Risk, Ruin, and Luxury in Primitive Societies. U. Ulrich Müller-Herold, Department of Environmental Sciences, ETH Zürich, Switzerland; and R. P. Sieferle, Historisches Institut der Universität, D-68131 Mannheim, Germany
Anthropologists of earlier generations have always pictured
Stone Age man as living on the brink of starvation. According to
this view, his life consisted - as Marvin Harris ironically put
it in retrospect - of a continuous battle for survival, "a
time of great fear and insecurity, when people spent their days
ceaselessly searching for food and their nights huddled about
fires in comfortless caves besieged by saber-toothed
tigers."1 This view was seriously undermined when
in 1972 the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins2
characterised Stone Age society as the "original affluent
society." Drawing on field studies, above all on Richard
Lee's studies of the bushmen of the Kalahari, Sahlins showed that
even in such a hostile environment as that of the Kalahari
desert, a life of relative material affluence was possible.
People had an adequate, balanced diet, consisting of one-third
meat and two-thirds plants, with a high proportion of protein.
The women gathered over a hundred different species of roots,
nuts and tubers, spending not more than two or three days on the
process. They did not build up supplies of food, as sufficient
quantities were always available for gathering. The men likewise
dedicated two to three days a week to the hunt, pursuing not less
than 54 edible species of animal.
Sahlin's work, and the literature in the wake of his study,
aimed at the reconstruction of the functional significance of
this behavioural pattern, as finally presented in a coherent
manner by Dieter Groh.3 Groh is concerned with the
general reconstruction of the social logic of "subsistence
economies," which is to be categorically distinguished from
that of other economies, above all market economies. Subsistence
economies existed among Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer societies as
well as among early peasant societies. It is only the agrarian
civilisations that came about some 5,000 years ago that differ
from this pattern, although in these, too, there are subsistence
economy elements which extend even into the European societies of
the Modem age.
The fundamental distinction between a subsistence economy and
its opposite and historical successor, the market economy,
resides in the fact that the latter is orientated around the
production of surplus, or on the principle of the maximisation of
yield. The basic strategy attributed to the subsistence economy,
by contrast, is that of "minimising of risk." According
to Groh this strategy of "risk minimisation" expresses
in a unity of "underproductivity" - by which is meant,
the systematic under-use of resources - and a behavioural
orientation in the sense of "leisure preference".
"Leisure preference" - or "laziness", in
common parlance - is a form of behaviour in primitive societies
that at a very early stage attracted the (disparaging) notice of
observers coming from a commercial or industrial society.
Colonisers repeatedly complained at the behaviour of the
indigenous or local lower classes of society, which consisted in
ceasing to work as soon as they thought they had earned enough.
This was a mode of behaviour that at first sight appeared to run
entirely counter to the logic of the modem market economy. In the
context of a market economy, such behaviour need not count as
imprudent if it can be interpreted to the effect that the
individual worker perceives a greater benefit in the avoidance of
"the misery of work" than in the increase of the
consumption of material goods. The logic of a homo oeconomicus
maximising benefits would thus not be shattered by the
observation of "leisure preference". Such as pattern of
preference, however, is regarded as pretty unusual in modem
society, and before talk was of a "post-materialist
transformation of values", it carried a whiff of laziness
and anti-social tendencies.
Within the basic strategy of a subsistence economy, by
contrast, "leisure preference" expresses a functional
orientation in the sense of a specific "adaptation" to
certain environmental conditions. For
"underproductivity" or under-use of resources
associated with leisure preference constitutes an evolutionarily
successful strategy if the "adaptation" resides less in
the attempt actively to control access to resources than in the
process of partaking of an already existing flow of resources.
Closer inspection, however, reveals the picture of subsistence
economies sketched here as requiring additions and corrections.
The indiscriminate use of the term "risk minimisation"
for subsistence economies is in itself problematic in that it
implies that risks are avoided at all costs. It can be shown,
however, that in particular situations of scarcity or danger, it
is eminently sensible - and also an observable fact - to accept
calculated risks if, by this means, the chances of survival are
increased per saltum. A case of this nature has been
presented by Ruth Mace, using the Gabbra, a pastoral people of
East Africa.4 Mace's study revealed that, in view of a
greatly fluctuating environmental situation, two complementary
modes of behaviour were to be observed within the population.
Anyone in the relatively safe position of having a large herd
does indeed attempt to minimise risks. Anyone whose herd is too
small to cope with variations, however, puts everything on a
single card, so to speak, as this way there is at least a chance
that the herd might manage to survive. Both modes of behaviour
can be seen as elements of a superior strategy, whose objective
is to guarantee the long-term existence of families in such a
manner that the shortage of a limiting resource does not lead to
destruction. Decisive for the evaluation of a ruin avoidance
strategy as one of "maximum ruin avoidance" is the
switch from risk-oriented to risk-avoiding behaviour at a well
defined turning-point, as deduced by Mace by means of a
corresponding dynamic programming model. In line with risk
research, a type of behaviour is defined here as risk-orientated
when, the choice being between two alternatives, that one is
consistently selected which is characterised by greater
insecurity regarding the consequences considered.
This superior overall strategy in subsistence economics
should be termed a "strategy of maximum ruin avoidance"
within which "risk minimisation" is only one - albeit
frequently occurring - element among others. Closer examination
of "risk minimisation" can ultimately demonstrate that
the combination of "underproductivity" or under-use of
resources with "leisure preference" once again
represents merely a certain band of a larger spectrum of
behaviour within which, historically, solutions in the sense of a
portfolio formation have developed.
When the availability of resources in a particular habitat
fluctuates and a group wishes passively to adapt to these
fluctuations, a prudent strategy is to stabilise consumption
below the effective lower margin of this fluctuation. As shown in
the first figure, we have a certain human habitat within which a
"limiting factor" r - for example, water, game or
certain edible plants - fluctuates at irregular intervals. In
this first and most simple instance, which most probably
corresponds to the mode of existence of Palaeolithic
hunter-gatherer societies, the group orientates itself around the
lower fluctuation margin of the limiting factor which is to be
anticipated in the long term. By this means, it maintains a
safety margin to the average value. It follows that this society
almost always lives in circumstances that can be described as
superabundance. This "luxury margin" can be very far
removed from the lower fluctuation limit, but the latter
constitutes precisely the bottleneck which, in some extreme
situation, society may have to pass. A growth in population or of
the material throughput onto a superior margin would in the
longer term be (ceteris paribus) fatal.
The greater the fluctuation, the greater is the expected
superabundance under normal conditions. Richard Lee, for
instance, estimates that the !Kung San in the Kalahari generally
use only half the average available food resources - and these
are normally those that can be procured with the least effort. In
cultural terms, this behavioural pattern finds expression in the
observed leisure preference, which functionally orientates the
individuals towards the under-use of resources. The ecological
effect of this strategy is the sustained occupation of a niche
that places little strain on the environment.
It can be shown that not only the orientation at the lower
edge of the fluctuation spectrum but also other behavioural
patterns can be understood as successful adaptations in the sense
of ruin avoidance - at least for short and middling periods of
several thousand years. For this purpose we take the following
basic model as our starting-point. In a particular habitat, a
limiting factor fluctuates in time. We assume that two different
habitats in which the limiting factors fluctuate more or less
independently of one another, are used with half the intensity.
Their combined use is then subject to a lesser fluctuation, and
the lower edge of the fluctuation band comes closer to the mean
value (portfolio effect).
In historical terms, four different strategies of
diversification can be identified for the use of the portfolio
effect: migration, storekeeping, transport and the scattering of
cultivable land. The combination of storekeeping and trade
provides a basis of the agrarian means of production whose
origins date back some 10,000 years and which for some 5,000
years have reached a level of surplus production, which has led
them away from the older subsistence economies. According to our
model, an impulse for the transition to agriculture resides in
the attempt to make the flow of resources permanent by means of
portfolio creation and thus in as close an approximation as
possible to the average value. This had two fundamental
consequences:
The normal state of agrarian civilisations thus essentially
consists of a combination of increased security and a reduced
level of provisioning. Working long hours and hard, the majority
of the population lives in a state of constant material shortage,
and "luxury" becomes the preserve of the upper classes.
Simultaneously the population density increases, which leads to
social conflicts and provides an incentive to develop
institutional solutions for coping with them. And, last but not
least, pressure on natural resources and on the environment now
increases. Seen from this point of view, the meaning and function
of luxury assumes a specific historical thrust. In subsistence
economies, which to a large extent refrain from technically
controlling their resource base, this "under-use" finds
expression in a "leisure preference" which indeed leads
to a surplus of "work-free" time. The luxury of these
societies resides in an excess of time, which is simultaneously
greatly prized in cultural terms.
References
Marvin Harris: Cannibals and kings. The origins of culture.
Vintage, New York 1978, IX.
Marshall Sahlins: Stone age economics. Tavistock, London
1974, 1-39.
Dieter Groh: "Strategien, Zeit und Ressourcen.
Risikominimierung, Unterproduktivität und Mußepräferenz - die
zentralen Kategorien von Subsistenzökonomien"(Strategies,
time and resources. Risk minimisation, underproductivity and
leisure preference - the central categories of subsistence
economies). In Dieter Groh: Anthropologische Dimensionen der
Geschichte. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1992, 54-113.
Ruth Mace 1993: Nomadic pastoralists adopt subsistence
strategies that maximise long-term household survival. Behavioural
Ecology and Sociobiology, 33, 329-334 (1993).