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San2 Economic Anthropology - Coggle Diagram

- - - - but also critiqued e.g. by Kaplan who looks at !Kung & ? as well as showing the Aboriginal Australian studies to be lacking in quality. Don't have 'jobs' so what is 'work', Sahlins w western mindset of leaving home defined as going out for foos but neglected preparing it, making tools, getting water, gathering firewood, discussing distribution etc.
- - - - in liberal, capitalist thought, property enables connection w the state, people feeling like they have a stake in it and engagement w society whilst leftists regard property ownership as the primary source of all social power so an area of social inequality, acquiring poperty the alienation of others from it- Proudhon's belief that property is theft
  - - - some forms of ethnic property rights and not others, same qustions asked in aftermath of Vietnam war and global climate of political unrest
  - - - real economic nature of gendered work shown in divorce where men's work for household is measured as labour and valued through money but the woman's, given as a gift, results in the man's ownership of the product so in divorce women tend to lose everything
- - - - gifts solely for solidarity, can never have not building intentions or consequences- 'a gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction'
      - no such thing as a free gift (morally? misunderstanding or purposeful misconception?)- 'the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts'
      - 'total system' in which 'the cycling gift system is the society'
        
        'the gift cycle echoes Adam Smith's invisible hand: gift complements the market in so far as it operates where the latter is absent. Like the market it supplies each individual with personal incentives for collaborating in the pattern of exchanges'
      - 'Mauss rightly remarks that the concept of interest is itself modern'
    - - 'exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatoriy' (what makes them contractual)
      - 'what rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?' (1)
      - 'shall see how far removed they are from a state of nature as regards law and economics' (Polynesians)
      - 'contracting parties are legal entities: clans, tribes, families' (kinship-based pol. structure?
      - 'what they exchange is not solely property and wealth, movable and immovable goods, and things economically useful' so must have significance beyond material utility e.g. as /acts of politeness'
        
        economic value 'only one feature of a much more general and enduring contract'
      - 'the word potlach essentially means 'to feed' , 'to consume'', should reserve it for 'total services of an agonistic type'
    - - struggled to find 'potlach proper' in Polynesia, just 'system of 'total services''
      - 'this system of contractual gifts in Samoa extends far beyond marriage' where economics and sentiment and gifting are expected to come into connection
      - 'two essential elemets in potlach can be clearly distinguished here: the honour, prestige and mana conferred by wealth; and the absolute obligation to reciprocate these gifts under the pain of losing that mana' (2), reciprocation can be legal status if gifts permanent
      - tonga & oloa- tonga 'the permanent paraphernalia, particularly the mats given at marriage, inherited by the daughters of that marriage'/ 'kind of fixed property- immovable because of their destination'. Oloa 'designate objects, mainly tools, tha tbelong specifically to the husband. These are essentially movable goods. Thus nowadays this term is applied to things passed on by the Whites'
        
        tonga can 'mean everything that may properly be termed possessions' and 'are strongly linked to the person, the clan, adn the earth, at least in the theory of Maori law and religion. They are the vehicle for its mana, it magical, religious, and spiritual force'
        
        'what imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is the fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him'!! like what Carrier saying abt western ideal gift ideology- for this not necessarily for lack of commodification but rather to ensure reciprocity, still in the game of building bonds and connections
        
        'the taonga is animated by the hau of its forest' and 'the hau follows after anyone possessing the thing'/ 'the toanga or its hau- which itself moreover possesses a kind of individuality- is attached to this chain of users until these give back from thier own property'- 'this in turn will give fonors authority and power over their first donor, who has become the last recipient' (3)
        
        role in long chain of relaitons holder wider society instead of forming extra, personal relations in a society held together by de-personalised commodities elsewhere, American ideology of the gift an attempt to regain personal connections?
      - obligation to accept also, to not do so 'is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality'
      - 'ancient morality of the gift, which has become a principle of justice'
    - - speaking of Fr Schmidt's work on pygmies- 'presents put the seal upon marriage and form a link of kinship between the two parents' so 'in short, this represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among eprsons os intermingled, each emerges from they own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are'
      - 'the kula' (as Malinowski studied) 'is a sort of grand potlach. The vehicle of busy inter-tribal trade' but it 'is of a noble kind. It seems to be reserved for the chief' and 'is distinguished carefully from the mere economic exchange of useful goods, which is called gimwali' (4), connection forming distinguished from regular material exchanges of utility as in US conception of the gift
        
        'the essential stuff of these gift-exchanges is the vaygu'a, a sort of money' that 'are not unimportant things, mere pieces of money/// each one has its name, a personality, a history, even a tale attached to it' (something like human), 'one cannot fail to acknowledge the eminent and sacred nature of the objects'
        
        significance shown in that 'vaygu'a are placed on the forehead, on the chest of a dying person, they are rubbed on his stomach, and dangled before his nose. They are his supreme comfort'
        
        'this ystems of gift-through-exchange permeates all the economic, tribal, and moral life of the Trobriand people' 'it is ;impregnated' with it as Malinowski very neatly expressed it'
        
        'generally, even what is received and has come into one's possession in this way- in whtever manner- is not kept for onesefl, unless one can do without it' (then would it become something of utility and not accountable to the same rules?
      - in Fiji, 'thse men have no conception of either selling or borrowing, u nevertheless carry out juridicial and economic operations that fulfil the same functions'
      - evolution: 'barter has arisen through a system of presents given and reciprocated according to a time limit' and 'buying and selling arose in the same way'
      - status establishing- 'in certain kinds of potlach one must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the most madly extravagant'- bonding but also 'based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry' (5)-possible to have a negatively formed bond based on assymetry?
    - - modern separation between 'real rights and personal rights, things and persons' that is not present in less developed societies
      - 'presents are still obligatory, things have special power and form part of human persons'
    - - 'modern' western society
        
        'fortunately, everything is not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling. Things still have sentimental as well as venal value'
        
        'the unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior, particularly when it has been accepted with no thought of returning it'
        
        'we must give back more than we have received. The round of drinks is ever dearer and larger in size', the invitation must be given, and must be accepted. This is still the custom, even in our liberal society'
        
        'one might even say that a section of the law, that relating to industrialists and businessmen, is nowadays at odds with morality'- trying to re-establish morality in gift exchange, separating it from these immoral actors?
        
        'we can and must return to archaic society and to elements in it. We shall find in this reasons for life and action that are still prevalent in certain societies and numerous social classes'
      - 'we have seen how far this whole economy of the exchange-through-gift lay outside the bounds of the so-called natural economy'
      - 'the very word 'interest' is itself recent, originally an accounting technique'
  - - - 'between conceptions of objects as anonoymous commodities that are bought and sld and of objects as personal tokens that are given and received as gifts'
      - 'between conceptions of people as free and independent individuals and of people as enmeshed in relations of mutual obligtion'
    - - 'a present of any amount is a gift when it conveys love'
      - Carrier identifies tension in this in that they are meant to 'bear the identity of the giver' but 'the objects available for giving are anonymous and impersonal mass commodities'
        
        so 'people act to appropriate the commodity, to stamp it with their identity and so cnvert it into a possession'
    - - also 'can create a wholly new form of relationsip, in which people can be related but independent, joined but seperate, linked fundamentally but in no way bound or restricted by each other'
    - - 'alternatively, in commodity transactions the parties define themselves as free and independent' according to 'the formal logic of the marketplace'
      - 'Schneider says that in the family people do not see themselves as freely independent beings. Instead, they identify themselves as moral pesons, members of the kinship unit, the family'
        
        'Americans are individualistic, but the fact htat they stress the freedom of the gift, just as they stress the freedom of the self, does not mean they recognize no obligation' but beyond the ciircle of kin, 'concer wih reciprocation disappears'
    - - !1 his argument 'that the ideology of the gift is shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism. Free and disinterested givers and recipients who transact unobligating expressions of affection come into cultural existence with the shift of production out of the affective and substantial relations that exist in the household to the impersonal relations of wage labour and capital'
      - Colin Campbell points to emerging moral sense in 1700s and idea 'that free and spontaneous, disinterested expression is moraly good'- 'freedom and spontaneity in other words, became part of the basic conceptions of what it means to be human and good at about the same time that emerging capitalism sought the free worker'
  - - - 'Malinowskian premises are only too often read into the Maussian text'
    - - 'Leach's alternative invites us to view the situation in terms of an endless sequence of dyadic exchanges which are in the long term balanced'
    - - individuals in their ststus positions 'do not act on their own behlf.' 'Nor do persons stand in opposition to the things exchanged. The gift contains some part of the spiritual essence of the donor, and this constrains the recipient to make a return- an argument which has been the source of some embarassment to Mauss's admirers, who have tended to dismiss it as peripheral'
        
        Sahlins 'misinterprets Mauss when he suggests that the argument about 'the spirit of the gift' is independent of the argument about the gift as a social construct'
    - - 'the ideology of a disinterested gift emerges in parallel with an ideology of a purel interested exchange'
      - !!!! ideology of gift and idea of economic self interest invented by us- 'while Mauss is generally represented as telling us how in fact the gift is never free,w hat I think he is really telling us is how we have acquired a theory that it should be'
- - - - 'insufficiency of means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity' and 'what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation'
      - 'scarcity is not an intrinsic proeprty of technical means. It is a relation between meands and ends'
    - - George Grey sayinh 'it is, however, utterly impossible for a traveller or even fro a strange native to judge whether a district affords an abundance of food, or the contrary' (1841)
        
        but then (in other reading?) they are deprives and they do complain about it themselves
    - - the context less pristine and the time of study too brief' alongside 'metal tools' and 'the reduction of local pressure on food resources by depopulation'
      - McCarthy and McArthur: ''they certainly did not approach it as an unpleasant job to be got over as soon as possible, nor as a necessary evil to be postponed as long as possible'
      - 'in any case, the dietary intake of the Arnhem Land hunters was adequate' (but just quoted Grey who said outsiders can't judge that?)
        
        Kaplan who says calories ok but not all calories equal
      - leiure not conduvice to cultural evelopment but the opposite? 'the failure of the Arnhem Landers to 'build culture' is not strictly from want of time. It is from idle hands'
    - - 'taken at face vallue, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II'
      - ? you can't just say this ? 'confessedly, the compariosn is misleading, but not as misleading as it is astonishing'
  - - - 'despire the paucity of reliable data, Sahlins drew quantitive and pseud-quantitive conclusions concerning hunter0gathers' work' w 'samples too small to be statistically meaningful'
      - hard2 critiqu bcus 'Sahlins integrated into the argument concepts which specialists would have found difficult to use in economic anlysis at the time' e.g. calling it 'the zen way;
      - 'in discussing evolutioarny processes of the macro-time scale, he projected ethnographic observations of the micro-time scale, he projected ethnographic observations of the micro-time scale- which left much to be desired'
    - - offered explanation that 'affluence is a culture-specific relation between material wants and means and that hunter-gatherers achieve it by reducing thier material wants through cultural processes'
        
        but ''honour[ing] different societies for what they are' means projecting upon them neither Western nor Zen ideas' !!
    - - 'whereas we commonly construct nature in mechanistic terms, for them nature seems to be a set of agencies, simultaneously natural and human-like'
    - - ;like sharing, hunting and gathering are social events and contexts for socializing. The BAtek, for example, do not 'view wrok as a burden'' and the MButi often go out 'with no particular sense of what they want to acquire'
      - 'both praise the goodness and generosity of the natural agencies and (regardless of what they actually have) frequently complain of hunger and other insatiable needs'- constant tension in sharing, constant tension in egalitarianism?
      - ;they culturally construct their needs as the want of a share'
  - - - 'faced with a choice, these people have opted for leisure and rejected the work ethic'
      - 'Sahlins concludes, contrary to what is usually tought, with cultural- development, the amount of work per capita actually increases and the amount of lesiure decreases'
    - - Sahlins argues 'characterized by ends that are limited and means that are modest but adquate' and argued that 'able to meet their needs by working at subsistence roughly 15-20 hours a week'
    - - 'ehat is more, when they do work, the work that the do is not terribly tacing or demaning and 'their wanderings, rather than axious, take on all the qualiteis of a picnic outing on the Thames' (Sahlins 1972:30)'
    - - 'the aflluence thesis, let me suggest, might be construed as a modern version of degeneration theory'
      - 'Gellner's remark that primitive man has had two lives: one for himself and one for us from which to draw certain moral lessions'
    - - work not universally agreed on in anthropolgy, should terms be defined exactly for comparison?
      - 'the difference, it turned out, was explainable by Hawkes and O'Connell's definition of work: in their calculations of work, they included time spent in processing food as well as hunting and gathering it'
      - different values on different things neglected in studies: 'people in nonmarket societies tend to be more task oriented than time oriented'
    - - abt !Kung diet- 'Truswell and Hansen (1976) themselves have concluded that the data suggest ;chronic or seasonal calorie insufficiency may be a major reason why San do not reach the same adult stature as most other people'
        
        'Lee (1979) reasserts the adequacy of the !Kung diet and claims questions about their height, wegith and fatness stem from innapropriate Western standards'
        
        'Konner and Shostak (quoted by Wilmsen 1989) are quite emphtaic that nutritional stress nad its health consequences among the !Kung are hardly in the eye of the bholder'- ''deprivation of material things, including food, was a general recollection [of zhu adults] and the typical emotional tone in relation to it was one of frustration and anger'
        
        Howell 1986: 'what we observers have trouble understanding is what chronic hunger feels like,a dn how human appetite responds to the availability of a kilo or so of rather tart berries or soemaht fibrous fruits'
      - link to Grey example Sahlins talks abt?
    - - impossible to distinguish 'evaluative, subjective element in what we deem to be leisure: to some, gardening is pleasurable, to others it is work'
      - job helps ot define work to some extend but not entirely as carrieds on after job
    - - might be that they have wants their want to not work is just greater- Altman 1992 asks 'why is it that at Momega [Australia] and, according tot hte literature, elsewhere modern hunter0gatherers have apparently insatiabl demands for shotguns, rifles, motor vehicles, cassette recoders, CD players, televisions, and VCRs?'
    - - part of work that the !Kung 'spend a great deal of time talking about who has wat and who gave what to whom or failed to give it to whom', hardly feels like leisure
  - - - immediate-return systems 'stress sharing and mutuality but do not invovle long-term binding commitments and dependencies'
    - - but free & equal access to these & all other needed raw materials
        
        'among the !Kung, this relative freedom of access operates in spite of the fact that people long associated with an area claim to be 'owners' (k''ausi) of it and in particular of its plant and water reources'
    - - large game animals killed- 'it is then that hte most elaborate formal rules dissociating the hunter from his kill and denying him the privileges of ownership are brought to bear'
        
        'Lee has reported how !Kung are expected to be self-deprecating about their hunting successes'
        
        'for the !Kung the owner of the first arrow to hit the animal effectively is the owner of the kill witht the right to distribute it. Arrow-lending is common and the owner of the arrow is often someone other than the hunter himself'
    - - further, 'it is a game of chance and palyers have relatively little oppourtunity of influencing the result'
      - 'will usually end the day without a substantial net gain or loss' but 'from time tot ime people do gain substantial winnings and are then subject to great pressure to continue to compete so that other competitors can win back thier lost possessions', if they flee to avoid will be followed
      - 'these transactions are neutralised and dpersonalised by being passed through th game'
  - - - but 'capitalism both accomodates nad is transformed by the cultural and social formations in which it takes place'