|
Political Economy of World-Systems 2002 Conference Riverside, California |
|
Abstract Same as it ever was? Lakota Culture, Semiproletarian Households, and the Myth of Full Employment in Hegemonic Decline Kathleen Pickering Economic anthropologists argue that all economies have two sides, one side regulated by socially mediated relations, and one side regulated by impersonal market trade (Gudeman 1998). Part of the project of constructing 'modernity' by the hegemons of the world-economy has been to promote the view that the impersonal 'free' market was the only efficient method for organizing economic production and exchange. Those in socially embedded economic relationships were labeled "backward," "primitive," and "traditional," resisting the progress that would transform them into economically wealthy 'modern' societies (Taylor 1996). This socially embedded approach to economic transactions characterizes Lakota economic practice, both before post-World War U.S. hegemony, and, through persistence or re-emergence, currently during U.S. hegemonic decline. The features of this economic practice include: some wage-earning activity, albeit irregular; important resource pooling within households and extended families; continuation of household handicraft trades, despite competition with factory production of similar goods; certain rights to "the commons" protected by concepts of tribal sovereignty; subsistence activities enhanced with symbolic commitments to Lakota cultural preservation; limited identification of work with formal employment in the market economy; and limited reliance on some forms of state transfer payments. There are important parallels between Lakota economic practice and Wallerstein's description of the semiproletarian household, which is now the predominate form of household world wide (Dunaway 2001). There is also an instructive degree of historic analogy between Lakota economic practice and descriptions of 18th century labor in England, before the start of British hegemony in 1815 (Rule 1981). Most of these features "re-emerge" in England in the 1880s, during the onset of British hegemonic decline, when the term "unemployment" first receives formal recognition and the ideology takes hold that industrial market societies will provide full employment (Kumar 1984). The key differences for laboring families in post-hegemonic England, in contrast to the pre-industrial phase, was the elimination of "the commons," the end of access to subsistence land use, and the ideological commitment to regular work hours despite declining wage opportunities. Current U.S. policies of welfare reform mirror Great Britain's ideological commitment to full employment precisely at the point of hegemonic decline. In order to obtain government transfer payments, Lakota families are now being directed by the state to spend time earning wages in a market economy that does not exist on the reservation. Concurrently, U.S. political hegemony is working to limit, modify, and attack the concept of tribal sovereignty, and with it the access of indigenous people to the tribal "commons." The political and cultural hegemony of the U.S. to "seize the bodies" of the Lakota for the ideological commitments of the state (Verdery 1996) far outstrip the material ability of the service market of the affluent society to provide them with full employment. Concluding from this analysis, it appears that in periods of hegemonic decline, political and cultural controls exceed the material ability of the world-economy to live up to its unidimensional dedication to the 'free' market. Indigenous societies who retained their participation in the socially embedded economy may posses greater abilities to supplement their semiproletarian households, but will confront even greater political and cultural assaults before the material shortcomings of the world-economy vindicate their social approach. |
|
27th Annual Conference of the Political Economy of World-Systems Spring Hosted by the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside |