George Foster's "Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good" was the second most cited journal article in anthropology between 1966 and 1982. It offered a theory about the "cognitive orientation of peasants." In plain English, it was an exercise in mind reading.
What interests me about Foster's model of the "Image of Limited Good" is that it was essentially an adaptation and expansion of the old lump-of-labor fallacy claim perennially made but never substantiated by economists. In Foster's case, the theory was "derived from observed behavior" -- or so he claimed. In a "brief communication" on the article, though, David Kaplan and Benson Saler complained that Foster "never tells us what he means by 'deriving' his model from 'observed behavior.'" They conclude that "the 'Image of Limited Good' is essentially a tautology." In stunning contrast to the abject conformism prevailing in economics regarding the lump-of-labor, Foster's limited good hypothesis was the subject of a great deal of controversy in anthropology. Responding to the study that found the article second most cited, Peter Hinton pointed out that the article "is frequently cited as an example of how not to go about understanding peasant societies." In spite of Foster's notion being little more than a restatement and re-situation of the centuries-old fallacy claim, there is no cross reference between advocates of one or the other. Anthropologists discussing limited good don't mention the lump of labor; economists invoking the lump of labor are oblivious to the controversy in anthropology. For more on this peculiar episode of cognitive compartmentalization see: http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.ca/2012/09/how-not-to-go-about-understanding.html -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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