From Luxury to Necessity

Claudine’s recent post (“Giving the Worst Part”, Tuesday, March 31, 2009) reminds us that the perceived value of objects change over time and across cultures.  All foods, as we know, have an inherent and fundamental value as givers of energy, and we have seen (recall our early discussion of Human Behavioral Ecology) that different foods may have more or less value to hunter-gatherers based on caloric content, abundance, difficulty of processing, etc.  Foods may also take on symbolic and political value that seem esoteric to those of us removed from the value systems of past or unfamiliar groups (remember those bowhead whales?).

In his paper “Were Luxury Foods the First Domesticates?” (2003) Brian Hayden takes the notion that terms like “common” and “luxury” are temporally and culturally relative, and applies it to the question of why past hunter-gatherers first made the transition to domestication. Hayden observes the curious fact that so-called food staples of today’s industrial societies—white bread, chocolate, out-of-season fruits, fat-rich meats, wines and spirits—were once reserved for the elites of various groups and were forms of wealth used primarily in feasts.  Hayden then uses a number of ethnoarchaeological examples from the tribal cultures of Southeast Asia to illustrate the proposition that the first domesticated plants and animals were prestige foods whose value went beyond the nutritional to the political.

According to Hayden, traditional Southeast Asian luxury foods include meat with high fat content (from domesticated water buffaloes, cattle, pigs, and chickens) and rice. Hayden observes a common behavioral pattern among many of the world’s tribal cultures (including those of Southeast Asia), in which domestic animals are killed only in the context of feasting and sacrifice.  He argues that the costs and risks of raising animals specifically for this purpose must have been outweighed by some important advantage.  In a line of thinking familiar from our discussion of Hayden’s 1994 paper “Competition, Labour and Complex Hunter-Gatherers,” the author identifies this advantage as the creation of a reliable basis for feasts, which were “critical for the conversion of surplus production into social and political ties through the creation of debt relationships” (2003: 460).  Hayden uses a similar logic to explain why cultivating rice—which requires a high labor investment compared to other plant foods—eventually became ubiquitous throughout the region.

As Bruce D. Smith (2007) has discussed, efforts to explain why hunter-gatherers made the transition to agriculture have plagued anthropology and archaeology since V. Gordon Childe attempted to “explain the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ within a framework of human response to a changing world.”  While Hayden’s argument abandons the external environment in favor of a social force as the cause for this worldwide “revolution”, his model remains frustratingly reactive and universalizing.  Furthermore, it ignores the recent shift in anthropological thinking (proposed by Niche Construction Theory) toward recognizing the ways in which past and extant hunter-gatherers modify and manage their resources. Rethinking the relationship of hunter-gatherers to their landscape begs the question: Was there anything truly “revolutionary” about the Neolithic Revolution?

References: 

Hayden, Brian.  2003.  Were Luxury Foods the First Domesticates?  Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives from Southeast Asia.  World Archaeology 34(3): 458-469

Smith, Bruce D.  2007.  Niche Construction and the Behavioral Context of Plant and Animal Domestication.  Evolutionary Anthropology 16: 188-199.