ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY SOCI 202 Spring 2014 Instructor: Deniz Yükseker
How do members of a society provide for themselves? Subsistence: how people make a living, how they provide their food Subsistence strategies: Food collectors: foragers (hunters and gatherers) (no domestication) Food producers (domestication)
Subsistence strategies Food producers: Herding (pastoralism) Extensive agriculture (horticulture, slash-and-burn) Intensive agriculture Mechanized industrial agriculture
Do different subsistence strategies coexist?
Theories of material life Formal economic anthropology (led by Melville Herskovits) Formalists used neoclassical economic theory’s concepts (e.g. supply, demand, price, money) to understand pre-capitalist/pre-modern societies’ economic relations
Formalist definition of economy: allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends based on supply and demand Maximization of profit and individual utility through competition in a market A “universal human nature” homo economicus (self-interested rational individuals making economic choices) Is there anything wrong with this definition, and the formalists’ assumptions?
Theories (cont’d) Substantivist economic anthropology (led by Marshall Sahlins, Karl Polanyi) Economy: concrete (and particular) way in which material goods and services are made available to members of a society Economic systems may be defined in terms of the substantive institutional arrangements for provisioning members of a society
Substantivists: capitalist market economy is only one way, among many others, that goods and services may be provided in a society. Pre-capitalist societies had other ways in which goods and services were provided. In pre-capitalist societies, economic activities are embedded in noneconomic institutions (e.g. kinship, political or religious institutions)
Terms for discussion: Scarcity Affluence
Modes of exchange Reciprocity Redistribution Market exchange Generalized Balanced Negative Redistribution Market exchange
Reciprocity: transfer of goods and services between two or more people in small, face-to-face societies based on role obligations Redistribution: transfer of goods and services between a central collecting source and members of society according to some social norms Market exchange: transfer of goods and services in a market, based on prices, supply and demand
A special case of reciprocity Gift exchange: giving and receiving gifts on a reciprocal basis. Obligation to give Obligation to receive Obligation to repay Delayed reciprocity in gift exchange Why?
Can reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange co-exist Can reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange co-exist? Note on reading: 8.5 (p.133) to 8.9 (p.144) not included in Lavenda and Schultz
“Reciprocity and the power of giving” (Lee Cronk) Gift-giving is used to nurture long-term relationships of mutual obligation, to embarrass rivals and to foster feelings of indebtedness Examples: Kula gifts (islands off New Guinea) Potlatch (Kwakiutl, British Columbia) Swapping “gifts” of knowledge Foreign aid
Case studies The !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana Cultivating the tropical forest in Paraguay
Case 1 Richard Borshay Lee’s ethnography of subsistence among the !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari desert in the 1960s How did these people subsist? Where did most of the diet come from? Is a lifestyle based on foraging “nasty, short and brutish”?
The !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari How did the their subsistence activities change by the 1990s? How has their lifestyle been challenged in recent years? See news stories at: http://www.survival-international.org/news/3816 http://www.survival-international.org/news/3867
Case 2 Richard Reed’s ethnography of the Guarani people in eastern Paraguay How did they subsist? How did the Guarani use the land in the forest? Is it a sustainable way of using forests? What are the consequences of commercial logging? Is it sustainable development?