Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg, Nationalökonomische Vorstellungen bei Naturvölkern (1885)

This published lecture, preserved as an abridged stenographic record, proposes an ethnological study of economic ideas. Addressing Vienna’s anthropological society, Inama-Sternegg argues that anthropology can reunite natural science and the science of society through their common object: human beings in the totality of their relationships. Political economy belongs within this inquiry because material welfare is a collective aspiration whose meaning changes historically. Economic theory must therefore investigate different peoples’ conceptions of welfare rather than assume that its own categories express universal motives. The lecture develops this programme through connected studies of the division of labour, valuation, money, wealth, and economical conduct.

The methodological difficulty is that descriptions of economic activities do not necessarily disclose the ideas governing them. Travellers and colonial reports provide observations, but their explanations can import the observer’s assumptions. Tacitus and Caesar exemplify this danger: their accounts of Germanic and Gallic motives can reflect Roman philosophical or political purposes. Modern technical terms likewise risk attributing concepts to people who do not possess them. Inama-Sternegg consequently presents his findings as modest, fragmentary investigations. His historical comparisons make ancient Germans relevant alongside contemporary populations classified as Naturvölker, although the lecture retains a hierarchical vocabulary of “primitive” and “cultivated” peoples.

His first conceptual move separates the existence of divided labour from the pursuit of economic efficiency. Against the account he attributes to Adam Smith, linking exchange and specialization with developed reason and language, he argues that organized communities already coordinate differentiated activities. Yet this does not establish that their members seek greater productive returns:

Die Arbeit ist wohl getheilt, aber nicht, um damit einen grösseren wirthschaftlichen Effect zu erzielen, sondern aus politischen Rücksichten, sie ist getheilt im Interesse der Gemeinschaft, im Interesse der Ordnung, die da herrschen soll.

English translation: Labour is indeed divided, but not in order thereby to achieve a greater economic effect; rather, it is divided for political considerations, in the interest of the community, in the interest of the order that is to prevail there.

Household divisions that assign heavy work to women illustrate authority rather than calculated efficiency. Specialized crafts similarly appear under collective protection: North American pipe-makers obtain access to neutral clay deposits, while the reported pottery of the Andamanese belongs to the community rather than its makers. The argument does not deny specialization; it relocates its motivating purpose within social order, communal survival, and relations of power.

Division of labour can create opportunities for exchange, but need not do so when products remain communal. Where exchange emerges, the question becomes how goods acquire value. Admiration for ornaments alone cannot distinguish pleasure, distinction, rarity, and exchangeability. Inama-Sternegg challenges a traveller’s labour-based explanation of shell ornaments and wampum by observing that European glass beads displaced them although their manufacture remained laborious. Similarly, iron displaced highly valued copper. These substitutions suggest that valuation concerned what goods supplied in the absence of alternatives, not simply the labour embodied in a particular material. He then emphasizes valuation’s collective character:

Es ist eine öffentliche Meinung über den Werth eines gewissen Dinges, und solange nur dieser gewisse Urtheilskreis nicht überschritten wird, wird dasselbe Werthurtheil immer wieder auftreten.

English translation: It is a public opinion about the value of a particular thing, and so long as this particular circle of judgment is not exceeded, the same judgment of value will recur again and again.

Value is thus socially stabilized within a particular sphere, which expanding intercourse can enlarge. Reports of Tangut clothing priced equally despite differences in size suggest an equivalence organized around a person’s need for clothing, rather than a fixed quantity of fabric. Unfamiliar goods, conversely, can unsettle established comparisons. These examples make valuation historically intelligible without reducing it to one invariant principle.

The discussion of money extends this argument by distinguishing familiar value relations from actual payment. Goods with widely recognized equivalents can become common standards. Cattle are especially revealing: reckoning prices or legal penalties in livestock does not prove that livestock routinely changed hands. Drawing on ancient and early Germanic evidence, Inama-Sternegg advances a historical sequence:

Werthmass zu sein ist, wie mir scheint, historisch überhaupt die erste Function des Geldes, viel früher als die Function, Tauschmittel oder Zahlungsmittel zu sein.

English translation: To be a measure of value is, it seems to me, historically the first function of money in general, much earlier than the function of being a medium of exchange or a means of payment.

Smaller goods representing fractions of cattle values can subsequently facilitate payment. Their desirability may initially derive from ornament and prestige; demand specifically for their monetary function develops later. Money’s functions must therefore be distinguished rather than read backwards from mature monetary exchange.

Wealth likewise need not mean accumulated payment instruments or inert possessions. Reports from Car Nicobar identify numerous children as wealth because their support secures a parent’s future. Livestock and social relationships can serve analogous purposes:

Immer ist die Idee des Reichthums, sichergestellt zu sein in Bezug auf die Befriedigung seiner Bedürfnisse für die Zukunft, eine Idee, die ausserordentlich einfach, aber sehr schön ist.

English translation: The idea of wealth is always that of being secure with regard to satisfying one’s needs in the future, an idea that is extraordinarily simple, but very beautiful.

The final section questions whether maximizing benefit with minimal expenditure is an original human impulse. Inama-Sternegg treats economical conduct as potentially acquired through experience, citing preferences for quantity over quality and limited preservation of surpluses. Future security may depend instead on living resources. His concluding request for better ethnographic observation captures the lecture’s relevance: economic categories become questions to investigate, not motives to presume. Its strongest contribution is this distinction between observable institutions and the historically specific ideas that animate them.