1 Introduction to Social Anthropology B Lecture 6.

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Introduction to Social Anthropology B

Lecture 6

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Universal questions

• How do we know what something is worth?– “Everything has a price”?– A money economy destroyed many local cultures,

producing a devastating anomie

• What is the value of a person? What is the price of a man (or a woman)?– Thirty cows, – thirty pieces of silver, – $381, £5.73 per hour (or £4.77 between 18-21) , – £7,840 QALY/year at 1990 prices

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Economic anthropology

• Can we use concepts from Economics to understand societies which do not have money, or markets, or wages or banks? Are the laws of supply and demand universal?

• The use of cash and market exchange is one (very efficient) way of integrating the division of labour.

• However with such indirect exchange is very much more difficult to identify the relationships of inequality and who is exploiting whom.

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Money and markets

• Different cultures measure value in different ways. Money as a medium of exchange is not universal.

• The use of money and markets are only one kind of institutional mechanism for exchange.

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Markets• How you obtain

goods for daily consumption as opposed to prestige goods can vary.

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Prestige goods

• Why compete with ostentatious display of useless articles? Standardised status goods e.g. enamel bowls, shell necklaces, mobile phones

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• Ownership and consumption but also gift giving and exchange of such artefacts can demarcate who are the important people.

• Circuits of exchange, limits to what can be exchanged for what.

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Karl Polanyi on formal and substantive economics“the term economic is a compound of two meanings that have independent roots. We will call them the substantive and the formal meaning.

• The substantive meaning of economic derives from man’s dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows. It refers to the interchange with his natural and social environments, in so far as this results in supplying him with the means of material want satisfaction.

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Karl Polanyi on formal and substantive economics

• The formal meaning of economic derives from the logical character of the means-ends relationship as apparent in such words as “economical” or “economising”. It refers to a definite situation of choice, namely that between the different uses of means induced by an insufficiency of those means.

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Karl Polanyi on formal and substantive economics

• The two root meanings of “economic” have nothing in common. The latter derives from logic, the former from fact. The formal meaning implies a set of rules referring to choice between alternative uses of insufficient means. The substantive meaning implies neither choice nor insufficiency of means; man’s livelihood may or may not involve the necessity of choice and if choice there be it need not be induced by the limiting effect of a scarcity of the means;…”

• Karl Polyani (1957) Trade and Market in Early Empires. Glencoe Ill.: Free Press.

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What is a market?

• Similarly two meanings of the word market – the formal and substantive. Markets can be physical places which are both social and economic institutions where people exchange things. On the other hand it also is the economists term for a theoretical concept which describes supply and demand coming together to establish a price.

• One argument against the use of the methods of formal economics in anthropology is that the whole conceptual apparatus is inter-twined. That concepts such as prices, rent, capital, marginal costs become meaningless if prices cannot be established and compared and no monetary value can be used to establish the price of labour or the cost of borrowing.

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The social nature of trade• Trade is systematic exchange of goods at a distance.• “From the substantive point of view trade is a relatively peaceful

method of acquiring foods which are not available on the spot… It is external to the group, similar to activities which we are used to associating with hunts, slaving expeditions or piratic raids. In either case the point is acquisition and carrying of goods from a distance…”

• “…. a hunt, raid or expedition under native conditions trade is not so much an individual as rather a group activity in this respect closely akin to the organisation of wooing and mating, which is often concerned with the acquisition of wives from a distance by more or less peaceful means.” Trade thus centres in the meeting of different communities one of its purposes being the exchange of goods. The purpose of being sociable might be to trade, but equally trading might be with the purpose of being sociable.

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Money and prices• “…There is …no contradiction involved

– in “paying” with a means with which one cannot buy, – nor in employing objects as a “standard” which are

not used as a means of exchange. – In Hammurabi’s Babylonia barley was the means of

payment; silver was the universal standard in exchange …”

• “The thirty pieces of silver received by Judas as the price of a man for betraying Jesus was a close variant of the equivalency of a slave as set out in Hammurabi’s code some 1700 years earlier. … price systems may have an institutional history of their own. …”

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Universal or ethnocentric concepts

• “Primitive economy is different from market industrialism not in degree but in kind. ...The attempt to translate primitive economic processes into functional equivalents of our own inevitably obscures just those features of primitive economy which distinguish it from our own.” G. Dalton (1961) “Economic Theory and Primitive Society”, American Anthropologist 20(1):

• This special case argument contrasts with Douglas and Isherwood who suggest a universal set of social relations, ie. we can understand people as rational utility maximising individuals, but need to understand utility is culturally bound and that information is power.

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Kula Ring

• I.M. Lewis (1976) Social Anthropologist in Perspective quoting Malinowski

• The kula is a form of exchange, of extensive inter-tribal character; it is carried on by communities inhabiting a wide ring of islands which form a closed circuit… Along this route, articles of the two kinds and these two kinds only, are constantly travelling in opposite directions. ….

• -long necklaces of red shell called soulava – in the opposite direction moves the other kind – bracelets of white shell called mwali.

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Mwala braclets• http://www.galenfrysinger.com/trobriand_islands.htm

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Kula ring necklaces - soulava• http://szabo.best.vwh.net/KulaRingNecklacesbagi.jpg

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Closed circle of exchange• Source: Roger M Keesing, Cultural

Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective, Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, New York, 1976, p.322.

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http://www.art-pacific.com/artifacts/nuguinea/massim/trobkula.htm

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‘once in the Kula, always in the Kula’

• “Therefore every man who is in the Kula, periodically though not regularly receives on the several mwala (arm-shells), or a soulava necklace (necklace of red shell disks), and then has to hand it on to one of his partners, from who he receives the opposite commodity in exchange. Thus no man ever keeps any of the articles for any length of time in his possession.

• One transaction does not finish the Kula relationship, the rule being ‘one in the Kula, always in the Kula,’ and a partnership between two men is a permanent and lifelong affair. Again, any given mwali or soulava may always be found travelling and changing hands, and these is not question of its ever settling down, so that the principle ‘once in the Kula, always in the Kula’ applies also to the valuables themselves.

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Names of gifts• Vaga - the initial gift (In the case of Kiriwina armshells

going south to Dobu)• Yotile – restoration gift (a necklace of equivalent value)If an equivalent is not readily available• Basi – an intermediary gift – small not equivalent but a

token of good faith • Kudu - Final gift that cements the whole transaction.Partners will come and compete for favour and receive:• Pokala (offerings) – pigs, bananas, yams, taro• Kaributu (soliciting gifts) – axe blades, whale bone

spoons (larger value with anticipated repayment)

The word for barter is gimwali which is differentiated from Kula.

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Kula Ring

• [Bock 1969:121 quoting Malinowski Argonauts of the Western Pacific]

• Kula is “A half commercial, half ceremonial exchange…. Carried out for its own sake, in fulfilment of a deep desire to possess. But… it is not ordinary possession but a special type in which a man owns for a short time and in an alternating manner, individual specimens of two classes of objects.

• The acts of exchange of the valuables have to conform to a designate code…. The ceremonial attached to the act of giving, the manner of carrying and handling the valuables shows distinctly that this is regarded as something else than mere merchandise. Indeed it is to the nature something that confers dignity, that exalts him and which he therefore treats with veneration and affection.”

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Kula – irrational, functional or instrumental?

• Malinowski’s argument was that the Kula was functional, because it enabled peaceful trade to be conducted as an adjunct.

• Douglas and Isherwood see Kula as a cultural method for elites to emerge and perpetuate their status by differentiating themselves from the lesser people. Kula gifts are information goods tell others about credit worthiness, reliability, productivity, and political strength. C.f. Bourdieu on “habitus”

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The Nuer; as described by E.Evans-Prichard

• The importance of cattle. Self identity. Bulls.

• Use milk and blood but do not kill their animals to eat. Do sacrifice them to ‘god’ in return for favours.

• Also exchange them for women – lineage acquires brides through payments of bride price in cattle. Ghost marriage.

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The Nuer

• Compensation for a killing.

• Evans-Pritchard could not buy cattle for his household

• So commercial ranching, or even restaurant is outrageous. Like growing human organs which the local fast food shop would sell as burgers.

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Sharon Hutchinson 1996 Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. University of California Press: London

• “I did, however, hear tales of one Nuer man names Puol, who brazenly transgressed this taboo as well as restrictions on the cooking of food by men by opening a small restaurant in the distant provincial capital of Malakal during the early 1980s. This event sent shock waves throughout the entire Nuer community. Although Puol’s restaurant apparently proved popular with local Dinka, Shilluk and northern Arab residents, no Nuer – or so people claimed – had ever deigned to eat there. Indeed, it was a common joke during the early 1980s for rural Nuer women in the west to respond to complaints of a stomach ache by a friend with the question, Ci mith dhor Puol? (“have you eaten at Puol’s place”).

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Money, markets and circuits of exchange

• What is person worth? What is life worth?– Kula exchange history– Cattle equivalent– Market price of a slave– Market price of labour– Health economics analysis of the cost of

added years of life

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Prices

– Thirty cows, Nuer compensation for a homicide

– thirty pieces of silver, Judas’s bounty for Jesus

– $381, prize of a slave in South Carolina circa 1810, http://eh.net/Clio/Conferences/ASSA/Jan_00/rosenbloom.shtml

– £5.73 per hour (or £4.77 between 18-21), UK minimum wage 2009, www.hmrc.gov.uk/nmw/

– £7,840 QALY/year at 1990 prices, value of a heart transplant by Aventis Pharma http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/painres/download/whatis/QALY.pdf