Purpose economic anthropology 19th century

Economic Anthropology

Chapter 1

Purpose economic anthropology 19th century: to test the claim that a world economic order must be found on the principles that underpinned a Western industrial society striving for universality → largely for insiders and experts, not for general public

Three stages in the development of economic anthropology:

1. 
   1870s – 1940s: idea of evolutionary process → anthropologists were interested in whether the economic behavior of savages was underpinned by the same notions of efficiency and rationality that were taken to motivate economic action in the West
   
2. 
   1950s – 1960s: Formalists (the concepts and tools of mainstream economics were adequate to the studying of tribesmen and peasants) ↔ Substantivists (institutional approaches were more appropriate; economic life in societies other than ours (impersonal markets) was always embedded in other institutions (like household and religion))
   
3. 
   1970s - …: idea of neoliberal globalization → New Institutional Economics; new inquiries addressed the full range of human economic organizations, studies from different perspectives
   

→ studying of local modes of economy important for the discipline

Serious limitations to the book:

• 
  Economic anthropology is often placed in the context of Western intellectual history and this in turn is linked within a particular view or world history
  
• 
  Language: focusing primarily on English-language materials
  

→ the dominant tradition since the 19^th century has grown out of English Utilitarianism (it privileges free markets and individual maximalization of value within budget constraints)

On the other hand: Herder (1744-1803) laid the basis for relativist ethnography, which was more consistent with a world society fragmented into nation states → in the time of Herder, rationalist thinkers divided the world in Naturvölker and Kulturvölker (who had entered history by discovering civilizations)

→ in beginning 20^th century anthropologists like Malinowski and Boas devoted themselves to close up studies of particular society → they broke new ground; the major gain for Economic anthropology was a much better understanding of complex motivations for behavior in the domains of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, and of how this human economy was connected to behavior in other domains → downside: anthropologists lost any perspective on the big picture, in both time and space

So in general

Focus on the universal (economics and cognitive psychologists) ↔ focus on the particular (anthropologists and historians)

Important contributions to economic anthropology :

Marcel Mauss: the Gift + Karl Polanyi: Great divide theory

Economic Anthropology

Hst. 3: The Rise of Modern Economics and Anthropology

John Stuart Mill → Utilitarian liberalism (1848) → refashioned from the 1870s to the neoclassical paradigm (it was neoclassical in that it still celebrated the market as the main source of increased economic welfare → but it replaced the classical view of Mill and Marx that saw economic value as an objective property of produced commodities, to be struggled over by the different classes, with a focus on the subjective calculations of individuals seeking to maximize their own utility)

→ the idea of the economic man: value not as a social average, but as an increment at the margin, given an actor’s total assets ( a dollar is worth more to a man with ten dollars then it is worth to a millionaire )

1. 
   The German Tradition
   

• 
  1^st stage: the emergence of household as the key coordinating unit of production and consumption in preindustrial societies
  
• 
  2^nd stage: the City State → from this stage onwards, the market becomes very important
  
• 
  3^rd stage: the contemporary national economy (Volkswirschaft)
  

→ also Bücher emphasized, like Aristotle did, the closed, autarkic nature of the subsistence-oriented systems

→ Bücher also emphasized the contextualizing of economic life: the principles of the market and the new methodological individualism could not explain all economic behaviour, not even in newly unified Germany

Max Weber (1922) → based his ideas upon the dialectical premise of Hegel and Kant → form (arising from the operations in the mind) ↔ substance (perception of the material world through the sense) → very different rationalities

Thurnwald (1932) and Polanyi (1930s) → demonstrated the significance of reciprocity through ethnographies

2. 
   The British Tradition
   

→ also, Malinowski noted the importance of cooperation: it would serve more general social ends, but he didn’t lost eye of the room for individual choice

→ critic on Malinowski: he portrayed traditional activities of natives and ignored the extent to which they had already been incorporated by government officers, missionaries etcetera into new colonial systems

→ Malinowski’s functionalism established a new school of Anthropology in Britain → A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s Structural-Functionalism (1952): comparative science of society; Firth (1939): one of the first formalists

3. 
   The American Tradition
   

In anthropology: Franz Boas important ( however, their aversion to the evolutionist paradigm of the 19^th century led them unable to theorize the relationship between economy and society )

→ Rural Mexico convenient for American anthropologists, who lacked a large overseas empire replete with tribes

George Foster (1942,1948): image of the limited good: the idea that the good things in life were understood to be scarce, so that one man’s gain was likely to be another’s loss

4. 
   The French Tradition
   

→ Durkheim (1893): reaction on Adam Smith (the idea of economic progress through specialization) and Herbert Spencer (Social Darwinism) → the individual is the result of its social development, and not its source

→ systèmes de prestations totales: the earliest form of exchange took place between entire social groups and involved the whole range of things people can do for each other

Economic Anthropology

Chapter 4: The Golden Age of Economic Anthropology

→ the decades after World War II: Economic Anthropology flourished at this time → focal point: formalist ↔ substantivist debate

→ what make something formal is its conformity with an idea or rule → a formalist approach emphasizes the regular operation of ideas, in this case the universal claims of neoclassical economics, while a substantivist approach gives priority to the empirical content of material circumstances and disputes that this diversity can be adequately grasped through just one set of concepts

→ but both approaches recognized the important of markets for economic coordination

Polanyi: Reciprocity (symmetrical form of exchange between groups or persons of equal standing; dominant in ‘primitive’ egalitarian societies with simple technologies) ↔ Redistribution (a principle of centricity, whereby resources were pooled and handed out through a hierarchy; presupposed the possibility of storing a surplus and some degree of social stratification)

→ Polanyi stated that, with industrialization and the creation of a market for free wage labor, the economy disembedded (in ancient societies, economy was embedded in society, commercial activity was concentrated in specific ports of trade, where it had little or no direct impact on the bulk of population)

→ Polanyi identified a double movement: the economics of laissez-faire ↔ social resistance and protectionism from the State

Polanyi also divided general-purpose money (our own) ↔ special-purpose monies (enjoyed wide circulation in the non-industrial world)

→ Polanyi saw money as something introduced from outside, and not internal → he distinguished: token money (designed to facilitate domestic trade) ↔ commodity money (designed to facilitate foreign trade): two systems often came in conflict → only national monopoly currencies combined the functions of payment, standard, store and exchange, and this gave them the capacity to sustain the set through a limited number of ‘all-purpose’ symbols

→ the non-industrial household was a good site for exploring the different approaches

→ formalism gradually broke up into a number of specialist approaches drawing on information theory, game theory, cost-benefit analysis, rational choice, agricultural development etc.

Economic Anthropology

Chapter 5: After the Formalist-Substantivist Debate

→ a few major figures in anthropology decided not to engage with the above mentioned debate (Leach, Douglas, Dumont, Sahlins)

1970s → Marxism was rediscovered in economic anthropology, especially enjoying a cult status in France → a deep structure of the ideal mode of production was outlined, with 3 central elements: (1) producers, (2) non-producers, (3) means of production → Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1965) → Latin America a focus on Marxist research

Last decades of twentieth century: Feminism at the forefront of cultural critique → fell on fertile ground within anthropology:

• 
  Engels’ idea that patriarchal domination set in only after the dissolution of primitive communism and the rise of private property and class conflict were taken over by feminists → hunter-gather specialists showed that in those societies women’s autonomy in production was also reflected in a more general parity of status
  
• 
  Scholars like Leacock, Mead and Benedict were proof that women had long achieved parity inside the discipline of anthropology
  

→ feminism has spawned a new focus on the place of sex in society, especially in capitalist societies (nice example page 82 in book) and it has torn apart conceptual pairs ( like individual ↔ society, nature ↔ culture, public ↔ private )

So in general: 1980s: dissolving of Polanyi school → many anthropologists went their own way → this period is called the cultural turn (the idea that denied the possibility of a comparative anthropological economics, since material life everywhere was structured by incommensurate local symbolic orders, of which bourgeois economics was just one

→ this cultural turn was preceded by German pioneers of primitive economics (looking at local ways of arranging economics) → during this cultural turn the notions culture and morality replaced notions as class and society + former dichotomies of the substantivist school (like capitalist societies ↔ non capitalist societies) were thought to be irrelevant

Economic Anthropology

Chapter 7: The Socialist Alternative

Basic issues for economic development in most regions of the Second World → most important: the means of production passed into collective ownership

→ the Stalinist version of factories in the countryside and anthropologist ethnographies on Western and Southern Europe weren’t so different (individualization of Marriage and Rural Exodus) → the new system brought disproportionate prosperity to the countryside → in event, members of cooperative farms would find some space for private commercial activities

• 
  Redistribution was the most salient mode of integration (socialist officials formed a new class. Although low-level bureaucrats in enterprises and farms who tended their own gardens were obviously a different stratum from the all-powerful nomenklatura at higher levels)
  
• 
  Markets regulated this socialist redistribution (work point were replaced by salaries and wages and private access to the market expanded)
  
• 
  The Household remained a vital unit of production and consumption, thanks to the generous allocation of plots and gardens
  
• 
  Reciprocity linked households and socialist office-holder to each other through mutual aid and connections (this applies to the latter)
  

1. 
   Shock Therapy (Sachs 1989): the benefits of the market would be forfeited unless there was full and immediate privatization of state assets and the imposition of hard budgets for all economic actors (so no half measures)
   
2. 
   Gradualism: its advocates favored allowing the State to dispose of its property more slowly, to intervene to maintain employment levels and to restrict or delay the influx of foreign capital
   

→ small-scale marketing in capitalist countries became a survival strategy for trader tourists (victims of decollectivization and factory closures, who sold whatever they could lay their hands on in the workplace and even in their apartment to meet basic subsistence needs); also intensification of subsistence production was another option

→ on the other hand, ethnographers documented the emergence of biznismen, who were able to profit from the postsocial transformation → they found that new patterns of stratification often led to a positive reassessment of the old socialist institutions

→ the new market economy was boosted by more or less rapid privatization of assets previously owned by the state or by some lower form of collective → the gap between expectations ↔ realities was often very great here

→ anthropologists focused on the countryside: Privatization had many forms in these rural areas, but rural production levels and the productivity of land declined almost everywhere (with the ending of socialist subsidies, many could not afford to purchase fertilizer or to maintain their machinery + large areas of cultivated land fell out of production as the new owners failed to use the parcels allotted to them

→ but also moral values were important → the idea of a free market for farm labour was a foreign idea (land was owned for different reasons, than economical reasons, such as out of respect for their forefathers, although the land didn’t offer any economic prospect → Karl Polanyi: Land and Labour are fictitious commodities → he was proven right in this case

→ new elites soon began to emerge → these were often former communists, who had the information and the social capital to make profitable use of their new property → in both town and countryside, most goods were readily available, but only for those who could afford it → the right networks were no longer enough to gain access to those goods, only money could command the goods

→ numerous ethnographic studies suggest that the nature of the family and of social networks has changed considerably since the socialist era, if only as a result of temporary labor migration, the full extent of which is seldom captured in official statistics; yet there remain significant differences from the dominant pattern of the more wealthy capitalist economies → in the old shortage economy, information about the availability of goods was a crucial resource; nowadays information about jobs and temporary accommodation in a Western metropolis is just as critical; now as then, many people feel resentment towards the elite for whom luxury goods seem to be available in abundance → but the sources of this new wealth are less transparent than the privileges enjoyed by the socialist nomenklatura

→ we spoke about a postsocial transformation (not transition, implying a new stable condition) → but: stability is still nowhere in sight → anthropologists focused on particular on symbolic orders: perhaps their major achievement was to document resilience: to probe continuities neglected by other disciplines

Cuba, Vietnam, China → persistence of socialism: Reform Socialists → anthropologists place key role on that the societies didn’t want to expand their allocative power (Verdery 1996), but instead these governments respected the rights of autonomy and the rights of entrepreneurs and citizen consumers → crucial feature: rural transformation → the massive exodus of labour to form the floating population in the cities

Economic Anthropology

Chapter eight: One-world Capitalism

→ 1980s: Anthropologists no longer focus on primitive societies → we all seem to be living in one world unified by capitalism → new ways were developed of studying globalization everywhere

• 
  The end of history (as Fukuyama would call it), with which they meant the end of the Cold War
  
• 
  The rise of China and India as worldwide powers, forming a challenge to Western hegemony
  
• 
  Digital revolution in communications → the internet
  

↕

Economists → stress the withdrawal of money from immediate consumption and the enhanced productivity of factors other than labor in which the capitalist has invested → this vision, however, can’t cope with historical change between production and the circuit of money + it can’t cope with today’s financial crisis

→ Weber came with the concept of Rational (the calculated pursuit of explicit ends by chosen means) Enterprise (= undertaken with a view (speculative, but drive by a compulsion to eliminate the risks entailed in relying on uncertain futures) to the future) → Rational Enterprise, and capitalism, rests above all on the entrepreneur’s ability to calculate outcomes

Capitalism is always modified by the specific conditions in which it grows → therefore ethnography should inform the search for general principles of economic organization in our world, for we need to explain not only the common form, but also its infinite variation

Pierre-Philippe Rey (1973): wherever capitalism developed, the new class was forced to make compromises with the old property-owning classes in ways that made the resulting hybrid something specific to that society

→ Economic Anthropologists have always forfeited the field of industrial work and unemployment → sociologists and psychologists have done here the most ( Braverman (1974) and Burawoy (1979) → Marxist sociologists; came with the concept of deskilling → the process whereby artisans are reduced to tending machined that require little of their traditional craft )

People express as well collective as individual identities through these objects → Chevalier (2010) → Social structure and organization make their appearance in the private sphere through home decoration → process of internalization

→ basis institution capitalism = firm → small businesses that rely on the labor of family members often remain extremely important + the role of kinship in facilitating and frustrating rational enterprise remains under-researched

→ however: politically, as well as economically, family firms have long been overshadowed by global organizations → flexible organization, which overlaps with those of governments → this has led to problems of managerial control and corruption, while control has passed to a new class of directors, lawyers and accountants

→ (history of the corporations from Bills of Rights until now → page 157/158 book) → we have now reached the moment that corporations are being granted the legal rights of individual citizens → most ordinary citizens cannot compete with them on equal footing in law or politics; never mind in the market (abstract entities like governments and corporations can hold exclusive rights in something against the world)

→ not only has private property evolved from individual ownership to corporate forms, but its focus has also shifted from real to intellectual property → from material objects to ideas (partly caused by digital revolution)

→ it has already become almost commonplace for anthropologists to work in financial centres

Economic Anthropology

Chapter 9: Where do we go from here?

→ important to look at economic anthropology within larger histories (like world history or Western social philosophy)

Academic institutions as presently structured do no favor this approach → it takes a lot of investment for anthropologists and a lot of financing for institutions (staying in the field for at least a year and learning local language)

→ but: as more anthropologists acquire complementary knowledge from outside their discipline and indeed often work within a multi- or interdisciplinary framework, the situation is changing → great obstacle: a pressure to publish fast, while historical breadth can only come with experience

→ in order to face the challenges of the coming century, we should also be ready to lean from predecessors such as Rousseau and Kant, whose eighteenth-century project was linked to the drive for universal emancipation → notion of a human economy, which we conceive of as being continuously remade by people in their everyday lives while it concerns the interests of humanity as a whole

Mauss (to the need for establishing local limits on social action must always be added the means of extending a community’s reach abroad (contesting the ethnography of Malinowski in which he claimed to have studied the Trobriands and the Kula as a local society and local practices) ; this is why markets and money in some form are universal) ↔ Polanyi (drew attention to how economic institutions organize and are in turn organized by a plurality of distribution mechanisms, that, in the modern world, affect the lives of millions of people who participate in them without being granted any measure of control)

→ Polanyi and Mauss made sure that their more abstract understandings of political economy were grounded in the everyday lives of concrete persons, thereby lending to field research the power of general ideas