7a. 

Social Organization and Economic Anthropology

Introduction

What is economic anthropology? As a subfield of socio-cultural anthropology, economic anthropologists are interested in how individuals and the groups of which they are a part engage in, make decisions related to, and organize themselves according to the following: resource use and management; approaches to reciprocity and the distribution of valued goods (food, material items, money); the division of labour or how certain tasks are understood and organized according to social status, age, and gender; and different forms of consumption.

When we’re born, we’re thrown into the world, as philosopher Martin Heidegger used to say—we’re thrown into social groups by default. We don’t have any choice. We’re such an interesting species because we have our basic needs (food, water, sleep, shelter), but then we have so many other needs (read: desires) that have nothing to do with our basic survival: cars, boats, laptops, phones, fashion, Starbucks, rechargeable lawnmowers—the list honestly goes on and on. If you ask me, these desires or, depending on the context, needs or necessities mark us off from our sort of close relations genetically and biologically. Humans sometimes have too many needs, and this is what causes trouble—whether at the individual level (you’ll hear parents sometimes tell their teenagers that “they want too much”) or corporate level (corporate greed). Either way, though, whether it’s fulfilling basic needs or superficial ones, like getting the latest iPhone, we’re able to meet such demands and even create new ones through social organization.

Social Organization

Let's Break It Down

By this definition, in order to solve basic problems in everyday life, in order to fulfill basic needs and requirements, people need to come together and make use of social relations as a resource in and of themselves. Whether we’re talking about extended families, nuclear families, or families based on, let’s say, fictive kin networks (non-blood-related ties like friendships), social organization really is just people being interdependent on each other. At its simplest, it’s just patterned social relations. What defines social relationships is dependent on cultural understandings, norms, and mores of what’s appropriate, what’s not, etc. Again, people living in certain social contexts will come together in certain ways to meet these demands of everyday living. 

Example

Imagine we’re going back in time to, let’s say, around the 1600s here in Canada. Indigenous Peoples, who typically weren’t sedentary (with the exception of the Huron Iroquois here in Ontario), such as the Cree, the Ojibwa, the Chipewyan, and the Inuit would participate in something called fission/fusion group patterning. The primary social unit called the band would consist of between 50–100 individuals.

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When resources were plentiful, several bands could join together through fusion and form a regional band. Through the fusion of families, economic needs could be met since there would be more individuals to help with berry picking, hunting, fishing, trapping, and trade.

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During times of food/resource scarcity, though, the regional band might fission off into smaller, more nuclear families, making it easier to meet the economic needs of fewer people (Waldram et al., 2006, p. 8).

They were really in a constant state of flux, living a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence.