Wolfe articles
relevant to Evolution of the Supranational System, with links to copies on the
web.
(web version of this
document:
http://wolfe.myweb.usf.edu/evolution-supranational.html)
Upon taking up anthropology as an archeology student in the
1940s, I recognized a fairly clear general pattern of increasing scale of social
systems in prehistory. In North
America, there were first the archaic hunting sites, then the “woodland”
horticultural settlements, then the farming villages, then the larger complex
“mound-builders” such as
Under John Champe at
As I advanced in my studies, becoming in the 1950s, a
cultural anthropological student of the ardent Boasian
Melville J. Herskovits, I had even less reason to put the systems I studied in
evolutionary perspective. My field studies of the Ngombe people in the swampy
equatorial forest of the Congo gave me a strong appreciation of the theoretical
approach of the British structuralists, for the Ngombe
exhibited a fully functioning segmentary lineage system, so effective that in my
view the Ngombe would have been a better type case of such a system than the
Nuer, Tallensi, or the Tiv (Wolfe 1961).
Certainly, again, no reason for me to consider evolutionary stages. After
all, those contemporary acephalous societies existed,
fully functioning, at the same time as the African kindoms of the
After
all those varied perspectives and experiences, my contemporary studies of the
problems of new African states in central and southern Africa in the early 1960s
led me to appreciate the importance of multinational enterprises in the mining
and metals industries -- not so much in their individual actions as in their
systematic organization at a supranational level.
My 1962
paper, “The Team
Rules Mining in Southern Africa,” was the first presentation of
the network of corporations that is the "team" of the title. Then I began to see
clearly that new human social systems grow out of one another. And sometimes a truly new level of organization can
be developed out of the interactions of the systems at lower levels. That, indeed, is evolution -- a new
system generating itself out of previously existing elements at lower
levels.And lower does not mean less valuable.
My 1963
paper on this subject was entitled “The African Mineral
Industry: Evolution of a Supranational Level of Integration”(1963). This is the first publication in which
the development of a supranational
system is recognized as a major evolutionary saltation. I saw this as a significant
extrapolation from Julian Steward’s evolutionary theory:
“I found the mineral extraction
industry of southern
My interpretations upset American
financial interests and the
About that same
time, I published a chapter, Capital and the Congo (1966b), that described
the ways in which what was often called the “Congo Economy” was completely
embedded within the supranational system. I showed, for example, how the firm,
Societe General de Belgique,
“came to control a much larger segment of
Congo industry than their risk, in terms of actual capital investment,
warranted”(p.368). In consequence, “this Belgian company is in a stronger
position than its investment warrants in the supranational system of mining
enterprises that involves such giants as Tanganyika Concessions, Rhodesian
Selection Trust, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Anglo-American Corporation of
South Africa, and the British South Africa Company”(p.
368).
Unfortunately, this was a time when few anthropologists
were interested in evolution and few were interested in studying business
corporations. It wasn’t until some
years later that Laura Nader excited some interest by calling for “studying
up”(1969).
In those early 1960s, anthropologists were not interested
in studying business corporations.
There was some talk of “corporate communities” (Wolf 1955, 1957) and some
talk of corporate lineages (discussed in Dow, 1973), but the anthropological
community and anthropologists as scholars were satisfied to leave the study of
business corporations to economists and organizational analysts. .Anthropological journals were certainly
not publishing on these international – no, rather “supranational” -- components
of wider scale.
For some reason, still unknown to me, even those
anthropologists who were interested in studying the processes of evolution using
some sequence of stages like Band, Tribe, Chiefdom and State -- the sequence
that “survived,” to use Robert Carneiro’s
characterization (2003:139) – focused their attention on the transitions within
that limited range. It was, and
still seems to be, as if the “State” was the ultimate achievement, never to be
surpassed, except perhaps by some sort of rising of the proletariat. What sort of system would be generated
by that rising seems not to have been a question for anthropology. The “State”
was as high as anthropologists’ thinking went.
I struggled on in the 1960s, trying to understand the
processes by which these business corporations were establishing genuinely new
institutions that were weakening state-level systems and strengthening the bonds
among international – or, as I prefer to call them, supranational – business
interests. Not even economists were yet calling such entities “multinational.”
That didn’t come into the literature until the 1970s.
In
Economies in Bondage: An Essay on the Mining Industry in
Africa (1967),
I explained how the companies
are organized, at least loosely, “in a network of overlapping groups so that
even though a company may compete directly with another at one level, their
higher-level supranational organization emphasizes their common interests”(p.
19). African states were constrained to use Western advisors whose counsel was
“likely to be limited to the purely technical (in either law, or economics, or
engineering -- and conceived in the context of status quo,” whereas the crucial
problems are surely political, so that “the context of African decision-making
should be oriented toward a future world system quite different from
today's”(p.19).
In 1970, I described, in a chapter
entitled “Tanzania-Zambia Railway: Escape Route from Neocolonial
Control?” the joint attempt of Tanzania and Zambia to escape from the
supranational network that controlled southern Africa, by expanding links across
the Indian Ocean by building a railroad that would give Central Africa a way to
export minerals outside the control of the southern African system. Unfortunately for them, as I warned,
“the extraction and processing of ores is, in all circumstances, an
interdependent part of a larger scale world industrial system” (p.
102).
Those four pieces just mentioned were essentially
case histories, not so much advancing the theory of evolution of the
supranational system as detailing the political and economic consequences of it,
especially for African development.
Distracted temporarily from the
supranational system, and from the evolutionary process by which it was
generated, I focused on other studies – the adaptation of urban families to
poverty in St. Louis (1968), the social structural bases of art (1969), the
development of network models that could be useful applied to all aspects of the
social sciences (1970), and, then, developing internships as a modality of
training applied anthropologists (1981).
My
attention returned to evolutionary theory when, in 1974, I was asked to present a
paper at the 141st annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, New York, January 1975, as part of the symposium "The
Mode of Production: Method and Theory." My paper was the capstone of the
symposium which traced human “modes of production” from primate tool use through
a number of stages “upward” to the supranational system, seen as the latest
"mode of production."
I
developed that AAAS paper into “The Supranational
Organization of Production,” published in Current Anthropology in
1977. This article presents the
theoretical aspects pretty well, but it was widely misunderstood – capitalists
still thought I was bringing down the West, and Marxists thought I was being too
kind to the corporations. Ordinary “evolutionary anthropologists” were
apparently oblivious to it.
In
1980, my paper entitled “Multinational enterprise and
urbanism” argues that
as the supranational system develops, states are weakened while cities (and
private corporations) grow relatively stronger. A 1986 paper, The Multinational
Corporation as a Form of Sociocultural Integration above the Level of the
State," presents
considerably more detail on the system, but it is poorly titled, the title
implying that a multinational corporation is, per se, a “form of integration”
above the level of the state whereas the “form” referred to is the system
generated by the interaction of multinational corporations, families, states,
cities, etc.
An
unpublished 1987 paper, "Supranational Networks:
States and Firms," deals with a question that has always fascinated
me: Why have so few scholars
recognized the supranational system as something that is truly above the level of the state? I argue
that my anthropological colleagues are, like others, bound by our own
culture, traditions and narratives
to such an extent that they are unable to study these phenomena with the same
"objectivity" and “relativism” with which they study the institutions of
cultural systems with which they are less familiar. See especially the section
on "Difficulties of Thinking Anew"(pp 3-5).
“Connecting
the Dots Without Forgetting the Circles,” published in 2005 in Connections , puts the evolution of
supranational systems within the context of the entire hierarchy of systems --
material, biological and sociocultural systems. It expresses my concern that
network analysts often concentrate so intently on the connections that they fail
to see the importance of the “whole” systems at various levels, represented in
the article as circles, clusters, equivalencies, etc. In evolution, new
structures are generated by interactions among the nodes at lower levels.
Understanding new structures is best achieved by using network models in the
comparative and emic/etic perspectives characteristic of anthropology.
“Supranational
Networks: States and Firms,” an update of the 1987 paper, was published in
Peace and Conflict Studies in 2006,
in a continuing effort to encourage anthropologists and other social scientists
to appreciate the full implications of the evolution of supranational
systems.
Wolfe References on evolution
and on supranational systems cited in the text above.
1962 "The Team Rules Mining in Southern Africa," Toward Freedom, Vol. II, No. 1, January. http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~wolfe/Wolfe1962TF.pdf
1963 "The African Mineral Industry: Evolution of a Supranational Level of Integration," Social Problems, Vol.11, No.2 (Fall), pp. 153-164. http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~wolfe/Wolfe1963.pdf
1966a Testimony on
United States-South African Relations, before the Subcommittee on
1966b "Capital and the
Congo," in Southern Africa in Transition, edited by John A.
Davis and James K. Baker.
1967 "Economies
in Bondage: An Essay on the Mining Industry in Africa,"
1967
"An Essay
on the Mining Industry in relation to the African Revolution,” Paper
presented at a Conference on Africa (Session on Neocolonialism) at Washington
University, St. Louis
1970 "Tanzania-Zambia Railway:
Escape Route from Neocolonial Control?" In Nonaligned
1977 "The Supranational Organization of Production," Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 615-636. http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~wolfe/Wolfe1977.pdf
1980 "Multinational enterprise and
urbanism." In Thomas W. Collins, ed., Cities in a Larger
Context. Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Southern
Anthropological Society.
1982 Sociocultural integration above the level of the state. Cultural Futures Research 7(1): 9-16, 22.
1986 "The Multinational
Corporation as a Form of Sociocultural Integration above the Level of the
State." In Hendrick Serrie, Ed., Anthropology and International Business.
Studies in
1987 “Supranational Networks:
States and Firms.” [This document, unpublished at the time, is an expanded
version of papers presented at the Sun Belt Social Network Conference,
Clearwater Beach, Florida, February, 1987, and at the 86th Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association, in Chicago, November 20, 1987.
http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~wolfe/Wolfe1987.pdf
2005 “Connecting
the Dots Without Forgetting the Circles.” Connections 26(2). http://www.insna.org/Connections-Web/Volume26-2/10.Wolfe.pdf
2006 “Supranational
Networks: States and Firms.” Peace
and Conflict Studies 13(1):68-80. http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~wolfe/Wolfe2006SNSF-2006.pdf
Other references
cited:
Carneiro, Robert L. 2003. Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A
Critical History.
Dow,
James. 1973 On the Muddled Concept of Corporation in
Anthropology. American
Anthropologist 75:904-908.
Nader, L. 1969. Up the anthropologist --
perspectives gained from studying up. In Reinventing anthropology (ed) D. Hymes.
Wolf, Eric
R. 1955 Types of Latin American Peasantry: A
Preliminary Discussion. American
Anthrpologist 57(3, Part
I):452-471.
Wolf, Eric
R 1957 Closed Corporate Communities in