OWNERSHIP OF SEA-SHRIMP PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTIONS OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN A NICARAGUAN MISKITU VILLAGE

This article on the catching and processing of sea shrimp investigates the relationship between differing degrees of access to the means of production and the generation of economic inequalities among the Miskitu people of Kakabila in Nicaragua's Pearl Lagoon. The widely held Kakabila notion that the production of wealth among some entails a concomitant impoverishment of others (Foster's "image of the limited good") is shown, in the context of the local sea-shrimp economy, to have a verifiable basis in truth. (Miskitu, economic anthropology, fishing, shrimp, Nicaragua) ********** One of Marx's most important insights in his analysis of the capitalist system was the significance of ownership of the means of production, specifically rights to the tools and property that reproduce and make operable the relations of production. Among anthropologists, however, this aspect of Marx's work has tended to be obscured through ethnographic and analytical focus on the relations of production themselves (e.g., Josephides 1985) and on articulations between local systems of production and global markets (e.g., Seddon 1978; Nash 1979), the assumption apparently being that analytic attention to property and tools necessarily constitutes a vulgar technological determinism. Anthropologists have long held theoretical and substantive interest in the social relations between people and things (Malinowski 1950 [1922]; Mauss 1974 [1925]; Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), but few have considered in detail the significance of these relations when it comes to those things that constitute tools and property to facilitate production. (2) Consequently, White's (1949:365-66) advice that anthropologists should examine the human experience of technology has remained strangely neglected (see also Sahlins 1976; Ingold 1986). For example, an important textbook (Gregory and Altman 1989) on key methods of data collection and analysis for economic anthropologists provides virtually no attention to ownership of tools and property. This neglect also appears in important ethnographic studies of economic activity, the most significant for this article being Nietschmann's (1973) superb account of the subsistence ecology of the Miskitu Indians. This article examines the social relations pertaining to the technological apparatus for catching and processing sea shrimp among the Miskitu. It attempts to show how focusing on the social lives of tools and property can yield valuable insights into the productive process, accounting to a considerable degree for the existence of the "image of the limited good" (Foster 1965). Among the Miskitu of eastern Nicaragua's remote Mosquito Coast the image of the limited good is common. Influenced perhaps by their proximity to Anglophone Caribbean communities with the similar concept of "crab antics" (Wilson 1973), the idea that one's social ascent is inevitably bought at the expense of others, much as a crab's attempt to climb out of a barrel is predicated on its ability to step on and push down competitors, Miskitu people often see economic success as a zero-sum game in which individuals acquire wealth by denying economic assistance to others. A plethora of beliefs ascribe the successful accumulation of wealth to deals made with evil forces such as devils or "science men from the bush" (sorcerers). (3) In day-to-day encounters, relatively successful individuals complain about leveling mechanisms designed to economically depress them. This article tests such views and seeks evidence for the apparent truth that oligopoly ownership of the tools and property which generate wealth does in fact exacerbate existing wealth differentials, giving support to the intuitive Miskitu idea expressed in beliefs that the accumulation of wealth is a zero-sum game, success for one meaning concomitant economic depression for others. THE MISKITU Nietschmann's (1973) classic study of the Miskitu focused on economic practices geared toward subsistence among the 997 inhabitants of a village called Tasbapauni. …