Week Six
Carrier
Exchange has been a core issue in anthropology almost from its beginnings. The seminal text is Mauss's long essay, The Gift (Essaisur la don in the original French). Here he lays out the fundamental elements of gift exchange: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. Lévi-Strauss builds upon Mauss's conclusions to suggest that the rules of the gift define human distinctness, arguing that the willingness to give away one's female kin (this is a rather sexist model, but not surprising given it was being framed in the 1940s) is premised on the trust that unrelated women will be given by the receivers in return. This widens the web of kin through marriage (hence the description of Lévi-Strauss's kinship writings as "alliance theory") and extends human sociality beyond the immediate group. This tri-part pattern runs throughout Lévi-Strauss's later work on myth and art, where he finds that mediation between dualities, as well as the exploration in myth of unacceptable realities of life (people return from the dead, humans become animals and so on).
As Carrier notes, however, most anthropological writing on gifting has focused on small scale gifting, or at most, the kinds of unusual gifting cycles like the famous kula of the Trobriand Islands, written about first by Malinowski, but analysed again by other Leach and Weiner among others. (The kula, for those that don't know, involves the exchange of valuables -- necklaces and bracelets, necklaces going in one direction, and the bracelets in another -- along a giant circle that links men throughout the the islands. The idea is not to hang on to the valuables and hoard them, but to pass them along to the next person in the circle, but only after on is assured of getting a nice one in turn from the person BEFORE you in the circle. All this would be rather dull if it weren't for the fact that a valuable can be detoured from the existing circuit by a skillful man who successfully courts someone with a valuable and gets them to give it to THEM instead of the existing next one in line. This element turns what would be a plodding handover-handoff into a kind of game, with fame and prestige at stake).
The difference between the Maussian view and the Malinowskian one is that the first speaks to SOCIAL obligation and the second to INDIVIDUAL strategizing. Actor-oriented anthropology and transactional anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s stressed the second (even before practice theory made the idea of agency popular) as a way to push back against British structural functionalism, and to assert the importance of choice and change in society (the key writer here is Fredrik Barth). The transactional, strategizing view is currently more popular, but it is worth noting how much we take for granted that gifting is a universal trait of human beings, used for a variety of human desires, which seems to hearken back to Mauss and Durkheim.
The anthropological focus on gifting, particularly in Melanesia and South Asia, is clearly warranted, since the cultural emphasis on exchange is very pronounced in both places, and is tied to some very important ideas about substance and persons (as noted in readings I cited from last week's class). But exchange is a bigger issue that can't always be reduced to such particularistic examples of gifting. I think Carrier overlooks some important work on economic anthropology, including Paul Bohannon's work on limited currencies (in other words, things other than cash - in his work among the Tiv in Nigeria, these would be cowrie shells, cattle and iron bars -- that can be exchanged for SOME things but not others). Bohannon's point is that while it might look superficially like barter, societies don't necessarily take on the principle that they'll exchange anything for anything. Rather the point (and the effect) of limited currencies is to create hierarchies of goods so as to keep exchange values proportionate. This then raises the question of how exchange goes on between people who've encountered each other for the first time, and must decide how they'll enter into exchange, using things that the other side may not have seen or used before, on a basis that is fair to both sides. Here is where notions of value come very much into play (and something to remind people about when they hear about Native Americans "selling" Manhattan for beads -- i.e. wampum, a complex valuable of Eastern Woodland peoples).
Carrier's larger point is, I think, that there is no clear division between forms of exchange, social complexity, and the spheres that exchange goes on in. Additionally, exchange, whatever form it takes, has broader social impacts and implications than just what is transacted in an exchange, and the people who do the transacting. He doesn't mention the theories of unequal exchange (e.g. Emmanuel) that sought to understand uneven global economic development in the 60s and 70s, but the idea that labour and goods were systematically undervalued in exchange was widely circulated at the time. To the extent that this owed anything to ideological imperatives that were racist and/or sexist, certainly the perpetuation of over-exploitation in informal labour in many parts of the world (where workers are deprived not just of the rewards of excess labour power but even essential labour power) owes itself to ruling ideas about what women and "lower classes" deserve (and are "lucky" to get).
As a final note, Carrier's analysis of how gifting takes on additional meanings during times of festive exchange is worthwhile. Goods are the same at Christmas as they are at other times, for example, and the close tie between relationships, things, and ritual festivity is both intense and often fragile (for more anthropology on Christmas, see Miller’s collection). This is worth remembering with respect to any OTHER important festive events in which gifting occurs.
Miller and Parrott
The theme of the connection between things and people, and the intentions behind gifting, are also explored in Miller and Parrott, as well as the motivations behind disposal, dispersal, and retention of objects. Miller has long held to the idea that the study of material culture (to which he is a major contemporary contributor in anthropology) is, at root, the study of social relationships. The essay here is one effort among many to try to expand the scope of studying objects, persons and exchange by looking at what people do at moments other than first gifting or receiving (or, if we're looking at commodity consumption, the point of first purchase and use). The contemporary study of material culture owes itself in part to the sheer profusion of things since the industrial age, forcing people into decisions about things that in an age of greater material constraint, might work out differently. I'd be interested to read about the way that goods pass from the deceased to the living in other social settings (with the obvious exception of societies where all traces of the deceased need to be expunged, including anything they owned -- I'm thinking here of various American and Amerindian cultures who are quite happy that the dead go elsewhere and want nothing more to do with them, including having their things around (e.g. Navajo, Wari' and French Roma mentioned in this article, to name three -- also manner of death can affect how their belongings and the deathplace are treated -- traditionally, Chinese suicides forced the survivors to destroy the place in which the death occurred, see Wolf).
Miller and Parrott, in a way that seems to me quite in line with much British Anthropology, seeks to find a way between structure and process. The structure comes from prevailing notions of how inheritance and bequests SHOULD proceed; the process comes from how people try to find a way to spotlight deviations and modifications from the rules (for example, honoring the principle that all children of a parent should inherit, but favouring one or other with some other cherished possessions). The piece also has much to say about the nature of memory, and the principle of "economy" that causes only a few things (and their associations) to be kept as opposed to all possible things. I wonder if one goal of monumental funerary architecture, or funerary objects that are made of enduring materials, is that they are less easy to dispose of or to be sacrificed to the economy of relationships?
Fortis
From the end of life we go back to the beginning of life with this reading. Human intervention and the formation of the distinctly human person is not restricted to this ethnographic setting by any means – that humans need to be made rather than simply allowed by nature to come into being is familiar to anyone who has explored the contrast of nature and culture. However, here, we see a particular use of notions of “design” that make humanness visible and real, as well as a sense that human identity is a fragile state that needs to be constantly monitored and maintained (for the Kuna people, this is not just achieved by making designs on bodies but people making things that are indicative of their creative natures).
Interpretation of unusual events is a staple of ethnographic writing – best exemplified by studies of “witchcraft” (I use inverted commas because of the possibility of confusion with Western style pagan practices that are largely invented traditions) in which supernatural defenses are mustered against patterns of misfortune (Evans-Pritchard, obviously). Here the characteristics of the newborn child factor into how the child’s relationship to animals is imagined, and how they are therefore treated. The reading is rich and complex on the nature of Kuna thought about the human and the animal worlds, but a nice summation points out how the children without amniotic traces at birth and those with amniotic “designs” are at opposite ends of a spectrum – the first have may have animal influences and inclinations but these cannot be known and can only be guarded against up to a point; the second’s connection to animals can be known and managed, because designs are visible. In between, those children with amniotic remnants that have no design, are “seers” with unique access to animal realms, but no guides to fellow humans as to how to navigate them. For the Kuna, as Fortis argues, the design and the surface for the design are inseparable. Making art, making design, is the same as “being” in Kuna thought, and is the necessary attribute of the human person.
The nature of human-animal relationships is a topic in anthropology that is just recently getting attention with the rise of the theme of “ontology” or – views of “what is” that include animals and other non-human components on different footings from what is considered “obvious” in Western imagination. For example, we know from a great deal of anthropology that the line that separates humans from animals is very tenuous – as it is with the Kuna. The Kaluli in New Guinea believe that they turn into birds upon death (Schieffelin); shamans in many societies are thought to be able to change into animals; Wari ancestral spirits ultimately emerge from the water where they go as a deceased person to become white-lipped peccaries(Conklin)). I am not aware that this kind of identification occurs in societies with domesticated animals, or among pastoralists, but I’m not sure. It seems very much to be at home with societies in which the reciprocal
Barth, F., 1981.Process and form in social life. London: RoutledgeKegan & Paul.
Bohannan, P., 1955.Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv.American Anthropologist,57(1), pp.60-70.
Ceci, L., 1982. The value of wampum among the New York Iroquois: A case study in artifact analysis.Journal of anthropological Research,38(1), pp.97-107.
Conklin, B.A., 2001.Consuming grief: compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society. University of Texas Press.
Emmanuel, A., 1972.Unequal exchange: A study of the imperialism of trade. Monthly Review Press.
Leach, J.W. and Leach, E. eds., 1983.The Kula: new perspectives on Massim exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C., 1955.The structural study of myth.The journal of American folklore,68(270), pp.428-444.
Malinowski, B., 2002.Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge.
Maurer, B., 2006.The anthropology of money.Annu. Rev. Anthropol.,35, pp.15-36.
Miller, D., 1995.Unwrapping christmas. Oxford Univ Pr.
Schieffelin, E., 2005.The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. Springer.
Weiner, A.B., 1983. A world of made is not a world of born’: doing kula in Kiriwina.In: The Kula: new perspectives on Massim Exchange. Leach JW and E. Leach (eds), pp.147-170.
Wolf, Margery. 1975. Suicide in China. In: Women in Chinese society, M Wolf, Witke and E. Martin (eds). Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press. pp. 111-142.