W3C3: exchange and consumption Flashcards
Economic anthropology distinguises itself from economic science:
- Holism in anthropology: fundamentally different way of looking at the economy, since it’s so integrated in the ways of life
- the economy is an integrated part of a social and cultural totality: economic systems and actions can only be fully understood if we look into their interrelationships with other aspects of culture and society.
- Eriksen -> examples of different tribes
Formalist and substantivist approach to economy:
Formalist:
- About market principles, supply and demand
- Homo economicus, rational choice model, laws of demand an supply, cost-benefit analysis
- Dominant approach, this is how economic studies are done
- ‘Economism [=formalist approach] is a form of ethnocentrism […] it applies to [pre-capitalist or good faith economies], methods or concepts which are the historical product of capitalism’ (Bourdieu 1990: 112).
Substantivist:
- Simply look at how societies produce goods, circulate goods, and consume goods.
- ‘the economy [… is] the production, distribution and consumption of material and non-material valuables in society’ (Eriksen 2023: 304).
- Example of potlatch: doesn’t make sense from a formalist approach
Different views on ‘value’:
- Marx: distinguished between exchange value (had a monetary price) and use value (no monetary value, experienced through using/consuming)
- Anthropologists use the word value in three different ways:
1. Values in the philosophical or sociological sense (family values)
2. Value in the classic economic sene
3. Value in a specific linguistic sense, where value refers to a meaningful difference (as in values of variables in quantitative research)
Gifts are a total social phenomena:
- ‘Gift economies’ -> distribution of goods takes place with no fixed price.
- Within the household and the lineage, goods are distributed according to individual needs and rights, and gifts are also an important means of making contact with outsiders: a means of creating peace, friendship or political loyalty.
- Gifts are socially integrating at the same time as they define and reconfirm specified relationships between individuals.
Different (universal) mechanisms for circulation of goods, distinctions: (Polanyi)
Reciprocity:
- Exchanging goods of more or less of the same value
- Reciprocity is the dominant principle of distribution in gift economies such as those found in the relatively egalitarian societies
- Egalitarian principle
Redistribution
- Somebody at the centre of the economic system, collects goods, and redistribute them over the same people
- Centre of the economic system has power over others, hierarchy
Monetary economy / market exchange
- Using an intermediary like money, like our current economy
Forms of reciprocity:
Generalized reciprocity
- Can’t measure value, between very close friends, partners
- You don’t count how much you give and get, but you do develop a close social network
Balanced reciprocity
- You give something, and you expect more or less the same in return
Negative reciprocity
- More theoretical option: you don’t try to get a balance, but you try to get the most for yourself and as little as possible for the other
The great transformation
- Historically speaking, you started with reciprocity and redistribution and now more and more market systems. The rise of capitalism led to a complete transformation of the structure of society
Didn’t just happen -> was a struggle - ‘“the change from regulated to self-regulating markets at the end of the eighteenth century represented a complete transformation of the structure of society”’
- In the past, our economy were based in social relations. For market economies, economy is taken out of the sphere of social relations.
But: there are also advantages to capitalism. It liberated the exchanges from the clammy web of moral obligations, including hierarchy, entailed by reciprocity. May entail a liberation from feudal bonds
Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’ échange dans les sociétés archaiïques, 1923-1924. (The Gift)
- One of the most important works in anthropology, English title: The Gift. Has shaped our thinking about kinship systems, marriage, wife exchanges, politics
Gifts come with universal obligations, three obligations:
- To give away a gift
In many situations, people are obliged to give a gift.
It must also look like a gift, not like an economic exchange.
Birthdays: wrapping the gift, price tag removed, economic value is hidden or denied
- To accept a gift
The recipient is obliged to accept the gift - To return a gift
You’re obliged to give something in return, but not at the same time.
Bases his analysis on other studies, one of the studies he used was the Kula ring on the Trobriand islands (Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific):
- Kula […] refers to the cyclical exchange of two kinds of valuables: shell necklaces and shell bracelets. […] The necklaces [soulava] circulate clockwise, the bracelets [mwali] anti-clockwise’ (Eriksen 2023: 307).
- Soulava, long, red shell-dusk necklaces clockwise; Mwali, white shell bracelet anti-clockwise
- Having them gives status, but you cannot give them. You have to give them away, which gives status as well. You cannot receive the gift. A return gift must be given, but not at the same time.
- Some risk involved: sometimes traveling to different islands.
- Return gift can never be exactly the same, because you give necklaces and receive shell bracelets in return. Therefore, there’s an ungoing debt-relationship
Later study by Annette Weiner:
- Malinowski is male biased, also females have an enormous power in this society. Apart from symbolic objects going around, there are also practical trade.
- Bracelets and necklaces are always connected to a particular person, so there are attachments
Potlatch, example
- Was practiced by Kwakiutl groups and their neighbours in North-Western America.
- The aristocrats within the system continuously had to defend, and to try to improve their relative rank by giving spectacular gifts to each other.
- In a party they would destroy valuables to show off their wealth, in the return party the host would have to surpass the previous host in destructive capabilities.
- The purpose of the waste is to establish a political hierarchy with oneself on top.
Consumption
‘In Miller’s words, “commodities as well as gifts have the capacity to construct cultural projects where there is no simple dichotomy between things and persons”’ (Eriksen 2023: 321).
Consumption isn’t just demand and supply. In consumption we also communicate about our identities.
Because it is part of our identities, you can’t separate persons and objects.
Daniel Miller on consumption
- Marx: in capitalist production, laborers have become alienated from the product they make.
- We as consumers have also become alienated from the product
But: when we purchase products, we make them our own
Example of economic spheres among the Tiv:
- The Tiv are traditionally farmers who live in the savannah of central-eastern Nigeria. They are patrilineal and also transfer land rights along the patrilineal line.
- Their system of distribution was multicentric, which is to say that economic resources were distributed according to different principles and did not form a uniform single market.
- Until the Second World War the Tiv had three economic spheres which were ranked morally:
The lowest was the subsidence sphere where cereals and other foodstuffs and kitchen tools circulated. These commodities were exchanged in the market and were thus commensurable.
The second sphere was the prestige sphere. Here cattle, brass rods,magical things and highly valued slaves circulated. Brass rods functioned as a means of payments.
The third and highest sphere was where women and children were exchanged. Generally a person would only be paid for with another person.
