Tribesmen

by Marshall Sahlins

Tribesmen (Foundations of Modern Anthropology)

Genres: Anthropology

Paperback

First published November 1, 1967

About the author

Marshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first became aware of tribesman as a kind of people during my freshman year studies of anthropology. That was 1984. Anthropology is certainly a lot different now, having been forced to catch up to modern realities and postmodern epistemologies. Marshall Sahlins' Tribesman was created as an undergraduate textbook back in the summer of love. Even so, Tribesman is a lot closer to the anthropology I initially encountered and loved in the 1980's than it is to current themes and approaches of contemporary anthropology.

The methodology and ideology of this book are partially out of date and partially timeless. As a result, this book has a great deal of value for the student of the history of anthropology as well as for anybody interested in understanding the tenor of pre-postmodern 'cultural studies'. Sahlins starts out on page two with a quip about how he is not performing an autopsy on primitive life. But from today's perspective that is exactly what he does. Through his engagement with 'production, polity, and piety' among primitives he follows the classic plan of moving from the material means of subsistence to the ritual basis of cosmology. En route he makes stops at 'politics', 'kinship', and 'economics.' Although writing as an economic substantivist rather than as a formalist, Sahlins nevertheless makes formal use of structuralist strategies (reduction to binary) and functionalist assumptions (organs of social body). His key structuralist concepts indicate a continuum of social-political-economic distance--with one pole being mutual intimacy (households and close lineage mates and bands, where everything is traded freely through generalized reciprocity and selfless generosity) and the opposite pole being mutual antagonism (distant relations and strangers who live beyond the bounds of tribal language and culture, where negative reciprocity (the desire to rob or to rip off the other or to make war) holds). Betwixt and between lies a liminal area of balanced reciprocity, where ritualized exchange activities within the tribe or between villages can make all the difference for who is a friend and who is an enemy. By this distance metaphor, people who are close to you (by blood, through marriage, or based on physical location) become organized as a collective corporation, while people you feel remote to (citizens in general) might still be linked to you through a system of regulated transactions, such as chiefly redistribution or kingly taxation. However, little attention in Tribesman is placed on the anecdotal or interpersonal justification for this schema, so Sahlins' structural method tends to decay into a universalization of 'us here' versus 'them others over there'.

Yet there are some truly positive virtues to Tribesman's method. Classic ethnographies are consulted frequently (but tersely), including works by Radcliffe-Brown, Benedict, Lowie, Bohannan, and Evans-Prichard, among others. These snippets of ethnography are used to build Weberian ideal types. And by juxtaposing different cultural traditions that resolve similar problems in similar ways, Sahlins' book also provides a classic ethnological typology, one that is perhaps most relevant today for archeology. As in many of his early works, Sahlins wishes to move methodically past the Hobbesian dream of a pandemic Warre of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes). Although partners in (inter-)tribal exchange may still be guided by self interest, they also follow a different sort of logic. This logic frequently stops short of making any strong distinction between the individual and the local collective (hence the etymological link in English and elsewhere between 'kindred' and 'kindness'). This alternative logic conversely does not allow extension of the category of person or human to those beyond the boundaries of speech and custom. The end result of this ethological synthesis is a practical fetishizing of the system. Although all typologies, like all grammars, leak, the reader is presented with some complex kinship structures which are represented in 1967 formalist terms (i.e., one man and one woman having one boy and one girl in patterns of cross-cousin marriage that are repeated over and over again ad infinitum). It has often been said that actual tribal reality is seldom as neat as these models suppose. If I ever meet a tribesman, I’ll be sure to ask.

Moving beyond the method of Tribesman, the substance and content can be very engaging. The way various tribesman and tribeswomen get by (make a living) does not receive a Westernized economic treatment. Sahlins instead, as an economic substantivist, describes distinct non-Western economic systems on their own terms.

In all these traditional economic systems, the family factors in as the primary mode of economic production. Within the family, a sexual division of labor is found everywhere. As collective economic units, kin groups generally spur productivity. All feel obligated to their local collective, where everyone in the group is constantly reinforcing kind togetherness through gifts and favors. Whereas tribal work is not separated from life, work is also not metered and enforced. The result is frequently a shortage of goods and a lot of leisure time. As Sahlins aptly says, the tribesmen live by desiring little rather than by producing much.

So how do (did?) tribesmen make a living? Well, they might be mobile or sedentary. If they are mobile, the might be pastoral nomads, moving across semi-arid grasslands with their flocks or herds. They tend to be well organized socially by chiefs but thinly distributed over a vast territory. Wealth (that is, wealth that is not on the hoof) is only a burden to them. Although they are disadvantaged economically (unable to accumulate a surplus), they have the military advantage of not having a fixed home to defend. Like pastoral nomads, equestrian hunters (such as the Plains Indians buffalo hunters) were spread out geographically and were continuously mobile.

Sahlins also summarizes sedentary models of economic practice. First, there are the forest agriculturalists, who just like mobile groups are thinly distributed, but who are nevertheless fixed to a territory. Their slash and burn farming requires long fallow times, so most of the arable land is slowly regenerating while a small minority of the fields are being cultivated. The fishing tribes of the Pacific Northwest were also sedentary, although not farmers. They relied on the salmon runs for survival (and surplus). Although sedentary communities tend to be wealthier than mobile ones, they are not as organized nor as fixed in location as peasants. With the intensivization of agriculture, there can arise an oriental despotism (Wittfogel) or an Apollonian gestalt (Benedict). In almost all cases, a measure of economic flexibility pervades the system. There are numerous mixed systems (like the Crow, equestrian hunters who also grew tobacco), and there are transformations of political systems (bands uniting into chiefdoms, or tribes breaking up into bands run by big-men.)

Sahlins divides up most of the tribal universe of political practices into these categories of bands and chiefdoms. Bands tend to be based on lineage segments which unify only in order to contest an equal and opposed unity of lineage segments. In classical sociology terms, bands are run by big-men whose legitimacy rests in their personal charisma, and bands are unified by a mechanical solidarity, which means that there is no specialization of labor (apart from sex). In contrast, chiefdoms are run by, what else, chiefs. Chiefs derive their authority not from charisma but from tradition, so that decisions are arrived at by way of reference to an unwritten (therefore frequently pliant) body of spoken 'law'. And under chiefdoms, labor tends to have greater specialization, and the workforce is composed organically (separate parts of the chiefdom's economy have separate functions) rather than mechanically (everybody doing the same tasks as in bands).

Overlaying and in some ways overriding these systems of polity are the structures of the local household. Sahlins synthesizes (1960's) kinship theories based on descent or on alliance. Tracing descent through the mother, through the father, or through both (as in dual organizations) are possibilities. Totems are also commonly found in tribes. A totem embodies a group of individuals linked by a common ancestor (often a long way back or else fictional). As a whole, the totemic group comprises a category of person that does not act collectively (totemic groups do not make war against or trade with other totemic groups). Totemism is not a religion. The totem is not revered as an object of worship. Nevertheless, members of a totem regard one another as equals. Also, totems like lineages define for the individual who is marriageable and who is not.

Kinship, besides being a system of descent, is also a system of alliances. Native groups appear to prefer cross-cousin marriage, i.e. marriage to a cousin that is not of ego's lineage or totem. The result is of course that lineages are linked again and again through the men's exchange of sisters for wives. There tends to be a current of women through the system, either an alternating current of wife exchange going back and forth between two lines over successive generations, or else a direct current where lineages all form a chain whereby a particular line always gives wives to one group and always receives them from a specific other group. Of course the metaphor of women being electrons in a copper wire is a bit much. Many feminists have insisted that the point of view of women in these kinds of systems be respected. Yet ultimately there is peculiar recurring tendency for men to run the household, even when one's lineage is traced only through women (in that case, mother's brothers runs the show).

I would like to conclude with a discussion of the weakest part of Tribesman, the final chapter on religion. Religion is handled as an afterthought, which is surprising because Sahlins is obviously aware of Durkheim's and Weber's works on religion. Since Sahlins's later works (especially Culture and Practical Reason) show an essentially Marxist emphasis, one could speculate that the only reason religion is treated at all is because Tribesman is above all else an undergraduate text. From the 1960's. As with all other organs of culture, religion is ultimately reduced to some kind of kinship problem. There are discussions of cults, sorcery, witchcraft, as well as cosmic reciprocity, but in the end the fact that gods and fetishes are seen as being related through kinship and alliance to each other and to their worshipers fails to tie up neatly the tribe's ideological stratum with its economic basis. Ritual is described best by Sahlins, not in Tribesman's final chapter on religion, but in an earlier discussion about tribal economics. Exchange is key to understanding ritual practice, whether it be exchange in food at mealtime or at a feast, or the making of offerings, or the presentation of gifts or favors to 'outsiders', thereby making them 'insiders'. Outside the tribe's clearly defined orbit of sacredness lie the eternally profane realms of debt, barter, and commerce. In a way, the tribesmen are sacred beings.

My sole criticism of this book is that it is an undergraduate textbook from the late 1960's. But as such, it makes a pretty interesting read. With just over 100 pages, a lot of social organization theory and ethnographic insights are packed in here. Am I glad I read it? Yes. Will I ever read it again? No. Is anthropology a better discipline now than it was fifty years ago? Probably, but it is often hard to tell.

[pjr8888 · Rating 4 out of 5]

stanford