Gift, barter, market, money

Karl Polanyi (1957) The Economy as Instituted Process

Value

- mobile phone - dependent on cost, trend, newness, features, depreciates

- Bible - value separate to cost as ink and paper is rather cheap, more likely to hold sentimental value

- billum (string bag weaved out of bush fibres by women in PNG) - very useful as it is very strong and used to carry garden produce, fire wood, shopping, or a baby (if big enough)

Economic anth - relationships, not models

- production, circulation, consumption

- from the ancient Greek 'ekonomia': looking after the house

Subsistence economies: producing what you consume

- hunter-gatherers, foragers, fishing; little intervention

- horticultural - gardens (e.g. swidden) where forestry is dense

- pastoral - herding livestock

- agricultural/peasant - intense growing of a limited variety of crops

Market economies

- money - selling your labour

- barter

- credit and virtual currencies - debt peonage

Classical Economic Anth

Formalism - 1920s

- mostly linked to neo-classical economics

- utility maximisation under conditions of scrcity - finite resources

- extends the purview of economics into 'non-traditional' areas, i.e. any social relationship can be analysed in this way

Substantivism - 1940s

- originates in Polanyi's (1944) The Great Transformation

- presupposes neither rationalism or scarcity, but instead concentrates on a society's livelihood strategy as an adaptation to the social and material environment

Cultural economics - 1960s

- an extension of substantivism..

- ..but with an even greater emphasis on socio-cultural dynamics, symbolism and social constructivism

- less taxonomic (classificatory), more relativistic

- detailed analysis of a community of non-economic related activities that link with economics

Marxism and feminism

- how difference (in class, gender etc.) is organised through control over the spheres of production, circulation and consumption

- which differences made a difference?

- renewed attention to the effects of colonial and industrial history on present conditions

Marcel Mauss (1924) The Gift

- 'Gifts are never free'; they are 'total social facts'

- focused on 'total prestations' in rituals such as kula, pot latch and..

- .. Maori concept of the hau (spirit or intentionality) of the gift

- gifts distinguished from commodities

- a gift asks for reciprocation

Aspects of gift exchange (drawn primarily from Mauss's The Gift and Gregory's (1982) Gifts and Commodities) 

- inalienability - it's origin can be identified, e.g. the gift-giver or maker

- reciprocity

- long transaction cycles

- known transactors

- fixed, concrete and absolute value

Custody battles

- child is not seen as commodity but still as property

Human gametes may not be legally sold in the UK

- genes make such items inalienable

Aspects of commodity exchange

- alienability - maker and consumer may never meet or know each other's role

- reciprocity unnecessary - fees already paid

- short transaction cycles - instant buying

- transactors can be strangers

Aspects of barter

- somewhere in between gift and commodiy?

- tends to take place at economic margins - where systems of value are incommensurate, or where resources are limited

- good for avoiding the 'visibility' of both gift and market transactions

George Simmel - German sociologist

- The Philosophy of Money (1907)

- money has no 'objective' value..

- .. but has symbolic value which then has particular effects on transactions conducted with the money and the people who use it