The Image of the Limited Good: A Lesson on the Striving for Communal and Human Solidarity

Abstract

This presentation deals with the essence and functions of the Image of limited good—a term invented by the famous American anthropologist, George Foster (1913-2006) in the early sixties, while studying in Tzintzuntzan; a Mexican rural village in western Mexico. Foster had shown that the image— an indication that a person who holds and employs greater means of subsistence, prestige, love, beauty, power, influence and vitality (however calculated) than the habitual average person, causes someone else to suffer from a scarcity of these means—functioned as a useful buffer against a possible disintegration of the rural community.
This hypothesis drew large waves of both critique and support. The critiques pointed out that Foster had tried to predicate an entire way of life on one generalizing and organizing concept, an unacceptable proposition in social research. His advocates found that Foster had effected a breakthrough toward a deep understanding of the lives of simple agrarian communities and of the creative ways that they had discovered to preserve the communal framework, which was important to them as a source of identity and belonging. These points have now been demonstrated convincingly by a series of studies of indigenous communities in Latin America and in other parts of the world, of the Israeli kibbutz, of Calvinist Holland, and of the conduct of civil-society organizations and modern bureaucratic attitudes toward the root causes of poverty. The paper concludes by suggesting a different organization of the issue, which views the Image of the Limited Good as a simple but efficient means employed by the poor or the weak to effect a more just distribution of material, cultural, and social wealth, under the conditions of competitive survival in the era of global capital.