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-~~DECKJS~~
-# Gifts and commodities #
-## Gifts and commodities ##
-Ryan Schram
-Mills 169 (A26)
-ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
-Monday, August 8, 2016
-Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/3.1
-## Reciprocity and the system of total services ##
-* Mauss's theory of reciprocity as an obligation is one of the most influential theories of society.
-* The gift entails three obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
-* The gift has obligations because societies are more than the some of their parts. A society consists of people who are interdependent on each other.
-* **All societies in some way impose the three obligations of reciprocity on their members, even if they don't realize it.**
-This holistic model of a social system is also a very useful lens for understanding contemporary societies. This week, I'd like to develop these three ideas:
-* A social system creates separate spheres of exchange.
-* The spheres of exchange in one society determine how people understand new ways of exchange.
-* Many societies opt for 'develop-man' instead of 'development'.
-## Gifts have spirit ##
-For Mauss, the Maori word hau means the “spirit of the thing given.” When someone gives a gift, they give part of themselves. “The hau wishes to return to its birthplace” (Mauss 2000 [1925]: 12).
-## What if...? ##
-What if we lived in a world in which everything was a gift, and everything possessed a hau?
-## Spheres of exchange ##
-Many societies organize objects into distinct, ranked [[:spheres_of_exchange|spheres of exchange]]
-. Women as wives
-. Prestige items: brass rods, tugudu cloth, slaves
-. Subsistence items: food, utensils, chickens, tools
-Some things, like land, cannot be exchanged for anything, but are inherited.
-## Two points about spheres ##
-. In spite of predictions to the contrary, money does not collapse all spheres into one market. Often money exchanges are placed in their own sphere.
-. Western and “modern” societies think of themselves as being dominated by money, but if you think about it, these societies have spheres of exchange too, and worry about maintaining the boundaries between spheres.
-## Ongka redux ##
-* Has a bank account
-* Grows coffee
-* He has also said that cash-cropping and moka should coexist (Strathern and Stewart 2004, 133).
-## Talk pigeon? ##
-Papua New Guinea Pidgin (*Tok Pisin*) is sometimes called Neo-Melanesian English.
-**//pait// (v.): fight, strum.**
-**Man i paitim gita.** //The man strums the guitar.//
-**//stap// (v.): stop, be.**
-**Ol i stap long Mosbi.** //They are in Port Moresby.//
-**//rot// (n.): road, road, way, method, plan, strategy.**
-**Husat save rot?** //Who knows the way?//
-## Develop-man ##
-"The first commercial impulse of the local people is not to become just like [the West], but more like themselves" (Sahlins 1992, 13).
-As a Kewa leader once told an anthropologist (paraphrase): "You know what we mean by 'development?': building a //hauslain// [a village community], a men's house, and killing pigs. This we have done" (quoted in Sahlins 1992, 14).
-"//Developman//: the enrichment of their own ideas of what mankind is all about" (Sahlins, 1992, 14).
-## The two traps ##
-* The trap of nostalgia: Cultures are dying.
-* The trap of modernism: Everything is getting better.
-## Positive thinking ##
-Positive thinking has deep roots in Western culture, going back to the
-Enlightenment:
-* There is a reason for all of this.
-* Everything is getting better.
-Yet there has also been a *critical tradition* in Western culture
-which has been skeptical of this.
-## Voltaire's Candide and Doctor Pangloss ##
-[[:pangloss|Doctor Pangloss]] believes:
-* There is no effect without a cause, and
-* All is for the best in, this, the best of all possible worlds.
-For Doctor Pangloss, there is no other way that things could turn out
-* "Legs are visibly designed for stockings--and we have stockings."
-* "Pigs were made to be eaten--therefore we eat pork..."
-## What's next ##
-* We look more closely at buying and selling
-  - Capitalist societies make buying and selling possible
-  - [[:Karl Marx]] provides a social theory of capitalism and its rules
-  - Capitalism is organized into classes, and people of each class play distinct social roles
-  - Capitalism is contradictory. It alienates value from workers to benefit owners, but it also needs people to belong to a social whole based on interdependence and reciprocity.
-If you would like to learn more about Marxism, visit:
-http://marxists.org/ for online editions of the *Manifesto*,
-*Capital*, and other key writings of Marx and Engels.
-## References ##
-Andrae, Thomas. 2013. "Barks, Carl." In Icons of the American Comic
-Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman, volume 1, Duncan, Randy,
-and Matthew J. Smith, eds. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.
-Bohannan, Paul. 1955. "Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv." American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70.
-Marx, Karl. 1867. "Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of
-Labor-Power." Capital,
-vol 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm
-Mauss, Marcel. 2000 [1925]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
-Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela Stewart. 2004. Empowering the Past,
-Confronting the Future: The Duna People of Papua New
-Guinea. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan.
-Voltaire. 2006 [1759]. Candide. Project
-Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm.
-## A guide to the unit ##
-{{page>1002guide}}