American Anthropological Association

April AN Now Online

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1. 

   Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D., on April 16, 2009 at 12:10 pm said:

   I read Prof. Schwegler’s article in AN in the April issue with
   great interest. Prof. Schwegler blames Neoliberalism for the current
   credit crisis and suggests that we are between 20th century capitalist
   formations and some new form of economic order. If we take a
   uniformitarian view of economics as Melville Herskovits described in his
   _Economic Anthropology_ (1940 & 1952), we find we can conceive of the
   current situation as the transition she mentions from a 19th century
   unilinear view of society that created the ideologies of socialism and
   communism and some new perspective. Prof. Schwegler overlooks the fact
   that capitalist forms have often been adapted by the addition of welfare
   redistributions and regulatory mechanisms but that these are usually
   short-lived with the exception of adapted forms of socialism in the
   Nordic states that are really capitalist/socialist hybrids like the old
   Yugoslavia was or embedded in pre-modern cultural systems that mandate
   kinship (and fictitious kinship) redistribution patterns as in Japan’s
   communitarianism.
   Herskovits’ discussion, however, requires a dismantling of the
   concept of “modernity” as Jack Goody (see his _Capitalism and Modernity:
   The Great Debate_) has argued (and Toynbee before him in his
   _Civilization on Trial and the World and the West,_ 1948). Therefore,
   any new transition in economic and political history (e.g., Greece &
   Rome to Islamic Caliphates, etc.) produces a new perspective, modernity,
   which becomes an embedded view of technology and power in the cultural
   foundations of society.
   This idea can be seen clearly displayed in Catherine McClellan’s
   work (_The Inland Tlingit_, 1953, Memiors, S.A.A.) on the Tlingit and
   the inland Tagish and Teslin. The Chihlkat formed fur-procurement
   alliances with these inland tribes, blocking trade to the coast by these
   tribes to promote their own economic benefit and prestige systems. The
   Tagish and Teslin eventually became “Tlingitized” or acculturated
   reproducing the stratified Tlingit society and prestige system, a quite
   parallel process of exploitation as modern colonialism. If we look
   beyond the ideologies of the 19th and 20th century we can perhaps see
   the outlines of a new paradigm of the future political-economic ideology
   Prof. Schwegler mentions.

   Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D.
   Dept. of Anthropology
   San Francisco State University

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