Comments on: April AN Now Online http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/04/15/april-an-now-online/ Conversations in Anthropology Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:32:48 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D. http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/04/15/april-an-now-online/#comment-671 Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:10:30 +0000 http://blog.aaanet.org/?p=619#comment-671 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 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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