Labor, Division of

Anthropologists refer to the division of labor as the different tasks that people do to provide for their physical needs and to reproduce their culture. We base these tasks on such criteria as age, gender, and skill. How this division is manifested varies across cultures and according to societal type.

In the foraging, tribal, and peasant societies, labor tends to divide along gender lines. Among foragers, such as the !Kung, men hunt large game animals, while women collect wild edible plants and care for[Page 1398]children. Within tribal societies such as the Yanomami, women keep garden plots and care for children, while men engage in hunting and trade. Among peasants in Latin America and Asia, men tend to farm and women manage the household. In these societies, there is little specialization in that a man or a woman does just one job, although they learn most of the tasks that their respective gender does.

Among people living within state societies, in contrast to foragers, tribal people, and peasants, there is a high degree of job specialization. From farmers to craftspersons, government administrators to cooks and teachers, men and women dedicate their labor to one specific task. In industrialized societies, a person can specialize even further by making only a component of a product rather than the entire product. Service industries are similarly divided into multiple tasks. In these societies, members cannot learn all the jobs that are performed, but there are fewer gender- and age-based divisions of labor.

This deceptively simple definition belies both the complex classificatory practices used by earlier ethnographers as they described how people provide for their needs and wants and the diverse analytical practices used by contemporary ethnographers studying why people do the tasks they do. Anthropologists have long recognized that human beings divide their labor into distinct tasks according to age, gender, kinship, skill, and knowledge. Classic ethnographies by Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Margaret Mead contain obligatory chapters explaining the division of labor within a structural-functionalist framework. In such ethnographies, the ways in which labor is divided illustrates how labor functions to reproduce the members and culture of that society.

In more contemporary ethnographies, anthropologists have moved away from the mere classification of the division of labor and functionalist explanations. Instead, anthropologists study the division of labor by analyzing why people do the jobs they do. They aim to show how people work within their respective societies and across diverse cultures and to learn why the division of labor in society changes.

In part, this line of research grows out of Adam Smith's 1776 book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A proponent of industrialism, Smith argued that, not only does the division of labor increase productivity, the specialization of tasks into subtasks makes the workers more productive and allows them to increase their skills. By focusing on a particular subtask rather than the whole task, workers are more efficient and contribute to a superior product.

Early anthropologists such as Herbert Spencer in Principles of Sociology combined Smith's analysis with evolutionary perspectives of societal change to argue that, as individuals compete for jobs and compete to improve the products they make, societies would progress from simple to complex. Civilization, as conceived of by Americans and Europeans in the late 1800s, is the ideal. Along the way, a new, more efficient division of labor would replace the division of labor in less complex societies.

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