SES no.30; Introduction : Cash, Commoditisation and Changing Foragers

It has recently been argued that hunting and gathering as a distinct way of life no longer exists and has not done so for the past several thousand years.All foragersi), it has been asserted, have interacted through exchange with non-foragers and while there may still be some that practise neither cultivation nor animal husbandry of any kind, such people are not "purel' hunter-gatherers/foragers because they depend at least seasonally on produced foods secured through trade [HEADLAND and REiD 1989: 48, 60].People such as the San of Botswana remain .dependent on hunting and gathering not because they are voluntarily continuing to live in that way but because they are forced to by their more powerful neighbours and because it is their most viable option in their restricted circumstances.Observers have not understood such societies, it is concluded, because they have failed to realise that what they interpret as,fossilised isolates are really "commercial foragers" carrying on a life-style not in spite of but because of their particular economic role in the world economy [DENBow 1984; HEADLAND and REiD 1989;WILMsEN 1989].These views echo long standing materialist ideas about the central role of cash and commoditisation in bringing about change in precapitalist societies.Marx, for instance, argued that the exchange of commodities evolved not within primitive communities but on their margins at the few points where they come into contact with other communities: from these points, he argued, commoditisation moves into the interior of the community, exerting a disintegrating infiuence' upon it ' [l859/1970: 50].His assumption that the impact of the exchange'of commodities on these societies is negative has also been widely shared.The appearance of cash and commoditisation are usually seen as the first manifestation of modernity and as evidence of the impact of market economies among people previously untouched by them.Such impacts go back five thousand years or more in some cases and certainly encompass virtually all foragers today.Despite the general recognition that there are no pure' foragers in this sense, it has not stopped the continued use of the term to refer to people living in a wide range of circumstances as the papers in this volume indicate.It is used to encompass 1) The term forager, as used in this volume, is identical with the term hunter-gatherer.'No distinction is implied or intended.s 2 N. PETERSON Pygmies dependent on meat trading, small-scale swiddening Agta in the Philippines, state subsidised hunters in northern Canada, commercial fisherman in Alaska, welfare dependent Aboriginal artefact producers in Australia and people not classified as hunter-gatherers/foragers yet indistinguishable from them in their impure' form, the Semai of Malaysia.Thegrouping of these people together not only raises questions of definition but also the question of whcn do hunter-gatherers .stopbeing hunter-gatherers.The ,current debate over foragers pure' and impure' has for the most part been fuelled by neo-marxist views that have tended to see contemporary precapitalist economies as under-developed and created or internally orchestrated by the dominant world economy, giving causal priority to production over ..... exchange. .Such views tend to.collapse culture into superstructural ideolQgy and consequently underrate its significance and are often in danger of casting the members of precapitalist societies in an entirely passive role, thus ignoring the full range of possible consequences of these external impacts.Yet if economic activity is socially constituted, as such materialist perspectives assume, then it is possible that as well as being transformedi by these external infiuences foragers may assimilate some, many or all of the intrusions and linkages with the dominant economy to their own internal social purposes and in so doing reproduce distinctive ' sets of economic and social relations.' ' 'In this introduction I wil! examine how the papers in this volume relate to these general issues.I will begin by briefly outlining classical views of the general significance of cash and commoditisation for social relations, and the nature of the category,hunter-gatherer/forager, before turning to a consideration and an evaluation of a classic model of their impact on precapitalist societies in the light of the contributions here. CASH AND COMMODITISATIONA simple definition of commodity is something produced for exchange:commoditisation is, thus, the process of becoming involved in producing things for exchange and by extension the obtaining of things offered for exchange by others.The inclusion of land and labour as commodities and the free circulation of money are the central features of market economies and intimately involved with the emergence of industrialisation and capitalism.Capitalist market economies appeared at the end of the eighteenth century when the predominant form of labour organisation started to be through the market in some areas, although in other areas gf the world money and full commoditisation only arrived during the twentieth century.The development of commoditisation and money relates directly to the history of exchange.Exchange is central to all social life, but the ways in which people have made their labour social has evolved over time in a process of increasing abstraction.Keith Hart [1982: 39-41] has distinguished ten stages in the