Chapter 7 ANTH 212
Raymond Hames
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08/18/2017
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Chapter 7 Ember and Ember 14th edition.
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- [00:00:01.739]Alright, good afternoon.
- [00:00:03.353]We are on chapter seven, economic systems,
- [00:00:05.744]and we're gonna kinda review some of the details
- [00:00:08.345]that were presented on
- [00:00:10.226]hunting and gathering societies, horticultural societies,
- [00:00:13.802]pastoral societies in chapter six.
- [00:00:16.727]So we'll be talking about the allocation of resources
- [00:00:18.817]and here we're talking essentially
- [00:00:20.883]about the means of production, land,
- [00:00:22.370]and how land is made available.
- [00:00:25.690]Historically that's been the most crucial thing
- [00:00:28.802]people have had to work with through time.
- [00:00:31.820]Of course today, land isn't the only kind of resource.
- [00:00:35.419]We have other capital resources
- [00:00:36.994]such as money and things of that nature.
- [00:00:40.388]The conversion of resources,
- [00:00:42.339]that is the activities people engage in to convert land,
- [00:00:46.861]whether it's growing crops or hunting and gathering,
- [00:00:50.414]or herding cattle, into resources needed by families.
- [00:00:53.833]The distribution of goods and services,
- [00:00:56.387]that is part of the society's production,
- [00:01:00.358]which we'll see in the conversion of resources.
- [00:01:02.796]The other part of an economic system
- [00:01:05.141]is the movement of goods and services.
- [00:01:08.411]Goods clearly are pretty easy to understand,
- [00:01:11.825]they have to do with the things, food for example.
- [00:01:14.449]And services, these are activities
- [00:01:17.026]where you help or assist, or give your labor
- [00:01:19.348]to someone else, outside your family,
- [00:01:22.479]or within your family.
- [00:01:24.225]And then some of the worldwide trends
- [00:01:26.129]towards commercialization,
- [00:01:27.638]especially the issue of globalization,
- [00:01:30.328]which is very important politically and economically
- [00:01:33.443]as we engage in different kinds of trade agreements.
- [00:01:36.392]And also part of it has to do with the movement of people
- [00:01:40.316]to take advantage of economic opportunities.
- [00:01:43.776]And I remind you all that this is how our nation was built,
- [00:01:48.652]people in Europe and other parts of the globe
- [00:01:52.669]saw opportunities over here that weren't in
- [00:01:56.640]their own countries and as a consequence
- [00:01:59.356]they settled in our country,
- [00:02:01.168]creating who we are today.
- [00:02:03.554]Today, travel is much more efficient,
- [00:02:05.928]and so we have the phenomenon of migratory labor.
- [00:02:08.830]That is, people who come to a rich nation, like our nation,
- [00:02:13.010]or some places in Europe, to work for a time
- [00:02:15.912]and then return home.
- [00:02:17.143]They typically send their funds back to their families
- [00:02:21.205]to help support them.
- [00:02:22.716]And this is enabled by much more efficient
- [00:02:26.195]transportation system that we have today
- [00:02:29.751]compared with the past.
- [00:02:30.912]So these are the issues that we're gonna deal with
- [00:02:32.677]in Chapter Seven.
- [00:02:34.113]So we're talking about access to land.
- [00:02:38.784]And foragers, there pretty much wasn't any
- [00:02:42.639]private ownership of land.
- [00:02:44.566]Anybody in the group could go out,
- [00:02:46.754]hunt, gather, fish,
- [00:02:48.263]bring back what they brought in.
- [00:02:51.142]Although, there was an expectation,
- [00:02:52.397]that is if you brought in a lot,
- [00:02:54.133]then you would share with people outside of your family.
- [00:02:56.646]As horticulturalists, we begin to get a little bit
- [00:03:00.291]moved toward the development of private property.
- [00:03:03.310]That is, if you were farming a stretch of land,
- [00:03:07.536]then you would have possession to that land,
- [00:03:11.716]but only that land that you're actually working on.
- [00:03:14.775]You couldn't preemptively say, you know,
- [00:03:16.772]not only do I have this land right here
- [00:03:18.953]that I'm currently cropping,
- [00:03:20.348]but this area of forest over here that I plan to crop in.
- [00:03:24.434]And so what you essentially possessed
- [00:03:26.592]was what you were working on,
- [00:03:28.057]and you couldn't exclude others by saying that
- [00:03:30.957]you can't farm over there,
- [00:03:32.677]even though I'm not farming over there right now,
- [00:03:34.451]because some time in the future I might like
- [00:03:35.661]to farm there et cetera.
- [00:03:38.677]We'll move to pastoral people,
- [00:03:40.161]then ownership becomes really really interesting,
- [00:03:43.068]because different tribal groups communally own pastures
- [00:03:48.826]that members can use,
- [00:03:53.753]to the exclusion of other groups.
- [00:03:57.256]And what we know from the studies of pastoralists
- [00:03:59.742]is they tend to be very warlike,
- [00:04:02.228]they tent to raid one another
- [00:04:05.131]for their cattle resources.
- [00:04:06.942]They're a rich resource, easy to transport
- [00:04:11.005]because they can walk, you don't have to carry them.
- [00:04:14.140]And so we get of the development of private propety.
- [00:04:17.855]Intensive agriculturists, then we get the development
- [00:04:20.688]of private property, but it can be really complex.
- [00:04:23.916]Typically, people own the land that they farm on,
- [00:04:27.812]and they can exclude others from using that land.
- [00:04:31.160]But throughout history, the owners of the land
- [00:04:34.945]were not the people who cultivated the land,
- [00:04:37.035]but some wealthy lord, or king or prince,
- [00:04:41.563]or earl or duke.
- [00:04:43.187]And this occurred in Europe and Southeast Asia,
- [00:04:46.414]all over the world.
- [00:04:49.713]And essentially peasants had a right to work the land,
- [00:04:54.334]but they had to give up food supplies to the lord
- [00:04:56.840]in exchange for that right.
- [00:05:00.777]And so with intensive agriculturalists then,
- [00:05:03.831]we do really get the development of private property.
- [00:05:07.499]And a group of individuals, sometimes poor farmers
- [00:05:11.029]who really only have rights to work the land
- [00:05:14.698]owned by other people in exchange for some kind of taxation.
- [00:05:19.133]And then further on, as colonialism and imperialism spread,
- [00:05:24.171]the state began to have different sorts of rights to land.
- [00:05:30.278]And we'll explore this issue a little bit later on.
- [00:05:34.944]So in the conversion of resources,
- [00:05:37.523]in all societies the resources have to be transformed
- [00:05:40.263]or converted through labor into food, tools and other goods,
- [00:05:44.670]and so this is what we call production.
- [00:05:46.579]You know, what you do for a living,
- [00:05:48.785]how you engage the land through horticulture,
- [00:05:51.426]pastoralism, hunting and gathering, things of that nature.
- [00:05:53.963]And the conversion of these resources have to do with,
- [00:05:58.699]once produced, where do they go?
- [00:06:02.252]Throughout most of human history they've gone
- [00:06:04.249]to one's family.
- [00:06:06.670]That is they were used to satisfy
- [00:06:09.804]basic nutritional needs of the family.
- [00:06:13.611]In some systems, we have this sort of tributary system,
- [00:06:16.852]where we have social complexity developing,
- [00:06:20.204]and essentially, individual producers would have to
- [00:06:24.178]pay part of what they produced to a lord
- [00:06:26.195]who may technically own the land or control the land,
- [00:06:30.375]and this we call a tributary system.
- [00:06:33.928]And in industrial systems,
- [00:06:36.391]here we engage in production
- [00:06:38.760]that is essentially off the land,
- [00:06:41.244]that is we work for some kind of monetary reward,
- [00:06:45.691]for money.
- [00:06:47.177]And money comes into play a little bit later in history,
- [00:06:50.033]we'll talk about that a little bit further on.
- [00:06:52.120]But basically, you use your labor to get money,
- [00:06:55.048]then use that money to buy the food and shelter.
- [00:06:58.438]And then we have this kind of post-industrial situation,
- [00:07:02.293]where the service industry begins to become more important.
- [00:07:07.309]For example, I'm a member of the service industry,
- [00:07:10.118]I'm a teacher, I provide a service, called education.
- [00:07:13.388]And so, as we become more efficient at producing food,
- [00:07:16.573]people are freed up, as it were,
- [00:07:18.218]to engage in other kinds of economic transactions.
- [00:07:22.146]And finally, telecommuting,
- [00:07:24.422]which is a really interesting phenomenon.
- [00:07:26.604]Essentially, you don't have to be present at your workplace,
- [00:07:29.548]you can be present at home and do work
- [00:07:32.293]mainly through the internet
- [00:07:35.683]and other communication technologies.
- [00:07:39.306]So these are sorts of, and if you look at this pattern,
- [00:07:42.905]this is early on to later on through time,
- [00:07:47.177]these are kinds of historical, cultural,
- [00:07:49.430]evolutionary trends.
- [00:07:52.262]Conversion of resources is incentives for labor,
- [00:07:55.149]forced and required labor, division of labor,
- [00:07:57.197]organization of labor and making decisions about work.
- [00:07:59.867]So what the next set of slides is gonna be talking about
- [00:08:02.328]is these sorts of activities,
- [00:08:05.068]what incentives are there to people to work.
- [00:08:11.364]And throughout most of human history
- [00:08:14.169]it's been to feed your own family.
- [00:08:16.077]But in some societies, not only do you do that,
- [00:08:18.074]but you're forced to engage in required labor
- [00:08:20.350]for some powerful political authority,
- [00:08:22.947]and a lot of times it has to do with the development
- [00:08:26.312]of infrastructure, for example, maintaining roads
- [00:08:28.941]or irrigation systems.
- [00:08:30.590]And so we'll talk about these issues
- [00:08:32.050]in the next set of slides.
- [00:08:34.410]But one of the things that was mentioned in the text
- [00:08:37.892]in one of the highlighted sections,
- [00:08:39.704]has to do with communal ownership.
- [00:08:41.701]As I mentioned early on,
- [00:08:43.256]there was essentially no private property,
- [00:08:45.532]resources were kind of communally held.
- [00:08:48.156]That is, the group could, sometimes,
- [00:08:51.263]through means of territory, exclude people outside the group
- [00:08:55.190]from using their hunting, gathering and pastoral resources.
- [00:08:59.302]But here we're talking about a classic article
- [00:09:03.782]by Gerrett Hardin called tragedy of the commons,
- [00:09:06.778]and it has to do with the problem of conservation.
- [00:09:10.377]And what he points out,
- [00:09:13.257]using historical England as the example,
- [00:09:16.089]there was an area of land they called the commons
- [00:09:18.620]that anyone could have access to.
- [00:09:21.918]And it was largely, essentially, grazing areas.
- [00:09:24.890]And what quickly happened,
- [00:09:26.933]when people had equal access to the commons
- [00:09:30.509]is that the resources in the commons,
- [00:09:32.320]the grassland, was quickly destroyed,
- [00:09:34.851]because there was no restraint on how many cattle,
- [00:09:38.590]or sheep in the case of England,
- [00:09:40.610]that people could set out to graze,
- [00:09:43.001]and there was just a positive incentive
- [00:09:45.068]to have as big a herd as possible.
- [00:09:49.619]And quickly these commons were destroyed,
- [00:09:55.006]in that they could no longer offer the grazing opportunities
- [00:09:59.186]that existed when there were fewer cattle or sheep
- [00:10:02.576]on the land.
- [00:10:04.803]His solution was private property,
- [00:10:07.197]that is the idea that people owned sections of the commons,
- [00:10:12.421]then they could essentially safeguard
- [00:10:16.229]the resources in these areas
- [00:10:21.059]because it would be in their best interest,
- [00:10:23.265]to have a perpetual amount of grazing areas
- [00:10:27.212]if you just cut down the number of cattle.
- [00:10:32.286]So there was an incentive to conserve.
- [00:10:35.722]However, sometimes we do have community control,
- [00:10:38.834]which has to do with regulation of exploitation.
- [00:10:43.756]And there are some examples about in the fishing resources
- [00:10:46.445]in Palau and Alaska, and the idea, I think,
- [00:10:51.605]is that not necessarily is private property
- [00:10:56.063]the only solution, but some kind of regulation
- [00:10:59.520]through community control of people
- [00:11:02.700]and their exploitations of what we call
- [00:11:06.117]common good resources.
- [00:11:07.998]So it's really clear that regulation,
- [00:11:10.320]whether it's in the hand of private individuals
- [00:11:13.060]or a community, are key to maintaining
- [00:11:16.241]the conservation, the integrity of ecosystems.
- [00:11:26.876]Division of labor.
- [00:11:29.337]This is how tasks are assigned to the society.
- [00:11:32.237]It's based, essentially, on gender and age.
- [00:11:34.118]There's also a mention of efficiency
- [00:11:36.953]and optimal foraging theory,
- [00:11:38.579]I've written a couple of pieces on this
- [00:11:40.692]in relation to the hunting activities
- [00:11:43.130]of the Yanamamo and the Yekuana.
- [00:11:49.609]It's kind of out of place here, it seems to me,
- [00:11:52.122]but what it really does point out is that
- [00:11:54.838]people in simple societies are very good
- [00:11:58.716]at maximizing their net rates of return,
- [00:12:02.652]which is a microeconomic idea,
- [00:12:05.597]that people try to get the greatest amount of return
- [00:12:09.293]they can get when they're doing something like agriculture
- [00:12:12.822]or hunting, because of how selective they are
- [00:12:17.090]in what they do.
- [00:12:18.372]So yup, this is true, it's shown to be true for modern firms
- [00:12:24.177]and individual hunters and gatherers.
- [00:12:27.312]But I think the more interesting thing
- [00:12:30.748]is the division of labor,
- [00:12:33.651]because it's changing through time,
- [00:12:36.573]we'll talk about this next.
- [00:12:38.271]Here's what you have in your textbook.
- [00:12:39.522]It talks about men and women, young and old,
- [00:12:42.054]agricultural production, hunting, fishing, food gathering.
- [00:12:46.561]Kinda hard to understand.
- [00:12:48.651]But basically, what this shows,
- [00:12:51.344]and the next slide I'm gonna show you, I think,
- [00:12:54.107]is much more revealing, but that you know,
- [00:12:57.381]kids do a lot of economic activities,
- [00:13:02.229]we sometimes back in the day called it chores,
- [00:13:04.832]and they contribute to the household economy.
- [00:13:06.786]They do activities that don't require a lot of strength
- [00:13:10.274]or a lot of skill.
- [00:13:11.825]And as they get older, then they move into activities
- [00:13:15.171]as adult males or females,
- [00:13:17.333]into activities that require more skill and more strength,
- [00:13:21.513]and so kids are part of the natural economy,
- [00:13:28.223]and they have been throughout most of human history.
- [00:13:33.309]But I think what's more interesting,
- [00:13:34.957]if we look at the division of labor.
- [00:13:36.420]And so we see, you know if you look at the top left,
- [00:13:38.974]certain kind of activity, called hunting,
- [00:13:41.087]dominated by males.
- [00:13:42.254]And if you look at the bottom right, down here,
- [00:13:44.326]you know, cooking, dominated by females.
- [00:13:47.938]And so, what are the theories,
- [00:13:49.690]why do we have this kind of division of labor
- [00:13:52.221]that is from a sample of cross-cultural studies?
- [00:13:57.260]One idea the textbook mentions is that men are stronger,
- [00:14:01.602]and as a consequence they engage in things like hunting,
- [00:14:04.557]metalwork, stonework, mining, land clearance,
- [00:14:06.850]the tending of large animals,
- [00:14:09.608]which require physical strength.
- [00:14:11.935]But if you look at large animal tending,
- [00:14:13.816]you find that women, they did a lot of this activity
- [00:14:16.997]in some societies, both men and women do these activities.
- [00:14:21.176]And that cooking, doesn't take a lot of strength,
- [00:14:24.404]dominated by women.
- [00:14:25.937]But the explanation I like best is the idea that
- [00:14:30.813]women largely are constrained by childcare activities.
- [00:14:35.794]Therefore they are restricted to activities
- [00:14:38.499]that permit simultaneous childcare.
- [00:14:42.516]You have to understand that throughout
- [00:14:44.232]most of human history,
- [00:14:45.395]women had about six to eight live births
- [00:14:49.040]through their lifetime.
- [00:14:50.341]And so, in their daily activities,
- [00:14:52.893]they were essentially always had to mind a child,
- [00:14:56.537]since men didn't do any of these activities.
- [00:14:58.444]So Judith Brown was the one who thought up this idea,
- [00:15:02.462]and the idea that women would do those activities
- [00:15:06.966]that are compatible with simultaneous childcare.
- [00:15:09.962]And essentially, many of these activities
- [00:15:12.396]have to do with tasks that are done near the home,
- [00:15:17.043]or in the home.
- [00:15:18.390]You know, you look at crop planting,
- [00:15:21.572]they'll typically, in many societies,
- [00:15:23.777]your farm is right next to the house,
- [00:15:26.169]and so it's easy to essentially care for a child
- [00:15:34.704]and do the cropping work such as harvesting or weeding.
- [00:15:38.418]On the other hand, for example, if you're a male,
- [00:15:41.018]trying to carry a child around while you're hunting
- [00:15:44.014]is gonna, one, make you less efficient,
- [00:15:46.076]because the child may make noise,
- [00:15:47.796]or two, if you're running after an animal,
- [00:15:50.120]carrying a child on your hip,
- [00:15:51.977]you're not gonna be able to run very effectively.
- [00:15:54.021]And three, you put that child in danger.
- [00:15:57.806]The reason I like this activity,
- [00:16:00.500]as fertility has declined,
- [00:16:02.450]and women only have one to two children,
- [00:16:04.958]all of a sudden today, they're freed up
- [00:16:06.926]to engage in activities that were dominated by men.
- [00:16:10.090]Now many of this form of domination
- [00:16:12.040]was through discrimination,
- [00:16:13.573]but at the same time,
- [00:16:16.150]if your husband and you see that, you know,
- [00:16:18.333]maybe your wife has an opportunity to engage
- [00:16:21.189]in a lucrative activity formerly dominated by men,
- [00:16:23.924]then you might be in favor of changing laws
- [00:16:27.249]that would ban discrimination.
- [00:16:28.712]And so I think the nice thing about his model
- [00:16:33.820]devised by Judith Brown,
- [00:16:36.189]is that it helps us understand the past,
- [00:16:38.604]and it helps us understand the current situation,
- [00:16:40.830]the division of labor.
- [00:16:42.435]Okay, so how do goods and services move
- [00:16:45.866]in a society, especially a society that doesn't have
- [00:16:54.406]money as a means of exchange?
- [00:16:57.104]And so we're gonna talk about, as I mentioned before,
- [00:16:59.728]reciprocity, redistribution,
- [00:17:01.420]and market or commercial exchange.
- [00:17:03.048]So reciprocity is essential giving and taking
- [00:17:06.462]without the use of money.
- [00:17:08.250]This is really key.
- [00:17:09.736]And so, for example, we talk about two different kinds
- [00:17:11.919]of reciprocity, generalized and balanced.
- [00:17:14.659]Generalized reciprocity, essentially one gives
- [00:17:18.234]without an expectation of immediate return,
- [00:17:23.714]or maybe a return at all.
- [00:17:25.734]For example, generalized reciprocity occurs
- [00:17:29.125]among people who are closely related.
- [00:17:32.166]For example, your grandparents have given you
- [00:17:35.905]birthday gift after birthday gift after birthday gift,
- [00:17:39.179]and what they've given to you is largely
- [00:17:41.594]much more costly than what you've given to them,
- [00:17:47.163]which is maybe a thank you note,
- [00:17:49.071]or you know a birthday card or something of that nature.
- [00:17:53.436]And so what we have in generalized reciprocity
- [00:17:56.663]is essentially the flow of goods
- [00:18:00.003]from older to younger members
- [00:18:01.493]without the expectation from the older members
- [00:18:04.047]that the younger members will return those sorts of things.
- [00:18:10.061]Balanced reciprocity is something that you engage in
- [00:18:13.750]with people who aren't related to you
- [00:18:15.657]but you have a social relationship,
- [00:18:17.260]that we'll call friendship.
- [00:18:19.073]And for example, I have a next-door neighbor
- [00:18:21.777]that goes to Puerto Rico every winter,
- [00:18:26.182]and while they're there,
- [00:18:28.829]I make sure that their driveway is plowed
- [00:18:32.080]and their walk is clean.
- [00:18:35.447]When they come back they don't give me any money,
- [00:18:37.583]but when I go on vacation in the summer,
- [00:18:41.484]they collect my mail, watch over my house,
- [00:18:45.450]make sure the newspaper is picked up,
- [00:18:50.934]that the trash can is moved back into the garage,
- [00:18:53.326]and sometimes they mow the lawn,
- [00:18:55.114]and I don't pay them anything.
- [00:18:56.623]And this is what we call balanced reciprocity,
- [00:19:00.083]things that you do to help out your friends
- [00:19:02.585]if they need a ride or something of that nature.
- [00:19:05.958]And there's an expectation that there's gonna be return,
- [00:19:11.061]but you don't say to your friend,
- [00:19:13.685]look I drove you to your doctor's appointment,
- [00:19:19.376]it cost me about $8, so pay up.
- [00:19:22.281]The expectation is that it'll rebalance itself
- [00:19:26.229]at some later point in time when your friend
- [00:19:28.388]needs assistance from you you'll be there for them.
- [00:19:32.284]And so this is a kind of non-monetized
- [00:19:35.282]dimension of our economy.
- [00:19:37.603]And that is very ancient and works today.
- [00:19:42.527]Redistribution is the accumulation of goods or labor
- [00:19:45.398]by a particular person, or in a particular place,
- [00:19:48.752]for the purpose of subsequent distribution.
- [00:19:51.882]So what you have is essentially, for example,
- [00:19:55.393]you have a chief, and the chief requires
- [00:19:57.953]that you on a periodic basis give him
- [00:20:00.315]some of your crops, he puts it in his storehouse.
- [00:20:05.627]And then at some later point,
- [00:20:08.907]he may use those resources you've given him
- [00:20:13.156]for a variety of tasks.
- [00:20:14.874]One thing, for example,
- [00:20:16.195]is that chieftains tend to be fairly large,
- [00:20:18.172]and in some areas there are natural catastrophes
- [00:20:22.235]that cause crops to fail, people are in need,
- [00:20:25.834]and so he'll use that stored wealth
- [00:20:28.435]to help those people out.
- [00:20:29.735]So it's like kind of social insurance.
- [00:20:31.709]He'll also use it, for example, for the common defense,
- [00:20:35.447]to pay warriors, or on trading expeditions
- [00:20:38.835]to facilitate trade.
- [00:20:41.345]And so the idea is that you give in to a central entity
- [00:20:46.361]and then that's redistributed,
- [00:20:47.986]not necessarily in the amount you gave
- [00:20:49.588]for the common good.
- [00:20:51.933]Sometimes the common good is
- [00:20:53.745]maintaining an irrigation system,
- [00:20:57.506]that he'll use the food you've given him
- [00:20:59.943]to pay laborers to fix a dam, fix canals,
- [00:21:03.915]dredge them, things of that nature.
- [00:21:05.982]This has occurred, you know,
- [00:21:08.860]when societies began to get a little complex,
- [00:21:11.461]about 12, 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture.
- [00:21:17.126]And another word for it is taxation.
- [00:21:19.240]And all states, regardless of whether they're capitalistic
- [00:21:23.048]or socialistic, depend on taxation to provide,
- [00:21:26.578]typically pro-social benefits,
- [00:21:30.037]that is benefits for the common good.
- [00:21:32.011]And so this is something that wasn't invented recently,
- [00:21:34.983]but is an old part of human history.
- [00:21:37.817]More on the distribution of goods and services,
- [00:21:42.553]market or commercial exchange.
- [00:21:44.945]And the text talks about kinds of money,
- [00:21:47.615]all-purpose versus special-purpose money.
- [00:21:49.589]We have all-purpose money,
- [00:21:50.819]that is we can use money to buy just about anything
- [00:21:54.140]you would want.
- [00:21:55.649]There are exceptions, obviously,
- [00:21:57.576]for example, you can't use money legally to buy sex,
- [00:21:59.991]or to buy drugs.
- [00:22:01.941]But barring those two sorts of,
- [00:22:04.171]or you can't use it to buy children
- [00:22:06.307]that you wanna adopt, for example.
- [00:22:08.188]So we have this kind of all-purpose money.
- [00:22:11.740]Early on in human history you had special-purpose money
- [00:22:15.595]that could only be used in a very limited way,
- [00:22:18.614]for example to pay for bride price
- [00:22:21.537]that we'll talk about a little bit later in the course,
- [00:22:23.884]or for some kind of indemnification
- [00:22:26.532]if you accidentally or purposely kill someone,
- [00:22:29.689]instead of war going on you could pay up
- [00:22:32.472]a kind of blood debt with it.
- [00:22:35.419]And then we'll also talk about degrees of commercialization,
- [00:22:37.863]why do money and market exchanges develop,
- [00:22:40.951]and possible leveling mechanisms in commercial economies.
- [00:22:47.816]And so, some other topics that are mentioned
- [00:22:51.254]are migratory labor, nonagricultural commercial production,
- [00:22:54.923]supplementary cash crops,
- [00:22:57.268]and introduction of commercial and industrial agriculture.
- [00:22:59.497]So we wanna kind of go through these things one by one.
- [00:23:01.378]Migratory labor has to do with some members of the community
- [00:23:06.812]move to a place that offers the possibility of working
- [00:23:10.411]for a wage.
- [00:23:12.001]You know, examples given were of Turkish men
- [00:23:14.962]moving into Germany after World War II.
- [00:23:17.911]Now, migratory labor has to be kind of put
- [00:23:21.552]in an historical context.
- [00:23:24.527]Way back, when the United States was growing,
- [00:23:27.013]we had people coming over from all parts of the world,
- [00:23:32.029]but largely Europe,
- [00:23:33.538]because of restrictive immigration rules,
- [00:23:37.462]because there were superior economic opportunities
- [00:23:39.877]here than in their own country.
- [00:23:42.338]Migratory labor works the same way,
- [00:23:44.868]except there's one little technological change
- [00:23:47.423]that has to do with the development of cheap transportation.
- [00:23:51.905]You could go to a country and work there for a while,
- [00:23:57.870]because transportation was easy,
- [00:23:59.981]and send money back home.
- [00:24:01.680]Some people would stay,
- [00:24:02.910]as the example of Turkish men moving into Germany
- [00:24:06.112]after World War II, because it was a labor shortage,
- [00:24:09.227]and they later brought their wives
- [00:24:12.013]and started families there.
- [00:24:13.778]But migratory labor is a phenomenon that has been
- [00:24:18.283]going on for a long time,
- [00:24:19.746]and was a phenomenon that essentially
- [00:24:22.439]built the United States.
- [00:24:25.086]Another trend that's going on
- [00:24:28.777]is nonagricultural commercial production.
- [00:24:32.609]Look at the bullet point down below.
- [00:24:34.815]In the US only 2% of the population
- [00:24:36.766]is engaged in agriculture.
- [00:24:40.365]At the turn of the century,
- [00:24:43.267]from the start of the 1900s,
- [00:24:46.820]it was about 80, 85% of people worked on the land.
- [00:24:50.373]And so what we've done is essentially created
- [00:24:53.972]an agricultural production system
- [00:24:57.687]that's so efficient that there are other kinds
- [00:25:00.938]of economic opportunities available to people.
- [00:25:05.693]And so it begins with supplementary cash crops,
- [00:25:11.990]when people cultivating the soil produce a surplus
- [00:25:14.545]above the subsistence requirements,
- [00:25:16.978]which is then sold by cash.
- [00:25:19.514]And so this is kind of like an historical section
- [00:25:22.138]of the text, talks about how the sorts of process go,
- [00:25:27.060]comes into being.
- [00:25:29.890]And so it begins with you not producing
- [00:25:34.649]just for your own consumption,
- [00:25:37.237]but selling on a market to get resources that you need
- [00:25:41.364]like perhaps steel goods.
- [00:25:43.616]And it talks about the rubber collection in the Amazon
- [00:25:46.310]by the Mudurucu in the text,
- [00:25:49.326]as an example of how former subsistence groups
- [00:25:53.183]are integrated into a world economic system
- [00:25:57.130]by selling some of what they produce
- [00:26:00.334]to get modern goods that they otherwise would not have had.
- [00:26:05.232]And now what happens is they're dependent
- [00:26:07.672]on outside resources,
- [00:26:09.576]because they can no longer produce
- [00:26:11.267]the goods they need to cultivate the land
- [00:26:15.886]because they now rely on steel goods
- [00:26:18.721]instead of wood or stone goods.
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