WAS
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Volume 102
Number 1
Spring 2016
Journal of the
WASHINGTON
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
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Editor of the Journal
Sethanne Howard
Journal of the Washington Academy of
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Journal of the
WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Volume 102 Number 1 Spring 2016
Contents
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Culture-Scale and the Study of Domestic-Scale Societies R. HAWKINS .........:000006+ ]
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ISSN 0043-0439 Issued Quarterly at Washington DC
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MAY 17 2016
HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
Spring 2016
Editor’s Comments
It is an honor and privilege to serve as the editor of our Journal. I want to
thank each of you for your submissions, your assistance as peer reviewers,
and especially those who take the time to read the Journal. I am looking
ahead to what 2016 holds for our Journal.
The Spring issue opens the Journal year with a typically eclectic group of
papers. Our former President of the Board of Directors, Mark Holland,
brings us an interesting paper on probiotics for plants. Peter Varandi
discusses OPEC and the price of oil. Ralph Hawkins tells us about the
culture-scale and its use as a tool to study human culture.
Plants, oil, and human culture are about as eclectic as one can get. Which
brings me to the next subject.
Initiatives for The Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences
Please continue submitting your primary research manuscripts. Our readers
look forward to these, and they form the basis of our reputation as a scientific
resource. However, given the wide scope of expertise represented by our
membership, I would also like to suggest a few initiatives that I hope will
encourage you and your students/interns and colleagues to seek publication
in our Journal, and enhance the excellent quality that is already represented.
1. Review articles: While the Journal loves to highlight primary
research, review articles play an important role in conveying the
bigger picture of a research topic. Given the breadth of our
readership, review articles are often a welcome overview of topics
that may not be well known, but are very interesting to learn about.
2. In Brevia: Do you have a commentary to offer on a new finding or
a technique in your field? Is there a publication about which you
would like to comment? Is there a hot topic in the policy realm being
discussed that you feel needs highlighting in our Journal? An /n
Brevia section allows the author the freedom to write a short
submission on a topic of interest. Please note there is no word count
minimum for your submission, so I encourage submission of shorter
articles that may focus attention on other than primary research
outcomes. This can be as simple as a letter to the editor.
Washington Academy of Sciences
1
3. Technical Book Reviews: We welcome reviews of a technical
book.
4. Spotlights:
a. Affiliate spotlight: The Academy has over 50 affiliated
societies, and | would like to invite each of the affiliates to
contact me if they would like to do a single-page piece (or
longer) highlighting the mission and ongoing work of their
Society.
b. Student Spotlight: The Academy is committed to
encouraging the next generation of scientists and engineers.
As such, I invite you to recruit students to submit articles to
our Journal for publication. We would love the opportunity
to work with you and your students to develop a high quality
piece to present in an issue of the Journal.
5. Theme Issues: The Journal would like to offer some issues that have
a common theme tying the papers together. To date, I have big data,
mental health (e.g. depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and
traumatic brain injury), climate change, and stem cell technologies
on my short list. Other suggestions are welcome and suggestions
accompanied by promises of submissions are encouraged!
If you have other ideas for submission, or have a submission for the Journal,
please contact me at wasjournal@washacadsci.org.
Sethanne Howard
Editor
sethanneh@msn.com
Spring 2016
Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences
Editor Sethanne Howard sethanneh@msn.com
Board of Discipline Editors
The Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences has a 12-member Board
of Discipline Editors representing many scientific and technical fields. The
members of the Board of Discipline Editors are affiliated with a variety of
scientific institutions in the Washington area and beyond — government
agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST);
universities such as Georgetown; and professional associations such as the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Anthropology Emanuela Appetiti eappetiti@hotmail.com
Astronomy Sethanne Howard sethanneh@msn.com
Biology/Biophysics Eugenie Mielczarek mielczar@physics.gmu.edu
Botany Mark Holland maholland@salisbury.edu
Chemistry Deana Jaber djaber@marymount.edu
Environmental Natural
Sciences Terrell Erickson terrell.erickson] @wdc.nsda.gov
Health Robin Stombler rstombler@auburnstrat.com
History of Medicine Alain Touwaide atouwaide@hotmail.com
Operations Research Michael Katehakis mnk@rci.rutgers.edu
Physics Katharine Gebbie katharine.gebbie@nist.gov
Science Education Jim Egenrieder jim@deepwater.org
Systems Science Elizabeth Corona elizabethcorona@gmail.com
Washington Academy of Sciences
Culture-Scale and the Study of Domestic-Scale
Societies: Principles and Case Studies'
Ralph K. Hawkins
Averett University
Abstract
This paper affirms culture-scale as a valuable tool for the study of
human culture. It begins by defining the culture-scale. Next, it provides
an in-depth study of domestic-scale culture in the form of two case
studies, those of the Australian Aboriginal and African cattle peoples.
Finally, the essay concludes with a brief consideration of the benefits of
domestic-scale culture.
Introduction
As I discuss in How Israel Became a People, one of the major
emphases in the New Archaeology is the study of culture.” This has been
a standard feature of anthropological study since at least the middle of the
20" century. One of the most widely adopted strategies for the study of
culture has been the measurement of the complexity of cultures and then
their division into culture types. These are then grouped into a continuum
of progressive stages often known in anthropology as levels of
sociocultural integration. Many anthropologists have sought to define
and/or measure these levels of complexity.2 Measuring societal
complexity is not an end in and of itself, but serves the purpose of
understanding a given social group, since cultures at different levels of
sociocultural integration are different by definition.* Cultures at different
levels of integration organize socially, implement varying political
controls, and technologically and economically adapt to their environment
all in different ways. The study of societal complexity is one method for
seeking to understand these differences.
Culture-Scale
John H. Bodley uses culture-scale as a lens through which one
views and interprets cultures.’ His scale is organized according to power
systems: domestic, political, or commercial (Fig. 1). In each of these types
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i)
of societies, power is organized differently. Domestic-scale cultures are
small-scale societies in which social power is maintained and dispersed at
the household level. The focus in a domestic-scale culture is on the well-
being of the household. The domestic organization of a society enables its
members to focus on the sapienization process. The term sapienization,
which derives from the Latin sapiens (as in homo sapiens), refers to the
development of a people group and its culture. When family groups in a
society do not have to worry about producing a taxable surplus to send to
a government, then each household is able to control its own material
resources, and production and distribution are managed in the domestic
sphere. In a domestic-scale culture, systems of social support for
households are provided by networks of kinship. This means that, while
social power may vary based on the size and shape of individual families
and their kinship support networks, the households in the community have
roughly equal social power.
Political-scale cultures are larger-scale societies that are led by a
ruler instead of by household heads. In a political-scale culture production
systems are centrally managed and are geared to the wants and needs of
this ruler or a ruling class. When a society transitions into a political-scale
culture, its primary culture process ceases to be sapienization and
becomes, instead, politicization, which refers to the production and
maintenance of the political apparatus. At this level taxes are imposed,
specialization occurs, a military is built, and urbanization arises.
Households must become involved 1n all of these processes, and their own
interests must be subordinated to the interests of political rulers.
Commercial-scale cultures are not led by an individual ruler, but
by those who control the production and distribution of goods and
services by means of the business enterprises they own and the financial
capital they control. In commercial-scale cultures power is basically
commercial, and it is driven by cultural institutions such as private
property, contractual agreements, and monetary systems, all of which are
validated, controlled, and protected by the centralized political power.
Food production, labor, and various goods and services that were once
managed by households, are all converted into commercial products and
brought under the prevue of business enterprises, into which societies are
incorporated. At this level of culture-scale, national societies the world
Washington Academy of Sciences
over are involved in mass-industrialized production and distribution
systems, and they participate in a global culture characterized by common
cultural understandings.
Sociocultural growth and the changes that accompany it in the
culture scale have not been consistent and do not seem to be predictable.
Early humankind lived almost exclusively in small-scale, self-sufficient
local societies based initially on mobile foraging and later on sedentary
village life. Every significant domestic technology was invented and
disseminated during this time, including ceramics, textiles, farming, and
herding. And these technologies improved the quality of daily life for
everyone because, in the domestic-scale cultures, they were equally
available to every household. While domestic-scale cultures persisted in
various parts of the world, some even into modern times, the politicization
process began in others, and chiefdoms, small agrarian kingdoms, and
even empires began to develop.
Objective
Equalit
surplus Inequalit
Commercial Commercialization | Profit-making | Inequality
commodity Instability
Pover
Figure 1. Culture-scale and its features (John H. Bodley, Cultural Anthropology:
Tribes, States, and the Global System [3" ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing,
2000]. Used by permission).
How this process occurs has been a subject of speculation among
anthropologists since at least the beginning of the 20" century. Early
anthropologists, such as Edward B. Tyler (1832-1917) and Lewis H.
Morgan (1818-1881), defined "culture" basically as "civilization," and
believed that human societies pass through stages en route to civilization.
These processes inevitably lead from one stage to the next. The Victorian
doctrine of progress assumed a uniform transition from primitive stages to
more complex stages that would culminate in the highly evolved
civilizations of the present. Franz Boas (1858-1942) reacted against this
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kind of ethnocentric thinking and became a key proponent of historicism,
which rejected the grand evolutionary theories of early anthropology in
favor of cultural relativism, the idea that the differences among peoples
were the results of historical, social, and geographic conditions and that
the cultures of all peoples were complete and equally developed. He
advocated a historical particularism that focuses on the regional study of
culture and its processes of change. Functionalists were not interested in
the history of individual societies, but insisted on studying them in their
present condition. Later functionalists such as Bronislaw Malinowski
(1884-1942) and George P. Murdock (1897-1985), however, concerned
themselves with change. Murdock made detailed studies of cross-cultural
correlations among traits and sought to establish correlations between
kinship terminologies, rules of descent, taboos, and other characteristics
in the belief that these kinds of comparisons provided a step toward
understanding the processes of social change in general.° Materialists
such as Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederich Engels (1820-1895)
focused on modes of production in order to explain change. They argued
that the key factor that ultimately resulted in change 1n a given society
was the unequal control of the means of production. This unequal control
produces tension, which ultimately results in change. Marvin Harris
(1927-2001) essentially adopted this approach, arguing that the material
base determines the superstructure within a society.
It does not seem that culture change can be said to be inevitable,
since some cultures, such as that of the Australian aborigines and those of
many of the African cattle peoples, have persisted into modern times.
Instead, there must be something that triggers change. The theories of
Ester Boserup are of special interest, since they are directed at the
question of how farming systems evolved in Sub-Saharan Africa. She
argued that "the greater the population size, the greater the degree of
agricultural complexity," and that "the greater the degree of agricultural
complexity, the more people become available for non-agrarian cultural
activities."’ In her reconstruction, these steps lead to politicization. In any
case, solving the riddle of the reasons for culture change goes beyond the
purpose of this study.
In How Israel Became a People, | use culture-scale as a tool for
reconstructing the early Israelite settlement of Canaan.* Specifically, I
Washington Academy of Sciences
propose that earliest Israel was a domestic-scale culture. When the
Israelites sedentarized in the highlands of Canaan during the transition
from the Late Bronze to Iron Age I (c. 1230-1000 B.C.E.), their
organization as a domestic-scale culture enabled them to persist for at
least two hundred years before they developed into a political-scale
culture. In the section that follows, I will provide additional examples of
domestic-scale culture as analogies for that study.
Case Studies of Domestic-Scale Cultures
As discussed above, domestic-scale cultures are small-scale
societies in which social power is maintained and dispersed at the
household level. The focus in a domestic-scale culture is the well-being of
the household. The domestic organization of a society enables its
members to focus on the sapienization process. When family groups in a
society do not have to worry about producing a taxable surplus to send to
a government, then each household is able to control its own material
resources, and production and distribution are managed in the domestic
sphere. In a domestic-scale culture, systems of social support for
households are provided by networks of kin. This means that, while social
power may vary based on the size and shape of individual families and
their kinship support networks, the households in the community have
roughly equal social power. To become familiar with the concept of
domestic-scale cultures and how they work, we will review the salient
features of two such social groups, the Australian aborigines and the
African cattle-people, after which we will look at the emergence of Israel
through the lens of the culture scale.
The Australian Aborigines
Australia has often been the focal point of the anthropological
study of domestic-scale cultures, because it is the only continent in the
modern world that has been occupied, at one time, exclusively by tribal
foragers. The Australian aborigines are famous for having persisted for
thousands of years by foraging (scavenging, rummaging, searching) for
food, and doing so by using only the simplest of material technologies.’
When the Europeans began to settle in Australia, there were at least
300,000 people there who had managed and shaped their natural resources
without ever having resorted to modern farming methods or sedentary
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village life. Their societies also appear to be egalitarian, which refers to
equality and the absence of a class system. Bodley explains that "the
discovery and successful colonization of the Australian continent by
foraging peoples and its continuous occupation for [thousands of] years is
surely one of the most remarkable events in human history. It clearly
demonstrates the tremendous potential of mobile foraging technology and
egalitarian social systems ... the foraging way of life is certainly one of
the most successful human adaptations ever developed and persists in
scattered locations throughout the world."!® There are at least six main
keys to understanding the Australian aborigines.
Salient Features of Australian Aboriginal Society
1. Environment
The domestication of animals and the cultivation of crops began
many thousands of years ago. Civilization as we know it began about
5,000 years ago, when farmers in very fertile areas around the Eastern
Mediterranean began to produce sufficient surplus food which allowed
some people to specialize as craftsmen, merchants, and priests. Metals
were first used about this time in Asia and Egypt. The Aborigines,
however, did not develop along similar lines: they never became food
producers. Instead, they remained foragers and hunters. The reason for
this has to do mainly with their environment. Aboriginal culture
developed in response to the environment, which was isolated and
unsuitable for agriculture. Australia does not have indigenous cattle,
sheep, goats, horses, or donkeys that could be herded for food supplies or
used as beasts of burden or as draught animals. Neither does it have
indigenous grain foods that could be cultivated. Furthermore, the area is
totally sequestered, so the Aborigines did not have the stimulating effect
of contact and interaction with developing societies, which prohibited the
processes of diffusion or peer-polity interaction, both of which are
explanations for cultural development, from leading to technological or
other advancements in Australia. Instead, the Aborigines remained
entirely dependent on nature. Their reaction to these conditions was to
rely on the second salient feature of Aboriginal culture.
Washington Academy of Sciences
2. Mobile Foraging
Foraging is conventionally understood as scavenging, rummaging,
or searching for food, which can include hunting. Mobile foragers are
thought of as being constantly on the move in search of food and water,
and conducting their quest for food by using only the simplest of material
technologies.'' The Australian Aborigines did not wander aimlessly,
however, but divided their land up into traditional territories using natural
barriers, such as rivers, lakes, and mountains, as well as Totemic
boundaries. Knowledge of these boundaries was passed down orally by
the Elders to the younger members of communities through songs,
dances, art, and storytelling. Aborigines would then forage within their
respective territories. !”
Furthermore, Aboriginals did not raise livestock or farm using
techniques with which contemporary westerners were familiar, and this
led early observers to believe that they just wandered around in search of
food. However, while they were traditional "hunter gatherers" who were
limited to the range of foods occurring naturally in their area, they
developed very sophisticated traditional knowledge about exactly when,
where, and how to find everything edible, and those things that would
meet their nutritional needs. Anthropologists and nutrition experts who
studied the tribal diet in Arnhem Land found it to be well-balanced, with
most of the nutrients modern dietitians recommend. '°
Food was not secured without effort, however, and in some areas
both men and women had to spend from half to two-thirds of each day
hunting or foraging for food. Each day the women of the horde went into
successive parts of the countryside, with digging sticks and bags or
wooden buckets. They would dig yams and edible roots and collect fruits,
berries, seeds, vegetables, and insects. They killed lizards, bandicoots, and
other small creatures with their digging sticks. The men hunted, and could
take small game, like birds, opossums, lizards, and snakes by hand.
Larger animals, like kangaroos and emus, were disabled with a throw
stick, such as a boomerang. There were many indigenous devices that the
men would use to get within striking distance of prey. They were
excellent trackers and stalkers and would approach their prey running if
there was cover, or "freezing" and crawling in the open. They were
careful to stay downwind, and they would sometimes cover themselves
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with mud to disguise their smell or even serve as camouflage. Hunting
was also frequently organized as a cooperative effort. Groups of men
would combine to drive animals into a line of spearmen, or into large nets.
Animals would also be trapped in snares, pits, and partly-enclosed water
holes.
Furthermore, even though the Aborigines did not “farm” in the
same sense that a sedentarized population would, they did use
sophisticated land management techniques. One of their principle
techniques was setting bushfires all over the continent. Early
anthropologists reported seeing Aboriginals carrying smoldering fire-
sticks, with which they would set fire to the bush as they walked along.
Burning the bush served several important purposes in the Aboriginal
economy. First, it facilitated hunting and foraging. When fire was set to
the bush, animals that broke cover could be clubbed or speared. The
clearing of the ground by burning also revealed animals like lizards that
might be hiding in holes, which could then be found by foragers. Second,
burning promotes regrowth, which also attracts grazing animals.
Aboriginals would return to a burned area after rain to hunt the animals
which had returned to browse, and also to forage and collect fresh
vegetables. Third, burning extended an Aboriginal habitat rich in both
animal and plant food. The Aboriginal use of fire has come to be known
as “fire-stick farming,” and is now recognized as having been a very
important force in the shaping and maintenance of Australian plains and
the shaping of indigenous plant communities.“
The point we are seeking to make with regard to the Aboriginal
food-procurement strategy is that it was a response to their environment.
But it was not a passive response. The Aboriginals were not passive
slaves to their environment. Instead, they developed adaptive strategies
that allowed them to procure food most effectively in their particular
setting. These adaptive strategies included the design and use of simple
tools well-suited for the circumstances, such as the digging stick, the fire
stick, the throw stick, and the use of anthropogenic fire to shape and
maintain their environment and its plant communities. !°
One implication of the foraging lifestyle is that those who adopt it
are constantly on the move, and so the Aborigines would limit their
possessions to a minimum. They did not need permanent houses, but
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would build temporary shelters ranging from a simple windbreak of
branches to bark, or stones. To maintain this kind of transience, mobile-
foragers could not continue expanding their families. The need to
maintain a manageable carrying capacity leads to the next salient feature
of Aboriginal society.
3. Infanticide.
If Aboriginal people had too many infants to carry, then they had
difficulty being mobile. In addition, high numbers of children may exceed
the carrying capacity of the environment, which refers to its ability to
sustain a given number of people by means of a particular technology and
culture.'° Joseph B. Birdsell estimates that the optimum population for a
tribal territory was about 60% of its carrying capacity, which would allow
for arbitrary ebb and flow in availability of resources.'’ Aboriginals used
infanticide as a response to these environmental pressures.'* While
westerners may chafe at the idea of infanticide as a strategy for
maintaining mobility, it has been a feature of numerous world cultures
throughout history.’
4. Egalitarianism.
Australian Aboriginal communities were acephalous, which
literally means that they were "without a head," or had no ruler. They
were all equal. They shared everything. A family could not save a big
kangaroo for five weeks in the refrigerator for themselves; instead, when
a kangaroo was found, it was shared with everyone so that everyone could
eat. The next time someone else found something, they too would share it.
Some people did specialize: the best hunters often led the hunt; the best
root finders led other foragers 1n the search for good roots. The aborigines
have an age-set system, but no hierarchy or political structure.
The most important territorial group within Australian Aboriginal
society was the "horde" or band, the nucleus of which consisted of a clan,
the most important social group. These clans were groups of people who
claimed to be descended in one line from the same ancestor, sometimes a
mythological being.
The survival of any local group depended on its solidarity, and so
there was a strong feeling against serious quarrels within Aboriginal
society. Even in cases where a duel was fought, the combatants would
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take care not to disable each other permanently, because the loss of an
able-bodied man to a small hunting community could be very detrimental.
Even in large-scale fights, a sense of prudence and common interest made
itself felt, and on most occasions the fighting ceased when several men
were badly hurt or killed.
Another aspect of hunting and gathering societies that facilitates
their egalitarianism is that they are invariably small. The average
population of such societies tends towards around 50, and the largest have
not exceeded more than a few hundred.*° Worldwide, the size of hunter-
gatherer bands has tended to average between 25 and 50 people.*! When
the Australian Aboriginal horde began to exceed those numbers, they
would branch into multiple smaller units. By maintaining a low human
population density, not only would they keep from exceeding the carrying
capacity of the land on which they are foraging, but they would also
maintain their ability to exist as an egalitarian society.
5.The Dreaming.
This is very much an emic feature unique to the culture of the
Australian Aborigines. The Dreaming constituted the cosmogenical
stories about the beginnings of life.*” It begins with the story of the
Rainbow Serpent, from which everything else derives, and it consists of
stories about spirits that are in the trees, the animals, and in the ground.
According to this animistic perception the Aborigines are, in a sense,
imbued with the gods, and the world around them also therefore deserves
the special love and respect one would give to the gods. The stories about
the spirits in the Dreamtime are retold and become the basis for cultural
rules in the society.
The Aborigines saw humankind as sharing a common life-
principle with animals, birds, and plants, and they included all of these
things in human social and religious life by establishing totemic
relationships between them, people, and places. A totem is a specific
animal, plant, or natural phenomena that originates in the Dreaming and
becomes the spiritual progenitor of Aboriginal descent groups. A totemic
relationship refers to any cultural association between specific natural
objects and human social groups, and a person's identity is directly tied to
a totem, which is associated with a certain geographical place, a sacred
site. In a place full of kangaroos, for example, the kangaroo would likely
Washington Academy of Sciences
1]
be the totem of those who frequented the area. These men and women
would go through life interpreting their lives through stories associated
with the kangaroo and the symbol of the kangaroo. This phenomenon
resulted in a kind of symbiotic relationship between certain clans and their
totemic animal, plant, or object. What this means is that if a certain clan
had a totemic relationship with the kangaroo, for example, they would
guard what they thought of as its "beginning place" (the place from which
the kangaroo originated in the Dreamtime), protect it, and perform
ceremonies that would ensure that there would be plenty of kangaroos
continuously. This would, in turn, guarantee the survival and perpetuation
of the kangaroo population. And this same kind of totemic relationship
occurred between other clans and various other animals, plants, or places.
Totemism, therefore, actually linked the Aborigines in a bond of mutual
life-giving with nature.
One of the most sacred of such sites is Uluru, formerly called
Ayers Rock, a giant monolith in central Australia. This weathered dome is
around 5 miles around and more than 1,100 feet tall. After having been
returned to the Anangue people, its traditional owners, it was designated a
national park in 1985 and is managed by the Anangue themselves. The
north side of the rock belongs to the clan of hare wallabies, while the
south side belongs to the carpet boa clan. A series of stories recount the
activities of ten totemic beings and their relatives, including various
snakes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, who created the existing landscape
and established clan boundaries. Australian anthropologist Charles
Mountford made an expedition to Ayers Rock in 1950. During the years
1935-1960, he recorded some of the Aboriginal myths, and made some
200 photographs that document specific rock outcrops, stains, caves, and
other markings on Ayers Rock.” These physical features all represent the
physical signs of the totemic beings.
6.Law.
The Australian Aborigines did not have a written law, and many
outside observers have assumed that they had no law. After the
colonization of Australia by westerners, the English legal system was
haphazardly imported into Australia and imposed on the Aboriginal
peoples.** It was not until 1986 that the Australian Law Reform
Commission issued a report on the recognition of Aboriginal customary
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~
law.*° The relationship of Australian Aboriginal traditional law to
contemporary Australian law has been the subject of ongoing debate.”°
Aboriginal law is derived from the Dreaming, is the moral authority for
behavior in Australian Aboriginal society. When it is referred to as such,
it is called the "Dreaming Law," or simply the "Law."*’ Aboriginal law,
therefore, is inextricably linked to Aboriginal religion. The traditional law
deals with all manner of criminal behavior and dispute resolution through
reciprocal negotiation, restorative justice, mediation, conciliation,
arbitration, and/or punishment.”* Traditional punishments include death,
supernatural punishment (using sorcery), physical punishment,
banishment or exile, ridicule and shaming, and/or the requirement of
compensation.
African Cattle Peoples: Tribal Nomads
The Nuer, Maasai, and other East African groups have fascinated
anthropologists for the last century. These peoples were able to support
themselves almost entirely from their cattle in an environment that
Europeans considered virtually useless. They not only survived but
thrived on their cattle, which provided for them so well that they had
leisure time for other pursuits, one of which was developing themselves
as warriors. One of the ways they honed their warrior ability was through
lion hunting, in which they would hunt and kill a lion with spears. Once a
Maasai had killed a lion, he would wear the mane as a badge of courage.
Cattle dominated the lives of the African cattle people to such a degree
that outsiders thought irrational. And yet these "cattle peoples" have
survived droughts and epidemics, and they have retained much of their
autonomy in the face of a great deal of modern change.
Salient Features of the African Cattle People
1. Savanna Ecosystem.
In Nuer land, the flat, clay-soiled and seasonally flooded
environment made it deficient in basic raw materials like stone and wood,
and it also made it a difficult area in which to grow crops. In this kind of
environment, how does one provide food? How can someone maintain a
supply of food in an uncertain ecological environment? The environment
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may not be suitable for agriculture, but it provides excellent pasturage,
and leads to the second key for understanding the Cattle People.
2. Cattle Complex
The cattle people provide food in an uncertain ecological
environment by relying on cattle. It took some time for anthropologists to
understand this. The first to study this was the American anthropologist,
Melville Herskovits, who believed that the cattle people's emphasis on
cattle was irrational and non-utilitarian.””? He thought they used the cattle
more for social and ritual purposes than survival, and that the cattle were
treated as wealth objects and sources of prestige. The famous British
anthropologist, Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, conducted one of the first
and most detailed studies of the Nuer cattle people of the Sudan from
1930-1936. This study became a classic in ethnographic literature and
showed the importance social, ritual, and utilitarian functions of cattle.*°
Pritchard observed that the Nuer were virtually obsessed with cattle, and
that there was a profusion in cattle terminology in their language.
According to his observations, boys receive an "ox-name" at birth, and
men are often addressed using names that referred to their favorite oxen;
women are often given nicknames that have to do with the cows they
milk; he found dozens of terms that describe various features of cattle,
such as horn shape, ear cropping, and age and sex categories; and the
Nuer write poetry and songs about their cattle.
While Europeans and early anthropologists thought this was
bizarre and obsessive, Pritchard realized that this extreme interest in cattle
had a utilitarian basis. The Nuer relied on cattle for their sustenance. This
reliance seldom involved slaughtering the cattle, because meat production
represented a one-time use of an animal. Instead, Cattle People focused on
using the products the cattle produced, like milk and blood. Milk could be
produced without harm to the animal. When an animal was not producing
milk, such as during a time of famine, blood could be siphoned from a
vein, again without injury to the animal, in order to have a source of
protein. Milk could be consumed in liquid form or processed into cheese.
Dung was used for fuel for cooking, making fires to ward off biting
insects, and for making plaster. Cattle were seldom killed in these
societies because their products were so valuable for sustenance. Cattle
would also be used for exchange, such as at a wedding, or to settle
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disputes, and they would sacrifice them on ritual occasions. If and when a
cow was killed, none of it would be wasted. The skin could be used for
making various containers, such as a canteen or items of clothing. The
bones could be used to make spear tips, jewelry, and other items. Herds
were of great value and were well-cared for, and the Nuer moved them
seasonally in a process of transhumance in order to take advantage of the
best pasture. Pritchard concluded that the Nuer had a virtually symbiotic
relationship, in which the Nuer and their cattle each depended on the
other.
3. Flexible marriages.
The "ordinary" Nuer marriage created a simple nuclear family
household based on husband, wife, and child. This kind of a household
derived its subsistence from the husband's herd and the wife's garden. The
marriage arrangement, however, was flexible, depending on the needs of
men and women. *! An infertile woman, for example, might become a
"husband" and have children by marrying another woman, who then took
a male lover who became the genitor, or biological father, of the female
"husband's" children. In this case, the female "husband" is the legitimate
"father" of the children. Another example of flexible marriage among
Cattle People is the "ghost marriage," in which someone marries in the
name of a sibling or other relative who has died without having completed
a marriage and who has therefore left no descendants. In these kinds of
cases, cattle were transferred to the bride's family as a bride-price. These
examples of different types of marriages were based on what was
expedient. They were not random, but were based on creating and
maintaining access to food.
4. Segmentary lineages.
Tribes are made up of kinship systems, which are expressed
through genealogies. The kinship systems are important for bringing
people together, many of whom may be related, but some of whom may
not. Kinship relations are an important organizing principle for a people’s
understanding of economic and political, as well as social, relationships —
as well as their relationships with outside groups. For example, the
property of a village or family, as well as the formation of political and
economic alliances between families or villages, are all kinship-based.
Washington Academy of Sciences
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Kinship seems to have served as a convention within which
relationships of power were defined among the African cattle peoples.
These principles have been understood in anthropology as the segmentary
lineage system. *” In tribes that practice this system, the tribe may become
too small to defend itself. In these cases the segmentary lineages allow
them to join with other tribes to defend their water sources, wives, cattle,
or territory. After defending themselves, they might “collapse” back to
their former size. The flexible genealogy allows for this, and gave tribal
groups that practiced it a special advantage.*? These segmented systems
made it possible for people groups to continually change over time. If the
political conditions change, the subgroups may change their political and
familial relationships with other subgroups within the tribe, or even with
other tribes.
In the classic segmented system an ancestor represents political
unity in a group. Everyone "descended" from the ancestor is considered to
be a member of the particular segment and is responsible, for example, for
protecting it. In domestic-scale cultures, there 1s no central governmental
authority. Without centralization of authority the segmentary principle
actually serves to minimize conflict. For example, among the East African
cattle people, who continue to live in acephalous societies, exogamy
divides the loyalties of various village members. The exogamous
character of the villages leads to a broad extension of incest restrictions.
This reduces potential confusion in bride-wealth transfers. Inter-village
feuding, therefore, would have the potential to disrupt the bride-wealth
transfers. This divides the loyalties of people who might feel obligated to
support one another in blood feuds as co-villagers, as close kin, or as
claimants to bride-wealth cattle. It is thus in virtually everyone’s self-
interest to keep feuding to an absolute minimum. In the segmented
lineage system, therefore, marriage ties, a wife’s inheritance, or
purchasing land in another rural local community could serve as the basis
for realignment. These actions may preserve peace among existing tribal
relationships, and could certainly be taken to establish new intertribal
relationships. When the groups get too large to function without structure
and leadership, they will "branch" into new, smaller groups, just as the
Australian Aborigines do.**
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5. Egalitarianism.
Like the Australian Aborigines, the East African cattle peoples
have no centralized political leadership and are organized along kinship
lines. In Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer, he found them to be a
"deeply democratic" society, with an egalitarian approach to their life as a
community.*°> Kin are obligated to help one another and, when one
household has a surplus, it is shared with neighbors. Accumulating wealth
does not appear to exist as a goal among the Nuer and, although someone
who owns a large amount of cattle may be envied, the size of his herd
does not gain him a special position in the society. As in the case of the
Australian Aborigines, the maintenance of a low population density
among cattle people villages facilitates egalitarianism. *°
6. Warfare
While pastoral peoples have often been idealized as serene and
peaceful, the Nuer are a people with a penchant for fighting.*’ Frequent
conflicts occur both internally and externally. Internally, the Nuer often
fight with each other, and these conflicts often end in death. While there
are built-in deterrents to conflict within the society, there is no formal
mechanism for reparation in the face of an insult, and so justice must be
sought by individuals. This usually results in the issue of a challenge to a
duel, which must be accepted. These duels will typically be fought until
the point of severe injury, at which point the combatants will be pulled
apart in order to prevent the death of the injured. Externally, pastoralist
societies have not only fought in order to defend themselves, but also for
offensive reasons, such as to expand their territory. In the nineteenth
century, the Nuer overtook much of the territory of the Dinka, a
neighboring group, by means of warfare. The Nuer's segmentary lineage
system gave them the advantage over the Dinka, whose society did not
share this feature. In the end, the Nuer increased their holdings from 8,700
square miles to 35,000 square miles by taking it from the Dinka.
7. Law
Like the Australian Aborigines, the East African cattle peoples
have not had a written law, and this led many early observers to conclude
that they had no law. With regard to the Nuer, for example, Evans-
Pritchard concluded that, "in a strict sense, the Nuer have no law.'"?’ As
Washington Academy of Sciences
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noted above, this means that, in cases of personal disputes within the
tribe, justice must be sought by individuals, and this can and does lead to
violent conflict. There are, however, conventional compensations for a
wide range of disputes, and one can speak of "law" among the Nuer in the
sense of "a moral obligation to settle disputes by conventional methods,
and not in the sense of legal procedure or legal institutions.'"°? This
traditional Nuer civil law addresses reparations or punishments with
regard to damages, adultery, loss of limb, and so on, and it has, in recent
times, been recognized by the Sudanese government.*”
8. Leopard Skin Chief
When members of the tribe are in conflict and cannot resolve it
without an arbiter, then they may go to the elders or, more ideally, to a
figure that Evans-Pritchard called the Leopard Skin Chief, who is not a
political leader but a mediator. The Nuer are essentially acephalous,
which means that they have no central authority or permanent leaders.
The Leopard-Skin Chief will try to persuade the conflicted parties to settle
the dispute by means of a cattle transfer, which can serve as
compensation.
9. Age Sets.
The reason everyone respects the Leopard Skin Chief is because
of the age set system. The age set system refers to the group of people
who are promoted together through the same sequence of age-grades, or
culturally designated stages of life. Among the Cattle People, these age
grades include boyhood, warriorhood, elderhood, and _ retirement.
Transitions from one grade to the next are marked by rituals, such as
circumcision, incisions on the forehead, and so on. The age-class system
is very important in an acephalous society, because it creates an
egalitarian society by regulating the rights, privileges, and responsibilities
between men who might otherwise find themselves in frequent conflict.
The underlying principle of male age classes is that every male enjoys the
same potential to be a warrior, marry, raise a family, officiate at rituals,
and so on, and these potential experiences are realized in orderly sequence
because he is a member in an age-set in which these rights are jointly
shared. This may either eliminate or at least minimize political struggle
between individuals because of the shared experiences the age-sets create.
The Leopard Skin Chief often presides at rites and ceremonies associated
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with transitions from one age-set to another. Because of his role of
presiding in life-transitions, he is seen as having some authority to
mediate.
10. Belief in spirits.
Spirits are mediators of this entire system. The belief of the people
in these spirits gives authority to the Leopard Skin Chief, and it conveys
moral authority to the whole system.)
The foregoing salient features of the Australian Aborigines and the
African cattle people are not random, but are all particularly related to the
sustainable way of life practiced by both groups. These features allow
each of these people groups to live together without a "leader" per se.
Other cases of small-scale societies could be examined, but these are
sufficient to allow for a cost-benefit analysis of domestic-scale culture.
In Praise of Domestic-Scale Cultures
In this essay we have used a culture-scale organized according to
power systems: domestic, political, and commercial. In each of these
kinds of societies, power is organized differently. While anthropology
tends to avoid making value judgments, Bodley suggests that we can
evaluate the effectiveness of different cultures according to five universal
variables.** These include: (1) human health and well-being; (2) social
cohesion; (3) population stability; (4) natural resources and ecosystems;
and (5) cultural continuity. If a culture facilitates these five variables, then
a positive evaluation can be reached. If it undermines them, a negative
evaluation must be assessed.
As we have seen in the foregoing study, domestic-scale cultures
are small-scale societies in which social power is maintained and
dispersed at the household level. The focus in a domestic-scale culture is
on the well-being of the household, and its primary culture process is
sapienization. This means that the members within the society are enabled
to focus on the sapienization process. And such a focus generally
produces a rich, strong, and durable cultural identity.
Domestic-scale culture also _ facilitates autonomy and
egalitarianism. When family groups in a society do not have to worry
about producing a taxable surplus to send to a government, then each
Washington Academy of Sciences
19
household is able to control its own material resources, and production
and distribution are managed in the domestic sphere. Furthermore, in a
domestic-scale culture, systems of social support for households are
provided by networks of kin. This means that, while social power may
vary based on the size and shape of individual families and their kinship
support networks, the households in the community have roughly equal
social power.
Early humankind lived almost exclusively in small-scale, self-
sufficient local societies based initially on mobile foraging and later on
sedentary village life. Hunter-gatherer societies have been referred to as
the “original affluent societies,’** because historically they actually
worked relatively little — perhaps four or five hours a day.** Many people
in contemporary society work 12-14 hours a day to earn their living,
working to produce a profit-making commodity for a commercial
enterprise in which they have no ownership. Conversely, those in
domestic-scale cultures were in control of their own food sources. They
did not produce a taxable surplus, but were subsistence-level societies.
These features of domestic-scale culture comport with the five
universal variables enumerated above. Domestic-scale culture facilitated:
(1) human health and well-being; (2) social cohesion; (3) population
stability; (4) natural resources and ecosystems; and (5) cultural continuity.
In many respects, domestic-scale culture appears to provide an ideal
setting for the development of stable and generally egalitarian societies.
Today it is widely assumed that growth leads inevitably to
increases in culture-scale, and that the features of larger scale societies
represent “progress” and therefore must be beneficial. While my purpose
in this paper is primarily to understand domestic-scale cultures
functionally, it can be observed that increases in scale bring scalar
stresses, and some of these are clearly not to the advantage of the
household.*? Bodley observes that “the persistence of no-growth tribal
peoples into the twenty-first century with their relatively egalitarian social
systems still intact demonstrates that perpetual growth is not inevitable,
and offers a model of successful small-scale corporate communities
operating democratically in support of the humanization process.”
Modern peoples living in commercial-scale cultures can learn
from these successful tribal peoples. In concluding his study of complex
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20
communities in early Iron Age West Central Jordan, Benjamin Porter
praises small-scale societies, and suggests that “archaeologists have an
opportunity to tell different stories about how past communities found
common cause around tangible issues such as subsistence and survival.’”*’
I would add that we can also tell the stories of the ways in which
domestic-scale societies built strong and stable communities by
empowering families and households, facilitating autonomy and
egalitarianism, and building a shared culture.** In the case of the settlers
in the highlands of Canaan during the transition from the Late Bronze
Age to the Iron Age I, it facilitated their stability for nearly two centuries
before outside pressures triggered their transition into a political-scale
culture.*”
'T would like to thank the anonymous peer-reviewer of this article, who provided
feedback that was essential for 1ts accuracy and overall improvement. Any
shortcomings that may remain are the fault of this author alone. The citation method
follows that in The SBL Handbook of Style: For Biblical Studies and Related
Disciplines (2° ed.; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014).
> R. K. Hawkins, How Israel Became a People (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013), 25-
Pde
3 e.g., R. L. Carneiro and S. L. Tobias, "The Application of Scale Analysis to Cultural
Evolution," Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences (Series II) 26 (1963),
196-207; V. G. Childe, Piecing Together the Past (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1956); L. Freeman, "An Empirical Test of Folk-Urbanism," (Ann Arbor:
University Microfilms No. 23, 502); M. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society
(New York: Random House, 1967); A. W. Johnson and T. Earle, On the Evolution of
Human Societies: From Foraging Groups to Agrarian State (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1987); C. McNett, Jr., "A Settlement Pattern Scale of Cultural
Complexity," in A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology (ed. R. Naroll and
R. Cohen; Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1973), 872-886; R. Marsh,
Comparative Sociology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); R. Naroll, "A
Preliminary Index of Social Development," American Anthropologist 58 (1956), 687-
715; M. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968); E.
Service, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective (New Y ork:
Random House, 1962); J. Steward, Theory of Culture Change (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1955).
* G. Gibbon, Anthropological Archaeology (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 347-48.
Washington Academy of Sciences
21
> J. H. Bodley, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System (4" ed.;
Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005), 18-29.
° E.g., George Murdock, “Evolution in Social Organization,” in Evolution and
Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (B. Meggers, ed.; Washington, D.C.: The
Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), 126-43; idem., Ethnographic Atlas
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967); idem., “Ethnographic Atlas: A
Summary,” Ethnology 6 (1967): 109-236.
’E. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).
* Hawkins, How Israel Became a People, 189-206.
” J. Flood, The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin Academic, 2007); J. Isaacs, Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of
Aboriginal History (Johannesburg: New Holland Publishing, 2006);
'© J. H. Bodley, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System (5" ed.;
Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), 68.
'! Cf. G. E. Lenski, Power & Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratificiation (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 94-116.
'? Even though the British acknowledged the presence of indigenous peoples when they
arrived in Australia, they assumed that they did not own land, since they did not see
fences marking land ownership. They concluded that the Aborigines were too
“primitive” to have any conception about the ownership of land, and that the land
was therefore Terra nullius, from the Latin, meaning “nobody’s land.” This
assumption was formalized in British colonial law, and remained in place until 1992,
when the so-called Mabo judgment dispelled the notion of Australia as Terra nullius.
The notion was revised over time and eventually acknowledged as plainly wrong.
Even though the Aborigines did not mark their land in ways that were obvious to the
British at the time of the European invasion, they did indeed own land and passed it
down primarily through a patrilineal system. Cf. S. Banner, “Why Terra Nullius?
Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia,” in Law and History Review 23
(2005): 95-131; B. Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made
Australia (Sydney, AU: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 157-304; A. Hamilton, “Descended
from Father, Belonging to Country: Rights to Land in the Australian Western
Desert,” in Traditional Aboriginal Society (W. H. Edwards, ed.; South Yarra, AU:
Macmillan Education Australia, 1998), 90-108.I. Keen, ed., /ndigenous Participation
in Australian Economies: Historical and Anthroplogical Perspectives (Canberra:
ANU Press, 2010); F. R. Myers, “Always Ask: Resource Use and Land Ownership
among Pintupi Aborigines of the Australian Western Desert,” in Traditional
Aboriginal Society (W. H. Edwards, ed.; South Yarra, AU: Macmillan Education
Australia, 1998), 30-46; W. E. H. Stanner, “Aboriginal Territorial Organization:
Estate, Range, Domain and Regime,” Oceania 36/1 (1965): 1-26.
13 F. D. McCarthy and M. McArthur, "The Food Quest and Time Factor in Aboriginal
Economic Life," in Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to
Arnhem Land (vol. 2 of Anthropology and Nutrition, ed. C. Mountford; Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1960), 145-94.
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2D,
'4 Cf. R. B. Bird, D. W. Bird, B. F. Codding, C. H. Parker, and J. H. Jones, “The ‘Fire
Stick Farming’ Hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal Foraging Strategies, Biodiversity,
and Anthropogenic Fire Mosaics,” PNAS 105/39 (2008): 14796-801; Gammage, The
Biggest Estate on Earth, 92-93, 163-85, 203-22; R. Jones, “Fire-Stick Farming,”
Australian Natural History 16/7 (1969): 224-31; S. J. Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire
History of Australia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.
'S In recent years, some scholars have challenged the theory that Australian Aboriginals
did not have agriculture. Of particular interest is the work of Bruce Pascoe who,
drawing on historical sources and diaries of Australian explorers, examines the ways
that Aboriginals harvest, grind, cook, and store food. Cf. B. Pascoe, Dark Emu. Black
Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Broome, Western Australia: Magbala Books, 2014).
16 B. Malinowski, The Family among the Australian Aborigines (New Y ork: Shocken
Books, 1963), 235.
17J. B. Birdsell, "A Basic Demographic Unit," Current Anthropology 14/4 (1973) 337-
50.
18 Cf. G. Cowlinshaw, “Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia,” Oceania 48/4 (1978): 262-
83.
19 Cf. S. Nanda and R. L. Warms, Cultural Anthropology (10th ed.; Belmont, CA.:
Wadsworth, 2011), 76-78.
20 G. E. Lenski, Power & Privilege, (U. of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1966) 98.
*I J. H. Steward, "The Economic and Social Basis of Primitive Bands," in Essays in
Anthropology in Honor of Alfred Louis Kroeber (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1936), 331-50.
2H. Arden, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995); R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, The Speaking Land: Myth
and Story in Aboriginal Australia (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1994); J.
Lambert, ed., Wise Women of the Dreamtime: Aboriginal Tales of Ancestral Powers
(Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1993); A. W. Reed, Aboriginal Myths: Tales of
the Dreamtime (Chatswood, AU: New Holland Publishing, 2006); W. R. Smith,
Myths and Legends of the Australian Aborigines (New Y ork: Dover Publications,
2003).
3 C. Mountford, Ayers Rock: Its People, Their Beliefs, and Their Art (Honolulu: East-
West Center Press, 1965).
*4 For the history, see C. Cunneen and T. Libesman, Indigenous People and the Law in
Australia (Sydney: Butterworths, 1995).
> Australian Law Reform Commission, The Recogntion of Aboriginal Customary Laws,
Report No. 31 (Canberra: AGPS Press, 1986) (3 vols).
°° See the papers and bibliographies in E. Johnston, M. Hinton and D. Rigney, eds.,
Indigenous Australians and the Law (Sydney: Cavendish, 1997).
Washington Academy of Sciences
23
*7 See the articles on the “Dreaming,” “law,” and “mythology” in D. Horton, ed., The
Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
History, Society, and Culture (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994); J. Jupp,
ed., The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their
Origins (2™ ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); S. Kleinert and M.
Neale, The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); M. D. Prentis, A Concise Companion to Aboriginal History
(Kenthurst: Rosenberg Publishing, 2008);
** Australian Law Reform Commission, "Traditional Aboriginal Society and Its Law," in
Traditional Aboriginal Society (2° ed.; ed. W. H. Edwards; Melbourne: MacMillan,
1998), 213-26.
°° M. Herskovits, "The Cattle Complex in East Africa," American Anthropologist 28/1
(1926), 230-72.
°° E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940).
*! Cf. S. McKinnon, “Domestic exceptions: Evans-Pritchard and the Creation of Nuer
Patrilineality and Equality,” Cultural Anthropology 15/1 (2000): 35-83.
*? M. D. Sahlins, "The Segmentary Lineage: And Organization of Predatory Expansion,"
American Anthropologist 63 (1961), 322-43.
33 Rvans-Pritchard, The Nuer, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) 240.
*4 Cf. further, S. McKinnon, “The Economies in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture:
Origin Stories in Kinship Theory,” in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship
Studies (S. Franklin and S. McKinnon, eds.; Durham: Duke University Press, 2001),
277-301.
3° Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) 110-13.
36 In Tanzania, for example, the Maasai support 2-6 people per square kilometer.
37 B. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) 162.
38 B. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) 162-68.
39 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) 168. See
also articles related to law and justice in H. L. Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds.,
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (5
vols.; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); F. A. Irele and B. Jeyifo, eds.,
The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010). For focused studies, see S. Eboh, An African Concept of Law and Order: A
Case Study of Igbo Traditional Society (Oslo: IKO Press, 2004); M. A. Mohamed,
T. Dietz, and A. G. Mohamed, eds., African Pastoralism: Conflict, Institutions and
Government (London: Pluto Press, 2001).
40 PP. Howell, A Manuel of Nuer Law: Being an Account of Customary Law, Its
Evolution and Development in the Courts Established by the Sudan Government
(London: Oxford University Press, 1954).
41 BR. B, Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
Spring 2016
* J. H. Bodley, The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach (Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 2003), 15-17.
43M. Sahlins, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” in Man the Hunter (ed. R. B.
Lee and I. DeVore; New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), 85-89.
4 McC arthy and McArthur, “The Food Quest and Time Factor in Aboriginal Economic
Life,” 145-94. Cf. also M. Rolls and Murray Johnson, “Economy,” in Historical
Dictionary of Australian Aborigines (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2011), 67-
69.
4S John H. Bodley, “Socioeconomic Growth, Culture Scale, and Household Well Being,”
Current Anthropology 40/5 (1999), 597-98.
46 Bodley, The Power of Scale, (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003) 258.
*” Benjamin W. Porter, Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West
Central Jordan (Tuscan: The University of Arizona Press, 2013), 147.
*? For a more substantial discussion of the implications of scale for contemporary society
and what we can learn from indigenous cultures, see Bodley, 7he Power of Scale,
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003) 235-62.
°° Cf. Hawkins, How Israel Became a People, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013) 189-
206.
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Bio
Ralph K. Hawkins (Ph.D., Andrews University) is an associate professor
of Biblical and Archaeological Studies at Averett University. He is the
author of The Iron Age I Structure on Mt. Ebal: Excavation and
Interpretation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012) and How Israel
Became a People (Nashville: Abingdon, 2013).
Spring 2016
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Washington Academy of Sciences
3]
Probiotics for Plants? What the PPFMs Told Us and
Some Ideas about How to Use Them
Mark A. Holland
Salisbury University
Abstract
PPFMs are Pink-Pigmented Facultatively Methylotrophic bacteria of the
genus, Methylobacterium. They are found ubiquitously on plant surfaces and
are horizontally transmitted through seed from one generation to the next.
Given their persistent association with plants, it is reasonable to ask whether
their presence is of any significance to the plant. This is a question that has
consumed the members of my laboratory for the past twenty five years. In
this review of some of the lessons learned from these bacteria, we will present
evidence that the PPFMs are a significant member of the plant microbiome,
functioning as a probiotic for the plants on which they live. We also focus on
ways in which this bacterium can be manipulated to alter plant performance
for the benefit of agriculture. Information on the isolation and culture of the
PPFM bacteria can be found in Holland ef al. (2000).
PPFM bacteria are transmitted vertically through seed and seeds
cured of their bacteria no longer germinate properly
EARLY EXPERIMENTS ON THE PPFMS demonstrated that they are seed-
borne. This was something of a revelation since conventional wisdom told
us that the interiors of fruits and seeds were a sterile environment A paper
from Rodrigues Periera ef al. (1972) convinced us not only that there were
reliable mechanisms for the natural bacterization of developing seeds, but
that there were some simple methods for disinfestation. The simplest of these
is to heat the dry seeds in a 50°C oven for 48h. This treatment reduces the
microbial population to a few percent of its natural state. Soybean, Glycine
max, seeds thusly treated display lowered rates of germination and slow
development. Significantly, these effects were reversed by bacterization with
a culture of the PPFMs (Fig.la). Lingering doubts about the possibility that
heat treatment itself was responsible for reduced germinability were
addressed when PPFMs were removed from Arabidopsis thaliana seeds by
a treatment with PPFM-specific phages (previously unpublished). Phage-
soaked seeds show reduced germinability and slow development; these are
reversed by washing and bacterization with a fresh culture (Fig. 1b).
Spring 2016
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1
ted
i
i
unheated _ healed 48h
| PPFMs added _ PPEMs addod
Figure 1. a. soybean seeds
heat treated to remove PPFM
bacteria. Untreated controls
upper left; PPFMs removed
upper right; PPFMss first
removed, then replaced lower
right; controls with PPFMs
added lower left.
b. Arabidopsis seeds: controls
left, PPFMs removed by phage
right. c. aged Kidney Beans,
50% germination left; PPFMs
added, 82% germination right.
d. Rice untreated left,
bacterized with PPFMss right.
e. Soybean seedlings, treated
as in “a.” above.
Washington Academy of Sciences
33
These experiments suggested to us that sometimes seeds may fail to
germinate not because they have lost viability, but because their bacterial
population has been compromised.
Experiments with seeds obtained from the National Seed Storage Lab
(Ft. Collins, CO) demonstrated that this may indeed be the case. Samples of
moribund seeds along with fresh controls of the same genotype were
subjected to germination tests with and without bacterization with the
PPFMs. Results from a representative experiment are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: The effect of PPFM bacterization on the germination of moribund seeds of
safflower, Carthamus tinctorius. (n=50 for each treatment)
Seed Quality Were PPFMs added?
The germination rate of old seeds was increased dramatically by
bacterization. These results have since been confirmed using a larger number
of samples obtained from the Maryland Department of Agriculture Seed
Testing Lab. Seeds that had been germ-tested by them and then stored for
several years before disposal were bacterized in our lab and then re-tested.
Representative results from an experiment on kidney bean, Phaseolus
vulgaris, are shown in Fig.1c. [Bacterization can be as simple as soaking dry
seeds in a culture of the PPFMs for several hours before germination.
Bacterization with a washed suspension of the bacteria and/or vacuum
infiltration of seeds have also been done, but these are not generally more
effective treatments. Treatment of seeds with spent bacterial media is not an
effective substitute for treatment with the bacteria themselves. | In retrospect,
it occurs to us that conditions considered poor for seed storage (warm and
wet) are also poor for maintaining the viability of PPFMs on seeds. In a test
of Accelerated Aging (AOSA Seed Vigor Testing Handbook 1983), PPFM
populations decline suggesting that a loss of bacteria may be the basis for
Spring 2016
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this test’s utility in predicting seed storability. Indeed, bacterization may be
a useful method for extending or improving the shelf life of seeds.
Other applications of bacterization for the seed industry might be as
a component of osmoconditioning (priming) protocols and as a value-added
processing step in seed production. Osmoconditioning is a process aimed at
improving the rate of germination and synchronizing development of seeds
(Kahn ef al. 1980, Georghiou 1987). Because the bacteria play a role in both
germination and development, bacterization during osmoconditioning can be
expected to improve the effectiveness of the treatment.
Plant growth and development — especially root development- is
altered in cured plants.
Figure Id illustrates the effect of bacterization on the development of
rice, Oryza sativa. Note the overall increase in plant height and the increased
root mass. Quantitative experiments on root/shoot ratios show the specific
influence of the PPFMs on root development in soybean (Table 2).
Table 2. Effects of heating and PPFMs on germination and root development in
soybean. (n=50 for each treatment)
Treatment
Heat (50°C, 48 hours)
0
0.1
4
6
y)
Differences in soy development are also illustrated in Fig.le, where
treatments similar to those illustrated in Fig.1a were applied before planting
(Butler 2001). A recent work by Cervantes-Martinez ef al. (2004) shows
similar positive effects in Agave of PPFM bacterization.
During the early and mid-nineties, work from Nonomura and Benson
(1992) stirred interest in the stimulation of plant growth following
application of foliar methanol. Because the PPFMs are methylotrophic, we
wondered whether these effects were due to stimulation of the bacteria rather
Washington Academy of Sciences
35
than to direct influences on plant metabolism. In a greenhouse experiment,
our lab showed that soy seedlings growing with reduced PPFM populations
did not respond to foliar methanol (unpublished). These observations led to
large scale field trials described below.
PPFM bacteria produce a full spectrum of plant growth regulators in
metabolically meaningful amounts
Early experiments showed us that the PPFMs were producing
cytokinins. This was not surprising since cytokinin production was well
known from many plant-associated bacteria. Koenig ef al. (2002) elucidated
the metabolic pathway responsible for cytokinin production in the PPFMs.
What was a surprise was the demonstration that tissue-extractable levels of
cytokinin (trans-zeatin and its riboside) were directly correlated with the size
of the PPFM population on the plant (Butler 2001). This finding led us to
suggest that perhaps cytokinins are not produced by plants at all, but are
exclusively produced by bacterial symbionts (Holland 1997). At the time this
was suggested, genes for cytokinin biosynthesis in plants had not been
identified. Such genes have subsequently been described (Kakimoto 2001).
As a result, the contribution of bacteria to the plants’ cytokinin profile has
since largely been ignored by the plant biology community. We suspect that
an appreciation of the contribution of bacteria to the production of plant
growth regulators will only come along with greater appreciation in general
for the role of the plant microbiome in plant biology.
By no means are cytokinins the only growth regulator produced by
the PPFMs. Ivanova ef al. (2001) demonstrated auxin production. Siddikee
et al. (2010) showed gibberellic acid production and this was confirmed in
our lab (Miller, unpublished data). Effects on PPFMS on ethylene production
have been shown by Madhatyan ef al. (2006) and by Ardanov ef al. (2010).
PPFM bacteria contribute to crop performance
One of the biggest influences on yield in soy is the success of seed
set, a cytokinin-influenced process. In our part of the country (Maryland,
Mid-Atlantic coast) the timing of seed set often occurs at the hottest and
driest time of year, compromising yield. In field trials, we tested whether the
foliar application of methanol described above and/or the foliar application
of active PPFM cultures during seed set would have positive effects on yield
Spring 2016
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(Munsanje 1999). These experiments were stunningly successful. At best,
we saw a 70% increase in yield over controls and at worst, al5% increase.
PPFM bacteria have also been demonstrated to play a role in plant
fertility. Given that the PPFM bacteria are reliably vertically transmitted by
seed, any effects of the bacteria on plant phenotype should give the
appearance of maternal (cytoplasmic) inheritance. So it is reasonable to ask
whether any familiar maternal traits are influenced by the PPFMs. One such
trait is cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS). This trait is not uncommonly seen
and several cases of CMS have been attributed to mitochondrial mutations.
However, a search of the literature found a case of CMS in barley where
CMS was correlated with abnormally low levels of cytokinin (Ahokas 1982).
In our lab, PPFM bacteria were isolated form the CMS and wild-type lines
of this barley and assayed for cytokinin production. In repeated tests the
bacterial isolated from CMS barley only secreted one tenth the amount of
cytokinin secreted by the bacteria isolated from the wild type. When PPFMs
from the wild type barley were used to bacterize seeds from the CMS line,
the plants regained fertility. These experiments suggest a simple strategy for
the production of Fl hybrids from some of our most intractable crops, the
grasses (U.S. Patent 7,435,878). Experiments aimed at developing this
technology for breeding are ongoing.
PPFMs have also been implicated in the development of disease
resistance in several crops (Madhatyan ef al. 2004).
PPFM bacteria are partners in plant metabolism
Some of our earliest experiments with the PPFMs in soybean
demonstrated a cross-kingdom pleiotropic effect of bean mutations on
bacterial phenotype (Holland and Polacco 1992). The delivery of nickel
essential for urease function in the PPFM bacteria 1s dependent on a
functional nickel chaperonin in the soybean (Freyermuth 2000).
Experiments in our lab on tobacco seedlings suggested the possibility
that PPFMs on plant surfaces contribute to plant nutrition through nitrogen
fixation. PPFMs were shown to grow under anaerobic conditions with
atmospheric nitrogen as their only nitrogen source. Tobacco seedlings
harboring normal PPFM populations accumulated only 55% as much
chlorophyll when starved for nitrogen as controls while nitrogen-starved
tobacco seedlings cured of their PPFMs accumulated only 29% as much
Washington Academy of Sciences
37
chlorophyll as controls (previously unpublished data from McGrath and
Holland 2000). Nitrogen fixation by certain species of the PPFMs has also
been shown in root and stem nodules of Crotolaria (Sy ef al. 2001) and
Lotononus (Jourand et al. 2004). New data extend these observations to the
un-nodulated leaf surfaces of Jatropha (Madhaiyan 2015). The significance
of diazotrophic feeding on the leaf surfaces of plants is heretofore almost
completely unknown but may be of great significance in global carbon
cycling given the ubiquitous distribution of the PPFMs.
The flavor and fragrance of strawberry was found to depend on
presursors produced by PPFM symbionts (Zabetakis 1997). These results
suggest the possibility that PPFMs might be identified that alter metabolism
in useful ways. As a step in the value-added processing of seeds,
bacterization might be expected to help seed and plant performance under
adverse environmental conditions, but might also impart different flavors,
fragrances, or nutritional value to seeds used as foodstuffs themselves. In our
lab, PPFM mutants that over-produce and secrete vitamin B12 and mutants
that over-produce and secrete methionine were isolated and used to bacterize
seeds of lettuce and soybean respectively (Witzig and Holland 1998, 1999).
In these experiments, lettuce accumulated enough Vitamin B12 to provide
the RDA for this nutrient in a dinner salad. Soybean accumulated 16% more
bound methionine in seed protein than controls. Additional mutants, a folate
overproducer, for example, are currently being isolated.
A recent paper from Indian colleagues illustrates a benefit to using
psychrotropic bacteria on wheat to improve cold-tolerance (Verma ef al.
2015). Experiments in our lab are ongoing in these areas as well.
The effects of PPFM bacteria extend to other plants and other
environments
Recently, the lab has begun to look at the influence of PPFM bacteria
on plants in aquatic and marine environments, especially algae. The algae
are responsive to the same growth regulators as terrestrial plants
(Tarakhovskaya ef al. 2007). These are the same growth regulators secreted
by the PPFMs. Many of the micro-algae are auxotrophic for Vitamin B12
(Croft et al. 2005) and are thought to meet this nutritional requirement
through symbiotic associations with bacteria. The B12- and growth
regulator-secreting PPFMs are easily isolable from aquatic and marine
Spring 2016
38
sources. Moreover, it appears that PPFM populations are correlated with the
presence of micro-algae. It is difficult to show a specific and physical
relationship between micro-algae and PPFMs, but this is certainly a
reasonable hypothesis. Co-cultivation of the freshwater micro-algae,
Neochloris and Chlamydomonas with PPFMs showed a dramatic increase in
growth rate of the algae (unpublished data). The algae grown in this way also
accumulated substantially higher levels of oil than controls, especially as
nitrogen became depleted in the culture (Davis and Holland 2010). Building
on these experiments, another of my students co-cultivated marine
microalgae used as feedstock for oyster aquaculture with PPFMs,
demonstrating increased growth rates as well as substantial improvements in
nutritional content (manuscript in preparation).
Conclusions
When we first became aware of the PPFM bacteria, we asked the
question: “Is there more to Plant Physiology than just Plant?” (Holland and
Polacco 1994). Numerous experiments performed over the past twenty-five
years in our lab and others have demonstrated the probiotic activities of
PPFM bacteria on plants. Given their ubiquitous distribution in significant
numbers, the PPFMs play an unappreciated, but important role in plant
biology and in global biogeochemical cycles. Manipulations of their
populations can be expected to alter plant performance from seed to fruit.
Bacterization of seeds or foliar applications to growing plants offers a low-
tech biotech way to alter plant performance, improve growth, change the
nutritional profile or add new characteristics to an established variety.
Washington Academy of Sciences
39
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Lajudie. 2004. Methylobacterium nodulans sp. nov., for a group of aerobic,
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4]
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50 179-183.
BIO
Mark Holland has three alma maters, Muhlenberg College (B.S. ’75), Wake
Forest University (M.A. ’79) and Rutgers University (PhD. ‘85). After a
post-doctoral stint at the University of Missouri, he assumed a position at
Salisbury University, where he teaches in the Department of Biological
Sciences and continues to wrestle with the PPFM bacteria and their plant
host/partners. He is a member of the American Society of Plant Biologists
and the Washington Academy of Sciences. He has served in the past as a
vice-president and president of the Academy.
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Washington Academy of Sciences
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Twilight of the Gods of Oil
Peter F. Varadi
P/V Enterprises Inc. Chevy Chase, MD - USA
Abstract
For most of the past 43 years OPEC, the association of Big Oil exporters, and
the big international oil companies controlled our lives. After the oil embargo
in 1973, OPEC and the large oil companies discovered that they can regulate
the price of oil because it has an upward elasticity. The OPEC price of a
barrel of oil in 1973 was $5.43 and by 2011 it was over $100. It stayed at that
level until the middle of 2014 when it started to decline. Now it is down to
around $30. There are several explanations as to what caused this reversal in
price, and the question is whether the price of oil will stay down and if so for
how long. The most important question, however, is what effect this reversal
will have on OPEC and on the Big Oil. Will they be able to adapt themselves
to the new realities? This is the issue this paper is discussing.
Introduction
OIL AND GASOLINE once were considered commodities much like milk,
flour or sugar. Gas stations tried to attract more customers by giving them
gifts like mugs or drinking glasses. Gas station attendants pumped gasoline,
checked fluid levels under the hood, washed car windows, checked the tire
pressure. This idyllic life for drivers started to end in 1973 when the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised oil
prices by 70% and OAPEC, the Arab part of OPEC, instituted an oil
embargo!. They realized their immense power to show that everyday life is
unimaginable without oil and found out the upward elasticity of the price of
oil. Big Oil, the expression used to identify the world’s seven
largest publicly owned oil companies, discovered that only the sky is the
limit for oil prices and started to drill for more oil independent of the cost.
What is not being realized yet is that oil is again becoming a commodity.
The questions are why this is happening now and what are going to be the
results?
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OPEC
OPEC was initiated in 1960 by five countries and by the 1970s had
12 members who controlled the flow of oil and its price. Everybody
remembers the 1973 oil crisis which ushered in a recession in the US and
other countries. In the following years OPEC regularly made threats and on
at least one occasion caused another crisis, in 1979. They forgot the age old
saying that one should not make war with one’s customers. The customers
will react somehow. And they did — as is evident from the fact that
today among the World’s top 10 oil producing countries only four are
members of OPEC and the USA, which was the hardest hit by the 1973 “oul
embargo”, now exceeds in oil production the legendary oil producer Saudi
Arabia by no less than 12.5% and the Russian Federation by 29%. Among
the 20 oil producing countries with daily production over 1,000,000 bbl/day
there are only 10 OPEC countries.
A case in point is Brazil, where crude oil production 1n 1980 was
182,000 bbl/day (barrels per day) and by 2014 catapulted to 2,950,000
bbl/day — more than is produced in the OPEC countries Kuwait, Venezuela
and Nigeria.
OPEC 1s at a point where it 1s falling apart. It consists now ofa group
of haves and have-nots. The have-nots want the largest, Saudi Arabia, to
decrease production but they do not understand that we are not in the good
old days anymore. There is now plenty of oil and the new exploration
method, fracking, has turned the table around.
The conclusion is, as BP Chief Economist Spencer Dale said
recently*, “OPEC is simply powerless’. If this would be the script of a
movie about OPEC, the next frame would have only two words “THE
END”.
Big Oil
Corporate culture
The Big Oil, international oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell,
Chevron, BP, Total and others have also gone past their zenith and started
on their twilight journey. In the future they may either transform themselves
(as some German utility companies are attempting to do) or become
immaterial, as happened to companies such as Kodak, RCA, Xerox,
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Polaroid and many others — names the present generation does not even
remember.
The similarity between these forgotten companies is that they all
rode up to the top and then went down and became oblivious. The reason
was not that people stopped making photographs or buying TV sets or
making copies of their papers — the reason was that they started doing these
things differently, and the companies’ “corporate culture’ made it
impossible for them to adapt.
Thus, for example, Kodak’s management and technical staff could
not believe that digital imaging could even threaten the traditional film
business. Their “corporate culture” did not let them do it and 124 years after
it was founded it filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
There are many similar examples. The conclusion is that the
destructive effect of the “corporate culture” is to prohibit companies from
moving into a new but related field which ultimately could make their
dominant business secondary or even obsolete. And that is happening now
with the Big Oil.
Drilling for Oil
John D. Rockefeller’s oil empire was structured to control the oil
refinery and distribution business. ExxonMobil, a descendant of
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, is still the largest refiner in the world. It is hard
to pinpoint the time when oil companies started to concentrate on finding
and producing more and more oil and gas. But by the 1960s they had
developed expertise and money to carry out very large projects, which came
to be the hallmark of the “corporate culture” of Big Oil.
Drilling to find oil started 156 years ago in 1859 in Pennsylvania
with the 69.5-foot (21.2 meter) deep “Drake well”. As demand increased
the oil companies developed technology to find new oil and gas reservoirs.
They had to go deeper and deeper to discover new oil formations, many of
them offshore under deep sea water, and lately even in the Arctic. Today a
great number of drilling rigs are being used which can operate in water
deeper than one mile (1,600 meters) and can drill to a depth of 5 miles
(9,000 meters) or below. In 2012 ExxonMobil completed the world’s
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deepest well on the Sakhalin shelf in the Russian Far East: 7.7 miles (12,376
meters) deep and 7.1 miles (11,426 meters) out under the ocean.
The cost of these deep and offshore drillings is unbelievably high.
The daily rental cost of a deep water drilling rig used for example in the
Gulf of Mexico is about $500,000 excluding other expenses. Because of
their expertise and wealth, this type of drilling assured Big Oil a dominant
position. The cost of drilling was immaterial because the upward elasticity
of the price of oil seemed to be infinite.
The price of oil (per barrel) at the beginning of 2000 was $25. This
lasted for 3 years when in 2003 it started to move higher. In 2005 it had
doubled and 3 years later in 2008 doubled again and reached $100. From
2008 the price of oil fluctuated between $90 and $110. However, by the
middle of 2014, the price started to decline sharply and by the beginning of
2015 it was $50 — half of what it was 6 months before. Since then it has
been in the $30 to $45 range, which was the price of a barrel of oil 11 years
ago (data: US Energy Information Administration).
The stability of the price of oil in the period of 2008 to mid-2014
prevailed in spite of increased usage in China and India and of interruptions
from major suppliers such as Libya, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela. These were
counterbalanced by improved efficiency of products using oil, such as cars,
switching from oil to natural gas in electric power stations and the beginning
of the tightening of policies related to global warming. The high price of oil
also encouraged more drilling and by now over 100 countries are producing
more than 1000 bbl/day.
A New Technology
But there was another reason why prices eventually came down, a
new technology called “fracking” to extract oil and gas from shale, which
started to be used on a large scale. Drilling for oil deeper and deeper at very
challenging locations became extremely expensive in comparison. It
required enormous amount of capital and therefore it was a small club which
was able to do it. Fracking required little money and therefore lots of
startups got in.
Fracking experiments, the injection of fluid into shale beds at high
pressure in order to free up petroleum resources (such as oil or natural gas)
Washington Academy of Sciences
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were started in the 1950s, but large scale usage first occurred in 1968. It was
then used mainly to improve the production of vertically drilled oil or gas
wells. When it was realized that oil and gas inclusions in shale were in many
cases horizontal and not vertical, horizontal “fracking” to create oil and gas
wells was started in the 1980s but more generally used from 1991 on.
Nonetheless in 2010 still only a negligible amount of oil was
produced in the US by fracking. Five years later, in the beginning of 2015,
close to 50% of US production was from fracking. To appreciate how much
oil is produced in the USA by “fracking” one should consider, that at the
beginning of 2015 daily production was somewhat more than the production
of two OPEC countries, Kuwait and Algeria, put together.
The Question Now Is Will Big Oil Find New Areas To Grow?
Fracking
Big Oil knew about this and could have easily branched into
fracking when it was still in its infancy. But Big Oil’s “corporate culture”
could not let them to believe that their well established and successful
drilling technology could be affected by shale fracking. As Big Oil ignored
it a number of small organizations were able to get started.
Shell, for example, ignored fracking for a long time. When they did
get in, they were, as Karel Beckman writes in his recent article’, “simply
unable to survive in this kind of highly competitive market in which small,
versatile players set the tone.” Please remember that Kodak also entered the
digital camera business belatedly, but had to close it because similarly they
could not compete with the many relatively small organizations which had
entered that field.
The story of Shell’s “Polar Pioneer”, the oil rig used to start the
exploitation of the very large oil resources in the Arctic, will be a famous
milestone in the history of Big Oil. Until the end of the summer of 2015,
Shell’s management seemed to still believe in Big Oil’s motto: “Damn the
cost of drilling and full steam ahead.” They towed the gigantic oil rig to the
Chukchi Sea, offshore Alaska, and paid $620,000 per day during the
summer drilling season, and $589,000 a day for the rest of the year, to lease
the rig.
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“Polar Pioneer” started drilling on July 30, 2015. But Shell
obviously realized that under the new market circumstances the exploitation
of Arctic oil will not be profitable and that this condition may last for a
decade or more. On September 27 the company announced that it
would pull back from oil exploration in Alaska and started to tow the Polar
Pioneer back to Seattle. We can mark this date, September 27, 2015, as a
famous milestone in the history of Big Oil, the day when the twilight of its
dominance started.
As Shell demonstrated the “corporate culture” of Big O1l makes it
unlikely that it will be able to adapt to the world of “fracking”. Another
problem is described in the recent book “The Price of Oil” by R.F. Aguilera
and M.Radetzki*. The world is headed for an era of oil “superabundance”
in which the low price of oil will prevail and oil produced with oil rigs
costing $500,000 per day can only be sold at a loss. This would mean not
only loss of profit but also lower revenues.
Renewable Energy
The oil companies could reverse this trend and diversify into the
field of renewable energy. But this will be difficult for them to do. I know
this from my own experience. As I describe in my recent book°, around
1973 the oil companies got involved in the solar photovoltaic business.
There were two reasons for this:
1. The fashionable doomsday reason: oil and gas will run out, solar
energy 1s permanent. Oil companies should get in now (in the 1970s)
to invest in the development of the continuation of their oil and gas
business.
2. The other reason was that a few leaders of the oil industry correctly
envisioned that PV, because of its decentralized nature, would become
_ an independent parallel energy source to oil and gas.
The terrestrial PV industry was started in 1973 but by the end of
1983 the major PV manufacturers in the world were all owned by oil
companies: AMOCO’s Solarex Corporation (USA); ARCO’s Arco Solar
(USA); Exxon’s Solar Power Corporation (SPC) (USA); BP’s BP
Solar International (UK).
Ultimately all of them got out of the PV business. Why? The major
reason is their “corporate culture”. To show the way they are thinking, this
Washington Academy of Sciences
49
is what ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson told investors on May 27, 2015,
explaining why the company isn’t investing in renewable energy: “We
choose not to lose money on purpose”.
It seems Mr. Tillerson was not informed that since 2000 over $500
billion was invested in solar (PV) alone, including by Warren Buffett’s
MidAmerican Energy investment of $2.0 billion to buy the 579 megawatts
Antelope Valley Solar Projects in California. Buffet is not known to lose
money on purpose.
As of losing money by investing in renewables, Mr. Tillerson was
also a little bit misinformed. Solar PV manufacturer “First Solar Inc.”
recorded sales in 2014 of $3,391,814,000 and made 8.5% profit which is a
little more than the 8.1% ExxonMobil made in the same year.
So for Big Oil to get back now to PV is the same as getting into
“fracking”.
Conclusion
In the old days when Big Oil calculated their odds in PV, their only
risk was that they would lose their investment, which was not much more
than the loss of a single dry hole. But even the minimum investment today
for Big Oil 1s much bigger. Two big oil companies are now in the PV
business but both are only minor participants.
Shell with Showa Shell Solar (Japan) was started in 2006,
manufacturing the thin film CIGS solar cell/module. The company was
renamed Solar Frontier in April 2010. Solar Frontier’s manufacturing
capacity will reach over 1 GW in 2015, which is about 3% of today’s global
PV manufacturing. The French oil company Total invested 1.1% of their
entire market capitalization to buy 60% of SunPower (a US PV
manufacturer). Today, if Occidental Petroleum (OXY) were to buy 60% of
SunPower (SPWR), Occidental would have to put up about 5.9% of its
entire market capitalization. If OXY were to buy 60% of Solar City (SCTY),
it would need to put up 7.2% of its market capitalization.
The Paris climate agreement makes it clear that the world will not
turn back on serious global warming policies. There do not seem to be many
options left for Big Oil. If they want to avoid the fate of Kodak, they could
split up like German utilities Eon and RWE did, and shed their drilling
Spring 2016
50
business, in the same way telephone companies did with their land line
business. After that the Big Oil in their twilight, they will have to compete
in a brave new world.
References
'D. Yergin — The Prize — Simon & Schuster, 1991, pp 606 — 632.
* §. Dales — London October 13, 2015 — www.EnergyPost.eu.
3K. Beckman: Exit Ahead — Shell at the end of the Oil Superhighway -
September 28, 2015 — www.EnergyPost.eu.
* R. F. Aguilera and M. Radetzki — The Price of Oil. Cambridge University
Press, 20115,
> A. Hoffman — Book Review — Sun Above the Horizon — Journal of the
Washington Academy of Sciences, 100, No. 2, 2014, pp. 21.
Bio
Peter F. Varadi is a Fellow of the Washington Academy of Sciences since
1982. He is the co-founder in 1973 of SOLAREX Corporation, Rockville,
MD (USA), which pioneered the use and production of solar cells (PV) for
terrestrial applications. By 1978 it had become the largest PV Company in
the world and it was sold to AMOCO in 1983. He recently wrote a history
of the solar industry, Sun Above the Horizon.
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