Paper short abstract:

For the Hadza hunter-gatherers, the economic catalogue includes formats that are rooted in strong conventions against accumulation. They have developed in tandem with particular social relations and specific historical dynamics, so how are such formats relevant beyond their empirical source?

Paper long abstract:

'If gifts make friends, friends make gifts', Marshall Sahlins wrote in his seminal work on Stone Age Economics (1972). As the quote indicates, economics create the very foundation for social relations - and vice versa; the quote also testaments to the generative force of economics - a powerful future-making tool. For the Hadza hunter-gatherers, expectations to the future form a complex of ambiguity and certainty; there is a conspicuous confidence in food continuity (data from fieldwork in 2022) combined with strong certainty that time ahead will present unforeseeable radical change. The indigenous Hadza economic catalogue includes particular formats, such as demand-sharing, immediate-return systems, egalitarian meat-sharing, and managing cosmological debt relating to the hunting and eating of animals - all economic practices that are rooted in strong conventions against accumulation (Woodburn 1982). Accumulation, whether as piling, storage, or harvesting interests, is among the Hadza perceived as particularly anti-social human behaviour. The economic formats have developed in tandem with specific social relations and historical dynamics in an egalitarian hunting and gathering society, so how are such formats relevant beyond their empirical source? Late capitalism is a radically different ideational system, yet it has fostered novel economic models that bear some resemblance, e.g. sharing economies, and, most recently, the current energy crisis has (re)introduced talking about the commons and a communal call for restraint. These late-capitalist formats reintroduce morality and social conventions to the core of economic practice whether they are founded in degrowth or in anti-accumulation theories.