ABSTRACT
In sociology and particularly in social and cultural anthropology, one reason is that the perspectives of resources and action have not always been adequately interrelated, another is the devious notion of scarcity. While economists have conventionally studied how people allocate ‘scarce resources’, many anthropologists have questioned whether pre-industrial peoples allocate ‘scarce resources’ or ‘economize’ in resources. One type of interaction which thereby becomes susceptible to processual study is the synchronized allocation and economizing in several different resources put into human projects; an idea that can be generalized to the analysis of animal ecology or processes in nature as well. When resources are tied to their physical carriers, media or vehicles and when the latter are expressed as paths in time-space, it can be readily seen that due to constraints on divisibility and coupling, the limits to path allocation make it impossible to use all resources equally and fully due to different displacement effects.
