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From an egocentric to a sociocentric perspective
To be able to understand Tuvalu, you have to make a big switch in
your perspective
It’s not migration, it’s relocation.
It’s not individuals leaving one society and entering another,
it’s a society moving.
We can make a similar change in thinking to understand why the
world is weird
Society is not just a bunch of individuals living next to each
other, even though that is what seems natural and obvious
When making decisions in everyday life, it feels like each of us
is simply doing what we choose is best for us. We each act as
individual, rational maximizers of utility.
That’s the duck. What’s the rabbit?
Learning to see the social, collective dimension of existence
instead of individuals is anthropology’s way of challenging very
influential ideas about how the contemporary world works, and what it
can be.
An “arm ornament”
Arm ornament; Cylindrical-spiral of
conus shell, with 2 perforations through which is tied 2 plant fibre
cords strung with red & white glass beads, 3 black banana seed
pods and long strips of palm leaf. 1904. Pitt Rivers Museum,
University of Oxford, 1904.60.131.
https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/collections-online#/item/prm-object-99833.
A “necklace”
Chief’s necklace of red shell discs
with pendants of pearl shell, black plant seeds (banana?) and palm
fibre. The red shell discs are interspersed with white beads and four
long cylindrical black beads. The pendant is made from a circular
piece of shell with holes around the edge. From each hole hands a
length of red beads topped with a seed. the shell discs are threaded
parallel to each other. A piece of pearl shell and palm fibre hangs at
the bottom of each sting. 1872. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of
Oxford, 1890.5.1.
https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/collections-online#/item/prm-object-63161.
Coins and bills
Men counting bills and coins at a table
in Wadaheya, an Auhelawa village on Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea,
in 2006.
Yams
A collection of baskets of yams
(Dioscorea alata) brought to an event in Tupwagidu, an
Auhelawa village on Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea in
2004.
Durkheim and Mauss
Emile Durkheim is a
founding figure of sociology and anthropology
He wanted to analyze society as an objective fact
Society is a collective consciousness, like the Borg,
from Star Trek (yes).
Applied a Durkheimian analysis to economic activity
Reciprocity is an obligation underlying
many if not all transactions
Mauss’s argument clashes with his own culture’s conventional
understanding of economic activity
Mauss grew up in a world in which everyone assumed that people
acted as self-interested rational maximizers
For Adam Smith, for instance, says
“[There is] a certain propensity in human nature
…: the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one
thing for another” (Smith [1776] 1843, 6)
And yet, most people in most places don’t do this. Exchanges take
the form of presents. Often people exchange identical things.
Gifts create obligations
Mauss says: Because you have to.
Gifts come with obligations because a gift is part of the system of
total services. Specifically, giving a gift involves a triple
obligation:
The obligation to give
The obligation to receive
The obligation to reciprocate, or to give back to
one who has given.
Society, in essence, is a total system.
Reciprocity is an expression of this fundamental reality of society.
We may not even be aware of this state of interdependence, but it is
still there.
Gifts have spirit
For Mauss, the Maori word hau means the “spirit of the
thing given” (Mauss [1925] 1990, 10).
When someone gives a gift, they give part of themselves.
“The hau wishes to return to its birthplace” (Mauss [1925] 1990,
12).
Mauss says that the essence of society is a “system of
total services”(Mauss [1925] 1990, 5–6)
In a system of total services,
everything one does is for someone else, and
other people do everything for you.
It is a state of total interdependence.
Yam gardening in Auhelawa
Auhelawa is a society of people living on the south coast of Duau
(Normanby Island), off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea.
Every family in Auhelawa produces most of their own food grown on
their own lands, and the most important of these are
ʻwateya (Dioscorea alata)
halutu (Dioscorea esculenta)
Yet although most of people’s effort and thinking goes into growing
these yams, most of the ʻwateya are not grown as food for
one’s family.
The best halutu are also preserved.
Tiv spheres of exchange
What if everything you owned “wished to return to its birthplace”
(Mauss [1925]
1990, 12)?
Everything of value would be embedded in social
relationships.
In many societies the embeddedness of value takes
the form of a system that organizes objects into distinct, ranked spheres of exchange. One example
is the Tiv of Nigeria, who have three spheres:
Some things, like land, cannot be exchanged for anything, but are
inherited (Bohannan 1955).
Money in Tiv society: Bohannan’s prediction
Bohannan claimed that money would disrupt the separation of spheres
of exchange. However…
Money was initially placed in the lowest of spheres, or even
outside of the three spheres (Bohannan 1955, 68). It
continued to mainly be exchanged against low-ranking items (Parry and
Bloch 1989, 13–14).
Other scholars have noted that money does not have this
revolutionizing effect on similar systems (Hoskins 1997, 186–88).
We got apples
Apples on display at a supermarket in
downtown Sydney, 2022
You can think of commodities as a “sphere of exchange.” When you
exchange commodities for money, and back again, you are following
certain rules.
The sale of commodities generates a profit.
A system of producing, selling and distributing commodities as the
main form of economic system is associated with
capitalism.
Private property creates a new kind of society
For capitalism to emerge, first the concept that one’s property can
be owned privately has to be instituted.
Private property gives me the right to exclude other people from
my property, like a fence.
Talk about selling out…
A worker under capitalism brings “his own hide to market
and has nothing to expect but – a hiding”(Marx [1867] 1972,
343).
What do you think he means by this? Buzz about this. What do you
associate with the word Capitalism? Marxism? When did you first hear
these words? Have you ever read the Communist Manifesto?
Capitalism is…
Capitalism is a system in which the means of
production (capital, or productive wealth) are privately owned by one
social class, the bourgeois class.
Capitalism is a system in which nobody else has
access to the means of production; in order to live, people have to
sell their labor.
Either gifts or commodities?
This might sound like a simple dichotomy:
societies based on gifts, reciprocity, and a system of total
services;
capitalist societies based on commodity production and
consumption.
Instead, consider this possibility:
Every society is based on a system of total services, even if its
members don’t know it and cannot see it.
Some societies impose a specific set of social fictions:
valuable things can be private property, and
your body and your labor power is your private property, and you
can sell it if you have to.
We see both the reality of society and the fiction of individual
alienation in every society, and they interact in several different
ways.
A side note: There is a paradox in our concept of society
Bourgeois culture teaches us that we are each individual economic
actors and that there is no society on which we depend.
But societies are real. We really
are all part of a system of total services.
Yet, also, every society is based on a fiction.
We need to be part of a social order
But any one social order will involve lying to ourselves.
And some social fictions completely obscure the existence of any
social ties.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Exchange and
Consumption.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An
Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed.,
217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.
Lyon, Sarah. 2020. “Economics.” In Perspectives: An
Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Nina Brown,
Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de González. Arlington, Va.: The
American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/economics/.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The
Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Parry, Jonathan, and Maurice Bloch. 1989. “Introduction: Money
and the Morality of Exchange.” In Money and the Morality of
Exchange, edited by Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, 1–32.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Adam. (1776) 1843. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations With a Life of the Author: Also a View of the
Doctrine of Smith, Compared with That of the French Economists, with a
Method of Facilitating the Study of His Works, from the French of M.
Jariner. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson.
West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern
Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from
Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
