1. ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
SOCI 202
Spring 2014
Instructor: Deniz Yükseker

2. 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)

3. Subsistence strategies
Food producers:
Herding (pastoralism)
Extensive agriculture (horticulture, slash-and-burn)
Intensive agriculture
Mechanized industrial agriculture

4. Do different subsistence strategies coexist?

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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

8. 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)

9. Terms for discussion: Scarcity Affluence

10. Modes of exchange Reciprocity Redistribution Market exchange
Generalized
Balanced
Negative
Redistribution
Market exchange

11. 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

12. 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?

13. 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

14. “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

15. Case studies
The !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana Cultivating the tropical forest in Paraguay

16. 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”?

17. 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:

18. 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?