Economic Thought among American Aboriginals Prior to 1492

Introduction This essay is an investigation into the nature of economic thought among indigenous Americans prior to European contact a task easier to describe than to execute. The history of economic thought is a sub-discipline of intellectual history, broadly defined as the story of ideas and the people who create them. Ideas develop in context. A basic tenet of intellectual history is that an analysis of thought and the processes producing it require an understanding of the thinkers' cultural environment. Within this framework, the thinking of persons who create ideas are typically revealed through the written word, that is, transcribed speeches, personal journals, or published works. In the lexicon of cultural anthropology, this is an emic viewpoint or the participants' description and/or interpretation of their culture, institutions, and values (Pike 1954: 8-28). This usual path to discovery in the field of intellectual history does not work for pre-Colombian aboriginals as native American societies were primitive, not poor, even by modern standards, but preliterate (Posner 1980: 1). Indeed, in all North America prior to 1492, only the Olmecs, Mayas, and Zapotecs in Mesoamerica developed true writing (Driver 1969: 50-51). Of these civilizations, the Mayas are considered the most advanced but their writing did not go beyond ideographic glyphs, comparable to ancient Egyptian and Chinese, and has only recently been deciphered (Coe 1992). Indigenous societies of the 50 United States had an oral tradition used mostly for the intergenerational communication of philosophical truths and societal norms and less so for how-to knowledge or factual information. Prior to 1492 none of these groups had a written language. In the absence of a written legacy that reveals the Amerindians' self-described approaches to economics in theory or practice, an intellectual history of their economic thought must build on information derived from first-hand European accounts of indigenous peoples and a rich and growing body of data drawn from archeology and the anthropological interpretations thereof (Trigger 1968: 1-5). This is an etic focus or the observers' interpretations of a society's culture and institutions, a viewpoint that may be subject to ethnocentric biases and other limitations (Pike 1954). This article's first part is devoted to a detailed analysis of how in this essay a description of economic behavior and thought among American aboriginals is created in the absence of documents. This involves a discussion of economic anthropology and its dominant approaches, formalism and substantivism. Two less prominent methodologies are also considered: culturalism and cultural materialism, an approach that is especially important to this article. The second part of this study gives an overview of the material conditions and institutional arrangements in precontact America, what cultural materialism would describe, respectively, as the infrastructure and structure of Amerindian civilization (Murphy and Margolis 1995: 2). Building on the methodology and contents developed in the first two sections of the article, the third part provides an interpretation of the economic thought of American aboriginals, what some scholars refer to as the superstructure (values and norms) of these societies (Murphy and Margolis 1995). The article concludes with two case studies, Cahokia and the Iroquois. Intellectual History Without Documents Archaeological discoveries and their anthropological interpretations offer circumstantial evidence about the lifestyles of preliterate societies from which inferences about the practices, institutions, and thought patterns of said societies can be made. Actually, economic anthropology is the sub-field that considers the central issue of anthropology--human behavior within a network of social relationships and cultural influences--through the lens of economics. There are two major approaches in economic anthropology, formalism and substantivism. …