How anthropologists study exchange, trade, and economic systems across cultures.
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- Reciprocity
- Mutual exchange of goods or services based on social obligation rather than strict market value
- Redistribution
- System where goods flow to a central authority, then distributed back to community members
- Who studied the Kula ring?
- Bronislaw Malinowski
- Kula ring
- Ceremonial exchange system among Trobriand Islanders where shell valuables circulate in a ring, maintaining social bonds between distant communities
- Embedded economy (Polanyi)
- Economic exchange inseparable from social and political relationships in pre-capitalist societies
- Substantivism vs formalism debate
- Disagreement over whether non-capitalist economies follow fundamentally different logic than market economies
- Generalized reciprocity (Sahlins)
- Exchange with no immediate return expected, typical of family or close group sharing
- Balanced reciprocity (Sahlins)
- Exchange with roughly equivalent return within reasonable time, typical of inter-group trade
- Negative reciprocity (Sahlins)
- Exchange where both parties attempt to gain advantage; haggling or barter with minimal social obligation
- Potlatch
- Gift-giving feast among Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples where hosts gain status through giving away or destroying wealth
- Purpose of the Kula ring (Malinowski)
- Maintains peace and social bonds between distant communities while enabling practical everyday trade in basic goods
- Bridewealth
- Goods or payment transferred from groom's family to bride's family upon marriage
- Gift economy
- Economic system based on reciprocal gift-giving rather than monetary exchange or competitive markets
- David Graeber on debt history
- Argued that credit and debt systems preceded money and barter in human economic history
- Commodity fetishism
- Process where manufactured goods appear to have value independent of the labor and social relations creating them
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