Antropologia Enfrenta La Desigualdad

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DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228746

2001 1: 299Anthropological TheoryCharles Tilly

Introduction : Anthropology confronts inequality

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Anthropological Theory

Copyright SAGE PublicationsLondon, Thousand Oaks, CA

and New DelhiVol 1(3): 299306

[1463-4996(200109)1:3;299306;018907]

299

Introduction

A nthropology confronts inequality

Charles TillyColumbia Uni versity, USA

Anthropology once centered on inequality, and significantly shaped how non-anthro-pologists thought about inequality. Just one example: after three years field experienceamong Australian aborigines, anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner began intensive study ofNewburyport, Massachusetts in 1930. For Warner, social class hierarchies providedorganizing structures for industrial societies, structures roughly equivalent to kinshipsystems in small non-literate populations. A large team continued the Newburyportstudy until 1959. During the same decades, Warner also conducted or inspired multiplecomparative studies of other American communities. Under Warners pen, Newbury-port became Yankee City, and his division of Newburyports people into upper-upper,

lower-upper, upper-middle, lower-middle, upper-lower, and lower-lower classes becamestandard language in discussions of American social inequality.

Warner placed his influential Yankee City studies squarely in the lineage of Radcliffe-Brown, Lowie, and Malinowski (Warner, 1963: xiii). His approach to class analysisincited plenty of debate and criticism, but his model of investigation dominated empiri-cal analyses of American class structure for a generation. Critical reaction to Warnersstudies even launched a whole school of historical investigation, beginning with StephanThernstromsPoverty and Progress(1964), not to mention John P. Marquands mordantportrait of an anthropologist inPoint of No Return(1949). BothPoverty and Progressand

Point of No Return, in fact, concerned Newburyport itself. Warners anthropologicalwork put Newburyports inequality on the intellectual map.

During the last few decades, however, inequality has lost its centrality in the anthropo-logical enterprise as anthropology has lost prominence as a source of general ideas aboutinequality. A quick count of 337 titles in theAnnual Review of Anthropologyfrom 1984to 2000, for example, yields a mere 19 articles less than 6 per cent! whose titlesinclude variants on the words caste, chiefs, class, ethnicity, gender, hierarchy, inequality,minority, power, race, slavery and/or status, with gender by far the leading mention. Tobe sure, specialists in archaeology, political economy, sociolinguistics, race, gender, and

ethnicity still keep inequality on the anthropological agenda. Nevertheless, the days arelong gone when many anthropologists took hierarchies and inequalities as major objectsof study, and when outsiders looked to anthropology for major descriptions and expla-nations of inequality.

That is a pity. Anthropology has formidable advantages in the description and

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explanation of inequality: access to a wide range of variation, built-in resistance to tele-ologies of modernization, skepticism about the generality and uniformity of markets,knowledge of inequalities outside the world of jobs and wages, concern for visible victimsof unequal struggles, sensitivity to culture, and employment of direct observation as ameans of gathering evidence (see, for example, Breman, 1994). Since professionalstudents of inequality concentrate overwhelmingly on differential locations and mone-tary rewards within capitalist labor markets, anthropologists have a splendid opportunitynot only to redress the empirical balance, but also to improve on market-based expla-nations. The papers in this symposium demonstrate how much anthropologists have tooffer.

Speaking very generally, studies of inequality pivot on four main questions:

1 What asymmetrical relations prevail among persons, groups, categories, and sociallocations?

2 How do persons, groups, categories, and social locations end up in the positionsthey occupy?

3 What effects do 1 and 2 have on individual and collective social experience?4 How do 1, 2, and 3 change?

Each of these questions, in turn, has two versions: descriptive and explanatory. Descrip-tive accounts of inequality trace and catalog various patterns of asymmetrical relations(for example, caste vs. class) and their correlates. Explanatory accounts specify why 1,2, 3, and 4 occur. Both descriptive and explanatory accounts are essential.

Description and explanation of inequality present anthropologists with a number ofimportant challenges. At the level of metatheory, inequality challenges its analysts tothread their way among competing ontologies and epistemologies: to what extent andhow, for example, can we conceive of inequalities by race, gender, or lineage as observ-able, perdurable, and consequential attributes of social structures?Must we instead takethem to be shared ideas or linguistic constructions?This symposiums authors huddletogether toward the realistic end of the realistidealist continuum, but readers have theright to try their own metatheories on the materials reported by the authors.

At the level of theory, inequality is a phenomenon for which scholars have proposed

genuinely competing explanations. Anthropological evidence can be of great value inadjudicating, verifying, or modifying those explanations. Prevailing cultural, functional,coercive, competitive, and relational theories, while not entirely incompatible pair bypair, differ sufficiently that close observation of inequalitys production, operation, andreproduction over a wide range of social settings will provide crucial information abouttheir adequacies and inadequacies.

If, for example, virtual monetization has effects as sweeping and uniform as KeithHarts analysis indicates, strictly cultural theories of inequality will have great difficultyin accounting for those effects. Similarly, reports from Katherine Verdery and CarolineHumphrey on East Europes inequality-generating processes cast doubt on the general-ity of market-based competitive theories. The least students of inequality can get frommore sustained anthropological investigation is better specification of scope conditionsfor available cultural, functional, coercive, competitive, and relational models. They cansurely get much more.

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Methodologically, anthropologists also have a distinctive contribution to make.Outsideof anthropology, studentsof inequality commonly assembleinformation aboutindividuals or households from surveysand administrativerecords, then aggregate theinformation to examine unit-to-unit variation or regroup it into categories for com-parison. For all their value in establishing whether well-defined patternsof differenceor co-variation exist, such procedures face serious logical limits. First, they biasexpla-nations toward the presupposition that durable attributes of social units (rather than,say, their locations in larger systems, processes, or sequences) cause their behavior.Second, they lend themselves easily to representations of inequality as consisting oflocationswithin abstract hierarchiesrather than of concreteconnectionsamongpeople.Third, they curtail or eliminate evidenceabout interactionswith othersascauses, cor-relates, and effectsof inequality. Finally, to theextent that crucial inequality-generatingmechanisms operate incrementally and through interpersonal negotiation, thosemechanismsdisappear from view. Anthropologists who follow interpersonal relations,

reconstruct li fe histories, participate in social processes, and observe social interactiondirectly havean opportunity to compensate for theseweaknessesof individualized evi-dence. In this issue, wesee Humphrey and Verdery pondering their own observationsof East European social life to arrive at fresh insights concerning inequality-generatingprocesses in general.

Even more profound and subtle questions confront anthropological students ofinequality. Let me single out two dilemmas that pervade social analysis in general, butshow up with particular clarity in studies of inequality. The first is individual vs. cate-gorical effects, the second, historicism vs. universalism. Many students of social pro-

cesses, notably including inequality-generating processes, assume that only individualsexist, therefore that collective effects such as racial discrimination must result cumula-tively from common properties of individual dispositions to act. Thus the competitivemodels of inequality my article describes generally assume that racial categories residein individual minds. They then assume that the categories resemble each other from onemind to the next. Similar mental categories, goes the standard argument, lead the ownersof those minds to act in parallel ways toward people they place on one side or the otherof a racial boundary.

In a line of thought quite familiar to anthropologists, however, other analysts suppose

that racial categories operate through relations, practices, and representations whoseoverall connections (like those of a trade diaspora or a kindred) are rarely or never visibleto their participants. The first view reduces all social effects to individual causes, whereasthe second view insists on structural effects. With their expertise in connecting persons,practices, and representations, anthropologists stand in a good position to assess the rela-tive strengths of individual and categorical accounts.

As for historicism vs. universalism, the question arises with peculiar intensity instudies of inequality. On one side, local patterns of inequality by gender, race, caste, orclass unquestionably accumulate enormous historical content in the form of stories,teachings, taboos, diagnoses, remedies, labels, and interpersonal routines. Yet, on theother side, striking similarities appear in the operation of deference, subjugation,patronclient relations, and the emergence of chiefdoms in a wide variety of historicalsettings. Within a phenomenon such as nationalism, furthermore, principles of divisionas ostensibly different as religion, language, ethnicity, territorial proximity, and market

TILLY Introduction to special issue

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connection relate in similar ways to claims for political autonomy. How can we recon-cile historical-cultural particularity with recurrent causal processes?

Resort to fundamental human nature will not do the job, for it begs the question ofexplaining variation. My article in this symposium proposes to approach the problemby identifying causal mechanisms of very general scope, but causal mechanisms that (a)incorporate local cultural material, (b) occur in different combinations and sequences,and therefore (c) produce varying but still systematic and explicable aggregate effects.But it is also possible in principle that basic inequality-generating processes differsignificantly from one historical setting to another. Marxist mode of production analy-ses, for example, treat exploitation as a very general cause of inequality, but argue thatexploitation operates quite differently, with different effects, under feudal, capitalist, andother modes (Hobsbawm, 1964). With their historical-geographical range, anthropolo-gists have an opportunity to renew discussions of historicism vs. universalism.

This symposiums four articles illustrate anthropologys contribution to studies of

inequality. They break into two pairs, with Caroline Humphreys and KatherineVerderys displaying the virtues of sustained ethnography within well-defined settings,while Keith Harts and my own seek to identify common properties and connecting pro-cesses at a larger scale. Humphrey seeks to identify very general exclusionary processes noticeable, she argues, in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and India by careful analy-sis of exclusion in contemporary Russia. Close local observations at hand, Humphreyargues that Russians have created powerful unity-maintaining practices with strong con-sequences for inequality: the more they emphasize unity, the more they build bound-aries excluding others from that unity, and the more serious the penalties visited upon

those excluded. Russians, according to Humphrey, tolerate significant differences inpower and wealth within such solidary systems, just so long as members meet their obli-gations, acknowledge their common membership, and join in stigmatizing outcasts. Thearrangements she describes therefore resemble many trade diasporas, religious sects, andrevolutionary conspiracies. In my articles terms, Russians build strong systems of oppor-tunity hoarding, cementing them with local adaptation.

But Humphrey raises three interesting challenges to the arguments of my own articlefor this symposium. First, she denies that durable, visible boundaries separate theRussian included from the excluded, as my article suggests they should. Her exclusion

looks more like being thrown off a moving train than being walled off from your neigh-bors. What is more, she sees strong continuities in exclusionary rationales and practicesfrom early imperial times to the present. Once again, her argument challenges mine,since in my more utilitarian account both boundaries and configurations within bound-aries shift with relations of exploitation and opportunity hoarding. Finally, she arguesthat meanings and emotions based on deep commitment to shared moral systems moti-vate both the desire to cast out unworthy community members and the willingness totolerate visible material inequality so long as its beneficiaries meet their moral commit-ments. Such a view counters my own emphasis on material costs and benefits. Hereon-the-spot readershaveachanceto judgetherelativeplausibility of phenomenological-cultural (Humphrey) and relational-material (Tilly) explanations for inequality.

Readers who care little for such scholarly tournaments nevertheless have good reasonsfor reading Humphrey. Her documentation of widespread exclusionary practices intodays Russia lends insight into the travails of postsocialism. Although some people have


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become newly rich and powerful in postsocialist transformations and many have main-tained their attachments to segments of the old system, she shows us that increasingnumbers are falling or finding themselves pushed off the train. The result is increas-ing inequality, and a serious threat to Russias future.

Katherine Verdery likewise analyzes postsocialist transitions, but hers take place inrural Romania. Verdery examines a very general problem in a very particular place andtime. In general, she calls our attention to the grounding of property rights in time, orrather times: the times at which governments intervene to change available legal defi-nitions of rights to property, the times over which such rights endure, the times in whichpeople act to claim rights to property. Those times intersect everywhere that govern-ments exist, for governmental agents incessantly regulate and manipulate property rightsin pursuit of programs that often align badly with the interests and preconceptions ofthe people who interact most directly with the property in question. Frequently peopleon the ground struggle in governmental time to acquire those legal sanctions of their

property rights that will most closely approximate their conceptions of those rights asembedded in local time. Verdery is analyzing just such a case. (It is only fair to signalthat Verdery rejects my attachment of the various temporal modes to particular socialstructures, relations, or settings on the grounds that such a view reifies the structures,relations, or settings.)

In Verderys chosen territory of Transylvania, legal authorization of dissolution for col-lective farms in 1991 precipitated the problem. In Transylvanian villages, populationturnover, including those who lived and worked on collective farms, had continued longafter the collectivization of the 1950s. The law authorized restitution of ceded lands to

the families that had ceded them. Time immediately came into play: as of when did priorrights to land apply?In the 1990s, what did membership in the same families that hadexisted in the 1940s or 1950s mean?Where collective farms had plowed over bound-aries and paths, how could a village reconstitute the same parcels as families had farmedin the 1940s or 1950s?What about parcels farmed under mixed, disputed, or fictiveownership back then?What about families that arrived and worked on collective farmsafter collectivization?What of former landowning families who had left the village sincethe 1950s?

Such questions pertained both to times set by governmental agents and to those com-

monly invoked by local residents as they participated in land commissions. As inHumphreys Russia, Transylvanias villagers were struggling over who would be included,who excluded. Since land ownership was again becoming the primary criterion of com-munity membership and standing, to acquire no land at all was to fall into an excludedlower class. Again, as in Humphreys Russia, at stake were not only prestige, power, andmoral standing, but also access to networks of mutual aid on which people relied heavilyfor survival under socialism. Or consider similarities to the credit networks that sus-tained families in 16th-century England, as described in my article. Just as losing creditconsigned 16th-century English households to moral oblivion, losing claims to landexcludes Transylvanian villagers from local collective life. Unlike 16th-century credit,however, enforceable claims to land in Transylvania come to depend heavily on recog-nition and registration of those claims by pre-communist authorities, right back to 19th-century Austro-Hungarian authorities. Relevant times become ever more complicated(for parallel processes of top-down control and bottom-up negotiation, see Stevens,


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1999; Tilly, 1999). Eventually, as Verdery emphasizes, people use their previouslyaccumulated political capital to forward their own preferred temporal reference points.Despite the illusion that time determines property, eventually power struggles definerelevant times.

In Transylvania and elsewhere, property timeslook backward to momentswhen stateauthoritiesregistered,confirmed,altered,orotherwiseintervened in claimstoland,aswellasto other momentswhen particular householdsexercised effectivecontrol over differentpiecesof land.Theylooksidewisetocontemporaryshiftsandstruggleswithrespect tolegalrights and effective control. They also look forward to the positions of households inregard to futuretransfers, disputes, and negotiationsover land ownership within villages.In all three of these temporal perspectives, inequality is doubly at stake: the relativepositions of individualsandhouseholdsin hierarchiesof wealth, power,andprestigeareatrisk, but so are relations, including relations of patronage and mutual aid, among house-holds within villages. Although Verdery, like Humphrey, raises doubts that categorical

differences operate as neatly as my arguments require, Verdery is actually describing andexplaining the relational creation of new, consequential categorical differences.

Keith Hart likewise confronts time and inequality, but at a much larger geographicscale than Humphrey and Verdery; the whole world is his oyster. Hart examines howsuccessive phases of monetization have transformed material inequality among worldregions. He argues that the 18th-century industrial revolution, the 19th-century bureau-cratic revolution, and the 20th-century communications revolution each concentratedeconomic advantages in fewer hands, thus generating momentous increases in worldinequality. In each of these phases, money became a more influential means of connec-

tion, domination, and exclusion than in the previous phase. But the invention of virtualmoney, exemplified by the creation of futures markets anchored not only in goods andservices but also in securities, promoted a vast increase of inequality. It did so, arguesHart, by allowing capitalists to invest and disinvest in different parts of the world rapidlyand at their own convenience. He therefore sees a 21st century teetering among five verydifferent options:

1 utter subjection of world resources to the wills and advantages of a few connectedcapitalists

2 explosion of the money-connected system, leaving only those still exercisingimmediate control over land, labor, and means of material production to survivewithin their disconnected fragments

3 world revolution on the part of (or perhaps on behalf of) the losers in the economicprocesses generating ever-increasing inequality

4 alliance among segments of government, corporations, and the consuming publicto contain and humanize the power of capital, on something like the model of 19th-century liberal revolutions

5 opting out on the part of well-connected closed circuits of network users, benefit-ing from the radical decline in communication costs, on something like the recur-rent model of communitarian or artisanal socialism.

This is no modest vision. Despite his occasional references to the necessity of worldrevolution, Harts own professed preferences lie somewhere between options 4 and 5.


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He envisions middle-class activists as fortified vis-a-vis national governments by theirincreased capacity to shield money from taxation and to ally with fellow sufferers outsidetheir own countries. He does not say how the benefits of such a soft revolution wouldextend to the more serious victims of capitalist expansion his analysis identifies: poorpeople outside the centers of world capitalism. His closing words, however, suggest thatfurther alliances between the partially excluded middle classes and the totally excludedworking classes again perhaps on the model of 19th-century revolutions have becomeboth feasible and necessary. Thus at very different scales, the analyses of Humphrey,Verdery, and Hart all feature inclusion and exclusion as inequality-transforming pro-cesses.

So doesmyanalysis. My articleattemptsthreethings. First, it invokesCraig Muldrewstreatment of credit in 16th-century England to illustrate how the dynamics of inter-personal relations cause shifts in durable patterns of inequality. Second, it makes a casefor anthropological study (exemplified here by the works of Eric Wolf, Don Kalb, and

Timothy Earle) as a privileged means of access to the relevant dynamics of interpersonalrelations. Third, it lays out a primitive general theory of categorical inequality centeringon the dynamics of interpersonal relations. The theory treats the exclusionary processesstressed by Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart as special cases of a very general interpersonalmechanism called opportunity hoarding: confining use of a value-producing resource toan in-group. As relevant value-producing resources, Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart focusrespectively on mutual aid networks, land, and electronically diffused information.Occupational niches, craft technologies, precious commodities, rare minerals, scientificknowledge, and inside information about markets and politics similarly lend themselves

to opportunity hoarding.Opportunity hoarding, in my view, produces a significant range of inequalities, but

(a) always in the company of two other mechanisms, emulation and adaptation, bothof which should be quite familiar to anthropologists and particularly susceptible toinvestigation by ethnographic methods,

(b) no more so than the separate, if often complementary, mechanism of exploitation,which involves (1) sequestration of a value-producing resource, (2) organization ofother peoples effort in the production of value by means of that resource, (3) allo-

cation to those others of less than the value added by their effort, (4) commitmentof some portion of the value added to reproduction of control over the resource andover other peoples effort.

Given the centrality of exploitation to Marxist and marxisantexplanations of inequal-ity, indeed, it is striking how little exploitation appears in the accounts of Humphrey,Verdery, and Hart. Is this due to substantive disagreements, differences in perspective,selectivity of problems, or features of the eras and places addressed by my co-authors?My own guess is that a closer look at the materials examined by Humphrey, Verdery,and Hart will reveal more exploitation than their own analyses allow.

From my perspective, it is also surprising how little construction, reinforcement, andborrowing of bounded categorical differences (such as female/male, Roma/Russian,or citizen/alien) figure in the explanations of inequality proposed by Hart, Verdery,and Humphrey. I recognize both that continua such as from rich to poor exist and that


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sometimes who belongs to some network is much clearer than who does not belong. Iclaim nevertheless that socially organized categorical differences underlie a large share ofthe inequality that western observers commonly attribute to individual differences intalent, knowledge, and effort. Given its deep grounding in earlier anthropologicalinvestigations, such an argument deserves serious empirical attention rather than quickdismissal. At least I hope so. This journals readers must decide, of course, whether thetheory helps them do their own explanatory work. Even readers who remain dubious onthat score should find the ensemble of articles in this issue an encouragement to givingdescription and explanation of inequality greater prominence in todays anthropology.

References

Breman, Jan (1994) Wage Hunters & Gatherers: Search for Work in the Urban and RuralEconomy of South Gujarat. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964) Introduction, in Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist EconomicFormations. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marquand, John P. (1949) Point of No Return. Boston: Little, Brown.Stevens, Jacqueline (1999) Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.Thernstrom, Stephan (1964) Poverty and Progress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Tilly, Charles (1999) Power Top-Down and Bottom Up, Journal of Poli ti cal

Phi losophy7: 30628.Warner, W. Lloyd (1963) Yankee Ci ty. One vol., abridged edn. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.


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