(web version of this
document: http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~wolfe/Supranational-AWW.html)
In the
early 1960s, my studies of the problems of new African states in central and
southern
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.
A 1963
paper, entitled “The
African Mineral Industry: Evolution of a Supranational Level of Integration,” 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).
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 issue, I focused on other studies – the
adaptation of urban families to poverty in
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.
In
1980, “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.
“Network Perspectives on Communities,” in Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences, Volume
1, Issue 4 (2006). while not devoted to
investigating the supranational level of integration, discusses in its final
pages new and developing methods of network analysis that will improve understanding
of the supranational system. It is available at the following web address:
http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol1/iss4/art2
References Cited
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
2006 “Network Perspectives on Communities.”
Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences, Volume 1, Issue 4 (2006). http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol1/iss4/art2