By Gustav Peebles

Incontestably, the world is besieged by abundance. We have too many floods, too many forest fires, too much war, too much carbon in the skies. Believe it or not, we even frequently find ourselves overproducing such staples as milk, sugar, and wine. And in our everyday lives, grocery stores beckon with a seeming cornucopia of endless fruits, cereal boxes, and ice cream. Scarcity, when it does tragically strike, is typically a distribution problem rather than a production problem.

Given this foundational abundance, why have policy debates for the last 50 years been so dominated by economists, whose “dismal science” axiomatically believes that the world is constituted by scarcity? And with their endless fixation on scarcity, they have genuflected not only to the “price mechanism” (which emerges out of relative scarcity), but also to damaging austerity and climate politics. Surely, one powerful reason for economists’ dominance in public policy debate is that they have more instinctively abided by the spirit of Sweden’s admirable “Tredje Uppgift”– a 1977 law that mandates public outreach. Can anthropologists adopt these same instincts, and more adroitly use their research findings and their methodology to vociferously and publicly push back against the politics and policies of scarcity?

After all, anthropologists typically approach the world—dare we say, the universe?— as if it is constituted by abundance. For them, scarcity is often seen as but “a veil”, laid upon the natural world by categorizing cultures that craft hierarchy and status out of a socially-produced scarcity. Marshall Sahlins laid this out most famously in his essay on “The Original Affluent Society,” where he argued that hunter-gatherers worry not for tomorrow, for these groups readily believe that the same abundance that they harvested today will be equally available in the future.^[i] Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart offer up a compendium of similar attitudes found around the world, of peoples who approach the world as if it is naturally overflowing.^[ii] Nary a dismal scientist to be found among them.

But aside from these ethnographic reports and analyses, you can also spot anthropologists’ distrust of an allegedly scarce natural world when you contrast the two disciplines. While economists seek “elegance” and “simplicity” in their answers, anthropologists seek “nuance” and “complexity.” The latter implies that anthropologists believe that there is always more difference to discover, and that simplicity is but a crass “reduction”of an infinite and always-in-flux social world.

If all this is true, what policies might blossom from anthropological wisdom?

For starters, we could note that anthropology’s epistemology of abundance is deeply connected to its qualitative method. Quantitative method is proudly and intentionally reductive, slicing away qualities that need to be forgotten, neglected, or even violently extracted from the data. Contrariwise, a qualitative approach openly acknowledges the bewildering complexity of the world, and how we can never fully portray it in social scientific terms.^[iii] In following this methodology, anthropology implicitly embraces the “ineffable”— that which cannot be fully described in words.

What if anthropologists turned their skill in studying the ineffable into one of their biggest strengths, rather than letting their commitment to partial truths be an Achilles’ heel? Economists and other social scientists have not developed similar tactics for studying the ineffable. Indeed, the constraints of their methods means that they must ignore it, or at best, find proxy indices for it. But if anthropologists truly believe that certain elemental aspects of the social world are infinitely complex then they are in the best position to develop policy responses to those particular spaces of social life.

Let us take the sacred as a premier example, which is largely ignored by economists. Sacrality is considered ineffable across countless cultures. Felicitously, both theologians and anthropologists have noted that one of the defining features of the sacred is that it is “that which issues abundantly,” that is, the sacred is often associated with infinite and boundless gifting, with no concern for the constraints of market price. And through this association, it is also deeply associated with the cycle of birth and rebirth, or in the more typical and anodyne terms of anthropology, social reproduction. We often want our policymakers to be focused on social reproduction, and to do so without too much regard for the cost—two elemental aspects of the sacred. Instead of austerity politics, we propose following (ironically, since he was an economist), John Maynard Keynes’ forgotten wisdom that “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”^[iv]

In this regard, what if, instead of the economists’ price mechanism, anthropologists have identified a “priceless mechanism”? How and when do societies identify something as elemental to their social reproduction? Once they do so, how do they typically remove it from the market? In some ways, this is but another way of describing “public goods” — commodities that a given society has decided to decommodify. For example, public education is a relatively recent public good in some countries (in many countries, it is meagerly available, at best). Countries with robust public education systems, at some point in their histories, had deep and lasting battles with their already-existing private education system, and these battles often hinged on claims seemingly unrelated to sacrality. But as Eliade proposes, “even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.”^[v] In actuality, fights over such public goods as education turn on hidden notions of the sacred, in that they are battles oriented around social reproduction and abundant gifting.

If we learn how to search for these instances of hidden sacrality, we can apply standard anthropological studies and insights to building and nurturing them, or as the case may be, dismantling them. Annette Weiner identified the priceless mechanism—without naming it as such—when she published her treatise on “inalienable possessions.” She described how societies withdraw certain items from the market and refuse to let them be priced. Societies select these items for this arduous process of decommodification precisely because they believe that “inalienable possessions are the representation of how social identities are reconstituted through time.”^[vi] Weiner’s priceless mechanism sweeps these goods off the market, hoping to instead dedicate their fecund nature to the crucial task of social reproduction.

Crucially, sacred inalienable possessions are not necessarily “good” in any moral sense. For example, Japan has a “strategic rice reserve,” whereas the USA has a “strategic oil reserve.” In both cases, these governments have determined that these items are so elemental to the social reproduction of their societies, that they have heaped them up into immense storage containers, like temple hoards of old. We might want a policy that promotes a priceless rice hoard, while we might want to identify and dismantle a priceless oil hoard. Either way, anthropologists can help identify these sacred objects and discover the rules for building and managing them in a given society.

None of this is to say that the sacred is the only inroad to policy intervention for anthropologists. It was simply chosen as “low-hanging fruit,” given its obvious history in the discipline, and its isomorphic harmonies with its methodology. The overarching point is that, if anthropologists believe in their own studies and methodologies, they should be able to more frequently lean on them to advocate– as mandated by the Tredje Uppgift–  for a better, less scarce, world. If, instead, they refuse to engage, they are merely ceding ground to those who have led us to the state that we’re in today— those who have been unnecessarily hobbled by an epistemology of scarcity.

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^[i] Sahlins, Marshall. 1998. “The original affluent society.” In Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. Edited by John Gowdy. Island Press.

^[ii] Day, Sophie, Akis Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart. 1998. Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment. Westview Press.

^[iii] See Rutherford’s wonderful essay “Kinky Empiricism” (Cultural Anthropology. 27(3): 465–479) for more on this acknowledgement of how anthropological method is at home with, and humbled by, its ability to attain only “partial truths.”

^[iv] Keynes, John Maynard. 1980. “How Much Does Finance Matter?” In The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVII. Edited by D. Moggridge. Macmillan Press. Page 270.

^[v] Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane. Harper & Row Books. Page 23.

^[vi] Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. University of California Press. Page 11.

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