"Traditional" cultures and relations of production

Paul H. Dillon (dillonph who-is-at tidepool.com)
Sun, 22 Sep 1996 10:49:10 -0700

Pedro's post concerning Navajo cultural change and Jay's remarks
about native Australian groups (which?) both employ a notion of "traditional
culture", implicitly in the former and explicitly in the latter. Pedro asks
whether it is "capitalist relations of production" or the "consumerism and
socialization for consumerism" that is responsible for the break down of the
means of cultural continuity. Insofar as Pedro's post "chimed in" on what I
had earlier written about the difference between our contemporary ways of
"producing, consuming, and remembering" and that of Trobriand Islanders
cerca 1870, I would like to clarify that, from my perspective, the abstract
general notion, "traditional cultures", lacks utility.

As a result, much like the term "commodification", a notion of
traditional cultures doesn't help clarify the relations between technical
relations of production, social relations of production, and the cultural
institutions that mediate, reproduce, and maintain these relations. Also
like the term "commodification", the abstract notion, "traditional
cultures", supplants more fully developed concepts and even becomes a theme
of investigation itself. For example, what does commodification propose to
add the the concept: "the extension of capitalist production relations to a
sphere of human activity?" The problem of cultural survival likewise
obscured with the traditional/modern dichotomy. At best these are Weberian
ideal types which are not articulated to any concept of social, economic, or
cultural evolution.

It is easy to imagine that the Navajo and native Australian cultures
up through the era of mass communication (TV) were not in some way the
product of the world capitalist system but this is extemely myopic.

First of all, both the Navajo and the native Australian tribes of
Victoria and the Northern Territories (e.g., the Murngin, the Kariera, the
Murinbata, the Aranda, etc.) inhabit truly marginal areas of the world,
lands that have little or no agricultural value and were never attractive
for European settlers. There is a great line in Nava's film, "El Norte", in
which a Mayan man tells his son: "This is good land. People only fight over
good land." He continues to explain to his son that the quality of the land
was the reason "the rich ones" came and took it all, converting the natives
into "nothing more than a pair of arms." The Guatemalan Mayans depicted in
the film were clearly absorbed as impressed agricultural laborers into local
productive systems that were part of the capitalist world system, local
productive systems that would not exist without the world capitalist markets
for coffee. Yet the Mayans maintained vigorously their "traditional
culture" and language. There are other expamples such as the native groups
who inhabit the area around Otavalo Ecuador. These Andeans have maintained
their language (Quechua B), dress, and even male hair styles (which led the
Ecuadorean government to accept long braided hair on "indian" male
recruits). If this "cultural survival" occurs where local economies had
been integrated into the world system of capitalist production, how less
surprising that it should also be found in the areas inhabited by Navajo and
native Australians. So what is the point about relations of production?

In the precapitalist economic systems of the Navajo, the native
Australians (quite different in respect of technology and economic
specialization), and other groups, access to labor and natural resources was
mediated primarily through kinship relations. The market's "invisible hand"
did not determine the distribution of anything. One can speak of cultural
survival and point to a continuum ranging from culinary habits, to language
maintenance, to strict patterns of exogamy, etc. But from the perspective
of "the penetration of capitalist relations of production" into those
groups' social reproduction one would want to examine exactly how a given
tool, language, institution, or custom functioned in the system of
precapitalist relations of production and whether or not it had relevance
for the extension of capitalist relations. Capitalist relations only
flourish where there is a profit to made! Furthermore, capitalist and
precapitalist systems easily coexist, as long as existence of the
precapitalist system does not affect the expanded reproduction of the
capitalist system.

With respect to Pedro's direct question concerning "TV and the other
tools of capitalist commercialization" I would suggest that it is a
variation of a pattern that has always been associated with the expanded
reproduction of capitalist relations. One of the most heated debates in
marxist economic and social history revolves around the question of whether
people voluntarily begin to consume the products the capitalist system
brings with it and thereby find themselves in the need to participate to get
cash or whether these markets must be violently created. Marx himself
thought that the separation of land and laborers, which he called "primitive
accumumation" (and which Anthony Giddens glossed as "the commodification of
land and labor) was a violent process. To create simultaneously a labor
force and a market for the goods of the emerging capitalist mode of
production in England, the commons were enclosed, rents in money were
established, etc. The capitalist state created the conditions for expanded
capitalist reproduction through physical violence and through violent legal
systems. Some French marxist anthropologists have viewed such barbarous
historical events as the construction of the Congo Railroad in the same
light. I don't think there is a final verdict in on this debate, but isn't
it clear that television advertising is one of the most subtle, most
perverse forms of psychological violence in the world today. Programming
and advertising (where does one draw the line?) target children with images
whose sole purpose is to make them consume! Girls are taught that social
prestige corresponds to certain bodies and that other bodies should be
ridiculed and despised. Advertising/programming causes bulimia, anorexia,
and other potentially fatal disorders.

Again, from the Marxist perspective, the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall generates an incessant pressure to develop new markets
through new and improved technologies for satisfying old needs and creating
new ones, imperialist expansion, and in general through supplanting all
patterns and types of human social relations with capitalist ones: the
mediation of which is a market mediation. Perhaps this is what is meant
when people speak of commodification. Unfortunately the reification of this
notion, which is the exact opposite of the dialectical development of its
concept, has the usual effect: universal characteristics are postulated in
the individual human psyche (even when it's expanded to encompass an
"interaction group). Terms and vocabularies are invented accompanied by
research agendas and directions. But then isn't this necessary to
participate in the production of academic commodities?