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Conclusion |
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To conclude, human production systems
differ with respect to social relations. I have emphasised - drawing
upon recent developments in economic anthropology - a distinction
between three modes of production: household economies, simple commodity
production, and capitalist firms. While in some ways simple commodity
production resembles industrial, capitalist whaling, and may therefore
be regarded as quasi-capitalistic, it also has much in common with
household production. Simple commodity production, then, deserves
a taxonomic place of its own as a mode of production which is neither
fully capitalist nor simply domestic. Minke whaling in Iceland,
as I have tried to show, is best described as simple commodity production.
Here production is partly geared for the marked, but what motivates
the producers is not primarily profit but rather social responsibilities,
local committments, and kinship relations. |
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There are good reasons why one should
bother to construct and refine concepts of modes of production,
including categories of whaling. For one thing, some kind of conceptual
umbrella is needed to appreciate the different ways in which humans
appropriate aquatic animals. If anthropology deserves to be called
a comparative science, the units of comparison must be established
on some logical basis and not just on the grounds that they are
traditional. Also, classificatory schemes are often central for
resource management and environmental rhetoric, especially with
respect to sea mammals. A case in point is the notion of 'subsistence'
production employed by the International Whaling Commission, for
whom whaling is the privilege of 'indigenous' hunters who do not
produce for markets and are, therefore, only minimally involved
in the world economy. Such a notion, I have argued, is highly romantic
in that it presents indigenous hunters as lay ecologists, as being
closer to nature than the rest of humanity. While it may represent
charitable motives, it has much in common with the ethnocentric
discourse of the colonial past. Humans, whatever their mode of production
or subsistence, are simultaneously part of nature and society. Modern
policy on animal rights and the environment should be based on that
premise - and not on the idea that humanity, or some part of it,
is suspended above nature. |
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