I knew from other readings that the Inuit across the northern regions of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland has a very complex material culture ("technology x art") in a very austere climate. The Inupiat are what you get when you take the "poor" Inuit and put them in a region with access to a lot of resources. Massive complexity in tools, practically a specialized tool or technique for everything and there is a large variety of activities the Inupiaq did.
For example, to kill wolves, they created a special tool called a isivrugaq or qagruqsaq. It was a piece of whale baleen sharpened at both ends, rolled and secured with sinew. They wrapped it in a piece of frozen meat and left it where they believed wolves would find it. Simply, the digestion of the sinew releases the indigestible baleen which punctures the digestive tract of the wolf.
They also created effective windlass systems to haul multi-ton beluga whales out of the water. In all of these tasks, they seem to have done what we (modern Westerners) do when we need to solve a problem: take what we have and create a tool to get the job done. One probable factor to their specificity, I believe, is simply because they learned how to take advantage of their climate and their resources and--unlike many hunter-gatherers--learned how to store food for a very long time.
This contrasts greatly with the simplicity of their social interactions. There were no great chiefs. The closest thing to a "chief" you could say existed was the head of a household. Given the fact many of the smaller settlements were essentially a group of related individuals through descent or marriage, the person in charge of a settlement would essentially be the head of the household.
A household, though, even in the larger settlements, wasn't usually a nuclear family. Instead, it was usually one or more "domestic families" made up of 2 or more nuclear families. These were often related by kinship, usually one or more pairs of siblings and possibly one or more surviving parents.
Within the domestic family, things were essentially egalitarian. As you might expect, many collective tasks were accomplished by the members of a domestic family. If you needed some help, you went to your family first and--if they could help--it was yours.
The strange part is how much cooperation there was among domestic families. In some cases, like harvesting whale or driving caribou, they would use large groups, several families' worth. Only here, they actually paid attention to whose was whose when came time to divvy up the spoils, even if no one had anything special to contribute.
Tied to this degree of cooperation were the ways they saw authority over others being derived. The primary one was skill. Simply, the older person was deferred to at the same time the expectation was the older was responsible for sharing the right way to do things with younger people. This held in families--even between siblings--as well as other social interactions. It also tied into deciding who would lead things such as war parties or cooperative hunts. The person in charge was typically the person everyone acknowledged was best at the common task.
A second way of authority was necessary specialized skills. In this way, a highly skilled harpooner garnered some level of authority on whale crews. Shamans and doctors were respected by and sought by others based on their skills. You could even argue that women were respected in society for having a different, essential skill set from men who were nominally more dominant.
Considering they didn't use money, what does this have to do with wage disparity?
I have a "leaky" mind when it comes to ideas. Basically, discussions or readings about one course's studies or a debate or a news article or anything else, for that matter, seem to leak into other lines of thought. Given the upcoming elections and all the discussions about taxes, I wondered what the Inupiaq would do about wage disparity.
Then I noticed it was already part of their culture.
First, there is an obvious difference. Even with the ability to store food for a long time and to make many complex items with real transitive wealth, the reality is those things of value the Inupiaq would consider wages degrade rather quickly with time and/or use. Though durable, it means--for them--wealth is as much a process more as a state of being. Inheritance of "stuff" tends to be tied to two things: the material goods held in common with the family and skills/abilities taught to others.
This tends to create--if you think about it--a potential limitation on wealth we don't really see in our culture. In their's, the payoff isn't accumulating stuff, it's sharing it with your family and others because the value of stuff goes away rather quickly.
Tied into that, the disparity of resources is often at the family level. Even when the wealth is derived from the skills and abilities of a single person, the mechanism of sharing in domestic and compound families (highly related although not living in same structure) diffuses the payoff a bit and allows a greater opportunity for others to connect to such a family. Additionally, because of the reliance on cooperative hunting and other activities for survival, the poorer people around often benefit from the wealthiness of the richer person.
I think this is where our culture has it's issues. The simple social disconnection between those that have and those that have not, often by simply disrupting the interdependence of people over time, seems to be the source of both the degree of wage disparity as well as the underlying cause(s) of poverty.
If I could do one thing and have everyone obey it, I think I might abolish the idea of the nuclear family. This simple action might compel people to build the familial and then social networks they need to survive over time. Understandably, it wouldn't be easy or even comfortable for some people. Dealing with a parent's or a young adult child's sexual behavior would wreak havoc on the psyche's of many, but it would probably reduce a number of other problems as well. Things like child neglect and abuse would be harder to hide.
So, that's my stump speech on wage disparity and I didn't even mention taxes...
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