Epstein (1963) is a more comprehensive account. But Salisbury’s conceptual framework, the focus on the service sector, per se, and its role in development gives his work its particular value for our purposes.

Salisbury set the discussion in a context of structural change in the Tolai economy, drawing on Colin Clark’s notion of the growing importance of services, while echoing Bauer’s objection to the classification of subsistence cultivators as simply ‘farmers’ when in fact they devoted (on his reckoning) perhaps 20 percent of their time to service activities. Thus, in the matter of the informal economy Salisbury’s intellectual debts, principally to Bauer and secondarily to Clark, are manifest. Regarding services, the originality of his argument lies, first, in applying Bauer’s logic to a novel set of circumstances, second, in his careful measurement of the uses of labour-time, third, in his recognition of the possibility of an ‘urban involution’ of services, and, finally, in his attempt to incorporate a political dynamic which had no part in Bauer’s thesis. To say that the argument is sometimes laboured, and that his formalist/social evolutionary machinery creaks rather audibly in places, is not to deny the power of the Siane and Tolai studies as records of ‘economic transformation in a traditional society’ (to recall the subtitle of Vunamami).

5. Conclusion

This concluding section draws together the ideas of the ‘quartet’ – Hart, Mayhew, Bauer and Salisbury – to examine points of congruence and divergence and give credit to each, as seems appropriate. Hart’s conception of the informal economy arose from his capacity to see, with great clarity, certain realities associated with the getting of livelihoods in Nima. His vision was not obscured by categories devised for the regulation of an economy governed by particular ‘forms’. Neither was his vision coloured by judgments, drawn from the norms of ‘respectable’ society, of the propriety of the livelihoods he observed. As viewed from the streets of Nima, the ‘forms’ of the economy, as ordained by authority, were best interpreted as a vision of a world only partially realized – the world as it might become, rather than as it was in 1966. Whether or not Hart himself shared any such vision, he rendered a service by pointing to the discrepancies between vision and reality, and by questioning the categories imposed by theory and bureaucracy on an unruly actuality. Understanding and accounting for such discrepancies is surely a prerequisite for any purposive program. We do not find this same appreciation of the significance of bureaucratic intervention in the work of those other writers selected here as Hart’s ‘precursors’.

Central to the narrative of each was how people gained their livelihoods informally, outside the ‘official’ frameworks of the economies in which they lived and worked. Although differences in historical setting, environment and other circumstances operated to distinguish each case study, our task is to consider the degree to which genuine commonalities emerge from these accounts. All dealt with societies in transition, but while Mayhew was concerned with a period of gathering industrialization, political change and social dislocation, the others were placed at various points along a path from subsistence agriculture to market exchange, and at various stages of political development. The provision of services played a central role in each of these disparate accounts of informal economies, though with different degrees of emphasis on the role of the service ‘sector’ per se.

Salisbury and Bauer both accorded special status to services, with the former dubbing them the ‘leading sector’ and setting out a model of development based on the progressive accretion of capacity for service delivery on the foundation of an ‘affluent’ subsistence economy. For our purposes his obiter dicta, descriptions of the Tolai service economy, are the more interesting elements of his contribution. Bauer also privileged services, singling out transport and trade as crucial in the transition of economies from subsistence agriculture to market exchange. Both Bauer and Salisbury engaged with Clark and Fisher’s celebrated generalization concerning the increasing role of services in the course of economic growth. Bauer pointed to the under-enumeration of service activities in agricultural societies during the transition from subsistence, due to what he described as ‘imperfect specialization’. Salisbury, following Bauer, added empirical weight to this analysis by measuring the time-budgets of individual Tolai ‘farmers’, confirming Bauer’s results. Salisbury nonetheless accepted the broad sweep of the Clark/Fisher ’hypothesis’, which underpinned his ‘leading sector’ proposition, whereas Bauer regarded it as having been undermined. However Bauer’s view has not prevailed in the continuing economic debate, which accepts the reality of a shift to services and focuses instead on the causal mechanisms underlying the shift. Bauer did not falsify Clark/Fisher, rather he offered an intriguing qualification to the hypothesis touching on the transition from subsistence, and in the process provided a pioneering account of the economics of the informal sector. Neither Bauer nor Salisbury was concerned explicitly with ‘form’, as such, though readers coming to their work from Hart will find themselves in familiar territory. But this is also true of Henry Mayhew, from whose rich body of observation Hart might almost (like some latter-day Marcel Mauss) have derived the elements of his ‘informality’ construct without troubling to visit Africa.

Important environmental differences affected the societies described by the quartet, influencing the nature, and in particular the urgency, of economic activity. At one extreme, Salisbury’s Tolai pursued a relatively small range of livelihoods, buffered by the ‘affluence’ of the subsistence sector which provided the base for their economy. While he considered the possibility of an involution of urban services, Salisbury believed this could be avoided. At another extreme, Hart’s rural-urban migrants, the Frafra, suffered ‘extreme pressure on the land at home’ (Hart 1970, 105). For many of them, returning to the subsistence sector was not an available option. Making allowance for the radically different context of mid-Victorian London, we may still imagine why refugees from Ireland and Eastern Europe, artisans displaced by technological change, and the indigent elderly facing the severities of the workhouse might feel obliged to ‘hustle’ with a degree of desperation similar to that ascribed by Hart to many of the Frafra. The term ‘sub-proletariat’, which Hart applied to the Frafra in Nima, seems equally apposite to Mayhew’s London poor.

The circumstances of Bauer’s West Africans are rather more ambiguous. Unlike Hart, Salisbury and Mayhew, he drew upon the experience of an enormous geographic region and a population both substantial and heterogeneous. His generalized ‘West Africa’ resembled Salisbury’s Gazelle insofar as it still had a land frontier for the expansion of export cropping. However it also contained population sub-groups suffering land shortage, Hart’s Frafra among them. Much later, Michael Lipton would criticize Bauer’s analysis, charging that Bauer’s ‘classical’ prescription, that ‘enterprise, trade, enlargement of markets’ would act as ‘engines of development’, was persuasive only because he drew his generalizations from ‘lucky places’. Bauer’s analysis, based on experience in colonial West Africa and Malaya, had produced an optimistic scenario biased by their favourable environments (Lipton 1984). This may be a just observation, but for present purposes it is worth noting that Bauer’s West Africa had an economy where opportunity (in the guise of an expanding frontier and rapid growth of commercial agriculture) co-existed with deprivation among sections of the population, such as Hart’s Frafra. That low-cost labour was readily available to fill the niches of opportunity created by a flourishing export agriculture helps to explain the flowering of Bauer’s intricate and dynamic informal economy. By contrast, Tolai labour costs were relatively higher in 1961, providing fewer opportunities for such development on the Gazelle Peninsula.

Certainly, areading of Bauer does not suggest the desperate or involutionary character evident in at least some aspects of informality, as documented by Mayhew and Hart. This may simply reflect an optimism founded on Bauer’s trust in the ultimate success of the ‘engines of development’ posited by Smithian economics. In any event, both Bauer and Salisbury were enthusiastic supporters of the informal economy as they recorded it, whereas Hart remained unconvinced whether its net value to the economy was positive or negative. Mayhew, like Hart, reported positive contributions of the informal economy, both to higher income groups and to the poor themselves, but was nonetheless scathing of a social order that could permit such injustice.

Comparisons between the four bodies of work discussed here bring out contrasts, not only in geographic location but also in the specific locus of research. Hart introduced an urban informal economy, though there is enough in his account to convey a sense of the rural hinterland from which the Frafra came and with which they maintained economic and social relationships. Both Bauer and Salisbury dealt for the most part with rural informal activities, with the former describing the role of trade and transport in opening up chains of distribution deep into the African interior (though there are also numerous discussions of urban activities). Salisbury conveyed a sense of close economic relationships between the rural villages of the Gazelle and their quite accessible district town. There is in both cases a stronger sense of rural-urban relationships than appears in Hart’s work and the reader is entitled to conclude from the work of Bauer and Salisbury that the concept of informality may be extended fruitfully into the countryside. Mayhew’s observations confirm this; he gave numerous accounts of London pedlars making rural rounds, of traders seeking materials in the countryside, and of rural folk in town for trading. Much of this circular movement was seasonal in nature and was complemented by seasonal movements of labour, extending as far afield as Ireland.

A defining characteristic of the informal ‘sector’, the non-enumeration of informal workers and activities, was stressed by all four, and all were critical of the deficiencies of official data. The existence of ‘imperfect specialization’ and ‘occupational fluidity’ as underlying this problem was documented by frequent references in all studies to the multiple sources of income typically enjoyed by operators. Such fluidity leads to complexity and in the four cases there are substantial differences in the degrees of complexity observed. Not surprisingly, the Tolai informal economy revealed a comparatively small number of roles or livelihood activities, reflecting perhaps its recent emergence from a relatively undifferentiated subsistence condition. Intermediary functions and other occupational diversity were correspondingly underdeveloped. Other factors, including relatively limited demand for non-traditional services and good infrastructure (the latter limiting the scope for informal transport and storage options) may also have contributed to this comparative lack of complexity. Mayhew’s London revealed perhaps the most fine-grained and complex system of livelihoods, while both Hart’s Frafra and Bauer’s West Africa demonstrated considerable complexity.

A somewhat disappointing aspect of Hart’s account of Nima is the limited attention he gave to women in the informal economy (aside from ‘red light’ activity). This is surprising since the ‘Mammy’ traders of West Africa were well-known for their importance in marketing and distribution¹⁵. Bauer had a somewhat fuller account while Mayhew’s thoroughness is evident in his recording of many livelihoods peculiar to women, as well as those in which they competed with men. Salisbury gave particular attention, as we have seen, to the market trading of women on the Gazelle. He documented, in meticulous detail, their contribution to the subsistence agriculture which undergirded the changing rural economies of the Siane and the Tolai, while his discussion (in From Stone to Steel) of the impact of technological change on women is notable.

As might be expected of anthropologists, Salisbury and Hart tell us more about the importance of traditional (or quasi-traditional) mechanisms of mutual support and exchange than is available in the accounts of either Bauer or Mayhew. In Hart, this was often associated with patron-client relations. Given his emphasis on the unreliability of income streams in Nima, personal transfers and access to credit were important for consumption-smoothing, indeed for survival. For Salisbury, traditional exchange relationships, and the status rewards accruing to their successful manipulation, provided the motor force for much social change (and especially ‘political consolidation’) among the Siane and the Tolai. Mayhew has much more to say about credit than any of the others and despite the tribal solidarity of his Costermongers, we are left with the impression that in mid-century London ‘consumption-smoothing’ required access to usurers as often as to relatives. Indeed, many Costers accessed credit on a daily basis, simply to go about their trades.

In regard to illegal or ‘illegitimate’ activities, we learn almost nothing from Bauer or Salisbury (leaving aside the latter’s few references to banana ‘hootch’, ‘sly-grog’ and pati). Mayhew is reliably encyclopedic on the subject, from a socially-concerned and normative standpoint. But only Hart really confronts the issue of ‘pervasive’ illegitimate activity on his patch. Indeed the legitimate/illegitimate distinction is his, occurring in the context of a non-judgmental listing of informal occupations in Nima. This is done to show ‘how things work’, as an illustration of the phenomenon of multiple income sources, and as a negative example (in an accounting sense) of the economic flows between Nima and middle-class Accra. This suggestion, in effect for a flow-of-funds chart for Nima, is another sense in which Hart applies the term ‘transfers’. A related, but analytically distinct, phenomenon is the activity of influence-pedlars and political ‘fixers’, to whom Hart gave detailed attention. Aside from deploring the ‘politicization’ of economic life in developing countries Peter Bauer was uninformative on this subject, while Mayhew preserved a discreet silence. Salisbury, however, put ‘political consolidation’ at the centre of his theoretical apparatus. But while Hart was non-judgmental in regard to political fixing, Salisbury (from the perspective of 1961) appears to have viewed it as a constructive force.

All four observers discussed here produced accounts of continuing interest, providing, to a greater or less degree, insights into our contemporary experience and propositions of continuing explanatory power. Mayhew alone had no pretension to theorizing or generalization beyond his time and place, yet his enduring impact flows – these words are used without ironic or pejorative intent – from a virtuous polemicism. Salisbury certainly did pretend to theorization, but in his case the ‘pay-dirt’ lies hidden in the details rather than in the thesis. His rather cumbersome ‘model’ of service-led growth gained no traction, but nonetheless minutiae and footnotes in his argument (his ‘obiter dicta’) throw shafts of light onto the contemporary situation of PNG. Peter Bauer’s analysis was informative and stimulating. He certainly purported to generalize, and Lipton was no doubt correct to criticize his reliance on those colonial territories most promising for the application of the nostrums of classical economics. But whatever about the ‘Baverian’ worldview, as now celebrated in conservative think tanks, his application of a relatively simple set of conventional economic tools to the mechanics of the informal economy, reinforced by a sharp eye for social and cultural context, provided many satisfying explanations and insights.

Bauer might have been (as Basil Yamey believed) the first economist to see the scope and economic significance of the activities of the informal ‘sector’. But it was left to Keith Hart to recognize them as a phenomenon in their own right, and to provide an appropriately interdisciplinary framework for their analysis. Nowadays Hart evidences quite some ambivalence about this concept he introduced forty years back, and which continues to dog his footsteps. Observing its capacity for renewal, and adaptation to a wide range of circumstances and to changing times, he has come to see the informal economy as ‘a remedial concept’, serving to reconcile orthodox economic analysis with reality. It is as applicable to the remaining ‘socialist’ regimes (Cuba, North Korea) as to the market economies of the industrialized world and the ‘state capitalist’, ‘transitional’ or ‘emerging market’ systems of the developing world, for

‘As long as there is formal economic analysis and the partial institutionalization of economies around the globe along capitalist or socialist lines, there will be a need for some such remedialconcept as the informal economy. Its application to concrete conditions is likely to be stimulated by palpable discrepancies between prevalent intellectual models and observed realities’ (Hart 2007, italics in original).

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Notes

1 John Conroy is an economist, not entirely unreconstructed although he still calls himself a ‘development economist’. He spent the 1970s in Papua New Guinea, finishing as Director of the PNG Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research. After six years in Indonesia, during the 1980s, he ran the Foundation for Development Cooperation through the 1990s, specializing in microfinance and ‘financial inclusion’. He abandoned that field in disgust after its invasion by private equity and is now a visiting fellow at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University.

2 I am grateful for discussions with Ron Duncan, Scott MacWilliam, Peter Drake and Andrew Elek; also to Michael Bourke and other participants in the Crawford seminar at ANU in August 2011, at which a preliminary version of this paper was presented. Most particularly I am grateful to Keith Hart for patiently fielding all the balls I have tossed up over the past several years.

3 For an early application of the concept to industrial societies by a sociologist, see Pahl (1984). For a spirited application to the contemporary world economy see Hart (2004).

4 Hart’s use of the term ‘transfers’ in this connection is somewhat confusing; ‘illegitimate’ transfers are to be distinguished from interpersonal transfers among members of kin- or social groups.

5 A more positive evaluation occurs in a scenario in which Hart suggested the processes of the Lewis model (Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour) might assure the eventual absorption of surplus urban African labour into formal employment, while being supported in the interim by ‘the inherent economic dynamism of concentrated urban markets, which [as in Nima] generate an almost infinite range of activities based on commodity exchange’ (Hart 1982, 162).

6 I am grateful to Keith Hart for having referred me to Mayhew in 1972.

7 In this study, reference is made to a Mayhew compilation edited by Quennell (1951 [1984]) and to online sources for the original three volume version (cited as Mayhew I, II and III). I have not drawn on volume IV, published in 1862, since Mayhew was not its sole author. Vol. IV was devoted to the London petty underworld, described adequately for our purposes in the first three volumes.

8 For which reason I adopt Hart’s usage here; he changed his description of the Nima underclass (as noted above in Section 2) from a ‘proletariat’ (Hart 1971) to a ‘sub-proletariat’ (Hart 1973). The former might be appropriate in a Two Nations framework, but the latter fits the reality of Mayhew’s London quite as well as it does Hart’s Nima.

9 Material in this section is drawn from Mayhew I, ‘Of the markets and trade rights of the Costermongers and of the laws affecting them’, ‘Of the removals of Costermongers from the streets’ and ‘Of the variety of street-folk in general and Costermongers in particular’ .

10 See for example ILO (2007) and WTO and ILO (2009).

11 Polly Hill (1963) was an honourable, if later, exception to this generalization.

12 Bauer has a posthumous Facebook page and was the subject of tribute volumes by Cato (in the US) and the IEA (in the UK) before his death. The term ‘ikon’ is appropriate, since some of the tributes paid him border on hagiography.

13 Most of the citations in this section, concerned with the sectoral distribution issue, are drawn from Chapter 3 of the 1957 book, except where the 1951 paper is cited explicitly.

14 See Schettkat and Yocarini (2006) for a review of the literature on ‘the shift to services employment’. On the basis of the empirical evidence they concluded that ‘Employment in the advanced economies shifts with a remarkable regularity towards services as income per capita rises … ’ (Schettkat and Yocarini 2006, 142).

15 Hart (pers. comm. 16 August 2011) has responded to this comment by noting that his study was of a particular ethnic group. ‘There are few women in my account because they were almost entirely absent from the Frafra migrant community in Nima which consisted of a sea of transient young men loosely attached to a few older men with established families’.

What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?

Thomas Sturm
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

© 2012 Thomas Sturm

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
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Forthcoming in: Kant and Philosophy from a Cosmopolitan Point of View: XIth International Kant-Congress. Ed. by Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca & Margit Ruffing. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Introduction

It is widely held – and not false – that Kant’s philosophy of history expresses the Enlightenment hope for a stepwise progress of humankind towards freedom or morality. However, we are nowadays suspicious of models of a stadial development of human history, especially teleological ones. Furthermore, Kant’s model of historical development is burdened with problems of its own, concerning its epistemic status, and its position within his philosophy in general. To deal with these issues, scholars have mostly focused on connections between Kant’s philosophy of history and his ethics or his views about teleology. They have downplayed or neglected another context, namely, the theories of historiography that he was faced with. I shall show how Kant reacts to debates about a theory and practice of historiography highly influential in his time, especially in his German environment. It was called “pragmatic history”.

In part I, I indicate what major versions there existed of this approach. I then outline three crucial problems that emerged with the requirement, set up by many pragmatic historians, of a stage model of humankind’s development. Among other things, I shall point to how the debate about the meaning of ‘pragmatic history’ became connected to the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan viewpoint’ in history, an issue that was discussed particularly between August Ludwig Schlözer and Johann Gottfried Herder. In part II, I report on Kant’s reception of pragmatic history, and what he found lacking in the most important versions of it – namely, an appropriate understanding of human nature, which he himself developed more fully in his lectures on pragmatic anthropology. I shall thereby try to clarify how his own “cosmopolitan” idea of the development of human nature through history is likewise entangled with the notion of pragmatic history, and that his notion of a cosmopolitan idea itself has three different aspects, responding to the three problems outlined. Thus, relating Kant’s philosophy of history to contemporary debates can make his views more intelligible than merely analyzing their connection to other parts of his critical philosophy.  

I. Pragmatic History and Models of Human Historical Development

1. What Is ‘Pragmatic History’?

By the 18^th century the study of history is growing quickly not only in terms of institutions and literary output but also in terms of the level of the debates about its theoretical and methodological presuppositions. In the German countries, this debate takes often shape under the heading of a “pragmatic” orientation. To mention but a few examples, eighteenth-century authors before Kant write pragmatic histories of the Jesuits and Protestants, the rulers of Braunschweig, the school reform in Bavaria, of literature, medicine, the souls of humans and animals, and even of sleep. And many historians at the time have a serious intention with this. As the Göttingen professor Johann Christoph Gatterer, the most influential organizer of historical research in the eighteenth century, writes, in “history, pragmatic is just what in the proper sciences is called systematic”.[1]

But which requirements pragmatic historiography need fulfill becomes controversial. In the debate, the following four requirements become introduced stepwise:

(i)             Most conceptions of pragmatic historiography take it for granted that the object of investigation is human action, particularly in more or less widely conceived areas of social life (at certain times and places).

(ii)           In methodological terms, a history can be pragmatic if it studies the causes, particularly the motives or intentions of human agents.

(iii)          A historical study can be called ‘pragmatic’ if it is tied to a universal history of mankind – either by helping to write that history or by presupposing it. Being “universal” does not necessarily mean that it has to cover all historical details, but at least the major factors and/or stages of human history.

(iv)          Finally, history can be called ‘pragmatic’ if practical consequences or lessons for human (particularly social) action can be derived from it.

These elements are not mutually exclusive. However, some pragmatic historians require only some of these features, while others demand that all be satisfied; furthermore, some authors claim that a certain requirement is more important than others; and, occasionally, some requirements are developed and discussed more closely and thereby become understood in different ways.

For instance, in the early eighteenth century, Johann David Kö(h)ler claims that a historical study is already pragmatic if it treats of public matters, especially the official and social deeds of rulers, and if it offers practical orientation in civil life, having in mind specifically political action and the design of public affairs.[2] But no later than in the 1750s, such a meaning of “pragmatic history” becomes viewed as overly narrow. This is accompanied by a growing awareness that there might be a pragmatic historiography of the “highest level” or in the “truest understanding” of the term, which has to be distinguished from lesser degrees and incorrect meanings.[3] To begin, a number of authors stresses that pragmatic histories must also inform readers of “impelling forces” (Triebfedern)[4], motives, and other causes.[5] Gatterer himself, who voices this point with particular emphasis, does not claim that previous historians had never sought out “causes and effects, means and intentions”.[6] Thucydides and Polybius clearly did. Gatterer’s main criticism is directed at the genres of mere annals, chronicles, and genealogies, and the accompanying conception that history merely records particular facts of the past. The causes behind historical events seldom coincide with periods or commencements of rule, and outcomes often extend beyond the dates covered by annals.

Gatterer moreover argues that the “highest level of what can be considered pragmatic history” can only be achieved by developing a universal history, by embedding historical investigation in “the idea of the overall connection of things in the world (Nexus rerum Universalis)” – that is, causal explanations in history must be embedded in a system of world history:

For no occurrence in the word is – as it were – insular. Everything is connected, is produced, is induced, and in turn produces and induces. The affairs of the noble and the lowly, individual persons and all of them together, private life and the world at large, indeed, even those of reasonless and lifeless entities and humans; all are intertwined and interconnected.[7]

While these requirements are all repeatedly emphasized by the majority of authors, requirement (iv) remains relatively negligible for Gatterer, unlike for others. He hints at it in one of his earlier writings[8], but later on clearly rejects the view that it would be constitutive of the idea of pragmatic history.[9] He also makes fun of the view, held by several authors, that one could derive practically useful conclusions from mere annals, chronicles or genealogies.[10] One might also think here of Lord Bolingbroke’s well-known dictum that “history is philosophy taught by examples”.[11] Obviously, Gatterer denies that such views help to raise the rank of history – to approximate it to the bona fide sciences.

While Gatterer becomes the most influential German historian of his times, his conception of pragmatic history does not remain undisputed. For instance, the Church historian Johann Matthias Schroeckh (1733-1808) favors a combination of all four requirements: A truly pragmatic history should focus upon human actions, provide causal explanations, develop and use a system of universal human history, and attempt to draw practical lessons on the basis of the first three requirements.[12] Also, other authors raise questions about various requirements. Some already discuss the possibility of giving causal explanations in history, while others are concerned about whether pragmatic histories ultimately have to study humankind as a whole, and whether such histories – if they aim at practical conclusions at all – should instruct particular individuals or groups or humankind as a whole.

2. The Requirement of a System of Universal History

Of special relevance here is the call for a system of history as a whole (requirement iii). How should or even could one write “the” complete history of humankind’s development? Most authors agree that it will not suffice to collect and order all existing special studies, and then continue them. That had been tried before. Schroeckh emphasizes that causal explanation demands various kinds of weighting. It is not easy, he writes, to describe the universal historical “Nexus” in a way that gathers and lists all causes and outcomes. It is not necessary, for instance, to note every historical detail or every slight causal connection. On the contrary, it is the difficult task of the historian to select the facts relevant for an adequate explanation of events. As Gatterer remarks, one has to identify and structure the “revolutions” of human history. Only these will help to identify the really important causes of human actions in history.[13]

His colleague at Göttingen, August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809) works out this approach in his Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (1772-73). He claims that one needs a unifying viewpoint in order to be able to select and order facts and turn them into a system:

World history can be imagined from a double perspective: Either as an aggregate of specialized histories, a collection of which, if it is complete, constitutes a whole in its own way; or as a system, in which the world and humanity constitute the one entity, for which from among all the parts of the aggregate some are preferably selected and ordered purposefully.[14]

 Furthermore, Schlözer demands that for this we need to single out factors that “interest not individual nations or classes of the human race, but that are significant for the cosmopolitan [Weltbürger], for man as such”.[15] More specifically, he claims that Roman history – from the city’s founding, the formation and division of the world empire, to its decline – provides the best focal point:

[Roman history] is the overall guiding thread [Leitfaden] that throughout various concurrent courses of almost innumerous peoples prevents chronological confusion. Rom deserves this honor: For which empire of the world has had greater influence on the fate of the world?[16]

3. Three Problems with the Requirement of Universal History

While the requirement for a structured system of universal history has its attractiveness for authors at the time, it has several problems.

(I) A first problem concerns an assumption about human nature, and it can best be explained by the impact of Hume. He does not, neither in his History of England (1754-62) nor elsewhere, use the term ‘pragmatic history’. Yet, German reviews praise the History as an example of pragmatic work and applaud Hume’s skill at “using his knowledge of human nature to enlighten and promote the usefulness of history”.[17] Two of Hume’s philosophical theses on human nature and history – to be found in the Treatise and the first Enquiry – are of particular importance here. He claims, first, that the historian may and should presume that human nature is constant, or subject to unchangeable causal laws. Second, he advances the methodological claim that by studying history we can discover these laws:

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations.[18]

Pragmatic historians often follow Hume on these points.[19] But this raises problems for their views. Many of these historians also stress that human history includes “revolutions”, necessitating a system of the most important developments. Also, as one reviewer of Hume’s History points out, impartiality is seen as vital to causal explanation: In order to reveal true causes, it is crucial to assess the past not in terms of maxims of the historian’s time, but in terms on those that held in the period and place under investigation[20]. However, these points only make sense given that modes of human conduct change substantially over time. Moreover, if pragmatic history should be used to draw practically relevant conclusions, then such conclusions may repeatedly lead to new principles for conduct – which threatens the Humean claim of the constancy of human nature as well.

(II) Second, how ought one to structure human history as a whole? If you take dominant nations as in Gatterer’s and Schlözer’s proposals: Should universal history first depict their histories and then turn to the subordinate countries? Or should the mutual influence of countries on one another be examined together?[21] Moreover, besides dominant nations, natural, economic, technological and intellectual factors are important too. Schlözer himself stresses that earthquakes, floods and epidemics, or also “the discovery of fire, bread and alcohol, and so on, are facts equally as important as the battles at Arbela, Zama, and Merseburg”.[22] Can all the factors be arranged within a single system of human history? In a review of 1772, Johann Gottfried Herder complains that Schlözer merely presents a plan lacking clear execution. In 1774, Herder furthermore suggests that what one reads “in almost all so-called Pragmatic Histories of the World is nothing but the disgusting tangled mass of ‘the time’s prized ideals’”.[23] In other words, Schlözer’s cosmopolitan orientation may in the best case be useless and in the worst case be the expression of an ideology.

(III) Finally, what is the epistemic role and status of the stage models of human history? The views here are quite divided. The outlines by Gatterer, Schlözer, and others are shaped by tangible tasks of empirical history. Claims about dividing the past into epochs, or questions of chronology are viewed as subject to empirical scrutiny. However, even the very same authors characterize their historical ideas and frameworks as “conjectural” or “philosophical”. This indicates that their function and status is not clear.

To sum up: One can see that the shift towards pragmatic history, reasonable as it was when compared with other traditions of history writing, led into serious new predicaments.

II. Kant on Pragmatic History and the Development of Humankind

4. Kant’s Reaction to Pragmatic History

Now to Kant. First, a bit about his standpoint towards pragmatic history. Since the mid-1770s, he presents his views especially in his annual lectures on anthropology. Here, he praises Hume’s History for not confining itself to chronicles of wars and rulers, but relating to humanity in general.[24] Also, Kant is familiar with the Enquiries. And in his early statements, one can see Kant as understanding and sharing the idea of pragmatic history along Humean lines: as a study of individual and social intentions causing actions, ideally useful for a practical instruction of agents in the social sphere. At least until 1775-76, he also accepts the ontological thesis that human nature is constant, linking it even to his own conception of anthropology. At the same time Kant becomes also interested in the genre of histories of the stadial development of humankind, including the idea of genuine change in human history.

In the 1780s, he suddenly scathes pragmatic historians for lacking the knowledge of human nature they pretend to have:

… since the authors of many history books have little knowledge of human nature, they have no idea of pragmatic history and much less of how to write it.[25]

I will explain in a moment what he means. Before this, I need to briefly comment on a related passage in the Groundwork. Here, Kant first distinguishes between pragmatic principles as leading to prudence, and notes that there are two different notions of prudence: Weltklugheit and Privatklugheit. The first is the competence to use other human beings for one’s purpose, the second is the competence to order one’s purposes such that one approximates one’s own happiness. He also says that Weltklugheit should serve Privatklugheit, because knowing how to manipulate other persons but not doing so for furthering one’s own well-reflected purposes isn’t very bright. But all this expresses not his fully considered opinion on what ‘pragmatic’ means but, rather, a report on widely held views. Just one page later he gives his own viewpoint:

It seems to me that the proper meaning of the word pragmatic could be determined thus most precisely. Pragmatic are called the sanctions which do not properly follow from the law of states as necessary laws, but from the precaution for general welfare. Pragmatically written is a history if it makes prudent, that is if it instructs the world how to reach its advantage better, or at least as well as its preceding world.[26]

So what he wants pragmatic history to do is not to teach us how to use other human beings simply for our personal purposes. But what would be wrong with that (leaving moral concerns aside here)? And what does he really have in mind with the „general welfare“? His answers stem from the background of his then developing anthropological views about what it means to be a citizen of the world. This then leads him to a specific notion of a cosmopolitan standpoint in history.

5. Kant’s Response to the Three Problems of Universal History

Let me explain this by reference to Kant’s response to the three problems of the various approaches to universal history described earlier on (section 3 above).

(I) First, Kant comes to reject a naïve view of the constancy of human nature. He does so by means of assumptions concerning basic factors of the dynamics of social interaction developed in his anthropology lectures. Six basic claims are necessary here.[27]

(1) Human dependency upon society. Human beings need education, and later on other forms of social cooperation to achieve our goals, to improve action possibilities and to uphold our self-regard.

(2) Human egoism. At the same time, unfortunately, human beings are mostly driven by self-interested inclinations. We do not trust each other; we are jealous; we try to manipulate and exploit one another. The conjunction of (1) and (2) Kant famously calls the “unsocial sociability” of humankind.

(3) The first-person point of view. That such things are possible is rooted in other, basic human facts. There is an important difference between our having of mental states and our having of physical states. Not only can we note that we are in such-and-such a mental state – say, that we feel a pain or have a desire. Unlike mere animals, we can be happy or sad about that, or we can view these states – and those of other persons as well – with a critical eye, reflect upon and change them. This requires a first-person point of view upon first-order mental states: To know that one is unhappy about a certain pain, and that one wishes that the pain goes away, requires knowing whose pain it is. Also, egoism and self-regard as well would be impossible without such a first-person point of view.

(4) Prudence and learning to adopt the third-person point of view. But what can we do about the dilemma of our unsocial sociability? Kant’s answer: If I want to act prudently, I have to learn that others have that egoism as well, and that it can be useful to take into account their first-person point of view.

(5) Invention of new social roles and rules. Thereby, however, social interaction becomes easily extremely complex. Not only do I perceive others as having egoistic motives and as having abilities for hiding such motives; they perceive me in the same way. Hence, our basic purposes of receiving respect and support must not be exerted too obviously, and we must be able to find new ways by which to pursue our goals prudently. This leads to iterated forms of role-playing in society, to a concealing and dissembling of egoistic intentions before others.

(6) New roles and rules become “another nature”. In this interaction, humans therefore develop new rules of interaction, or “another nature”.[28] But that means that our actions do not simply fall under rules as if they were natural laws; rather, we follow certain rules with a greater or lesser amount of rational deliberation. We can thus be producers instead of being mere products of our development.

From all this derives a first sense of cosmopolitanism in Kant’s, which is related to human nature: We are citizens of the world in the sense that our nature is partly plastic, and more specifically that we ourselves produce our rules of action and, thereby, our social world. This is a fact that holds, in principle, for each of us, and which each of us better recognizes in social interaction – instead of expecting to extract more superficial kinds of egoistic prudence from history.

(II) How does this notion of cosmopolitanism relate to the project of universal history? Kant – like Schlözer – claims that the historian needs a guiding “idea”, and again characterizes this idea by claiming that it centers on the human being as a “citizen of the world”. But, unlike Schlözer, Kant gives this notion a distinctive and not implausible meaning: the knowledge about the plasticity of human nature and its conditions is the knowledge he finds lacking in many pragmatic historians.

In Idea Kant then first outlines basic features of human social dynamics and explains afterwards how an adequate universal history would have to look like. It should start with ancient Greek history, for the contingent reason that only here a real source-based historiography could start. But the further steps should not look at dominant people and then wonder how to include other important factors; they should focus upon the development of forms of society that reduced aggression and war (such as the introduction of international commerce), introduced different elements of a republican constitution (the French Revolution becoming later on the outstanding “sign” of such a history), and that may lead to the establishment of a league of nations. This is obviously a second, richer notion of cosmopolitanism, but one presupposing the first. It flows from the former in the sense that such institutions help us to realize more fully the possibilities inherent in our nature, and to cope with our unsocial sociability.

(III) Finally, what about the epistemic role and status of this cosmopolitan idea? The answer is not surprising. No universal history should or even could aim a sum-total of all past events. Instead, by using the idea as guiding thread – another notion already to be found in Schlözer, as cited above, but not clarified by him – helps to find concepts and principles for selecting, linking and organizing historical knowledge in a certain way. The idea thus has a regulative function. Still, history seen from that perspective can be connected to empirically discoverable occurrences and developments.

There might be other perspectives, of course; but these have to be brought to the fore first. Kant emphasizes the sketchy nature of the Idea essay, it being “only one of the thoughts that a philosophical mind (that incidentally must be well-versed in history) might also toy with from a different standpoint”.[29] Kant does not claim that the propositions he sets forth about the development of human capacities, the mechanism of unsocial sociability, and the resulting sequence of forms of social or political order of humankind are already to be taken as full-blown developmental principles of history. Rather, he explicitly aims to provoke contemporary historians to develop better ideas and frameworks. This is further evidence that his views should be seen as responding to contemporary debates rather than internal problems of his own philosophy only.

Conclusion

It would be a misunderstanding to view my foregoing considerations as a complete defense of Kant’s views. I tried to add an important facet to the existing interpretations. What this contextualization cannot explain (and, a forteriori, defend) are the strongly teleological claims of his views on human history, or their exact relation to his ethical theory. Even then, critics might either reject the very demand for a grand-scale model of human history, or at least claim that Kant’s sketch is useless for, say, current historical research.  But note that I have tried to reduce his claims about human social dynamics to their most simple, largely innocent basic points. Given this, and given the epistemological modesty of his claims about human development, perhaps things look better for a kind of reflection about the question of how we could give meaning to the fragmented masses of historical knowledge.

How old brain functions constrain modern features of economies

– And how to see this

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde
Institut Jean-Nicod

© 2012 Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
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Abstract

Approaches by neuroscience to the production and handling of material artifacts has recently found support for a ‘cultural cortical recycling’ hypothesis (Stout et al. 2008). This hypothesis had already been robustly established for symbolic artifacts such as letters and numbers (Dehaene and Cohen 2007). In both cases, specific cortical maps dedicated to basic perceptual and/or motor functions appear to have been re-used at a relatively recent point in human history (on temporal scales too brief for any anatomical evolution of the brain to take place), allowing new cultural capacities to develop. Such functional recycling both facilitates and constrains the processing of these artifacts. It also presumably plays a role in their emergence and morphogenesis. I present theoretical arguments and preliminary behavioral and neurobiological findings in support of the speculation that the historical emergence and typical neural processing of coins – as both material and symbolic artifacts – might be explained by a similar hypothesis.

My goal here, however, is to provide the empirical and theoretical background to testing this hypothesis from the perspective of behavioral economic anthropology. This might lead to collaboration with anthropologists in designing and making operational future experiments that could be performed easily online or in the field.

Keywords: cultural cortical recycling; coins; money emergence; categorization tasks; response times; field experiments.

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde is a philosopher and an experimental economist. He is interested in understanding the emergence of modern economic environments and artifacts. His main question is about the biological, and especially neurobiological, resources that have been put to use by humans to shape and adapt to their economic environments. He is running several experiments to try to understand these adaptive processes and the constraints on lay economic cognition and behaviour. He has published empirical, philosophical and formal work to make sense of some typical cognitive biases and behavioral anomalies within that perspective. He is currently professor of philosophy at Aix-Marseille University, a member of Aix-Marseille School of Economics and an associate researcher at the Institut Jean-Nicod, École Normale Supérieure.

1. Introduction

Neural plasticity probably allowed humanity to adapt and even to generate modern post-Neolithic cultural environments, but these changes could not be accompanied by genetic and anatomical modifications in so short a time. These modern environments were, however, enhanced by brain plasticity in that typically adaptive genetic and neurobiological features selected on a long-run evolutionary basis were not eliminated. On the contrary, these could well have been re-used, or recycled, in order to process emerging artifacts stimulated by cultural practice. I present an argument here for use in the field of economic anthropology similar to the hypothesis Dehaene and Cohen (2007) developed about reading and arithmetic in cognitive neuroscience.

There is only limited evidence in support of this hypothesis in economic anthropology and that is open to various interpretations. So far, studies in neuroeconomics have not been designed explicitly to test it. Neuroeconomics has been defined as the study of neurobiological mechanisms underpinning decision-making in situations involving – taken separately and together — uncertainty, variable temporal horizons and other-regarding strategies (Sanfey et al. 2006). I would add that neuroeconomics might use a new ‘archeological’ tool (based on the whole set of brain-imaging techniques) to unravel the older (from an evolutionary point of view) neural pathways that continue to underpin our decision processes. This would illuminate how the brain had to adapt to new social contexts by recycling these ancient neural pathways and putting them to novel use. As a result of these neural adaptive processes, for some recent cultural artifacts (like numbers and maybe monetary instruments) and situations (like exchanges in modern economic settings like markets for goods and labor), their ‘cortical niches’ might be constrained by genetic factors. Plasticity is realized within certain limits and new cultural acquisitions are made possible within those limits. The emergence of a given cultural artifact or behavioral pattern is then both facilitated and constrained by its alleged cortical niche.

2. The hypothesis of cultural cortical recycling

The hypothesis of cultural recycling of cortical maps was put forward to make sense of a seeming paradox in neurobiology. As Dehaene and Cohen (2007) put it: “Part of the human cortex is specialized for cultural domains such as reading and arithmetic, whose invention is too recent to have influenced the evolution of our species. (…) To explain this paradoxical cerebral invariance of cultural maps, we propose a neuronal recycling hypothesis, according to which cultural inventions invade evolutionarily older brain circuits and inherit many of their structural constraints”. In what does the recycling consist and what sort of inherited constraints may affect the neural processing of cultural inventions?

The concept of a cortical map is central to Dehaene and Cohen’s hypothesis. Maps are invariant brain structures which encode cultural items and supervene on basic neuronal layouts. Seen working at various scales, these cortical maps reflect the representational structure of a targeted cultural item in an isomorphic way. Structures of encoded items and corresponding cortical mappings may be of different topological types. With regard to reading, for example, we intuitively understand what this isomorphism amounts to in the case of letters. Strings of letters belong to a continuous two-dimensional metric space and their structure is reproduced on the surface of the cortex. Retinotopy, more generally, refers to the spatial organization of the cortex in response to visual stimuli, which has been observed to form a map of the visual field (Tanaka 2003). Here the topology is simple and the isomorphism may be implemented at different neuronal scales. The topology may also be more complex, but isomorphism may still be uncovered (Tanaka 2003, Dehaene 2005).

Neuronal layouts are shaped by evolution and are genetically constrained. Epigenetic factors in the early phase of an individual’s development will finalize the cortical structures, which then react to external stimuli in an invariant way. There occurs a compromise between genetic constraints, cortical relative plasticity and the frequency and tractable structure of encountered stimuli. Dehaene and Cohen (2007) list the potential constraints that might underlie the organization of visual cortical maps in reaction to orthographic stimuli. Those constraints determine the way a given stimulus is processed, as well as potential biases in processing the relevant information. The two determining components of cultural cortical recycling are the presence of a specific mapping process supervening on a pre-structured cortical map and observation of inherited constraints in the processing of a novel cultural item.

Evidence of recycling may be interpreted as the convergence of neural activations on specific patterns in a preexisting and functionally dedicated cortical map. Dehaene and Cohen (2007) report such evidence of converging neural responses in the acquisition of reading skills. At early stages of learning, the neural activities associated with reading are not scattered in an orderly fashion over the ventral visual system. They progressively find an optimal location in the so-called “visual word form area” after reading has become a routine skill. In the process, cells of that area are recycled in order to decode automatically the precise stimuli of a given writing system. Where a cultural cortical map fits both is determined by the structure of the stimuli to be treated and determines some features of that treatment. Biases in neural processing of novel cultural items, when they are attributable to the constraints of a cortical niche that already exists, may give reliable signs that some sort of cultural ‘exaptation’ of that cortical structure has actually taken place. In the case of reading, inherited biases point in two directions: constraints might be transposed into typical behavior (eye movements, limits to the simultaneous processing of several individual stimuli or anomalies like dyslexia etc.) and into a co-adaptive evolution of the stimuli, given their potentially optimal processing by the brain. In spite of cross-cultural variations, writing systems present a limited number of internal organizational forms — a high degree of sameness in terms of the invariant shape, position and size of letters – showing perhaps processing constraints and the forms of cultural stimuli have converged. This cultural cortical recycling hypothesis’ double provisional conclusion seems to be not only that the brain ‘exapted’ some of its evolutionary older neural pathways in order to process novel cultural items; but also that the latter might have evolved to be optimally apprehensible by the brain.

Cultural artifacts may have acquired typical shapes and other material features not only because those shapes and features were apt realizations of some general functions they were destined to fulfill, but because this material organization was optimally tractable by a plastic, but functionally constrained, cortical map. Moreover, we may speculate that the success of a few cultural items, seen through their dissemination and stabilization across places and cultures, as well as their durability, may have been fostered by the existence of such recycled cortical maps, which would be the general anthropological conclusion to draw. I will now be more specific and consider whether it is plausible to extend this hypothesis to the emergence
of money considered as a medium of exchange, referring at this juncture at our co-authored study on the neural basis of categorizing coins (Tallon-Baudry et al. 2011), which points towards a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of monetary artifacts.

3. Neural anchoring of material culture

Recent cultural neuroscience (Chiao and Ambady 2007) seeks to identify the neural structures that are shaped by cultural environments. It generally deals with only one aspect of the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis, namely the influence of repeated cultural exposure to typical stimuli on the early development of corresponding cortical maps (when these can be identified). In this respect, however, it is crucial to connect cultural environments – and especially their material or artificial aspects – with brain structures. Cultural neuroscience, understood in this way as how material and cultural contexts more generally shape the brain, differs from the opposite approach that would investigate how some cultural invariants might be identified and ultimately related to neuronal constraints. If such a reduction could be granted, it would put us in a position to use the methods and data of neuroscience to understand the emergence and history of human artifacts and cultural institutions. I do not aspire to such “ideal” mapping of human social creations onto brain structures. My contention is that some experimental facts, when adeptly acquired, shed light on how the brain’s functional architecture and its genetically limited plasticity have constrained structural aspects of artifacts and institutions. This approach has been advocated by Renfrew, Frith, and Malafouris (2008) when they state that the use of neuroscience techniques and results may improve archaeologists’ analysis of past material cultures. They adapt the concept of “extended cognition” to such an analysis, adding the notion that artificial environments are cognitive prostheses which individual brains jointly shape and wherein they fit.

The stabilization and success of a given material culture, undertaken by a close group of human brains perhaps over a few generations, may be strongly correlated to the same neurobiological processes (such as the convergence of cortical maps toward optimal recycling neuronal sites). Determining the speed and ease of cultural learning may then have archaeological consequences. The study of past material cultures from a neurobiological point of view may offer a more precise, direct and challenging way of uncovering possible correlations between archeological typologies (Gosden 2008). It could reveal slow changes in artifacts over many human generations and, in early developmental stages of the brain, the speed of convergence toward a relevant cortical area that will eventually be selected to deal with a given artifact. Think of lithic cultures and of coinage, the time and resistance it took to introduce alternative monetary means, coins still remaining the prototypical material form of money (Snelders et al. 1992). Is there a possible correlation between the pace and type of historical evolution of stone tools and the neurobiological mechanisms that could support a cultural recycling process in this case?

Stout et al. (2008) have shed some light on the neural and evolutionary foundations of human primitive tool-making skills. They carried out a PET study involving inexperienced subjects who were progressively trained in carving stone tools. Evidence that would point to a likely cultural recycling hypothesis in this case would consist of inter-individual convergence toward a neuronal “niche”. That neuronal niche would superimpose on a preexisting cortical map that it would make sense to “parasitize” when routinizing that task. Finally, inherited structural constraints in processing the intended artifact might be observed. These results, however, only partially support the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of tool-handling.
Having acquired the stone tool-making ability, subjects showed varied neural activities in several parieto-frontal perceptual-motor systems. Among these activities of the neural motor system, one was specific to humans and specialized in the perception and recognition of three-dimensional shapes in motion. As no other specific human neural activities associated with planning and strategy were observed, the authors concluded that low-level fine-tuned processes, rather than higher cognitive ones, would suffice for the neural processing of ‘affordance perception’ and tool-use. This low-level process, rather than more cognitively demanding processes of abstract conceptualization, could well be crucial for the launching of a cultural innovation. Even though the latter carries a lot of very abstract and conventional connotations in other respects, I expect that the very emergence and success of a cultural innovation depends on its fit with a preferentially low-level neural structure.

Another criterion of recent cortical recycling is that, particular proto-historic cultural innovations (such as reading, writing, numbers, money, modern tools and symbols, etc.) could not have influenced the anatomy of the brain in the short evolutionary time since their inception. They may simply be an upshot of specific brain extensions, in contrast with a former anthropological stage or by comparison with primate brains. But if invariant cortical maps and specific neurobiological niches are observed with respect to the processing of these novel cultural items, given that the latter cannot have influenced brain anatomy, this is likely to be explained by a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis. But in that case, they would in turn likely be morphologically constrained by the functional specificities of the re-used older brain circuits they are parasitic on. But this is where the hypothesis of specific cortical maps being recycled in connection with the processing of cultural items becomes tricky. Interpreting systematic observations that seemingly support such an hypothesis may be ambiguous; and one needs first to determine whether evidence points to specific human brain extensions or to the functional reshuffling of evolutionarily older neural pathways.

As an instance of such interpretive indeterminacy, Orban et al. (2006) reviewed comparative fMRI studies of the intra-parietal sulcus (IPS). They confirmed that the human IPS, which has its anatomical counterpart in monkeys, contains functional regions specific to humans. In particular, it includes a region uniquely sensitive to the perception of three-dimensional shapes in motion, as also noted by Stout and his colleagues (2008). At this stage, human brain extension is expected to be correlated with functional specification. Despite the link to monkeys, this may have developed in a specific way in humans: and then re-used or recycled in the context of cultural innovation. The first anatomical and functional extension made possible apprehension of moving objects which was the optimal cortical niche to parasite for a technological ‘affordance ability’ to emerge.

Figure 1: basic plausible functional shift in tool use; underlined in red: the intra-parietal sulcus

Technology is a dual system in the sense that it encompasses both low-level motor procedures – some of them requiring highly specific neutrally-wired functions – and more abstract, cognitively demanding aspects, such as planning, teleological thought and maybe symbolism. Crucially, tool-handling primarily taps into the low-level procedures and, to the extent that there is a pre-established optimally relevant cortical map locally available, a functional shift may be hypothesized with respect to tools. We might ask whether similar conditions may be hypothesized in relation to other cultural artifacts, in particular those relevant to economic environments in which I am primarily interested. Not, of course, that there were not any economic environments before the advent of money, but money defines what we could call a “modern economic environment”, in that it is one where omnipresent face-to-face bargaining relationships are mediated by inert symbolic proxies. In the same way as tools, money encompasses a very material level (if we consider, precisely, money’s materializations) and a highly abstract and conventional one (it is interesting to note that money presides over the increased abstraction of human relationships by means of a material artifact). An analogy with cultural cortical recycling in tool-processing would mean that low-level neural mechanisms are preferentially triggered when dealing with money, in contrast with the immediate involvement of neural circuits that would correspond to the treatment of its more abstract features, and that these low-level mechanisms are grafted onto optimally relevant older neural pathways. Even though there is little direct neurobiological evidence supporting cultural cortical recycling of money-processing, economic and anthropological models of the emergence of money, as well as behavioral anomalies with respect to money and their neural bases, may point towards such a hypothesis.

4. Issues in money emergence

Theoretical economics does not assign any role to an intrinsically useless object such as fiat money. For example, the general equilibrium economy of Arrow-Debreu is completely devoid of any medium of exchange. In real-world economies, however, money not only exists but expectations of inter-temporal variations in the value of money are an important part of monetary transmission mechanisms. Kiyotaki and Wright’s (1989) model (henceforth KW) provides an understanding of money’s role in an economy and incidentally of the mechanisms that may have presided over its emergence. In a KW economy, there is a mismatch between the goods an agent produces and those she wishes to consume. This discrepancy requires the agent to accept a mediator to acquire her own consumption goods (see Figure 2). If trade occurs, it yields a positive payoff, otherwise an agent has to wait and bear the storage costs of his produced good. Agents aim at inter-temporal maximization of the gains from trade and minimization of storage costs. To see how agents’ behavior evolves
in a KW economic environment, this model has been applied in a number of laboratory settings. These experiments show that the marketability of an object plays an important role in its acceptance as a medium of exchange; and in some situations agents could not discern these aspects and thus chose sub-optimally (Duffy and Ochs 1999, Duffy 2001). It has also been observed that an intrinsically worthless piece of fiat money may circulate as a medium of exchange as long as one of its feature is the lowest storage cost; if it is not the least costly to store goods, then its circulation as a medium of exchange less than that predicted by the theory (Duffy and Ochs 2002).

Some recent work in the psychology of money has distinguished between instrumental and hedonistic attitudes and behavior towards money (Lea & Webley 2006). It seems that money as a tool – taken essentially as a medium of exchange for purchasing desired goods – is conceptually primitive; hedonistic qualities of the purported good being derived from acquisition and consumption. But it has been noticed that money per se possesses hedonistic qualities that may sometimes outweigh an instrumental perspective (Vohs et al. 2006). An important question with regard to the study of money emergence is whether money was (and still is) primarily processed by brain structures that connect it to the value of what it is exchanged for, or whether it tends to be valued for itself independently of these intended items. If such an independent valuation phenomenon may be observed, we might wonder why and specifically whether money takes advantage of functionally relevant prewired circuits. If we adopt the purely instrumental view of money as being devoid of intrinsic value, the question becomes to understand how worthless tokens could be adopted as a universal means of exchange.

In the KW theoretical model of money emergence, perceptions of value are mediated by expectations concerning other agents’ behavior. The fact that a good of no intrinsic value is adopted indicates that it acquires value through rational expectations, i.e. through strategic considerations that presumably tap into the most evolved parts of the frontal lobes associated with planning and control, but also into brain areas associated with coordinating behavior, joint intention and action, and mental abilities (Coricelli & Nagel 2009). If, on the contrary, behavioral and neural data with respect to money may be understood as those high-level processes being short-circuited by lower processes, it would alter our view of money emergence in terms of the KW model, or at least lead to a closer focus on the respective contribution of value perception and strategic input to the emergence of a medium of exchange in an experimental environment.

A conceptual shift away from the determination of value by exchange to its derivation (even of an intrinsically worthless object) from the conventions governing monetary exchange is clearly a heterodox move in economics. It has been adopted by Aglietta and Orléan (2002) in a seminal work relying on several anthropological sources. Archaeological data may also provide hints to answering this question about the relationship between valuation and social coordination, especially since the material remnants of money use present features that are likely shaped and were shaped by the neural systems most systematically and primitively involved in money-use. In that respect, the case of electrum coinage is interesting, since its introduction generated a tension between value-perception and social convention (Wallace 1987). Coins in 600BC Lydia were exclusively minted from electrum, a natural alloy of a variable proportion of gold and silver. But given the inconsistent and indeterminable gold content of electrum coins, its intrinsic value for users was uncertain.

Electrum coinage may be viewed more precisely as showing that intrinsic value is not what grants money its market value, at least not since its inception as coinage. Electrum coins were of carefully standardized weight, implying that, regardless of its metallic content, each coin was assigned a particular value by monetary authorities warranting its redemption. Interestingly, coins were still made from an allegedly precious metal, perhaps not so much because their intrinsic value determined the use of these coins, but because it enhanced their perception as valuable items, as if the prevailing social convention could not guarantee it by itself. We may hypothesize, after this brief review of the heavily discussed topic of early coinage, that, on the one hand, the use of something bearing value may certainly take advantage of having the trappings of intrinsic value but the latter is not essential for its adoption as a valued means of exchange; on the other hand, its value, whether this is intrinsically or extrinsically grounded, is the most easily and perceptually processed feature of monetary artifacts.

5. Low-level money functional processing

If this hypothesis is correct, there should be observable conflicts between value-processing and conventional understandings of money, pointing towards the possible prevalence of low-level processing of monetary stimuli. Recent neural data on the money illusion may point into that direction. ‘The money illusion’ means that an increase in income is valued positively, even when prices go up by the same amount, leaving real purchasing power unchanged. The nominal value of money is not connected to its real value or, rather, there is a bias in the assessment of real economic transactions induced by an undue consideration of their nominal evaluation. This means that some features of the real economic structure in which an agent trades may remain unperceived by them in spite of their willingness to trade. This stands in contradiction, first, to the prediction of economic theory that an individual judges the value of money by its purchasing power rather than by its nominal value and, second, to the experimental economics norm of expecting behavioral anomalies to be eliminated through experience of market interactions.

Until recently, little was known about the mechanisms that make people tend to use a suboptimal heuristic and fall prey of the money illusion. Shafir, Tversky and Diamond (1997), in a behavioral study, tried to understand why individuals do indeed use nominal values as a heuristic to infer real values of transactions, thereby failing, in contexts where the real incentive structure has been modified in an inflationary or deflationary direction, to optimize their monetary utility. In the past few years, Weber et al. (2009) have used fMRI to investigate whether the brain shows this money illusion. Subjects were submitted to two distinct experiments that were identical in their real economic structure, but variable in nominal terms. Participants earned low or high amounts of money that could be used to buy items from two catalogues respectively offering low and high prices for identical items. In the absence of a money illusion, no region of the brain typically associated with the processing of value should be sensitive to this purely nominal variation. On the contrary, the experimenters found that a crucial area of the brain-reward circuitry (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC) associated with the valuation and anticipation of goods, exhibited a money illusion. Its level of activity was significantly greater under high-price conditions as opposed to low prices, despite the unchanging real incentive structure. The following picture and graph show how the vmPFC was correlated with the degree of money illusion revealed by participants’ evaluation of simple economic transactions.

Figure 2

This study’s findings show that money was processed at the lower level of reward-related brain activity in the vmPFC. This suggests that the money illusion is deeply anchored at a biological infra-individual level and that its neural treatment favors hedonistic features of value rather than an instrumental and more abstract conventional approach to the use of money.

Although money seems to be primarily treated as a reward and secondarily as a tool, thereby indicating the prevalence of low-level neural processes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the neural processes have taken advantage of old neural pathways that could optimally extend their functions to that specific processing end. Moreover, money is not just any reward; it is a reward – and is primarily treated as such – to the extent that it acquires some value through conventional institutions. We would need to figure out what behavioral and neural evidence could point to a neural mechanism reflecting this characteristically arbitrary feature of money, namely how the features of money are processed outside of contexts of conventional reward and trade.

In Tallon-Baudry, Meyniel, and Bourgeois-Gironde (2011), we demonstrate the existence of symbolic activities in the fusiform gyrus associated with visual categorization of particular monetary stimuli.

We were interested in how money is identified by the brain outside of contexts of reward. What kind of object is it? It is difficult to dissociate money from reward, as we saw, and its perception outside such contexts may well be strongly influenced by the use we usually make of it to obtain reward or in regarding money itself as the primary reward. In spite of this, we decided to investigate the way the brain identifies money in non-rewarding situations. Moreover, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts, and our starting point was to ask how monetary stimuli are identified in the first place. We translated this question into another that makes it answerable through the use of magneto-encephalography (MEG) recordings of cortical activities: how and when does the brain identify a valid currency, rather than “where”, since we were not concerned at the outset with investigating localization.

By “valid currency” or “valid coin”, we meant, in our experiment, a coin that is (or was in 2010) endowed with current purchasing power. We took advantage of the formation of the Eurozone in 2002 to compare neural responses to valid coins (we used Euros and Australian $ for this) and invalid coins (French Francs and Finnish Marks, which were put out of circulation in 2002). The other factor built into this choice of types of stimuli is familiarity with these coins (minimally previous acquaintance) or lack of it. We made sure that the subjects were familiar with Euros and Francs (and were old enough in 2002 to have traded with the former French currency) and had never been in visual or economic contact with Australian $ and Finnish Marks. The experiment we invited our participants to perform was a one-back re-identification task. Namely, coins were successively presented on the computer screen and participants had to click on the mouse when they saw the same coin twice in a row. We did not directly test the factors we built in our choice of stimuli or the hypotheses we had in mind. The indirectness of our paradigm is an important methodological asset, in that if significant effects are shown with respect to our parameters and hypotheses, the conclusions we draw thereby escapes any criticism that we would have forced those effects on the participants.

Before running this experiment, we had expectations that are important to spell out briefly, given that they involve psychological and neural abilities lying at the core of observations and the associated methodology that we intend subsequently to transpose to other relevant contexts, where anthropological knowledge would be vital. We were aware that coins are both material and symbolic objects, endowed with economic properties by tacit, or most often explicit, social agreement. What we defined as coin-validity bears some analogy with the relation between a word and its meaning. Symbolic categories such as coins and words are therefore different from ecological categories, like faces, food, animals, which are based on visual similarities rather than being conventional carvings of reality. Given the partially symbolic properties of our monetary stimuli, we expected that these properties would be decoded by certain brain structures with a minimal 300ms delay. Categorizing a letter string as forming a valid lexical instance of one’s natural language takes at least this time. On the other hand, categorizing natural objects such as faces occurs in the human ventral visual pathway within about 150ms. We expected money to be categorized at a speed more like words than faces.

What we observed was dramatically different from what we expected. As we report in detail in Tallon-Baudry et al. (2011), both familiar and unfamiliar coins were readily recognized and differentiated in the ventral human pathway. This suggests that there preexists a neural representation of money in subjects sufficiently generic and abstract to accommodate new instances of this category. Our main result then was that familiarity with certain categorical instances of valid or invalid coins is not a requirement for money categorization along this abstract dimension. Our second, quite unexpected, result was that in our experiment stimuli are categorized as valid or invalid money within a time window located between 150-175ms. Such processing speed is usually found in the case of natural categories defined, as I said, by visual properties, not social agreement. This result suggest that the human ventral visual system is well able to deal with symbolic environments, or at least certain objects such as coins, on the basis of general knowledge rather than long reinforced experiential channels.

From a neural point of view, our findings may show that the ventral visual pathway, a system previously thought to analyze visual features such as shape or color and to be influenced by daily experience, was also able to use conceptual attributes such as monetary validity to categorize familiar as well as unfamiliar visual objects by tapping into the same neural mechanisms and just as automatically. The symbolic abilities of the posterior fusiform region could therefore constitute an efficient neural substrate to deal with culturally defined symbols, independently of experience, which probably fostered money’s cultural emergence and success in the first place. Natural candidates that come to mind are items such as faces, food or, again, tools. As with tools themselves, and the prior emergence of a motor module associated with three-dimensional moving affordances, we simply conclude that a special neural cortical map located in the ventral stream may have been selected through long-run evolution in order to detect whether faces or foods, or anything contributing to the individual’s survival in her environment, are of a “valid” or an “invalid” sort. This primitive cortical map may have been re-used in the processing of money-stimuli and supported their emergence and the shapes they historically initially took. This neural nesting of money would then help to explain behavioral anomalies that have been often recognized for this culturally central human artifact.

6. Conclusion

A series of experiments in various cultural contexts and using different coins would be needed to validate this interpretation of our findings. Our initial study, still speculatively pointing towards the plausibility of a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of monetary artifacts, must be extended in new directions. Among such questions I would mention the following:

• Is money the only conceptual category that can receive a fast, automatic, reinforcement-free treatment by the visual system? At least another conceptual (or semi-conceptual) category (alive/not alive) shows a neuronal organization independent of learning. It is most unlikely that the neural pattern we observed stems from a module functionally dedicated to money. It is a far too recent invention (about 3000 years) to have influenced brain evolution. If any cortical process has taken place in the case of money, it probably encompasses a more general or more variegated symbolic category than monetary validity only.

• More generally, our results suggest that, on a par with other cultural inventions, cultural capacities do not necessarily develop on the basis of higher-level, flexible, distributed neural mechanisms, but may consist in automatic routines taking place in dedicated neural territories originally associated with other more directly ecological goals. This point, yet to be confirmed, needs more systematic investigation (not necessarily involving brain-imaging) of the acquisition of behavioral measures in categorization patters and response times, referring to tasks in contrasting cultural vs. ecological contexts, more precisely, in contexts requiring anthropological expertise.

• Whichever primitive mechanism money processing is rooted in, the fact that an object conventionally defined as social is treated so automatically, fluidly and within circuits and mechanisms evolutionarily dedicated to ecological items such as faces or food, must have contributed to its cultural emergence and success. Of course, there is a gap between this preliminary result and the more general hypothesis that cultural success in human history (artifacts, institutions, abilities, behaviors?) must be rooted in similar neurobiological recycling processes.

[In order to start to address these open questions we plan to propose online and easy to perform on field experiments that could help to corroborate (or disconfirm), by means of acquisition of basic behavioral measures (items classification, categorization and response times in those tasks), the plausibility of a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of money as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. It means that the three classical functions of money should be systematically explored, separately. Tasks, schematically, will involve pictures (if online) and maybe actual items (if in the field) of monetary artifacts (familiar or unfamiliar, valid or invalid), food, faces (familiar or exotic, friendly, edible, hostile, rotten, etc.) that we will ask the subject to categorize. We measure response times in those tasks by means of precise chronometric devices. The main prediction that short response times point toward automatic cognitive processes in categorization or associative (putting two objects together according to some criterion) tasks, which will be interested to observe whether they are the case in visual settings involving cultural vs. ecological artifacts.]

References

Aglietta, M. and Orléan, A. (2002). La monnaie entre violence et confiance, Paris : Éditions Odile Jacob.

Chiao, J. Y., and Ambady, N. (2007). Cultural neuroscience: Parsing universality and diversity across levels of analysis. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

Coricelli G, and Nagel R. (2009). Neural correlates of depth of strategic reasoning in medial prefrontal cortex. PNAS, 106:9163-68

Dehaene, S. (2005). Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic: The ”neuronal recycling” hypothesis. In From Monkey Brain to Human Brain, S. Dehaene, J.R. Duhamel, M. Hauser, and G. Rizzolatti, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 133-157.

Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron, 56, 384-398.

Duffy, J. (2001), Learning to Speculate: Experiments with Artificial and Real Agents, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 25, 295-319.

Duffy, J. and Ochs, J. (1999), Emergence of Fiat Money as a Medium of Exchange: An Experimental Study, American Economic Review, 89, 847-877

Duffy, J. and Ochs, J. (2002), Intrinsically Worthless Objects as Media of Exchange: Experimental Evidence, International Economic Review, 43, 637-673

Gosden C. (2008) Social ontologies. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 363, 2003-2010.

Kiyotaki, N. and R. Wright (1989), “On Money as a Medium of Exchange,” Journal of Political Economy, 97, 927-954.

Lea, S. and Webley, P. (2006). Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 161-209.

Orban, G.A., Claeys, K., Nelissen, K., Smans, R., Sunaert, S., Todd, J.T., Wardak, C., Durand, J.B., and Vanduffel, W. (2006). Mapping the parietal cortex of human and non-human primates, Neuropsychologia, 44, 2647-2667.

Renfrew C, Frith C. and Malafouris L. (2008), Introduction. The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 363, 1935-8.

Sanfey, A. G., Loewenstein, G., McClure, S. M. and Cohen, J. D. (2006) Neuroeconomics: Cross-currents in research on decision-making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, 108-16.

Shafir, E., Diamond, P., and Tversky, A. (1997). “Money Illusion.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 341-74.

Snelders, H., Hussein, G., Lea, S.., and Webley, P. (1992). The polymorphous concept of money. Journal of Economic Psychology, 13, 71-92.

Stout, D., Toth, N., Schick, K. and Chaminade, T. (2008). Neural correlates of Early Stone Age tool-making: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 363, 1939-1949.

Tallon-Baudry C., Meyniel F., and Bourgeois-Gironde S. (2011). Fast and Automatic Activation of an Abstract Representation of Money in the Human Ventral Visual Pathway. PLoS ONE 6(11)

Tanaka, K. (2003). Columns for complex visual object features in the inferotemporal cortex: clustering of cells with similar but slightly different stimulus selectivities. Cereb. Cortex, 13, 90-99.

Vohs, K.D., Mead, N.L., and Goode, M.R. (2006). Psychological consequences of money. Science, 314, 1154-1156.

Wallace, R. (1987) The origin of electrum coinage, American Journal of Archeology, 91, pp. 385-397.

Weber et al. (2009) The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion, PNAS, 106, 5025-5028.

Simeon S. Magliveras
The American College of Greece, Deree College & Nanyang Technical University, Singapore

© 2012 Simeon S. Magliveras

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
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TAPP, N. 2010. The Impossibility of Self: an essay on the Hmong Diaspora. Lit Verlag: Munster, 320pp. €29.90

The book, “The Impossibility of Self: an Essay on the Hmong Diaspora,” is a well thought out book which attempts to place the Hmong self into an anthropological context. The book is separated into four parts. The first part examines theories and approaches relating to the ‘self’. The second part of the book familiarizes the reader with the Hmong. The third part of the book discusses the changes that relate to Hmong identity and sociality. Finally, in the fourth section, there is an examination of the Miao (the Chinese Hmong) and a critical evaluation of the theories which explore the concept of the self. Tapp spends much time on well-known and sometimes not so well-known works relating to the subject of the self. The book examines the ‘self’ from the point of view that there is a dichotomy of the pre-modern, or production, self and the modern/postmodern, or consumption, self and discusses the different disciplines which have reflected upon the self. The premise of the book is primarily based on the work of D. Bell (1978) and D. Miller (1987; 1993). Bell’s perception of the self is a mirror of the ‘authentic’ while Miller’ perception of the self is that of a decontextualized self. The weakness of the book’s argument is that both Miller and Bell appear to perceive the world from a primarily Western perspective which troubled me throughout the text. However, putting that aside for the moment, let’s examine the text and the positive additions it makes towards Hmong studies and to the greater anthropological discipline.

In the first part of the text, the book examines both anthropological and non-anthropological approaches to the self. Tapp considers how we as practitioners have viewed the self, either from a medieval European model, a classical Unitarian model, a romantic model or as a decontextualized modern, post-modern model.

Part two examines the social-historical context within which the Hmong are situated. Tapp examines how the Hmong’s past, and those voices which have shaped our present-day impressions of them, affected both Hmong perceptions of themselves and how Hmong specialists’ view them. He suggests that the writers of the past had particular frames of reference and objectives that in turn either mystified the Hmong or made assumptions about them. Priest, missionaries, soldiers and ethnographers had particular preconceived thoughts about who and what the Hmong were. Their views are sometimes romanticised images of the Hmong, or sometimes positive or negative, but all have an accumulative effect on the present Hmong and /or others’ opinionsⁱ about them. Tapp’s main point is that history and historic writings are perceived through the lens of the present ⁱⁱ. As a result when one reads about the Hmong or any group, for that matter, the writers’ objectives in the past should be considered. Tapp’s analysis deconstructs common perceived notions of who the Hmong were understood to be.

In the latter chapters of part two Tapp examines the Hmong’s multiplicity of self, as he terms it. He proposes a different conception of ‘self’, which is multiple and contested through the examination of shamanism and funeral rituals contrasting them with globalising trends. Tapp argues that the Hmong have a new selfhood that is fragmented, modernist and textualized, creating a unified self. In addition, new modes of communication, such as mobile phones and internet/email, reinforce connections with distant, far off places and family, to create a borderless Hmong ‘national’ community. This perception of a national identity appears seemingly close to Anderson’s (1984) construction of “imagined communities”ⁱⁱⁱ. However, Tapp discusses the Hmong’s national identity as attached to a virtual place, in other words detached.

The third part of the book explores the Hmong as transnationals, as Tapp delves further into their understandings of themselves in the world. Earlier in the text he argues that the Hmong have been part of a globalized world at least since the time of colonialism. However, contemporary Hmong have a vision of themselves with a virtual homeland (since they spread throughout Southern China and Southeast Asia and have had a very long history of being up-rooted). They see themselves tied to a mythical ancestral Chinese homeland, but envisage Laos or Thailand as homelands as well. This portion of the book examines how the Hmong attach themselves to places and formulate relationships either through marriage between transnationals who may have grown up on different parts of the globe. These transnational Hmong use the medium of the internet to reconnect or by visiting places such as China or Thailand to create a common sense of kinship, nationalism, and nostalgia.

Part four of Tapp’s book initially examines the Chinese Hmong, or Miao. Tapp first explores the concept of romanticism in China, which gauges the metaphors of the ethnic other in China. However, historically, romanticism may arguably be based on a European or Western philosophical tradition and, therefore, may be a bit of a problematic fit. Nevertheless, Tapp endeavours to situate Chinese ideologies into a romantic mould. He concludes that aspects of romanticism did not exist before the 19th and 20th Century in China. He then, discusses the Miao from a contemporary Chinese perspective. The Chinese perceive the Miao as a romantic primordial Chinese. They are seen by the Chinese as backward and exotic country bumpkins, which has justified national public discourse to deny their participation in the modernisation project. Tapp suggests there is a valorisation/denigration of ethnic minorities at the same time. As a result, he situates Chinese Hmong as an ethnic minority who have a public Chinese self and private Miao self^iv

In the second half of part four, Tapp challenges the theories regarding the modern self and then removes the Hmong from its contradictory labyrinth. Tapp argues that the ‘self’ defines significance and meaning and that spirituality and ritual secure the meaning of the self. Thus, the Hmong shaman reconstitutes the self in a post-modern world; in a post-modern world, where the self has become referenceless. In contrast, the Self anchored in ritual and religious belief and is the primary foundation of identity for the Hmong where ever they may find themselves in space or time.

In conclusion, Tapp’s attempt at examining the self from an anthropological perspective is daring. However, the most troubling part of the book was the theoretical arguments he decided to use and ignore. Tapp has decided to avoid Eastern perceptions of the self. The Hmong self should be considered from this Eastern philosophical milieu within which they exist. The Hmong, even with religious change and transnational migration, have been able to maintain non-western perspectives as was observed and illustrated by (Fadiman 1997). Tapp, himself, in his earlier work mentions that the Hmong have many shared cosmological aspects with Chinese cosmology such as how they divide the world into a sky world, a living world and underworld (Tapp 1989). This Chinese cosmological aspect and its relationship to the Hmong self has not been investigated in his book. However, if it had, it might suggest that Hmong perceptions of self could be understood very differently and, to some degree, have common cultural representations of the self with those of Chinese philosophical constructions. He does mention Eastern ideas of self, but merely in passing.

In the conclusion of this book Tapp states that Hmong spirituality and “ritual is the hypostasis which reinserts the self into a timeless and communal narrative of history” (p274). It has been argued by many in Hmong studies that the Chinese/Hmong religious cosmologies and spirituality share some similar foundations. He does suggest that the Chinese self was different and not based in romanticism, but it manifests questions about what the Hmong and Chinese selves have in common, if anything. However, if this omission is overlooked, Tapp makes salient points that might be taken into consideration when doing fieldwork or when (re)examining texts with regards to the Hmong. The text is a good overview of the work done in Hmong studies and although the premise about the ‘self’ is not fully explored, it presents a good place from which to begin thinking about the Hmong self.

REFERENCES

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, Verso.

Bell, D. (1978). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books. New York.

Fadiman, A. (1997). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York, Farrar, Staus and Giroux.

Frentress, J. and. C. Wickham (1992). Social Memory. Oxford, Blackwell.

Herzfeld, M. (1997). Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation – state. New York, Routlege.

Hirsch, E. and C. Stewart, (2005). “Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity.” History and Anthropology 16(3): 261-274.

Jenkins, R. (2008). Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Exploration. London, Sage Pub. Ltd.

Miller, D. (1987;1993). Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Basil Black-well, Oxford.

Tapp, N. (1989). “Hmong Religion.” Asian Folklore Studies 48(1): 59-94.

NOTES

i Jenkins 2008 discusses how ethnic groups envisage themselves suggesting that how a dominant groups categorise a subordinate group, positively or negatively, effects a subordinate groups perceptions of themselves.

ii Frentress and Wickham (1992) and Hirsch and Steward (2005) suggest that memory and history respectively are remembered, viewed, and understood, in the context of the present. Frentress and Wickham also suggest that those things which are not understood are then easily forgotten.

iii Anderson (1983) suggests that the national identity began with print capitalism. Tapp infers the Hmong boundless ‘national’ identities may be a function of electronic media in the same way.

iv Tapp’s understanding about concealment resembles Herzfeld’s (1997) concept of cultural intimacy, where public personae’s are expressed while at the same time private personas are cherished and shared with like individuals who share the same representations of the other. Herzfeld calls this type of behaviour, disemia. He used the example of the Greeks Hellenistic public personae and their private flawed Byzantine/ Romios self which contemporary Greeks would share with among themselves in private.

Friendship, Anthropology

Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
University of St. Andrews

© 2011 Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
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Spanish translation: PDF.

The reflexive turn that made anthropologists protagonists of their texts did not alter the role of informants: they remain objects rather than creators of anthropological knowledge. Through their concepts, analytical frameworks, and debates, ethnographers talk to each other, not to their informants. As interlocutors, informants belong firmly in the field, not in the academy. It is as if informants were what happened to ethnographers before they started writing. And so, although ethnographies deal with the lives of informants, informants are kept out of the conversation of ethnography.

Here we collaborate, acknowledging that ethnographic knowledge is made by ethnographers and informants, and should be owned by both. We write together, an informant and an anthropologist, a Gitana (Spanish Gypsy) and a Paya (non-Gypsy), a street seller and an academic, two women born in the same city, in the same year, two mothers, two friends. We write about our worlds and about us: this text is ethnographic and biographical. We talk about being women, mothers, wives, lovers, and workers in a world shaped by inequalities to do with gender, class, ethnicity and wealth. And we talk about anthropology: not just as writing, although that too, but as a powerful presence in our lives.

By reflecting together on our lives and on how we have influenced each other through the years, we try to challenge divisions that have been fundamental to anthropology since its beginnings. These are the divisions between field and academia, between the ones who write and the ones who are written about, those who do the knowing and those who are known. We also consider other divisions: between men and women, Gitanos and Payos, people for whom everyday survival in twenty-first century Spain is easier and people for whom it is harder. These are the divisions that have moulded our lives and that underlie our friendship.

We first met in 1992, when Paloma was doing her fieldwork in a government-built Gitano ghetto in the south of Madrid where Liria had some close relatives. The two of us were twenty-three at the time, since we were born in Madrid towards the end of the Francoist dictatorship. Our lives, however, had developed in very different directions. Liria, a Gitana, had grown up in the expanding suburbs where the cheapest council housing mixed with shanty-towns. Until leaving to start university in Britain aged eighteen, Paloma, a middle-class Paya, had lived in a large apartment in an affluent district of the city. When we met, Liria was a young mother of two sharing a council flat with her husband and children near the ghetto, in an inner-city estate where Gitano families mixed with low-income working-class Payos. Paloma was working towards her anthropology PhD for Cambridge University in the UK, and was looking for a Gitano family with whom to stay. Liria and her husband, Ramón, offered their home. Quickly, we two became close friends.

Nineteen years later, Liria no longer lives with Ramón and their children. In 2008, she met a young Moroccan immigrant, Younes, fell in love, and had to lose her whole family in order to start a new life with him. She is shunned by other Gitanos and lives instead amongst North African and Latin American immigrants. Paloma is now an academic, a wife, and a mother of two working in Scotland. On the cusp of middle-age, we are still close friends. Until recently, we have remained fixed in our roles as informant and anthropologist. Now we have decided to challenge these roles: we have things to say, and we believe we can say them best together. In this project, Liria is not the provider of raw material, of ‘ethnographic data’ for Paloma to analyse and argue about. We each talk, about ourselves and about each other, from our own particular standpoints, with our histories, our own interests, fears and desires as a foundationincluding a deep involvement with anthropology. In these pages both of us speak, sometimes apart, sometimes together, sometimes with each other. The strength of what follows lies not only in the story we tell but also in the way we tell it. We mix voices and styles because we want to foreground our complicity and also the tensions, negotiations, agreements and disagreements involved in doing and writing anthropology.

How we work together

In order to write this article, we started by discussing what we wanted to write, and how we would do it. Since we were apart for the majority of the time, Liria in Madrid and Paloma in St Andrews, we talked on the phone and emailed each other with the kind assistance of Younes Bziz, Liria’s partner. Liria wrote in Spanish, by hand, the sections where she speaks in the first person, and Paloma typed them, added punctuation and translated them into English. On her laptop Paloma wrote in English the sections where she speaks in the first person and translated them into Spanish for Liria to read and suggest changes. Paloma also wrote in English first drafts of the sections were we speak together, using the plural ‘we’. She translated these drafts into Spanish, and Liria made changes and additions, sometimes very substantial, which were then incorporated into the English text. We had Paloma’s fieldnotes, and her letters from the field to her PhD supervisor in Cambridge, Stephen Hugh-Jones, but only Liria’s letters to Paloma since Liria had left Paloma’s letters behind when she eloped. We also had many hours of taped conversations in which we talked about our lives, past and present, and our friendship. Because Liria is unfamiliar with anthropological literature, we have not quoted other authors. We have only made a short explicit reference to anthropological debates in the introduction, and Paloma is responsible for this interpretation. We hope that readers will be able to make their own connections with other anthropological texts.

In order to make our joint and separate voices clear to readers, we use three different fonts. We use Arial when we speak together, Cambria for Liria’s sections, and Calibri for Paloma’s.

Beginnings

I would like it if, with what I am going to write, people could understand how wonderful and important it was to meet my friend Paloma. No matter how much I write, it will never be enough to express so much gratitude towards just one friend. Because everything started with just a fieldtrip. We never thought this would reach so far into both our lives. We had barely started to live, we were both twenty, she was single and I was married with two children, Nena and Angel. We have had so much in common although we grew up in very different settings because I was Gitana and she Paya, and because we belonged to different ethnicities (etnias). That never pulled us apart, the very opposite. I even believe this was the interesting thing about our friendship, the desire to get to know new worlds and different people from what we were used to living with.

For this reason I remember very well the day I met Paloma. My elder sister Carmen had already talked to me about her. She had told me that she had met a Paya girl who came to the Villaverde church and who was doing a study about the Evengelical Gitanos and about all our surroundings and anything related to the Gitanos of the neighbourhood. Back then Paloma lived in Tío Basilio’s house, the most respected Gitano in the area of Madrid and some provinces. He was also my father’s uncle, although we have been brought up very differently in our two families, in particular we in my father’s house. And so when my sister told me that a young Paya girl was staying at Tío Basilio’s, I was surprised, not because they are bad people but because, as Gitanos, they still lived by rather old customs. When my sister introduced her to me, I thought she appeared ignorant and shy, but I recognise now that we were the ignorant ones, and she was also very brave to be in a neighbourhood full of Gitanos, most of them poor and with little schooling. For this reason I recognise that she was doing a very difficult job because she had started with the hardest part, and she still had a long way to go.

My first impression was that she was intelligent and a little serious. After introducing us my sister had told me that Paloma needed to live with a family in the neighbourhood but nobody was offering their house and all her studies hung on her living with a family. I hardly knew Paloma, only from seeing her in church, I had never talked to her, but my sister had said very good things about her and she told me that they couldn’t have her in their house because her husband was an Evangelical pastor. They could be given a church to lead at any time, and they would have to go outside Madrid, so they wouldn’t be able to pay the necessary attention to Paloma to help her do her work. But I also know they were influenced by gossip because they were a young couple, and people’s tongues and their enviousness are very bad. I too was advised not to take a Paya girl into my house because she would bring problems to my marriage. But my marriage could not go to waste more than it already had, even though back then he was not so bad with me. So I felt very sorry for this girl who had so much interest in our lives and our way of life, that we would not give her the chance to realise her project and her future. It was then that my parents supported my decision to have Paloma in my house. They have always been very liberal, in particular my mother, who had friends of all ethnicities (etnias), not minding about race, or colour, or circumstance. She put that in our hearts, and without a doubt this helped me a lot in my decision to open my house to Paloma and to show myself the way I was. And also I acknowledge that I too was interested in knowing more about her world, because the first friends I had as a girl were Payas who went to school with me and I liked very much their way of being, so simple. For Payos live more independently in their lives, without thinking about others’ opinions or gossip. And it has always bothered me, having to do things so that people will let you be and not be criticised for no matter what. For this reason I wanted to have a Payo friendship in my life, because since I married all my friends were Gitanas. I had a good group of friends, and got along with everybody, but I also wanted to make new friends, different from what I was used to.

And so, listening to my heart and my instinct, I said yes, she could come to my house to live with us and finish her research. Although in some ways I also researched her, because I was fascinated by her world and her way of life, even though I did not know what Paloma’s family thought about us, the Gitanos. I admit that I have never been bothered by what her family or my family think, although I have to say that my parents behaved rather well with Paloma, and they were never negative about her work and our friendship. The truth is that Paloma earned their trust through her behaviour. She adapted very well to the Gitano world, and she knew how to get in, through the elders and then through the church, and coming to live with me was the icing on the cake.

It was an experience for both of us. In our free time we used to go to the university behind Ramón’s back, because Gitanos, and in particular the men think that a woman goes to places like that because she wants to meet boys and do bad things. They do not think that two people can just be friends, without going any further. And in that they were wrong, because I met friends of Paloma, and nothing bad ever happened.

Paloma’s fieldnotes, March 1993

Liria and I talked today about what it has meant for her to have me in her house, and about what other people have been asking and telling her. She told me that people have been amazed that she has a young Paya in her house, in particular because her husband is very young. Young men are easily tempted, she said, and any tiny event would make people gossip: ‘you know what people’s tongues are like…’ For example, she said that if it was hot and Ramón took his shirt off, and I happened to be in the same room then, people would say ‘Ramón is having it off with the Paya’, and specially ‘how stupid Liria is, they are doing it in her own house’. Even people who have known me well for a full year were, according to Liria, shocked to learn that I was living in her house. The two pastor’s wives, Carmen and Emilia, who are always friendly and open with me, refused to take me in on the grounds that ‘people would talk, and it would damage very much out testimony, our standing’. Today I began to understand the implications that having me in her house has for Liria, since even those who seem to accept me best and talk freely with me would not have me. According to Liria, even these people ask her if I pay her money, and if I help her in the house, and she said she feels compelled to say that I do, because it is a kind of justification. I said to Liria that, in my opinion, for them it is a question of finding out who is fooling who, who is being tricked, and who is doing the tricking, a very Gitano thing: Gitanos won’t accept that ours could be a relationship on equal terms. So when her grandmother ‘innocently’ asked me where I was staying (she already knew) Liria told her, ‘poor wee Palomi, she is very good, poor thing, she helps me a lot in the house and with the children.’ Although I see that Liria could have done little else, I was rather offended at this, being made to look like a dimwit. But I didn’t say anything.

Informant and anthropologist

Our friendship started with her kindness, taking me into her house although she barely knew me and even though I was bad news. I was a Paya, young, unattached, not really managing to gain acceptance in a strongly marginalised community where the dominant Payos were distrusted and despised, and where Payas were considered uniformly immoral and sexually promiscuous. It was only because Liria looked beyond the stereotypes and the conventions that dominated interactions between Payos and Gitanos, because she questioned what most around her took for granted, that we became friends. Her generosity, her compassion, and her curiosity were the foundation of our friendship. From the first time we met and throughout twenty years, she has loved, helped and supported me.

We were fascinated by each other, perhaps because we were both dissatisfied with our lives and because we embodied for the other the deep unfulfilled desire to belong somewhere else. I had had an average childhood in an upper-middle class, conservative family. I had learnt languages and travelled abroad relatively often, but had also been immersed in a world of rigid conventions regarding such things as class, upbringing, occupation, dress and accent. I looked to anthropology as an escape into imagined, alternative worlds, but all I did was exchange the inward-looking, suffocating atmosphere of the Madrid middle-class for the inward-looking, suffocating atmosphere of a Cambridge college, and I felt at ease in neither. Among the Gitanos of Villaverde I was even more out of place: by the time I met Liria I had been doing fieldwork for nine months and was increasingly frustrated and convinced that I would never ‘get in’.

To start with, Liria seemed to me certain of her place and of her path in life. She was a well-respected young matron, a good street seller and money-maker, strict in her adherence to the highly elaborated Gitano code of conduct for women, always dressing modestly in long skirts, not smoking, drinking, or interacting with unrelated men. Her parents were well off by comparison with other Gitano families nearby, and they were very well liked, her father’s patrilineage was large and powerful and controlled much of Gitano life in the ghetto. At fifteen, her mother had arranged her betrothal to an older relative, Ramón, and she had married well, at a wedding ceremony where her virginity was tested and displayed, rather than much less prestigiously by elopement like some of her cousins and friends. She fitted in, and yet I soon learnt that she was discontented, with her marriage to a man she did not love and who could not love her, with the routine of wifely everyday life, and with the restrictions that being a ‘decent Gitana’ imposed on her. Above all, she was desperately curious to know what things were like among the Payos, the Others who surrounded her but were beyond her reach. She had a deep intuitive understanding of what anthropology was about and embraced the informant role with enthusiasm.

Liria wanted to learn, about the Payos and so about me and what she called ‘your world’. Together we took what seemed like huge risks, lying to Ramón and going for secret outings into Madrid so that she could see what my life was like. We dressed Payo-style, discarding our long skirts and putting on trousers, which the Gitanas never wore, and we visited museums, parks, middle-class restaurants, and the home where I grew up. Since she had opened up her house and her life to me, and she was so curious about mine, I felt I had to reciprocate and took Liria to my mother’s flat, where she met not only my family but the housekeepers who worked for us, and to the university where we had lunch with my childhood friends, well-off boys and girls who studied business, law or economics. Just like fieldwork amongst the Gitanos for me, these trips into middle-class Madrid were a great adventure for Liria. Having spent all her life on the periphery of the city, she literally discovered a new Madrid. And, at the university, she talked freely with unrelated men of her own age for the first time in her life.

Our outings were interludesfrom the strain of fieldwork for me, from the monotony of everyday life for herand they made us accomplices. Aged 22, we were excited, by life itself and by our friendship. We talked endlessly, while selling in the streets, cooking, taking care of the children, and at night while Ramón watched TV. We talked about men and about sex, about our pasts and futures, about being Gitana and Paya, and about anthropology. We argued about whether, as a Paya, I really had more freedom than her, and of what kinds. I read to Liria from San Román’s classic Gitano ethnography, and we discussed together the rights and wrongs of the anthropologist’s account of Gitano patrilineages. I also read to her from my fieldnotes, and we laughed about things we had said only days or weeks before. Liria’s friendship was a wonderful gift.

Looking back, I see that we were not preoccupied by the material inequalities between us, which now seem so blatantly important and which worry me so much. I was very aware of the large-scale hierarchies and inequalities that framed Gitano marginality, and of our relative positions within these, but in our everyday life in the ghetto I was out, wanting in. Yes, my parents were better off and I had reaped the benefits, having a comfortable life and going to study abroad. But Liria came from a Gitano family which was highly respected in Villaverde and she was secure in her role within the Gitano community, where the hierarchies and inequalities that mattered were among Gitanos, and where Payos were despised outsiders. In Villaverde Liria belonged and had status where I had none. Similarly, it did not occur to me that opening my life to Liria might be unethical. Later on, talking about our friendship to anthropological audiences in the UK, I have been criticised for not considering the impact that allowing Liria to meet my family might have on her, for not envisaging that it might make her dissatisfied with her lot as a poor Gitano woman. Back then, both of us knew that that I could not ask to be let into Liria’s life whilst keeping mine out of her reach.

Friends

Paloma and I, after spending so many moments together from when she came to my house to do fieldwork until now, we have lived so many experiences together that I would not have notebooks enough to tell all the good things and the bad ones. Today I can say with all my heart that between myself and Paloma there is a relationship as if we were sisters, because friends are not just for when things go well, but for when things go badly. And throughout many years I think that both of us have realised that our relationship as friends has been very firm and sincere. Even when we were separated by a large distance because she had to work in England, nothing prevented us from staying in contact, by letters or by phone, and whenever she came to see her mother in the holidays she kept some days exclusively to share with me. Nothing has stopped our union as great friends. Even though one was Gitana and the other Paya, and even though we had such different customs, we knew very well how to share our ideas and our tastes. My whole world revolved around the Gitano environment (entorno), and when Paloma was living with me just seeing her was an eye-opener. I saw that a woman is not just good for marrying and having children and cleaning, even though within the Gitano world I used to go out with my sisters, to the beach in the summer, and in winter to the malls and shopping. But with Paloma I did other things, like visiting museums, or going to the university, and many more things that I loved. And above all she made me see my qualities as a woman. She always used to tell me that I was intelligent and a very good person, but in my family I was always treated as a something of a moron, and I used to be taken for a ride. One of the people who helped me see my good qualities and my worth was Paloma. In particular with Ramón, he knew how to have me all mixed up, psychologically, with the idea that I wasn’t sufficiently clever, or pretty, and he told me so often that I came to believe it. Until one day a great friend turned up to tell me that this was not true, and through the years I have had other Paya friends, I had the pleasure of working with them when I was president of the parents’ association in my daughter’s school and they also encouraged me.

From the first time I met Paloma I opened my heart to her, as sincerely as possible, because as time went by I realised that I could tell her any secret since I knew she would keep it, and she knew she could also tell me anything, because with me it would be safe. The truth is that in this life you never know when you are going to need your friends. I think that in life, if you do good, the future can return it to you, although I never helped Paloma out of any kind of interest, and she knew it. Because when I helped Paloma I never thought that later on she would return the help to me with increase. When I decided to leave my Gitano environment (entorno) to find my happiness in a completely different world with a Moroccan partner (he was prepared to fight for our love against the Gitano people, Younes Bziz is his name), that is when I received all the support and the unconditional love, something never seen before, from my great friend Paloma. This is why we decided to write together. We both know we have many experiences to tell, together and apart, but our lives are always intertwined, the lives of two people, a Paya anthropologist with a great heart, and a sincere Gitana.

The middle years

Between 1993 and 2008 we wrote to each other, back and forth. We also talked on the telephone often and met whenever Paloma was in Madrid, at least once a year. As time went by, we continued to share our preoccupations — with pregnancies, children, schools, husbands, work, and our families. Liria and Ramón continued to earn their living by selling textiles at open air markets. They were resettled by the local government to a different flat, even closer to the ghetto where Paloma had carried out her fieldwork. Earning a livelihood became increasingly difficult as they became indebted and lost first one and then another permit to sell at weekly markets. Villaverde changed around them as immigration into Spain grew and more and more North Africans and Latin Americans came to the southern periphery of the city. Meanwhile, Paloma and her husband obtained tenured academic positions, moved to Scotland and bought a house. They settled into a typically British middle-class life.

All along Paloma wrote about Liria and her relatives and neighbours, a book and articles: we were friends, but we were also anthropologist and informant. Liria helped Paloma with her anthropology because she was a friend. She had a sense of what Paloma’s anthropological interests were but did not fully know what Paloma did with what she learnt, how she communicated her knowledge and to whom, and who benefitted or how. Paloma felt that she could only explain to Liria in very basic terms what her work was about, or how academic anthropology is produced. The jargon and theories through which Liria’s life could be made anthropologically meaningful seemed to Paloma almost impossible to convey to her. The fact that Paloma wrote in English meant that Liria could not even read what Paloma produced.

Throughout these years our friendship continued whilst our personal lives changed. Liria’s marriage deteriorated and she left Ramón several times. She took her children to her father’s house, but was always persuaded by her family to return. But as her difficulties inside the home increased, Liria found satisfying rewards outside it. In 2008 she became president of the parents’ association at her daughter’s school. She found herself at the helm at a time of serious crisis, when the local government decided to transfer the children (mostly Gitano) to a smaller building of poorer quality, to make way for the children of a neighbouring school (mostly Payo). Liria became a key player in the campaign against the plans, making several appearances on national radio and television. Although the fight was lost, Liria discovered in herself new capacities and needs, the desire to become something else than a Gitana wife and mother. In the meantime Paloma too found herself moving in new directions. She become a mother by birth and adoption in her thirties, engaged in political activism, and let her career take second or even third place in her life. For both of us our horizons opened up throughout the 2000s: for Paloma to the world beyond anthropology and academia, for Liria beyond her family and the Gitano Evangelical Church. And then Liria met Younes, by chance, and our lives were brought closer than ever before.

Lives transformed

One morning like so many the unexpected happened. There was a young man working with some friends of mine at a stall nearby, we were separated only by some fruit sellers. I don’t know how one morning I came to the stall of my friends to say hello, and to see the clothes they were selling, because often they had very pretty things and I liked to buy from them. The truth is that I had already seen that boy before, but shame and fear to fall in love, especially because he was younger than me, those things did not allow me to pay attention to him or to anybody else. But I don’t know how something made me look at him that morning, and his eyes were fixed deep into mine. I felt that he talked with me through his eyes. I had never felt like that before.

One morning like so many the unexpected happened. Liria’s sisters phoned me from Madrid. She had disappeared the day before, and they were desperate. They had found a small piece of paper with a man’s name and a telephone number in one of Liria’s handbags, and they suspected that she had eloped with him. I was to ring them immediately if she got in touch. I tried and tried Liria’s phone, and texted her, ‘Where are you? Everybody is worried. Is everything ok? Please get in touch, I’m dying of anguish here.’ That evening she rang. She had left with Younes, her sisters had realised she was having an affair and she felt she had no option but to elope, straight away. She had tried living with Ramón for twenty years, and Younes loved her. She hadn’t been able to take her young daughter along: according to Gitano customary law, which is often violently enforced, in cases of adultery children must remain with the blameless spouse. And so her family were looking for her, to bring her back and perhaps punish Liria, and Younes too. She was terrified. I was to pretend she had not been in touch, keep her secret, help her be safe.

I had no alternative but to return, because my sisters and their husbands found me, and my family threatened to kill Younes, and so I had no other option. Today I realise I allowed myself to be intimidated, and that my fear did not let me think straight. Now I see they could easily have harmed him before coming up to fetch me from the flat where I was hiding, because they were with him downstairs quite a while, but they did not. The thing is they convinced me, with threats and with kindness, they did all they could because they were desperate at that time. For me it was very painful, in two ways. First there was Younes, and being forced to leave him. I didn’t know how to explain to him that my family feared that he had tricked me, or pressured me somehow to be with him, because I had never done anything like this before. And then there were my children, and when I returned my heart broke to see how much they had missed me. ‘How am I going to recover my family, and my children?’, that is what I was thinking back then. But it was too late, nobody trusted me, they kept me under watch all the time. They tried to make me see I was deluded, that it was all an illusion because I had never had happiness with Ramón. And so they thought I was very confused, and a little bit mad.

She had no alternative but to return and, when three weeks later I went to Madrid, all her family wanted to make sure I understood why she had done wrong. ‘This is how we Gitanos do things, you know us, you understand us, you know how terrible this is for us, we are not like you Payos, this is beyond the pale, there is nothing worse than this.’ I had to talk to her, they said, convince her not to elope again, help to keep her in the house, under their control. Ramón, Carmen and Liria’s other sisters, her children, her daughter-in-law… they were the voice of Gitano reason. They knew how close Liria and I were, and were desperate for me to take sides. These were ‘the Gitanos’ of whom I had written for so many years, and what they said fitted all I had learnt about them: women’s virtue and subservience to men were central to how they saw their place in the world. And yet she asked for my help, and she was Liria, my friend, a woman whose fears and desires I knew, who had shared with me her wishes and disappointments, who loved me and whom I loved. So I did not say ‘leave’ or ‘stay’, but I helped her meet Younes clandestinely, taking our young children along as cover, knowing that the family would never think we would try something like that. When she decided she would leave for good, I helped again, sorting out plans, listening to Liria’s fears, anxieties, and hopes, and gving some of the money they needed to try to start again. After she and Younes went into hiding, I became the point of contact between Liria and her family, relaying her children’s heart-wrenching pleas, receiving and forwarding Ramón’s desperate letters.

My heart is broken in two.
Every day that passes I feel worse, for my daughter. Whenever I see girls of her age in the street I die inside, it is true.
Something is killing me inside.
I try not to tell Younes and I go into the bathroom to cry.
I tell myself, ‘Be happy’. How can I be happy knowing that my daughter needs me?
Then I say, ‘What if I return, and I die of longing for Younes?’
I can’t think of anything else, I only think about her.

Her heart is broken in two. Liria spent six months of living with Younes, in flats shared with African and Latin American immigrants, working as a domestic, hiding her Gitano identity from her middle-class employers, people very similar to my own family. We talked almost every day, and I visited her in Madrid every few weeks. I could see how much she and Younes loved each other, how much fun and freedom she had in her new life, but also how deeply cutting her pain was. I saw her cry with my daughter in her arms. I raged at Ramón and her sisters, who were unwavering: so long as she stayed away, she would not see her child. And if she took the child, they told me, they would kill both her and Younes. I understood well the cultural logic that underlay their actions, and knew I could not expect them to behave in a different way, yet I did. I began to ask myself about the force of compassion and of hatred too: could Ramón and Liria’s sisters not take pity on her, just because they were Gitanos? Were they so firm because they were Gitanos, or because they hurt? Liria asked for my help and from Scotland I rang women’s NGOs in Madrid, government agencies, social workers, solicitors, but nobody seemed to be able or willing to give any help. They were all puzzled by the complexities of the Gitano world, unable to understand why Liria would not simply apply for a divorce, request access to her child through the usual legal routes, why she was frightened, why there were threats. We could not see a way forward and so she went back once again.

When for the second time I had to return it was much worse. I thought that after so many conversations with my sisters and my children’s father, the situation was going to be better. But it was much worse. I could feel a tremendous hatred from Ramón. Earlier on, even when I was an honest and stupid woman our marriage did not go well, so imagine the situation after living six months away from home, with another man, and Ramón swallowing his pride of Gitano man, fooled by a woman who was inferior to him. So the last night I spent with my daughter I made her a promise, and I told her, ‘Darling, whatever happens I want you to know I love you very much’, and told her that if one day we had to be apart from each other for whatever reason, I would fight for her, until we could be together again. She looked into my eyes and said, ‘Mama, you are going to leave again’. And with pain in my soul, and so as not to worry her, I said no, but that if that happened I would go back to get her. And I looked at her straight and said, ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ So the first thing I did when I returned with Younes was find a solicitor to get custody of my child, and my divorce from Ramón. I got on with it, ready to face the world for the sake of my daughter.

When for the second time she had to return it was much worse. Ramón knew I had helped Liria with money and emotional support during her time away: although he allowed us to talk on his mobile phone, he was always nearby, listening closely to our conversations. Younes was heartbroken, thinking that she had left him for good, and would not sleep or eat. We talked often, but there was little I could do for him. Liria had managed to hide a mobile phone, and she would go into the bathroom at three of four in the morning, to ring Younes and me. In whispers, she told me about her life: she had no freedom, Ramón was in touch with a solicitor to get sole custody of her child, he wanted to have sex in spite of her reluctance, and she missed Younes desperately. When her sisters brought a Gitano Pentecostal priest to exorcise her, she thought it was the last straw, and decided to leave knowing that this time there would be no turning back.

Sharing our lives

When Liria left her home for the very first time, but also later, she and Younes were in dire need of money. Since they had to hide from Liria’s family, they also lost their livelihoods. Liria could no longer sell with Ramón and Younes could no longer work for Gitano street-market sellers loading and unloading stock. As the economic crisis deepened and Spain’s unemployment reached 20%, finding work became almost impossible. Without papers the only jobs Younes could find were sporadic and very badly paid. They could not afford to lose Liria’s small disability pension, so she worked without contracts for two or three euros per hour, cooking in bars, as an office cleaner or as a domestic servant.

Knowing it would be difficult to provide substantial economic help on a long-term basis, Paloma applied first to her Department and then for a small grant to pay Liria for writing down her life. What began as a way to find money became a project that came to fascinate us both. We started to tape long conversations, about Liria’s elopement, our earlier lives, and our families and friendship. Liria wrote, and Paloma wrote too. Liria went to
Scotland, visiting Paloma abroad for the first time ever. She talked to Paloma’s colleagues and students, and we gave a talk about our relationship. As Liria’s and Younes’ life unfolded, and as Paloma shared in it, we thought together about what it meant. Since Paloma was not just an observer, but a player in the story, it became clear that what we wrote had to include her too.

In March 2011, two years after she first eloped, Liria went to court to claim visiting rights to her child. She was the first Gitano woman to turn to the Payo courts to challenge Gitano traditional law and custom. Paloma went with her, and we came face to face with Liria’s sisters, their husbands, and Ramón. In spite of repeated requests, we had not managed to be allocated police protection, and we were frightened that Ramón or Liria’s brothers-in-law would manage to hurt one or both of us. All in Liria’s family thought Paloma had betrayed them and had shown her true nature as a Paya, helping Liria in her transgression. They were wrong in thinking that Paloma had encouraged Liria to leave, but right in identifying the strength of our bond.

Paloma’s Spanish family too have seen our friendship, and are disturbed by it. One of Paloma’s sisters suggested a solicitor and a social worker who might help. Another opened her home to Liria and Younes when they needed a place to stay for a couple of nights. But their middle class, comfortable lives have very little in common with Liria’s and Younes’s, and they are keen to keep their distance. They have a highly developed sense of class and ethnic distinctiveness, like many other well-off, culturally conservative Madrileños. They believe firmly in their economic and moral superiority. Paloma’s family see Gitanos like Liria and immigrants like Younes as unfortunate parts of Spanish society, to be blamed for their ‘situation’, victims of their inability to join in or ‘integrate’. They perceive Younes, like other Moroccan immigrants, as one of the lowest of the low, a member of an abject tide that threatens to engulf Spain. They call him, pejoratively, ‘el moro’ (‘the Moor’), and have been adamant that he must under no circumstance visit their homes, where Paloma stays during her visitsto Madrid. The majority of Paloma’s Spanish relatives are not unlike Liria’s Gitano family in the effort they make to keep themselves distinct, and in their conviction that they, and only they, live righteous and beautiful lives. But while Liria’s family were the amongst the first Gitanos to open their lives and their homes to Paloma, most of Paloma’s family want to have as little as possible to do with Liria or Younes. For them, Paloma’s friendship with Liria is a sign of her unfortunate eccentricity. The fact that Paloma spends more time with Liria than with her own sisters or her mother, demonstrates that Paloma has failed in her responsibilities to her family.

Writing together

I learnt what anthropology was when Paloma came to live in my house. I had a vague idea of what anthropology was, but it was living together day by day, seeing Paloma’s fieldwork, that I learnt its meaning. I think it is a very beautiful work that opens frontiers onto new worlds. Because it is not just writing about other people, but getting to know their lives, their customs, religions, and their ways of being. I find it fascinating, writing not only about my life, but about Paloma’s life. Because I have always been the informant, but now we are breaking the mould. We know that telling our lives, together and united, is going to be something never done before. Two women, a Paya and a Gitana, but very close from youth, breaking the barriers between two different levels and ways of life, although that distance never pulled us apart. Since I started writing about anthropology I have found it wonderful to have the opportunity to express my feelings towards other people, and to understand them. As I write about Paloma, I also learn to see things in a different way, especially because we two have been brought up so differently, in our customs. I know for sure that what I am doing right now is that I would like to do for the rest of my life, because getting to know people, their customs, their experiences,
their sadness and their joys, and especially having another person opening their heart to you, is wonderful.

I want people to know what the world of a Gitana is like, told by herself, and also how my life has changed so that through circumstances I find myself in the Payo world. I want to tell how I see everything, and also how my life changed, and also how things changed for Paloma and those who surround us, like Younes, and Paloma’s husband and her children… All of us have come much closer together. Being able to become united while you work, that is the beauty of anthropology. For me anthropology is about complicity and union, so that we all of us can build a better world, a world with more love.

I have learnt what anthropology is alongside Liria, and my understanding has changed as we have become older and our lives have been transformed. For many years after I first did fieldwork among the Gitanos I thought that my task was to extract information, make knowledge, weave patterns with words. I wrote and I looked away from those parts of experience I could not make sense of easily, from what did not fit into the moulds I had built. And so much of Liria’s life, and of the lives of her relatives and neighbours, was invisible to me. Over the last few years I have been drawn into Liria’s life much deeper than ever before, and she into mine. Sharing our happiness and our difficulties, I have had to confront the nitty-gritty of experience, as a person and as an anthropologist.

The bedrock of anthropology is fieldwork, because fieldwork is what brings us into deep contact with people, with their daily miseries and joys, their fears and their hopes. And it is during fieldwork that we anthropologists open ourselves up to others. But then those others, our informants, are left behind, they do not continue the journey with us. Imagine the possibilities if the deep mutual commitment that is so often seeded in fieldwork were allowed to grow, to spread into other areas of life. I do not know how successful our experiment has been. But I know that, if I want to learn and write about Liria, I have to let her learn and write about me. We share our lives, this is why we write together.

We meet in the spaces between worlds: between Gitanos and Payos, between immigrants and middle-class Spaniards, between informants and anthropologists. These worlds touch and interpenetrate, but they are also sealed away from each other, in many senses far apart. Anthropology is what has enabled us to come together, yet anthropology also erects barriers between us: until now Paloma has watched, investigated, looked for, written; Liria has been in a way in the dark. Our relation has been unequal, not because of Paloma’s greater wealth, but because Liria was a friend above all while Paloma was always a friend and an anthropologist. For anthropology to reach its potential to change the world, barriers like these need to be not just acknowledged, but undermined. By writing together, about our lives, our friendship, and our worlds, we hope to have contributed, in a small way, towards this project.

Landscapes of Wealth & Desire:
Histories of Value in Baja California Sur, Mexico

Ryan Anderson ¹
University of Kentucky

© 2011 Ryan Anderson

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

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Summary

This paper explores the historical background to a proposed study of political disputes over the value of large-scale tourism development in Baja California Sur. The paper starts with a review of anthropological discussions of value — focusing on the work of Kluckhohn, Graeber, Elyachar and Appadurai. The aim is to use an anthropological approach to value to place current conflicts over land and resources arising from recent developments within a historical perspective.  The paper then investigates how actors in different time periods have contributed to collective and often contradictory constructions of the area as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure and conflict.  It is not a report on the contemporary situation, but rather it examines some of the key moments and events that have in the past created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur as a place of value, meaning, and importance. These episodes start with the Spanish contact period and focus primarily on the southern portion of the peninsula. [Value, tourism, development, Baja California Sur, Mexico]

INTRODUCTION: A BACKWATER NO LONGER

On May 3, 1535, famed explorer Hernán Cortés landed on the shores of present-day La Paz in Baja California Sur (see Figure 1) with high hopes that he had finally found a legendary island full of gold (Leonard 1992; Alvarez, jr 1987; Crosby 1994). The following year, after spending vast amounts of capital and resources on the venture, the last remnants of Cortés’ expedition set sail for Acapulco on mainland Mexico, abandoning the settlement as a complete failure. While Cortés had hoped to find an island full of wealth, he only found a few pearls and a hot, dry, desolate landscape with few native inhabitants (Crosby 1994: 4). It was, by many accounts, a place of little worth, especially for a conquistador who had sacked the capital city of the Aztecs fifteen years prior.

Cortés was, of course, several centuries too early to cash in on the popularity of international tourism and development that turned the desert landscape of Baja California Sur into a high-end tourism destination that includes everything from ATV tours and Costco to exclusive hotels, expansive golf courses, and even a Hard Rock Café. For more than four centuries after 1536, the landscapes of Baja California Sur remained difficult, perplexing, and challenging places for explorers and entrepreneurs who hoped to extract some measure of value from its territories (whether gold or souls). From pearl diving and missionary work to silver mining, relatively few were able to achieve long-term economic or political success. Baja California Sur remained economically marginal—at least from the perspective of outsiders—until the late 20^th century. And then something changed.

So what happened? How did this supposed “backwater” of Mexico suddenly rise to such prominence and economic importance? As urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch argue in their landmark text Urban Fortunes, “A place is defined as much by its position in a particular organizational web—political, economic, and cultural—as by its physical makeup and topographical configuration” (43-44). The landscapes and territories of Baja California Sur, especially those located near the coast, clearly underwent a radical repositioning within a particular political and economic network. With the onset of mass travel in the 1960s, improvements in transportation technology, and specifically the rising popularity of international coastal tourism, the same arid, seemingly worthless environment of Baja California Sur became the locus for the creation of Mexico’s most prized tourism destination: Los Cabos² (Berger and Wood 2010).

The contemporary socio-economic importance of the coastal territories of Baja California Sur was only made possible by a shift in how various actors—from global tourists to Mexican State officials—re-imagined and re-shaped the formerly “desolate” environment into a desirable destination for travel, leisure, investment, and even permanent residence. From particular perspectives (e.g. the Mexican State, investors, and developers), increased tourism development, along with sharply rising land values, are clear indicators of considerable success and economic “progress”. Los Cabos is, in many ways, a powerful symbol of prosperity in Mexico. But this is only part of the story. To quote the late Vine Deloria, “Into each life, it is said, a little rain must fall” (1985: 78).

Figure 1. Location of Baja California Sur.

In this case, the “rain” is the social and economic inequality that has been generated by Los Cabos. The urban colonias that ring the high-end tourism zone present a radically different picture of the “success” of tourism development in Los Cabos. Poverty, uneven development, unemployment, socio-economic segregation, and lack of access to critical resources such as water and land plague these settlements (Lopez et al 2006; Torres and Momsen 2005; Wilson 2008). This pattern of economic growth and consequent social inequality is a common theme for many tourism developments throughout Mexico, most notably Cancún (Hiernaux 1999, Castellanos 2010). The economic benefits of tourism development “successes” in Mexico are unevenly distributed, both spatially and socially. But this aspect of international and domestic tourism does not get that much attention.

The social, economic, and political restructuring of place in Los Cabos, and throughout the peninsula, is anything but uncontested, however. Sometimes it seems that powerful, larger discourses—such as those that originate with state systems or international media—define these places, spaces, and territories. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 2010), for example, claims that international tourism development is a “key driver” of socio-economic “progress” around the world. But what gets lost in such grand statements? According to this view, the Los Cabos tourism corridor, which has witnessed considerable tourism development, would stand as a major success and site of progress—and for some that is the case. But for others, this re-valuation, development, and transformation of place hasn’t resulted in prosperity. Despite the existence of prominent narratives and discourses that construct Baja California Sur as a place of successful, even “sustainable” development, there are other voices, other experiences, and other values that people attach to places, and they speak to some very different social and political realities.

These contested values and competing interpretations of place in Baja California Sur are by no means recent. By taking a historic look at how different people have engaged with Baja California Sur over time, this paper explores present conflicts over resources and ideas of place in light of the past. The current conflicts over the definition and control of the region are not new—they are just the latest acts of a long-running play. Here I investigate the various ways in which a multiplicity of actors—at various scales—have contributed to the collective and often contradictory construction of Baja California Sur as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure, conflict—and ultimately value. These investigations are preliminary and suggestive, rather than definitive. Starting with the Spanish contact period, and focusing primarily on the southern tip of the peninsula (known as the cape region), the argument covers some of the key moments and events that have created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur over time as a place of value, meaning, and importance.

SOME NOTES ON VALUE

Before going any further, it makes sense to establish a few foundations. My analysis focuses on the concept of value as it relates to the construction of meaning and place in Baja California Sur. I draw from the work of anthropologists, urban sociologists, and geographers in exploring what is admittedly an unwieldy concept. Theoretical discussions about value—the attribution of import or meaning to ideas, ways of life, goods, and/or actions—have a deep history in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology (see Kluckhohn 1958; Appadurai 1986; Eiss and Pedersen 2002; Graeber 2001, 2011; West 2005; Hart 2011; Elyachar 2005). The term “value” is tremendously loaded and complex. It sounds fairly simple to talk about the value of a place or an idea…but the more you dig into the concept the more difficult things become. That is because, as Graeber argues, while there are plenty of discussions about value, there is no clear theory of value per se. Part of the reason for this is that the term itself refers to a wide array of different—yet interrelated—understandings of what “value” is all about.

As Graeber (2001:1-2) explains, theories of value tend to fall into three overlapping categories: 1) values in the sociological sense (i.e. what is good or desirable for society); 2) the economic sense (how objects/goods are desired and measured according to a particular system of accounting, such as money); and 3) the linguistic sense (which Graeber glosses as “meaningful difference” within a larger structured system). Value in these various, interrelated senses is ultimately about how and why people rank, order, and organize their social worlds according to particular ideals, whether moral, cultural, or political. A truly exhaustive account of value should, as some argue, probably extend at least as far back as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and especially Karl Marx (Hart 2011), whose theories of value focused heavily on the critical importance of labor. Such a project, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. For the sake of conceptual clarity, I am going to limit my use of value to a few lines of thought derived mostly from relatively recent anthropological theories of value (although Marx does play a key role for many of these theorists). I draw primarily on Kluckhohn (1958), Graeber (2001), Elyachar (2005), and Appadurai (1986). Kluckhohn’s comparative project on value is a good place to start.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Clyde Kluckhohn launched an ambitious initiative aiming to make the scientific study of values the key concern of anthropology (Graeber 2001:2). Kluckhohn’s work focused mostly on a sociological sense of value, and attempted to analyze how and why different societies came to develop particular value orientations (Kluckhohn 1958). As Graeber explains, this early effort to analyze and cogently theorize value “ran most definitely aground” (2001:5). But it was not without merit. Foremost was Kluckhohn’s drive to find a way to push anthropology toward a study of social life that paid close attention to moral desires—or what individuals “ought to want” out of their lives (Kluckhohn 1958: 469; Graeber 2001:3). Kluckhohn advocated a study of values that sought to move beyond mechanistic assumptions about human choices and behavior:

We want to live in particular ways and toward selected ends. When the gap between actuality and aspiration is too great, individuals and indeed whole groups choose death rather than survival. For we human beings are not just pushed by our biological needs and psychological drives; we are also pulled by conceptions of the right, the good, the desirable (1958:469).

He argued that since there are patterned “habits of thinking which individuals consciously learn and unconsciously absorb in their daily social experience” (1958:469), an empirically grounded and systematic study of values was possible. He was in search of the “codes which unite individuals in adherence to shared goals that transcend immediate and egocentric interest” (1958:470). Values for Kluckhohn “are cultural and psychological facts of a certain type which can be described as objectively as other types of cultural and psychological facts” (1958: 472). The only problem was that Kluckhohn’s value project was never able to actually achieve these ambitious goals, despite much effort from Kluckhohn and his research team. The key issue, as Graeber (2001:4) points out, was the difficulty of finding a way to relate this comparative project to specific choices, behaviors, and actions within a coherent framework. What was ultimately missing was “an adequate theory of structure” (Graeber 2001:5).

Although Kluckhohn’s project hit a dead end, and has had no intellectual legacy, maybe something worthwhile may be salvaged from his efforts. As Graeber explains, Kluckhohn’s key idea was that cultures differ not simply in what they believe about the world, but also in “what they feel one can justifiably demand from it” (2001:5). This is at heart a moral project. Kluckhohn tried to move beyond studies of belief and perception toward a comparative analysis of morally-based ideals and desires. While most anthropologists may consider Kluckhohn’s project passé or irrelevant today, maybe he was onto something after all. In Graeber’s words: “However primitive the models Kluckhohn actually produced, he did at least open up the possibility of looking at cultures as not just different ways of perceiving the world, but as different ways of imagining what life ought to be like—as moral projects, one might say” (2001:22). This takes us further than many of the approaches to value that followed his.

Kluckhohn provides the first key component, then, of how I want to approach value. Value is not just about market forces, and it is not intrinsically embedded in commodities, places, or other material things. Kluckhohn’s value project went beyond questions of supply, demand, and taste to embrace what people feel is socially and morally just. As one foundation for thinking about value, this requires us to think about how such conceptions are linked to actions and to larger cultural contexts.

David Graeber’s book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, offers perhaps the most thorough anthropological investigation of value to date. I want to highlight two key components from Graeber’s discussions of value here. The first is a focus on action. The second is an emphasis on how these actions translate into wider systems of meaning. Graeber seeks to construct a theory of value that moves away from Saussurean structuralism on the one hand and from what he calls “economism” on the other. The problem with the former is that value is reduced to little more than “meaningful difference” (2001:46). With the latter, value is framed as a factor of individual choice and little more. Both frameworks are also hopelessly static; Graeber, following the lead of Nancy Munn, moves toward an understanding of value that is dramatically more dynamic (2001:46).

Munn argues that value emerges in action or through the process of creation itself. Value is not just an intrinsic property of objects, goods, services, or places. It has to be produced—within the context of surrounding cultural systems. This argument, which emphasizes both process and action, comes full circle back to Marx’s theoretical discussions of value (which were, after all, very much about measuring value based upon human action—labor). Money, Graeber explains, is key to Marx’s theory of value: “What money measures and mediates…is ultimately the importance of certain forms of human action (Graeber 2001:66-67). Money, which is an abstract yet ubiquitous representation of value, comes to signify the meaning and importance of human labor or what Graeber sometimes calls “creative energies” (ibid). While Marxists tend to focus on a fairly restricted understanding of human labor, Graeber argues that it might be fruitful to broaden our thinking and consider some other possibilities when it comes to labor and human action.

He writes, “One invests one’s energies in those things one considers most important or most meaningful” (2001:45). Value, he argues, “is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves” (2001:45). This takes certain socially recognizable forms, whether kula valuables, currency, or credit cards. The important point is that these forms are not the actual source of value—they are just the medium through which value is created and passed around. Human actions produce value….and these actions take on meaning when they are understood within larger social and cultural systems. This brings us to the second point: these human actions and creative energies attain meaning when they are placed within expanded symbolic and social systems.

Graeber argues that value may be understood as how “actions become meaningful” within a larger social system, “real or imagined” (2001:254; see also Elyachar 2006:8)³. In order to understand the importance or meaning of a particular action, there has to be some reference to a surrounding totality. There must be some sort of comparison going on: “Parts take on meaning in relation to each other, and that process always involved references to some sort of whole: whether it be a matter of words in a language, episodes in a story, or ‘goods and services’ on the market” (Graeber 2001:86-87). The “real or imagined” aspect of all this is also important here. Graeber says that the process of creating value requires comparison, which necessitates some kind of audience. This audience may be real (e.g. direct social relationships) or imagined. “Society” is basically an imagined, totalized audience that people use to assess tastes, choices, desires, and values. This is akin to the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson (2006) wrote about, which are connected through shared ideals, ideologies, and meanings.

So we have to take account of action in value creation, and we need to pay attention to how those actions are linked to surrounding social, cultural, and political systems of meaning. This is where politics and power come into the equation. Graeber writes, “In any real social situation, there are likely to be any number of such imaginary totalities at play, organized around different conceptions of value” (2001:88). There is not just one system of meaning that people engage with or contest—there are multiple interwoven, contested, overlapping systems. The confluence of these systems leads to what might be called a “politics of value” (Graeber 2001:88; Appadurai 1986). For Graeber, competing or conflicting claims about value are always inherently political in nature (2001:115). Terry Turner, according to him, claims that the struggle to define value is “the ultimate stakes of politics” (2001:88). It would be ideal if value (i.e. what matters, or what is important and how that importance is represented) were determined through democratic, fair, and just decision-making processes. But Graeber and others argue that this is not the case (see also Elyachar 2005). The playing field is not level. This leads to the question of power.

Julia Elyachar writes, “The anthropology of value, which has a strong focus on symbolic meaning, can have politics at its center as well” (2005:7). Elyachar’s monograph, Markets of Dispossession, is a deeply ethnographic work exploring the politics of value through an extended, detailed investigation of workshops in Cairo. She draws from both Munn and Graeber to analyze how workshop masters create what she calls “relational value,” which “expresses the positive value attached to the creation, production, and extension of relationships in communities of Cairo” (2005:7). The power struggles in this case consist of conflicts between these workshop masters, the Egyptian state, international organizations, and NGOs, among others.

Her ethnography outlines a conflict between the intrusion of neoliberal market reforms and ideologies, on the one hand, and the morally-grounded economies of the workshop masters in Cairo on the other. What is being “dispossessed,” she argues, is “the power to decide what matters or, in other words, what is value” (2005:8). Through a focus on neoliberal market reforms, Elyachar shows that “Markets are social and political worlds with their own cosmologies. Each is a cosmos of its own, an intricately functioning field of power” (2005:214). She challenges the utopian notion of neo-classical economists that markets are benign instruments which, if properly unleashed, will serve the interests of “society” at large⁴ (Elyachar 2005:214). Instead, Elyachar argues forcefully that markets are highly political projects that have real—and often dramatically disparate—material effects. What all of this means is that economic expansion and development is anything but a value-neutral or objective process…no matter what many economists and development experts assert. Elyachar makes a solid case for the need to pay close attention to power relations, and more specifically to how different forms of power work, interact, and clash, in the ongoing politics of value.

Arjun Appadurai has explored the politics of value as well, but in a very different way. His approach, which draws a lot on the work of Georg Simmel, is far more economic in its focus. While Graeber seeks to shift the emphasis from a focus on things to an emphasis on actions, Appadurai explores the question of value by paying close attention to the “lives” of commodities. This is because he sees exchange as they key issue in value creation. What matters, ultimately, is how much someone is willing to give up in order to obtain certain goods and services. For Appadurai, value is ultimately based on individual desire (this is a different conception of desire than Kluckhohn sought to address). His analysis of the politics of value focuses on the struggles to control “flows of commodities” themselves, which is a decidedly market-based approach. Appadurai seeks to trace these commodity flows as they pass through different “regimes of value in space and time” (1986:4). He writes, “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, and their trajectories” (1986:5). Although some aspects of Appadurai’s approach are problematic, I find the idea of “regimes of value in space and time” to be particularly intriguing and useful.

This framework, with commodities passing through different systems of meaning and their value related to this overall process, is yet another foundation for my current work on value creation in Baja California Sur. But it needs reworking a bit, mostly because the commodity in question is not a linen coat or a can of Coke—it’s a place. Land, as Polanyi once argued, is a commodity of a special kind. Logan and Molotch, following him, insist that land is 1) immobile, and 2) not originally produced for sale in a market (1987:23). This means that an analysis of how value is created in particular landscapes or places requires different considerations. Yes, there is an argument to be made that places such as Cabo San Lucas or La Paz are most definitely “produced,” but this is not the same as the production of traditional commodities like coats—or iPods for that matter. The “regimes of value” in this case are the ideas, beliefs, and predilections of people, past and present—and these work to shape and define the meaning and value of particular geographic places. These systems of meaning overlap, clash, coalesce, and break apart. In what follows, I seek to trace the historical trajectories of value embedded in specific places.

AMAZONS & PEARLS: 1533-1697

Before a single European even set foot on the territories of present day Baja California Sur, the imagined possibilities of the place had already been influenced by a powerful source: literature. In 1510, Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo first published Sergas de Esplandian (the exploits of Esplandian), a sequel to his previous successful series called Amadis de Gaula. All of these books were written in a genre that was widely popular in 16^th century Spain: the “romances of chivalry,” which were

usually long accounts of the impossible exploits of knightly heroes in strange and enchanted lands inhabited by monsters and extraordinary creatures, and they presented a highly imaginative, idealized concept of life in which strength, virtue, and passion were all of a transcendent and unnatural character (Leonard 1992: 13).

Throughout the century, upwards of ten editions of the Sergas were published (Leonard 1992: 17; Martinez 1960: 90). The main story of Sergas recounts the adventures of Esplandian, the son of Amadis, who eventually falls in love with Calafia, the formidable Queen of Amazon women who inhabit a rocky, gold-laden island named “California” (Leonard 1992: 38; Martinez 1960: 90; Alvarez jr. 1987: 12-13). One of the crucial aspects of this literature is that it often incorporated narrative components of contemporary historical accounts, leaving audiences convinced that such tales were literally true. Leonard argues that there was widespread belief in tales such as Sergas de Esplandian and that they influenced the ideas and actions of Spanish conquistadors, from Columbus to Cortés (Leonard 1992: 13-14). In fact, belief in the actual existence of Amazons was so pervasive that the “contractual agreements between conquistadors and their financial backers…frequently included clauses requiring a search for these mythical women” (Leonard 1992: 36).

The legend of an island full of warrior women dates to ancient Greece, and similar stories were passed around throughout the Middle Ages by famous travelers such as Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Pedro Tarfur (Leonard 1992: 37). These Amazon women have been reported everywhere from Asia Minor to West Africa, but the exact location of their island home always remained (conveniently) vague (ibid). While several explorers repeated similar narratives about these famed female warriors in their letters and publications, Leonard (1992: 38) argues that the popular myths of Sergas de Esplandian may have been the main source for the dramatic prevalence of these themes in the minds of 16^th century conquistadors. Leonard even suggests that the author, Montalvo, may have in heard of Columbus’ reports of seeing Amazon-like women in the Caribbean and added those details to his story about Espandian to capitalize on the popularity of the legend (Leonard 1992: 39). One passage of the Sergas about women who “dwelled in well-formed caves” echoes Columbus’s earlier report (ibid).

One key passage from Montalvo’s romantic novel may have played a critical role in the motivation to explore the lands that were later called California. In Chapter 157 we read:

Now I wish you to learn of one of the strangest matters that has ever been found in writing or in the memory of mankind…Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to the Earthly Paradise, and inhabited by black women without a single man among them, for they live almost in the manner of Amazons. They are robust in body with stout, passionate hearts and great strength. The island itself is the most rugged with craggy rocks in the world. Their weapons are all of gold as well as the trappings of wild beasts which they ride after taming, for there is no other metal on the whole island [in Leonard 1992: 39-40].

Editions of these books were widespread in key Spanish cities, including Toledo, Salamanca, Burgos, and Seville—the last being a primary place from which conquistadors embarked for the New World (Leonard 1992: 41). Editions of the Sergas were published in 1521, 1525, and 1526—all around the time that Cortés and his legions were conquering New Spain (ibid). In 1524, Cortés repeated rumors about this mystical island and its inhabitants in his reports to the Spanish emperor, Charles V (Miller 1974: 6; Leonard 1992: 41). He explicitly expressed his intent to “discover the truth” about the famed island (Miller 1974: 6).

By 1530, Cortés received authorization to explore the western ports of New Spain. This authorization also granted him the power to govern any new territories he discovered. In 1533 he sent two ships into the gulf, but they were separated, and one quickly returned to port in Acapulco. The other, the Concepción, headed west and anchored in the bay of what the crew thought was an island (Miller 1974: 7). This was, in fact, the bay of La Paz (see Figure 2). Its captain “received no welcome and from the outset the peninsula became known as inhospitable country” (ibid). The captain and most of his crew were killed by the inhabitants of the new land (most likely the Guaycara), but one survivor managed to get back to the mainland and informed Cortés about the discovery, which was supposedly an island laden with gold and pearls (ibid).

Figure 2. Map of key cities mentioned in the text. Note: Los Cabos includes the cities of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas.

Cortés set sail late in the year of 1534 for what became “California,” in the hope of exploiting its resources (Crosby 1994: 4) and finding the legendary island of the Amazons. Ultimately, he found neither. The La Paz colony struggled from the start, and by 1536, Cortés returned to New Spain to “defend his rights of conquest and acquisition” (Alvarez Jr., 1987: 14). He never went back to the peninsula, which remained “unsettled” or, perhaps more accurately, unconquered, for the next century. Still, it held strategic importance for Spain, as one of the resting stops for Spanish ships traveling the Manila Galleon route (Ibid: 15). Cabo San Lucas, at the very tip of the peninsula, was a convenient waypoint for ships traveling in and out of New Spain.

For the remainder of the 16th century, the Spanish had little success with their attempts to establish settlements and harbors in Baja California. In the context of Spain’s overall colonial project on the mainland of New Spain, the peninsula held a marginal position (Alvarez, Jr., 1987: 16). The presence of English and Dutch pirates made the region even more inhospitable (ibid). Between 1533 and 1680, each attempt at settlement ended in failure. According to Alvarez, Jr., “Baja California provided no riches, no great cities, and no great populations to evangelize. Furthermore, colonists saw Baja as a barren wasteland in which the European could not live” (1987: 16). Some, however, did manage to find value on the peninsula.

Upon landing in La Paz in 1535, Cortés wrote to Cristobal de Oñate saying that he had discovered a land rich in pearls (Gerhard 1956: 239). While this news was certain to arouse interest, there are no records to indicate that any substantial attempts at pearl exploitation took place for the next fifty years. This may have been due in part to the perceived difficulty of such a venture after Cortés’ failure (Gerhard 1956: 240). The viceroy of New Spain granted three men the exclusive right to the pearl fisheries from the present-day state of Jalisco to the coasts of California. This virtual monopoly was broken in 1593 when Sebastian Vizcaino filed a legal suit and gained his own license to exploit the region’s pearls. From around 1600 onward, various licensed and unlicensed individuals took part in this resource extraction. According to Gerhard, “There is reason to believe that pearl hunting in Lower California became a well-established industry after about 1625, with frequent expeditions setting out from Chacala, Matanchel, Chametla, and other ports on the west coast of New Spain” (1956: 242). By 1685 profits from pearling were already dropping and, upon the arrival of missionaries in 1697, life became even more difficult for the pearlers. The coming of the missionaries meant the loss of a primary labor pool (the California Indians) and also increased government oversight (Gerhard 1956: 244-245). The pearling industry continued well into the missionary period, but “serious depletion” of the resources was already apparent by the early part of the 18^th century.

It is not difficult to accept that the discursive literary tales of writers such as Montalvo had significant effects on the imaginations of Spanish captains, generals, soldiers, sailors, investors, and others who engaged in the conquest and exploitation of the Americas. “There can be little doubt,” writes Leonard, “that a factor in creating the fantastic illusion of the Conquest in the minds of so many participants was the multitude of fables, myths, and legends that so completely possessed their imaginations” (Leonard 1992: 314). Much like TV and internet media of today, these popular discourses had their own material effects, even if they are, ultimately, difficult to measure directly.

Clearly, however, these legends and narratives helped to fill this western edge of the Spanish empire with intrigue—and ultimately high social and political value, at least for a while. The myths of Amazons and islands full of gold and pearls swept across the New World, always located just out of reach, on the horizon, were also undoubtedly spurred by inaccuracies and blunders born out of poor language translation and fevered expectations of wealth and success (Leonard 1992: 45). These discourses, mixed with political, economic, and strategic motivations from the sovereign down, encouraged people to traverse incredible distances and explore unknown places—all without any realistic idea of what to expect at the end of the journey. The search for value, then, is also about what Graeber calls “creative action”; the potential value of those territories depended on marshalling political and financial support from key individuals, as much as it was about literally sailing to the peninsula and attempting to extract resources or secure a territory. Baja California Sur was shaped, from the start, by a constellation of ideas and desires, which led to the interlinked fates of native populations and these Spanish argonauts. The actualities, once the boots hit the sand, were another matter. Regardless, the process continued, as previous discourses, ideas, stories, and narratives led to even more interest in the peninsula. One map always seems to lead to another. It is just a matter of time. For the early conquistadors, the Baja peninsula was desirable and valuable because of its potential material wealth. For a wave of new explorers who came more than a century later, value was measured in terms of human souls.

JESUITS: 1678-1767

In 1678 the Spanish made a second serious attempt at colonizing the peninsula of California. The Jesuit priest, Eusebio Francisco Kino, who became one of the driving forces behind the settlement of Baja, arrived in 1683 as part of a “government-backed effort to colonize the California peninsula” (Crosby 1994: 8). Kino was enlisted in the expedition as a geographer, mapmaker, and missionary (Crosby 1994: 8). They established a settlement at San Bruno, located about 20 km north of present day Loreto. The endeavor was a financial disaster, and Admiral Isidro de Atondo y Antillón, leader of the expedition, blamed the failure on the “sterility” of the new land. This “helped to create a perception of California that dealt a severe blow not only to the continuation of his own venture, but also to the prospects of anyone who might later try to raise money for an occupation of the peninsula” (Crosby 1994: 10). The project was abandoned, as was the colonization of the peninsula of California. Father Kino, however, was determined to establish a mission in California, and spent years working toward his goal. Contrary to conquistadors, pirates, pearlers, colonists, and common soldiers, Kino envisioned the wealth of California not in terms of economic resources, but souls. He remained steadfast in his desire to Christianize the native people of the distant peninsula that had repelled his earlier efforts (Martinez 1960: 118).

Kino, with fellow Jesuit Juan Maria Salvatierra, began working toward finding a way to implement his missionary plans. Both Kino and Salvatierra agreed that the primary reason for the failure of the first attempt at colonization was conflicting agendas between the parties involved. The missionaries, soldiers, and colonists all had different motives, expectations, and desires—and this was exactly what Kino and Salvatierra needed to control (Crosby 1994: 12-13). By 1696, Salvatierra and Kino were able to convince Spanish religious and political authorities to develop missions in California (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 19). Due to an insurrection in Sonora, however, Kino was unable join the 1697 expedition to California. His religious superiors ordered him to remain in the tempestuous region where he held considerable influence; they felt he was far too valuable to be sent to some distant frontier (Crosby 1994: 23). Salvatierra continued on, with the help of the newly enlisted father Francisco Maria Piccolo. Along with Captain Luis de Torres y Tortolero, three mainland Indians, and five soldiers, Salvatierra set sail for the peninsula. They landed at the site of the present day city of Loreto, which is located on the lower third of the peninsula. Eventually, “This small group formed the basis for a successful settlement and for the establishment of a permanent mestizo/criollo populace in the Californias” (Alvarez Jr., 1987: 19). Within two years of landing, Salvatierra and his compatriots forged a settlement that included about seventy colonists.

Over the next three decades, four missions were built on the cape in the pueblos of La Paz (1720), Santiago (1724), Todos Santos (1733), and San Jose del Cabo (1730). Disease and social conflict, however, threatened these sites almost immediately. “Pestilences,” writes Crosby, “had ravaged every band of the cape’s people” (1994: 111). In addition, the missionaries zealously undermined the cultural and social ways of life of the native populations. One particular campaign against polygamy took place in 1733; this effort generated heavy resistance and enmity from the local Pericú people, and fueled aversion to life in the mission system (Crosby 1994: 111). The missionaries argued that the Pericú were the unwitting victims of devious leaders who immorally took multiple wives (ibid). Syphilis swept across the population, killing females disproportionately, and sending shockwaves through the Pericú social order. Polygamy was a common practice among Pericú leaders, and the missionaries struck at the heart of this custom by actively trying to recruit young women into the mission order (Crosby 1994: 111).

Political leaders and shamans fought back with a vengeance and resentment between the Spanish and native populations grew. At this point, half of the cape region’s population was already dead from epidemics. Rumors of insurrection spread throughout the three southern missions. By October of 1734, two Jesuit padres, two servants, and one guard were killed in the missions at San Jose del Cabo, La Paz, and Santiago (Crosby 1994: 115). All four of the missions were destroyed in the uprising, leaving the Jesuits in a precarious position on the cape. The Jesuits appealed to help from the rest of New Spain, and this brought about a radical shift in the power dynamic of the population. Kino and Salvatierra’s original plan for a mission system controlled by a predominantly theocratic agenda fell apart (Crosby 1994: 129). Ultimately, while the rebellion temporarily freed the native populations in the cape region from missionary control, their situation dramatically degraded shortly thereafter. Plagues continued to decimate the population. More importantly, the power of the Jesuits slowly began to crumble, opening up the region to external populations—many from the northern part of the peninsula—who sought new economic opportunities in the south.

Despite numerous conflicts, the decimation of native populations, and decades of adversity, by 1767 the Jesuits still managed to establish fourteen mission sites throughout Lower California. That was also the same year they were expelled from the New World, in part due to competition from other religious orders and the widespread perception that the Jesuits possessed too much political power. In 1772 the two Californias (which included the present day state of California in the U.S. and the two states of Mexico now known as Baja California and Baja California Sur) were divided into different administrative units due to conflicts between the Dominican and Franciscan orders, who took over control of the missions throughout the Californias. The Franciscans took control of the upper territory of California, leaving the lower part of California under Dominican jurisdiction. This division was formalized in 1804, when the territories were officially split into Alta and Baja California (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). Spain concentrated its efforts on the exploitation of Alta California, while Baja served as a launching point for those efforts. Baja California was not, by any means, a focal point of colonial interest or exploitation for the Spanish (and this continued under the new Mexican state in the 19^th century). This relative lack of attention paved the way for the incursion of foreign interests in the 19th century.

Before moving on, however, we should take note of how the Jesuits inscribed value on the Baja peninsula. The place was clearly located outside the primary interests of the Spanish Empire, yet a few key individuals were driven by their desire to spread their ideologies to new lands, to save new people. In this way, these territories became valuable in a very different way: primarily because they were terra incognita, located outside the civilized, Christianized world. Kino and Salvatierra sought a kind of value that was bound within deep ideological and cultural systems of meaning…but the realization of those values also depended on the actions (as Graeber argues) and work (as Marx tells us) that were required to build the missionary structures and networks. Unlike the earlier Spanish colonists, the Jesuits were not interested primarily in economic or political gain—at least not explicitly. The value of Baja California, for them, rested on a worldview framed in terms of faith, fate, and a zealous sense of duty. It was yet another form of value that arose, coalesced for a short time, and then slowly crumbled—like Cortés’s dreams before—and gave way, eventually, to new values, desires, and hopes in the centuries to come.

THE OTHER CALIFORNIA

In the early 1800s, American, English, and Russian hunters and traders, attracted by the rich sea otter colonies in Baja California, began to establish trade networks along the peninsula. American traders made a base in the San Quintin area (in the northern part of the peninsula), and commerce increased in spite of Spanish efforts to quell the operations (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). After the Mexican Revolution, the newly formed nation of Mexico revived interest in mining as one means of developing its economy and of creating much needed post-war capital. This included willingness to allow foreign investment in mining industries within Mexico (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). Interest and investment in mining on the mainland—primarily by the British—waned by the 1840s. At the same time, however, the otter trade and whaling in Baja California was on the rise, drawing in both American and British whaling fleets. The Mexican-American War, which took place between 1846 and 1848, interrupted this period of increased foreign exploitation of Mexico’s—and Baja California’s—resources.

US President James Polk was intent on expanding the nation’s territorial bounds, and the western territories of California and New Mexico were among his prime targets (McPherson 1988: 49). Polk originally attempted to buy the territories from Mexico, but when the latter refused, he opted to use military force. What Polk and his compatriots really wanted was Upper California, which would not only expand the geographic territory of the US, but also assure control of critical coastal ports, such as San Diego, San Francisco, and Monterey. Lower California was a secondary interest. With the aid of internal insurrection and naval occupation of key ports, the conquest of Upper California was relatively swift. By the end of July 1845, in fact, Polk believed that he had undisputed control of the entirety of the Californias, despite the US military not having stepped foot on the lower peninsula (Chamberlain 1963: 50). The war did finally arrive in Baja California in 1846, when Commander S.F. Dupont sailed into the harbor at La Paz in order to blockade the west coast of Mexico (Chamberlain 1963: 50). There was no resistance from the population at La Paz, which was declared “neutral” by the territorial governor, Colonel Francisco Palacios de Miranda. Undoubtedly, the governor gambled on having picked the winning side (he was later reviled in the histories of Baja California as a cowardly traitor; see Martinez 1960). Dupont then continued on to Loreto, Mulege, and then San Jose del Cabo before heading back to the port of Monterey in Upper California. In 1846, Polk announced to the US congress that the conquest of the Californias was complete (Chamberlain 1963: 51).

The only problem was that US control of certain parts of California—especially Lower California—was tenuous at best. The US secretaries of War and the Navy, along with Commodore Robert F. Stockton, acknowledged this situation (Chamberlain 1963: 51). In February of 1846, Stockton ordered Commander John B. Montgomery to establish a more forceful US presence at the coastal towns of San Jose del Cabo, La Paz, and Cabo San Lucas (ibid). By April 14, all of these ports were “pacified,” along with the pueblo of Loreto. In each of these pueblos, there was little resistance to the US forces. The US flag replaced the Mexican flag in both Loreto and La Paz, and Montgomery granted “all peaceably inclined persons” the rights of US citizens (ibid). Having underestimated resistance, the US left many of these towns with little military protection. This incited repeated complaints from the citizens of San Jose del Cabo, for instance, who appealed for a garrison to protect them from “the rancheros and Mexican troops inland”⁵ (Chamberlain 1963: 51). Open fighting between the US and Mexico erupted with the Battle of Mulege in 1847. By the time of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February of 1848, the territorial conflict over Baja California between the US and Mexico was a draw, at best (Chamberlain 1963: 57). While the US repelled Mexican troops from La Paz, Mulege, and San Jose del Cabo, they held only superficial control of the peninsula, whose inhabitants put up fierce resistance (especially when compared to Upper California).

Baja California remained a part of Mexico, ultimately, because Polk never actually demanded the territory during the formal treaty process. He sent Nicholas Trist to Mexico City to negotiate with General Santa Anna’s government, with the explicit command to secure Upper California and New Mexico, but not Lower California (Chamberlain 1963). If Polk had made Baja California a part of the treaty, is it very likely that it would have become a part of US territory, despite the disputes on the ground. While Trist was in Mexico working on the final treaty terms, the Polk administration actually changed its demands and decided that they did in fact want the peninsula. After realizing the high costs of the war, Polk felt that the US deserved more territory than the original treaty demanded. By the time this change of heart reached Trist in Mexico, however, the original terms had already been agreed upon. While the Mexican government initially put off negotiations with Trist, once they received news of a possible change of terms, they probably did all they could to agree to the original terms (Chamberlain 1963). Thus, a measure of diplomatic blundering and carefully timed obfuscation on the part of the Mexican government probably saved the peninsula for Mexico.

With the onset of the California Gold Rush in 1849, Baja California received considerable domestic and international attention, as many new prospectors, migrants, and travelers arrived in the hope of cashing in on the mineral wealth of the Californias (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 28). In 1857 president Benito Juarez enacted measures that once again loosened restrictions on foreign investment and development in an effort to stabilize the nation’s shaky economy (Meyer el al 2003: 385). The Porfiriato, which lasted from 1877 to 1911, resulted in an even stronger push toward development through foreign capital investment. The trend extended to Baja California as well, and foreign investment was dominated by businesses from the United States. Mining once again gained prominence throughout Mexico, spurred by technological advances (Alvarez, Jr. 1987:31). While mining operations in Baja California increased in number, the peninsula remained in a relatively marginalized position in the larger Mexican economy (Taylor 2001: 464). According to Alvarez, Jr., “As in the colonial and missionary periods, Baja’s main barrier to settlement and development continued to be physical geography” (1987: 32). This daunting geography continued to play a key role in shaping discourses and attitudes about the peninsula for decades to come. However, there were some early hints of a perceptual shift, foreshadowing a dramatic change in how people imagined and valued the landscapes of Baja California Sur. The very same rugged landscape that forestalled “development” and conquest for generations became the attraction for outsiders in search of new experiences in exotic, “natural” places.

UN PAISAJE DEL TURSIMO (A TOURISM LANDSCAPE)

In 1897, Swedish-born Gustav Eisen published a short paper about his explorations of the cape region of Baja California Sur. According to Jane Radcliffe, “Eisen’s interests were numerous and he has been described as a horticulturalist, a biologist, a zoologist, an artist and illustrator, an archaeologist, a viticulturalist, anologist, arborist, microbiologist, cartographer, explorer, and would be considered today to be a pioneer conservationist” (Radcliffe nd). His paper reads, in some senses, as a scientific account, since he describes the temperature, climate, rainfall patterns, watersheds, mountains, geology, and “botanical and zoological features” (Eisen 1897: 278) of the region. It also reads, however, as a tourist travelogue:

No one seemed to know that the southern part of the peninsula of Baja California, the country from La Paz southwards, possessed entirely different features from those of the country northward. And, indeed, when I first arrived there it was a surprise to see that, instead of landing on a barren waste, I had before me a tropical country, with luxuriant vegetation, and with many other attractions, at variance with what I had surmised from the few and scanty descriptions that had been published [Eisen 1897:271].

Eisen traveled to the cape region four times in all; three of those were “under the auspices of the California Academy of Sciences” to explore the landscape and collect faunal specimens (Eisen 1897: 272). He recounts tales of scaling unnamed peaks⁶, notes how suited the clear skies are for astronomical observation, and points out “the finest spring” he has ever seen in San Bartolo.

Eisen laments the lack of “taste for athletic exercise” in Mexico, noting that there is no sierra club, no mountaineering club, and “no desire to enjoy the sublime scenery of the high mountains” (Eisen 1897: 277). He goes on to explain that there was a dismal lack of record of ascents for the highest peaks in the region, and writes this off due to the fact that “the natives are satisfied to look at the mountains from below or to engage in deer-hunts in the more accessible places” (ibid). By the end of his article, the once foreboding natural environment of the southernmost part of Baja California Sur sounds like a paradisiacal natural wonderland. This seems to be an early salvo in a complete revaluation of these once feared and spurned landscapes. About a century later, the Mexican government, along with a cadre of hoteliers and developers, caught onto the economic potential of turning the landscape itself into a lucrative commodity.

In the late 1960s, inspired by the success of coastal tourism destinations such as Acapulco, a team of Mexican bankers, planners, economists, and developers crafted a plan to create five regional coastal tourism destinations. The chosen sites were Cancún, Loreto, Huatulco, Ixtapa, and San Jose del Cabo in the cape region of Baja California Sur (Clancy 2001: 50). These marginal places were suddenly seen as potential sources of tremendous value, precisely because of the shifts in the global economy that were taking place. Middle-class American tourists were the prime target market for this development plan; Mexico sought to create destinations that could compete with the popularity of Caribbean tourist sites (Clancy 2001: 53). San Jose del Cabo was likely chosen, in part, because it was already a favored destination for US expatriate sport fishermen, surfers, and other adventurous travelers who were willing to brave the long, dusty drive down the peninsula in Steinbeck-esque campers, trucks, and Jeeps. These populations, like Eisen before them, contributed to a reconstruction of the cape region as a desirable, valuable destination and romantic frontier for travel and leisure. By literally paving the way for future travelers, tourists, pleasure seekers, investors, and developers, these early migrants mapped new economic social values onto the cape region. This re-mapping or re-imagination of place had powerful economic and material consequences.

These histories lead back to my earlier discussion of the shifting nature of value. If value is, as Graeber argues, the way that society measures the importance of its actions, what do the histories of Baja California Sur tell us? The historical examples I have presented clearly illustrate how the same place may embody very different political, economic, and cultural values and meanings, depending on how it is situated within wider social networks. As the interlinked histories of the humans and landscapes of Baja California Sur show, there is no single way of a place to embody value, meaning, and importance. The social, political, economic, and even metaphysical meanings and values of the cape have all shifted dramatically over time—depending on the perceptions, desires, and expectations that various actors brought with them and the material effects of their actions once they arrived. Value, then, is not just the product of ideology or actions. It is instead a complex, dynamic combination of the two. As Marx suggests, value is the result of dialectical, not dichotomous processes that are ongoing. The importance or value of Baja California Sur has risen—and imploded—because of an ever-changing, unpredictable amalgamation of subjective understandings and very concrete actions.

Today, tourism and development media promote the landscapes and marine environments of Baja California Sur’s cape region as luxurious, high-end destinations for adventure, travel, romance, relaxation, and exploration. These discourses emphasize the natural environment, focusing on everything from the azure waters to isolated beaches and the austere beauty of the desert environment. But the value of these places for mass tourism was only made possible by a change in global travel from the 1960s, along with the rise of middle classes (many of them from the US) who had the time and resources to travel for pleasure (Gmelch 2004: 7). Combined with the earlier actions and experiences of expatriates who literally laid the groundwork for future development in places like Los Cabos, these re-imaginations and reconstructions of place coalesced with concrete actions to turn a once barren, isolated, seemingly treacherous territory into an appealing product, ready for consumption.

Yet, like the historical discourses and ever-shifting imaginaries of the cape region, these conceptualizations of place are not without conflict and contestation. The “progress” of tourism development is not shared by everyone, as the urban colonias just outside of the international airport in San Jose del Cabo so forcefully attest (Lopez et al 2006; Wilson 2008). While many international organizations, individuals, investors, and other stakeholders—including the Mexican government—continue to hedge their bets on this newest imaginary of the peninsula, it remains to be seen whether the benefits are truly “sustainable,” or if this is yet another elusive, romantic vision laden with false dreams and Quixotic values.

REFERENCES

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Anderson, Benedict. 2006[1983] Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things. Arjun Appaduira, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berger, Dina and Andrew Grant Wood. 2010. Holiday in Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press.

Castellanos, M. Bianet. 2010. A Return to Servitude. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chamberlin, Keith. 1963. Nicholas Trist and Baja California. The Pacific Historical Review 32(1): 49-63.

Clancy, Michael. 2001. Exporting Paradise. New York: Pergamon.

Crosby, Harry W. 1994. Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Deloria, Vine. 1985. Custer Died For Your Sins. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Del Río, Ignacio and María Eugenia Altable Fernández. 2000. Breve historia de Baja California Sur. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.

Eisen, Gustav. 1897. Explorations in the Cape Region of Baja California. Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 29(3): 271-280.

Eiss, Paul K., and David Pederson. 2002. Introduction: Values of Value. Cultural Anthropology 17(3): 283-290.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gerhard, Peter. 1956. Pearl Diving in Lower California. 1533-1830. The Pacific Historical Review 25(3): 239-249.

Gmelch, Sharon Bohn. 2004. Tourists and Tourism: A Reader. Long Grove: Waveland Press.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Hart, Keith. 2011. Building a human economy: a question of value? Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36(2): 5-17.

Hiernaux, Daniel Nicolas. 1999. “Cancún Bliss,” In The Tourist City. Denise R. Judd and Susan F. Fainstein, eds. Pp. 124-142. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1958. The Scientific Study of Values and Contemporary Civilization. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102(5): 469-476.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. 1986. The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

López-López, Álvaro, Judith Cukier, and Álvaro Sánchez Crispín. 2006. “Segration of Tourist Space in Los Cabos, Mexico.” Tourism Geographies Vol. 8(4): 359-379.

Martinez, Pablo L. 1960. A History of Lower California. Translated by Ethel Duffy Turner. In: Editorial Baja California, México, D.F.

McPherson, James M. 1988. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Ballantine Books.

Miller, Ryal. 1974. Cortés and the First Attempt to Colonize California. California Historical Quarterly 53(1): 4-16.

Leonard, Irving Albert. 1992. Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-century New World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Radcliffe, Jane. 2010. Biographic Sketch of Gustav Eisen (1847-1947). California Academy of Sciences,  researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/library/special/bios/Eisen.pdf, accessed December 6, 2010.

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West, Paige. 2005. Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology. American Anthropologist 107(4): 632-642.

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NOTES

1 Ryan Anderson is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Kentucky.  His research focuses on the politics of development and tourism in Baja California Sur, Mexico. He is the editor of a collaborative online project anthropologies and blogs at ethnografix, as well as being a contributor to the collective anthropology blog, Savage Minds (For examples related to this paper, see this link, and this one). Ryan first encountered Baja California Sur in 2005 and is currently seeking funds to carry out his doctoral research there.

2 This includes the present day cities and surrounding tourism zones of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo.

3 Compare this with Logan and Molotch’s discussion about the definition of a place within particular political, economic, and cultural systems (1987:43-44).

4 Notice how the abstract notion of “society” plays a key role in the value system of neo-classical economic thought. It is, as Graeber argues, an imagined totality that serves a comparative purpose within a particular system of meaning and politics.

5 Considering the fact that the present day population of Los Cabos has many expatriate migrants from the United States, the allegiance of the town of San Jose del Cabo during the Mexican-American War is of particular interest.

6 These peaks, of course, had to be named: “With the right of every explorer, we have named some of the mountain peaks ascended by us, and which previously had no name. Thus in the El Taste region we named Mt. Troyer and Mt. Molera after members of the California Academy of Sciences” (Eisen 1897: 277).

APPENDIX: A Few Photographs & Notes from Baja California Sur, 2005-2010

Broken metate eroding out of the sand in the very southern portion of the peninsula. There are many archaeological sites throughout the region, which speak to the deep histories of these landscapes. 2009.

Landscape scene taken while driving down Highway One in Baja California Sur. This is the same landscape that repelled conquistadors, missionaries, and many others for centuries. This paved highway, which now runs the length of the peninsula, makes the journey quite a bit easier. 2006.

Guard tower and no trespassing sign, located in the far southern portion of the peninsula. With rising land values and ensuing conflicts over title and tenure, scenes like this have become more and more common. Property owners often hire private security guards to protect their lands against squatters and other possible intruders. 2009.

This is a coastal development site in the southern portion of the peninsula. The sign on the right provides some information about the development. Developers buy lots, and then seek investors by advertising the plans for the project. The most expensive properties on this site were listed at around 600,000 USD, just for the land. Similar properties sold for around 10,000 USD in the 1980s. 2009.

This is one of the main beaches in the Los Cabos tourism zone. Tourists, umbrellas, and hotels fill the landscape. Notice the ropes in front of the umbrellas, which are meant to help separate the tourists from local vendors who seek to sell their wares (hats, watches, jewelry, etc). The spatial segregation like this is very common in the tourism zone. 2009.

A long stretch of beach in a part of the peninsula that is relatively undeveloped at present. This is a perfect example of the type of desert landscape that was considered desolate and of little value by many outsiders for centuries. Today, such austere places attract the imaginations (and money) of a multitude of travelers. A few decades ago, the beaches of Los Cabos looked a little more like this. 2009.

This is a small coastal community at the tip of the peninsula. It is composed of citiziens from both the US and Mexico. Communities like this are increasingly common throughout the peninsula. This portion of the peninsula, which remains relatively undeveloped at present, has some of the most high demand real estate in the region.

This image shows some of the remnants of Baja California Sur’s mining past. This was taken in the inland pueblo of El Triunfo, where mining operations peaked in the late 19th century. 2009.

Fishing has a long history on the peninsula. Archaeological sites clearly illustrate the fac that early inhabitants depended heavily on marine resources. This continues up to the present day, but in some very different ways. Baja California Sur’s oceans host everything from large-scale commercial fishermen and international sport fishermen all the way to small fishing camps like this one, located on the Pacific coast. 2006.

As the traffic up and down the peninsular highway has increased over the years, so have the accidents—many of them fatal. The highway has many roadside shrines and grave markers. This particular shrine is located a short way south of the city of La Paz. 2009.

I mentioned in the main text that many travelers make their way down the peninsula in “Steinbeck-esque” vehicles (many of them from the US). There is a long history of tourists and other travelers making their way down the coast in campers, vans, and off-road trucks in search of everything from waves to marlin. There is, in fact, an interesting sub-culture that has developed around these trips to “Baja.” The above image is one recent example of a long-running phenomenon. 2010.

Malinowski had his tent, and I have mine. The bad part about working in a region that has an increasing amount of high-end tourism is that it is can be pretty expensive to find a place to stay. The good thing, however, is that it’s usually warm enough to set up a tent and camp. 2010.

Viktoryia Kalesnikava
University of Virginia

© 2011 Viktoryia Kalesnikava

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
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YBEMA, S., YANOW, D., WELS, H., & F. KAMSTEEG (Eds.). 2009. Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. Sage Publications Ltd. vii + 287 pages.

Organizations appear bounded in so far as they are considered in terms of rigid structures, fixed hierarchies, and specifically designated spaces. Should they, however, be thought of anthropologically, the substance of everyday life—the contingency of human relations, creativity and failure, humor and irony, fear and desire, etc.—begin to manifest themselves inside organizations, forcing rigid divisions and bounded structures beyond convention, and away from such simple dichotomies as inside/outside, high/low, manager/worker, etc.

A venture by a group of scholars from Vrije University, Amsterdam, this edited volume on “organizational ethnography” lives up to what it says it is: an introduction to an alternative method of conducting organizational studies through the anthropological methodology, ethnography. The volume brings together a wide-ranging combination of contributors: hands-on professionals and managers, consultants, and academic scholars of anthropology, sociology, public policy, and business. Despite the differences in the authors’ backgrounds and styles of presentation, each of the twelve essays here appear to echo and resonate with one another in their central quest as to what an ethnography of organizations look like. Grouped into three thematic parts, the essays also touch upon adjacent issues relating to the writing and doing of ethnography. These thematic areas are the challenges and limitations of ethnographic method, power and representation, and ethics and responsibility.

In their introduction to the book, the editors give a brief overview of the field of organizational studies, and explain the role this volume might play as a “method text” that sets apart ethnography as “constructivist-interpretative perspective” (9) from other positivist approaches common to the organizational studies field. The introductory character of the book suggests a widely targeted audience and interdisciplinary scope. Indeed, the editors promise the book to those both new and experienced in the field, “ranging from advanced undergraduate and graduate students to organizational scholars, researchers, consultants, and analysts”(15). Whether due to its mostly dry prose, numerous typologies, or its “how to” style of representation, this volume, with the exception of a few of the essays, resembles a neatly assembled textbook where all divisions are settled and all gaps reconciled. With that in mind, for what textbooks are worth as introductory tools, I would definitely recommend it as a good classroom guide to ethnographic method. You will find a few challenging intellectual discussions, but you will come upon a variety of interesting ethnographic experiences from the field. And the latter is one of the worthwhile features of the volume. In addition, the volume might serve as an invaluable source of literature in the sphere of organizational ethnography, as it provides extensive references throughout, and concludes with a detailed annotated bibliography.

Whatever innovation this volume might offer to the field of organizational studies, this review specifically focuses on how the authors have adopted ethnography as a research method; what intellectual issues, gaps and anxieties they raise in its regard, including those around trust, truth, authenticity, representation, norms and standards, etc; and finally, how they attempt to reconcile them.

In what follows, I will briefly comment on each of the contributions (not in strict order of appearance in the volume).

Anthropologist Kees van der Waal starts off the first part of the book by depicting ethnography as but a “generic research approach” (24). The story of his own professional conversion from an ‘innocent’ South African ethnologist to a critical organizational ethnographer serves to situate his writing, which defends the importance of theory for the ethnographic method. In doing so, he proceeds to lay out a foundational scheme of steps and list of tentative questions – including issues of access and ethics – to arm oneself upon embarking on the ethnographic project. It is true that if one has never done or read ethnography of any kind (which is arguably difficult to avoid for an anthropologist), this inventory should prove to be useful.

Along the way, my experience of this text was that of reading a practical manual about how to write a grant, or better yet an IRB proposal, or do research: “make realistic goals,” “think of a back-up plan,” “what is your methodology?” “how are you going to store data?” and “how to attend to asymmetrical relations of power in the field?” Separate advice given, which might serve some well, include caution against tying oneself to “obligations to obtain approval of one’s work in order to publish it,” while still offering the “draft publication for comment” (28). One the whole, the ‘manual’ attempted to explain how to ward oneself off a strong feeling of anxiety, when in the field and prior. But in doing so, it failed to point out that however uncomfortable, this anxiety is not a curse against which one needs spells and safety cushions; anxiety is what constitutes the ethnographic moment (See Devereux 1967).

The essay jointly authored by Michael Humphreys, a Professor of Organizational Studies, and Tony Watson, Professor of Organizational Behavior, both from Nottingham University Business School, targets mostly issues related to post-field research, and focuses on the writing-up stage of the ethnographic enterprise. They make, what I find to be, a curious distinction between “writing-up ethnographic research” and “writing ethnography.” This seemed rather limiting and exclusive, but simultaneously a useful heuristic tool on ethnographic styles and various audiences. Unfortunately, rigid exclusions follow throughout, and the authors, among others in the volume, argue for a narrow definition of ethnography that includes “a huge range from doctoral theses converted into extended monographs to short stories, plays and poems” (41).

Putting these differentiations aside, Humphreys and Watson further focus on the topic of ethnographic genres, and create a four-fold typology of ethnographic writing distributed across a “spectrum of truth” (53). Here, truth or validity becomes the measuring rod for the division, which is staged in correlative terms to “what really happened.” As such, they start with what they assume to be straightforward, “plain ethnography,” proceeding to a “semi-fictionalized” description, and conclude with a “fully fictionalized account” (43). The article is more than worthwhile, due to the extensive ethnographic examples given to illustrate the “truth spectrum.” At the same time, fixation on truth as a measure of validity and success, painfully reflects utopian dimensions of holism, and complements Euro-American academic standards of a ‘good’ scientific research and expectations thereof.

The following article by two Political Science scholars, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, resonates with Humphrey and Watson’s piece in its search for what it calls “trustworthy texts.” But if the latter concerns itself with the divisions between the writing and experience, the former focuses on the gap between writing a text and reader/reviewer expectations. In doing so, it sets up a six-tier evaluative criteria of trustworthiness comprised of “specific textual elements” based on the “standards and expectations” of the interpretative “Chicago School-style field research” (57). These, argue Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, aid ethnographers in their attempt to stage readers’ perception of the “overall trustworthiness of the research narrative” (58). As such, the authors claim that trustworthiness suggests a more “appropriate criterion than ‘validity’ […] and the like, as these are rooted firmly in a positivist scientific methodology that rests on the presumption of a real social work[...]” (62). Notably, the focus on trustworthiness in devising methodologies of research can be rendered as an indirect critique of Humphrey and Watson’s essay. This attempt to escape a correlation between the “truth” and representation is laudatory, but it too assumes the singularity of human experience and perception, and hence proceeds to devise strategies and create typologies for “proper” research design. The authors, however, do warn against taking their suggestions in a “checklist fashion,” but rather as a “starting point” of reflection about the “quality of a particular study” (63).

Likewise, Simon Down and Michael Hughes echo the concerns of the previous authors in relation to the authenticity of an account, and focus on the strategies of doing and writing organizational ethnography. Simon Down, a lecturer/researcher, and Michael Hughes, a worker/manager at a coke-making steel plant, jointly co-author an ethnographic account of an “experience of going through a corporate cultural change programme” (84). They do so by positing a concern about representation within the framework of power and ethics of speaking and writing, and attend to the issues of positionality, power, identity and reflexivity inherent to the question of representation á la Foucault and Spivak (1988). In doing so, they largely avoid the question of whether ethnographic subjects can speak for themselves. Accordingly, they frame ethnography in terms of autobiography, where both the researcher and the researched become the objects of study and reflection. In this piece, complexity of emotional engagement with human subjects – whether in the organizational, or research settings, or both – surfaces in the narrative. The authors contend that their co-produced story portrays “organizational life as it is lived.” As such, it does not make claims regarding authenticity of representation, but allows to “avoid the moral and emotional neutrality that social science so confidently claims, so often” (96).

The second and third sections of the book interrogate the classic schizophrenic division in anthropology between self and other, inside and outside, and familiarity and strangeness. They also gear towards questions that relate to ethics and perceived limitations, pertinent to doing ethnography at home.

In their essay, Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg make a case for a “disengaged engaged” approach to organizational ethnography. They argue that ‘going native’ is counterbalanced by the theoretical or intersubjective “distancing,” where the latter is seen as a necessary prerequisite for doing ethnography. If a researcher is already “native” and “at home,” they ask (103), “How do we step back?” Here, the authors argue for cultivating ethnomethodological strategies of surprise and play, and holding onto the mystery and irrationality – such as “breaching intimate relations” with the researched, or movement between scales of focus and research sites – all in order to break with “taken-for-granted understandings” (110). Or perhaps, suggest the authors, ethnographers should stop trying to take themselves so seriously and speak like experts (113). Instead, they argue they should adopt the role of an idiot, or “organizational fool” (Kets de Vries 1990).

Similarly, Davide Nicolini suggests that it is the strategy of improvisation and taking chances that allows for an ethnographic “processual ontology” approach. This type of ethnographic research stands out in the edited volume, as it focuses not on individuals, but rather takes as its main object of study their mundane practice and activity. Such a strategy of following social practice also “partially coincides with multi-sited ethnography,” as it implies shifts in time and space (120). Nicolini illustrates this research method with a four year-long ethnographic research project that he conducted on telemonitoring serious chronic heart failure patients at home. In the process, he studies things and people indirectly, from the side – focusing not on the objects and subjects as such, but rather on the “interactional order” between humans and non-humans (125), on bodies and artifacts and their trajectories, on learning curves of novices and accomplishments of apprentices, “texture of dependencies and references” (128), “following the intermediaries” resources and conditions necessary for practice (130), and “comparing sites of the same practice” (131). As such, the author claims to proceed “rhizomatically,” following connections between things extending in time and space. Notably, such a rhizomatic shifting argues ethnographically against an idea that there is some deeper knowledge underneath, and deep immersion into the field will eventually lead to it. In fact, “zooming in” does not warrant either a deeper understanding or better grasp of organizational practices. Instead, concludes Nicolini, it is attention to the “fragmented, distributed, and fast moving reality” of virtual and multi-layered organizations that yields increased understanding thereof (136).

Contrary to Nicolini, Brian Moeran, an anthropologist with a focus on Business Studies, argues for a complete immersion in the field. Furthermore, he advocates for the “observant participation” where the ethnographer puts participation ahead of observation. Drawing on his own experience in a Japanese advertising agency, he suggests a business model of ethnography that insists on taking advantage of strategic connections to gain access into an organization (141). In doing so, he advises how to properly “make a pitch,” and cautions against taking all what people say as truths. In his account, Moeran also distinguishes observant participation from “traditional” participant observation, critiquing the latter for its limiting focus on holism, inactive approach, and restrictions that it imposes on a researcher in terms of their ability to be fully “incorporated” as a community member (139). This, I argue, results from an overly narrow definition of participant observation and understanding of what it has to offer to the ethnography of organizations.

Chris Sykes and Lesley Treleaven largely echo already raised concerns in relation to organizational ethnography as a method. They suggest a hybrid method theoretically akin to Brian Moeran’s “participant observer” in focusing on “useful” action, also paralleling the co-authored account by Simon Down and Michael Hughes in co-construction of knowledge.

Likewise, Mats Alvesson in his own piece takes issue with both interview-based qualitative research and ethnography, arguing that both are “time consuming,” politically-sensitive, “uneconomical,” and focus too much attention on the “empirical material” at the cost of researcher’s reflexivity and theoretical analysis (159). Instead, he suggests a “new” method of “at-home ethnography,” which, according to Alvesson, is “a study and text in which the researcher-author describes a cultural setting to which s/he has a ‘natural access’ and in which s/he is an active participant” (159). In addition, he argues such an at-home ethnography will not be constrained by staged methodologies and procedures or a-priori chosen research questions, and would be quite convenient in terms of exercise and economical in expense (163). Alvesson’s concerns largely resonate with the earlier discussed account by Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg, who attempt to break away from the constraint of familiarity, by creating critical distance through irony and the cultivation of surprise as it lends itself to reflexivity and recursiveness.

The final piece of the volume, co-authored by Halleh Ghorashi and Harry Wels, resonates well with the concerns of reflexivity. As such it focuses on what seems to be an oxymoron, the “complicity of engaged research.” The authors contend that we, researchers and our informants, are always already embedded in disciplinary power and structures of violence, and hence without reflexivity and critical awareness easily slip into the normalized modes of moral and political legitimacy. The authors give a liberally utopian and vague answer: to take responsibility by engaging with “all players in the configuration of power” (231), regardless of prior divisions and allocated roles, thus “contributing to a more just world” (247).

Similarly, Gary Alan Fine and David Shulman concern themselves with ethical issues that inevitably accompany any human interaction, including that in organizations. More specifically, they claim that any organizational fieldworker is guilty of “lies” s/he inevitably tells before, in and after the field. These lies ordinarily are hidden behind numerous representational techniques and strategies. “Such antiseptic accounts,” argue the authors with an air of moral righteousness, “cost readers and practitioners, offering an incomplete account of the practical ethical dilemmas” (177). Their piece, however, suggests two virtuous contributions. One the one hand, the authors lay bare the constraints and limitations that most of the ethnographers face due to their conditions of research, the demands of academic standards, IRB requirements, and discursive norms (178), thus dispelling the myth of a liberally “virtuous” ethnographer. On the other hand, it also combats an illusion of giving neat and holistic ethnographic accounts. Instead, the authors argue, “each ethnography tells a tale of multiple sites – the field site and the sites of the interventions of colleagues, mentors, reviewers and publishers.” And of course ethnographers tell lies, conclude the authors, “but through lying we also present truths about organizations that escape those who are not so bold” (192).

Finally, Nic Beech, Paul Hibbert, Robert MacIntosh and Peter McInnes support the conclusions of Fine and Shulman, and address the question of friendship relations in field research and beyond. Illustrated with extensive ethnographic cases, the authors uphold the fact that ethical concerns always arise as researchers are embedded in a multiples locations and relations at once. However, these concerns are rather mundane in the course of social life, so why one needs to reify these in the context of a fieldwork. Friendships do get breached and compromised, but they are also sustained and cherished.

As a matter of conclusion, I wonder what the central preoccupations of the authors of the book – representation, truth, trustworthiness, authenticity, lying, reception, academic standards, and criteria of measurement – are symptomatic of? These issues are a concern for anthropologists as well, especially since the 1980s turn of “writing culture.” But in this case, I suspect, the anxiety has to do with the fact that organizational studies, a discipline with its own established methodologies and canons of legitimacy, has adopted a methodology foreign to it, especially the one that empirically interrogates the truth of received wisdom. Instead of attempting to suture them, they would do well to explore and exploit the gaps that the ethnographic method creates and makes visible in order to question received knowledge and truths, for this is very value and virtue of ethnography. Empiricism gives the researcher something to reflect upon. To be open to truth means questioning received ones. That is good scientific method.

In summary, the volume offers a fine introduction to interdisciplinary research, and makes a considerable effort to bridge anthropology and organizational studies, or rather enriching and extending the latter by borrowing the ethnographic method from the former. As such, it largely succeeds, and additionally gathers many useful references pertinent to both. At the same time, a general genre of the organizational ethnography situated largely in interpretative-constructivist approach that this book participates in, however innovative to the field of organizational studies is not to most anthropologists. Despite this, the book is of tremendous value precisely because of its reformulation of classic and perennial issues and problems of ethnography in a new setting, suggesting fertile ground for discussions in and outside the ivory tower. This is more than enough reason to assign the book for both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Mallika Shakya
University of Pretoria

© 2011 Mallika Shakya

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HART, K. LAVILLE, J-L and A.D. CATTANI (2010) The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Polity Press: Cambridge UK and Massachusetts, xvi + 370 pages.

Neoliberalism has been wounded, but it is not yet defeated,’ say Keith Hart and his co-authors. In calling for a human economy project, they assert that, unlike the dominant paradigm which views human beings as homo economicus operating under a mechanised framework of rational choice, economy is made and remade by people’s actions as social beings and the fine balance between an individual’s need for self-reliance and belonging to others must be brought back to contemporary economic thinking. This vision of human economy underscores a democratic political drive to overcome the unnecessary divide between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism,’ both of which tell us only part of what is going on in an economy.

In what should essential reading for scholars who engage with the philosophy of economics, Hart et al highlight three facets of neoliberalism. First, an economic doctrine that evolved very much as an Anglophone phenomenon now openly claims universal application. This volume reflects a realisation that non-Anglophone economic thinking from France, Latin America and Scandinavia – often lost in translation in an increasingly anglicised world – needs to be brought back into the global mainstream. Second, the financial crisis made it clear for all to see that the ideology of ‘free market’ superiority is just so much hype. For millennia, economy was conceived of in domestic terms as ‘household management’ of personal incomes, expenses, servants, loans and repayments. Its overstretched usage to apply the principle to whole nations became untenable during the financial meltdown when the “financial ‘masters of the universe’ quickly brought out the begging bowl and in some cases had to suffer nationalisation,” and governments who once preached the free market gospel, desperately embraced Keynesian remedies with all the inflationary risks involved. Third, linked to the rise and fall of geographical and ideological hegemonies, the editors identify a need to build a global civil society, rising above the socialist-capitalist divide, and drawing on the work of anti-colonial intellectuals like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James, who expressed an aspiration to make their own independent relationship to the colonialism of the twentieth century.

A new ‘new institutional economics’ is proposed, to be formed out of anthropology, sociology, political economy, economic philosophy and world history. This would be the product of an extended international collaboration that cuts not only across disciplines, but also geography and languages. The Human Economy traces its origin to the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, and draws on earlier publications in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, all called Dictionary of the Other Economy. This version combines Jean-Louis Laville’s work on economie solidaire (1997) with Keith Hart’s seminal idea of the informal economy. On offer are thirty two chapters organised under five broad headers as: World Society, Economics with a Human Face, Moral Politics, Beyond Market and State and New Directions.

What is globalization? One aspect is the unprecedented rise of world-wide networks that heighten possibilities of collaboration in all walks of life. However, globalization has not necessarily worked for the poor, nor has it worked for the environment. In their chapter, Golub and Maréchal rightly attribute this to failure to identify and preserve global public goods which cannot be produced through capitalist markets. They call for a new architecture of global governance that respects democracy in both structure and spirit. Existing global institutions have shifted their focus from development to a neoliberal fixation on free capital flows, echoing the paradigm shift in the world order from the East-West conflict of the Cold War to a North-South divide, as is manifested most explicitly in the Washington Consensus (the chapter by Merrien and Mendy). The word ‘development’ itself has turned into a label for political relations between rich and poor countries after colonial empire. As the former shirk their responsibility for the latter’s economic improvement, development has become merely a means of legitimising the reproduction of inequality across the globe. One alternative proposed is what Pleyers calls ‘alter-globalisation,’ which critiques the neoliberal regime in three ways: through citizens’ and experts’ advocacy networks, renewed calls for local action and lending moral support to progressive regimes around the world.

The Human Economy’s call for action is also a call to revisit the theoretical foundations of economics. Who could argue against the aim to put our common affairs on a rational footing? For over a century now, however, economic gain has come to trump prudence in a trend that must lead to a critical debate over theory. Economic actions range between two poles of meaning: at one end an atomized rationality mobilizes scarce resources for unlimited needs, while at the other broader social considerations come into play. Neoclassical economics’ concern only with the former sense is conceptually erroneous and its political dominance runs the risk of undermining democracy and provoking extreme social reactions. This danger is apparent on several fronts: ecology, feminism, social entrepreneurship, fair trade, labour relations, microcredit and the informal economy. Effective answers require an economic pluralism expressed through many political and social forms.

The section on Moral Politics continues the line that economic thinking either needs redefinition or underplaying. For example, how are ideas of citizenship and welfare compatible with economic supremacy over politics? Is corporate social responsibility a neoliberal victory that blurs the distinction between states and corporations, thus placing one set of citizens above others on grounds of wealth? Caillé’s discussion of ‘gift’ again picks up the inadequacy of market principles to define the human economy. The point of Mauss’s seminal essay written just under a century ago on was that economic transactions have an inherent social logic behind them. Gifts are self-interested but they also carry reasons for alliance and disinterestedness. Here the anti-utilitarian paradigm may support the idea of economie solidaire which addresses plural interests over both the profit motive and universal class action (Jean-Louis Laville). Gift undermines the clear-cut opposition between pure charity and self-interest or between the market and associations. The gift paradigm also implies that dialectical continuities between the two sides may also be inverted. In this sense, a society is never complete as a construction; instead it evolves in a continuous process of making and remaking meaning.

Hann offers ethnographic evidence for this: he juxtaposes Malinowski’s account of Trobriand Islanders to Thompson’s idea of moral economy among English workers. Both accounts contradict Adam Smith’s opposition of self-interest to morality as well as the Marxist utopia of class solidarity. Further, how are we to make sense of the Indian caste system which evidently places merchants below kings and priests? This complex division of labour is prescribed and maintained on the basis of ritual purity even though India has historically been a fiercely competitive society. It is true that this ancient hierarchy has undergone substantial changes today, but caste ideology continues to exercise a hegemony that does not necessarily conflict with the profit motive for Indians.

While this book collectively identifies major obstacles to humanising economics, straightforward answers to go about this task are not readily available from the varied chapters, except for the assertion that substantive interests must be given play over formal considerations in economies that are essentially local and self-reliant. This resembles an approach to development by the bootstraps where societies must have inductive freedom to find their own balance between self-interest and morality in developing an economic framework of their own. Such a process must emancipate the theory of economics from an atomic rational assumption of what human beings are, and release them from existing methodological, geographic and linguistic hegemonies. Thus, the book suitably ends by charting out new directions for engagement.

Banking Nature?
The financialisation of environmental conservation¹

Sian Sullivan²
Birkbeck College, London

© 2011 Sian Sullivan

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In addressing the challenge of achieving global sustainability, we must apply the basic principles of business. This means running “Earth Incorporated” with a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account.

Statement by Maurice Strong, Secretary General at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in a 1996 lecture to the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, Seoul.³ Currently reproduced on the website for EKO Asset Management Partners (www.ekoamp.com), a ‘merchant bank’ for environmental markets.⁴

A recent special issue of the journal Antipode on capitalism and conservation,⁵ introduced and edited by Daniel Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy, traces how what they call a capitalist ‘conservationist mode of production’ is emerging through consolidated alliances between business and environmental conservation. Alongside other key texts,⁶ they emphasise the sustained effort on the part of conservation organisations to recruit business to the environmental cause. Coupled with this is a systemic revisioning of environmental sustainability as a new frontier for capital expansion and revenue growth,⁷ and of markets as the realm through which environmental damage can best be mediated, mitigated and governed. As such, the current combination of environmental and financial meltdowns are being constructed explicitly as creating business and investment opportunities in ‘sustainability’.

Brockington and Duffy assert additionally, however, that ‘[c]onservation has hardly been involved in the production of value through financialisation’.⁸ Financialisation is the process whereby finance comes to dominate other activities in the economy. In post-manufacturing economies, financialisation has come to be the primary engine of economic growth and expansion, generating accumulation through financialisation, even as other economic areas are stagnating.⁹

My perception differs from Brockington and Duffy in that I think the contexts briefly described above actually are ushering in an intense financialisation of environmental governance for conservation, combined in part with the financialisation of environmental risk.¹⁰ And interestingly, in recent months several academic opportunities have appeared seeking to research precisely this.¹¹

I think of the financialisation of environmental conservation as taking two key forms. First, is the turning of banks and financiers to environmental parameters as a locus for expansion and investment. Second, is the modelling of both conservation practice and understandings of non-human natures in terms of banking and financial concepts. These are taking place in the context of two paradoxes. First, while it would seem that recent financial crisis should signal that finance markets had reached some sort of expansionary limit, subsequent bailouts with public money suggest instead that finance has been substantially reinforced, both in resources and in the power to command legitimising strategies by national governments¹² Second, while apparent environmental crisis might be interpreted as signalling a developmental crisis of capitalism – aka James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ whereby capitalism putatively undermines its own possibilities for accumulation by depleting its required material and metabolic base¹³ – it is instead becoming an accumulation frontier for capitalism, precisely through relationships with finance and capital investment. Both financial and environmental crises thus are entwined in ways that strengthen, rather than reduce, the power of finance capital.

As Jason Moore writes, the consequent emerging ‘financialisation’ of environmental crisis and protection extends ‘the penetration of finance into everyday life, and above all into the reproduction of extra-human nature’ as a key feature of capitalism in its current guise as neoliberalism.¹⁴ As such, financialisation has critical structuring effects in all realms of life, composing new and resistant socionatures¹⁵ It is thus ripe for anthropological study. New layers of financialisation pose challenges for the sustenance of local ecological knowledges and ‘biocultural diversities’. They rationalise human and non-human natures to conform with a particular economic system that privileges price over other values, and profit-oriented market exchanges over the distributive and sustainable logics of other economic systems.¹⁶ And by assuming people to be individual utility-maximisers and private property to be the norm, they are simplifying cultural diversity and arguably are contributing to critical transformations of biological, linguistic, cultural and epistemological diversities globally.¹⁷

This paper is an attempt to both delineate and theorise some of these effects in the arena of environmental conservation. It is structured into four remaining sections. First, I draw attention to the ways that environmental crisis and conservation are being created as a spectacular frontier for capital investment. I follow Anna Tsing¹⁸ who observes that ‘the self-conscious making of a spectacle is a necessary aid to gathering investment funds’ and ‘a regular feature of the search for finance capital’, and I detail several ways that finance capital, in collaboration with conservation agendas, is constructing such a spectacular frontier in environmental conservation. In the next section I offer a brief survey of the emerging financialisation of environmental conservation. I focus on four aspects of this process: the production of nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives. My third section constitutes a theorisation of these entwined phenomena. I apply current thinking regarding the continuous nature of primitive accumulation as delineated by Marx, to explain the impetus towards investment in the new frontier of environmental conservation and to consider its likely effects. I follow this with a Foucaultian framing of the current financialisation of environmental conservation as extending the technical and biopolitical entraining of environmental governance to the controlling tenets of neoliberal capitalism. I close with a brief conclusion.

Creating the spectacular new frontier of environmental conservation

Source: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/cms_documents/2008_StateofVoluntaryCarbonMarket.4.pdf

For finance to ‘operationalise’ the accumulation opportunity of environmental crisis and conservation, products and commodities connecting these domains need to be created that permit new investment, trade and speculation. As Martin O’Connor writes in the 1990s, nature needs to be ‘capitalised’ and ‘capital ecologized’ in new ways.¹⁹

Or, to paraphrase Morgan Robertson’s recent work²⁰ capital needs to create new natures that it can see. This requires that the earth-in-crisis is rethought and reworded such that it is brought further into alignment, conceptually, semiotically, and materially, with capital.

The attraction of financial investment to the creation of both new products and new markets for the profitable exchange of these products, requires the spectacular creation of an investment frontier. Tsing notes that new investment frontiers are made through the productive use of spectacle, requiring combinations of dramatic performance, as well as of conjuring tricks in the opening up of unforeseen possibilities. As she states, ‘the more spectacular the conjuring, the more possible an investment frenzy’.²¹ Speculators conjure potential to create commodity bubbles attractive to investors, which although often based on multiple layers of product abstraction can have significant social and material effects. The spectacular frontier of environmental conservation is no different and I want to highlight three mutually reinforcing mechanisms of its creation.

First, are the repetitive utterances of the spectacular financial returns deemed possible through the exchange of new environmental conservation products. Since ecological economist Robert Costanza and colleagues famously estimated the annual ‘value’ globally of ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ to be $16-54 trillion, affirmations of nature’s dollar value have proliferated.²² Costanza et al. were attempting to draw attention to ways that exclusion of environmental factors as externalities in conventional economic analyses misrepresented the cost of environmental impacts of development activities. This has been rapidly transformed, however, into an optimistic embrace of the returns that might be captured if this ‘value’ of environmental externalities can be priced and traded. Statements now abound of the spectacular promise of new markets in products intending to signify environmental degradation and conservation, in terms of returns to both investors/traders and to ‘the environment’. The environmental consultancy firm Advanced Conservation Strategies states on its website, for example, that ‘[b]y 2030, Carbon will be the largest commodity market in the world: $1.6-2.4 trillion, about the same as the current oil market’,²³ and it is easy to find many such assertions of the potential dollar value of emerging commodities that are based on some appeal to environmental conservation.

The promise of this new equation of nature with money is marked by the proliferation of powerful images conveying nature as money. As shown below, for example, a 2007-8 UNEP and IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) document on payments for ecosystem services (PES) features an image of verdant green foliage amongst which various currency notes appear as ‘leaves’.²⁴ This is echoed in the 2009 logo of the United Nation’s Environment Programme’s (UNEP) current New Green Deal initiative, which depicts a delicate young green plant, shooting up from a pile of Euro coins.²⁵ Bombardment by text and images displaying a unitary discourse that nature’s value can be captured adequately through application of money’s signs, is a powerfully manipulative means of marketing, and thereby composing, this ‘reality’.

Sources: http://www.unep.ch/etb/areas/ pdf/IPES_IUCNbrochure.pdf; http://www.unep.org/greeneconomy

This constitutes the opening of a new investment frontier. For this fledgeling frontier to grow, i.e. to attract more interest and investment, it needs to become pregnant with promise. In the financialised world of environmental conservation, this second aspect of frontier creation is constituted by the conjuring of a spectacularly proliferating range of new products and trading possibilities. These are based on unforeseen abstractions of non-human nature and the consequent opening up of new niches for investment. Key to this is the infinite substitutability posited by the notion of a global environment as a sort of abstract ‘global ledger’ that can be essentialised into new definable and exchangeable parts, permitting offsetting trades in newly commoditised measures of environmental health and degradation.

This is made possible through two key interconnected routes. First, is the creation of increasingly derived tradable products through the addition of layers of abstraction to commoditised signifiers of nature health and degradation. Second, is the constructing of tradable equivalence between previously non-exchangeable entities and distant localities. This conceptual mechanism releases any brakes on the creation of environmental conservation commodities that can be traded between localities.

Until recently, for example, the possibility of an emerging global trade in carbon emissions, would have seemed strange and surreal. This is now entrenched and familiar. The market trade in carbon manifests in various ways, significant ones being: 1. trade in the ‘free gift’²⁶ to industrial emitters of government allocated emissions quotas (i.e. ‘carbon credits’) (e.g. under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (UE ETS)); and 2. purchase of standing biomass (normally in the global south), which, under expansionary carbon accounting practices such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, www.un-redd.org), increasingly is becoming conceived as carbon ‘sinks’ for the voluntary ‘offsetting’, or dumping, of carbon emitted elsewhere.²⁷

Within the international policy frame that opens the possibility of this trade (the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)), work to create and stake claims to carbon has been conducted by ‘[b]rokers, consultants, carbon procurement funds, hedge fund managers and other buyers’, who have ‘scoured the globe for opportunities to buy credits associated with projects that reduce emissions in developing countries’.²⁸ Conservation and Policy²⁹ and current heat over REDD, is indicative of policy and business excitement over the potentially lucrative linkage of carbon offsets with the carbon stored in standing biomass. An accompanying array of derivative products increases possibilities for greater financial returns on this trade, extending its reach into the complex and intractable realm of ‘mad money’³⁰ associated with derivatives trading, hedge funds and futures markets. Stock exchanges existing only to service trade in carbon products now exist in London (www.ecx.eu) and Chicago (www.chicagoclimatex.com), and are emerging in Montreal (www.mcex.ca), China (www.chinatcx.com.cn), and Australia (www.envex.com.au). The organisation running these exchanges, Climate Exchange Plc (www.climateexchangeplc.com), is itself a company whose shares are listed and traded on the London Stock Exchange, recently purchased for US$ 395 million by the US-based energy and futures trader InterContinental Exchange (ICE).³¹

This proliferating trade in carbon products naturalises an idea critical for enhancing investment and trading possibilities at the conservation frontier. This is of the equivalence and substitutability of very different ‘things’ and ‘environments’, via essentialising reductions to a defined environmental measure, in this case the element of carbon. The carbon offset trade conceptually enables carbon production as one thing (e.g. industrial emissions) in one location, to be ‘offset’ against its storage in another qualitatively different thing (e.g. tropical forests) in another location. Through this the earth becomes conjured as a carbon matrix in which all production and activity is reduced to the concentration and exchange of the element of carbon. This innovation permits unintuitive conflations, as well as having profound implications for local socio-ecologies.

The possibility of using market exchanges to offset environmental damage in one location through investment in some measure of environmental conservation or restoration in another location, now is a feature of global environmental governance. Equivalent and accompanying offset trades are emerging in additional measures of biodiversity and habitat health. These are being pursued in collaborations between corporations, major environmental organisations and government regulators, to facilitate emergence of an array of new environmental offset commodities and exchanges (outlined further below). The mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, for example, is working with Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in Madagascar to create biodiversity offset schemes whereby the impacts of mining in one location will be ‘paid for’ by investing in biodiversity conservation in a different location.³² As such, biodiversity offsets bring what has been termed ‘the ultimate anti-commodity’, i.e. biodiversity, into the mitigation banking market³³ such that ‘clearing of native vegetation may be allowed if offsets are established elsewhere in the landscape’.³⁴

Ecologically then, these are designed to enable habitat loss through extractive industry. Geographically, they constitute a radical discounting of cultural and biophysical place-based specificities. What they do permit is a bringing forth of proliferating layers of possible finance accumulation through the bundling together of different environmental products that, as they are distinguished and capitalised, can begin to be banked, offset and traded in combination with each other. Bekessy and Wintle³⁵ make plain this opportunity in suggesting that carbon offsetters (i.e. investors in carbon sequestration landscapes), also might accrue biodiversity credits ‘when the biodiversity benefits of a carbon-sequestration project can be demonstrated’.

Accompaniment by spectacularly dramatic performances and mediated presentations of environmental crisis, of the nature treasures that require conservation, and of conservation performance constitutes a third impetus in creating the frontier of environmental conservation investment. These combine to compose an environmental and conservation spectacle that both sets the scene for investment in environmental conservation, and acts to engender particular human and non-human natures as well as relationships between them.³⁶ The lucrative and proliferating investment frontier of trade in environmental conservation products thus is set against, and justified through, spectacular marketing of nature loss and value, and of conservation endeavour and conservationists.³⁷

The recently released film Hotspots, made by the mega-ENGO Conservation International under the direction of celebrity conservation biologist Russell Mittermeir, brilliantly illustrates this production of conservation as spectacle.³⁸ The trailer spectacularly dramatises conservation work, using tropes of treasure, rarity and the exotic in signifying global localities of high biodiversity, and of crisis and threat in specifying the urgency of conservation work. This sets the scene for entrance of the story’s leading actors: the heroic, predominantly white and male, conservation biologists, whose work is a military-style operation featuring long lensed cameras, helicopters, camouflage fatigues, a racy soundtrack and machismo. The cinematic experience thereby generated is similar to that of Hollywood portrayals of contemporary US military engagement in ‘Third World’ frontiers, echoing, for example, Apocalypse now (Vietnam) and Black hawk down (Somalia). The trailer closes with a deep male voice-over describing the protection of hotspots as ‘the mother of all wars’. But alongside fighting to protect nature’s treasures, CI is systematising its productive collaborations with corporate and financial worlds. It is run by a board of directors consisting largely of CEOs and other representatives from businesses such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks.³⁹ It works with business and finance⁴⁰ to seek offsetting solutions for industrial impacts in particular locations, as well as to realise conservation capital through monetising lands owned or purchased by corporations that exhibit newly priced ‘ecosystems services’.⁴¹ The dramatisation of natural history, environmental crisis and capitalist conservation endeavour, is further performed and orchestrated through spectacular events such as at the four-yearly IUCN World Conservation Congress⁴² and the biannual Wildscreen natural history film festival in the UK.⁴³ At these meetings, corporate-conservation networks and empowered understandings of conservation issues and interventions are produced and reinforced.

As with any frontier of capital expansion, this created frontier of environmental conservation is making possible the penetration of finance into the ensuing new spaces for investment. It accompanies and is accompanied by a modelling and conceptualisation of nature using banking categories to produce a proliferating range of new nature products that can be easily aligned with finance. I outline these entwined components of nature’s financialisation in the following section, focusing on the categories of nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives.

Banking nature

Nature Finance

The movement of financial investment into the world of environmental conservation and governance is the most direct means of conservation financialisation. Several tendencies are indicative of this movement and I outline a few of these here.

First, is a notable presence of new investment funds offering products and services linked with discourses and indices of environmental conservation and sustainability. The investment fund EKO Asset Management Partners, for example, is

… a specialized investment firm focused on discovering and monetizing unrealized or unrecognized environmental assets… in short, a “merchant bank” for the world of environmental markets.⁴⁴

EKO’s investors hail from the world of haute finance and include James Wolfensohn, 9th president of the World Bank Group, as well as Lord Jacob Rothschild and Alexander and Ben Goldsmith of the Rothschild and Goldsmiths banking dynasties.⁴⁵ Elsewhere on their website they state that EKO’s approach is to:

stimulate the development of environmental markets’ through aligning ‘smart capital with people, projects, and companies that are poised to profit from emerging markets for ecosystem services, whether they be markets for carbon, for water quality, or for biodiversity.⁴⁶

Investments are oriented towards, for example, towards:

land with undeveloped or unrecognized environmental assets with a view to developing these assets and profiting from their sale in emerging environmental markets’.⁴⁷

Source: http://www.ekoamp.com/

The investment fund ‘Inflection Point Capital Management’, has a slightly different focus but environmental sustainability is emphasised as key for investment choices. The fund’s website describes it as ‘the world’s first multi-strategy asset management boutique offering exclusively sustainability-enhanced investment products across a broad range of asset classes’.⁴⁸ The fund-managers identify ‘recent market meltdown as a multi-trillion dollar “advertorial” for sustainability-enhanced approaches’,⁴⁹ and aim to increase the ‘sustainability alpha premium’⁵⁰ of company performance through incorporating proxy measures of ‘sustainability performance’ into investment practices, based on the proprietary database developed by associated company Innovest.

Source: http://www.inflectionpointcm.com/

This fund is headed by Matthew Kiernan, acclaimed author of Investing in a Sustainable World: Why Green is the New Colour of Money on Wall Street⁵¹ former President of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and regular speaker at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. The cover of Kiernan’s book displays a blue-green earth, half of which is subsumed by gleaming American quarter-dollar coins; an image echoing painted representations of the globe used in the 1500s and 1600s to depict the new commodity trades then bolstering an emerging European mercantile class.

Through work for JPMorgan via his previous company Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Kiernan has been associated with the creation of index-linked corporate bonds, ‘designed to enable credit investors to make return-driven investment decisions that systematically take into account the risks and opportunities created by global warming’.⁵² Thus, ‘[u]sing Innovest’s proprietary database and applying an exacting methodology, [the] JENI [carbon-beta index] overweights the securities of issuers judged to have relatively lower risk due to climate change, and underweights issuers with relatively higher risks’.⁵³ Risk here is related to a firm’s ‘carbon intensity’ (its vulnerability in the context of climate change and carbon regulation), with the index intending to signal firms preferable for investment in relation to carbon reductions, as well as those vulnerable to climate-change associated risks.

It is being proposed that index-linked carbon bonds might also be issued by governments, such that ‘interest payments [from government to investors] are linked to the actual greenhouse gas emissions of the issuing country against published targets’.⁵⁴ This would enable investors to hedge against the risk of a government not meeting its carbon commitments, such that investors would receive ‘an excess return if the issuing country’s emissions are above the government’s published target’, and vice versa.⁵⁵ The rationale is that the issuing government then has an additional incentive to make sure national emissions targets are met, because this will enable them to pay lower interest rates to bonds issued to investors. Investors in turn would provide governments with cheaper debt as long as governments meet their emissions targets. The important point is the implication that private sector ‘green financiers’ would then be governing, or at least disciplining, governments on their carbon/climate policies, via the incentives built into the bond structure. This structurally shifts the locus of responsibility for global environmental outcomes into the incentivising domain of investment finance, and further entangles possibilities for emissions reductions with other competing domains of investment.⁵⁶

Conventional banks also are turning their investment practices towards substantially integrating environmental ‘assets’ into lending. The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility of the World Bank is supporting forest-rich countries of the global south to enter the global offsetting trade in carbon.⁵⁷ The European Investment Bank is working with the University of Stirling’s Management School to ‘design markets for ecosystem service delivery’ (or ‘eco-delivery’ as they call it).⁵⁸ Multilateral development banks, themselves increasingly making private sector investments that go towards financial intermediaries and private equity funds,⁵⁹ are being encouraged to ‘partner countries to sustain their natural capital’, through integrating mapped and monetised ‘ecosystem services’ in all bank ‘strategic direction-setting, investment, and advisory services’.⁶⁰ An interpretation of these moves, consistent with the thesis that financialisation currently is driving accumulation, is that large bank lenders are financialising their own investment practices (through lending to private sector finance), at the same time as encouraging the increasing financialisation of environmental management and conservation.

This moves us into the next layer I want to draw attention to, which is the creation of nature as a ‘service-provider’ and the production of billable ‘nature work’.

Nature Work

Source: http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/home04.html

A significant conceptual move enabling the financialisation of conserved non-human nature, is the construction of nature as a ‘service-provider’. Conservation biologists have been using the language of ecosystem services since the 1970s.⁶¹ The 2005 publication of the influential United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), which highlights human-generated change of the biosphere, overwhelmingly uses this language in speaking of the non-human world.⁶² More recently, the Deputy Head of the Species Programme of the IUCN has stated that ‘[i]t’s time to recognize that nature is the largest company on Earth working for the benefit of 100 percent of humankind – and it’s doing it for free’.⁶³

In combination, this language creates non-human nature as a company that needs to be acknowledged for the service work that it does. Of course, any ensuing payments do not actually go to nature, but to the people who are able to capture them. What becomes significant then are questions of what nature work is able to become billable, and of who, via enforceable property rights signalling ownership, becomes able to capture the revenue arising from payments for this billable work.

The growing discourse on payments for ecosystem services (PES) both creates, and attempts to resolve, precisely these questions. The key idea here is that those wanting and/or requiring the ‘service’ of environmental health should pay those dwelling in the landscapes in which these ‘services’ are located. These flows and ‘cascades’ of services and payments⁶⁴ can be seen most clearly in the case of downstream water users paying upstream users to maintain water flow and/or quality.⁶⁵

Given both the location of valued ecosystems in the ‘global south’, accompanied by need for their services in the industrialised ‘global north’, payments from north to south for service maintenance by the south for the north increasingly are being posited as a means of producing win-win sustainability (i.e. conservation and economic development) scenarios.⁶⁶ The result has been an urgent requirement to measure, assess, standardise and disaggregate nature into new ‘goods and service categories’, combined with measures of their health and/or degradation and the assigning of monetary prices to these measures⁶⁷

This is being done via rapid ecological assessment and economic valuation techniques. The latter rely heavily on contingent valuation or estimates of ‘willingness to pay’, the validity of which has received intense criticism within economics.⁶⁸ Ecosystem service valuation projected from unit values (dollar estimates of economic value on a per-unit basis) derived from particular use and non-use values measured at specific sites, also is often arrived at via the practice of ‘benefit transfer’. This parallels the conceptual convenience, as noted above, of the substitutability or correspondence between different locations, by permitting the transfer of ‘economic value estimates from one location to a similar site in another location’, an assumption and practice that again can produce a number of transfer errors.⁶⁹

Through investment combined with regulatory and legislative support, these valuation techniques are permitting creation of an array of new markets in the environmental service products represented by the measurements they generate. They are ushering in an enormous systematic and competitive effort to measure, catalogue, dissect and ‘value’, i.e. price, nature’s ‘goods and services’, via an emerging ‘ecoinformatics’ that entrains mapping, measuring and monetisation techniques to produce combined ecosystems services catalogues, applicable from local to global scales. The table below provides examples of four such current and massive ecosystem services valuation initiatives.

Details of four current major global ‘eco-informatics’ initiatives to map and price ecosystem services.

All this effort constitutes a systematic ushering in of a new large-scale economic-environmental science so as to bring into focus a world of measured and ‘valued’ ecosystem services or ‘nature work’. The collaborative (and competitive) investment in complex ‘ecoinformatics’ approaches is connecting and entraining ecological and economics data so as to create ‘value’ at various ecosystem scales. It parallels capital investment in bioinformatics at the scale of molecular biology, or ‘accumulation by molecularisation’ as Nally puts it.⁷⁴ In combination these moves into both large and small scales of nature are working to permit consolidation of claims to domains (and inventions) of life, and as such to ‘expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation via so-called “extra-economic” means’.⁷⁵

PES thus capitalises landscapes such that they can be brought into global markets in various new ways. The creation of billable nature work also is radically reframing inhabitants of service-producing landscapes as service-maintainers for consumers elsewhere in the global ledger of environmental services. The implications for those dwelling in landscapes newly priced for their ecosystem service functions are profound. This can be seen in proposals that local people might mortgage the environmental values newly associated with local landscapes so as to provide income for local development. The suggestion here is that communities in low income nations finance poverty alleviation and economic development through offering newly monetised ‘environmental assets’ as collateral for ‘environmental mortgages’. These would be loans offered by international environmental investors that are linked to measures of the state of an ‘environmental asset’.⁷⁶ They would contribute ‘debt-based investment’, i.e. that ‘capitalizes environmental assets locally and makes that capital available to local communities through collateralized lending, microfinance approaches, and access to affordable financial services’, thereby ‘providing access to affordable financial services in exchange for environmental stewardship’.⁷⁷ In these proposals, then, sustained ecosystem services as newly priced nature values are to be used as collateral for loans so that people of the ‘south’ – or the ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ as the business community likes to frame them⁷⁸ – can be brought further into the global monetary economy. Complex questions arise of who then possesses or has governing powers over the collateral (particularly in the case of default), and of how the pricing of local ecologies intersects with other socially embedded culture:nature values.

Nature Banking

Accompanying creation of nature as billable service-provider, is an increasingly hegemonic conceptualisation of the health and degradation of nature’s services as dependent on the underlying stock of nature as ‘natural capital’. Nature itself is becoming conceived as a bank account, as noted in the statement opening this paper, that ‘Earth Incorporated’ will only be sustainable if run as ‘a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account’.⁷⁹ This has been taken seriously by the UN/EU project on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), headed by Pavan Sukdhev – a career banker from Deutsche Bank. The latest TEEB initiative is establishment of a website called The Bank of Natural Capital. This represents environmental issues in a rather standard current bank account format with pages for ‘Current Account’, ‘Natural Capital’, ‘Ecosystem Services’, ‘Stocks and Investment’, and ‘Advice and Guidance’.

Source: http://bankofnaturalcapital.com/ Accessed 5 March 2011.

Unsurprisingly then, ‘nature banks’, managed by nature bankers, are emerging as key management structures in environmental governance for conservation.⁸⁰ By creating the nature that capital can see,⁸¹ in part through capitalising the service work that it is deemed to do, and in tandem with formalised property rights, landowners (private or collective) can thereby become nature entrepreneurs: they can capitalise on the new nature prices attaching to the ‘nature assets’ associated with the monetised and thus billable service work accruing to defined land areas. Forms of ‘nature banking’ now are prominent in the US and Australia, and this approach is gaining traction elsewhere. An array of ‘wetland mitigation banks’, for example, exists in the US. These enable landowners to realise ‘value’ through maintaining wetland ecosystems by entering into financial exchanges with developers intending to degrade wetlands elsewhere, and accompanied by permitting and regulating legislation.⁸² ‘Species banking’ has proliferated in recent years, particularly in the US (e.g. see www.speciesbanking.com),⁸³ allowing trade in species credits to mitigate development impacts on protected species. Biodiversity banking (or ‘biobanking’) now is advocated such that ‘[a]ccrued investment [by landowners in biodiversity] could be sold to a party wishing to liquidate an equivalent amount and quality of vegetation elsewhere in the landscape’.⁸⁴ And the UK now is entering the environmental mitigation banking arena, with recent announcement of its first conservation credit scheme to be facilitated by The Environment Bank Ltd. (www.environmentbank.com)⁸⁵ within a conservative policy discourse that considers a future biobanking industry to be worth billions.⁸⁶ The nature banking and offset market approach has been advocated particularly strongly by the Katoomba Group, ‘an international network of individuals working to promote, and improve capacity related to, markets and payments for ecosystem services (PES)’,⁸⁷ and whose online ‘Ecosystem Marketplace’ (www.ecosystemmarketplace.com) provides market information to facilitate transactions.

Private investment is promoted as the source of funds to facilitate the creation and structuring of nature banks and the ensuing mitigation banking market. The Ecosystem Marketplace’s former Director and co-founder in fact is now a partner and co-founder of EKO Asset Management Partners, the merchant bank mentioned above established precisely to invest in – i.e. to capitalise – new markets in new environmental products.⁸⁸ The consequent attaching of prices to nature’s ‘services’ permits the banking of these new nature values by those who own land and whose ownership is protected by property law. The mission of the US Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets thus is to ‘focus on scientifically rigorous and economically sound methods for quantifying carbon, air and water quality, wetlands, and endangered species benefits in an effort to facilitate the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in emerging ecosystem markets’.⁸⁹ In combination, then, the process serves to add and bank more monetary value to that which already is able to enter a market exchange; i.e. to that which already is formally owned (discussed further below).

Nature Derivatives

I have noted above the proliferation of increasingly derived carbon products as a constitutive aspect of the expanding frontier of conservation commodity markets. The creation of similarly derived environmental-financial products, or ‘nature derivatives’, in additional environmental domains is a burgeoning feature of financialisation of environmental conservation for lucrative management of environmental risk and scarcity.

A recent paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, for example, proposes the creation of ‘biodiversity derivatives’.⁹⁰ A derivative contract ‘is a bet as to whether the value of the underlying security, which might be a stock, bond, or financial index, will increase or decrease by a specified date’.⁹¹ These contracts permit businesses to ‘hedge against the occurrence of unpredictable adverse events’.⁹² As such, they are associated with the construction of risk as a tradable commodity,⁹³ at the same time as also permitting speculative returns based on the chances of the derivatives contract itself.⁹⁴ In recent years, derivative creation has extended into the turbulent realms associated with unpredictable atmospheric, oceanic and biospheric dynamics, permitting the direct hedging and trading of environmental contingencies in capital markets, as superbly described and theorised by Melinda Cooper.⁹⁵ For biodiversity derivatives, the suggestion is that the market be used to reduce the costs of conservation, by applying derivatives to the risk of species extinction. The proposal is that ‘governments issue modified derivatives contracts to sell species’ extinction risk to market investors and stakeholders’, as a means of providing incentive structures that take ‘full advantage of the market to reduce costs in conservation’.⁹⁶ This, it is argued, will align the interests of conservationists, governments and landowners, by making species presence more valuable to landowners than modifying habitat through development. Contracts would be priced on current interest rates and the probability of a payout or default due to species decline below an agreed threshold. If triggered through species decline, the principal paid by investors would be made available for remediation and recovery of the species in advance of being placed on an endangered species list.⁹⁷ Biodiversity derivatives based on risk of species extinction would be akin to insurance derivatives, ‘issued with modifications to allow responsible action to decrease the likelihood of the insured event’ (i.e. extinction of a species) so as to encourage ‘social change that is incentivized through market forces’.⁹⁸

This transferring of derivatives logic to the domain of species survival seems strange. Futures exchanges might help stabilise prices for storable commodities by balancing sellers’ hopes for rising prices with buyers’ desire for the opposite. But it seems perverse to transform the value of species survival into prices whose rise or fall is entangled with bets on the likelihood of their being susceptible to their irreversible loss, underscored by a situation whereby species value rises with rarity, i.e. with greater risk of extinction. Susan Strange notes that gambling on prices creates ‘heightened volatility’. Is this what is wanted for species presence?⁹⁹ Mandel et al. argue, however, that through issuing a derivative whose value is based on species decline, and ‘[i]f the trading of species derivatives were responsibly permitted’, then ‘those who do not currently incorporate a conservation ethic into their economic decisions would stand to profit from a change in behaviour towards environmental stewardship’.¹⁰⁰ This, of course, is a classic neoliberal suggestion to design, invest in, and legislate for market-based incentives to manipulate behaviours through appealing to the economic self-interest of those with protected land tenure.

Proposals such as this act to enhance the ways in which environmental change, itself indelibly and inequitably entwined with human activity, can become ‘a speculative opportunity like any other in a market hungry for critical events’.¹⁰¹ They are rationalising nature dynamics to fit the dynamics of human constructed financial markets, permitting the assigning of tradable prices to the unstorable commodities of essentially unknowable futures.¹⁰² So whilst the production of nature work and nature banking, as described above, is rendering nature into a new ‘mass of standardized, qualitatively indifferent exchange values’,¹⁰³ financialisation here is extending possibilities for nature’s speculative release into the realm of circulating money in its new universal form of derivatives. This derivative realm ‘challenge[s] the idea that the circulation of money must be anchored in some fundamental, underlying value’,¹⁰⁴ whilst at the same time binding nature’s dynamics, and associated wealth-making possibilities, to the influence of financial investment in other commodities. The innovative conceptual alignment of nature change with derivative finance products acts to materially enhance the fortunes of investors and their associated impacts, whilst shifting the locus of decision-making power regarding environmental governance to the realm of finance and the speculative expectations governing futures markets. It is capturing a nature of unpredictable flows and dynamism such that these are able to circulate as money – as a nature ‘on the move’ as Bram Büscher calls it¹⁰⁵ – the power and material effects of which are concealed through the abstract and seemingly virtual milieu of its movement.

The environmentality of ‘earth incorporated’? Theoretical gestures

The above documents the transformation of conserved nature into discrete ‘billable hours’ and bankable assets, whose release onto markets in varied forms and at different scales is constituting an expanding investment frontier. The novel and frequently opaque ecology of associated and intersecting terms and concepts on which this frontier feeds, constitute an emergent and systemic wave of semiotic¹⁰⁶ and material enclosure of ‘the global environment’. It is creating a new ‘product range’ of complex, virtual and mobile nature products, to produce a ‘derivative nature’¹⁰⁷, which while increasingly abstract nonetheless has significant material effects. In what remains I theorise these phenomena through two key and complementary theoretical lenses: that of Marxian primitive accumulation, and of the consolidation of Foucaultian bio-political governmentality in the realm of socio-environmental management.

On contemporary primitive accumulation

Primitive accumulation is the drive of capital and its protagonists to both create and capture the forms of capitalist value that underscore all subsequent relations of production and exchange. For Marx, the two critical enclosures are of land as property, and human activity as labour, the creation of which required the historical separation of each from the other, or the disembedding of people from land-entwined social relations, as Polanyi puts it.¹⁰⁸ Other scholars have highlighted additional historical primitive accumulations as integral to capitalist strategy, together with the ideational changes required and effected in bending nature in situ, as well as human life and bodies, into the commodity form.¹⁰⁹

The accumulations of productive forces that are not a priori manufactured for sale, all require, and are mirrored by, significant and frequently radical, i.e. onto-epistemologically unintuitive, conceptual transformations. New commodity fictions need to be imagined for them to manifest; and the commodity fantasies that become discursively and materially prominent are those privileged by empowered socio-political structures, which in modernity are associated with imperial and patriarchal adventure. In relation to non-human natures, the radical application of a notion of absolute private property to land areas, and a rejection of prior values, access or use rights by those dwelling there, underscores all subsequent commodity creation. Land itself becomes capital that can be owned absolutely: the monetary value of which can rise and fall in relation to other commodities, and the exchange of which can occur at a distance with money as symbolic medium and measure of value. In combination, land and human activity are transformed from subject to object, thereby permitting their reification as tradable commodities.¹¹⁰ Viewed through the onto-epistemological lens of non-capitalist cultures, whether historic or contemporary, such conceptualisations can be a nonsense. Instead it might make more common sense to think that land ‘owns’ people,¹¹¹ or at least is animated by myriad other practices of relationship, value and ethical requirements.¹¹²

Marx states additionally that ‘[a]s soon as capitalist production is on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation [of labour from the means of capitalist production], but reproduces it on a continually extending scale‘.¹¹³ Massimo de Angelis refers to this as the ontological, as opposed to historical, condition of capitalist production, to describe the continuous creation, capture and enforced possession of new commodities that permit capital’s recursive accumulation.¹¹⁴ Many other authors have stressed this continuous nature of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, from Rosa Luxemburg writing in 1913, to David Harvey writing in 2010. Recent analyses of primitive accumulation that see its historical shape as present in contemporary circumstances globally, thus frame the process as ‘continuous’,¹¹⁶ ‘permanent’,¹¹⁷ and ‘contemporary’.¹¹⁸ As Silvia Federici, maintains, ‘primitive accumulation has been a universal process in every phase of capitalist development’, re-launching ‘similar strategies in the face of every major capitalist crisis’.¹¹⁹

Historically and today, rises in capital ‘values’ for land increase the possibility for enhanced money rents, and strengthen desires by land-owners to expropriate land-dwellers, thus ‘releasing’ their availability as labour.¹²⁰ The current proliferation of new nature values and tradable commodities for environmental conservation, as outlined above, can be understood as a similar and significant wave of primitive accumulation in these terms. They are structuring nature into the reified and exchangeable commodity form in previously unthought ways,¹²¹ at the same time as creating additional ways of bringing diverse peoples into the global market in service to these new commodity forms. As such, they are consistent with maintaining a political economic (and cultural) system in which ‘only production-for-market… [is] defined as a value-creating activity’,¹²² a movement which seems likely to discount and displace other value practices and and diversities.¹²³

The environmentality of ‘Earth Incorporated’

Whilst not discounting the hybrid ‘uses’ and manifestations of neoliberal policies in environmental domains,¹²⁴ the myriad policies and practices described above arguably become clearer given their consistency with the globally hegemonic governmentality, or even ‘culture complex’,¹²⁵ of neoliberalism. Here I draw inspiration from Foucault in two ways: to highlight the practices delineating and thereby composing the natures that can be managed and traded as ‘Earth Incorporated’; and to emphasise the ‘bootstrapping’ biopolitical gestalt of the empowered ‘truth regime’ of the market, in both shaping and being reinforced by these natures.

Foucault emphasised that new regimes of governance are structured and bolstered by new social sciences, which iteratively also enable new techniques of management and administration that concord with the episteme of modernity. At the time of the rise of the bourgeois class and the Age of Reason in Europe, for example, he makes much of the accompanying presence of a novel bourgeois spirit that partitions, makes distinctions, classifies, codifies and calculates.¹²⁶ He is talking here about the body; and about the new social sciences that helped to construct, subject, manage and accumulate the body as a utility-maximising ‘body-machine’, as well as to rationalise and administrate bodies as populations.

In the contemporary arena of primitive accumulation in association with neoliberal environmental governance, my suggestion is that we are bearing witness to an intense extension of these tendencies into socio-ecological domains. Through ecosystem service science, nature, like the body, is being made conceptually docile. It is becoming ‘caught in a [new] system of subjection’, whereby its productive characteristics are further ‘calculated, organized, technically thought’ and ‘invested with power relations’.¹²⁷ As with the new sciences of demography, nutrition etc. that make possible the administrations of the modern era and which involved the application of accounting to social relations, currently we are witnessing the similar and apparently depoliticised application of accounting to socio-environmental relations. Like the human body, and the body-politic of populations, nature as service-provider and store of capital is ‘entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’, thus bending and releasing its immanent forces towards economic utility.¹²⁸ In these new ecological accounting practices for environmental conservation, the very necessity of conceptualising ecosystems in terms that lend themselves to the disaggregation of measures amenable to monetisation contracts ecological understanding and may hamper conservation outcomes.¹²⁹ In further transforming and accumulating ‘Nature’s’ exceeding immanence into ‘work powers’, the animated, embodied and sentient world that may be experienced by non-capitalist rationalities is of necessity erased.¹³⁰ Nature’s operations are made ‘intelligible and controllable’, ‘void of any intrinsic teleology’¹³¹ or agency.¹³² As such, human nature is rendered deaf but in apparent authority over a mirroring mute and intractably distinct non-human nature.

Alvehus and Spicer¹³³ note that an increasing experience of work as financialised ‘billable hours’ is a classic strategy of workplace control. Similarly, the ‘micro-physics of power’ operating in the multiplicitous moments and institutional apparatuses of ecosystem service science is strategically training socio-environment relations into those of Earth Incorporated,¹³⁴ creating nature as both usefully productive and utterly subdued in the process. Disaggregation of environmental turbulence into financial products that capture environmental unpredictability into the circulating and derivative commodity form, similarly flattens nature’s life and dynamism through ‘writing’ these as finance.¹³⁵

Foucault’s more recently published work, particularly his lectures of 1978-79 on biopolitics, published in English in 2008, is critically illuminating in this respect.¹³⁶ In this, he draws to the fore the socio-political fact of the ‘truth regime’ of the market under liberalism; and the corresponding necessity of working to create the governing incentivising and regulatory structures that allow for the ‘free market’s’ need for ‘frugal government’. As Martin O’Connor has also noted, ‘[t]he logic of the marketplace states plainly that all capitals will realize their “full value” only by insertion within the sphere of exchange value. Under the doctrine of utility maximisation, their best use will be signaled by price: they should always go to the highest bidder’.¹³⁷ Muradian, Corbera, Pascual, Kosoy and May describe how this naturalisation of capitalist ‘free markets’ also is rationalised by a Coasean institutional economics that assumes the emergence of social and environmental optima through the incentivised bargaining of those with private property allocations.¹³⁸

These conspire to produce a ‘governmentality’ that ironically requires intense government and public engagement to facilitate the construction and regulation of the incentive structures that discipline individual and corporate behaviour, to conform with the logic of the ‘free market’. This, as Noel Castree notes, is ‘the paradoxical need for “free” markets to be managed’.¹³⁹ In understanding neoliberalism to take hold as governmentality, i.e. to be both reinforced and hybridised through multiplicitous yet patterned acts and practices of governance, participation and resistance, it becomes possible to notice how similar practices are unfolding as the ‘truths’ of contemporary environmental governance. Robert Fletcher, in a recent article in Conservation and Society, thus extends the notion of governmentality to highlight the governing incentive structures associated with environmental governance for environmental conservation under neoliberal logics, as well as the different environmentalities associated with other governing logics.¹⁴⁰ In embracing the truth regime of the market, the art of government in relation to ‘environmental conservation’ of necessity will be the environmentality of Earth Incorporated: the accepted participation of all environmental concerns in the logic the market, such that they become framed, traded, banked and circulated as capital.

The nature of the beast?

Current rationalisations and monetisations of nature in terms of the disaggregated, commodified and banked services that ‘it’ provides, constitute a new mechanisation of nature management to satisfy discourses of efficiency in the realm of environmental conservation;¹⁴¹ whilst maintaining accumulation as ‘the engine which powers growth under the capitalist [conservationist] mode of production’.¹⁴² The enhanced separation of human from non-human worlds that this permits makes possible further transformations of nature from subject into object, constituting a significant new layer in the reification of nature as an object consisting of many objects. Nature’s agency is foundationally discounted,¹⁴³ and human:non-human relationships become further disciplined into master-slave or doctor-patient configurations.¹⁴⁴ Nature is reconstituted as ‘service-provider’ for humanity, and people dwelling in landscapes now valued for their ecosystem services are transformed into the labour needed to maintain these services (or are displaced). To paraphrase Sassen, vast regions of the world are being repositioned and territorialised as sites for capitalised global ecosystem services conservation and supply.¹⁴⁵

All these market-based innovations are being effected to accord with the desirable objective of promoting nature’s conservation. But surely there is a fallacy at the heart of these conceptual and technical strategies to incentivise environmentally ethical behaviour via the design of commodity markets and associated financialised trading activity? This is that ‘the market’ does not in and of itself embody or produce virtuous behaviour. The market does not care. And given a political economic system based on the ‘permanently revolutionary force’ of capital accumulation,¹⁴⁶ it seems problematic to assume that it is only the correct design of markets, e.g. through pricing mechanisms, that will prevent the manifestation of nature losses. What is being promoted here is a valuing of nature as money, not of nature’s immanence or sentience, or as a communicative community of which we as humans are one of many companions. And since the ‘free-market’ is an emergent property of the competitive dance of multiple commodity prices, exchanges and other asymmetries and influencing factors, there is nothing intrinsic to this system to uphold the prices of environmental health relative to unpredictably shifting prices of other commodities.

It is pertinent to remember Polanyi’s description of the transformation of land into the commodity form as ‘perhaps the wierdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors’.¹⁴⁷ Currently we are in the midst of an equivalently revolutionary shift in empowered ideas regarding a global geography of non-human natures and associated cultural diversities. While these build on extant understandings of land as commodity and of private property, they extend these in radical ways to release new nature ‘values’ that can be traded, invested in and speculated on via conversion into the commodity form. To paraphrase Marx,¹⁴⁸ once again, a ‘new social soul’ is popping into the body of nature; as the non-human world becomes enclosed, conceptually, economically and legally, into new nature products, and as human and non-natures become reoriented around the emerging environmentality of Earth Incorporated. It seems to me that perhaps the composing of humane, healthy, equitable and diverse socio-ecological relationships instead requires moving in an entirely different direction: towards conceptualising and embodying socio-environmental realities that connect human and non-human ecologies without the always mediating and structuring sign of money. Opening up such possibilities is a task that anthropologist are particularly well-placed to embrace.

NOTES

Ritual Murder?

Jean La Fontaine
London School of Economics

© 2011 Jean La Fontaine

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Ritual murder is a phrase used by many people but what does it actually mean, or imply? To remind you – ritual is a religious performance and embodies authority; its aim is public, the personnel that perform it and, ideally, their actions, are specified and cannot be varied without weakening its efficacy.¹ Its aim benefits those for whom it is performed. Ritual concerns the sacred and it is a truism of anthropology that it also invokes the highest cultural legitimacy, activating spiritual powers, whether they be of gods, spirits, or ancestors, in order to achieve a beneficent result.

Murder is, by contrast, immoral and illegal; it is an act carried out in secret that attracts a severe penalty. In all societies killing human beings is subject to some form of regulation that define what is illegitimate killing, that is to say murder.² Murder commonly pollutes the murderer who must be ritually cleansed; the victim’s kin incur the duty to seek vengeance or compensation. In Western i.e. Christian doctrine all killing is wrong: thou shalt not kill; in other societies there may be exceptions to a general rule. These exceptions generally designate categories of person who are virtually rendered non-human by their exclusion. Killing them is not murder. In Bugisu, where I first worked, sorcerers and homosexuals were excluded in this way; killing them was not murder and entailed no blood guilt. Murder then is the opposite of a religious act; it is the prototype of illegitimate action. Murder performed as part of a ritual implies the existence of religious acts which are not legitimate and which are, like murder, illicit and morally wrong. Ritual murder is thus an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms and for any anthropologist this requires investigation.

Several forms of killing may also be referred to as ritual murder. There is also a common synonym, human sacrifice, which is used in much the same sense. What the killings seem to have in common is a link to the realm of spiritual power. One of the aims of this paper is to compare these concepts and show that whereas human sacrifice involved real killings, ritual murder is a much more shadowy concept, invoked often enough to describe grisly events or denigrate particular communities, but never pinned down by reliable evidence. In fact, as I shall argue, the idea of ritual murder is just that, an idea that in Britain represents the epitome of evil and which denotes the alien nature of other people outside what may be known as “the civilised world” or, worse still, the horror of the evil within. In this respect it resembles witchcraft. I shall come back to this.

While it is sometimes said that academics are too prone to spend their time arguing about definitions and distinctions I would argue that such discussions frequently lead to clarification of ideas and this is my aim here. In my approach though, I follow the French historian Muchembled who wrote of the risk carried by an analysis of ideas without taking into account their social context; this is the risk that “the investigator will describe his own mental processes rather than the subject of his research” (Muchembled 1960:141). That he wrote this in an article about witchcraft makes his remarks even more relevant. To avoid this risk I shall consider try to give at least some of the social context of the relevant ethnography.

The impetus to write this paper was given by the reactions evoked by a film in the television series, Dispatches, which some of you may have seen. It concerned a series of murders in Uganda that were referred to both as ritual murder and as human sacrifice, although I would argue that they were neither. This set various anthropologists, myself included, against the film-makers who can be said to represent the general (British) public, although I am aware that journalists are usually believed to be more sceptical than most people.

Professor Pat Caplan wrote an article about this controversy for Anthropology Today (26 (2) 4-7) which provides a useful summary of what happened. The cause of this major disagreement between film-makers and anthropologists was the alleged existence of a rapid increase of killings, particularly of children, who were murdered and then mutilated. It was this that was referred to as “child sacrifice” or ritual murder. In support of their view the film-makers relied heavily on a man who confessed to having killed 70 individuals but to have reformed. He claimed to be mounting a campaign against child sacrifice. Most of the anthropologists did not believe him, recognising the type of Christian leader whose conversion gains added lustre from the contrast with the blackness of former sin, and considering what people say as weak evidence without reliable information on what they do or have done. While the film-makers reported that they had been told by reliable witnesses of multiple killings and mutilations, a Ugandan anthropologist from Makerere referred to the situation as “hysteria” and linked it to the popularity of Nigerian (Nollywood) films in which such killings feature. A series of fairly heated emails were exchanged most of which found their way to Adam Kuper’s London Review of Books blog.

Caplan’s aim was not to decide either way but to discuss the two main topics she thought had been raised by the controversy: the first concerned “the interpretation of witchcraft and other forms of alleged ritual killings in contemporary Africa …” while the second, which I shall not consider, had to do with the media and what she calls ‘public anthropology’. She argued that anthropologists are inclined to interpret allegations of witchcraft as ideas and moral values in the classical tradition, implying that this leads them to deny the reality of such beliefs. She does not spell out whether she means that they deny that people actually are witches or that what they do works. She points out that, in an alternative view of ‘occult phenomena’: “some anthropologists working in Africa have accepted that there has indeed been an increase in allegations of witchcraft, but also in its material manifestations, including killing and the removal of body parts….” Here killing for body parts is identified with witchcraft; the other material manifestations are not specified. So, not only is there a dispute between anthropologists and the journalists about what is going on in Africa but there are opposed views among anthropologists. I shall try and show that this situation is in part a confusion of terminology.

I turn now to what we know about killings that are linked with beliefs in occult phenomena and I start with human sacrifice.

Human sacrifice

The killing of a living creature as a ritual offering to a god or spirit used to be termed a blood sacrifice, an old-fashioned term that focuses attention on the spilling of blood. The blood may be important, less in itself, than as a manifestation of the dispatch of a victim’s life as offering to the spiritual being or beings to whom the ritual is addressed. Usually a return is expected in the form of good fortune, whether generalised or as the granting of a particular prayer. Blood sacrifice might also be used to cleanse sufferers from sin, prevent misfortune or failure and avert evil. In some cases the blood spilled was human.

However, not all sacrifices entail the spilling of blood; victims were killed in other ways and in some societies, and on some occasions, it was actually important not to spill the victim’s blood. The reference to blood has been dropped now and we consider sacrifice in general. This is a part of rituals in many parts of the world, though usually the offering takes the form of an animal or even a bird. Most anthropologists in the field in Africa have seen at least one of these sacrifices, usually involving a chicken or a goat. The more valued the creature sacrificed, the greater the honour done the recipient of the offering.³

The most valuable of all life is that of a human being and human sacrifice, where it occurred, was the greatest possible ritual gift. Human sacrifice has been recorded in many parts of the world although, as historians have pointed out, executions and other killings of human beings have sometimes been wrongly interpreted as human sacrifice (Wilks cited in Law 1985). The most famous example is perhaps that of the Aztecs, whose human sacrifice allegedly consisted of a heart taken from a living victim.

There is evidence that human sacrifice took place in antiquity in societies, including some in what is now Britain, bordering the Roman and Greek Empires, whose members sacrificed only animals and birds. Rituals including it have been described by outside observers. In Central America the practice of human sacrifice among the Aztecs and Incas was recorded by the invading Spaniards in early modern times and in parts of Africa by the Europeans who came first as traders and then as colonisers. There is most information on human sacrifice in Africa where it has been described in relatively recent times by travellers, missionaries and by officials of the colonising powers, so I will draw largely on that material as summarised in a useful article by the historian Robin Law.⁴ There is no doubt that this killing took place as part of public rituals and was considered legitimate.

In Africa, human sacrifice was a practice largely confined to some kingdoms of West Africa, such as Asante, Benin, Dahomey, Calabar and the riverine Ibo, although disregard of human life was much more widespread.⁵ Human beings were sacrificed as offerings to gods and to the dead, particularly dead kings and other elite forbears. In the West African kingdom of Dahomey, a regular ritual of remembrance offered to dead kings, known as the Annual Customs, required the sacrifice of human victims to strengthen the dead rulers’ spiritual powers and by showing the filial piety, engage them on behalf of his successor. It also demonstrated the mundane power of the ruler and the legitimacy of his position (Law 1985), the former function being explicitly recognised by one such ruler, King Kpengla of Dahomey, who explained succinctly the need for human sacrifice to a European enquirer in the 1780s as follows: “You have seen me kill many men at the Customs. This gives a grandeur to my Customs, far beyond the display of fine things which I buy. This makes my enemies fear me and gives me a name in the bush.”⁶

In West Africa, as in ancient China and elsewhere, funerals might entail the killing of human beings to accompany the dead. A great ruler might be buried with his wives and/or members of his entourage to provide him with a suitable retinue in the afterlife. The individuals who were killed were not, strictly speaking, sacrificed, since they were not killed as offerings either to the gods or the spirit of the dead king or ruler. Moreover it is alleged in some cases that the close associates of the dead man volunteered to die, much as Indian widows were traditionally expected to commit suicide on the funeral pyre of their dead husband⁷. Nevertheless, the term human sacrifice may be used to refer to these practices, since the additional deaths were an integral part of the funeral ritual. In parts of West Africa, individuals might also be killed as messengers to the dead in addition to the normal human sacrifices. Fear of the approaching colonial powers resulted in many human sacrifices to avert military disaster.

Killings as offerings to the dead may not seem to Westerners to be sacrifices, in that they are not offerings to gods. However in many African religions, ancestors are holy beings, with spiritual powers to reward or punish their descendants. There may be some recognition of a vaguely conceptualised creator god but as a remote deity, uninterested in human affairs; the ancestors are usually the spirits to whom one appeals for help in trouble. Thus in Dahomey when human sacrifices were made “to water the graves of the ancestors” they were as much part of their religion as other religious festivals. Hence we may call these sacrifices and where the victim was human they were human sacrifices.

Two patterns among the selection of victims can be seen. The victim for sacrifice may be chosen either as a particularly pure or valuable human being: a child, a virgin or a young warrior; alternatively the opposite choice is made; the victim is an outsider: captive, representative of a defeated enemy, or a slave. Slaves might also be bought to be sacrificed, thus avoiding the need to kill a member of the community. However, where the tally of captives and slaves was inadequate, victims might be taken by force from among them.

The Greeks and Romans offered blood sacrifices to their gods but they were never human sacrifices, although both they and the Greeks kept slaves whom they might have sacrificed. In fact the Romans characterised some societies on the margins of their empires as barbarians because they did perform human sacrifices. The failure to draw a distinction between human beings and animals which the existence of human sacrifice implied, was to both Greeks and Romans clear evidence of the lack of civilisation of those people who practised it. Those they conquered, such as the tribes in what is now Britain, were strongly discouraged from the practice. In the early centuries of the Christian Era from which this information comes there were increasing number of Christians within the Roman Empire who believed that the death of Jesus was “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world”⁸ and it rendered any sacrifice, not merely unnecessary, but a failure of faith. Pagans who offered sacrifices to their gods were barbarians. Thus sacrifice and in particular, what was sacrificed, was a powerful symbol for both communities, dividing them and justifying to each the inferiority of the other.

Human sacrifice is no longer practised, even in those societies where it used to be part of the traditional religious rites. Apart from the disapproval of the Romans, the spread of Christianity in territories taken as colonies by European powers, starting with Spain and Portugal in southern America in early modern times, have rendered it immoral and illegal in many areas where it used to be practised. Islam, spreading southwards from North Africa into Africa south of the Sahara, put an end to the practice in the north of many West African states and further colonisation by the European powers in the nineteenth century has forcibly ended the practice in the southern areas⁹. There may be talk of its revival in independent West African states where it has only been a century or so since the practice was stopped, but the stories are, so far, only unconfirmed rumours. There has been no public revival of the practice. But people persist in associating Africa with human sacrifice. Since the practice is abhorred in Britain it is also seen as ritual murder.

There are also practices that are sometimes confused with human sacrifice or considered to be necessarily linked to it. Cannibalism is not an inevitable consequence of human sacrifice nor are the victims dismembered for use in some other way, although the Aztecs were reputed to eat the hearts of human sacrifices. Some peoples, in many different parts of the world – the Ijo of West Africa are an example – ate parts of their dead enemies as a means of magically taking over their strength. Marshall Sahlins describes with some gusto similar practices in Fiji (Anthropology Today 19 (3) 3-5). Such practices have been referred to as ritual cannibalism, since they have magical and spiritual connotations to the participants. However, in Africa, although animal sacrifices were normally eaten at the end of a ritual, in a feast whose participants were carefully selected for their relation to the spirit (usually an ancestor) in whose honour the sacrifice had been offered, human sacrifices were not eaten. Speaking generally, cannibalism, even as a ritual, was always much less frequent than human sacrifice.

The rationale for eating human sacrificial victims or enemies who had been killed in battle, was that power was thought to be inherent in parts of the human body, even after death. The same belief lies behind the use of body parts in ‘medicines’¹⁰ records of which in Africa go back as far as the 17th century. These ‘medicines’ are magical concoctions but their purposes are purely secular; they are put together by specialists, who charge for their services and they purport to ensure success, wealth and the confounding of enemies. The magicians often referred to as witchdoctors may employ killers to obtain what they need or may kill themselves. The use of human body parts is said to give the ‘muti’ very great power. This is a form of magic or sorcery, concocted in secrecy for the benefit of the sorcerer’s client and of course to increase the renown and wealth of the magician. Universally stigmatised as ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ the practice has nevertheless been reported widely in Africa.

The early records of this ‘medicine’ came from West Africa but it probably occurred elsewhere as well. In modern times, from the end of the twentieth century to the present, murders for the purpose of making medicine (the South African term muti may be used) have been reported in large numbers from South Africa and from much of East Africa. The murders of albino Tanzanians for ‘muti’ were widely publicised in the international press. The acquisition of body parts does not always require killing. Some unfortunate victims have been left alive after limbs have been severed.

The “child sacrifices” in Uganda were killings for such magical purposes. The police reported that some corpses lacked limbs or organs. (Killing was not always necessary; in Kenya recently two men have been arrested for dealing in body parts obtained from a crematorium). But murders for body parts are not offerings to any god or spirit but killings for gain: both the client who orders and the magician/ sorcerer who prepares the ‘medicine’ profit by the death. While the belief in the power of human body parts may be called magical thinking, as can the idea that albino body parts have greater power than normal African ones, the killing is not part of any ritual. Children and young people may be chosen as victims more often because of their purity and the potential for growth in their bodies, but their selection may be simply the more mundane one of greater ease of capture. We do not know, as everything about these ‘medicine’ killings is secret until the mutilated body is found. Whereas human sacrifice was performed openly and as part of rituals that were believed to benefit the community, these murders are furtive and hidden, fuelled by individual ambitions and the lust for wealth and power. They are manifestations of continuing belief in the power of magic (or sorcery if you prefer) but not of witchcraft which has never rested on material proof except the misfortunes that are, with hindsight, attributed to it. Killings for ‘muti’ are openly condemned by members of the communities where they take place but they are not human sacrifices or even ritual murders.

Ritual murder

If ritual murder is not human sacrifice or killing to obtain ingredients for powerful magic, what is it? The term implies a killing to obtain spiritual powers that are not recognised as morally right, but are evil and dangerous. So far from being the same as human sacrifice it is its antithesis.

It is in Western Europe that one finds this idea of ritual murder and it has a long history. In the second century AD, Christians may have despised the religion of their pagan neighbours for the blood spilt in their rituals, but much worse allegations were made against these small dissident groups within the Roman body (Rives 1995). Christians were said to worship their god in secret, performing rites in which there were sexual orgies, often incestuous and cannibal feasts. The central act of the ritual was the killing and eating of a child or baby, perhaps stolen for the purpose. Since the early Christians were forced to conceal their gatherings, meeting in secret, the conviction that they were engaged in shameful acts seemed plausible. In AD 177 in Lyons, a number of Christians were publicly tortured and killed by the Roman authorities and these allegations played a large part in their condemnation. Some of those who died cried out denials of the accusations, proof of the role they had had in these horrible deaths.

When Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, the idea of secret groups practising ritual murder did not disappear; Christian authorities took over the myth that had earlier been used to justify their own persecution. Like their Roman predecessors they used the accusation of ritual murder to denigrate and persecute opponents. In this case it was those divergent religious communities such as the Waldensians or the Cathars who were designated heretics and accused of it. Centuries later, in a more elaborate development of the story, ritual murder was believed to be carried out by covens of witches, gathering to worship the devil and feast on the flesh of human sacrifice.

They represented the opposite of all that was considered good and their pleasure was to do evil and ultimately to destroy society. The rituals they performed were the opposite of Christian services: they took place at night, not in the daytime and in secret locations, not in public buildings that were known and open to all; most sinister of all, the rites included practices that represented all that was believed to be against human nature: cannibalistic feasts, incest and other perversions. It was these ideas that triggered the infamous witchhunts of early modern Europe.

The picture that I have drawn was built up gradually during the centuries. The people who were accused of ritual murder, or suspected if they were not accused, were people seen as non-believers, outsiders, whose very existence threatened the fabric of society. Belief in hidden conspiracies, secret societies whose members aimed to rule the world, were rife from the eighteenth century onwards. Subsequently Jews, Freemasons, and, in twentieth century America, conspiracies of communists, were seen in a similar light, as people of evil intent, whose aim was to destroy society as it then existed. It is important to recognise the historical depth of our beliefs in a secret and conspiratorial group, the epitome of evil characterised by the ritual killing they are believed to indulge in. The depraved actions of these hidden beings are very similar to those of witches the world over: they commit incest, kill and eat human beings and commit the most lurid crimes. This is part of a cultural definition of evil, just as beliefs in witchcraft as a manifestation of evil, are part of the world view of most Africans (see Pocock, Parkin et al The Anthropology of Evil.¹¹

The colonisation of Africa may have suppressed human sacrifice but it allowed for the development in Europe of the myth of ritual murder in another direction. The former existence of human sacrifice in West Africa encouraged the most sinister beliefs about African culture. Events in Africa seemed to confirm these as realistic portrayals. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards there were outcrops of serial killings in different parts of Africa that local people claimed were the work of human beings who had transformed themselves into animals, usually leopards or lions. Given the belief that occurs in many parts of Africa that witches can transform themselves into wild animals for the purpose of killing and ‘eating’ other human beings, an anthropologist would expect that both the killing and the eating were spiritual rather than actual. However the deaths were real and the death blows appeared to have been dealt by an animal, showing wounds apparently inflicted by teeth and claws, although sceptics claimed that these mutilations might be inflicted by special weapons designed to conceal the fact that the killer was another human being. Given the existence in Sierra Leone, where the first such cases emerged, of secret societies of witches associated with leopards it was thought that these societies might be to blame and that the killings were offerings to their secret shrines. Some witnesses claimed to have seen leopards attacking the victims, others claimed that the murderers were human beings disguised as leopards. The European colonial servants who were responsible for the areas in which these murders occurred and who shared to a greater or lesser extent existing fantasies about Africa were unable to decide whether the killings were ritual murder or not. But reports of the deaths contributed to a whole genre of literature that embedded the notion of ritual murder ever more deeply into the European imagination.¹²

Ritual murder is still murder and hence a crime. If we treat it as such, we have to consider what the evidence for it is. Over the course of history, many people have been accused of ritual murder and many have been executed for it, but the evidence for their guilt has been unsatisfactory from a modern point of view. Two kinds of evidence have been accepted as ‘proof’ of participation in ritual murder: first accusations by people who claimed to have suffered the evil attacks and/or to have seen the secret meetings or secondly confessions from the accused, in former times often extracted by torture. Checks as to whether personal malice or pre-existing quarrels were the cause of accusations seem not to have been made although the accused have often claimed that the allegations were the result of malice. Independent evidence or material evidence such as would be demanded in a prosecution today has never existed. Yet the idea persists because it represents in a dramatic form what is the ultimate in inhuman evil and by contrast emphasises what it is to be human.

At the end of the twentieth century people across the world asserted their belief in rituals that included the sacrifice of children as offerings to the devil. In the United States, Britain, Europe, Australia and New Zealand accusations were made. The rituals were said to include a modern sin, that of the sexual abuse of children, but in other respects they resembled the accusations made across early modern Europe and included allegations of human sacrifice and cannibalism. But when investigated, the evidence for the conviction that ritual murder was being perpetrated was very like that of early modern Europe: allegations, often from children, and the ‘confessions’ of adults who claimed to have been participants. There was no forensic evidence. As one journalist put it, despite modern sophisticated techniques of investigation, police found: “no bodies, no bones, no blood, nothing”.

Yet seven years after the ritual abuse panic died down, when a little boy’s mutilated body was found floating in the Thames, some of the same people who had publicised their belief in Satanism claimed it as justifying their beliefs. The Catholic Herald proclaimed: “Boy’s torso prompts new ‘Satanic abuse’ fears (March 2002). Was this the proof of ritual murder that had not been available before? It was presented as such in the media. Amazing detective work by the Metropolitan Police traced the child, referred to as Adam, first by the police and later from its use in the media, by everyone in general. Medical science showed the mutilations had been performed after death. The origin of the only garment he was wearing, shorts, were traced by their label. Forensic science indicated from the contents of his stomach where he had originally come from, Nigeria, from a village in the south-east of the country. This is all material evidence on which conclusions may be based and it can only be challenged by similar but contrary evidence.

Yet, despite the good work of the police, they could not show why Adam was killed and then mutilated or who did it. Nevertheless his death continues to be cited as evidence for the existence of ritual murder. It was the fact that ‘Adam’ was found to be African turned attention to the possibility of ritual murder. According to one BBC report, (BBC News July 9th 2002 accessed April 13 2010) police were investigating whether Adam’s death “was a West African voodoo killing involving human sacrifice.” The use of the term voodoo is an example of how ignorance about a non-Christian religion can support this myth of ritual murder. Vodun is a religion that developed in the Caribbean among West African slaves, from a mixture of Catholic Christianity and the traditional beliefs preserved in memories of their homeland. Its rituals do not include human sacrifice, but the whites in the Caribbean, for reasons that were partly political, claimed it was devil worship and that evil reputation has clung to it ever since. Voodoo became a term denoting evil magic and ritual practices, even in Africa.¹³

When it was discovered that the child Adam was probably brought to London from Africa, which has for centuries been subject to myths about ‘The Dark Continent’, certain people hastened to claim that it ‘proved’ the truth of satanic ritual abuse and of human sacrifice continuing to occur among the ‘uncivilised’. The general attitude has been described very nicely by David Pratten who wrote: “…Africa represented a blank space in Europe’s collective imagination and could therefore be populated by all manner of invented creatures, sometimes noble, sometimes monstrous, that were the visual and visceral products of European fears and desires” (Pratten 2007:9) Over simplistic ideas about ‘leopard societies’ and secret organisations that kill for pleasure, have influenced Christian missionaries in Nigeria and kept the idea of ritual murder alive.

While Sanders (2001) has done a good job of pointing out how the continued emphasis on the African provenance of ‘ritual murder’ has deepened existing prejudices about Africa and Africans, he stuffs all the evidence of British cultural concepts into that vast portmanteau labelled The Other. Unfortunately this neither illuminates nor analyses the ethnographic material that is thus bundled together. What I have tried to do here is to show how British concepts of evil – particularly the ideas of ritual murder and human sacrifice – emerge in the way they think about the African killings. ‘Ritual murder’ is a European representation of great evil; its historical origin has been demonstrated by historians who have demonstrated its role in generating the Christian pursuit of witches in early modern Europe. It is hardly surprising then that the present rash of accusations of witchcraft against children (which I have no had time to deal with) owes as much to Christian fundamentalist missions as to ‘traditional’ African ideas of witchcraft. In today’s Africa the Pentecostal belief in Satan’s demonic servants as the source of the power of witchcraft links the two concepts firmly together into a single contemporary image of the grossest evil.

Beliefs in ritual murder and in witchcraft are similar cultural traditions and both are worthy of anthropological study and of comparison, since if it is to be anything anthropology must be comparative. While I have not attempted this yet, a brief indication of the differences and similarities between the concepts might be a fitting end to this article.

Both the idea of ritual murder and the concept of witchcraft concern activities and persons who do not, as far as we know, exist. While real people may be accused, the evidence supporting the accusations is not rationally founded or supported by hard evidence So we are talking about ideas, not behaviour, but ideas that motivate strong reactions. The actions and the people who perform them represent evil in its most extreme forms. The actions of witches and in ritual murder include the same acts of evil: incest, sexual perversion, infanticide and cannibalism; the cannibalism fills a lust for human flesh, rather than any ritual or symbolic requirement which may surround cannibalism in societies that do undertake it This may be what makes it so evil. In effect, these persons are inhuman and their lack of humanity may be further emphasised by attributing to them nonsensical reversals of behaviour. By opposition then, both concepts define not merely inhuman but human nature, not merely evil but the bounds of what is permissible in human society.

Both concepts also are linked to the distribution of unfortunate events although the power raised by ritual murder is not directed by individuals against their personal enemies. But neither allows for the random event, drawing everything into a framework of human (or near human) causative power. Moreover both concepts embody the possibility of social destruction whether of social life or of interpersonal relations and relate this to the power of evil, whether generated by organised groups or seen in individual malice. Evil can and may destroy the world.

Of course there are differences. In Western society evil is characterised by a group whose individual members act in concert to worship the fount of all evil, their demonic master. Witchcraft is essentially a matter of individuals, although Western witches undertook a collective worship of Satan. While African witches may attend communal feasts, the emphasis usually lies on the debts created by the provision of the flesh, the substance of the feast that create indebtedness between provider and receiver. Hence perhaps the elaboration of differences in behaviour and appearance of witches, the unnatural human beings, that does not appear to characterise participants in ritual murder. Indeed ritual murder does not depend on the people who enact the killing being inhuman, merely evil. Ritual murder, then, brings destructive evil within the range of human possibilities.

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NOTES