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# Develop-man # 

## Develop-man ## 

Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

August 16, 2017

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/3.2

## What happens when a gift system encounters a market economy? ##

When societies which are largely integrated through gifts encounter the market principle, many things can happen: 

* People can strive to segregate money in a separate sphere.
  * Auhelawa people sell garden food, but believe that buying yam seeds is shameful.
  * Wamira people prohibit the use of metal tools and wearing manufactured clothing in taro gardens (Kahn 1986, xi).
* People can also convert money and bought items into a new kind of gift.
  * Ongka (of Kawelka) includes money, a truck and motorbikes - bought with the proceeds from his followers' sale of coffee - in his //moka// to Perewa (Nairn 1976).

## Ongka redux ##

So now we can see Ongka in a new light. He's not a living fossil. He
straddles two worlds. 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. 

## Uncle Scrooge in the Land of Tralla La ##

{{:banks.scrooge.jpg|Uncle Scrooge #6 (June 1954)}}

## 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).



## When a gift system meets a commodity system

When a society organized on the basis of gifts encounters a globalizing capitalist market, many different outcomes are possible. In the next lecture and next week, we will look at other possible responses: 

  * Separation, tension, and conflict
  * Efflorescence
  * Transformation










## 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.

Kahn, Miriam. 1993 [1986]. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Nairn, Charlie. 1976. Ongka’s Big Moka. Granada Television. http://www.der.org/films/ongkas-big-moka.html.

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

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}}