Anthropology, political economy and world-system theory
J.S. Eades
The relationship between anthropology and political economy goes right back to the beginnings of anthropology in the nineteenth century, with the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, as is well known, the two traditions rather drifted apart early in the twentieth century. Generally, the ‘grand narratives’ of evolution were either rejected as speculation or seen as irrelevant to research. There were many reasons for this: the development of fieldwork by Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and their students; the belief that pre-monetary and pre-industrial economies had their own dynamics and logics which were different from those of the modern capitalist and socialist systems; and the ascendancy of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Talcott Parsons as the main sources of structural-functional and modernization theory.
After the Second World War, the two traditions began to draw together again and grand narratives began to come back into fashion. For one thing, there was an increasing overlap in the methods used by anthropologists and historians and in the materials they collected, both in areas where there were relatively few historical records, such as West Africa, and in areas where there was a rich historical tradition, such as Europe and Latin America. Some theoretical traditions such as substantivist economic anthropology also drew extensively on history, particularly the work of Polanyi as interpreted by George Dalton and others. As decolonization proceeded and the superpowers of the period, the United States and the Soviet Union, were increasingly involved in competition and proxy wars, many societies started to experience increasing social and political instability, and ‘modernization theory’ became increasingly unsatisfactory for the analysis of what was going on. The political radicalization in America and Europe which the same proxy wars produced resulted in a resurgence (bringing again into activity and prominence) of interest in Marx, and debates between proponents of various readings raged in a new generation of radical journals. One of the most important of these was world-system theory as developed by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), together with Andre Gunder Frank (1969), Giovanni Arrighi (1994) and Samir Amin (1974, 1997). By the 1980s a modified and generalized version of world-system theory was producing fruitful results at boundaries of anthropology, history and archaeology. World-system theory had become well-established in the historical, anthropological and sociological traditions. By the 1990s, world-system theorists were increasingly talking about ‘globalization’ as the dominant paradigm, as a new industrial revolution based on information technology began to take shape.
In this chapter, I sketch in the background and some of the main contributions to this increasingly interdisciplinary tradition, in five main sections. The first deals with some of the early contributions to the field; the second outlines the work of Wallerstein; the third and fourth consider extensions of the world-system concept by Frank, Gills, Chase-Dunn, Hall and others. In the fifth section I consider the impact of information technology, as discussed by Castells. Finally I spell out some of the implications of this corpus of work for the definition and practice of anthropology.
Antecedents[1]
After the end of the Second World War, reconstruction in Europe and Japan took off, and the result was a period of relative stability and rapid economic growth, bolstered by the Cold War system and the mutual nuclear deterrence of the Soviet Union and the United States. There were still conflicts, most notably in Korea and Indochina, but generally this was a period of optimism, marked by belief in the possibility of orderly change and in the Western industrialized countries as a model to which the developing nations would gradually approximate. This was enshrined in the modernization theories of the period, such that of Rostow (1960), with its five stages. This body of literature in turn generated its own body of criticisms (Shannon 1989: 2–11): that there was insufficient interest in conflict, that the conditions which had given rise to industrialization in Europe and America did not exist in most Third-World societies, and that individualism and materialism were not seen as particularly desirable in many non-Western cultures. In particular, critics of modernization theory took issue with the assumption that the reason for the lack of development in many areas was their ‘traditionalism’ rather than their historical relations with, and exploitation by, the wealthier countries.
As these criticisms were taken on board, theories that took into account the world-system, or something like it, began to take shape. It was argued that social change could only be explained by theories that were historically grounded and could take into account different contexts of industrialization, relations between societies (especially between rich and poor) and processes of conflict and exploitation. The emerging theories drew on Marx’s accounts of the capitalist system and Lenin’s (1939) accounts of imperialism, trade and colonial exploitation. Exploitation therefore also became a key issue (Shannon 1989: 13). A number of ideas were also adopted from Fernand Braudel (1981–84): the idea of an international system consisting of a dominant ‘centre’ and a weak periphery, and a cyclical view of history with the rise and fall of states. These kinds of ideas were most notably developed by Frank (1966, 1969) and Wallerstein (1974), together with a number of like-minded anthropologists and historians such as Eric Wolf (1971, 1982), Peter Worsley (1984, 1987) and Paul Kennedy (1989).
The use of centre–periphery and metropolis–satellite relations in the analysis of regional economies was popularized by Frank’s work on Latin America (Frank 1969). His explanation of relations of dependency centered on the exploitative relationship between the rich and the poor countries, with the poor countries acting as sources of raw materials for the rich, and also as markets for the manufactured goods produced at the centre. Investment in infrastructure and production in the poorer countries was geared to the needs of the richer countries, making balanced economic growth and improved conditions in the periphery impossible, as most of the profits of trade and production went to international capital rather than local people. The result was the ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Frank 1966): underdeveloped economies were not just those which had not developed, but those in which the relations of production had been distorted by involvement in international trade. The logical conclusion was that, if involvement in international trade by the weaker countries of the periphery results in exploitation and underdevelopment, the best thing to do is to withdraw from international trade and attempt to develop self-sufficiency. Frank himself noted that the most rapid growth took place in Latin America in periods when relations with the United States were disrupted (Frank 1969: 325–6). The dependency approach was taken up and extended to the study of other regions, most notably in the work of Walter Rodney (1967) and Amin (1973) on Africa. However, it was soon noted that some economic development was taking place in colonies or former colonies in other parts of the world, and so theoretical revision was required (Worsley 1987: 77–8; compare Warren 1980).
Wallerstein and the world-system
Hot on the heels of dependency theory, world-system theory began to enter the theoretical vocabulary, popularized by Wallerstein in his three-volume work. The modern world-system (1974, 1980, 1989) and in numerous essays (for example, Wallerstein 1975, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2001). Once again there was a period of intense theoretical debate, but by the late 1980s many of the main features of world-system theory had been generally agreed (for a synthesis, see Shannon 1989: chaps 2, 4).
1. The world-system arose as the different regions of the world became linked through exchange and trade into a single economic system with a distinctive division of labour between core and peripheral areas.
2. The system is based on capitalist exploitation: the appropriation of surplus value through the exploitation of the labour of the poor by the rich.
3. Individual parts of the system cannot be analyzed in isolation from the others, but only in relation to the whole.
4. The world-system is an inter-state system: the world is divided into nation-states which vary widely in size and wealth, and which compete with one another for power and wealth within the capitalist system.
5. Zones within the world-system can be divided into ‘core’, ‘semi-peripheral’ and ‘peripheral’ regions. The core consists of the most technologically advanced and powerful states. These rise and fall over time, so that the core moves over time. Since the start of international maritime trade in Europe, the core has been centered on Spain and Portugal, followed by Holland and England, and more recently by the United States. The states in the periphery are poorer, less advanced technologically, and their economies are often based on the export of raw materials. In between the core and the periphery lies the semi-periphery. This consists of states which are poor relative to the core but which are capable of making the transition to core status if the conditions are right. This may come about through the use of their low-wage advantage to take over some forms of production from the core countries, thus generating economic growth. The usual pattern in world-system theory is not for the most advanced states to continue to develop, but rather for them to be overtaken by new arrivals that find it easier to adopt the latest technology.
6. The concept of social class takes on a new meaning in world-system theory as classes are seen as transcending national borders, to become world-wide strata. They include not only capitalists and proletarians, but also petty commodity producers and a middle class of skilled and professional workers. In some cases different forms of production may exist in the same household. For instance, wage earners whose wages do not cover their living costs may have to supplement their incomes through various forms of petty commodity production. These workers have been described as ‘semi-proletarian’ and ‘super-exploited’: wages can be kept low because part of the cost of reproducing the household is met through non-wage labour economic activities (see Harris chap. 26 infra). Much of the debate about the ‘informal sector’ of the economy in the 1970s and 1980s revolved around the status and role of these nonwage forms of production within the capitalist system.
7. The global class system is also cross-cut by status groups whose unity is based on culture, including nations. Nationalism is seen as a major factor preventing members of the same social classes from uniting across international boundaries.
8. Political relations with the periphery can involve various forms of domination, ranging from seizure and colonial occupation to the establishment of networks of client states by a major power, as during the Cold War. Semi-peripheral states may therefore be co-opted as regional allies of the major powers.
9. Even though the interests of the state and the national capitalist class may not be identical, they are often symbiotic. The capitalist class provides the resources on which the state depends, while the state performs a number of important roles for the capitalist class: control of the workers, foreign relations initiatives in support of local businesses and opening up new areas for exploitation as part of the periphery.
10. In the core areas, states have acquired legitimacy by allowing workers political rights and bargaining powers, concessions made possible by the inflow of resources from the periphery. On the other hand, continued exploitation of the periphery tends to result in protest and instability, and in the growth of repressive and authoritarian states.
Eurocentrism or the centrality of Asia?
In this early phase, the world-system being discussed was explicitly the European world-system. Typical accounts from this period start with a description of the status quo in the fifteenth century on the eve of European expansion, followed by the development of Western maritime trade and colonialism. The orthodox view, following Wallerstein, is that the modern world-system was born in the ‘long’ sixteenth century that is to say between about 1450 and 1620, in response to a crisis in the feudal system. This crisis was partly solved by geographical expansion in search of new sources of raw materials; long-distance trade, which created a new division of labour based on the distinction among core, periphery and semi-periphery; and by the development of the modern nation-states in Europe as the basis of economic and political competition. Even though the populations of some European states such as Portugal and Holland were very small during the early period, they were able to gain control of trade routes and territory through a combination of guns and ships, and to set up colonial maritime empires. In this tradition, the world-system is seen as a European creation, with other regions playing the passive roles of old empires in decline or victims of Western colonialism.
Recently, Frank has attempted to counter what he sees as the Eurocentrism in these accounts in his book, ReOrient (Frank 1998). In this, he argues that Europe occupied a fairly peripheral role in the world economy until much later than is generally supposed. This argument grew out of Frank’s earlier work with Gills (Frank and Gills 1993), in which they propose that the evolution of the world-system has been taking place over the last 5000 rather than the last 500 years. The global economy was dominated by Asia until around 1800, and might well be so again, with the rise of the East Asian economies in the late twentieth century and with the emergence of China as a potential economic superpower (compare Overholt 1993).
In Frank’s account, the destinies of Europe and Asia have been linked in other unexpected ways. Columbus sailed across the Atlantic trying to get to India, after Iberian trade with Asia through the Mediterranean was blocked by Genoa (A seaport in northwestern Italy; provincial capital of Liguria). The Europeans not only traded in goods but also in pathogens (any disease-producing agent especially a virus or bacterium or other microorganism), as in the Black Death, while 95 per cent of the population of the Americas was wiped out by diseases brought from Europe. But the New World contributed maize and potatoes to the world economy, allowing increased production in China and a rise in population there. The Americas also contributed massive new flows of silver to the world-system of trade, as one of the few commodities that the Chinese were willing to buy. The irony of European maritime ascendancy was that the Chinese had long had the best and largest ships, with the biggest fleets in the world, but exploration of the rest of the world was phased out in the mid-fifteenth century, just as Europe was starting to expand. Fear of the Mongols to the north became the main preoccupation of the Chinese, so that the capital was moved to Beijing and the Great Wall was reinforced. But the imbalance between Asia and Europe remained: at the end of the eighteenth century, Asia still had 66 per cent of the world’s population and was responsible for 80 per cent of world production.
But if the Asian economy was always so powerful, why did the industrial revolution take place in Europe and America and how did the West win the struggle for economic dominance? Kennedy (1989) puts forward a military theory: the cost of defending large empires becomes so prohibitive that they must eventually collapse. Kennedy also argues that the reason why Europe started to develop in the first place was because the states were so weak that they could not control technological innovation or capital accumulation (Kennedy 1989: chap. 1). Frank, on the other hand, suggests a complex model based on a combination of demographic, micro- and macroeconomic factors (Frank 1998: chap. 6), the main features of which can be summarized as follows. The long period of prosperity in Asia that began in 1400 gave way to decline in the eighteenth century, starting with Bengal but also affecting the Ottoman[2] and Chinese empires. The growth in population during the years of prosperity left a labour surplus when the decline set in, reducing the incentives for technical innovations in agriculture. Meanwhile, the start of the colonial period and European exploitation of the economies of the East made Europe more prosperous, while migration to the new colonies of settlement in the Americas and Australasia kept wages high in Europe. This made technological innovation more cost-effective than it was in Asia, and Western technology (including military technology) started to overtake that of other regions. Generally this is another illustration of the way in which late arrivals in economic development are able to absorb the latest technology and leap-frog the established leaders.
Extending world-system analysis
The work of Frank and Gills (1993) on the date of the origins of the world-system, mentioned above, has led to other interesting possibilities for world-systems analysis. If the world-system developed long before the capitalist period, then pre-capitalist and non-capitalist world-systems are also theoretically possible. Frank and Gills’s own analysis was historical, tracing the origins of the modern world-system back to ancient Mesopotamia, via the civilizations of Mediterranean Europe. But another possibility for the use of the world-system concept is to refine it as an ideal type for use in comparative analysis, and this has been carried out most systematically in the work of Chase-Dunn and Hall during the 1980s and 1990s. They define their core concept in the following way:
We define world-systems as inter-societal networks that are systemic … [that is] they exhibit patterned structural reproduction and development. We contend that the developmental logics of world-systems are not all the same, though they do share some general properties … We envision a sequence of changes in which thousands of very small-scale world-systems merged into larger systems, which eventually merged to become the global modern world-system … How and why did these many small systems mixed together and transform over many millennia into a single, global world-system? This brings out well three propositions that are central to their work. First, world-systems are inter-societal; that is, they link together societies. This derives from the old political-economy critique of modernization theory, that societies cannot be studied in isolation from one another. Second, they are systemic, sharing general properties of development. Third, over time many world-systems have merged together, finally creating the single integrated capitalist world-system that we see today.
Chase-Dunn and Hall offer other variations on the world-system theme. Unlike many authors, they do not take core–periphery relationships for granted, but as something to be investigated in each case. In their view, a world-system could theoretically consist of a network of partners of equal status (1997: 28). They also spell out the different kinds of networks through which societies are connected with one another, based on flows of information, prestige goods, power, basic foodstuffs and raw materials. The largest networks are usually those within which information flows, followed by those in which prestige goods are exchanged. Next in size are what they call ‘political/military networks’ (PMNs), forming political units, while ‘basic goods networks’ based on the exchange of foods and raw materials tend to be smaller still.
How does evolution take place in the world-system? In Chase-Dunn and Hall’s analysis (1997: 249), this is a result of three linked processes: ‘semi-peripheral development’, ‘iterations of population pressure and hierarchy formation’, and ‘transformations of modes of accumulation’. Like other world-system theorists, they argue that many of the most dynamic and interesting innovations and developments take place in the semi-periphery, enabling semi-peripheral societies to overtake societies in the core, creating a leap-frogging effect. Many of these developments are influenced by population dynamics, with population growth and increasing social complexity being followed by dramatic decline due to warfare or the arrival of pathogens from outside.
The key dynamic for the evolution of world-systems, however, lies not in modes of production as in orthodox Marxist theory, but in modes of accumulation (an increase by natural growth or addition), defined as ‘the deep structural logic of production, distribution, exchange and accumulation’ (1997: 29). Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: 30) distinguish four modes of accumulation: kinship modes, ‘based on consensual definitions of value, obligations, affective ties, kinship networks, and rules of conduct’; tributary modes, based on political (including legal and military) coercion; capitalist modes, based on the production of commodities; and socialist modes (which they describe as ‘hypothetical’), that is, democratic systems of distribution based on collective rationality. Different modes can co-exist within the same system, and there are also transitional and mixed systems. The final concept they use to tie all this together is that of incorporation, the process through which separate systems become linked (1997: 59). The nature of this process changes with the mode of accumulation (1997: 249).
This leads to a typology of world-systems based on the mode of accumulation, which incorporates many of the classic categories of earlier anthropology (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 42–4):
I. Kin-based mode dominant
A. Stateless, classless
1. Sedentary foragers, horticulturists, pastoralists
2. Big-man systems
B. Chiefdoms (classes but not states)
II. Tributary modes dominant (states, cities)
A. Primary state-based world-systems (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, Ganges Valley, China, pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru)
B. Primary empires in which a number of previously autonomous states have been unified by conquest (Agade, Old Kingdom Egypt, Magahda, Chou, Teotihuacan, Huari)
C. Multi-centered world-systems composed of empires, states and peripheral regions (Near East, India, China, Mesoamerica, Peru)
D. Commercializing state-based world-systems in which important aspects of commodification have developed but the system is still dominated by the logic of the tributary modes (Afroeurasian world-system, including Roman, Indian, and Chinese core regions)
III. Capitalist mode dominant
A. The Europe-centered sub-system since the seventeenth century
B. The global modern world-system
Chase-Dunn and Hall emphasize that they are not putting forward a unilinear theory of evolution: transformations have been similar across regions only in a broad sense, and development has always been uneven. What they attempt to do is specify the kinds of organization and production that are necessary to allow this uneven development to take place. They are therefore interested not only in technology, ecology and demography, but also ‘those social institutions that facilitate consensus, legitimate power, and structure competition and conflict within and between societies’ (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 5). Typically it is not the most developed societies now that are most likely to develop fastest in the future: the ‘leading edge’ of social complexity is constantly moving as societies leap-frog one another to take over the lead, as happened in the case of Europe overtaking Asia.
Political economy, culture and the information age
The most recent ‘grand narrative’ to provide a framework for explaining the political economy of the modern world is that of Castells in his three-volume work, The information age (1996, 1997, 1999). This work traces the impact of information technology on the world economy and social structure. It brings together a number of Castells’s earlier interests, including the role of the state in consumption (compare Castells 1977), social movements (Castells 1983) and the relationship between information technology and urban development (Castells 1989; Castells and Hall 1994). It also shows how the new technology is leading to a process of polarization between the rich and the poor, as well as to the erosion of the nation-state and the internationalization of organized crime. A large part of the third volume deals with regional polarization between a ‘fourth world’, consisting of much of Africa and the former Soviet Union, and the major growth poles of Europe, North America and East Asia (Castells 1999: chaps 2, 4).
One of Castells’s main starting points is ‘the space of flows’ (Castells 1989: chap. 3, compare 1996: chap. 6). In his view, ‘space’ has often been used historically to define places in which power, capital, people and so forth have been concentrated, such as major cities. However, the new information technology means that people working together in some kinds of work no longer have to be in the same place.
Second, post-industrial societies are moving from industrialism to informationalism, the ‘informational mode’, which now operates together with the capitalist mode of production. Their economies are not based on services so much as information processing as the basis of production, distribution, consumption and management. Collective consumption organized by the state, and private consumption organized through the market, also involve the increasing use of information and information technology.
The new technology has to be produced somewhere, and in the United States the electronics and software industries are concentrated in a small number of regions located around San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York, Boston and Philadelphia (Castells 1989). Their location generally depends on the location of the top universities. Historically, Stanford was particularly important as the institution which gave rise to the development of Silicon Valley (Castells 1996: 53–60).
Once these areas develop as high-tech centers, a number of other social processes happen. Land and house prices rise, the middle classes involved in these industries move in, and the working class moves out. They form what have been called ‘edge cities’ (Garreau 1991) on the edges of the traditional large urban centers, and people with money prefer to move there because they are more convenient and much safer than the larger American cities, with their problems of crime, violence and poor public education. High-class recreation and retail facilities to cater to these groups also move in, but these employ a completely different group of people: low-skilled, low-paid workers in service industries, with heavy concentrations of women and ethnic-minority workers.
The result is the ‘dual city’ (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991), with its increasing division between the rich and the poor, as the middle class of skilled workers and clerical workers increasingly disappears. There has also been a shift in state funding from what Castells calls the ‘urban welfare state’ to the ‘suburban warfare state’ (1989: chap. 5). Much of the traditional state funding of education, health and welfare in large cities like New York has been cut back, while big defence contracts have led to an economic boom in the edge-city suburbs where the high-tech industries are located. Finally, of course, many of the traditional industrial jobs are moving overseas as the large companies look for cheaper labour markets outside the United States, Europe and Japan, in other words to the semi-periphery.
The effects of information technology have been to speed up the processes of globalization in the world economy. After the Second World War, the costs of research and development very quickly led to the development of multinational corporations, and with the decreasing cost of transmitting information these have been able to organize their research and production on a global rather than a national or even a regional basis. Three interdependent core areas of the world economy have emerged: North America, Europe and East Asia. The rise of information technology is also linked to the development of a global currency market, based in the three world cities of London, New York and Tokyo, and the rise of financial services industries, which are based there as well (compare Sassen 1991).
Deregulation of the currency markets means that capital can be transferred anywhere in the world electronically, and there is a vast subsidiary industry of people making money through betting on future currency movements. The result has been to amplify instability in world markets, and of course to marginalize even further the areas and people outside the reach of this new technology. And it is the corporations that have flexibility and are able to adapt quickly that have been particularly successful in this kind of environment.
The East Asian corporations were particularly well placed to take advantage of this new technology (Castells 1999: chap. 4) because of the nature of the links between them. The Japanese industries were organized around the keiretsu, networks of companies both big and small, with one or other of the large banks at the centre. Along with the growth of the giant corporations has gone the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy, and Japan combines the two ideas, with huge companies sitting at the top of a hierarchy of small family businesses. The Chinese businesses in East Asia are linked together in a similar way through family ties, which give flexibility in terms of flows of capital, loans, information and so on. But the network enterprise is also marked by flexibility of employment, the collapse of traditional work patterns in many cases and the massive influx of women into the labour market, often at lower rates of pay than their male counterparts. In the UK this took place during the Thatcher period of the 1980s, and in Japan it still seems to be taking place in the present.
In the second volume of The information age, The power of identity, Castells looks at some of the social impacts of these changes. The shift of power in the work place, the breakdown of traditional patterns of employment and the gender division of labour have produced a crisis in the family (Castells 1997: chap. 4). ‘Normal’ families with husband, wife and their children living together have now become the minority rather than the norm, thanks to the increasing divorce rate, and alternative lifestyles. Part of the response to these changes has been religious, with the rise of fundamentalist versions of Christianity and Islam stressing the importance of patriarchy (Castells 1997: 12–27). Resistance to the new global order has resulted in the flowering of a diversity of cults and social movements, from fringe cults such as AUM Shinrikyo in Japan (Castells 1997: 97–104) to various types of environmental movement, from the local to the global (Castells 1997: chap. 3).
Finally, of course, the state itself has been weakened by these processes of globalization (Castells 1997: chaps 5, 6). Increasingly states are unable to stop flows of capital or information, or to prevent the major corporations from moving industrial production to other regions of the world. Democratic processes in countries such as the United States have been profoundly influenced by television, the main concern of which is to sell advertising space. As a result, intellectual content is reduced, and a sex-and-scandal approach to politics reduces it to the level of soap opera. Castells argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was also partly due to the increasing gap in information technology, as the Soviets failed to develop their own IT industry (Castells 1999: chap. 1). The country became increasingly dependent on increasingly obsolete systems borrowed or pirated from the West, and even photocopying and typewriter facilities were tightly controlled for political reasons.
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, organized crime has flourished, organized partly by former party officials, especially in the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. One of the features of organized crime world-wide is the increasing integration of the various regional mafias which control it, and the amounts of money in circulation are staggering (Castells 1999: chap. 3). Many of the profits are based on the continuing criminalization of drug taking in the United States, which keeps the prices of drugs, and therefore the profits to organised crime, artificially high. Much of the attraction of criminal activity lies in the fact that there are few alternative sources of income for many people, especially in what Castells calls the ‘fourth world’ (Castells 1999: chap. 2), which are defined as regions and peoples excluded for one reason or another from the new information economy. It includes whole regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where the increasing struggle for survival has led to the collapse of economies and regimes and an upsurge in inter-ethnic violence, resulting in almost perpetual civil war in states such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zaire, Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi. But it also includes the excluded minorities in the core industrial countries, especially in the urban ghettos of the United States, where the imprisonment of a large proportion of young minority males for often fairly petty criminal offences is a major cause of family poverty.
In the last thirty years, studies of business and industry, ethnic minorities, housing problems, poverty, deviance, international migration and the sex industry have all multiplied, creating the need for new grand narratives to tie these all together. This is where Castells’s work, together with that of the other major theorists working in the political-economy tradition, is perhaps most important, for it provides not only a framework for understanding the core processes in modern society, but also offers a critique of the direction in which it is going. Like Chase-Dunn and Hall, his conclusions about the future are pretty bleak (Castells 1999: conclusion; compare Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: chap. 11), but at least understanding the underlying processes provides the hope of solutions for the problems of humanity in the present century, even though the current logic of the mode of accumulation hardly suggests optimism.
Conclusions
The study of political economy and the world-system has largely taken place on the fringes of anthropology, and has largely been interdisciplinary. Although it has involved historically-minded anthropologists such as Wolf and Worsley, the other main protagonists have been from sociology, history and economics, such as Frank, Wallerstein and Castells. In all this work, however, there is a sense that traditional disciplinary boundaries are irrelevant, and all of these authors have drawn freely on similarly vast bodies of research from across history and the social sciences. For anthropology as a discipline, the main significance of this work can perhaps be summarized under the following points.
First, with the move of anthropological research into complex urban societies and the capitalist economy, there has been an increasing need to bring back grand narratives to provide a macro-level framework for understanding the grassroots reality that most anthropologists actually study. The work within the political-economy tradition described above has provided the best tools to date for constructing this kind of framework, and has been indispensable in helping to understand the modern world and its evolution.
Second, in the study of small-scale societies, world-system theory can play an important role by focusing on the relationships between societies, allowing a critique of much of the earlier work in anthropology, in which societies and cultures tended to be treated as discrete entities isolated from each other. As shown above, outside links can often produce dramatic results within societies, particularly if they involve the spread of pathogens, which have in some instances led to catastrophic population decline.
Third, world-system theory is particularly fruitful in American anthropology, given the strong links between anthropology and archaeology. As Chase-Dunn and Hall have shown (1997: chap. 7), these models can be usefully applied even in the study of small-scale social groups for which the only evidence is historical and archaeological. Fourth, world-system theory is an important tool in the development of a scientific anthropology, as it suggests models which can be tested statistically using a variety of data, from material remains to field surveys and questionnaires.
Finally, because it deals with processes and trends rather than states, world-system theory provides interesting possibilities for developing scenarios for the future of social groups at all levels, from individual households through to the world population as a whole. Some of these scenarios may be exceptionally bleak, but one thing that world-system theory does teach us is that human history has been exceptionally messy at certain times in the past, and presumably will be so again in the future. Thus it provides a useful antidote to some of the more optimistic versions of social theory in allowing us to forecast what is likely to happen if current trends continue, and in reminding us that at the world-system level, exploitation, conflict and catastrophe are, statistically speaking, normal aspects of the human condition.
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