Richard Thurnwald’s ethnological study, here in its 1939 version of a work first published in 1937, examines economic organization across subsistence communities and early stratified states. It moves from conceptual foundations through dominant provisioning methods to craft production, distribution, money, and labor. Economic activity becomes intelligible through the social relations and cultural purposes organizing it, not through techniques or monetary calculation alone.
Wir sind es ja, die einzelne Tätigkeiten als „wirtschaftlich“ bezeichnen und herausheben.
English translation: It is we, after all, who designate and single out particular activities as "economic."
This observation makes the observer’s categories part of the problem. Hunting, cultivation, and manufacture supply livelihoods, while economic organization involves storage, allocation, and coordination across households and generations. Custom can embody planning without requiring individuals to devise arrangements anew. Magical procedures likewise need not negate purposeful action: participants’ understandings of efficacy and value shape their decisions. Kinship, religion, political protection, and material provision must therefore be examined together.
Die Mannigfaltigkeit der einzelnen „autarken“ Wirtschaftseinheiten ist viel größer als der Theoretiker mitunter anzunehmen geneigt ist.
English translation: The multiplicity of the individual "autarkic" economic units is far greater than the theorist is at times inclined to assume.
Household self-sufficiency is relative, and its forms resist a single theoretical model. Loans, assistance, and specializations connect families even where production appears domestic. Thurnwald’s discussion of Bittarbeit, requested help reciprocated in kind, identifies coordination that wage-centered categories would obscure. Such practices qualify any simple opposition between isolated households and communal economies.
The study classifies livelihoods through Leitmethoden, dominant provisioning methods, and their Zubehör: associated tools, knowledge, skills, and practices. Hunting and gathering, digging-stick and hoe cultivation, irrigation, livestock keeping, and plough agriculture constitute configurations of social life rather than inventories of implements. Hunters’ seasonal knowledge and stores demonstrate foresight; cultivators coordinate planting and harvests; herders maintain reproducing stock while consuming its yield. Thurnwald treats this distinction between substance and increment as a model for capital management.
Diese werden ergänzt durch Schonzeiten von Wild, Fischen oder Pflanzen, deren Einbringung oder Genuß während gewisser Monate „tabu“ ist.
English translation: These are supplemented by closed seasons for game, fish or plants, the taking or consumption of which is "taboo" during certain months.
Seasonal prohibitions illustrate how resource regulation can be embedded in customary and religious obligations. Technical effectiveness does not depend on separating economic conduct from other institutions. The argument recognizes skilled practice and specialized knowledge where an exclusively technological hierarchy might overlook them.
Specialization develops competence but can impede change. Innovation frequently emerges through contact between differently specialized populations. Combining cultivation and herding can generate plough agriculture, but does not necessarily do so: Thurnwald notes African cases in which cattle keeping and hoe cultivation remain technically separate. Political organization matters when cultivation and defense become differentiated functions. Increased production and concentrated settlement can also expose cultivators to conquest, tribute, and dependency.
The final part follows specialists from household craft into village exchange, chiefly service, and dependent production. Two diagrams illuminate hierarchical households and the coexistence of tribute, redistribution, and private trade. Distribution extends from reciprocal sharing of game through chiefly generosity to centralized states supported by goods and services. Unequal allocation, exploitation, and local exchange persist within these arrangements; central distribution does not eliminate social differentiation.
Money likewise requires distinctions. Prestige, political relationships, and family valuables help explain the acceptance of particular objects as carriers of value. Vorgeld retains practical or ornamental uses, whereas Frühgeld is made specifically to measure and mediate exchange. Neither necessarily purchases every good or functions as investible capital. In Buin, shell valuables purchase pigs and manufactured objects, while taro remains outside ordinary purchase. Exchange into reproducing livestock provides a qualified connection between currency and capital.
Thurnwald concludes by emphasizing the social acceptance of inventions and motives other than monetary gain. Rivalry can concern cultivation, craftsmanship, hunting, or generosity; influence may derive from distributing wealth rather than accumulating it. The study distinguishes reciprocal assistance, redistribution, restricted monetary functions, and culturally situated valuations. Its contextual approach nevertheless coexists with hierarchical civilization language, racial selection claims, and biologized explanations of gendered labor—assumptions that constrain its account of economic diversity.
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