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Introduction : Anthropology confronts inequality

Charles Tilly Anthropological Theory 2001 1: 299 DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228746 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/1/3/299

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Anthropological Theory
Copyright SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol 1(3): 299306 [1463-4996(200109)1:3;299306;018907]

Introduction
Anthropology confronts inequality
Charles Tilly Columbia University, USA

Anthropology once centered on inequality, and signicantly shaped how non-anthropologists thought about inequality. Just one example: after three years eld experience among Australian aborigines, anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner began intensive study of Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1930. For Warner, social class hierarchies provided organizing structures for industrial societies, structures roughly equivalent to kinship systems in small non-literate populations. A large team continued the Newburyport study until 1959. During the same decades, Warner also conducted or inspired multiple comparative studies of other American communities. Under Warners pen, Newburyport became Yankee City, and his division of Newburyports people into upper-upper, lower-upper, upper-middle, lower-middle, upper-lower, and lower-lower classes became standard language in discussions of American social inequality. Warner placed his inuential Yankee City studies squarely in the lineage of RadcliffeBrown, Lowie, and Malinowski (Warner, 1963: xiii). His approach to class analysis incited plenty of debate and criticism, but his model of investigation dominated empirical analyses of American class structure for a generation. Critical reaction to Warners studies even launched a whole school of historical investigation, beginning with Stephan Thernstroms Poverty and Progress (1964), not to mention John P. Marquands mordant portrait of an anthropologist in Point of No Return (1949). Both Poverty and Progress and Point of No Return, in fact, concerned Newburyport itself. Warners anthropological work put Newburyports inequality on the intellectual map. During the last few decades, however, inequality has lost its centrality in the anthropological enterprise as anthropology has lost prominence as a source of general ideas about inequality. A quick count of 337 titles in the Annual Review of Anthropology from 1984 to 2000, for example, yields a mere 19 articles less than 6 per cent! whose titles include variants on the words caste, chiefs, class, ethnicity, gender, hierarchy, inequality, minority, power, race, slavery and/or status, with gender by far the leading mention. To be sure, specialists in archaeology, political economy, sociolinguistics, race, gender, and ethnicity still keep inequality on the anthropological agenda. Nevertheless, the days are long gone when many anthropologists took hierarchies and inequalities as major objects of study, and when outsiders looked to anthropology for major descriptions and explanations of inequality. That is a pity. Anthropology has formidable advantages in the description and
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explanation of inequality: access to a wide range of variation, built-in resistance to teleologies of modernization, skepticism about the generality and uniformity of markets, knowledge of inequalities outside the world of jobs and wages, concern for visible victims of unequal struggles, sensitivity to culture, and employment of direct observation as a means of gathering evidence (see, for example, Breman, 1994). Since professional students of inequality concentrate overwhelmingly on differential locations and monetary rewards within capitalist labor markets, anthropologists have a splendid opportunity not only to redress the empirical balance, but also to improve on market-based explanations. The papers in this symposium demonstrate how much anthropologists have to offer. Speaking very generally, studies of inequality pivot on four main questions: 1 2 3 4 What asymmetrical relations prevail among persons, groups, categories, and social locations? How do persons, groups, categories, and social locations end up in the positions they occupy? What effects do 1 and 2 have on individual and collective social experience? How do 1, 2, and 3 change?

Each of these questions, in turn, has two versions: descriptive and explanatory. Descriptive accounts of inequality trace and catalog various patterns of asymmetrical relations (for example, caste vs. class) and their correlates. Explanatory accounts specify why 1, 2, 3, and 4 occur. Both descriptive and explanatory accounts are essential. Description and explanation of inequality present anthropologists with a number of important challenges. At the level of metatheory, inequality challenges its analysts to thread their way among competing ontologies and epistemologies: to what extent and how, for example, can we conceive of inequalities by race, gender, or lineage as observable, perdurable, and consequential attributes of social structures? Must we instead take them to be shared ideas or linguistic constructions? This symposiums authors huddle together toward the realistic end of the realistidealist continuum, but readers have the right to try their own metatheories on the materials reported by the authors. At the level of theory, inequality is a phenomenon for which scholars have proposed genuinely competing explanations. Anthropological evidence can be of great value in adjudicating, verifying, or modifying those explanations. Prevailing cultural, functional, coercive, competitive, and relational theories, while not entirely incompatible pair by pair, differ sufciently that close observation of inequalitys production, operation, and reproduction over a wide range of social settings will provide crucial information about their adequacies and inadequacies. If, for example, virtual monetization has effects as sweeping and uniform as Keith Harts analysis indicates, strictly cultural theories of inequality will have great difculty in accounting for those effects. Similarly, reports from Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey on East Europes inequality-generating processes cast doubt on the generality of market-based competitive theories. The least students of inequality can get from more sustained anthropological investigation is better specication of scope conditions for available cultural, functional, coercive, competitive, and relational models. They can surely get much more.
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Methodologically, anthropologists also have a distinctive contribution to make. Outside of anthropology, students of inequality commonly assemble information about individuals or households from surveys and administrative records, then aggregate the information to examine unit-to-unit variation or regroup it into categories for comparison. For all their value in establishing whether well-dened patterns of difference or co-variation exist, such procedures face serious logical limits. First, they bias explanations toward the presupposition that durable attributes of social units (rather than, say, their locations in larger systems, processes, or sequences) cause their behavior. Second, they lend themselves easily to representations of inequality as consisting of locations within abstract hierarchies rather than of concrete connections among people. Third, they curtail or eliminate evidence about interactions with others as causes, correlates, and effects of inequality. Finally, to the extent that crucial inequality-generating mechanisms operate incrementally and through interpersonal negotiation, those mechanisms disappear from view. Anthropologists who follow interpersonal relations, reconstruct life histories, participate in social processes, and observe social interaction directly have an opportunity to compensate for these weaknesses of individualized evidence. In this issue, we see Humphrey and Verdery pondering their own observations of East European social life to arrive at fresh insights concerning inequality-generating processes in general. Even more profound and subtle questions confront anthropological students of inequality. Let me single out two dilemmas that pervade social analysis in general, but show up with particular clarity in studies of inequality. The rst is individual vs. categorical effects, the second, historicism vs. universalism. Many students of social processes, notably including inequality-generating processes, assume that only individuals exist, therefore that collective effects such as racial discrimination must result cumulatively from common properties of individual dispositions to act. Thus the competitive models of inequality my article describes generally assume that racial categories reside in individual minds. They then assume that the categories resemble each other from one mind to the next. Similar mental categories, goes the standard argument, lead the owners of those minds to act in parallel ways toward people they place on one side or the other of a racial boundary. In a line of thought quite familiar to anthropologists, however, other analysts suppose that racial categories operate through relations, practices, and representations whose overall connections (like those of a trade diaspora or a kindred) are rarely or never visible to their participants. The rst view reduces all social effects to individual causes, whereas the second view insists on structural effects. With their expertise in connecting persons, practices, and representations, anthropologists stand in a good position to assess the relative strengths of individual and categorical accounts. As for historicism vs. universalism, the question arises with peculiar intensity in studies of inequality. On one side, local patterns of inequality by gender, race, caste, or class unquestionably accumulate enormous historical content in the form of stories, teachings, taboos, diagnoses, remedies, labels, and interpersonal routines. Yet, on the other side, striking similarities appear in the operation of deference, subjugation, patronclient relations, and the emergence of chiefdoms in a wide variety of historical settings. Within a phenomenon such as nationalism, furthermore, principles of division as ostensibly different as religion, language, ethnicity, territorial proximity, and market
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connection relate in similar ways to claims for political autonomy. How can we reconcile historical-cultural particularity with recurrent causal processes? Resort to fundamental human nature will not do the job, for it begs the question of explaining variation. My article in this symposium proposes to approach the problem by identifying causal mechanisms of very general scope, but causal mechanisms that (a) incorporate local cultural material, (b) occur in different combinations and sequences, and therefore (c) produce varying but still systematic and explicable aggregate effects. But it is also possible in principle that basic inequality-generating processes differ signicantly from one historical setting to another. Marxist mode of production analyses, for example, treat exploitation as a very general cause of inequality, but argue that exploitation operates quite differently, with different effects, under feudal, capitalist, and other modes (Hobsbawm, 1964). With their historical-geographical range, anthropologists have an opportunity to renew discussions of historicism vs. universalism. This symposiums four articles illustrate anthropologys contribution to studies of inequality. They break into two pairs, with Caroline Humphreys and Katherine Verderys displaying the virtues of sustained ethnography within well-dened settings, while Keith Harts and my own seek to identify common properties and connecting processes at a larger scale. Humphrey seeks to identify very general exclusionary processes noticeable, she argues, in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and India by careful analysis of exclusion in contemporary Russia. Close local observations at hand, Humphrey argues that Russians have created powerful unity-maintaining practices with strong consequences for inequality: the more they emphasize unity, the more they build boundaries excluding others from that unity, and the more serious the penalties visited upon those excluded. Russians, according to Humphrey, tolerate signicant differences in power and wealth within such solidary systems, just so long as members meet their obligations, acknowledge their common membership, and join in stigmatizing outcasts. The arrangements she describes therefore resemble many trade diasporas, religious sects, and revolutionary conspiracies. In my articles terms, Russians build strong systems of opportunity hoarding, cementing them with local adaptation. But Humphrey raises three interesting challenges to the arguments of my own article for this symposium. First, she denies that durable, visible boundaries separate the Russian included from the excluded, as my article suggests they should. Her exclusion looks more like being thrown off a moving train than being walled off from your neighbors. What is more, she sees strong continuities in exclusionary rationales and practices from early imperial times to the present. Once again, her argument challenges mine, since in my more utilitarian account both boundaries and congurations within boundaries shift with relations of exploitation and opportunity hoarding. Finally, she argues that meanings and emotions based on deep commitment to shared moral systems motivate both the desire to cast out unworthy community members and the willingness to tolerate visible material inequality so long as its beneciaries meet their moral commitments. Such a view counters my own emphasis on material costs and benets. Here on-the-spot readers have a chance to judge the relative plausibility of phenomenologicalcultural (Humphrey) and relational-material (Tilly) explanations for inequality. Readers who care little for such scholarly tournaments nevertheless have good reasons for reading Humphrey. Her documentation of widespread exclusionary practices in todays Russia lends insight into the travails of postsocialism. Although some people have
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become newly rich and powerful in postsocialist transformations and many have maintained their attachments to segments of the old system, she shows us that increasing numbers are falling or nding themselves pushed off the train. The result is increasing inequality, and a serious threat to Russias future. Katherine Verdery likewise analyzes postsocialist transitions, but hers take place in rural Romania. Verdery examines a very general problem in a very particular place and time. In general, she calls our attention to the grounding of property rights in time, or rather times: the times at which governments intervene to change available legal denitions of rights to property, the times over which such rights endure, the times in which people act to claim rights to property. Those times intersect everywhere that governments exist, for governmental agents incessantly regulate and manipulate property rights in pursuit of programs that often align badly with the interests and preconceptions of the people who interact most directly with the property in question. Frequently people on the ground struggle in governmental time to acquire those legal sanctions of their property rights that will most closely approximate their conceptions of those rights as embedded in local time. Verdery is analyzing just such a case. (It is only fair to signal that Verdery rejects my attachment of the various temporal modes to particular social structures, relations, or settings on the grounds that such a view reies the structures, relations, or settings.) In Verderys chosen territory of Transylvania, legal authorization of dissolution for collective farms in 1991 precipitated the problem. In Transylvanian villages, population turnover, including those who lived and worked on collective farms, had continued long after the collectivization of the 1950s. The law authorized restitution of ceded lands to the families that had ceded them. Time immediately came into play: as of when did prior rights to land apply? In the 1990s, what did membership in the same families that had existed in the 1940s or 1950s mean? Where collective farms had plowed over boundaries and paths, how could a village reconstitute the same parcels as families had farmed in the 1940s or 1950s? What about parcels farmed under mixed, disputed, or ctive ownership back then? What about families that arrived and worked on collective farms after collectivization? What of former landowning families who had left the village since the 1950s? Such questions pertained both to times set by governmental agents and to those commonly invoked by local residents as they participated in land commissions. As in Humphreys Russia, Transylvanias villagers were struggling over who would be included, who excluded. Since land ownership was again becoming the primary criterion of community membership and standing, to acquire no land at all was to fall into an excluded lower class. Again, as in Humphreys Russia, at stake were not only prestige, power, and moral standing, but also access to networks of mutual aid on which people relied heavily for survival under socialism. Or consider similarities to the credit networks that sustained families in 16th-century England, as described in my article. Just as losing credit consigned 16th-century English households to moral oblivion, losing claims to land excludes Transylvanian villagers from local collective life. Unlike 16th-century credit, however, enforceable claims to land in Transylvania come to depend heavily on recognition and registration of those claims by pre-communist authorities, right back to 19thcentury Austro-Hungarian authorities. Relevant times become ever more complicated (for parallel processes of top-down control and bottom-up negotiation, see Stevens,
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1999; Tilly, 1999). Eventually, as Verdery emphasizes, people use their previously accumulated political capital to forward their own preferred temporal reference points. Despite the illusion that time determines property, eventually power struggles dene relevant times. In Transylvania and elsewhere, property times look backward to moments when state authorities registered, conrmed, altered, or otherwise intervened in claims to land, as well as to other moments when particular households exercised effective control over different pieces of land. They look sidewise to contemporary shifts and struggles with respect to legal rights and effective control. They also look forward to the positions of households in regard to future transfers, disputes, and negotiations over land ownership within villages. In all three of these temporal perspectives, inequality is doubly at stake: the relative positions of individuals and households in hierarchies of wealth, power, and prestige are at risk, but so are relations, including relations of patronage and mutual aid, among households within villages. Although Verdery, like Humphrey, raises doubts that categorical differences operate as neatly as my arguments require, Verdery is actually describing and explaining the relational creation of new, consequential categorical differences. Keith Hart likewise confronts time and inequality, but at a much larger geographic scale than Humphrey and Verdery; the whole world is his oyster. Hart examines how successive phases of monetization have transformed material inequality among world regions. He argues that the 18th-century industrial revolution, the 19th-century bureaucratic revolution, and the 20th-century communications revolution each concentrated economic advantages in fewer hands, thus generating momentous increases in world inequality. In each of these phases, money became a more inuential means of connection, domination, and exclusion than in the previous phase. But the invention of virtual money, exemplied by the creation of futures markets anchored not only in goods and services but also in securities, promoted a vast increase of inequality. It did so, argues Hart, by allowing capitalists to invest and disinvest in different parts of the world rapidly and at their own convenience. He therefore sees a 21st century teetering among ve very different options: 1 2 utter subjection of world resources to the wills and advantages of a few connected capitalists explosion of the money-connected system, leaving only those still exercising immediate control over land, labor, and means of material production to survive within their disconnected fragments world revolution on the part of (or perhaps on behalf of ) the losers in the economic processes generating ever-increasing inequality alliance among segments of government, corporations, and the consuming public to contain and humanize the power of capital, on something like the model of 19thcentury liberal revolutions opting out on the part of well-connected closed circuits of network users, beneting from the radical decline in communication costs, on something like the recurrent model of communitarian or artisanal socialism.

3 4

This is no modest vision. Despite his occasional references to the necessity of world revolution, Harts own professed preferences lie somewhere between options 4 and 5.
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He envisions middle-class activists as fortied vis-a-vis national governments by their increased capacity to shield money from taxation and to ally with fellow sufferers outside their own countries. He does not say how the benets of such a soft revolution would extend to the more serious victims of capitalist expansion his analysis identies: poor people outside the centers of world capitalism. His closing words, however, suggest that further alliances between the partially excluded middle classes and the totally excluded working classes again perhaps on the model of 19th-century revolutions have become both feasible and necessary. Thus at very different scales, the analyses of Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart all feature inclusion and exclusion as inequality-transforming processes. So does my analysis. My article attempts three things. First, it invokes Craig Muldrews treatment of credit in 16th-century England to illustrate how the dynamics of interpersonal relations cause shifts in durable patterns of inequality. Second, it makes a case for anthropological study (exemplied here by the works of Eric Wolf, Don Kalb, and Timothy Earle) as a privileged means of access to the relevant dynamics of interpersonal relations. Third, it lays out a primitive general theory of categorical inequality centering on the dynamics of interpersonal relations. The theory treats the exclusionary processes stressed by Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart as special cases of a very general interpersonal mechanism called opportunity hoarding: conning use of a value-producing resource to an in-group. As relevant value-producing resources, Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart focus respectively on mutual aid networks, land, and electronically diffused information. Occupational niches, craft technologies, precious commodities, rare minerals, scientic knowledge, and inside information about markets and politics similarly lend themselves to opportunity hoarding. Opportunity hoarding, in my view, produces a signicant range of inequalities, but (a) always in the company of two other mechanisms, emulation and adaptation, both of which should be quite familiar to anthropologists and particularly susceptible to investigation by ethnographic methods, (b) no more so than the separate, if often complementary, mechanism of exploitation, which involves (1) sequestration of a value-producing resource, (2) organization of other peoples effort in the production of value by means of that resource, (3) allocation to those others of less than the value added by their effort, (4) commitment of some portion of the value added to reproduction of control over the resource and over other peoples effort. Given the centrality of exploitation to Marxist and marxisant explanations of inequality, indeed, it is striking how little exploitation appears in the accounts of Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart. Is this due to substantive disagreements, differences in perspective, selectivity of problems, or features of the eras and places addressed by my co-authors? My own guess is that a closer look at the materials examined by Humphrey, Verdery, and Hart will reveal more exploitation than their own analyses allow. From my perspective, it is also surprising how little construction, reinforcement, and borrowing of bounded categorical differences (such as female/male, Roma/Russian, or citizen/alien) gure in the explanations of inequality proposed by Hart, Verdery, and Humphrey. I recognize both that continua such as from rich to poor exist and that
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sometimes who belongs to some network is much clearer than who does not belong. I claim nevertheless that socially organized categorical differences underlie a large share of the inequality that western observers commonly attribute to individual differences in talent, knowledge, and effort. Given its deep grounding in earlier anthropological investigations, such an argument deserves serious empirical attention rather than quick dismissal. At least I hope so. This journals readers must decide, of course, whether the theory helps them do their own explanatory work. Even readers who remain dubious on that score should nd the ensemble of articles in this issue an encouragement to giving description and explanation of inequality greater prominence in todays anthropology.
References

Breman, Jan (1994) Wage Hunters & Gatherers: Search for Work in the Urban and Rural Economy of South Gujarat. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964) Introduction, in Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marquand, John P. (1949) Point of No Return. Boston: Little, Brown. Stevens, Jacqueline (1999) Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thernstrom, Stephan (1964) Poverty and Progress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tilly, Charles (1999) Power Top-Down and Bottom Up, Journal of Political Philosophy 7: 30628. Warner, W. Lloyd (1963) Yankee City. One vol., abridged edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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