Spheres of exchange in historical perspective

Spheres of exchange in historical perspective

Week 3: Spheres of exchange, in comparative and historical perspective

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/3.2

Main reading: Golden (1996); Deomampo (2019)

Gifts and commodities

Gift exchange (or reciprocal exchange) and commodity exchange are distinct kinds of exchange, and reflect distinct forms of social relationship.

• Rather than each mode of exchange belonging to different types of society, we see now that both modes exist in every society.
• Gift exchange and capitalist institutions coexist but also conflict with each other.
  • The triumph of capitalism over other kinds of social system is not inevitable.

Community versus capital

The people of Wamira in Papua New Guinea and the Luo ethnic group in Kenya both illustrate how commodification and alienation can be put in check:

• Wamira taro gardens can't be tended with metal tools (Kahn 1986). In other words, you can’t buy tools to grow taro; you have to use tools from your own place.
• When Luo people sell land, they earn “bitter money” (Shipton 1989). When they spend it, they get sick.

But capital and community interact in other ways too.

Potlatch: Giving and global trade

In the 18th and 19th centuries, and after a revival in the 20th century, Indigenous societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America celebrated huge feasts known as potlatch (which means to give)

• Gifts exchanged between different communities’ leaders were competitive in nature, each trying to give more than the other could give back (Mauss [1925] 1990, 6–7, 38–40; Eriksen 2015, 224–25).

European presence in North America after 1800 gave people more sources of wealth for potlatch gifts, and potlatch prestations grew (Wolf 1982, 184–92).

• Colonial contact did not compel people to abandon potlatching, but stimulated its growth and expansion, until it was banned by Canadian law as a political threat (which was repealed in 1951).

The efflorescence of exchange

The history of potlatch is an example of the efflorescence of an exchange system.

Culture change is like language contact

What looks like growth, change, or development in an ethnocentric perspective may very well be something else.

• Development is often not change, but a process called “develop-man” (Sahlins 1992).

“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).

Ongka’s “big moka” is an example of develop-man in PNG. Is there an example of develop-man in Sydney or where you live?

The informal economy

In the spaces most people call slums or ghettos, where we assume the poorest of the poor live, there’s actually a lot of enterprise and economic productivity.

To thrive in spaces that are between one world dominated by gifts and another dominated by the capitalist market, people have to engage in “informal” economic practices that are based on both reciprocity and alienation.

• Making gin in Frafra slums (Hart 1973)
• Selling betel nut around PNG (Sharp 2013)
• Selling tobacco and betel nut in Auhelawa

A trading network in Papua New Guinea

Making pots in Salamaua

We the people of Salamaua would like to put down the prices of our things in this newspaper so that all of you will see them. We would like this message to all of you people in villages in the area of Markham River and Finschhafen.

Now you all see the prices for all these things and then you all will get it right. So, prices for them are like this: If you see a pot for 4/-, then you pay with (givim long) two big pandanus of 4/-. If a pot for 2/-, then you pay with (givim long) a pandanus of 2/-. The reason is you all always just bring pandanus and get pots. So, you all don’t know the price (pei) of these things. And so, we put them for the pots so that you all can see them.

If a pot is 5/-, or £1, then you must pay (pei) directly with money. It is not good that you should give pandanus for 5/- and £1 and get a pot. You know that the work of a pot is not like the work of pandanus - Pots are harder work than pandanus, so you must pay directly for big pots with real money.

The work of pots is like this:- The very first thing, they must dig the ground and they get really deep. After that, they bring it to the village and the work of women now begins. The women bake the earth in a really big fire - They bake this earth so that it becomes really strong. This work isn’t easy. It’s really hard work. Many days pass, and then the pot is now finished and a man can cook food in it.

We say this because you all have put down many things of yours - So we see this and so we Salamaua people, we support you all. Our message is finished. We all the people of Salamaua.

“People of Salamaua.” 1948. “Pei bilong sosopen.” Lae Garamut (28 August) 2(23): 4.

Ongka’s Big Moka is about the present, not the past

If you watched the film Ongka’s Big Moka, you understand moka and being a big man.

Now, you can see Ongka in a new light. He’s not a living fossil. He straddles two worlds within one society. He makes money from selling coffee, and he keeps a cycle of moka going too.

• Has a bank account
• Grows coffee
• He has also said that cash-cropping and moka should coexist (Strathern and Stewart 2004, 133).

Ongka and other big men draw on money earned in markets to make bigger gifts. Money has led to the efflorescence of the moka system.

What appears to be change is often continuity, and transformations of people’s lives are at the same time development and extension of their existing social ties.

References and further reading

Deomampo, Daisy. 2019. “Racialized Commodities: Race and Value in Human Egg Donation.” Medical Anthropology 38 (7): 620–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1570188.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Exchange and Consumption.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.

Golden, Janet. 1996. “From Commodity to Gift: Gender, Class, and the Mmning of Breast Milk in the Twentieth Century.” The Historian 59 (1): 75–87. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6563.1996.tb00985.x.

Hart, Keith. 1973. “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 11 (1): 61–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/159873.

Kahn, Miriam. 1986. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. “Selections from introduction, chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1992. “The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific.” Res 21: 13–25.

Sharp, Timothy L. 2013. “Baias, Bisnis, and Betel Nut: The Place of Traders in the Making of a Melanesian Market.” In Engaging with Capitalism: Cases from Oceania, edited by Kate Barclay and Fiona McCormack, 227–56. Research in Economic Anthropology 33. Bingley, Eng., UK: Emerald Group Publishing.

Shipton, Parker. 1989. Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela Stewart. 2004. Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future: The Duna People of Papua New Guinea. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.