Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Dependence

Egalitarianism

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 19:05:43 +0000

London School of Economics

Initially published 29 Apr 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22egalitarianism

Abstract:

Anthropology makes a unique contribution to the study of egalitarianism. While ‘egalitarianism’ has long been the purview of moral philosophy, anthropology is unique in that it is the only discipline that claims to know, empirically, what it is like to live in an egalitarian society. This entry summarises some of the numerous ways that anthropologists, working with a broad variety of people from hunter-gatherers to state bureaucrats, have used the term ‘egalitarianism’ to describe forms of social and political organisation concerned with ‘equality’. What it means to be ‘equal’, however, is widely debated not only among anthropologists, but among the people they study. As is true for moral philosophy, there are numerous approaches to the question—with some that emphasise equal rights or freedoms, and others that emphasise equal wealth or opportunities. Engaging critically with debates concerning the meaning of ‘equality’, and with ethnographic evidence of efforts to achieve it, this entry provides insights not only into what ‘egalitarianism’ is and is not, but also into the contextual factors that threaten egalitarianism and the situations that might allow it to flourish.

Introduction

Egalitarianism, the view that all people are equal and should be treated as such, is a well-developed area of study in moral philosophy. There are numerous traditions, from those that emphasise equal rights or freedoms and are known as ‘liberal’ traditions, to those that emphasise equal wealth or opportunities and are at times referred to as ‘socialist’ traditions (see Sen 1980). These traditions are diverse, but they tend to converge on the basic point that egalitarianism describes a form of social and economic organisation that ensures people are free from tyranny, i.e. free from seeing their freedoms or opportunities oppressed by others, and free from hierarchy in that their rights to wealth or to opportunities, for example, are not determined by rank or status.

One of the ways in which these traditions differ, however, is in their assessments of how we might achieve such relative equality and what role property should play. Where classically ‘liberal’ traditions stress that egalitarianism depends on people having personal property rights to what they produce or accumulate, classically ‘socialist’ traditions stress that the wealth people generate should be redistributed—if not to everyone, then to those who are most in need.

These forms of egalitarianism are obviously at odds with one another, and much discussion has been had on how to reconcile them (Arneson 2013). Anthropology has long made a contribution to this discussion by looking, empirically, at what it is like to live in an egalitarian society, i.e. a society that, on the face of it, values both personal autonomy and material equality. Anthropological research shows that such societies keep mechanisms in place to reconcile problems of freedom and problems of redistribution—maintaining not only certain ideas about persons (be they human or non-human), but certain practices of sharing or ways of relating to one another. Anthropology also studies ethnographically how people attempt to bring egalitarian societies about—revealing where these efforts fall short and where they succeed. Taken together, the discipline does not only tell us about the values that people associate with egalitarianism or equality, but about what happens when people try to live by them. It shows that lived egalitarianism is much more than simply a set of either ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ values and that a greater degree of equality is achievable almost everywhere.

Early writing on freedom and equality

Early writing on egalitarianism can be divided into texts that emphasise equality of rights and opportunities (in other words, freedom of choice and equality of rights under the law), and those that emphasise equality of outcome, often assumed to be equality of wealth. These are not mutually exclusive, but they have developed into distinct schools of thought. Though there are numerous early contributions to this area of study, the most widely cited social theorists are John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx.

The popularity of these European authors may give the impression that egalitarian thought originated from insurrections against the tyrannies or hierarchies of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Europe, but increasingly the archive suggests otherwise. These were also periods of European empire, and with that came resistance and rebellion from those people that Europeans were colonising or enslaving. Their dissidence, as Priyamvada Gopal (2019) writes, shaped the way people in Europe thought about freedom and emancipation. In Spain, the atrocities suffered by colonised indigenous peoples led Bartolomé de las Casas to develop a Christian form of egalitarianism. In France, the egalitarian thinking that was central to the French Revolution followed from discussions with indigenous theorists such as the chief of the Huron people, Kondiaronk (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). In the United States, Frederick Douglass became a leading abolitionist writer who made the case for human equality, and in the Caribbean C.L.R. James’ (1938) account of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture illustrates the persecution that people of colour experienced then, and still experience disproportionately today. All these writings indicate that egalitarian thinking is not the privilege of one region, but may resonate with people around the world who have been subdued by tyrannical rule, colonisation, and slavery.

Writing in the late seventeenth century, English philosopher John Locke emphasised that people have ‘natural rights’ to do as they please so long as the ‘natural rights’ of others are not violated in the process. His writing was revolutionary within a context where philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes supported absolute monarchy, and in the lead up to England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that saw the partial separation of Parliament from the Crown. Locke’s central claim was that people have inalienable rights to what they produce, and should be free from coercion, either in the form of enforced redistribution or in the form of forced labour—quite unorthodox ideas at the time.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was similarly concerned with freedom, but his writing is more sensitive to the problems posed by the pursuit of self-interest and by systems of private property. Since people depend upon one another, both materially and psychologically, Rousseau argued, it does not make sense to speak as if this were not the case—as if they are not obligated or compelled to care for one another or part with their wealth. In Discourse on inequality (1755), Rousseau argued that it was in establishing systems of private property that inequality was able to develop. Yet, Rousseau did not go so far as to advocate for private property to be abolished. Where inequality was natural for Locke, for Rousseau it could be overcome through the development of laws based on the ‘general will’ of the people—in other words, laws that would ensure the common good.

Like Rousseau, Karl Marx was concerned with the way private property could develop into systems of oppression. His analysis, however, was much more sophisticated in its account of how this happens under capitalism. Like Locke and Rousseau, Marx emphasised that people have rights over what they produce. He recognised, however, that this would necessarily exacerbate inequalities where people’s natural abilities were beyond their control or where the economic system was structured in such a way to privilege some over others. Marx claimed, contrary to the Lockean definition of equality effectively as ‘liberty’, that measures must be put in place to redistribute wealth to those who deserve it—not only those who are less able or less fortunate, but those who had produced the wealth in the first place.

Stated differently, where Lockean notions of ‘property’ focus primarily on the wealth one can produce or accumulate, Marxists expand this notion of ‘property’ to include not only the wealth one is able to produce but one’s abilities or opportunities as ‘properties’ as well. This distinction is key because where differences in abilities or opportunities are largely ‘natural’ to Locke (the property, like wealth, of individuals), they are largely the product of political and economic processes for Marx, and therefore the property of more than simply those who ‘own’ or ‘possess’ them. This forms the basis for Marx’s critique of capitalism, but Marx’s recognition of political and social context also serves as the basis for his own formulation of what an ‘egalitarian society’ might look like.

Drawing upon Lewis Henry Morgan’s ethnographic writing on the Iroquois, Marx wrote with Friedrich Engels ([1884] 1972) of ‘primitive communism’. This was a form of social and economic organisation that supported neither the accumulation of wealth nor the development of hierarchy. Only with the development of pervasive forms of capital accumulation would these earlier forms of egalitarianism give way to present day forms of inequality. The thrust of the argument surrounding primitive communism was that capitalism (and by extension, inequality) was not the inevitable consequence of granting people freedom, but rather historically specific and changeable. For contemporary followers of Marxist thought, it is in fact Lockean notions of assumedly ‘natural’ rights that are at the root of contemporary problems of inequality. Political systems privileging natural rights, they argue, lead to a sort of ‘possessive individualism’, where the individual is conceived of ‘as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them’ (Macpherson 1962, 3). For liberal and neoliberal thinkers, these principles are central to their own formulations of a fair, well-functioning society (see Morningstar 2020).

While anthropologists have generally opposed the notion that neoliberalism, i.e. the expansion of market logics, practices, and institutions, is a solution to problems of inequality, they have not escaped some of the promises and problems neoliberalism brings about. Most notably, they have not escaped the issue of how to value freedom or autonomy (in the sense of people being free from the claims of others or from coercive political and economic processes), without fostering inequalities of wealth or opportunity. Similarly, anthropologists grapple with the question of how to value that people make claims upon and care for one another (something at times called ‘communalism’), without supporting social hierarchies or socially destructive forms of dependency.

The following section presents some key ethnographies of hunting and gathering populations, who are renowned not only for their traditions of sharing but also for their respect of personal autonomy. This body of ethnographic work provides significant insights into the way that certain groups of people reconcile the tensions that arise between conflicting sets of values and into the contextual factors that shape such values in the first place.

The entry then looks at contributions to the study of egalitarianism that emerge in contexts where we might not expect it, such as in the Indian caste system or in the Sicilian mafia, and returns to the problem of what we understand ‘equality’ to be. Does ‘equality’ stand for sameness or equivalence when it comes to personal rights or abilities, or does it refer to wealth or opportunities?

Subsequently, the entry turns to ethnographic writing on animism and ‘vitality’ which shows that equality of rights or abilities as well as wealth or opportunities condition one another. In these instances, wealth or opportunity make the exercise of rights or abilities possible. It raises the question of what we owe to one another as humans but also what we owe to other sorts of beings that give us vitality and make life possible, pointing out that an ‘egalitarian society’ may have to include non-humans as well.

The final section then turns to people’s frequently messy attempts of trying to work out what they owe to one another. It asks how people pursue egalitarian values when they are not sure that they can trust others to do the same, or when other forms of uncertainty make it hard to do so. This section plays to anthropology’s strength, in that it shows how the tension between different forms of ‘equality’ play out in its practical pursuit. Ethnography is a crucial resource here—providing insights not only into the contextual factors that threaten egalitarianism, but the situations that might allow it to flourish.

Hunter-gatherers and ‘egalitarianism’

For many classically liberal thinkers, the absence of systems of rights and forms of governance that protect private property and individual freedoms would entail a steady descent into war (the most violent form that claim-making can take). Responding to this claim, anthropologists writing in the post-war period turned to ethnography and to some of the last so-called ‘primitive societies’. They sought to better understand hunting and gathering as a mode of subsistence, and in turn were able to challenge the claim that the absence of systems of private property was synonymous with tyranny or poverty. Drawing upon early ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers who lived with a minimal amount of private property (notably Lee and DeVore 1968, see Solway 2006), Marshall Sahlins famously argued that hunter-gatherers enjoyed not only ‘a kind of material plenty’ (1972, 9), but greater degrees of personal autonomy. Later studies argued in a similar vein that greater equalities of wealth, power, and prestige are ensured in hunter-gatherer societies than in any other (Woodburn 1982).

Something interesting was certainly going on here. These societies were not only said to value sharing and shun the accumulation of wealth, in line with Marx and Engels’ writing on ‘primitive communism’, but also to value personal autonomy of the sort cherished by liberal thinkers (see Widlok 2020). Rather than have the value of sharing develop into forms of hierarchy or oppression, where one has no choice but to give up one’s wealth, these were societies that valued sharing without thereby sacrificing personal autonomy. The form of sharing valued here is not based on a primacy of private property, which many readers may associate with philanthropy or systems of taxation. Instead, it is a type of sharing that gives anyone the right to claim, or ‘demand’, an equal share of whatever is produced or gathered. One can make such a claim, so long as the outcome of sharing is equality.

How does such ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993; Widlok 2004, 2013, 2017), however, square with the value of personal autonomy? While there is certainly an obligation, or a compulsion to share within these societies, sharing is not strictly enforced. It is not only possible to refuse the demands that people make, but to avoid those demands being made in the first place. This is important because demand sharing does not automatically ensure equality. Not only is it not always obvious when someone has accumulated more than others (due to the fact that wealth can be concealed or simply out of sight), but it is not always possible to know who can be trusted to be transparent about their wealth when they have. Refusing the demands that people make or preventing them from making them in the first place are, therefore, not simply indicative of the breakdown of egalitarianism. To the contrary, they play an important role in its realisation and to the realisation of personal autonomy. Personal autonomy, however, carries its own risks; the risk, no less, of making it possible for people to conceal their wealth or keep it in the hands of only those they prefer.

Faced with this eventuality, people who value egalitarianism typically develop measures that either maintain a certain amount of transparency or that remind people of their commitments to one another. Among !Kung (or ‘Ju|’hoansi’) for example (Wiessner 1977, also Laws 2019b), there have long been gift-exchange relationships (called xaro or hxaro) that limit accumulation and the development of hierarchy between ‘clans’ or ‘bands’ who live apart from one another and whose wealth at any one time is unknown. Gift-giving thus establishes a pattern of visiting that not only ensures the circulation of certain goods but creates opportunities for demand sharing between those whose wealth is out of sight. Other means of orienting people towards egalitarian behaviour include deriding those who seek to gain greater wealth, power, or prestige (or who are suspected of doing so) or managing the claims that others can make by choosing when to make one’s wealth visible or accessible to those who hope to make demands (see Laws 2019a, also see Lee 1984, 48 on ‘insulting the meat’ for a popular example of a levelling mechanism against the development of prestige).

Egalitarianism then, much like hierarchy, is not natural; rather it is maintained through a series of social levelling mechanisms (Woodburn 1982, also see Clastres 1972), practices that encourage the redistribution of wealth and regulate personal autonomy. They attune people to the value of egalitarianism and to the various ways it may be threatened. We see such efforts to attune people to the values of egalitarianism not only in the hunter-gatherer literature, but in numerous contexts where the benefits of sharing or maintaining autonomy outweigh the benefits of accumulating wealth, power, or prestige. These levelling dynamics play out on the streets of Addis Ababa (Di Nunzio 2012, 2017), Johannesburg (Dawson 2021), Nairobi (Thieme 2013, 2017), or the Zimbabwe-South Africa border (Mate 2021), where getting by means not only accumulating relationships with others (at times referred to as having ‘wealth in people’ [Guyer 2009]) but hustling to get whatever material forms of wealth one is due. We also see this in the many print and digital forums set up to provide a space for political commentaries against dictators (Bernal 2013), governments (Coleman 2014), or other sources of oppression (see Kapferer 2015), where achieving or maintaining autonomy means, at times, tricking or deriding others. These all provide further evidence of the surprising ways in which people go about trying to achieve equality, and of the contextual factors that shape whether, or how successfully, they do so.

The study of mostly egalitarian societies raises the question of whether these are people who simply share certain values, or whether they are in fact compelled towards them by states of mutual vulnerability. Put differently, the question is: can egalitarianism flourish irrespective of the circumstances people find themselves in, or do certain conditions need to be met for egalitarianism to develop or be maintained? Within writing on hunter-gatherers, there has been a tendency to argue both ways. On the one hand, egalitarianism is said to have developed over thousands of years of living under very specific conditions, often in some of the most challenging environments in the world, and to be sensitive to those conditions. On the other hand, egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers appears to be remarkably resilient to changes in circumstances—precisely because, as Thomas Widlok (2020) puts it, the resilience and reappearance of egalitarianism ‘relies to a large extent on these levelling practices being kept in place across generations’.

This has, as Stan Frankland (2016, 561) shows, often given the impression that hunter-gatherers are ‘stuck in a cosmological loop of “hunter-gatherer situations”’ that compels them to remain the way they are. This fits with a tendency to turn to hunter-gatherers as exemplary of a non-Western, non-modern kind of utopia (c.f. Trouillot 2003, 17; Gable 2011, 2). This tendency has not only had the effect of distorting their lives, pitting egalitarian ‘societies’ against non-egalitarian ones when both pursue egalitarianism but in ways that are shaped by the different circumstances they face. To minimise this risk, some anthropologists have decided not to analyse societies as a whole, but instead look more closely at the broader contextual factors that shape how, and whether, people (in general, not just hunter-gatherers) pursue egalitarianism (see Gulbrandsen 1991).

The analysis of egalitarian circumstances and situations allows anthropologists to recognise egalitarianism in places where we would not have expected it, beyond hunter-gatherer contexts, including in large social groups (see Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 276-327). Research into egalitarianism can therefore take place even in highly hierarchical societies. This broadening of research contexts, however, has led some analysts to use the term ‘egalitarianism’ somewhat indiscriminately. Recalling the central distinction between freedom and autonomy on the one hand, and sharing and redistributive equality on the other, it often becomes hard to know what exactly the term egalitarianism means (also see Buitron and Steinmüller 2020). The next section addresses this with respect to a key determining factor: how people approach differences in property, and what we take ‘property’ to be.

Property, personhood, ‘equality’, and ‘equivalence

Outside of hunter-gatherer studies, the term ‘egalitarianism’ was perhaps most famously used by Louis Dumont (1980) in his structural analysis of the Indian case system. Comparing India with ‘the West’, from the perspective of both the society ‘as a whole’ and the individual within it, Dumont begins by equating the Indian caste system with ‘hierarchy’ as individuals are organised legally and in their everyday lives in relation to their rank, and the West with ‘equality’ or ‘egalitarianism’ because here individuals are equal before the law. However, Dumont goes on to challenge this standard formulation, arguing that rather than equate egalitarianism with the sort of equality exhibited by the Western legal system, it should be seen in the Indian caste system. Where the Indian caste system sees persons defined in relation to one another, the Western legal system sees persons defined in relation to themselves—whether, in other words, they are ‘equivalent’ to one another. Where the Indian caste system is an instance of ‘holism’ and inclusivity, the Western legal system is an instance of individualism and exclusivity.

Dumont’s ‘egalitarianism’, however, is one that focuses almost exclusively on identity—in other words, on how persons are defined. According to the Western legal system, persons are equivalent to one another to the extent that they share the same rights. According to the Indian caste system, persons are equivalent to one another insofar as they are similarly defined in relation to one another. The move that Dumont makes, as Joel Robbins (1994, 21) points out, is to ensure that ‘the mere existence of inegalitarian elements in a society does not prevent us from studying it as an egalitarian one’. While this comparison is insightful and allows us to consider egalitarianism from more than one vantage point, it is also limited. As David Graeber (2007, 47) has argued, it misses the basic point that ‘from the perspective of those on the bottom’ (Graeber 2007, 26), either of the formal hierarchy in India or from a standpoint of material deprivation in the West, both systems are highly exclusive, either restricting peoples rights and opportunities or limiting their access to wealth (see Beteille 1986, also see Leacock 1978 or Finnegan 2013 for an analysis of how this plays out in relation to gender). The relationship between how one is defined and one’s material equality or rights and opportunities is not fully explored. It is possible, in other words, to be equivalent in some way but not to have equality.

Naomi Haynes and Jason Hickel (2016) offer a complementary, albeit different, perspective on the relationship between equality and equivalence when proposing the term ‘egalitarian hierarchy’. This, they argue, is not a contradiction in terms but rather an analytical descriptor for situations where positions within a hierarchy are open to anyone. One’s position within the hierarchy, in other words, can shift—meaning that those at the bottom can take positions at the top—addressing, to an extent, the issue raised by David Graeber. This is not ‘egalitarianism’ as described by Dumont, but it is ‘egalitarianism’ insofar as the opportunity to occupy certain subject positions is equally shared. We see this in Haynes’ (2015) ethnography of Pentecostal Christianity in Zambia’s Copperbelt where, among the Pentecostal congregations she studies, we find a clear separation between leaders and laypeople. However, both kinds of positions can be held by anybody, and neither position can be held permanently. The Holy Spirit is ‘poured out on “all flesh”’ (Haynes and Hickel 2016, 9). It may be the case, in other words, that there are differences between people and their access to opportunities or to wealth, but these differences are not stable, nor do they necessarily result in unequal access to wealth—in this case, the Holy Spirit.

Studies such as these, that challenge any neat distinction between hierarchy and egalitarianism, or that draw attention to the differences between equality and equivalence, are significant because they challenge the claim that natural or social differences in abilities necessarily give way to inequality. By extension they also challenge the claim that equivalence or ‘sameness’ must entail equality or egalitarianism (Walker 2020). An early analysis of gender relations among Hagen people living in Papua New Guinea’s Mount Hagen region had already picked up on this issue (Strathern 1988, 138-58). In this area, during the late 1960s, numerous ‘inequalities’ existed between men and women in terms of their division of labour—in the raising of pigs by women, or the hosting of public ceremonies by men. However, these differences were not indicators of inequality proper because ownership over the resources that come from labour does not discriminate between them. Pigs raised by women may help men further their political interests, but the prestige they gain from the labour of ceremonial exchange may be the benefit of women (148). What makes this ‘egalitarian’ is the fact that what people accrue from their labour is not their property alone. This must be so because people are not regarded as the sole authors of their own actions. This applies not only to the products of their labour, be that pigs or yams, but to working bodies too as the outcome of social relations. One observes a similar recognition across much of the Amazon, where the language of ‘masters’ and ‘owners’ suggests that all capacities to act are themselves seen as the outcome of the acts of others (Rival 1998; Fausto 1999, 2008). What follows from this is that egalitarian societies rely on commonly accepted understandings of the debts we owe to one another, both with respect to wealth and with respect to status or ability.

Some writers have recently taken a more critical stance towards the idea that ‘egalitarianism’ can exist in a context of hierarchy. Within Australia, for example, ‘egalitarianism’ has been used to describe the view after World War II that people are ‘a society of equals who possessed as inner qualities the capacity to govern themselves’ (Kapferer and Morris 2003, 91). This view has also been used as the basis of populist rejections of efforts to address existing inequalities in Australia, typically between majority and minority populations, on the grounds that providing minorities with exclusive welfare programs could be considered ‘inegalitarian’ (Kapferer and Morris 2003, 91). Similarly, in Switzerland, ‘egalitarianism’ is used to describe the Swiss system of direct democracy which aims to ensure consensus between different political groups (Gold 2019). Yet this same system facilitates exclusionary practices if the will of the majority dictates it. An equivalence between voters, or between party members, may entail equality in other words, but it does not in itself ensure it. In Sicily, the ‘popular metaphor associating the Mafia with power, exercised through power’ (Rakopoulos 2017, 113) would suggest that the relationship between members within a Mafia cooperative is necessarily one of coercion. By contrast, Rakopoulos explains, relationships between Mafioso and those who form the political economy in the region, such as winemakers, are egalitarian in the sense that they are frequently based not on coercion but on consent. The question, then, is how to keep it this way? Or how to challenge and transform hierarchies of power if they develop? The following section addresses these questions in more depth, focusing not only on how humans redistribute or balance inequalities of power, but also how this extends to non-humans.

Vitality and uncertainty

It may be possible to bring together ‘egalitarianism’ as freedom or autonomy and ‘egalitarianism’ as sharing and redistribution. Terms like ‘sharing’ and ‘redistribution’ do not just refer to what we do with objects or goods. They also describe our abilities or capacities to act, i.e. the ‘properties’ of us as living beings. We often produce these properties in much the same way as we produce objects or goods: through labour, or by attending to or caring for one another, for example. Such a renewed focus on the qualities or properties of persons may help us appreciate that egalitarianism entails not only the sharing or redistribution of objects but of vitality itself. On the one hand, this highlights the important question: ‘to whom do we owe our existence?’ (Graeber 2011, 67). The social processes that enable us to live, of course, are not always equalising; however, investigating them is one good way to not just reflect upon our debts towards others but also on what others may owe to us. Here, a focus on vitality foregrounds that the ‘products’ of people’s actions are not only goods but people themselves. It shifts the question of how unequal distributions of wealth, power, or prestige are ‘levelled’ to how such desirable aspects of life are brought about in the first place

On the other hand, a focus on vitality foregrounds that many people survive by harvesting, hunting, or consuming beings they regard as having a vitality of their own. All social life, whether between humans, or between humans and non-humans, entails a degree of violence, and egalitarian societies are no exception. As David Graeber writes, with reference to anarchic sociopolitical formations, this ‘spectral violence seems to emerge from the very tensions inherent in the project of maintaining an egalitarian society’ (2004, 31). What is important in bringing about egalitarian situations is not preventing violence entirely, but rather to prevent these forms of violence from becoming excessive or overly exploitative. Language may play an important role here. Among Ju|’hoansi in northeastern Namibia, for example (Laws 2019b, 219), there are ‘owners’ and ‘masters’ not of goods or objects but of actions. Such ‘owners’ or ‘masters’ (indicated by the suffix –kxao) perform a particular action either especially well or excessively. A ‘master thief’ (dcàákxao), for example, is only ever referred to as such if they do so excessively. This suggests a certain tolerance for wrongdoing but also provides a language that marks excessive negative behaviour. The tolerance that this language communicates is borne not simply of the view that some theft is fine, but the reality that distinguishing theft from permitted acts of taking requires an understanding of intentions—something that is difficult and takes time.

Investigating the creation and distribution of vitality has also allowed anthropologists to highlight how important non-humans are in bringing about egalitarian situations. Non-humans feature prominently in efforts to rebalance all kinds of distribution. Within animist contexts, spirits who are often all seeing and all powerful regulate vitality both among humans (Laws 2021) and among humans and non-humans. Among the Yukaghir people of North Siberia, we see how this principle operates between hunters and their prey (Willerslev 2012). All prey are said to have spirit-masters. These spirit-masters regulate hunting among the Yukaghir by threatening to strike them with sickness or death if they hunt too much. The implication is that if the balance of vitality shifts from the forest to the Yukaghir, there must be mechanisms in place to restore it through comparable acts of violence. Similarly, in Amazonia, most things are described as having an ‘owner’—a ‘mediator between this resource and the collective to which he or she belongs’ (Fausto 2008, 330; also Walker 2012). What matters is not that people refrain from hunting or from getting into debt, but that they refrain from doing this too much. Their actions should be directed towards the right ends. People may of course attempt to resist these efforts, for example by ‘playing tricks’ to avoid being struck with sickness or death (Willerslev 2012) or to avoid sharing (Laws 2019a), but they do this not because they wish to exploit one another or the environment but because they fear they themselves are being exploited.

This line of analysis builds on scholarly insights in anthropology that non-humans are often deeply embedded in social relationships and processes. They are not simply the ‘products’ of labour that get shared among humans, but agents that make demands of their own. In her analysis of egalitarianism among Nayaka hunter-gatherers of South India, Nurit Bird-David (1990) illustrates how Nayaka root metaphors of the forest as a ‘giving parent’ are embedded in broader processes of ascribing agency (or rather, social sentience) not only to humans but also to the environment more broadly. Just as people, in the spirit of demand sharing, construct their needs in terms of their desire for an equal share (Bird-David et al. 1992), so too do the plants, animals, or environments they demand from. Similarly, when the balance of wealth shifts—in other words, when people take more from the environment than they give, or when their activities become unsustainable—the environment demands a share of the life-force that early acts of giving made possible. They are embedded within a ‘cosmic economy of sharing’ (also see Lewis 2008) that extends well beyond human interpersonal relations.

This raises a critical question: how should we go about balancing vitality? Writing on resistance and revolution in anthropology (see Wright 2016, Wilson 2019) demonstrates a variety of responses to this question, or rather a variety of approaches to efforts of societal transformation (see Cherstich et al. 2020), within both state and non-state contexts. We see everything from highly visible forms of political action in the form of revolutions or protests (see Rasza 2015; Graeber 2008; Sitrin 2012), to more ‘unobtrusive’ forms of political struggle (Scott 1990, 183; Maeckelbergh 2011, 2016). Writ large, what this literature suggests is that balancing vitality takes two primary forms: one which involves resisting oppression or overcoming marginalisation, and one that involves embodying the forms of political and social life that ought to take their place.

A key problem that emerges in the literature on egalitarianism is to do with the problem of uncertainty. To bring about an egalitarian society, one must know where wealth or power reside and whom to trust. We find that people are often concerned not simply with whether a given interaction is fair, but with whether actions or processes that seem putatively fair may, in fact, allow inequalities to develop over time. It is also in situations of scarcity and marginality, where uncertainty is rife and where people depend upon one another greatly, that concerns of this kind seem to become all the more pressing. In these situations, egalitarianism appears not simply as a possibility for social organisation but as a necessity or an inevitability (Gulbrandsen 1991, Laws 2019b).

At the same time, the anthropological literature warns us against teleological arguments about the nature of egalitarianism (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). A close analysis of archaeological and historical records finds that the relationship between modes of production and forms of social organisation are not straightforward, and that societies depending on agriculture may remain mostly egalitarian while hunter-gatherers may not. Whether human groups began as egalitarian or hierarchical ones is still up for debate. David Graeber and David Wengrow have recently argued that ‘we do not have to choose…between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story’ (2021, 118) as we should not underestimate human capacities for creativity when living under and responding to different material conditions. The authors draw upon archaeological and historical evidence from Çatalhöyük or early cities from Egypt to China to Central America to argue not only that egalitarianism appears within a wide variety of contexts, but that people develop ingenious ways of responding to the different challenges that these contexts pose for pursuing egalitarianism. We can start by agreeing that it is not simply the case that egalitarianism entails the rejection, under any circumstances, of relations of property. It is certainly the case that egalitarianism tends to mean holding the products of people’s labour as common property and, by extension, the abilities or qualities that people possess. But any ‘genuinely egalitarian system’ (Graeber 2007, 48)—one, in other words, that values autonomy—has embedded within it hierarchical possibilities and unequal potential that must be actively guarded against, often with recourse to relations of property.

This brings attention to at least one recurring challenge that people face when they pursue egalitarianism—the challenge of not knowing, on the one hand, where wealth or power resides and, on the other, whom we should trust to share wealth or power when they have it. ‘Assertive egalitarianism’, with this in mind, is less about performing sharing or acting autonomously and more about attuning oneself, and others, to these broader problems of knowledge that may allow inequalities to develop over time. We see this in ‘Melanesian egalitarianism’, where ceremonial processes of giving and receiving appear to be more about denying the ‘new manifestations of power’ that may emerge from the accumulation of resources, than they are about day-to-day processes of redistribution that circumscribe such forms of accumulation (Rio 2014).

One way that people go about addressing problems of uncertainty that arise is through developing moral arguments that remind people that they need each other, and that they owe their vitality and the products of their labour to each other. There are many ways that people do this and ensure that people refrain from the kinds of actions that lead to hierarchy or inequality in its most enduring forms, but one common way is through the development of universal systems of kin classification (see Barnard 1978, 2016; Leacock and Lee 1982; Bird-David 2017). These systems take ‘kin’ to be those who act in particular ways (most notably, those who share with one another), not those who are related by blood or residence. What this does, coupled with broader narratives of what it means to be ‘good’ and to be a ‘person’, is sustain a moral argument about the relationship between equality as an outcome and different ways of behaving or treating others.

These approaches to achieving equality, and the moral arguments that accompany them, can take a wide variety of forms. What unites them, however, is a subjunctive mood—a mood, in other words, that is attuned to doubts and suspicions (see Laws 2021, also see Stasch 2015). These doubts and suspicions concern not only people's commitments to the principles of egalitarianism but the way contingencies of scale and time shape people’s ability to recognise inequalities developing over time or prevent people from acting upon them. The study of egalitarianism suddenly looks quite different. It is not simply the study of values of freedom or sharing, but the study of the way people address uncertainty and the impact it has on efforts to achieve equality. This highlights the importance not only of redistribution or freedom but of concomitant practices of tracing inequalities of wealth, power, and prestige over time and finding ways to address these as they develop. When we take these practices seriously, we start to see egalitarianism at work in unexpected places—in political commentaries that use dark humour and satire to call out coercive or self-seeking behaviour, among programmers seeking to develop alternatives to centralised banking systems, among hackers seeking to expose or disrupt hierarchies, or in ordinary acts of mutual aid. How successful these are depends not only on the values people have, but on the availability of knowledge and the ability to address inequality when it does become apparent.

Conclusion

The study of egalitarianism makes clear that there is a tension between ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, or ‘autonomy’ and ‘communalism’, with one ‘running as a strong counter-current’ to the other (Guenther 1999, 42)—a ‘paradox’, even, at the heart of egalitarianism (see Kapferer 2015). Anthropological engagements with the topic suggest, however, that any model of equality that does not take sharing seriously fails to recognise the enabling conditions of individual freedom and autonomy. Anthropological scholarship of egalitarianism focuses as much on the creation of wealth, power, and prestige as on its redistribution. It broadens the object of inquiry to include the study of vitality and links the creation and maintenance of egalitarian relationships to notions of ‘property’ and personhood and to certain understandings of the non-human.

By analysing lived egalitarianism, it shows that distinguishing between the performance of egalitarian values and their enactment is a fundamental problem. It also shows that in contexts of high uncertainty, when people are compelled not only to share but to respect one another’s autonomy in the interests of social cohesion, equality appears almost inevitable. In many other contexts, however, equality must be actively pursued—not only as a value or set of values, but as a material reality that depends upon being both open about one's relative wealth and committed to achieving equality as an outcome (and not simply to pursuing a particular set of values).

By exploring how people actually go about pursuing the values associated with egalitarianism and how they navigate the many challenges that they face along the way, ethnography gives us a sense of what it might be like to live in an egalitarian society. More importantly, it teaches us under what conditions performing the actions or processes associated with egalitarianism might actually help us to bring equality about.

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Note on contributor

Megan Laws is a fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa, with research interests in the way that doubt and trust shape egalitarian values and redistributive practices.

Dr Megan Laws, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. m.laws1@lse.ac.uk

Social reproduction

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 21:09:51 +0000

Hadas Weiss

Initially published 25 Sep 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21socialrepro

Abstract:

Social reproduction is a lens through which to analyse the persistence of society over time, even as its human and material components keep changing. Its main value is in identifying and explaining tensions that emerge between the logic that reproduces society, and the continued survival (biological reproduction) and wellbeing of the population. Its origins are in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalist society, as governed by a drive towards accumulation. Initially, anthropologists have sought inspiration from Marx in examining the reproduction of non-capitalist societies, but they have since largely joined adjacent disciplines in focusing on capitalism. Modern social reproduction theory has proceeded from blind spots in Marx’s analysis, primarily regarding the role of women and domestic work in maintaining current workers and non-workers. From there, it has expanded to examine other fault lines in the reproduction of capitalist society. Contemporary strands of social reproduction theory attend to crises that emerge with respect to care work and livelihoods as finance becomes the main motor of accumulation. They also underline ways in which the reproduction of society reproduces inequalities within it. For ethnographers, attention to social reproduction illuminates the entanglements of any chosen fieldsite and plights therein with broader dynamics of accumulation.

Introduction

Social reproduction is a concept used in anthropology and adjacent disciplines to make sense of society’s continuity over time as recognisably the same entity. Its primary focus is therefore the logic (a composite of forces and institutions) that organises finite, ever-changing things and people into categories, positions, and patterns of behaviour that exceed their individual existence. Inevitably, social reproduction also attends to the persistence of society’s members: their biological reproduction (including the sexual relations and fertility that generate it) and the sources of their survival, longevity, and wellbeing. Biological reproduction, no less than the reproduction of a specific culture, institution, or phenomenon, is nevertheless understood to be subordinate to the reproduction of society writ large, which is the unit to which ‘social reproduction’ refers. The analytic value of social reproduction theory is precisely where the two key aspects of society—its logic and its human components—are in tension with each another. Focusing on social reproduction tends to work best when it allows us to recognise this tension, explain it, and identify ways in which it could be reduced or overcome.

The tension between society’s logic and the survival and wellbeing of its members is particularly jarring in capitalist society. This is so because the logic that holds capitalist society together cannot be reduced to the decrees (supporting the continued survival and wellbeing) of any one person or group of people. Social reproduction theory has emerged out of the writings of capitalism’s main critic, Karl Marx (1992 [1867]; 1992 [1885] and other writings). While anthropologists have also used it to analyse pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies, social reproduction as an analytic has proven most fruitful at illuminating the fault lines of capitalist society, including those that Marx himself had overlooked. Its main uses today, then, both within and outside of anthropology, are in mounting a critique of capitalism as it manifests itself in particular fieldsites and empirical case studies.

Anthropology’s baseline for working out the logic of society has been interdependence: that is, the dependence of society’s members on each other, as the glue that keeps a very large group of people together (Martin 2021). Insofar as interdependence is taken to be established through reciprocal exchange (Mauss 2018 [1925]), however, it cannot explain the long-term and inter-generational interactions that social reproduction entails (Weiner 1980). Nor does it capture the multiplicity of transactions that do not proceed symmetrically or reciprocally. The ubiquity of hierarchies and inequalities suggests, rather, something more fundamental against which everything else in society is synchronised. Inspired by Marx’s thought, social reproduction theory traces this something to the way in which a society’s resources are produced and distributed; and it goes on to ask how this production process reproduces itself (Godelier 1977).

What follows is a brief account of the journey that anthropology and adjacent disciplines have travelled in studying social reproduction. It begins with the theory’s origins in Marx’s analysis of capitalist society as governed by a logic of accumulation. It continues with feminist scholars’ insistence on the constitutive role of unwaged domestic labour. It then arrives at the various articulations of social reproduction theory against the backdrop of contemporary crises and finance-led capitalism. The entry ends with a reference to the role of culture and ideology in the reproduction of social inequalities.

Marxian origins

The concept of ‘reproduction’ presupposes the existence of something that is being reproduced, and expresses a preoccupation with its continuity, persistence, and repetition (Burawoy 1976). This something cannot be a material entity, as such entities perish and transform. Rather, it is likely a relation; one so foundational as to form the condition for every instance that occurs next, generating the consistency of each subsequent occurrence (Balibar 1970).

Karl Marx (1992 [1867]) identified this core relation, in capitalist society, as that which pertains between ‘capital’, i.e. money and material resources for investment in the production of goods and services to be sold on the market, and ‘labour power’, i.e. the capacity of largely propertyless but legally free people to work. Although this relation is an abstraction, it can and often is embodied in people, namely in capitalists, who own and invest the means to produce, and in workers, who sell their capacity to work for a wage. The relation is foundational because it structures everyone’s behaviour to a considerable extent. Capitalists are forced by competition with other capitalists to pursue market-mediated profit lest they be pushed out of business and cease being capitalists. And workers are forced by lack of independent means of livelihood to sell their labour power for a wage with which to buy the things they need and want.

What drives capitalist society’s reproduction, according to Marx, is therefore compulsion: the actions of all members of society being carried out under the domination of something external to them. The domination is ‘structural’; that is, enforced not by people but by structures and institutions, chief among them being the market. Marx showed how everything that is produced under capitalism is produced to be sold on the market. It is where capitalists obtain the material and human resources for undertaking production, and where workers obtain their living necessities. As both capital and labour power depend on it for the most basic conditions of their existence, the market exacts pressures and incentives that regulate and synchronise the reproduction of society at large (Wood 2002).

According to Marx, for capital to always be available for production, the value that workers produce in their work must exceed the value represented in their wages. Capitalists pocket the so-called ‘surplus value’ as profit, and they reinvest it. The capitalist market operates through them towards the goal of accumulation: the creation of surplus value that, when reinvested, launches the next cycle of production. And so, each new cycle of production resets the conditions for subsequent production and accumulation. This dynamic requires not only that there be enough capital for reinvestment, but also that there be enough workers to keep production going, and to buy the product and thereby ‘realise’ its profit. Marx identified this as a contradictory dynamic because capital stands in opposition to labour. On the one hand, the lower workers’ wages are, the greater the surplus value available for accumulation. On the other, wages must be high enough for workers to continue working, consuming, and raising the next generation of workers so that production won’t come to a standstill.

This renders the reproduction of capitalist society a bumpy, crisis-ridden affair. Capitalists overproduce to undersell their competitors, partly through ever-greater automation, whose surpluses end up being destroyed or devalued. The tighter the competition among capitalists, the harder to achieve the profits of yesteryear. Hence, escalating competition and automation, which in turn reduce the demand for and value of people’s labour power (Marx 1992 [1867]: 762-794). Unemployed, underemployed, and poorly paid workers struggle to purchase the stuff they need and desire. Resources must be distributed to smooth the process of reproduction. Marx therefore discussed ‘schemes of reproduction’ in the second volume of Capital (1992 [1885]) as the allocation of resources to people and of people to resources in a way that supports the continuity of production and, perforce, of accumulation (Narotzky 1997).

Throughout his writings on capitalism, Marx insisted on the interdependence of the production, consumption, and circulation of both people and things. Yet, anthropologists drawing inspiration from Marx in their studies of non-capitalist societies have found it useful to confine ‘production’ to the technical process of creating things. Arguing that it is not the predominant logic of non-capitalist economies, they could thereby focus on the logic that governs the biological reproduction and circulation of people (Gregory 1982).

A forerunner of social reproduction theory in anthropology has been Claude Meillassoux (1972, 1981), who had applied Marxian insights to pre-capitalist societies. He characterised the mode of production of Neolithic peasant communities as the agricultural cycle. Its slow pace forged lifelong and intergenerational dependencies. At all times, the workers of one agricultural cycle were indebted for seed and food to the workers of the previous one, and they supplied seed and food to their dependents and successors. Since these communities sustained themselves on agricultural work, their elders—the creditors of seed—managed the work and product of juniors. Each household needed a workforce large enough to make optimal use of its land, so elders also managed the ‘distribution’ of the women who birthed and raised children. Their socially reproductive task was thus matching the number of working hands to productive capacities. Meillassoux (1981) claimed that a similar logic of social reproduction persisted in capitalism’s peripheries. There, miners and factory workers live and subsist on farms, exiting them when their work is in demand. This allows employers to pay them only the wages necessary to cover their actual work time and throw them back on their families for the rest.

While acknowledging Meillassoux’s contribution to our understanding of social reproduction, anthropologists have nevertheless faulted him for positing a biological rather than a social basis for women’s oppression (Donham 1999; Katz 1983; O’Laughlin 1977) and for overemphasising women’s biological reproduction at the expense of their domestic work (Collier & Yanagisako 1987; Harris & Young 1981), issues that will resurface among feminist theorists of social reproduction. They have also faulted him for analytically separating production from reproduction, thereby defying the Marxian principle that ‘as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction’ (Marx 1992 [1867]: 711) (O’Laughlin 1977; c.f. Weiss 2018).

Separating production from reproduction makes even less sense for capitalist societies, whose reproduction can be simply considered the net result of its specific production process (Cammack 2020). Yet, the insistence of an earlier generation of anthropologists to examine the reproduction of people in contradistinction to that of things bespeaks a refusal to sideline the human components of a social logic that operates ‘as a connected whole’. This refusal lingers on in contemporary social reproduction theory, which emphasises the reproduction of labour power, livelihoods, and care.

Feminist interventions

One of the conditions for capitalist society to reproduce itself is that the workers producing surplus value receive wages to sustain them and their dependents. This should allow them to continue working and to raise the next generation of workers. Marx often wrote as if the wages of workers, and the goods and services they could buy, would lead to labour power’s daily maintenance and generational renewal without further ado. Yet, women not only give birth to workers; historically, they have also been disproportionately those raising and educating them, on top of caring for other dependents, making the house liveable, preparing meals, and so forth. Such domestic labour, because it is unwaged and not directly performed for market exchange, has been taken for granted and fell out of the traditional Marxian purview.

Feminists have long objected to the devaluation of domestic labour. In the 1970s, a Wages for Housework Campaign initiated public discussion about revalorising it. Anthropologists of the period, inspired by Friedrich Engels’ 1884 book The origin of the family, private property and the state, have pursued gender issues in the reproductive process, as a feminised sphere of ‘domestic production’, distinct but no less important than waged, market-mediated production (Edholm et al. 1977; Harris & Young 1981; Sacks 1979). Anthropologists Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako (1981) conceded that the distinction between men’s production and women’s reproduction reflects empirical observation. Yet, they warned against using it as a basis for theory, since strictly separating production from reproduction risks making a universal law out of a historically specific phenomenon. The same criticism could apply to assumptions about transhistorical sexism or patriarchy which, while noting how women’s undervalued domestic work intersects with capitalism, fail to consider what in capitalism itself produces it.

A touchstone of modern social reproduction theory has been Lise Vogel’s (2013 [1979]) anchoring of women’s oppression in the reproduction of capitalism itself. Capitalist production necessitates biological processes specific to women (pregnancy, childbirth, lactation) to produce the next generation of workers. But this alone does not condemn women to subordination. Vogel explains that, while childbearing is necessary for capitalism, it is also problematic for it: reducing the childbearing woman’s capacity to work for a wage, it further requires that she be maintained during this period. One cost-cutting solution is that men be made responsible for their wives. The capitalist state, acting as an agent of accumulation, has controlled and regulated female reproduction by reinforcing a male-dominant order made up of breadwinning husbands and (temporarily) unwaged, childrearing wives. This arrangement not only devolves more power on husbands-as-providers; it also creates potential conflicts between men and women, to be addressed through gendered notions of ‘love’ and ‘sacrifice’ (Picchio 1992).

Control over women’s childbirth and domestic labour emerges, then, from capitalism’s need to produce, in an efficient way, the next generation of workers. This need is most overt where there is a shortage of labour power. A well-known account thereof is by Silvia Federici (2004), focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Population declines and the necessity for working hands had then induced the budding capitalist powers to criminalise celibacy and birth control. Women accused of such ‘reproductive crimes’ were persecuted as witches. Men were co-opted into this subjugation of women, finding in it a means of regaining some of the power they lost on being turned into propertyless workers. Women became, for them, substitutes for the lands that had been taken away from them: a basic means of livelihood, and a resource to appropriate and exploit. New cultural canons followed suit, establishing that women had to be placed under male control because they were allegedly excessively emotional and lusty or, once defeated, asexual beings that could edify the household.

Vogel (2013 [1979]) also emphasised that the socially reproductive labour of caring for household members and raising the next generation of workers was neither always nor necessarily performed by housewives. On the contrary: women’s domestic labour competes with capital’s drive to accumulation because women could be spending the same time working for a wage, directly fuelling the production of surplus. It serves accumulation well, then, to reduce the amount and cost of domestic labour and so, to free up more labour power and capital for investment in for-profit production.

Vogel specified several ways in which this is done. One is commodification: laundromats, ready-made clothing, and fast-food chains allow aspects of domestic labour to be purchased on the market. Childcare, housekeeping, and eldercare can also be made available at a price, in what Arlie Hochschild (2003) identified as the ‘commercialization of intimate life’. Devolving these tasks onto the for-profit sector also provides opportunities for capitalist entrepreneurs, fuelling profitability and accumulation. And mass production of domestic goods and services reduces their costs, enabling the lowering of wages and, perforce, of the costs of social reproduction (Picchio 1992).

Another means Vogel identified for minimising the amount and costs of domestic labour is by socialising it: public education, healthcare, and retirement make aspects of domestic labour the responsibility of the state. The corporate sector also plays a role in socialisation through institutions like occupational insurances and pensions. Taxes and corporate contributions distribute the costs of social reproduction more widely across the population. This multiplies the sites in which socially reproductive labour takes place, from the household to workplace training, parks and playgrounds, social housing, schools, social welfare programs, childcare and healthcare facilities, and so on (Katz 2001).

Finally, Vogel stipulated that the cost of domestic labour can be reduced by importing migrant labour to perform it. The socially reproductive labour of maintaining the workforce and of renewing it is thereby separated geographically: migrants are recruited from one country to serve as the workforce of another, where they are also maintained (Burawoy 1976). Migrant women from the Global South and from former-Soviet countries often do double duty for social reproduction: the breadwinners and providers of their own families through the remittances they send back, and those performing housekeeping and caretaking tasks for the families that employ them (Barber & Lem 2018).

Crisis and financialisation

Despite the multiple sites and means through which social reproduction is accomplished, social reproduction theory of the 1970s focused primarily on the household. This reflected the end of an era where public support for the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model was at its highest. Following the Great Depression and Second World War, states in the core of global capitalism assumed some public responsibility over welfare, investing in healthcare, schooling, childcare, and pensions. Sparking economic demand among (primarily white and unionised) workers, and supplying them with the means to consume, was deemed necessary for maintaining the profitability of mass production. Households were supported by more jobs, higher wages, and public-sector spending, becoming private spaces for the consumption of mass-produced objects of daily use: the domain of the housewife (Fraser 2017).

However, recent developments in capitalism have raised attention to reproductive activity that cuts through the household. The capitalism of the present, often called ‘financialised’ because finance is its main motor of accumulation, has seen the relocation of manufacturing to low-wage regions and the mass recruitment of women into the paid workforce. Firms struggling to maintain profitability squeeze labour power such that wages decline, raising the number of hours of waged labour per household needed to support a family. Jobs become precarious, with workers (now including most mothers) having to increase workloads while dealing with less predictable work schedules, shift work, and longer work hours. This dovetails with higher divorce rates and single-parent households, and with a rollback in public support for healthcare, childcare, and eldercare. A so-called ‘crisis of care’ ensues, as care work is foisted upon families just as their capacity to perform it diminishes (Bakker 2007; Bakker & Gill 2003; Fraser 2017). Care work intensifies to such an extent that it becomes the most visible manifestation of social reproduction and is sometimes erroneously conflated with it.

A new strand of social reproduction theory foregrounds lives and livelihoods under such strains. It zeroes in on the work that maintains and renews labour power, while also identifying the people who perform it as an oppressed class, capable of transformative political action. In making visible their socially reproductive labour, it links it to other categories of oppression such as gender, race, and disability, asking how they are reproduced along with the reproduction of accumulation (Bhattacharya 2017). It further insists that capital’s drive to instrumentalise labour power runs up against sentient beings that cannot be fully subsumed as workers. It holds that, in the face of pressure to speed up and short-change socially reproductive labour, the people who perform this labour—maids, eldercare workers, social workers, etc.—confront the real needs of vulnerable populations. In helping them, they may even counter the alienating tendencies of capitalism (Ferguson 2020).

These ways of blending the reproduction of capitalist society with the reproduction of its members, as well as diagnosing the burdens on care work as a crisis of social reproduction, do much to foreground society’s human components. Yet, this intuition has its limits. Since the societies analysed are capitalist societies, the reproduction of lives and livelihoods within them can hardly be distinguished from that of their economies (Smith 2018). Labour power (which includes domestic labour, care work, and those performing it) is itself subsumed by the logic of accumulation rather than standing in opposition to it (Munro 2019). And capitalist reproduction does not ‘care’ for people in any meaningful sense of the term, as it does not necessitate the reproduction of the entire population or their wellbeing. It requires only enough workers to set the next cycle of production in motion (Cammack 2020; O’Laughlin 1977; Vogel 2013 [1979]). In an era of more jobseekers than jobs, maintaining every single person as a present or future worker, let alone the sick, disabled, and elderly, cannot be a priority when following the premises of capitalist accumulation. If capitalism can only be reproduced through the reproduction of both capital and labour power, the more urgent challenge is rather maintaining capital’s profitability (Weiss 2020).

Labour power took centre stage in an earlier era of industrial capitalism. But capital now bypasses its mass deployment, pursuing profit through financial channels. The household remains a nexus of social reproduction, but not only for being where labour power is maintained and renewed. Rather, it becomes a privileged site for making payments. For an increasing number of households, wages no longer cover all costs, and private debt finances things like housing, healthcare, and education. Households manage a range of regular payments, from utility bills through subscriptions to mortgage and credit card payments. Bundled together, these steady, risk-managed payment streams become assets for transactions by larger financial entities such as banks, pension funds, and institutional investors. Payments as means of sustaining family life are thus new profit opportunities for capital, replacing industry as key engines of accumulation (Adkins 2019; c.f. Federici 2014).

By no means does this ease the burden on women. They are a more vulnerable part of the workforce than men, and therefore the first to suffer from pressures upon it. And the shortage of jobs leads many more people to rely on their families for subsistence. If women are assigned most of the domestic work, they bear the brunt of this burden. Women also suffer directly through finance. Financing schemes usually target women, deemed easier than men to shame and pressure into repayment on account of their greater family and social entanglements. Women’s indebtedness thereupon strains these very relationships (Schuster 2015). The speedy and inexorable rhythm of women’s debt repayment may also attenuate the bond between mothers, preoccupied with debt servicing, and their children, whose educational trajectories orient them to long-term horizons (Newberry & Rosen 2020).

Inequality

Writing in 1979, Lise Vogel concluded that domestic labour cannot be completely removed from households: the costs of childcare and household maintenance are prohibitive while profitable day-care centres were yet to be established, making such services beyond most working-class households’ reach. But, at least in rich countries, things have since changed. With migrant labour and low wages in the care and service sectors, their costs are declining.

Recall that the relation in capitalism that, according to Marx, coordinates all others, is that between capital and labour power. It matters a great deal where a household and its members are positioned on the spectrum between them. Workers may be permanently or precariously employed. They may be high- or low-earning. And they may be propertyless or possess a home, savings, and credentials. As workers, they are all dominated by the pressures and incentives of accumulation and obliged to contribute to the production of more value than they receive. But they are also pitted against each other in a competition that allows some to benefit at the expense of others. This being the case, the focus on ‘households’ and ‘women’ for critically analysing social reproduction risks glossing over too much.

It still holds true that women’s unwaged domestic labour is among the factors that cheapens social reproduction, which in turn allows for the cheapening of waged labour. Every woman is exploited and dominated in this way. But these days, even households in capitalism’s core countries depend almost entirely on the wages of two adults to survive. Under pressure, women can and often do work harder at home, but wage declines more often lead to increases in female employment. However united women may be in their domestic labour, wages are what determines many of their possibilities. This is one major aspect of life where women’s interests are divided. The low wages and poor working conditions of housekeeping and childcare harms women who perform these services for a wage. But it allows other women to outsource this labour to others. Moreover, insufficient and inadequate employment makes education and cultivation more important for landing good jobs, and education is purchased at different qualities. This, while higher-income women who purchase housekeeping and childcare services can spend more development-enhancing time with their children. Wage levels make a huge difference, then, in the reproduction of each household’s social position (Gimenez 2018) and they serve as a wedge that divides women’s collective struggle for a better life.

This turns the provision of food and clothing, the managing of a budget, marriage and childrearing, homeownership, education, and public interventions, into ‘reproductive struggles’ (Weiss 2008) in which some have advantages over others. Social reproduction does not reproduce just any society; it reproduces a class society in which certain groups are empowered to and within their reproductive labour while others are disempowered (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995). Elite women, for instance, also devote unrecognised, unwaged labour to their families. But the goal of this labour is to ensure that their children get into the best schools and preserve their privileges (Glucksberg 2018; Kromidas 2021). Factory working men, in turn, must negotiate shift work to assume some of the unwaged reproductive labour that their working wives cannot undertake (Sabaté 2016). And racialised migrant women allow native European women to work outside their home for a wage, providing the housekeeping and childcare that rollbacks in public services have commodified (Farris 2017).

Not only households are divided according to their reproductive resources: communities and countries are, too. Geographers analyse social reproduction as reinforcing inequalities in space. Migrants are imported from low-income countries to perform domestic labour in high-income countries, while government disinvestments from welfare, healthcare, education, public space, and the environment generate spatially uneven erosion (Katz 2001). Anthropologists also foreground the role of culture and ideology in maintaining inequalities. The social relations involved in the reproduction of material life are bound up with their cultural expressions, just as culture itself is materially produced and embodied (Narotzky 1997).

Susana Narotzky (2021) demonstrates this in her ethnography of Ferrol, Spain. Its young adults express ambivalence regarding their parents: grateful for their material support, yet resentful of their privileges. Narotzky traces this ambivalence to different scales of social reproduction. The Spanish state, acting as an agent in the reproduction of finance-led accumulation, cuts back on pensions and restructures industry, squeezing the livelihoods of the old as well as the young. This intensifies the dependence of family members on each other, forcing them to pool resources. Still, pension cutbacks are promoted through a discourse of intergenerational fairness, as if different generations were vying for scarce resources. More generally, state policies are represented ideologically as aiming for sustainability, as if designed to ensure social reproduction in the very sense (the survival and wellbeing of the population) that they ultimately undermine.

Institutions like the church, the army, and above all schools, play important roles in social reproduction. These include instilling in their members the proper cultural knowhow and attitudes to preserve the social inequalities that accumulation generates (Althusser 2001 [1970]). Schools turn the favourable circumstances into which children are born into catalysts of success. Sent to a better school, these children’s upbringing prepares them to do well and gain confidence in their studies, making it easier for them to overcome obstacles that the less-prepared trip up on. Better school performance paves the path towards more valuable credentials and higher paying jobs. And higher wages allow for living in better school districts, where such advantages are bestowed upon the next generation (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron 1977).

In contrast, disadvantaged children might gain favour among their circles by rebelling against school authorities and rejecting the paths marked out for them. But in so doing, they end up replicating in the workplace and on the streets the very disadvantages into which they were born (Bourgois 1995; Willis 1981a). In reflecting on his ethnography of how this happens in an industrial town in England, Paul Willis (1981b) explained that the reproduction of capitalist society occurs at a very high level of abstraction. While exacting material and social pressures, this process still allows each member of society to inhabit the role they inherit differently. In the terrain of culture and experience, space opens up for ethnographic research to illuminate struggles for and within social reproduction, particularly as they occur in sites that a narrow focus on market transactions neglects.

Conclusion

Social reproduction is a concept that exposes tensions between society’s logic of accumulation on the one hand, and the survival and wellbeing of the people subject to it on the other. An invaluable tool for anthropology, it points to capitalist society and the process of accumulation to which it is beholden as the main driving force in the dynamics of any chosen fieldsite and the struggles of those who occupy it. It defies, therefore, any bounding in space and time of ethnographic observations, making capitalism a key reference point. At the same time, capitalism cannot be accessed through interviews and observation alone, since ‘a mode of production does not tend to reveal itself directly in any spontaneous and intimate experience of those agents who reproduce it by their activity’ (Godelier 1977: 24).

This presents a special challenge for anthropology. While ethnographic study, with its on-the-ground focus, has the unique capacity to bring to light obscured aspects of social reproduction, anthropologists also bear a responsibility to conduct their fieldwork informed by an understanding of capitalist accumulation. Only then can they look beyond reported speech and observed occurrences to the structures that animate them. This introduces new research foci and widens the ethnographic imagination. Understanding practices and institutions in terms of social reproduction means seeing them less as isolated things and more as forces, agencies, and bridgeheads of power: facilitating some occurrences and preventing others (Smith 1999: 11).

Once trained to see social reproduction, it becomes impossible to unsee it. Plights and fortunes in any fieldsite invoke analogous instances elsewhere, making sense with respect to a broader logic. This has, in the first instance, a sobering effect. As Tania Li (2008) describes of her experiences studying poverty-reduction programs of development agencies in Indonesia, it bars one from being taken in by technical solutions to immediate problems which, in their blindness to social reproduction, are helpless against the persistence of misery. But one must also keep in mind—as Susana Narotzky (1997) reminds us—that it is not the objective of society to reproduce itself, and to theorise as if this were a foregone conclusion is to preclude the viability of ruptures and radical change. Social reproduction is therefore not the endpoint of inquiry. It is rather the beginning of an engaged anthropology; one that asks not only about the forces that reproduce inequality and domination, but also about how they are changing, and about how they can change still (Li 2008).

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Note on contributor

Hadas Weiss is a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research deals with social and ideological aspects of contemporary capitalism as manifested in Israel, Germany, and Spain. She has published in anthropology and interdisciplinary journals and is the author of We have never been middle class: how social mobility misleads us (2019, Verso).

Dr. Hadas Weiss, Humboldt University, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany. hadaspweiss@gmail.com

Care

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 19:34:23 +0000

Patrick McKearney Megha Amrith

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21care

Abstract:

There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in particular, how it is organised by contemporary states and global markets. Second, the entry provides an overview of how, in everyday relationships of support, the political, economic, and moral dimensions of care become entangled in one another. This demonstrates how ethnography offers a different way to approach ethical and practical questions about what makes care good or effective in different cultural contexts and in different settings—such as in medical institutions or in the relationships between carers and those for whom they care. Finally, the entry shows how the different ways that care works in families and in communities challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about what care ought to look like and where it should take place. Overall, the entry illustrates that care varies greatly across social contexts. Anthropology distinctively illuminates how deeply these variations change the experience and consequences of care in ways that require our detailed attention.

Introduction

Humans sustain each other’s lives through giving and receiving care. We often think of acts of care—such as a primary caregiver looking after a child—as central to what it means to be human. Such relationships of dependence, support, and sustenance are, indeed, universal—something we necessarily find in all societies. But precisely because care is a relationship, rather than a biological quality of individuals, this universal varies along with other forms of social variation. Societies imagine, structure, and practise caring relationships so differently as to create significant differences at the level of who has responsibility to provide care, who is seen to need and to deserve it, and what care aspires to do and be.

Policies, philosophies, and practices are often founded on universal assumptions about what care is and ought to be. States may cut welfare on the basis that it can and ought to be provided by families. Clinicians can care for patients with the idea that the best, even only, thing they can do for them is to cure them. Families may give women the responsibility to care on the basis that they are supposedly ‘naturally’ inclined to do so. Paying for care can be regarded suspiciously when people hold that care ought to emanate from personal and sentimental concerns, rather than instrumental ones. Informal care might be judged as inadequate on the basis that it lacks the expertise and rigour of professional forms of it. We have a panoply of ideas about what, where, how, and by whom care is to be provided—ideas that we often take to be natural, universal, and immovable.

This entry explores care in its different guises, in order to see more expansively what care means around the world, to illuminate its diversity and to question our assumptions. Anthropological work on care demonstrates how many dominant assumptions about care arise from specific ways that care is structured in contemporary Euro-American capitalist states. It shows that such assumptions do not help us understand how care appears in other societies, and risk blinding us to the complexity of caring relationships within Euro-American societies themselves. Anthropological studies of care thus illustrate that to understand the actual role of care in human life, we must expand our imagination about what, where, and how it is given.

Structures of care

Nation states and economic markets play a central role in distributing and regulating care in contemporary societies. They function to define who is worthy of care, who should be responsible for giving it, and the contexts in which it is given. Attending to these diverse ways of structuring care reveals how different they are from one another—and thus the significant effect they can have on the kind of care people receive and, in some cases, on the possibility of receiving care at all.

Capitalist economies typically connect care work and dependence with the private sphere as opposed to the public sphere of the market and politics. Relatedly, care is often held in these contexts to be a natural feminine activity while the independent ‘breadwinner’ is regarded as traditionally male (Ferguson 2015; Fineman 2005; Held 2006). A large amount of care work is thus performed by female kin within households and receives no fiscal compensation or legal recognition (Fraser & Gordon 2003). When care work is performed by non-kin in exchange for money, it is typically poorly compensated in contrast to jobs more closely associated with the centres of economic and political power (Folbre & Nelson 2000; Constable 2009; Zelizer 2009). Professional care receives little of the social status of other professions and those who perform informal care often occupy even lower statuses – their work receiving stigma and moral scrutiny for its conflation of the sentimental realm of care with economic modes of exchange (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004; Glenn 2012).

The structuring of societies according to the values of rationality, independence, individualism, and productive work thus shapes caring relationships in distinctive ways. It often obscures the time, expertise, effort, and costs of ‘women’s work’ and of ‘emotional labour’ in the home and beyond (Hochschild 1983; Abel & Nelson 1990). It also creates the impression that care work is only necessary for specific classes of ‘dependents’ and that it can be confined to specific social contexts (Ferguson 2015; Siebers 2007; Kittay 1999; Fineman 2005; Rivas 2004). Anthropological approaches to care challenge these assumptions by examining how it is actually practised and distributed in people’s daily lives. They also demonstrate that such socio-cultural and gendered assumptions about care nevertheless continue to determine how care is distributed in different societies (Zelizer 2009).

States and markets

No nation state has ever fully taken on the responsibility and fiscally compensated for all forms of care. Kinship, charity, community-based and privately financed care continue to play a vital role. Contemporary European welfare states, especially those in Scandinavia, have taken on probably the most responsibility for care within human history in their provision of expansive welfare payments for parental leave, child support, disability care, and elderly care as well as free healthcare. In such countries, kin are less often expected to provide care without state compensation, while the state also offers extensive alternatives for people to be professionally cared for by non-kin (Altermark 2018). This kind of expansive welfare government is accompanied by active intervention into the care of citizens through medical, psychiatric, and public health institutions (Foucault 2009b; 2009a; 1975). Such state intervention in turn generates classifications of certain classes of citizens as more ‘vulnerable’ than others.

Among developed capitalist countries, the US offers a stark contrast to Scandinavian states. The American state takes on far less responsibility for the care of its citizens, most notably in relation to healthcare and long-term nursing care. Organisations that provide long-term care for the elderly are typically owned and run privately, and are thus often beholden to logics of profit-making (Diamond 1995). Meanwhile, healthcare is largely funded through payments to private health insurance companies, who have ample legal room to evade the responsibility to actually provide care to many of those who would seem to need it. For example, when clinicians and potential patients claim to need support for eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia, insurance companies can justify their refusal by reclassifying the very diagnostic symptoms such people initially use to make their claim to dependence as, instead, a wilful refusal of self-care (Lester 2019). Clinicians, operating within this mode of financing healthcare, can only obtain care for their patients by framing their conditions in the categories that insurance companies recognise as legitimate. Their clinical evaluations of patients thus become infused with insurance logics (Lester 2009; Brodwin 2013; see also Davis 2012; Biehl 2005).

In spite of this largely market-based approach to care, the American state is no less involved in its citizens’ lives. It makes ‘caring’ interventions through other institutions such as the military, justice, and carceral systems. War veterans, for instance, are entitled to kinds of healthcare assistance comparable to a comprehensive European welfare state (Wool 2015; Zogas 2021). Once someone with a mental-health disorder has committed a criminal offence, US courts can authorise otherwise-prohibited interventions in their lives to wean people off addiction or provide them with access to housing (Brodwin 2013; see also Cooper 2018). Prisons play a similarly unexpected role in providing healthcare to incarcerated pregnant mothers, making medical and emotional care simultaneously more available to some lower-income women of colour at the same time as entangling it with logics of incarceration (Sufrin 2017; see also Foucault 1995).

The opposite of this situation can also occur. States may attempt to maintain the idea that they are intervening to protect their citizens while, in reality, unburdening themselves of any responsibility to do so—often by bureaucratically distinguishing between supposedly legitimate and illegitimate forms of dependence (Foucault 2008). As Ukraine reeled from the Chernobyl explosion, the socialist and then post-socialist government was faced with unprecedented claims upon state assistance. It used biomedical institutions in order to reclassify people’s radiation damage as the result of an alternative condition that entitled citizens to nothing (Petryna 2013; see also Phillips 2011). When China introduced expansive new legislation to provide economic support to those with disabilities, the bureaucratic means for becoming certified as disabled turned out to be so complicated that few were able to claim it (Kohrman 2005).

A neoliberal logic, where governments redistribute responsibility to citizens by actively encouraging them to care for themselves (Foucault 2008), is present across many kinds of state intervention. This logic can make it easier for state institutions, and even families, to classify those who depend extensively on others, such as chronically ill or ‘unwanted’ populations, as ‘abnormal’—with the consequence that they may end up neglected in ‘zones of social abandonment’ (Biehl 2005; see also Marrow & Luhrmann 2012). Even the most well-meaning and charitable attempts to help those abandoned to these settings can unwittingly replicate the demands of neoliberal forms of government for citizens to take on more responsibility for their own care—rather than criticising the state for not providing it (Zigon 2010).

Humanitarianism and migrant care labour

Care is not confined to the borders of nation states, as humanitarian aid distributes it across regions in light of sharp global economic inequalities. States, together with non-profit organisations, make decisions about which populations in other parts of the world need, or are deserving of, humanitarian care. Much state-sponsored humanitarianism is shaped by ideals of a shared universal humanity that requires intervention to rescue and care for suffering victims. This logic can depoliticise the inequalities that produce such suffering in the first place (Beckett 2019; Feldman & Ticktin 2013; Ferguson 1994), creating unintended similarities between contemporary efforts and ideologies of benevolence underpinning colonial ‘civilising missions’ to reform those deemed vulnerable, deficient, suffering, or sick (Englund 2006). Lisa Malkki (1996) highlights how the category of ‘the refugee’ in programmes of humanitarian care for Hutus in East Africa reduces the complex identities and political subjectivities of those being ‘helped’ into a static, homogenous category of de-historicised victimhood. Similarly, children in conflict settings may come to be represented as fundamentally innocent and ‘needy’ through infantilising and at times futile ‘gifts of care’, such as hand-knitted toys (Malkki 2015).

A similar logic plays out when it comes to migrants and refugees at European state borders. The contemporary French state’s rhetoric of humanitarian care plays a role in categorising only certain undocumented migrants (sans-papiers) as vulnerable and ‘morally legitimate’ care-recipients—for instance, those who are sick or victims of sexual violence. This distinguishes them from migrants who might have been disenfranchised in other ways (Ticktin 2011). Such selective compassion by the state to care for specific bodies is a distinct political logic, one that may render issues of care apolitical and forecloses the possibility of contestation (see also Fassin 2011).

Global inequalities also shape, and are reinforced by, the international distribution of migrant care labour. Such labour is disproportionately performed by immigrant women from lower-income countries who move to engage in low-wage employment in the domestic and care work sectors of higher-income economies (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004; Glenn 2012; R. S. Parreñas 2015), such as from the Philippines to Hong Kong, Mexico and Central American countries to the US, and South Asia to the Gulf states. Precarious livelihoods in migrants’ countries of origin and aspirations to care for family futures often motivate these journeys abroad, while households in wealthier countries outsource care work to migrant women as sources of cheap labour.

Migrants may lack the legal rights of citizens in ways that are entangled with the marginalisation of care workers and care labour more widely. When migrant women enter into these already precarious and vulnerable forms of labour, their experience of this gendered devaluation of care intersects with their discrimination along the lines of class, race, and citizenship (Constable 1997; Rosenbaum 2017; Muehlebach 2012). This ‘global care chain’ has knock-on effects on women’s families in their country of origin, requiring them to find other kin or paid carers to take over caring responsibilities in their absence (Hochschild 2001).

The ethics of care

Political and economic logics distribute responsibility for care in such a way as to produce its presence or absence in different settings. How do people relate to one another within caring relationships themselves? What does care look like and involve in practice?

Ethics of care in professional settings

Many forms of health and social care now place a high value on autonomy, consent, and patient choice as they move away from paternalistic models. This ‘logic of choice’ (Mol 2008) limits many forms of caring intervention based on the authority of professional expertise. Social workers in the US bound by these values of autonomy cannot intervene in the lives of those with drug addictions and mental health problems, even when they find people sleeping in the snow without a blanket (Brodwin 2013). The logic of choice creates particular problems for those who need care when their mental capacity to choose is affected by conditions such as dementia, intellectual disability, or mental health problems (Driessen 2018b; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017). Many forms of care exist precisely because people are judged to be incapable of choosing for themselves—but strict adherence to a logic of choice leaves no room for this kind of intervention (Pols, Althoff & Bransen 2017).

Actual caring relationships tend to work in far more complex ways than the logic of choice, and its binary division of paternalism from autonomy, allows. In practice, many caring relationships work through constant intervention in the life of the care-recipient—some of which are paternalistic, and some of which can less easily be classified in this way (Mol, Moser & Pols 2010; see also Kittay 2007, 2019). Chinese parents, for instance, ‘tinker’ (Mol 2008) behind the scenes to create conditions that will be conducive to their children succeeding in a highly competitive economy, in order to avoid directly commanding their already stressed children (Kuan 2015). And many contemporary Euro-American forms of care try to combine intervention with freedom through different forms of pedagogy or persuasion (Pols 2006; Ochs & Izquierdo 2009; Driessen, van der Klift & Krause 2017; McKearney 2021).

Logics of care contrast, also, with another important standard within medical institutions: the goal-oriented focus of curing (Kleinman 2015; 2013). The role of such care comes into focus in settings where curing is not possible—such as in end-of life care (Kaufman 2014; Pols, Pasveer & Willems 2018; Shield 1988). Julie Livingston shows how, when doctors in resource-deprived hospitals in Botswana have little hope of curing their patients, they carefully attend to dressing wounds, managing pain, and providing emotional support (see also Kleinman 2009; Street 2014). They practise medicine as a form of solidarity with the sick—a care that exceeds standard biomedical forms of evaluation (Chambliss 1995). Medicine’s funding and regulation with the ideal of curing leads many in medical professions to miss the centrality of care to their own work, and to other people’s moral projects—as, for instance, when clinicians in the US misrecognise how parents pursue meaningful lives for their critically-ill children despite the improbability of curing them (Mattingly 2010; 2014).

The relational and hard-to-measure qualities of care often make it hard to justify in quantitative or economic terms. Interventions that work through the solidary logic of caring– such as long-term psychotherapy—often receive less funding (Lester 2019; Luhrmann 2001; Davis 2012). The impossibility of economically justifying long-term support for those with those mental disorders that incline them to reject care can lead clinicians to identify such patients as ‘incurable’—even when there is no strictly clinical reason to do so (Davis 2012; Lester 2009). A focus on such impersonal quantitative outcomes in the Canadian government’s response to a crisis of Inuit suicides ignored the sources of and the solutions to the crisis among the Inuit themselves, who see life as inherently bound up with relations of care with ancestors and relatives (Stevenson 2014).

Relations of care produce outcomes that the logics of choice and cure miss. A focus on autonomy can have the effect of wearing our relations thin, to the point that changes in cognitive capacity end up spelling social death (Biehl 2005; Cohen 2000; Marrow & Luhrmann 2012). Instead, a focus on relations of care can build sustaining ties between us as social beings (Taylor 2010). Athena McClean (2015) demonstrates the concrete effects of taking such hard-to-measure logics of care seriously by contrasting two long-term dementia care homes in the US: one which primarily treats care as an instrumental task, and the other as a relational form of solidarity. She demonstrates that the latter maintains not only the dignity but also the cognitive capacities of those in receipt of care—producing also far fewer incidents of conflict or distress.

It is for this reason that feminist scholars writing about the ‘ethics of care’ have long advocated for placing concerns about care at the centre of our moral imaginations and as integral to public and political life. They take care to be a relational practice that refers to all that people do to maintain, continue, and repair the world in which they live (Tronto & Fisher 1990; Tronto 2009).

Challenging moralities

Caring relationships that operate outside of the logics of cure, choice, and the market do not all look the same. Around the world, care takes many forms that challenge our moral intuitions about what it should look like—disrupting, in particular, the dichotomies we hold between good care and its opposites (Duclos & Criado 2020; McKearney 2020).

Professionalism, instrumentalism, and commodification are often set against the moral and emotional qualities we typically associate with care—of sentiment, connection, and warmth (see H. Brown 2010: 129). But, in practice, contractual relationships of care are frequently sites for human intimacy, connection, and flourishing. In the context of paid eldercare work in the US, precariously employed immigrant women who perform this work develop meaningful, if ambivalent, relationships with the older people they care for. Care is thus generative both of inequalities and of new forms of personhood, interdependence, and relatedness (Buch 2018) and thereby of moral engagement. Rather than telling a story about love or intimacy versus money, anthropologists have demonstrated how different ways of relating emerge in and through their very intersection. This has led them to question the assumption that a capitalist world is necessarily marked by a ‘lack’ of care (Constable 2009; Gutierrez Garza 2019; Zelizer 2009).

Some professional logics of care try to restrict these possibilities of intimacy. But other organisations deliberately use these possibilities to enable closer forms of personal connection for those whose dependence can deprive them of it (McKearney 2017; 2018; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017; Nakamura 2013; Kulick & Rydström 2015; Haeusermann 2018). These possibilities for human connection can also be important to care-givers, especially when their work is stigmatised and reproduces their social exclusion more widely (Muehlebach 2012; Rivas 2004). In Singapore, Filipino migrant nurses who might initially be rejected by their Chinese patients for being of ‘different skin’ can later find ways to connect with these patients through personal connections such as a shared religious orientations (Amrith 2017). Such everyday affective, intimate, and material exchanges within care work can constitute a form of political belonging for migrant carers, especially in the absence of formal citizenship rights (Coe 2019; see also T. M. Brown 2011).

The idea that care must take a particularly involved form of empathetic engagement does not hold everywhere (Otto & Keller 2018; Mezzenzana 2020). The warm and sentimental relationality we often associate with caring for another may be taken to get in the way of ‘good’ care. In Thailand, care is a matter of practical work, bodily ritual, and karmic morality. Here, care as the concrete, habituated, and mundane act of providing for others decentres more abstract, sentimentalised and morally loaded notions of care that have long dominated in Europe and America (Aulino 2016). Don Kulick and Jens Rydstrom (2015) demonstrate this in their study of carers in Denmark who support people with disabilities to have sexual encounters. These carers do not try, themselves, to be visible and involved. Instead, they aim to turn themselves into mere background influences—as do many carers supporting those who rely on extensive care throughout their daily lives (Rivas 2004; Stacey 2016; Buch 2018). At the other end of the spectrum, ‘warmth’ can arise in elderly care even when it is mediated by ‘cold’ objects like robots, as is the case in the Netherlands (Pols & Moser 2009; Mol, Moser & Pols 2010). Intimacy may similarly arise even in the apparent absence of human care relationships. Against the grain of popular discourses in Japan, which presume that elderly people living alone are socially abandoned, older adults can find their own ethical practices for living meaningfully in later life through daily rituals making offerings to departed ancestors (Danely 2015).

Control, confinement, and aggression are often imagined to stand in direct contrast to care. Anthropologists, by contrast, show how they can be central to the form that care takes in reality (Foucault 2009a; Johnson and Lindquist 2020; Mulla 2016). In many contexts, violence and deception do not compromise the purity of a more sentimental care but are instead central to how people imagine and practise good care (Brown 2010; Garcia 2015; Livingston 2012). In India, clinicians care for those with schizophrenia by hiding information about the diagnosis from these individuals, and enlisting the support of the family to regulate and control the care-recipient (Marrow & Luhrmann 2017; see also Luhrmann 2007). These paternalistic dynamics within and beyond the family may well be a key of part of the explanation as to why schizophrenia takes a far less severe form in this context. The line between abusive and affirming forms of care is thus much less clear, in practice, than our ideals of care may suggest (Garcia 2010; 2014). In these studies of alternative forms of professional care, hierarchy, paternalism, control, or detachment are not such grave dangers to the person as we often imagine. Rather, they are part of different ways of understanding what it means to be a person, to be cared for, and to be respected. These alternative caring ethics can have remarkably positive outcomes for conditions that mainstream Euro-American care struggles to handle, such as mental illness, dementia, intellectual disability, and addiction.

Care, kinship and communities

The majority of care around the world is still provided outside the direct purview and funding of the state and its institutions, within families and in communities. During the latter part of the twentieth century, many states closed long-stay institutions and shifted away from centralised hospitals on the idea that care is best provided in the ‘community’ (Horden Smith 2013). But this modernising narrative glosses over the fact that families and ‘communities’ rarely fit the imaginations of policy-makers and vary considerably in the way they distribute care.

Families are a primary site through which caring obligations are distributed—kinship roles themselves often being defined, in part, through one’s obligations to or entitlements to care at different life-stages (Goody 1971). But there are profound differences in normative cultural patterns about what families should look like, how care should be distributed within and beyond them, and what ought to constitute proper care. Children, in some contexts, may not have a single dedicated caregiver, nor any dedicated caregiver at all (Otto & Keller 2018), nor are they always regarded as the responsibility of parents in a concrete way, in no small part because they may not be defined as vulnerable to begin with (Lancy 2014). Children as young as five among the Runa of the Pastuza region in the Ecuadorian Amazon are left to look after themselves in very practical ways through building shelter and acquiring food on their own (Mezzenzana 2020). The Runa consider leaving children to their own devices as the best way to let them learn self-reliance, concern for others, and a capacity to manage themselves. This is connected to the self-reliant ‘obstinate individualism’ of the region, in which each person is their own responsibility and no one else’s (Mezzenzana 2020). Such alternative forms of childcare do not just challenge how childhood can be imagined; they also affect the extent to which adults are required to provide care and to which children can care for themselves (Ochs & Izquierdo 2009).

Kinship-care goes far beyond the nuclear family. There are many configurations of kinship that involve a different set of characters in providing care: grandparents, changing romantic partners (Zelizer 2009), or non-genetic close connections who may be described as kin (Edwards & Strathern 2000; Pande 2015). Domestic work by non-kin, more or less assumed into a family structure, has a long and continuous history (Delap 2011; Ray & Qayum 2009) as does the adoption of non-kin. In some societies, the very definition of a partner, parent, or child may not be a permanent genetic or legal bond (Sahlins 2013; Conklin & Morgan 1996). Kinship can also be created through acts of care; for instance, the day-to-day sharing of cooked meals in Langkawi in Malaysia (Carsten 1997; see also Parkes 2005). In these cases, kinship is often not defined at birth but rather is built between people through repeated transfers of care and exchanges of substances such as food or bodily fluids (Carsten 1989; 2000; Stasch 2009).

Kinship roles can also follow a more prescribed and structured set of normative expectations that concretely shape caring responsibilities. In rural Uganda, patrilineal family structures shape the different kinds of grandparental care that sons and daughters’ children receive (Whyte & Whyte 2004). In many South Asian families, one’s status as a child of one’s parents continues to define the care one receives and gives throughout the life course. Parents frequently refer to their adult children who have not yet married as bacche, ‘children’ in Hindi (Mody 2020a). Parental intervention in the sphere of marriage may also be seen as legitimate well into adulthood. The forms of pressure that it may take to make children conform to a parent’s decisions on suitable marriage partners are often expressed and justified through a language of care. Marriage-decisions gain part of their importance from the role that daughters-in-law play in providing care to their parents-in-law (Lamb 2000; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017).

These forms of kinship can give a stability, givenness, and intimacy to the kinship bond that makes the transfer of care obligatory and uncalculated. But that does not mean that care’s role in kinship is stable even in these contexts. One’s role shifts across the course of the lifetime with gendered transitions through childhood, adulthood, and elderhood (Goody 1971; Faubion 2001). The expectations of care that such transitions bring are negotiated and contested extensively. When kinship takes the burden of care, it is typically a weighty, complex, and fraught affair (Mody 2020b; Pinto 2014; Trawick 1990; Reece 2020).

Social and political changes brought about through processes of urbanisation and globalisation can also re-configure the role of kinship in caring relationships. Popular narratives in India lament the demise of the ‘Indian joint family’ to stress the importance of what they see as the legitimate way to look after elders: by caring for them within that familial context (Cohen 1992). But international migration from India has led to the growth of novel care arrangements: privatised eldercare homes and local care services as an alternative, or complement, to kinship care for elders who stay in India while their kin live abroad. A closer look at the lives of people living in these communities demonstrates that care homes are not merely impositions of Euro-American models but are culturally legitimate spaces for middle-class diasporic Indian families (Lamb 2009). In low-income settings in Sub-Saharan Africa, while the care of children, elders, and those with chronic health problems is often undertaken by family members, migration, urbanisation, and increasing inequalities constrain the capacities of households to care. Family care then becomes a dynamic space within which people do not only act according to emotional or moral obligations, but according to the resources available (Reece 2020; Read & van der Geest 2019; see also Han 2012 for an example from Chile). In Ghana, when family care becomes less viable on its own, other spaces such as church become important to providing health and social care, as well as acting as a form of ‘fictive’ family (Coe 2019b). Meanwhile, those living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, may find new ‘(quasi) relatives’ among health workers, volunteers, and strangers who are seen to be more trustworthy than family members (van der Geest, Dapaah & Kwansa 2019).

Among families rendered transnational through global care chains, creative care arrangements challenge normative understandings of what a family should look like. Care amidst family separation can be mobilised as an intergenerational resource and form of solidarity. Nicaraguan transnational family life draws extensively on extended kinship networks, while grandmothers and grandchildren who care for each other in these contexts challenge constructions of those ‘left behind’ by migrants as passive care recipients (Yarris 2017). Care at a distance is increasingly mediated by digital technologies and expressed through remittances, gifts, and goods, while the ‘family’ itself may involve multiple actors, including paid care workers, distant relatives, and neighbours (Hromadžić & Palmberger 2018; Ahlin 2020; Baldassar and Wilding 2020). Transnational care challenges the distinctions between family, paid, informal, professional, communal, and state-based care, demonstrating the interconnection between all these categories.

The expectations within policy about where care is to be performed, and by whom, are influenced by and reproduce the legal recognition of only certain types of relatedness as legitimate. But care often exceeds these classifications. The narrow confines of kinship categories deployed by the state and the law are frequently rooted in biological or heteronormative assumptions and thus often exclude other forms of partnership, intimacy, and mutual care (Weston 1997; Dave 2012; see also Strathern 2005). Gay and lesbian relationships, for example, may not fit into many legal definitions of kinship precisely because they are founded upon the very idea of ‘caring and being cared for’ (Borneman 1997).

In other contexts, kinship’s importance can be exaggerated. Migrant care workers’ absences from their families are often framed by state and public discourses as having damaging impacts on heterosexual family structures (Manalansan 2008). However, this narrative overlooks the novel caring relationships based on love, intimacy, and friendship that migrants develop in communities abroad that go beyond kinship categories yet remain deeply significant to their experiences and identities (Johnson & Werbner 2010; Liebelt 2011).

Religious, political, and ethical movements also decentre kinship by structuring distributions of care beyond the family. Religious groups can create relationships of care and compassion between previously unrelated social groups and social concerns (Copeman 2009; Evans 2016; Kertzer 1980; Mair & Evans 2015). Christianity, for instance, created new forms of spiritual kinship within the church—most strikingly in monastic communities where people renounced existing relations and future marital prospects to form new kinds of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ (Brown 1988; Banner 2014). These alternative moral imaginations created new categories of dependents worthy of care (such as children and the ‘poor’) as well as social practices and institutions to distribute care to them—many of which have decisively influenced the shape of contemporary forms of charity, healthcare, and education (Bakke 2005; Brown 1980, 2002; Scherz 2014).

Contemporary small-scale intentional communities can distribute responsibility for care within more limited and controlled environments—whether that be for those with dementia, intellectual disabilities, or the environment (Haeusermann 2018; McKearney 2017; Schiffer 2018). There is also increasing interest in how caring communities extend beyond the boundaries of humanity, both historically and in this age of climate change. One example is the relationship between orangutans, their local human caretakers, and the wider environment in rehabilitation centres in Sarawak (J. Parreñas 2018). Contrary to (post)colonial practices of conservation that are based on establishing control over other species and the environment, orangutans and their caretakers are embedded in a relationship of interdependence and shared vulnerability (through, for instance, land dispossession).

Volunteering can also be an important space for providing care and creating communities. In Greece, as people struggle to access national healthcare in times of economic crisis, networks of community-based clinics/pharmacies have emerged to redistribute donated medicines and provide care through networks of volunteers. These forms of care as social solidarity reanimate Greek citizenship, since it becomes a key location for caring relationships, instead of the family or the state (Cabot 2016). Similar kinds of solidarity can be found in Northern Italy in the context of austerity and diminishing state support. Here it is pensioners who take on the voluntary work of caring for each other, helping those more vulnerable in their neighbourhoods with their shopping, medical appointments and providing them with companionship. This unexpectedly correlates with a denigration of other forms of care, so that when migrant domestic workers in these regions provide similar kinds of care for little pay, their labours are ignored or stigmatised as profit-seeking (Muehlebach 2012). Such community-based caring solidarities are then bound up with questions around what kind of care is visible, and who or what is excluded from the moral framings of these movements.

Conclusion

Social relationships offer the possibility of sustaining another’s life, and of being sustained beyond what one is capable of. If these relationships are necessary for individuals and societies to survive, they are also as variable and open-ended as human life itself. When we attend to the vast diversity of meanings and practices of care around the world, many of our assumptions about it crumble. When care manifests as connection, asymmetric dependence, coercion, refusal, belonging, affirmation, desire, and neglect, all at the same time, we are forced to question what constitutes good care, and how clearly we can separate it from what we assume bad care to be. When we explore how care is structured by different social mechanisms, from kinship to the welfare state, we must take a much wider view about who provides care and in what settings. Within a globalised world of different economic regimes, we see how care is unequally distributed within and across societies, producing ambivalent and uncertain forms of intimacy and relatedness. In its everyday expressions, what care looks like in practice does not always fit in with the rigid pre-established normative ideals about how it ought to be. A detailed look at how care takes place outside of state and market overturns any easy or simple ideas about what care in the ‘community’ looks like and about how caring roles are taken on and negotiated. Care is a human universal. But humans universally structure, practise, and imagine it differently, creating vital differences to people’s lives.

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Note on contributors

Patrick McKearney is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He is editor of two special issues on cognitive disability in Medical Anthropology (2021) and The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2018), and writes, researches, and teaches on care, ethics, religion, disability, psychology, and personhood.

Dr. Patrick McKearney, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB23RF. pm419@cam.ac.uk

Megha Amrith leads the ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is the author of Caring for strangers: Filipino medical workers in Asia (2017, NIAS Press) and has research interests in migration and care work.

Dr. Megha Amrith, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. amrith@mmg.mpg.de

Dependence

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 18:57:54 +0000

Keir Martin

University of Manchester

Initially published 26 Feb 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21dependence

Abstract:

Dependence is often considered as a primarily negative state of being. It has gone from being described as a threat to individual self-reliance in early modern political theory in Western Europe to being a moral panic in political discourse across the world. Its negative connotation is particularly evident in the spheres of politics and economics, which this entry will focus on. Although anthropological theory has only recently made dependence a topic of explicit theoretical reflection, the idea has underpinned a wide variety of approaches throughout the discipline’s history. Given the tendency of anthropologists to stress the fundamental interdependence of human beings, they have emphasised that dependence is not always a bad thing and can even be desirable. They have also questioned whether or not we can neatly divide the world’s population into those in states of dependence versus independence. Lastly, they have considered the performative effects of ascribing dependence to some and independence to others. Ethnographically sifting through the different performative effects of ascriptions of dependence becomes particularly important today, as assumed states of dependence have become key tools in the management of populations across the world.

Introduction: dependence in context

The spectre of economic dependence haunts our world. In Western Europe and North America, we have long been familiar with attacks on welfare claimants on the basis that benefit payments encourage dependence. These claims are often based on racialised (see Morgen & Maskowsky 2003) or gendered (see Skeggs 2004) stereotypes, as they target particular groups as being somehow inherently prone to slipping into a negatively evaluated state. Accusations of dependence can often appear as the means by which business or political elites seek to delegitimise the claims for assistance of less fortunate members of society (see Martin 2013). This horror of dependence in Western public discourse is consistent with a long-standing similar aversion to dependence in Western political theory. Although we can trace the origins of the attempt to denigrate and police dependence in political theory to seventeenth century writers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, it is at the start of the twenty-first century that moral panics over the extent and effect of people’s dependence have become a global concern (Martin & Yanagisako 2020). Fear that economic dependence may lead to a wider breakdown in community cohesion and individual moral responsibility ranges from North America (Morgen & Maskowsky 2003) through South Africa (Ferguson 2013) to Papua New Guinea (Martin 2013). What sense can we make of such a global phenomenon and what might anthropological theory add to our understanding of it? This entry will show the ways that anthropologists have foregrounded different cultural evaluations of economic dependence in their ethnographic analysis. It thereby challenges the assumption that independence is the highest aspiration for adult humans, which lies at the heart of much political theory and economic discourse globally.

The valorisation of independence and the denigration of dependence are so well established in contemporary political and economic discourse that it might seem hard to imagine a world in which this was not the case. Yet, the central importance given to the idea of economic independence can be seen as a comparatively recent phenomenon, even in Western Europe. Writing in the 1850s, Karl Marx argued that the idea of the isolated and independent individual, who was the starting point of most political and economic analysis of the time, was itself the outcome of the particular organisation of Victorian capitalist society and that,

… the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual… appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole… in the family, and in the family expanded into the clan (1973 [1857-61]: 26).

Marx argues that it is only with the rise of capitalist modernity in the eighteenth century that these dependencies appear less visible and as a consequence that the ‘standpoint… of the isolated individual’ can emerge (1973 [1857-61]: 26).

A similar set of arguments are made by the political theorist C.B. Macpherson, who argued that early proto-liberal theorists such as Hobbes, Locke and James Harrington shared an underlying assumption of the ideal innate individual independence of adult males. This position of independence was at the core of what Macpherson (1962) described as the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’ that marked the birth of a new form of personhood. The possessive individual was held to be born ‘owing nothing to society’ for his capacities and in a state of individual self-ownership (Macpherson 1962: 263-4). However, this valorised independence could be given away by those who acted in a manner that made them dependent on others. Begging and wage labour, for example, were widely seen as relationships that created dependence in seventeenth century England. Variants of this view arguably continue to dominate much political discourse today, such as in debates that focus on the alleged morally negative impacts of ‘welfare dependence’.

Anthropological theory tends to take a different starting point, for a number of reasons. Given their strong focus on how values vary across and within cultures, most anthropologists sympathise with Marx and Macpherson’s caution that dependence may not be universally valued negatively compared to independence just because this has been the case in Western political thought since the 1700s. Secondly, because of their focus on the importance of social relations in shaping our lives, anthropologists most often begin their analysis by stressing interdependence as a fundamental part of human existence. This means that rather than starting from the assumption of independence as much of modern economic and political theory does, anthropologists tend to start from exploring how people are entangled with and mutually dependent upon each other. Rather than assuming that independence is good and dependence is bad, anthropological research has tended to show that whether or not dependence is positively or negatively evaluated, or indeed what kinds of relationships are evaluated as being examples of ‘dependency’ at all, can only be understood in the context of the lived experience and world-views of the communities among which we conduct research.

Importantly, anthropological analyses of ideas, such as ‘dependence’, have long included a focus on two important aspects. On the one hand, they foreground the contextually shifting nature of what such ideas might refer to. On the other hand, they ask how such ideas shape the obligations and relations that they help to categorise. As Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon observe in their discussion of the role of the concept of ‘dependence’ in shaping US politics, it is only by charting the ‘major historical shifts in the usage of this term’, that one might hope to understand its role as a tool of political governance (1994: 310). In the case of US political governance, Fraser and Gordon argue that by the late twentieth century, dependency had come to act as a keyword that, among other effects, was used to accuse single mothers of moral failing and took attention away from wider social structural inequalities. Rather than taking descriptions of ‘dependence’ as descriptive statements whose truth is to be validated or debunked, ethnographic analysis can explore the different contested dynamics by which a state of dependence is ascribed to or rejected by particular groups of people. This changing and performative role of ascriptions of dependence is here taken as a starting point.

Dependence in anthropological theory

Dependence has long been a central concept underpinning a variety of classical anthropological analyses, from accounts of how gift exchange creates leaders in the South Pacific by making others ‘dependent’ upon them (e.g. Malinowski 1922: 161, Sahlins 1963: 292, Epstein 1969: 223, Gregory 1982: 51), through the ascription of ‘dependence’ upon the environment or nature to peoples with ‘simple’ material cultures (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940: 16) to analyses of particular kinds of social systems, such as patron-client relations, with ‘dependency’ at their heart (e.g. Davis 1977: 81). Structures of dependence can sometimes act as fundamental markers for the difference between Western culture and other cultures. Based on ethnographic material collected in Melanesia, Marilyn Strathern argues that the nature of gift exchange transactions makes the parties to the exchange ‘reciprocally dependent upon one another’ (1988: 144). She thereby argues that dependency was actively sought in parts of Melanesia, inverting the modern European association between commodity exchange in the marketplace and the ideal of independence, noted by Marx. Yet despite the centrality of the idea of dependence to the framing of so much anthropological theory, the concept itself has remained largely unexplored as an explicit topic of anthropological theorising, unlike other concepts such as ‘kinship’ or ‘exchange’, both of which could easily be seen as either constituted by or constitutive of relations of dependence.

This is doubly surprising given the concept’s explicit centrality in other fields of enquiry with which anthropology has long had a critical engagement, beyond political theory mentioned above. For example, as Lynn Morgan (1987: 136) notes, many anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s largely accepted uncritically the idea of ‘dependency theory’ imported from development studies as an explanation for global inequalities in fields such as international trade, macroeconomic growth, and health care. Dependency theory was a theory developed by Marxist and radical scholars in the second half of the twentieth century that argued that countries in the global South were kept in a state of permanent and deliberate economic dependence upon powerful Western nations that benefitted by extracting surplus value from them (e.g. Wallerstein 1974). Morgan argues that although dependency theory was useful in drawing attention to global interdependencies and the ways in which they structured enduring socioeconomic inequalities, they often assumed that the development of capitalist markets occurred in fundamentally the same manner across the world (1987: 139-46). This carried the danger of blinding their advocates to the importance of cultural or historical variations in the kinds of relations of dependence that entanglement in the capitalist ‘world system’ created. It also meant that they tended to assume that international dependence always took on a similarly negative form. Some anthropological texts, (e.g. Comarroff 1985: 154-6), did critically engage with the assumption of one-way ‘dependency’ of the global South upon the West that characterised approaches such as ‘world-system(s) theories’, a political economic theory that grew out of ‘dependency theory’ in the 1970s. Jean Comaroff argues that dependency theory presents the world capitalist system as a total, penetrating, and determining force that overlooks the interaction of this particular sociocultural order with other formations (1985: 154). But even such critiques of dependency theory did not address the term ‘dependence’ head on but largely focused on other implicit biases, such as the way in which it tended to assume a singular logic to capitalist ‘penetration’ of local societies regardless of cultural or historical differences.

Anthropologists have also provided critiques of conceptions of dependency that were at the heart of conservative academic approaches to the problems of welfare and social exclusion in Western liberal democracies over the past four decades.^[1] In opposition to these views, anthropologists have attempted to redraw debates around welfare away from a narrow focus on the alleged dependency of particular individuals or households, towards the wider question of growing economic inequality in countries such as the US from the 1990s onwards (Morgen & Maskovsky 2003: 317). Although anthropologists have provided critiques of accusatory uses of the concept of dependence, this critique has tended to be limited. They either rejected that the urban poor are best described as ‘dependent’ in particular contexts, or the showed that dependency did not usually have morally debilitating effects on people (e.g. Morgen & Maskovsky 2003: 325-6, Wacquant 2009: 46-51). Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky, for example, demonstrate the ways in which anthropologists, such as Katherine Newman (1999) have sought to challenge the conception of single mothers on welfare as being dependent due to moral degeneracy or dysfunctional lifestyles. Whilst this work provided a rebuttal of conservative conceptions of ‘dependence’ among poor urban communities, it largely avoided providing a theoretical analysis of the concept’s analytical limitations and political performative effects more generally.

Some of the groundworks for a general theory of dependence have been laid by sociologists. One of the most significant works in the history of British sociology is 1957’s Family and kinship in East London. In this book, Peter Wilmott and Michael Young argued against traditional sociological models, which held that a move from the rural to the urban in ‘advanced’ economies, such as the UK, automatically led to the death of extended kinship systems and communities built upon such networks. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork in Britain’s rapidly decolonising empire, Young and Wilmott conducted long term fieldwork in London’s East End largely based upon repeated semi-structured interviews and on-going participant observation. They discovered that this part of London was informally governed by kinship networks, several generations deep and normally headed by an elderly strong matriarch. This was reminiscent, they argued, of the kind of structure that anthropologists had found in African villages (Young and Wilmott 1957: 57-8). Their insight might seem unsurprising today, but at the time it was something of a revolution.

In Family and kinship, Young praised the community that he saw as emerging from people’s dependence on kinship ties. He feared that the welfare state was loosening those ties and thereby ushering in an age of irresponsible individualism. While dependence on the state allowed the poorest to escape dependence upon their communities that had previously restrained their potentially anti-social behaviour, welfare payments also risked creating an illegitimate and unearned independence with dangerous anti-social consequences. It was dependence on these kinship networks that Wilmott and Young saw as providing the discipline and sanctioning force that stopped young East-Enders from indulging in petty crime, violence, sloth, and so on. This concern was a muted backdrop to Family and kinship but became an increasingly urgently stated concern in Young’s returns to the East End (Gavron, Dench & Young 2005). Here East London’s white working class was portrayed as having lost the community that sustained it half a century earlier. It was now unfavourably compared to Bengali immigrants in the area, who still lived in a community due to their reluctance to rely on state benefits and their persistent dependence on kin.

Young’s pessimist reappraisal was consistent with an emerging fear among politicians and commentators in the UK in the early 2000s that full employment would never return and that sections of the working class had become content with their allegedly illegitimate and unearned independence from community that dependence on the state had bought them. This fear was shared by centrist politicians who espoused the then-prevalent politics of multicultural neoliberalism. What Young’s interventions illustrated was that underpinning these fears was the continued rhetorical importance of a link between labour and independence. In essence, Young argued that if you want independence from your kin (a morally dubious desire in his eyes in the first place) then you should earn it rather than expect it by right. Young’s intervention draws attention to the continuing importance of wage labour as an ideal, if not always a present, reality in shaping the boundaries of dependence and independence. This is a long-established linkage in Western political theory, and debate continued to matter in the early 2000s. It is a linkage that a range of anthropological analyses have sought to problematise.

Wage labour and dependence

In many parts of the world it has become common to think of wage labour as one of the main available prerequisites for full independent personhood, at least for those born without access to inherited wealth. Yet we know that this is a highly context-dependent perspective. In fact, wage labour was originally held in seventeenth century England to be a form of dependency upon an employer little different from vagrancy or begging. At the time, only property ownership was cast as the basis for the non-dependence that enabled full individual participation in politics (e.g. Macpherson 1962: 128). It was only in the early nineteenth century that wage labour had become reconceptualised as the basis for the poor to gain independence. Historical analyses such as that of Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]) in The great transformation have drawn attention to the ways in which dependence became characterised as a moral vice by middle-class social reformers in this period. Polanyi tied this process to the increasing need for the rising power of the market in organising society and the consequent need to encourage the spread of wage labour. His analysis also draws our attention to the ways in which dependence on state authorities, wage labour, and kinship ties are mutually constitutive. Polanyi describes how reductions of relief for the rural poor in the United Kingdom (which can be viewed as the precursor of contemporary welfare programmes) were a central part of dividing a ‘respectable’ and ‘deserving’ working class, labouring to achieve independent self-reliance, from a class of ‘undeserving’ and ‘dependent’ paupers. A key moment in this transition was the abolishment of the so-called ‘Speenhamland’ system of poor relief, in which many local parishes had subsidised the living expenses of the unemployed rural poor. It was replaced with the Poor Law of 1834 that mandated parishes to force the unemployed into workhouses. Such changes in the nature of wage labour and state support are intimately entangled with changes in the nature of kinship interdependencies, as Polanyi observes. He points out that there had never been a public policy more popular than Speenhamland, as it meant that ‘parents were free of the care of their children, and children were no more dependent upon parents’ (Polanyi 1957: 83). Polanyi here foreshadows Young’s anxieties two centuries later, about the ways in which dependency on the state increased the possibility of independence from kin.

Anthropologists have also observed that the emergence of wage labour as a key social relationship in many parts of the world has reconfigured understandings of dependence and independence, challenging the universalising assumptions of liberal political theory. Australian expatriates, studied in Port Moresby between 1970 and 1972, which was the capital of the colonial territory of New Guinea at the time, considered wage labour to potentially lift ‘natives’ out of the morally debilitating state of inefficient dependencies on kin held to hold them back (Strathern 1975). For New Guinea migrants in Port Moresby, however, wage labour was sometimes characterised as a humiliating form of dependence upon employers who were not restrained by such obligations from potentially using their economic power to humiliate or damage their employees.

Ethnographic accounts from Europe also complicate the assumptions that the relationship between wage labour and dependence is clear-cut. Andrea Muehlebach’s account of the outsourcing of care of the elderly in Italy to poorly paid migrant workers from 2003 until 2005 draws our attention to the ways in which wage labour is not a singular category. Relatives of the elderly often demanded a degree of attention and emotional care from paid care workers that went beyond what might be expected in other similarly paid jobs. As one informant put it, it was not a ‘… normal job. You’re not a bricklayer’ (Muehlebach 201: 211). Muehlebach draws attention to the ways in which the perceived ‘dependency’ of the elderly recipients of care led to a situation in which the workers’ activities were viewed as sitting uneasily between an ethos of professional wage labour and affection. Her informants point to a difference between paid workers and care volunteers in this regard. The volunteers are normally Italians who provide care for the elderly out of a sense of vocation. Although they are not kin to the elderly that they assist, they are seen as providing an affective and genuine care that is more similar to the kind of support that kin should ideally be providing. The activity of the immigrant workers, on the other hand, is rendered morally dubious in the eyes of many informants by virtue of being conducted in exchange for wages.

Redrawing ‘dependence’ in the twenty-first century

Modernist teleological hopes that wage labour might expand across the world and provide the basis for universal ‘independence’ have become increasingly hard to sustain in the twenty-first century (Ferguson 2015). The increasing doubt about expanding ‘wage-dependent independence’ marks an epochal shift in how we understand legitimate citizenship and full personhood globally. However, the links between wage labour, idioms of independence, and full citizenship do not change according to singular global logic. In some contexts, such as Southern Africa for example, there can be increasing tolerance for citizenship, even for those who depend on government assistance programmes or universal-national basic income (Ferguson 2015). In others, the response might be an intensification of the rhetorical link between wage labour and legitimate independence, such as in the increasing prevalence of work training schemes in countries like the UK. Such schemes are often described as being largely designed to humiliate participants for their ‘dependence’ upon the state (e.g. Foster 2017: 119).

James Ferguson’s 2013 article ‘Declarations of dependence’ and his subsequent expansion of the article’s main thesis in his 2015 monograph Give a man a fish explicitly deal with the issue of how we might have to reconsider ascriptions of dependence in a time in which more and more people are coming to be ‘surplus’ to the needs of a wage labour economy. Both texts were also major factors in bringing discussion of ‘dependence’ as an analytical category to the forefront of anthropological theory. As noted, the ascription of ‘dependence’ had previously been critiqued by anthropologists who were opposed to the war on welfare that had characterised, in the 1980s, the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan government in the US, and their successors. They explicitly asked if and when ‘dependence’ was to be viewed as a barrier to legitimate adult personhood or citizenship. Building on fieldwork in Southern Africa, Ferguson drew a contrast between Western ‘liberal thought’ that presented dependence as ‘the opposite of freedom’ on the one hand, and a Southern African perspective that ‘has long recognized relations of social dependence as the very foundation of polities and persons alike’ (2013: 223). Ferguson’s work addressed head-on the underlying assumption that dependence led to un-freedom and a lesser form of individual personhood that had been identified by Macpherson as the unstated but implicit assumption underlying classical liberal political theory in the West.

Since their publication, Ferguson’s works have inspired an extensive and broadly supportive body of literature, that illustrate the importance of relations of dependence in enabling types of valued subjectivity that diverge from that of the ideal autonomous individual of Western liberal theory in Southern Africa and beyond. Most of this literature broadly shares Ferguson’s point that relations of dependence continue a long-standing Southern African cultural pattern. They are expressive of a ‘form of a political logic that was broadly characteristic of most precolonial southern African societies’ (Ferguson 2013: 226). Indeed, earlier comparative anthropological works that contrast political power in Europe and Africa describe European power struggles as being largely concerned with control of land. This stands in contrast to Southern Africa, where land was traditionally in abundant supply and leadership amounted to a contest to attract as many followers as possible, a situation famously described by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (1977) as accumulating ‘wealth in people’ (see also Vansina 1990, Guyer 1993). Political power among Ngoni in the early 1950s illustrates this point:

The principal index of power was the number of a man’s dependants. Political struggles were essentially not struggles to control wealth but to enjoy the support of followers (Barnes 1967: 30, cited in Ferguson 2013: 226).

Elements of Ferguson’s framing of dependence have been subject to critical examination by writers otherwise sympathetic to the broad thrust of his argument. One criticism is that his recent argument may lack ethnographic evidence, even if it does raise interesting points. Kathleen Rice, for example, draws attention to the ways in which Ferguson relies primarily on historical accounts rather than contemporary ethnography as his primary means of demonstrating that personhood in contemporary South Africa is deeply relational relative to the West (2015: 60).

Whilst this might seem to be a minor difference of emphasis, Rice’s intervention draws attention to a potentially wider issue. In today’s interconnected world, it may be an overgeneralisation to draw up different geographical and cultural areas and to argue that part of the essential nature of one ‘social system’ such as ‘The West’ has an abhorrence of dependence, while others, such as ‘Southern Africa’ validate and encourage it (Ferguson 2013: 226). Ferguson’s 2013 article contains no less than thirteen instances of the phrase ‘social system’ in a manner that seemed to refer to a fixed bounded sociocultural entity, such as ‘the Ngoni social system’, for example (Ferguson 2013: 225). Such schematic and frequently static models of bounded cultures make it difficult to deal with people who live at the borders of ‘cultures’; they tend to erase important differences within those boundaries; these models often fail to deal with the historical entanglements of colonialism and postcolonial global society; and they fail to deal with histories of interconnection more generally (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 7-8). It may be the fact that Ferguson himself had pioneered criticism of such bounded cultural models twenty years earlier, that his argument around cultural difference based on dependence has found some acceptance today (e.g. Haynes 2017).

This Southern African model of leadership through amassing followers is in some regards similar to the Melanesian pattern of ‘big man’ leadership. In parts of Melanesia, local leaders known as ‘big men’ have been described as amassing dependent followers through the creation of ‘gift-debts’ that followers cannot repay. For example, a ‘big man’ may sponsor the bridewealth payments of young men, thus binding them to him with a lifelong obligation (see Martin 2019). Similar to the Southern African examples, the focus on wealth in people in Melanesia is often considered to be the outcome of an abundance of land (e.g. Martin 2018: 91-2). That said, land claims and the creation of dependent followers can go hand in hand as well. The Tolai people of East New Britain, studied between 2002 and 2004, for example claimed customary rights to land through activity on it, which included clearing and cultivation of crops. For that claim to remain active, activity had to be maintained. This in part explained the desire for big men to amass as many dependent followers as possible. They recruited them even from outside of their immediate kinship networks, as these dependents could be used to maintain land claims. By the end of the twentieth century, this situation appeared to have drastically altered, however, as a result of a population explosion and the emergence of cash cropping for the global market. As a consequence, the political economy among Tolai people today has shifted from leaders trying to maximise their number of dependents to limiting the number of people who can make claims on them (2018: 91).

Another issue raised in current debates around dependence is whether this concept lies at the heart of a cultural misunderstanding between black South Africans who validate it and predominantly white expatriates who are introducing the idea that dependence is a failing to be overcome. We already saw versions of this question in work on New Guinea (Strathern 1975). Considering wage labour to be a mechanism by which expatriates hope to drag locals out of ‘dependence’ has also been documented in Zimbabwe by Erica Bornstein. Here, foreign NGO workers have been shown to painstakingly explain to local villagers that the purpose of development programmes and child sponsorship is to encourage villagers to stand on their own two feet and that they should ‘…not depend on others but should work for themselves’ (Bornstein 2001: 613). Bornstein also describes how NGO workers explained to villagers who sought cash payments that aid-donors wanted to ‘… feel parental delight at seeing their children walking for the first time’ (2001: 613). By focusing on child sponsorship, this work draws attention to the ways in which Western liberal thought does acknowledge childhood as a legitimate stage of dependence that should ideally be transcended on the way to adulthood. The dependence of childhood and the state of dependence are often conflated in ascriptions to people in the global South by a series of powerful actors from colonial authorities in the past to development agencies in the present day. Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2002: 22) observations about how the Australian government acted as the legal guardian for every Aboriginal child in the Northern Territory from 1911 onwards points our attention in a similar direction. Because Aboriginal adults were considered insufficiently independent, they could not be trusted with the care of their own dependents, meaning that the state took it upon itself to step in and take the responsibility. These works all in their different ways frame the situation as one in which an external group or institution of Western origin (expatriates promoting wage labour, NGOs promoting development or the nation-state) step in and attempt to impose a negative understanding of dependence upon local communities. However, my own work with Tolai people in Papua New Guinea draws attention to a different dynamic, in which rapidly emerging socioeconomic inequalities within local communities have led to a situation in which it is the more economically or politically successful local people who begin to adopt the rhetoric of possessive individualism (Martin 2007). Here, local elites denigrate dependence as a means to distance themselves from their own grassroots relatives, whom they castigate for wanting to be ‘spoonfed’ (Martin 2013) or demanding to be ‘fed like children’ (Martin 2020).

Examples such as this might lead us to a wider observation, namely the need to pay attention to the ways in which the kinds of relationships characterised as relations of dependence and the values placed upon them vary far across different groups and across the years. Maxim Bolt agrees that dependence is validated in Southern Africa as a ‘basic enduring model of sociality that has… survived social and economic transformations’ in contrast to the ‘lack of freedom’ that it signals from a liberal perspective’ (2013: 244). However, he goes on to caution that the meaning and experience of relations that might be characterised as ‘dependence’ varies massively depending upon context and power relations within the particular geographic area under examination. Bolt observes, for example, that during the colonial era in Southern Africa ‘personal dependence shaped life far more explicitly on farms than on the mines’, yet mine labour was more highly validated and sought after by black South Africans for a variety of socioeconomic reasons (2013: 244). This leads Bolt to conclude that we require a ‘messier picture’ when we think about dependence (2013: 245). All of this might suggest a starting point for analysis in which anthropologists consider these manifold differences without taking them as being necessarily the outcome of different regional cultural logics. Instead, they may want to focus as much on the changing economic factors that shape how dependence is lived and experienced. In both South Africa and the UK there are on-going political struggles over the extent to which different forms of ‘dependence’ should be accepted in a changing world. In particular, the situation at the start of the twenty-first century in which the previously widely accepted link between productive wage labour and legitimate independence is being reconfigured, often in widely divergent directions (Ferguson 2015). In such times, a comparative ethnographic analysis of the social effects of contested ascriptions of dependence (Bolt 2013: 245) becomes ever more important. Such an approach would not consider ‘dependence’ as the description of a particular state of being to which a particular definition can be fixed. Instead, the task of ethnographers would become to analyse how relations that get characterised under its umbrella become grouped together, and what the wider effects of such ascriptions of dependence are.

Conclusion

The idea of ‘dependence’ has long been a central theme in many anthropological analyses as an underlying analytical assumption. It has been commonly used in the analysis of non-Western societies as a means of stressing an interdependent model of human being that stands in contrast to the assumed autonomous individual actor of Western liberal theory. When anthropologists have discussed ‘dependence’ in Western contexts, it has often been in terms of a critique of accusations of the morally debilitating effects of dependence on particular populations, such as welfare recipients. Despite this, the concept of dependence itself has only recently become a central focus of anthropological theory. In particular, the work of Ferguson has made explicit the contrast between Western liberal associations between dependence and a desired state of autonomous freedom and alternative conceptions of personhood that validate some dependencies as their basis of being. As ever-larger populations across the world are potentially being cast as surplus to the needs of the wage labour economy, a previous cultural association between wage labour and validated forms of independence is becoming increasingly contested and difficult to sustain. Anthropology has a valuable role to play in documenting and analysing the performative effects of such contested and shifting ascriptions of dependence at this pivotal moment in global history.

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Note on contributor

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The death of the big men and the rise of the big shots: custom and conflict in East New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

[1] Notable examples of these conservative attacks on welfare ‘dependence’ include Murray (1984), Besharov (1995), and Mead (2004).