Topic: Anthropology

Quotes

Rachel Kranton, “Reciprocal Exchange: A Self-Sustaining System” (1996)

• The utility from alternative sources determines the severity of the punishment for cheating a reciprocal [gift] exchange partner. Consequently, the availability of a spot market where agents can anonymously buy and sell goods affects the enforceability of and gains from reciprocal exchange.#

David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (1990)

• To endure, all societies confront two basic formal requirements: production and reproduction, that is, economy and rebirth… To a large extent, both women’s and men’s roles are directed at replicating social structures rather than at some socially neutral or inconsequential path of personal self-fulfillment. Society is a delicate perpetual motion machine that depends upon the replication of its primary structures, the family in particular, because without the family there is no context for socializing children and thus for perpetuating the culture.#
• Myths, whatever else they may be, are also guides, or charters for right action.#
• From a psychological point of view, it is clear that this ancient morality of man-acting has something to do with the cultural encoding of impulse sublimation. An inspirational model of right action, it directs energies away from self-absorption and introspection toward a strategy of practical problem-solving and worldly concerns.#

Doug Jones, “Barbarigenesis and the Collapse of Complex Societies” (2021)

• Social complexity is multi-dimensional, an imperfectly correlated bundle of traits—economic, military, political, and cultural.#

Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (1992)

• Compared with farmers, pastoralists in all these societies were more open and direct in their expression of emotion and in their interpersonal relations. Farmers tended to avoid conflict, presumably because their ties to the land made it impossible for them to move away should they make an enemy, while pastoralists could and did move their families and herds if they had a serious quarrel.#
• The root cause of inequality [is] not the inevitability of social differentiation, but the fact that all societies have rules that are enforced by sanctions. People who break those rules lose prestige and their claim to equality with persons who conform to the rules.#
• Anthropologists often agree that there is equality among people in small-scale societies, but by equality (or egalitarianism, as they are likely to call it) they mean the absence of significant distinctions among people except for those based on sex, age, and ability. These distinctions are universal.#

Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)

• The manipulation and accumulation of ritual powers and offices has been one of the main ways in which some clans have set themselves above others.#

G.L.S. Shackle, Epistemics and Economics (1972)

• It is natural that men, who depend on their gifts of mind and conscious skills in the struggle to survive, should put a boundless faith in those powers. That faith is less an inference from observation than an indispensable condition of tolerable, and continuing, existence.#

Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics, and the Law” (2006)

• Among hunter–gatherers, coalitional cooperation among nonkin most commonly occurs in two contexts: cooperative hunting and intergroup aggression (small-scale warfare). Most other labor is pursued in other ways.#

Sam Bowles & Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species (2011)

• While isolated groups surely existed, most humans had frequent contact with a substantial number of individuals beyond the immediate family. . . . Social order in prestate small-scale societies was sustained in important measure by a process of coordinated peer pressures and punishment.#
• The sharing of some food in foraging groups does not take the form of the redistribution of food that has been pooled on a groupwide basis, what we term common pot redistribution, but rather is network-based.#

Yuval Harari, Sapiens (2014)

• Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.#
• Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.#
• Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them.#
• How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person, according to which profits should not be wasted, and should instead be reinvested in production? It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labour between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.#
• Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.#
• People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.#
• Trade may seem a very pragmatic activity, one that needs no fictive basis. Yet the fact is that no animal other than Sapiens engages in trade, and all the Sapiens trade networks about which we have detailed evidence were based on fictions.#
• Modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with dificult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture. Societies that have adapted to the extreme conditions of places such as the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa may well provide a very misleading model for understanding ancient societies in fertile areas such as the Yangtze River Valley. In particular, population density in an area like the Kalahari Desert is far lower than it was around the ancient Yangtze, and this has far-reaching implications for key questions about the size and structure of human bands and the relations between them.#
• The first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.#

Bronisław Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)

• No society can work in an efficient manner unless laws are obeyed ‘willingly’ and ‘spontaneously’. The threat of coercion and the fear of punishment do not touch the average man, whether ‘savage’ or ‘civilized’, while, on the other hand, they are indispensable with regard to certain turbulent or criminal elements in either society.#
• If the rules of custom are obeyed by the savage through sheer inability to break them, then no definition can be given of law, no distinction can be drawn between the rules of law, morals, manners, and other usages. For the only way in which we can classify rules of conduct is by reference to the motives and sanctions by which they are enforced.#
• The true problem [in anthropology] is not to study how human life submits to rules – it simply does not; the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life.#

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

• I do not believe that human altruism is a single trait, but rather that humans are more or less altruistic in different domains of activity, each of which has its own characteristics.#
• In the case of an intrinsically rewarding activity, external rewards undermine this intrinsic motivation—they externalize it to the reward.#
• Most human imperatives are not commands, e.g., “get me water,” but rather something more indirect, such as “I’d like some water,” which is just a statement of desire. I can get water by informing others of my desire because they are so cooperative that simply knowing my desire leads them automatically to want to fulfill it.#
• Children soon learn to lie also, but that comes only some years later and presupposes preexisting cooperation and trust. If people did not have a tendency to trust one another’s helpfulness, lying could never get off the ground.#
• Human children seem to be more generous than chimpanzees. But here, again, I would emphasize that this is only a matter of degree. Starving humans are not so generous with food, either. It is just that chimpanzees act as if they were always starving.#
• Enforcing norms is an act of altruism, as the whole group benefits from my attempts to make the transgressor shape up.#
• Guilt and shame are kinds of self-punishments that serve, first, to make it less likely that I will engage in the same transgression in the future, and second, to display to others that I indeed hew to the norm, even if I did not live up to it in this case. . . . Guilt and shame are thus biologically based emotional reactions, which presuppose the kinds of normative (or at least punitive) social environments that humans have constructed for themselves. They are thus particularly good exemplars of the co-evolutionary process between human biology and culture.#
• Imitation and conformity can create high degrees of intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity, and on a faster time scale than that of biological evolution.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• Explorers and missionaries report that in Africa and Polynesia primitive man stops short at his earliest perception of things and never reasons if he can in any way avoid it. European and American educators sometimes report the same of their students. With regard to the Mossi on the Niger Levy-Brúhl quotes a missionary’s observation: “Conversation with them turns only upon women, food, and (in the rainy season) the crops.” What other subjects did many contemporaries and neighbors of Newton, Kant, and Levy-Brúhl prefer?#

Napoleon Chagnon, Yąnomamö (2009)

• There appears to be an upper limit on the size of a group that can be cooperatively organized by the principles of kinship, descent, and marriage, the “integrating” mechanisms characteristically at the disposal of primitive peoples.#