Extending worldsystem analysis
The work of Frank and Gills 1993 on the date of the origins of the world-system, mentioned above, has led to other interesting possibilities for world-systems analysis. If the world-system developed long before the capitalist period, then pre-capitalist and non-capitalist world-systems are also theoretically possible. Frank and Gills's own analysis was historical, tracing the origins of the modern world-system back to ancient Mesopotamia, via the civilisations of Mediterranean Europe. But...
Sociology and anthropology of financial markets
Anthropologists and sociologists have produced pioneering ethnographies of financial markets, often involving participant-observation on the trading floor as well as in corporate offices. It is interesting, however, that despite the common methodologies, disciplinary concerns have inflected the character of these studies. So, where Abolafia 1996 discovers the importance of social networks and the role of the tension between self-interest and self-restraint in the maintenance of such networks,...
Two realms of economy
Economy contains two realms that of community and that of market or impersonal trade Gudeman 2001 . Both are found in all economies, each has many variations, and the balance of the two varies over time and by person and situation. These two faces of economy are complexly intertwined, and the border between them is often indistinct. By community I mean small groups, such as households, bands or tribal organisations, but also imagined groupings that may never meet yet hold some interests in...
Ecological consumption
As anthropology matured as a discipline, the 'total social fact' of feasts was deconstructed. The potlatch received a more explicitly economic analysis and the consumption that took place became read in more individualised terms. Status replaced obligation as an analytic variable elaborate feasting signalled not so much social contracts but prestige economies. Thus, in his synthetic overview of anthropology Melville Herskovits writes 1948 287 'The prestige economy is a topsy-turvy system, where...
Eurocentrism or the centrality of Asia
In this early phase, the world-system being discussed was explicitly the European world-system. Typical accounts from this period start with a description of the status quo in the fifteenth century on the eve of European expansion, followed by the development of Western maritime trade and colonialism Wolf 1982 24-72 compare Kennedy 1989 1-38 Shannon 1989 38-43 . The orthodox view, following Wallerstein, is that the modern world-system was born in the 'long' sixteenth century, that is to say...
Following the provisioning paths
There is an increasing interest in consumption in anthropology. We seem to think that consumption patterns can tell us more about contemporary social relations social differentiation, identity construction, agency, power than production patterns. Often the argument is that empowerment can only come from consumption practices, as a precarious and segmented labour market and flexible and informal production processes have rendered empowerment in the workplace obsolete Miller 1987, 1995 ....
Material consumption
Anthropology's concern with the symbolic dimensions of modern consumption unfolds in relation to cultural studies, sociology and the general explosion of consumption studies in the social sciences Miller 1995a . Across disciplines, a rather individualised variant of the categorical approach came to be stressed. Reviewing the sociological literature on consumption, for instance, Campbell said, 'Generally we may say that special emphasis tends to be placed on those theories that relate...
References Lqc
Anderlini, L. and H. Sabourian 1992. Some notes on the economics of barter, money and credit. In Barter, exchange and value an anthropological approach eds C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Becker, G. 1981. A treatise on the family. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. Bloch, M. and J. Parry 1989. Introduction money and the morality of exchange. In Money and the morality of exchange eds J. Parry and M. Bloch. Cambridge Cambridge University Press....
The provisioning approach
Goods and services such as food, clothes, water, shelter, sanitation, electricity, care and the like appear different and are materially different according to the social relations that have been involved in their production, distribution, circulation and consumption. The provisioning approach follows the path of provisioning in order to understand how the content and the meaning of goods and services are produced and how, in turn, they produce social differentiation. It also pays attention to...
Coercion and consent
In circumstances like these, and those described by Allen 1994 for the coal mines on the Japanese island of Kyushu into the 1960s, it is easy to explain why workers work. They are physically coerced. Although it is true that violence and intimidation are now rarely regarded as best management practice, even in the contemporary world it is striking how frequently management falls back on them when less crude methods of control break down. Mostly, however, coercion is less direct. 'Free labour'...
Rudi ColloredoMansfeld
For centuries, consumption offered one of the most palpable realms for the West to distinguish itself from the Rest.1 In 1503, Queen Isabella of Spain decreed that only those American Indians found to consume human flesh could be legally enslaved, motivating colonisers to reject as many natives as possible as cannibals and widen the division between Old world and New. In the late 1800s, indignant missionaries condemned the Kwakiutl potlatch on Vancouver Island where thousands of blankets were...
The not so nostalgic worker
There is no denying that industrial jobs are often tedious and physically taxing, and that many of them are performed under conditions that are coercive, exploitative and dangerous. But it is also important to recognise that a factory job is often regarded as infinitely preferable to a job in the informal urban economy or to work on the land. One of the premises from which we started was E.P. Thompson's presumption of a radical difference between industrial work regimes and those characteristic...
Decisions and choices the rationality of economic actors Sutti Ortiz
While economists are concerned with how markets direct the actions of profit-maximising actors, anthropologists have been interested in exploring how actors' perceptions, social relations and obligations affect their economic decisions. This wider social perspective became necessary when agricultural research stations began to design programmes to increase the productivity of small farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It became clear that an economic evaluation of the technical packages...
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements xv 1 Karl Polanyi 14 Barry L. Isaac 2 Anthropology, political economy and world-system theory 26 J.S. Eades 3 Political economy 41 Don Robotham 4 Decisions and choices the rationality of economic actors 59 Sutti Ortiz 5 Provisioning 78 Susana Narotzky 6 Community and economy economy's base 94 Stephen Gudeman 8 Labour 125 E. Paul Durrenberger 9 Industrial work 141 Jonathan Parry 10 Money one anthropologist's view 160 Keith Hart 11 Finance 176 Bill Maurer 12...
Yunxiang Yan
Gift giving constitutes one of the most important modes of social exchange in human societies. The give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains and strengthens various social bonds - be they cooperative, competitive or antagonistic - which in turn define the identities of persons. A scrutiny of the gift and the gift economy, therefore, may provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations in a given...
References Csl
Akin, D. and J. Robbins eds 1999. Money and modernity state and local currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburgh University of Pittsburgh Press. Bagehot, W. 1999 1873 . Lombard Street a description of the money market. New York Wiley. Bloch, M. and J. Parry 1989. Introduction money and the morality of exchange. In Money and the morality of exchange eds J. Parry and M. Bloch. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Bohannan, P. 1955. Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv of central...
Processual consumption
The expanding literature has none the less provoked concern and criticism. In her review of Jonathan Friedman's edited volume, Consumption and identity, Mary Weismantel, who has herself researched household consumption as a sphere of power relations and cultural change Weismantel 1988 , rejects the significance of consumption for understanding social structure. She writes 1997 381 , 'this book reveals both the substantive richness of studies of consumption and the theoretical weakness of...
Kinorganised societies and the communal mode of production
The most distinctive features of tribal societies manifesting the kin-communal mode of production are 1 collective ownership of the primary means of production and 2 the absence of social division of labour, in which the members of one group permanently appropriate the social product or labour of the direct producers. In other words, social relations are not exploitative in the sense that one group does not extort product or labour from the other throughout the entire developmental cycle....
Inheritance
In agrarian and industrial economies there can be considerable economic assets which are held as property by individuals. Some of these assets are transferred to living persons upon the death of the owner. Objects that can be devolved include land, facilities for example, mines or factories , buildings, domesticated animals horses, camels, sheep, and so on , household furnishings furniture, pictures , jewellery, equity instruments stocks, bonds and cash. In these cases A is the owner of the...
References Bbt
Alderman, H., L. Haddad and J. Hoddinott 1997. Policy issues and intrahousehold resource allocations conclusions. In Intrahousehold resource allocations in developing countries models, methods and policy eds L. Haddad, J. Hoddinott and H. Alderman. Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins University Press. Anderson, J.R. 1979. Perspective on models of uncertain decisions. In Risk, uncertainty and agricultural development eds J.A. Roumasset, J.-M. Boussard and I. Singh. New York Agricultural Development...
References 1
Block, F. 1991. Contradictions of self-regulating markets. In The legacy ofKarl Polanyi eds M. Mendell and D. Sal e. New York St. Martin's Press. Bohannan, P. and G. Dalton eds 1962. Markets in Africa. Evanston, Ill. Northwestern University Press. Campbell, T. 1981. Seven theories of human society, Oxford Oxford University Press. Cancian, F. 1966. Maximization as norm, strategy, and theory a comment on programmatic statements in economic anthropology. American Anthropologist 68 465-70. Cook, S....
Michael Blim
Much depends upon our values. People have values, notions of what is good or worthy and what is bad or unworthy of human life, regarding the most fundamental questions of existence. Our choices, our actions in the world, are guided by them. They are the ultimate ends against which we measure our actions see Alexander chap. 28, Graeber chap. 27 infra . Values point towards appropriate actions. For instance, suppose we value human beings leading long, disease-free lives however we may define this...
Political economy
Political economy is characterised by an analytical approach which treats the economy from the point of view of production rather than from that of distribution, exchange, consumption or the market. It does not ignore distribution and exchange but analyses these in relation to the role they play in the production of the material needs of a society, including the need to reproduce and expand the means of production themselves Dupre and Rey 1978 . The field is a vast one and contains many...
References Whu
Allen, M. 1994. Undermining the Japanese miracle work and conflict in a coalmining community. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Berg, M. 1988. Women's work, mechanization and the early phase of industrialization in England. In On work historical, comparative and theoretical approaches ed. R.E. Pahl. Oxford Basil Blackwell. Beynon, H. 1973. Working for Ford. Harmondsworth Penguin. Blauner, R. 1964. Alienation and freedom the factory worker and his industry. Chicago University of Chicago...
Anthropology political economy and worldsystem theory JS Eades
The relationship between anthropology and political economy goes right back to the beginnings of anthropology in the nineteenth century, with the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, as is well known, the two traditions rather drifted apart early in the twentieth century. Generally, the 'grand narratives' of evolution were either rejected as speculation or seen as irrelevant to research. There were many reasons for this the development of fieldwork by Franz Boas,...
Why money matters
Westerners appear to think that including money in a transaction makes a huge difference to its social significance. It is not so in most of the world's societies. I was once talking to a Ghanaian student about exchanges between lovers in his country and he said that it was common there for a boy, after sleeping with a girl he has met at a party, to leave some money as a gift and token of esteem. Once he had done this with a visiting American student and the resulting explosion was gigantic -...
Susana Narotzky
This chapter is about the different forms that provisioning for goods and services can take. Often provisioning is through the market, but in many cases the market is involved only partially, or not at all. Generally, in any society there are several possible paths for the provision of similar goods or services, as when medical care is available from the state, private practitioners, private corporations or a doctor friend. This situation might mean a wider choice for the consumer, or it might...
Kalman Applbaum
Reviews of the anthropology of markets customarily begin by dwelling on the distinction between physical marketplaces and 'the market principle' - or 'the diffuse interaction of suppliers and demanders' that determines the 'prices of labor, resources and outputs regardless of the site of transactions' Bohannan and Dalton 1965 2 see, for example, Plattner 1989 . Thus, a periodic, peasant or open-air market on the one hand, and the global electronic futures market for soybeans or eurodollars on...
Patrick Heady
'Barter' is a non-technical English term which anthropologists have applied to a range of transactions that share certain characteristics. Barter typically denotes the direct exchange of goods or services for each other without the medium of money. Within this broad class of exchanges, the term is generally restricted to those in which the prime focus of interest for the exchange partners is in the goods and services themselves rather than the social relationships arising from the exchange...
The principle of reciprocity
The anthropology of the gift was long dominated by the issue of the principle of reciprocity, which first emerged as a critique of the Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift. Prior to the appearance of Mauss's classic, Malinowski had published his famous ethnographic account of kula exchange in Melanesian society and had described in detail the local system of transactions, ranging from the 'pure gift' to 'real barter' 1984 1922 . Rejecting Mauss's interpretation of the spirit of the gift,...
Tributary states and the tributary mode of production
Anthropologists have also investigated a number of tributary states. Samir Amin 1976 13-58 coined the terms 'tributary' or 'tribute-paying' to refer to a variety of precapitalist, state-based societies where, as in the early civilisations found in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, labour or goods were extracted through extra-economic political means from the direct producers by the state apparatus or the ruling class that controlled it. Tributary states have several distinctive features,...
History historicism and time
These theories raise fundamental questions about the economic development process and about economic history as a whole. The dominant idea in political economy is the idea of progress derived from the Enlightenment in the form of historical and dialectical materialism. This approach to economic history makes two principal assumptions that have been strongly contested, both by anthropologists who adopt the political economy approach and by those who do not. The first assumption is that there is...
Contractual consumption
Ceremonial feasts like the potlatch mentioned at the outset draw immediate attention to their rich, almost overwhelming physical details. Powerful Kwakiutl men hosted the gatherings that in fact were not called 'potlatch', but had names such as kadzitla marriage , tlinagila eulachon grease potlatch and k'ilas feast to legitimate the political dominance of their lineage, to consecrate a young man's claim to chiefly title, and to forge alliances between local kin groups. In addition to the gifts...
Andrew Strathern and Pamela J Stewart
Ceremonial exchange is a term that anthropologists have applied to systems in which items of value are publicly displayed and given to partners on a reciprocal basis over time. Typically, these occasions are marked by dancing and festivities, where men, women and children participate in one way or another. This involvement of the community demonstrates the social importance of the complex events involved. These events also create and maintain forms of political alliance between the partners,...
References Dle
Abolafia, M. 1996. Making markets opportunism and restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. Amit, V. 2001. A clash of vulnerabilities citizenship, labor, and expatriacy in the Cayman Islands. American Ethnologist 28 574-94. Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Culture 2 1-24. Baker, W.E. 1984. The social structure of a national securities market. American Journal of Sociology 89 775-811. Bloch, M. and J. Parry 1989....
Jonathan Parry
Industrial work has had some bad press. Consider Charles Dickens's Coketown 'where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness'. Consider the 'robotisation' of the assembly-line worker, and the resigned monotony of a regime that imposes, in Jean-Paul Satre's acid formulation, 'a captive consciousness kept awake only the better to suppress itself' quoted in Beynon 1973 20 . And remember that it is one thing to...
Distribution and circulation in the paths of provisioning
Distribution describes the process by which things produced get to the hands of consumers, and it is a central aspect of the provisioning perspective. Except in the case of completely autonomous self-provisioning, distribution requires movement and allocation. Commonly this movement and allocation is through market systems, and in theory these systems are governed by supply and demand free from political or social constraints. In practice, however, often this freedom is absent. If we consider...
Money one anthropologists view Keith Hart
Most anthropologists don't like money and they don't have much of it. It symbolises the world they have rejected for something more authentic elsewhere. It lines them up with the have-nots and against the erosion of cultural diversity by globalisation. As a result, anthropologists have not had much of theoretical interest to say about money. Rather, they have been limited to discussing whether primitive valuables are money or not. Thus Bronislaw Malinowski 1921 13 see Strathern and Stewart...
Finance and neoliberal development
Recent anthropological work on finance has been less content to linger over its fictions and more interested in its objects, both in the sense of its ends and its technique and apparatus. Anthropologists writing ethnographies of neoliberal states often discuss the financialisation of the state and the efforts of multilateral institutions like the World Bank to produce 'investable' jurisdictions. Legal guarantees of property and security interests in land and other immovables are often central...
The Polanyi school today
The Polanyi group was dominant in economic anthropology during the 1960s and 1970s see Bohannan and Dalton 1962 Dalton 1967a, 1968 Dalton and Kocke 1983 Durrenberger 1998 Halperin and Dow 1977 Helm, Bohannan and Sahlins 1965 Polanyi 1977 Polanyi, Arensberg and Pearson 1957 Sahlins 1960, 1972 Somers 1990 . Their influence was notable among anthropological archaeologists and ethnohistorians as well as sociocultural anthropologists during that period Paul Bohannan, Pedro Carrasco, Louis Dumont,...
Geopolitics And Geoculture Essays On The Changing World-system. Cambridge
Amin, S. 1973. Neocolonialism in West Africa. Harmondsworth Penguin. Amin, S. 1974. Accumulation on a world scale a critique of the theory of underdevelopment. New York Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. 1997. Capitalism in the age of globalization. London Zed Books. Arrighi, G. 1994. The long twentieth century money, power and the origins of our times. London Verso. Arrighi, G. and B.J. Silver 1999. Chaos and governance in the world system. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press. Braudel, F....
References
Carrier, J.G. ed. 1997. Meanings of the market the free market in Western culture. Oxford Berg. Carrier, J.G. and A.H. Carrier 1989. Wage, trade and exchange in Melanesia a Manus society in the modern state. Berkeley University of California Press. Carrier, J.G. and D. Miller eds 1998. Virtualism a new political economy. Oxford Berg. Dilley, R. ed. 1992. Contesting markets analyses of ideology, discourse and practice. Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press. Dumont, L. 1977. From Mandeville to...
References Ulu
Appadurai, A. 1986. Introduction commodities and the politics of value. In The social life of things ed. A. Appadurai. New York Cambridge University Press. Befu, H. 1968. Gift-giving in a modernizing Japan. Monumenta Nipponica 23 445-56. Caplow, T. 1982. Christmas gifts and kin networks. American Sociological Review47 383-92. Caplow, T. 1984. Rule enforcement without visible means Christmas gift giving in Middletown. American Journal of Sociology 89 1306-23. Carrier, J.G. 1990. Gifts in a world...
The impact of money on traditional cultures
Consistent with this vision, every anthropology student knows that money undermines the integrity of cultures that were hitherto resistant to commerce. Anthropologists are not very happy in the marketplace and this gives many of them a jaundiced perspective on money. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen 1957 1918 once wrote a book to explain how capitalist societies could permit the pursuit of truth in their universities. He concluded that the solution was to persuade academics that they...
The barter origins of money
By now everyone knows where money came from. Our remote ancestors started swapping things they had too much of and others wanted. This barter ran into a bottleneck. It was not always easy to find someone who wanted what you had and had what you wanted in the right quantities. So some objects became valued as tokens that most people would be willing to hold to swap with something else in future. It might be salt or ox hides, but some metals were most often used in this way because they were...
Barter commodities and gift exchange
Having established when barter is likely to take place, it is time to describe and analyse the barter process itself. Here we meet an interesting dichotomy. According to some descriptions, the transacting partners haggle in order to obtain the very best bargain for themselves at the other's expense, so that the relations between barter partners are characterised by a degree of implicit hostility. Bronislaw Malinowski's 1978 1922 95-6, 187-90, 361-4 description of the barter deals that took...
Globalisation and trade concentration
Increasingly exchange transactions occurring anywhere in the world can only be understood with reference to external agencies. Bilateral exchanges in even remote corners of the world cannot be comprehensively understood without meaningful reference to the global contingencies and determinants conditioning the exchange. The purchase of a hand-crafted basket in a Vientiane outdoor market, the consumption of cheese produced on a kibbutz by its own members in the Galilee, or the return of a...
The person in the gift
An underlying theme in almost all anthropological discussions of the gift and the gift economy is the relationship between persons and material objects, which is also the fundamental issue that Mauss wanted to address. In this connection, studies by Parry and Carrier are particularly noteworthy. Parry 1986 shows that Maori and Hindu ideologies of gift exchange represent fundamentally opposite types the former requires the reciprocity of every gift given and the latter denies reciprocity, at...
Notes Vkn
1. Thus does Anthony Giddens define globalisation 'the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them' 1990 64 . 2. There is a varied literature on the topic of commodification or commoditisation. In this instance I am...
Karl Polanyi
Karl Polanyi 1886-1964 was a Hungarian lawyer turned journalist and economic historian whose reading of anthropology, especially the work of Bronislaw Malinowski and Richard Thurnwald, led him to produce work that made major contributions to economic anthropology, classical Greek studies and post-Soviet eastern European social policy. This last reflects his lifelong devotion to the question of individual freedom in industrial societies Polanyi 1936, 1944 249ff. In fact, the concepts he...