Week 6: Spheres of exchange
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2026)
September 8, 2026
There are some things that can’t be exchanged, and some things that money can’t buy. The theory of reciprocity leads to a model of how societies organize the flow of material things, and it works differently in every society, including yours.
Main reading: Reyes-Foster and Carter (2020)
Other reading: Addo and Besnier (2008); Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955)
Notes
In this week, we continue to look at the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the encounters between the logic of the gift and the logic of the commodity, private property, and capitalism.
We have already discussed Paul Bohannan’s concept of “spheres of exchange” as one corollary of Maussian reciprocity (Bohannan 1955). At first glance, Tiv spheres of exchange look like one society’s tradition, and that’s pretty much what Bohannan thought at the time. Soon, this will fade away, I suppose he must have thought, and a multicentric economy will become a unicentric one, like my culture in the United States.
Well, it was more complicated than that. And Bohannan was on to something that even he didn’t realize at them time. Tiv is not the only society with spheres of exchange. They just happen to be explicit about it and could tell Bohannan what he could and could not do with his chickens and utensils. We can generalize this idea to other contexts, even ones where people may not be aware of how they keep certain things is specific spheres.
Like any good theory derived from ethnographic description, “spheres of exchange” is a mirror one can hold up to oneself. If there is a society that classifies valuable things in separate spheres, then one is compelled to ask what spheres of exchange does my society impose on my use of valuable things? Does my society have spheres of exchange, and if it doesn’t, why not?
When people explain contemporary society, they often talk in terms of dichotomies. Some is either one thing or another:
- Either–or
- Traditional–modern
- Reciprocity–commodity exchange
- Collective–individual
- Village–city
It is easy to think that this applies to the idea of reciprocity, embeddedness, and spheres of exchange. One might assume that they are traits of one type of society, but they don’t apply to another type, based on markets and commodity consumption.
Yes, the idea of commodities and private property in the abstract are totally different from the logic of the gift, reciprocity, and interdependence. When you meet needs with commodities, you can pretend that you are an isolated individual with no social ties or obligations. But is that true in reality? No.
These two opposed ideas—reciprocity and the commodity form—are signs of different types of societies, they coexist in every society.
When Tiv people started acquiring money, they applied the spheres of exchange to money and its uses. That is one way that commodity and gift interact in one society:
- Segregation of commodity exchange and reciprocity as distinct spheres
But there are others we will learn about this and next week:
- Subordinating money, markets, and commodities, to an overarching system based on reciprocity, or the efflorescence of gift exchanges
- An “informal” economy where the ideas feed off of and reinforce each other (Hart 1973).
Possible discussion activities for tutorial
What cannot be sold? Or, can every material thing that has value also be exchanged for money? How do you interpret this fact about your own world?
In an interview, an informant of Reyes-Foster and Carter tells them:
From one mom, even after I had said, you know, that I wasn’t comfortable she insisted that we take her milk. And I took it because she wasn’t giving me another option and I threw it away. It was probably 200 ounces, but she wouldn’t let me say no. (Reyes-Foster and Carter 2020, 118–19)
How do you interpret this statement as evidence for the underlying ideas that inform how the informant and her partners in milk-exchanging networks understand their exchange of milk? How would your life be different if you had to pay for some things you needed in Australian dollars but other things you needed could only be bought with gold coins?
How would society be different if income taxes were abolished but a compulsory system of national service was instituted (with exceptions or modifications for people with qualified conditions)?
Keywords
spheres of exchange, the hau of the gift
Learning outcomes
- Understand the significance of history in holistic models of society
- Be able to restate ethical dilemmas of commodification as a problem of spheres of value in history
- Be able to argue for an interpretation of an empirical example in an ethnographic description as evidence for a sphere of exchange