ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY SOCI 202 Spring 2012 Instructor: Deniz Yükseker
How do members of a society provide for themselves? Subsistence: how people make a living, how they provide their food Subsistence strategies: Food collectors: foragers (hunters and gatherers) (no domestication) Food producers (domestication)
Subsistence strategies Food producers: Herding (pastoralism) Extensive agriculture (horticulture, slash-and-burn) Intensive agriculture Mechanized industrial agriculture
Do different subsistence strategies coexist?
Theories of material life Formal economic anthropology (led by Melville Herskovits) Formalists used neoclassical economic theory’s concepts (e.g. supply, demand, price, money) to understand pre-capitalist/pre-modern societies’ economic relations
Formalist definition of economy: allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends based on supply and demand Maximization of profit and individual utility through competition in a market A “universal human nature” homo economicus (self-interested rational individuals making economic choices) Is there anything wrong with this definition, and the formalists’ assumptions?
Theories (cont’d) Substantivist economic anthropology (led by Marshall Sahlins, Karl Polanyi) Economy: concrete (and particular) way in which material goods and services are made available to members of a society Economic systems may be defined in terms of the substantive institutional arrangements for provisioning members of a society
Substantivists: capitalist market economy is only one way, among many others, that goods and services may be provided in a society. Pre-capitalist societies had other ways in which goods and services were provided. In pre-capitalist societies, economic activities are embedded in noneconomic institutions (e.g. kinship, political or religious institutions)
Terms for discussion: Scarcity Affluence
Modes of exchange Reciprocity Redistribution Market exchange Generalized Balanced Negative Redistribution Market exchange
Reciprocity: transfer of goods and services between two or more people in small, face-to-face societies based on role obligations Redistribution: transfer of goods and services between a central collecting source and members of society according to some social norms Market exchange: transfer of goods and services in a market, based on prices, supply and demand
A special case of reciprocity Gift exchange: giving and receiving gifts on a reciprocal basis. Obligation to give Obligation to receive Obligation to repay Delayed reciprocity in gift exchange Why?
Can reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange co-exist Can reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange co-exist? Note on reading: 8.5 (p.133) to 8.9 (p.144) not included in Lavenda and Schultz
Case studies The !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana Cultivating the tropical forest in Paraguay Cocaine and the Deterioration of the Bolivian Economy The crack economy in New York City
Case 1 Richard Borshay Lee’s ethnography of subsistence among the !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari desert in the 1960s How did these people subsist? Where did most of the diet come from? Is a lifestyle based on foraging “nasty, short and brutish”?
The !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari How did the their subsistence activities change by the 1990s? Farming, herding animals How has their lifestyle been challenged in recent years? See news stories at: http://www.survival-international.org/news/3816 http://www.survival-international.org/news/3867
Case 2 Richard Reed’s ethnography of the Guarani people in eastern Paraguay How do they subsist? How do the Guarani use the land in the forest?
The Guarani in Paraguay What are the consequences of commercial logging? The Guarani lifestyle is challenged by white settlers Slash-and-burn agriculture is no longer sustainable Some Guarani natives become tenant farmers on white settlers’ lands
Case 3 Jack Weatherford’s fieldwork in the Chapare region and in the Pocona village in Bolivia What kind of economy did the people in the Bolivian Andes have until the 1980s? What kind of economy was created as a result of cocaine production and trade? Crops Labor use : males, females
Case 4 The crack economy in New York City in the 1980s Why did people in “El Barrio” use crack cocaine? What jobs were available to them in New York’s economy? Did selling crack provide them with a stable income?
Case 5 The Last Reindeer Herders in Sweden http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYFrb_8fEYA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlnl038fdY