Download 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 (selfinterested 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
 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 coexist?
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