E. Paul Durrenberger

Riddles of Herring and Rhetorics of Success

We test the speculations of Barth (1966) and Heath (1976) about the success of Norwegian herring skippers against ethnographic and statistical data and conclude that their analyses are incorrect on virtually every point. We then show that the individual differences among skippers are not significant. Although we can account for virtually all of the variance in catches of cod, we cannot account for some 60 percent of the variance in herring catches. Having ruled out the skipper effect as an explanation, we explain the high residuals, or unexplained variance, of the statistical model as a consequence of the randomness of herring behavior. Finally, we suggest that our analysis of the rhetorics of success in fishing may be relevant for the wider discussion of leadership and entrepreneurs.

Chayanov's Economic Analysis in Anthropology

Chayanovs work on household economies is receiving increasing notice from American social scientists. This paper articulates his central concepts and shows their usefulness in interpreting household economic action and their bearing on historical and prehistoric questions of interest to anthropologists, and discusses some misconceptions of his work.

An Analysis of Shan Household Production Decisions

I briefly discuss the factors that enter into rice production among the Shan of northwestern Thailand. I then develop an analysis of production decisions based on the work of Chayanov. I discuss how other crops fit into the system and point out some further research questions which this analysis indicates.

Rice Production in a Lisu Village

On hillside slash and burn fields, Lisu of Northern Thailand produce rice, opium poppies, and corn. In this paper I shall develop models to show the relation ships among various factors that determine how much rice each household pro duces, and the relative importance of opium and rice. A comparison of rice production figures for four Lisu villages indicates that in Ban Lum and one other village some households produced more rice than they required for their subsistence needs. Others produced less than the amount required for subsistence, but the overproduction of the first group of households balanced the underproduction of the second so there was sufficient rice locally available for all villagers. In one other village, however, the deficiencies of under producing households outweighed the surpluses of overproducing households, and in the fourth there were no overproducing households. Individuals of the un producing villages do not rely on their fellow villagers, but on their production of opium. One production strategy is to concentrate on opium and use some of the proceeds to purchase rice. Another is to grow sufficient rice for the needs of the household and use the proceeds of opium production for other purposes. This indicates that opium production may not simply be a supplement to rice production for subsistence but a major part of the subsistence strategy. This raises the question of under what circumstances opium production is a means of sub sistence and in what conditions it provides a cash supplement to subsistence. The choice of which strategy to follow rests on a number of regional factors. One of these is whether there is rice available for purchase. Another is related to the limitations of swidden agriculture and availability of suitable lands. If a village has exhausted suitable rice swidden lands and can find no other more attractive location to which to move, the villagers may choose to rely more on opium pro duction for subsistence. If they do this, relatively more days would be spent in producing opium than producing rice. To measure the production strategy of

Law And Literature In Medieval Iceland

Medieval Iceland was a stratified society without a state to enforce differential access to resources. Like other stateless societies its law defined private rather than public delicts. It did so in terms of the concepts of individual holiness, inviolateness, and ways one could lose holiness by violating other peoples holiness. This concept was central to notions of honor. As the institutional structure collapsed, so did concepts of honor. Icelanders recorded their law and sagas about their past and the 13th century as a response to these changes.

Stratification without a state: The collapse of the Icelandic commonwealth*

From the ninth century, when the first settlers came, until 1262 when it ceased to exist, the Icelandic Commonwealth was a stratified society without a state. There developed a class of independent householders who appropriated the production of a class of landless people. The householders gained access to land by supporting a class of chieftains who guaranteed their access by force. Each chieftain had to attempt to muster overwhelming force by expansion. This led to a period of conflict that ended when one chieftain was successful in gaining control of the island in the context of Norwegian royal hegemony. The collapse of the Commonwealth was not due to the introduction of Christianity, cultural changes, or Norwegian manipulation, but to the internal contradictions of a stratified society without a state.

Gambling debt : Iceland's rise and fall in the global economy

Gambling Debt, the product of an interdisciplinary workshop on what the authors term Iceland’s “ nancial meltdown,” is an arresting place-based portrait of the nancial crisis of 2008. Editors E. Paul Durrenberger and Gísli Pálsson, both eminent anthropologists of Iceland in their own right, bring together a diverse collection that ranges from economics to anthropology; education to sociology, and even a “poetic interlude.” In doing so they o er a broad view of the crisis, a corrective to narrowly economistic accounts. It is this wide range that makes Gambling Debt so lively, while also knotting (not unproductive) tensions throughout.

Using Paired Comparisons to Measure Reciprocity

From ethnographic observations and interviews, the author discovered that the concept of obligation was important in structuring power relationships in Chicago union locals. This was pivotal because relationships of reciprocity underlie the politics of union locals and resistance to some programs from the international organization. Here, the author discusses how he used paired comparisons to test ethnographically derived hypotheses about the salience of concepts of reciprocity and obligation to move beyond qualitative ethnographic intuition to measure cultural concepts and test hypotheses. In conclusion, he suggests that such approaches and methods can enlighten our understanding of reciprocity.

Checking for Relationships across Domains Measured by Triads and Paired Comparisons

The authors discuss an extension of the use of the triads test for judged similarity among various roles to measure union consciousness and paired comparisons techniques to assess the relative importance of structural versus personal characteristics for negotiating good contracts, the nature of obligations between stewards and staff, and tasks that stewards find most important to them. The authors show how they moved from the mapping of cognitive domains to testing for relationships among different domains to measure the strength of competing models of union organization in the stewards and staff of a single union. The authors suggest that the detection of patterns across domains can strengthen or question findings from each separate domain. They developed this method when an officer of one of the unions with whom they worked challenged an interpretation based on a single triads test.

Text and transactions in Commonwealth Iceland

Although the Family sagas about events of two to three hundred years in the past and the Sturlunga sagas about contemporary 13th century events were written about the same time, they record different frequencies of several classes of economic and legal transactions. These differences are consistent with the changes we would expect to occur in a stratified society without a state. These differences add credibility to the sagas as sociological representations of the society of the past.