The Wintu and Their Neighbors: A Very Small WorldSystem in Northern California

On the cutting edge of worldsystems theory comes The Wintu and Their Neighbors, the first case study to compare and contrast systematically an indigenous Native American society with the modern world at large. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, and history, Christopher ChaseDunn and Kelly M. Mann have scoured the archaeological record of the Wintu, an aboriginal people without agriculture, metallurgy, or class structure who lived in the wooded valleys and hills of northern California. By studying the household composition, kinship, and trade relations of the Wintu, they call into question some of the basic assumptions of prior sociological theory and analysis.ChaseDunn and Mann argue that Immanuel Wallersteins worldsystems perspective, originally applied only to the study of modern capitalistic societies, can also be applied to the study of the social, economic, and political relationships in small stateless societies. They contend that, despite the fact that the Wintu appear on the surface to have been a householdbased society, this indigenous group was in fact involved in a myriad of networks of interaction, which resulted in intermarriage and which extended for many miles around the region. These networks, which were not based on the economic dominance of one society over anothera concept fundamental to Wallersteins worldsystems theoryled to the eventual expansion of the Wintu as a cultural group.Thus, despite the fact that the Wintu did not behave like a modern societylacking wealth accumulation, class distinctions, and cultural dominanceChaseDunn and Mann insist that the Wintu were involved in a worldsystem and argue, therefore, that the concept of the minisystem should be discarded. They urge other scholars to employ this comparative worldsystems perspective in their research on stateless societies.