In Deepest Anthropologia II: The Steel Axe Cuts Both Ways

In comments and elsewhere people are disputing the claim that a steel axe is better than a stone one:

Comment: Chris Lovell: But this assumes that the people of PNG evaluate technology and goods in the same way as the European colonists did and as we do now. For all that steel axes seem to us clearly superior than stone ones, they've been viewed with ambivalence in the South Pacific--a classic article by Lauriston Sharp, "Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians," details what happened when missionaries introduced steel axes to a northern Australian tribe--the axes were not adopted smoothly, and many members of the tribe viewed them with suspicion...

And:

Savage Minds: Henry Swift asks: "Were the cargo cultists not interested at all in 'cargo' for its usefulness to them? (i.e. a steel axe would be useful to almost anyone.)" Fred and Deborah say: "Thanks for your responses.... To Henry, yes, perhaps [steel axes were 'useful', but steel axes were, of course, more useful to some than others--mostly to men in the PNG case. This is to say, there is always a political economy at work which must be understood when interpreting what is useful for whom and why--and often a gendered political economy. Usefulness, we think, is never absolute nor asocial. Lauriston Sharp's classic article, "Steel Tools for Stone Age Australians," is very good on the problematics of the introduction of steel tools among the Yir Yoront. They were welcomed by some and detested by others...

Let us be very, very clear about what Chris Lovell and Fred and Deborah are really saying when they claim that steel axes are not "useful." Let's let Lauriston Sharp speak:

Lauriston Sharp: In... aspects of conduct or social relations, the steel axe was... at the root of psychological stress among the Yir Yoront. This was the result of new factors which the missionary considered beneficial: the simple numerical increase in axes per capita as result of mission distribution, and distribution directly to younger men, women, and even children. By winning the favor of the mission staff, a woman might be given a steel axe which was clearly intended to be hers, thus creating a situation quite different from the previous custom which necessitated her borrowing an axe from a male relative. As a result a woman would refer to the axe as "mine," a possessive form she was never able to use of the stone axe. In the same fashion, young men or even boys also obtained steel axes directly from the missions, with the result that older men no longer had a complete monopoly of all the axes in the bush community. All this lead to a revolutionary confusion of sex, age, and kinship roles with a major gain in independence and loss of subordination on the part of those who now owned steel axes when they have previously been unable to possess stone axes...

Each individual steel axe was very useful to its possessor--on that all agree. But to the set of high-status older men as a group, the introduction of steel axes was not useful to them because they "no longer had a complete monopoly of all the axes." The result was a "revolutionary confusion of sex, age, and kinship roles." Why, even a woman could have an axe of her own! How shocking! How terrible!

Most of us would think that the fact that the coming of steel axes brings "a major gain in independence and loss of subordination" for the poorer members of the community would be a plus that makes steel axes more useful community, not a minus.

But, apparently, not Fred and Deborah, and not Chris Lovell. They appear to say that because steel axes destablized patriarchy, they were not "useful" to the Yir Yoront.

Consider:

1. Fred and Deborah write: "...the problematics of the introduction of steel tools... welcomed by some and detested by others."
2. Chris Lovell writes: "the axes were not adopted smoothly, and many members of the tribe viewed them with suspicion."
3. I would have written: "High-status established males were pissed: not only did women and youngsters no longer have to bow and scrape to get permission to borrow axes, but the women and youngsters had better axes that chopped faster."

Which of these three ways of putting it conveys more and more accurate information about the introduction of steel axes among the Yir Yoront?

Comments

[Brad DeLong]

Test...

[Firebug]

This is why most Americans have very little regard for the so-called "social sciences".

That includes economics, BTW. You can't hide it behind all those charts and graphs.

[Anderson]

It begins to appear to me that the basis of the dispute between BDL and the "Savage Minds" folk is, that BDL is not a values relativist. Greater independence for women is good, period. And so on. Whereas the anthropologists in question appear to believe that the existing values of the Yir Yoront are good simply because they are the existing, indigenous values.

Does this seem accurate to y'all?

[LeisureGuy]

I've read that the introduction of horses (by the Spanish) to the Plains Indians similarly led to a breakdown of old social structures. Whether that was ultimately good or bad will not be known, since the Indians were mostly wiped out before the new social structure could be fully worked out and established.

[ajay]

This is odd:

"Savage Minds:...To Henry, yes, perhaps [steel axes were 'useful', but steel axes were, of course, more useful to some than others--mostly to men in the PNG case."

But in fact the axes were more useful to women and youngsters than they were to men - in the sense that they were the ones who saw the biggest increase in living standards, while the headmen saw their authority undermined. Weren't they?
(NB: I think BDL goes a little far- by saying that 'women and youngsters had better axes that chopped faster'; there's nothing to suggest that the headmen didn't get steel axes as well. The point was that they weren't the only ones with axes (of any type) any more.)

[AD]

Anderson, yes, I agree with your assessment. And, like BDL, I am not a relativist.

[Jim Shirk]

What does "Collapse" say about PNG -- it is possibly the longest standing society/culture on earth. Diamond says 40,000 years, which is amazing to me. One of the hallmarks of a long lasting society is extreme cultural conservatism, and this seems just another manifestation of that conservatism.

[Saam Barrager]

Flint competed successfully with metal tools in the Levant for reasons totally different from all those mentioned here.

Metal was expensive; it had to be shipped in from Anatolia or beyond (if I'm not mistaken). Flint was a product of female labor. Early metal tools had a tendancy to dull and were difficult to sharpen. Flint, by contrast, could be chipped off in the field to be made sharper.

It wasn't until metal tools became significantly cheaper AND better than flint home production that they began to suplant flint at most home sites.

The result being that the provision of stone tools by women shifted to the provision of other tradeable goods that would be used to adquire metal tools.

(Source: fascinating conversation with professor at Tel Aviv University.)

[phil jones]

In the previous post, Brad pretty much says that having more cargo is beneficial to your self-esteem. But surely, self-esteem is most helped by feeling you aquired your cargo "legitimately" (by your own virtue). Maybe this can be cached out in terms of "by some reliable process you feel you have control over"

If the state of the art is stone axes and you know how to make a pretty good stone axe, and are recognised in your culture as being able to do so, then stone axes have a certain value to you in many dimensions. Sure it cuts. And it represents status. But it also represents a balanced, stable social system.

A steel-axe, on the other hand, has great utility on one dimension : that of cutting, but disutility on others : you no-longer feel secure that you can make a new steel axe if this one gets lost, you may feel unwelcome obligation to the people you gave it to you, if you have to fight, you can't tell if your oponents have a better axe than yours. And maybe the proliferation of axes makes younger, more volatile members of the tribe more likely to fight.

This is an increase in real uncertainty, and uncertainty always has an "cost" in economic terms.

When Brad writes : "High-status established males were pissed: not only did women and youngsters no longer have to bow and scrape to get permission to borrow axes, but the women and youngsters had better axes that chopped faster"

the word "pissed" is hiding what could be legitimate concern. The cost / benefit of the steel axes to *everyone* needs to take into account all repercussions on the stability of the tribal structure. It doesn't make sense to try to assign a utility to the steel axe independent of these.

[Chris Lovell]

I do not claim that steel axes weren't useful. I do argue that ideas of an object's usefulness depends in part on social factors--and that in some cases social factors outweigh the use-value of an object in evaluations of its usefulness. In other words, technological superiority is only one of the reasons that an object is perceived as useful, and it's not necessarily an important one in all cases. In the case of the Yir Yorant, I'd argue that social factors outweighed technological ones in the natives' valuation of steel axes.

Brad writes: "I would have written: 'High-status established males were pissed: not only did women and youngsters no longer have to bow and scrape to get permission to borrow axes, but the women and youngsters had better axes that chopped faster.'"

I like the part about high-status males being pissed, but I'm not so sure about the "chopped faster" part. Sharp (http://connecting.vccs.edu/feature-2.htm) doesn't stress the technological superiority of the axes--the important thing is that more people could own axes:

"As a result a woman would refer to the axe as 'mine,' a possessive form she was never able to use of the stone axe. In the same fashion, young men or even boys also obtained steel axes directly from the missions, with the result that older men no longer had a complete monopoly of all the axes in the bush community."

Obviously the new owners of steel axes found them useful--but wasn't this mostly due to the fact that they now had their own axe, and they didn't have to be dependent on the owners of stone axes? That's what Sharp is saying, anyway. (Owners of stone axes, who lost status, probably thought that the steel axes were *less* useful...)

Clearly the fact that steel axes are mass-manufactured products created by a technologically advanced process made widespread ownership possible, but I doubt that the Yir Yorant really cared or even thought about that fact. If the missionaries had shown up with boatloads of stone axes and distributed them to women, youngsters, etc., these would have been perceived as useful--because ownership of a stone axe would have freed the new owners from a dependent state just as well as ownership of a steel one.

On the question of whether the introduction of steel axes was ultimately beneficial to the Yir Yorant, people might want to look through Sharp's article--he blames a near-total social collapse on the disruption caused by the introduction of steel axes. I doubt things are that simple, and I really don't want to romanticize the pre-contact society, which was probably not much fun to live in. But I do want to point out that the adoption of new tools is not always the result of a hard-nosed evaluation of use-value.

[still working it out]

Brad,

You are assuming the increase in individual freedom automatically outweighs the costs of destroying the social order. Freedom for an individual has an inherent value, but that is not necessarily higher than living in a society with some level of functioning social order.

The steel axes destroyed the means by which the social order was maintained. Without social order I am assuming that the Yir Yoront people followed the pretty horrendous fate of most aboriginal people in Australia in the last 200 years. If that is the case then it hard to argue that the material usefulness and freedom gained by members of the Yir Yoront people were worth the costs of not having a functioning social order.

[still working it out]

To put it differently, when you say...

"They appear to say that because steel axes destablized patriarchy, they were not "useful" to the Yir Yoront."

I would say

They appear to say that because steel axes destablized patriarchy, they were more costly than "useful" to the Yir Yoront.

You are not recognising the very high costs to the society as a whole, or even to the members of that society who benefitted from the axes, of the loss of social order. Think of it as massive reduction in social capital for a small increase in material wealth and individual freedom.

Even a society that is not just or fair provides immense value to its members. Social order is an real need.

[anne]

Anderson:

"It begins to appear to me that the basis of the dispute between BDL and the "Savage Minds" folk is, that BDL is not a values relativist. Greater independence for women is good, period. And so on. Whereas the anthropologists in question appear to believe that the existing values of the Yir Yoront are good simply because they are the existing, indigenous values."

Nicely summarized. I too am with Brad and Jared.

[J Thomas]

Oh, this brings back memories. The first semester of my freshman year in college we had a short description of this. It was something like 6 pages that described the local culture, and the introduction of the steel axes. I read that part 10 minutes before class. Then there was a section about the consequences, which I didn't notice was part of the assignment. We got to class and then I found out I hadn't read the whole thing, and the instructor heard about it and told me to predict the consequences.

I got most of it, but I missed one part. The inland people needed some sort of shell or rayfish spine or something for their ceremonies. And the people on the shore needed stone axes, and they couldn't mine their own flint. So they had a ritual trade relationship. When the missionaries gave awy steel axes to everybody I correctly predicted that it disrupted the exchange. But I didn't predict that the inland tribes, having no other way to get the spines, prostituted their women for them.

"Most of us would think that the fact that the coming of steel axes brings "a major gain in independence and loss of subordination" for the poorer members of the community would be a plus that makes steel axes more useful community, not a minus."

Each individual RPG was very useful to its possessor--on that all agree. But to the set of high-status older men as a group, the introduction of RPGs was not useful to them because they "no longer had a complete monopoly of all the violence." The result was a "revolutionary confusion of sex, age, and kinship roles." Why, even a woman could have an RPG of her own! How shocking! How terrible!

Most of us would think that the fact that the coming of RPGs brings "a major gain in independence and loss of subordination" for the poorer members of the community would be a plus that makes RPGs more useful community, not a minus.

That is, unless we have a vested interest in police domination of the poorer members of the community.

I think you can reasonably have cultural values. It doesn't make sense that everything is as good as everything else. But you need a sense of the culture to decide whether a particular change is good. We might very well be better in the long run with more freedom and less monopoly on violence. But in the short run we don't want the poorest of the criminals to be able to blow up police cars or banks whenever they want. If it takes a bunch of high-status old men dominating things to prevent that, we'll put up with it.

There's something to be said for carefully noticing the fundamental flaws in our society and correcting them. If we have a bunch of inadequate jury-rigged scaffolding in place to keep us from a disaster, it's a good thing to fix it, and a bad thing to just blow it up and watch the rest fall.

So it seems to me oversimplified to decide that the steel axes were simply a good thing because they fit our ideology. It depends on circumstance too.

[Roger Albin]

Chris, the Sharp article is not evidence against "hard-nosed" evaluation of use value. For those adopting steel axes, it made life easier and reduced dependence on others. This sounds like a pretty good utilitarian calculation of use-value. For those resisting steel axes, the immediate benefits of easier to use technology are outweighed by the loss of a socially privileged position. Unless the steel axe provided a benefit significantly outweighing the loss of social privileges and their consequent economic rewards, the decision to resist steel axes is quite economically rational. Again, this is a pretty good utilitarian calculation. Is this qualitatively different from late 19th century British manufacturers seeking tariff protection from American and German goods produced via technologically superior methods? Probably not. The point made by Sharp and several posts that the introduction of steel axes destabilized this PNG society only underscores the fact that given the opportunity, people in this culture acted as utility maximizing individuals, looking at their own short term benefits, and not very different from from you and I in our Western, technologically oriented, materialistic culture.

[Chris Lovell]

Roger, you're right, the Yir Yorant were acting like utility maximizing individuals, much we do. But I don't think they evaluated the utility of the steel axes as we would have, because their social circumstances were different. We would compare a steel axe to a stone one and instantly think that the steel axe is superior because it's better at cutting things--this is what I meant by a "hard-nosed" evaluation of use value, and I think I used the term "use-value" incorrectly.

My point, though, is that individual Yir Yorant wanted steel axes primarily because individuals wanted to own an axe--the fact that they were steel, not stone, was secondary. Sharp stresses the possibility of ownership--for the first time, a woman could call an axe "mine." As I said above, if the missionaries had provided stone axes, the Yir Yorant would have happily accepted them, because stone axes still would have freed their new owners from dependence on the headmen. I'm sure that the new owners of steel axes quickly observed that they cut better than stone ones, leading to more efficient work and other benefits, but this was a secondary motivation to the possibility of owning an axe.

And this was my initial objection to Diamond--he seems to think material goods such as steel axes, soft drinks, etc. were instantly recognized as desirable by the natives because of their technological superiority--but the recognition that western goods were desirable was not always instant, and the adoption of new goods was conditioned by social/cultural factors.

I'm not sure how that makes me a supporter of neolithic patriarchy, though...

[J Thomas]

I have only one day experience with stone axes. But there are basicly two kinds. Flint axes are sharp, very sharp. They are good for things like cutting meat or hide or for that matter leather. They are not good at cutting down trees.

Quartzite axes are much better than flint axes for cutting wood but not nearly as good as steel axes.

It is very hard to sharpen a steel axe as sharp as a flint axe, and it's much harder to keep it sharp. For the amount of edge you get steel axes can be lighter than flint axes, and they can be narrower.

It's easier to get a lot of steel that's all the same quality. With flint you get whatever you get, and work with it or try for a better piece. And you can forge steel into any shape at all. There are still a few uses where stone is so much better at cutting that people go to the trouble to get a specialty product instead of a commodity one, but not so many.

I agree with Chris, probably they accepted steel axes first because they were available when stone axes weren't, and later found they were better at some things and learned better how to sharpen them. Kind of like american women went from wearing silk stockings to nylon. They didn't start out with the belief they were superior, it was that silk was mostly not available at all. And now real silk is so expensive compared to nylon that you seldom find a woman wearing silk panty-hose.