MAURICE GODELIER
Is it possible to speak of a single human nature in spite of - or perhaps because of - the great variety of economic systems, social relations, and ideologies that have emerged in the course of history and have been studied by anthropologists, historians, economists, and other social scien
tists?
Is it necessary, to answer this question, to go through the tedious process of comparing all societies with one another after having reduced them to a certain number of parameters and cultural traits? Must we decide in advance that this single human nature will correspond to the combination of traits which, at the end of this immense sifting process, would appear to be common to all societies? What, then, are we to do with the differences since they belong just as much to Man? Must we demonstrate that they are not what they seem, that they are in fact similarities which one has not discerned? The difficulty lies in the fact that appearances must be brought into question, for if appearances can be false, one might just as well find that all similarities are merely differences of which one is not aware.
The question is to determine both the location and the nature of the problem, and thus the method of treating it. We already have some idea of the location since we know that it is situated beyond the appearances of economic and social systems, in their hidden structures and the invisible laws of their operation. It also has to do with the reasons why these structures emerge and become articulated one with another to make up an entity, a society with only a limited capability of reproducing itself or of disappearing in history.
The method chosen must be distinguished from the customary pro
cedures of functionalist empiricism for which social structures are merely the "arrangement" of visible social relations, this being their role within
an entity of which they constitute functionally complementary parts. Such a method must avoid the seemingly insoluble difficulties of classifica
tional empiricism and, at the same time, allow one to explain both the similarities and the differences which exist between various economic and social systems or various structural levels in terms of a single set of factors.
This method must be at least initially a structural analysis of the type which Levi-Strauss uses in the study of kinship systems and systems of ideological representations associated with mythical thought. By this analysis, Levi-Strauss was able to demonstrate that different kinship systems belonged to a single family of structures and obeyed identical laws of transformation. This was an irreversible gain in the human sciences.
Nevertheless - and this will allow us to clarify the nature of the problems which structural analysis has come up against - one must remember that his most striking results up to this time are the develop
ment of a morphology of the structures of social kinship relations and a morphology of American Indian myths. There is as yet no analysis of the specific functions which these kinship relations or these ideologies play in the real societies where they were found. Because of this lack of a
"structural physiology," the problem of the conditions of reproduction or nonreproduction of these real societies, and thus the problem of their histories, has remained outside the field of theoretical analysis.
Of course, Claude Levi-Strauss is not unaware of these problems. For him it is "as wearisome as it is useless to try to prove that any society is within history and that it changes; that is perfectly obvious" (1962a:310).
He even hypothesizes that the way to approach the problem of explaining the transformation of societies lies in accepting as a "law of order" the
"incontestable primacy of infrastructures" (1962a:l 73) among all the structures which make up a society. This, it would seem, is the basic determinant of the way in which societies function and evolve. It is in this perspective that he writes, regarding the myths of the Australian aborigines:
We in no way wish to suggest that ideological transformations engender social transformations. The reverse order alone is true. The conception which men have of the relationships between nature and culture is a function of the manner in which their own social relations are modified . . . . We merely study shadows cast on the wall of the cave (1962a:155}.
Thus, Levi-Strauss joins Marx, whose fundamental thesis is that "the mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the conscious
ness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence which determines their consciousness" (Marx 1957:4).
Levi-Strauss himself affirms that in his work on myths and savage
thought, he wanted "to contribute to that theory of superstructures barely sketched by Marx" (Levi-Strauss 1962a: 198). Nevertheless, we also know that, in the conclusions of From honey to ashes (1973) regard
ing the fundamental historical revolution which has been christened "the Greek miracle" at the end of which, in ancient Greek society, ''mythology gives way to a philosophy which emerges as the preliminary condition of scientific thought," Levi-Strauss sees "a historical occurrence which has no meaning other than that it happened in that place and at that time."
History is reduced here to the domain of "irreducible contingency"
(1970:407�08), and, joining the functionalist empiricists, Levi-Strauss is able to write: "let the historian deal with change and the ethnologist with structures" (1926b:45).
The problem is not one of denying the fact of contingency, but rather of discovering the reasons why structures, whatever the internal or external causes of the changes they undergo, can evolve only in a finite number of directions which depend on their immanent, unintentional properties.
The main point, in our view, is that both Marx and Levi-Strauss seek to explain changes in social relations in terms of laws governing the relation
ships between economy, society, and history. In this respect Levi-Strauss and Marx concur with the conclusions of the great specialist in economic anthropology, Raymond Firth, who after studying the Polynesian society of Tikopia Island for thirty years, wrote in the introduction to Primitive Polynesian economy :
After publishing an account of the social structure, in particular the kinship structure (We, the Tikopia, London, 1936), I analyzed the economic structure of the society because so many social relations were made most manifest in their economic content. Indeed, the social structure, particularly the political structure, was clearly dependent upon specific economic relationships arising out of the system of control of resources. With these relationships, in turn, were linked the religious activities and institutions of the society . . . " (Firth 1964 :xi).
In order to analyze societies and explain their functioning and history, we must, then - and Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Firth coincide in this - give priority to relationships between economy and society. Of course, this means that we must first reconstruct theoretically the real economic infrastructure which characterizes a given society. It is not enough to say, as the classics did, that the economy of a society consists of the social relations, taken as a whole, which assure the production and circulation of the material means of its existence and reproduction, and then proceed to itemize the visible aspects of these social relations.1 One must discover, beyond the apparent economic relationships, the real, though hidden,
"mode of production" which characterizes the society. One must begin
1 Compare my own critique of both formalist definitions (Robbins, Leclair, etc.) and substantivist definitions (Polanyi, Dalton) of economy (1966:234-239).
by questioning the appearances, as Marx did, showing that in the capital
ist mode of production, wages "make the real relationships between capital and labour invisible and show precisely the opposite" (Marx 1957) since they conceal completely the fact that one person's profit comes from the unpaid work of another, the fundamental fact of the exploitation of the working class by the class which has a monopoly over money and the means of production.
The finished form which economic relationships assume, such as it is superficially manifest, in its concrete existence, and thus also such as it is conceived of by the agents of these relationships and by those who embody them when they try to understand them, is very different from their essential but hidden internal struc
ture and from the concept which corresponds to it. Indeed, it is even the reverse, the opposite (Marx 1957).
Is this to say that the study of the structural relationships between economy, society, and history coincides with what is today called
"economic anthropology?" We do not think so for two reasons: on the one hand, because one must break with the erroneous interpretation of Marx on the question of the relationships between infrastructure and superstructure, and one must refrain from treating the analysis of economic relationships as an autonomous fetishized domain; on the other hand, because it is no longer possible, in this perspective, to oppose anthropology and history, and because a single science of man is emerg
ing, beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, which will provide both a comparative theory of social relationships, and an explanation of the concrete societies that have appeared in history. Let us again take up these various points.
In practice, anthropology was born of Europe's discovery of the non
Western world and the development of various forms of Western colonial domination over the world, ranging from early forms contemporaneous with the birth of capitalism to the imperialism of the twentieth century.
Little by little, a field of study took shape, covering all the non-Western societies whi�h the West discovered during its world-wide expansion;
these the historians left to the anthropologists whenever they could not rely upon written archives to date the monuments and the material traces of past history and whenever it became necessary to resort to direct observation and oral inquiry.
At the same time, and for similar reasons, entire sections of Western history, ancient and modern, were abandoned to ethnology or to rural sociology (which were often confused with one another). To anthro
pology, thus, was ceded the study of all aspects of regional or village life which appeared to be survivals of precapitalist and preindustrial modes of production and social organization or which went back to very ancient ethnic and cultural characteristics, such as, for example, the Serbian
zadruga, the family organization of the southern Slavs, and Basque and Albanian customs. Such questions were only rarely discussed in the written documentation scrutinized by historians, and thus required direct field study of practices which most often formed part of oral traditions, folklore, and rules of custom. Moreover, the evolutionist idea, current in the nineteenth century, that European customs were survivals of ancient evolutionary stages which were still present or better preserved among non-Western peoples, strongly supported the view that these two areas of historical research should be left to anthropologists. Only anthropologists were thought to be capable of building up a complete and accurate picture of early European customs with the help of elements still present among exotic peoples (or the reverse, as the situation and necessity required);
they alone would be able to reconstruct an accurate picture of the first stages of humanity, or at least of those of its representatives who had left no written history.2
But if anthropology was formed by the convergence of two sources of material abandoned by historians, it does not follow that history, viewed as a scientific discipline, is founded on theoretically more rigorous prin
ciples. In fact, one finds a similar lack of rigor in the way in which the scope of history was defined. On the one hand, it was long oriented exclusively toward Western realities, whence the narrowness of its com
parisons. On the other hand, because many aspects of popular or local life hardly appeared in the written documents that historians studied, they had little choice but to view Western reality through the testimony of those who, in the West as elsewhere, have always used and controlled the practice of writing, that is, the cultured, dominant classes and the various state-controlled administrations (cf. Lefebvre 1971
)
. Thus, anthropology is not, in principle, inferior to history (or vice versa); any attempt to evaluate them in terms of greater or lesser scientific objectivity, any tendency to disregard the way they were constituted and their respective real content can only transform them into fetishized domains, into theoretical fetishes in which scientific practice is alienated.This discussion of the way in which the scope of history and anthro
pology was defined is indispensable for understanding two essential points. The first point concerns the enormous diversity of the societies and modes of production studied by anthropology. These range from the last bands of Bushmen hunting and gathering in the Kalahari desert to the tribes practicing horticulture on the high plateaux of New Guinea; from the opium-producing tribes working as mercenaries in Southeast Asia to the castes and subcastes of India, from the traditional African or Indonesian kingdoms and states which are today integrated into newly independent nations to vanished pre-Columbian empires which
contem-1 This is what was done, independently, by the two founders of anthropology, E. 8. Tylor (1865) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1877).
porary ethnohistory and archeology are trying to reconstruct; from the peasant communities of Mexico to those of Turkey, Macedonia, and Wales. These extremely diverse societies analyzed by anthropology have, it would seem, little in common and appear to be the results of historical development of different economic and social systems, responding to different rates of evolution through processes of transformation which little by little have almost entirely eliminated archaic modes of produc
tion in favor of other more dynamic and pervasive ones, of which the capitalist mode of production is one of the latest and most devastating examples. Let us not forget, for example, that since the beginning of the Neolithic period (9000 s.c.) hunting-gathering economies and societies have been gradually eliminated or driven into ecological zones unsuitable for agriculture and stock-raising and are today close to disappearing forever (cf. De Vore and Lee 1 967), and that extensive forms of agricul
ture are in competition with the more intensive forms made necessary by the growth of population and the needs of mercantile production, as well as other factors.
The second point is that because of the way history and anthropology developed as disciplines, history has appeared to be the knowledge and science of civilization (identified, except for a few exceptions such as China, with the West), while anthropology has been the study of bar
barians, of savages or of the rural populations of Europe that were still at an inferior stage of civilization. The relationship between anthropology and history has reflected the ideological prejudices which Western soci
ety and its dominant classes entertained about themselves and about the societies which gradually fell under their domination and exploitation.
This includes the rural populations of the West, which have either been transformed into an industrial and urban proletariat or have had to abandon their former ways of life to adopt forms of economic and social organization compatible with production for a market under conditions of competition set by the criteria of capitalist economic "rationality."
Consequently, one understands why at a theoretical level anthropology has generated so many ambiguities and ideological fetishes and why it causes such discomfort at the practical level.
These givens show clearly the necessity of developing a theoretical approach which, on the one hand, will enable us to reconstruct the various modes of production that have developed in the course of history, using material brought to light by historians and anthropologists, and which, on the other hand, make it possible to identify and eliminate the ideological aspects of these materials. However, to develop such an approach and to go further in the analysis of the structural causality of economics, we must first deal with the common and erroneous conception of the relationship between economy and society.
Unlike some Marxists who often slip into vulgar materialism, it is my
contention that when Marx distinguished infrastructure and superstruc
ture and stated that the profound logic of societies and of their history depended in the final analysis on the transformation of their infra
structure, he was simply highlighting for the first time a hierarchy of functional distinctions and of structural causalities without in the least prejudging either the nature of the structures which, in each case, take charge of these functions (kinship, politics, religion and so forth) or the number of functions which a structure can support. In order to discover this hidden logic, one must go beyond the structural analysis of the forms of social relations and thought, and attempt to reveal the "effects" of the structures one on another through various social processes, and gauge their real impact on the functioning and the reproduction of an economic and social formation. There are thus no grounds for refusing, as certain Marxists have done, to see relations of production in kinship relations, or, the reverse, to find in this fact an objection to or a refutation of Marx, as certain functionalists or structuralists have done. One must go beyond the morphological analysis of social structures in order to analyze their functions and the transformations of these functions and structures.
The fact that one structure can support several functions does not authorize one to confuse structural levels and disregard the fact of the relative autonomy of structures, that is, the autonomy of their internal properties. Marx's thought is not a kind of reductionist materialism which throws all reality back onto economics, or a simplistic functionalism which reduces all the structures of a society to that which appears at first sight to dominate it, whether this is kinship, politics, or religion. Starting from this distinction between functions and the relative autonomy of structures, one can correctly approach the problem of causality between one structure and another, between one level on the others. Now, insofar as one structure hassimultaneous effects on all the structures which make up with it a distinctive society capable of reproducing itself, one must seek to discover, in different places and at different levels and thus with a different content and form , the presence of a single cause, that is, the necessary and simultaneous effects of a specific combination of uninten
tional properties of particular social relations. This is not to "reduce"
some of the structures to others, but to higWight the different ways in which one of them can influence the functioning of all the others. Any metaphor which makes use of concepts such as container-contents or interior-exterior can only yield a distorted picture of these mechanisms
some of the structures to others, but to higWight the different ways in which one of them can influence the functioning of all the others. Any metaphor which makes use of concepts such as container-contents or interior-exterior can only yield a distorted picture of these mechanisms