Labor

Labor involves purposive effort, mental or physical, toward a goal. In studying labor, we should be particularly careful not to import the biases of our own economic culture. Labor is not always clearly segmented from other activities in daily life, although the wage labor system favors such segmentation; this confusion obscures unpaid labor within capitalism as well as work in noncapitalist settings. Likewise, we need to be careful not to extend male gender biases to the study of labor; child care is as much labor as is cutting hay. Finally, we need to include multiple dimensions of labor, such as ideas and social organization, as well as physical effort, and we need to pay corresponding attention to nonstereotypical instances of work and workers, for example, bureaucrats as much as miners.

Labor is a central characteristic of human life; indeed, a number of scholars have proposed it as the defining characteristic, one that has shaped human evolution and history. David Ricardo and other early economists proposed a labor theory of value, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made labor central to their theory of society as well as to their revolutionary politics. They viewed labor broadly, as active engagement with the natural and social world, and saw it as integral to human species. However, labor's products and value became separate from the humans who made them with the development of commodities, class society, and especially wage labor capitalism. The past results of labor, taken and used in the form of capital, then confront current labor as an alien and powerful force.

A number of anthropologists, such as Lewis Henry Morgan (who influenced Engels), similarly saw labor, or its close associate tool use and technology, as central to cultural evolution. Even as 19th-century evolutionary schemes faded, labor continued to be a central concern of anthropology. Many scholars saw tool use as central to the evolution of the brain. Julian Steward's combined approaches of cultural ecology and multilinear evolution focused on work, as Robert Murphy has noted. Steward's notion of the culture core was the social organization of labor in food production within a particular environment.

Important insights were achieved in grand theorizing about labor, but its importance was exaggerated. In hominid evolution, for example, bipedalism preceded well-formed tool manufacture, and social organization and language use must be accorded equal evolutionary importance to labor (although all are interrelated). Likewise, in the findings of cultural anthropology, expression and imagination balance purposive labor. The human condition combines work and release, discipline and antidiscipline, production, reproduction, and play, and no single view seems adequate.

Labor in small-scale societies is tightly integrated with the rest of daily life. Gathering, for example, takes place along with child care and socializing, and it produces an immediate product for consumption rather than a product to be stored and alienated from [Page 1397]the producers. The gender division of labor, along with age, largely organizes small-scale production, but as with so many human phenomena, flexibility and variability are the rule; most hunters are men, but there are female hunters, and gathering is done by males as well as by females (similar comments can be made about horticulturalists).

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