Economic universalism, Anthropological particularism and the point of social science

The underlying question being addressed throughout this introductory course is the extent to which historical or to put it in other terms, cultural factors shift the direction of human behaviour away from that which would be expected if all humans shared identical conceptions of the way of the world and the nature or purpose of human existence. The starting point of all anthropology, indeed all the social sciences, is that humans act not just in terms of how the world really is but also in terms of how they imagine the world to be; or to put it more concretely in terms of the representations they share over the nature of the world that they live in. These concepts or representations have been formed historically and so, notoriously, vary from place to place and time to time. The great question which anthropology attempts to answer is how and why a single species of animal should develop such widely different understandings of both the social world and the natural world we occupy. In attempting to answer this question two erroneous conceptions prevail. On the one hand there is the fallacy that dates back at least to middle of the 19th century, if not before, which argues that it is the singular human individual that is the object of sociological investigation. It follows that, since all humans share more or less equal powers of ratiocination as well as similar needs and interests, behavioural choices can be understood in terms of the rational calculation of interest by the human actor. Whether this theory takes the form of rational choice theory or game theory or utilitarianism the fundamental assumption is the same: history, locality and culture are mere froth covering the surface of deep, universal determinations of human social action. The parallel fallacy argues more or less precisely the opposite humans are so different from other animals that the kind of determination of behaviour that may apply for chimps, baboons or dolphins cannot work for our superior souls. Everything that matters, everything that makes the human worth studying as a distinct species from other primates, comes down to local history and the cultures that have arisen on the back of path dependent processes by which institutions, and the understandings that underpin them, have arisen locally. This fallacy is not the preserve of anthropologists (it can be found also strongly in some historical work and in literary studies) but it is particularly widely disseminated in this discipline because it appears to justify and legitimate the continuing employment of anthropologists. Both of these fallacies make powerful and persuasive points and can point to domains of human behaviour where they provide wholly convincing demonstrations of the power of their kind of reasoning and the persuasiveness of their model of the human actor. But in the form that they are often presented as the foundational and wholly incompatible ten commandments of diverse academic disciplines (economics or political science on the one hand, anthropology on the other) they offer a dangerous and damaging simplicity. In my view at least, you are among the last generation of students who will be taught within the disciplinary lines of the 19th century. Finding solutions to all the great questions of our age requires the collaboration of different disciplines in common

research projects and the kind of turf demarcation disputes that these twin fallacies lead to are an absolute obstacle to taking disciplines like anthropology or economics for that matter forward in the future. Economics a great area to begin to think about what this might mean and it is around this theme that the lectures ahead are loosely organised.

In this section of the introductory course we turn to anthropological approaches to different sorts of economic institutions. I devote two weeks to the examination of issues around gift, money and the interpenetration of the spheres of affect and calculation. In week three we will examine the vexed question of property rights (think of all the issues around downloadable music) and assess how far our notions of private property are universal. The week after we turn to look at the kind of economic order that is found by most anthropologists today who work in rural settings: peasant household economics. Finally, we will look at different ways of understanding the roots of poverty and how humans cope with relative material deprivation.

Capitalism How weird is it?

This week and next I want to examine how far Capitalism constitutes a unique system of human social organisation. Is there to use the jargon of last term a cosmology or culture of capitalism that marks it out as fundamentally different from all previous social systems? More abstractly, I will be examining the meanings we attribute to certain forms of exchanges or what you might call the symbolic ramifications of entering into particular exchange relations. Both in popular thought and in social theory our type of society is commonly claimed to be radically different from all that went before. Traditional v modern society. Gessellschaft versus Gemeinshaft etc etc. I set myself against that tradition in social thought associated today with all those who are starstruck by what they see as the novelty of globalisation that stresses the great divide separating us from the premoderns. Nonetheless, most social scientists still in the grip of the great divide model. Main roots of the great divide model: Weber Political and religious change Durkheim social structural (economic) and consciousness changes (Division of Labour and Elementary Forms of Religious Life) Above all Karl Marx who argued that it was capitalism as an economic system led to a revolutionary transformation of the terms of human existence.
In his rhetorical tour de force, The Communist Manifesto he writes: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid

melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Marxs argument for a radical break into modernity was above all a set of claims about the underlying categories and representations organising capitalism. Marx saw himself as part of a long historical dialogue and draws on the terms that others had conjured into existence. Here his key terms: Commodity Abstraction or depsonalisation (linked to alienation) Commodity, comes from the tradition that describes itself as political economy because it tries to consider economic relationships in their broader political and social context and its use involves an explicit rejection of a term that we will consider next: that of goods. The Scottish political economist Ricardo first talked of capitalism as the production of commodities by means of commodities The difference that Ricardo postulated between capitalism and pre-capitalist market exchanges can be summed up in the following formulaic expression: In markets in rural Europe one hundred years ago A peasant produced a good at home (G1) took it to market and sold it for a commodity (Money) and then bought another good (G2) with that money: G1-M-G2 (or to use Marxs symbolism C1-M-C2) C1-C2-C3

Under capitalism the dominant model now looks like:

A sum of money buys another commodity which, when sold produces a greater sum of money (hopefully). Karl Marx believed that a particular and important twist to this system lay in the transformation of work into a commodity: people now entered into productive relations with others as part of an economic relationship rather than as part of some other social relationship. As we shall see in two weeks, in a family farm you work because you are a member of a household, a kinship and residential unit. Under capitalism, you work because you have a contract. Whether Marx was right that this particular feature was a) so important and b) as oppressive as he claimed [for most of human history flight to the cities and conditions of waged labour has been willingly taken by those otherwise tied in relations of personal dependency] three further things followed from the transformation of work (productive activity) into labour an economic exchange. First of all, for the first time in history activity became separated in to labour and leisure. Second an entire sphere of social life comes into being that can now be called the economy. The identification of this process is one of Marx great and most anthropological contributions to understanding modern social life.

In many respects we see our society as an economy the economy is the organising or base metaphor for all social relations: but more than that it is the economy conceived as a market in which individuals contract with others for the exchange of services or goods that lies at the heart of our understanding of society. The oracular announcement of currency and stock market standings on the evening news, to take but one example, reflects the organising power of the market metaphor. In communist societies which also subscribed to the idea of society as an economy, the metaphor of economy came from the sphere of production: society was like one giant firm. And on the evening news in communist countries we used to hear not of the changing price of stocks and shares, but of the latest output figures for coal, steel and railway tracks, for instance. Now, one of the chief lessons that comparative sociology teaches us is that things were not always thus. In Ancient Athens the base metaphor of social relations derived from the notion of political engagement. Society was seen as a polis this was a world that imagined the political relations between citizens to be the driving force the shaping force of social life, just as we see economic relations as being the determinant force: its the economy stupid. Or, to take another example that we will return to, peasant society is often conceived on the model of household relations. The house and the relations of those who live within it provide a model to think about broader social connections. The third consequence of the generalisation of commodification to productive as well as exchange activity is that because of commercialisation the reduction of all values to a monetary quantity - there is a tendency under capitalism to lose sight of the concrete, particular aspect of labour and see it abstracted as simply labour power, the ability to work. (Contrast say male and female crops in traditional Papua New Guinea to, say, telephone call centre responders..its just a voice and a skill) It may help to think about the particular features of the commoditisation of work if you contrast it within your own lives with activity that is not commodified: like Housework. Consider the different organisation and differing social relations and rationalities involved in these two activities (though at times they can involve the same physical work: ironing shirts/hovering the floor/washing dishes etc.). No one sacks their spouse in favour of a domestic robot a spouse is not just a monetary investment/value, unlike a worker versus a machine in a place of employment. A nice example of this look it up was the complete failure of wages for housework campaign people engage in this activity not to realise economic value but to have certain sorts of relationships within their households. So what Marx anthropological analysis leads us to see is that in the modern world we find a characteristic set of separations:

Home

from

Work

Kin Person Personal Human considerations Moral

Contract Thing Impersonal Material considerations Amoral

And in all kinds of ethnographically demonstrable fashions TO SOME EXTENT this reduction of persons to things is visible in the way people interact in wage-labour settings in the modern world.

In terms of history of anthropology these ideas brought into the disciplinary discourse particularly by the work of the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation 1944. Argues that capitalism represents The Great Transformation from: Systems for the organisation of production, distribution, exchange and consumption (Economies) which are embedded in social relations to ones which are disembedded from them. The idea is simply that in the pre-modern world there was a kind of moral economy the honour of the lord meant that barefaced exploitation had customary limits. Or, to take an anthropological example, think of traditional New Guinean society where production took place within family units as part of selfreproduction; important food was often classified as male or female the symbolism of gender relations in the family inflecting attitudes towards production; and while pigs were normally raised by females it was males who exchanged them and not for monetary profit but rather for prestige over their competitors. The whole cycle of production, exchange and consumption were immediately part of the social reproduction of a community there is no separate economic sphere: it would be impossible in such a system so Polanyi implies, to allow someone to starve to death because they were no longer productive: what we see as economic activities are always part of other and moral social relations. Polanyi is part of a whole school of writers who fear that the capitalist market generates amorality because economic relations have been disembedded from any moral context. The point is akin to that made by the romantic Irish author Oscar Wilde who defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. For Polanyi and many, many others, the problem with the modern world is just that: we have learnt to price everything and therefore value nothing. It follows that a central task of any would be social reformer is to prevent the economy from seeping into areas of life where morality still holds us in thrall. For if we fail in this then we are over the falls with nothing to stop us from drowning in the churning amorality of commercialisation. On Thursday you will watch a film about a woman called Kim Cotton and one arrangement within the wide range of assisted reproduction techniques known as commercial surrogacy. This film set out, on Polanyi-esque premises, to attack the practice of commercial surrogacy as immoral and debasing because it brings the logic of the market into the arena of the family and reproduction - but I will suggest to

you next week that the film-makers arguments are a lot less robust than their tone suggests. (If you want to read the transcript copy this URL into your browser:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panora ma/transcripts/transcript_03_11_97.txt
If the Marxian inspired approach leads to a dead end when it comes to examining actual commercial arrangements in our society what of the alternatives? I will briefly outline that associated with the discipline of economics. Goods the key term here. Commodities was a key term for Marxians and political economists and as we shall see Gift is key term for anthropological approaches. Each of these ordinary words has been used in a specific scholarly and analytic tradition (and each is also a folk term whose usage rarely corresponds precisely to academic usage). By looking at their range of meanings and the understandings of exchange implied in each we are begining to uncover some of the characteristic features as well as the moral anxieties, the contradictions, if you will, of our way of conceptualising the world. Goods a term from neo-classical economics: any scarce thing that satisfies a need. Neo-classical Economics is famously defined as the science which studies: Allocation [by individuals] of scarce resources among alternative ends - taken from Lionel Robbins 1936 text former Professor of Economics at the LSE and author of the classic, still cited, account of his field). There are a number of claims or assumptions implicit in the notion of goods. Perhaps the two most fundamental are the ideas of scarcity and that objects of exchange and consumption can at least in theory - be reduced to a single register of value how far they satisfy needs. (Because of this single register of interest, the introduction of money as a universal and not just occasional means of exchange leads to a radical and, in one sense, natural development the creation of a universal calculus of interest). Let me just repeat that scarcity is the most fundamental economic characteristic of any good. If something is not scarce but exists in unlimited abundance it cannot be converted into a transactable economic resource. Air and sea-water are a good example of this except of course in the dystopias of films like Total Recall. But imagine, likewise, if there were abundance of all recourses or goods needed: there would be no economics, there would be no need for any social order: we would be in a garden of Eden; and this, of course, is what the Marxian economists of the 19th Century dreamed of creating in what they called communist society.

The example of fresh water, by contrast to that of sea water, is a nice example of a resource that is, in practice for the most part, scarce and will become a whole lot more scarce in years to come. It is not that there is not enough physical quantities of water on the planet for each individual human there is, but it is not found or does not flow where people want it or need it. (And in recent years its quality has also become subject to scarcity and this is likely to become more true with the rise of developing economies). The economists notion of a good also stresses the apparently banal fact that a good satisfies a need. Indeed the value of a good, to a consumer, is determined by it relative satisfaction of need compared to other needs. This notion of value is an interpretative stance that comes directly out of the 19th Century Utilitarian tradition the theoretical tradition that explains social phenomena by the uses or ends which they serve associated with the name of John Stuart Mill in philosophy and Herbert Spencer in sociology (and against whom Durkheim created modern sociology as the study of social facts. In economic theory people will rationally allocate their scarce resources to maximise their satisfactions. Now, how does this model stand up to the anthropological evidence both from societies across the world that do not have or have not had monetary systems and of western societies themselves? Many anthropologists have spent much time pointing out the limitations of this way of interpreting human motivation and behaviour of seeing market activities as the exchange of goods of transparent need-satisfying value. Famously, Marshall Sahlins in Culture and Practical Reason (1976) showed that when shortages occur in accustomed meats in north America people do not rationally switch to other alternative goods, but irrationally do something quite other: Cf his discussion of the Offal crisis. A more recent example is Susanne Friedbergs wonderful study, French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age, which demonstrates that the French/Burkina Faso and the British/Zambian food trade take distinctive, locally (culturally) determined forms eg protecting small holder farming in the French case and doing the opposite in the UK case (with our obsession over hygiene in the food production process doing much of the cultural-economic work). Another example, drawn from the topic on peasant farming, is that traditional peasant household in parts of central and east Europe while happy to market say Barley may never have sold Wheat, or only done so secretly or shamefully (women, but not men, of the household, might be sent to sell flour) Wheat was the sacred constituent of bread associated with Christian liturgical symbolism, and had a symbolic value that was incompatible with commercialisation. It represented, above all, the selfsufficiency of the household and so the transaction of wheat symbolically undermined the core value of peasant life. So 5 of wheat is not the equivalent to the farmer of 5 oats or barley. Even though the biological need that they satisfy is more or less the same.

But does all this mean that economists talk of goods and scarcity is inappropriate in a cross cultural perspective? Hardly in one of the very first studies by an anthropologist of a primitive i.e. tribal social order with no monetary system and indeed no overall scale of commensurable value, Raymond Firth demonstrated that concerns of scarcity were strongly motivating factors in economising behaviour. Of course this took a local, cultural form the imposition of tapus by Chiefs on the consumption of certain goods but it was understood as a saving device. More generally, Richard Salisburys From Stone to Steel (1962), an account of economic transformation in Melanesia, shows how the formalist premise that scarcity and allocation of resources to meet wants could plausibly account for much of the impact of a radical technological innovation (steels cuts trees far faster than stone) once one has taken into account the existence of three separate spheres of exchange, involving subsistence goods, luxury goods and ceremonial goods. But within that structure actors behaved rationally with respect to newly abundant resources. Another outstanding study demonstrating the power of economists models is Polly Hills (1963) The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana. Much of late 20th Century economic anthropology was, however, organised around a claim going back to Polanyis work - that non-capitalist societies could not be analysed using the same techniques and same assumptions as capitalist ones. A classic example of this is Chris Gregorys work contrasting the differential logic of gift and commodity economies in modern New Guinea. For Gregory (as for Marilyn Strathern) Gifts belong to a cultural universe in which things are personalised and as such inalienable from their donor the receipt of a gift entails an entanglement with the person of the giver. Conversely, commodities are impersonal (their value is rendered in the arid idiom of monetary value) and, as such, eminently alienable from their donor. This work itself draws upon the foundational work of the French sociologist and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss but as I will briefly demonstrate it is based on a complete misreading of what Mauss was actually arguing. What Mauss argues in The Gift On the Form and reason of exchange in archaic societies is that while capitalism presents itself as radically different from previous social orders, actually the fundamental principles and often even the institutions of exchange are common to archaic and more developed societies. Mauss makes three fundamental observations about the nature of Gift exchange: First giving, receiving and returning gifts is represented and conceived as a matter of choice and generosity but nowhere is this the case giver, receiver and reciprocator act under an iron logic of obligation. Second, Gift Exchange is always at once moral and interested or to put it in the jargon we used earlier, the impersonal and the personal, the rationally calculating and the socially or generously oriented are always intertwined. Third, as he stresses at the outset the gift morality and organisation still function in our own societies, in unchanging fashion and, so to speak, hidden, below the surface. Mauss was an anarchist who was seeking a way to reform market arrangements and institutionalise what we today call social security and the practical, bottom up way to do so was to build on this submerged but ever-present form of moral exchange.

And yet, perhaps despite this political agenda, and far more than either Marx or Polanyi neither of whom, for different reasons provide a plausible account of premarket economic arrangements, it was the sociologist Marcel Mauss who, at the turn of the last century made the most successful effort to reconstruct the archaeology of the contract and to provide an account of exchange in a world before the introduction of money and prices.

Jonathan Parry (web site) provides an essential commentary on how Mauss goes about this analysis and how he builds his programmatic argument. Parry makes three points First off, Mauss argument is EVOLUTIONARY: He wants to account for how we arrived at our impersonal contracts where you could sack without notice and without responsibility for the person and so goes through various historic societies, starting with island Melanesia, Maori and other pacific island peoples as well as North American native populations and then turning to India as the stand-in for a society between tribal and the state system of ancient Rome where he sees the separation of person and thing established for the first time in law. Second, Our assumptions about what gifts are makes it hard to read Mauss he is NOT saying that primitive gift giving is a charade which conceals the same kind of calculating, individually oriented self interest as demonstrated on a fully functioning market. Note Parrys comments on the translation and the characteristic misinterpretation of Mauss associated with the Malinowskian individualist tradition within anthropology. And, third, while this Malinowskian reading led anthropologists in the past to think Mauss were opposing disinterested gifts and interested commodity exchanges, in fact the divide Mauss describes is between a system in which all exchanges are at once moral and interested (gifts) to our own in which interested (commercial) exchanges are distinguished from a sphere of putatively disinterested (charitable) exchanges. Parry adds his own archaeology of the free gift to that of Mauss, in terms of the rise of Salvationist religion. Note that this argument of Parrys parallels a much older one from Pierre Bourdieu (see Theory of Practice,1972) who demonstrated the interested calculation that goes into determining when to return a gift: the strategy in gift exchange all lies in the timing since the goal is to disguise the venality that is present as strongly as in any commercial exchange. Since Parry and Bourdieu a lot of Melanesian ethnography has set about demonstrating the calculative and yet binding character of Melanesian gift giving, the entanglement of gift and commodity (e.g. Nick Thomas book, Entangled Objects). But as I have indicated there is another tradition within anthropology that wishes to establish a radical divide between them and us and which has to turn Mauss on his head to argue that Gift and Commodity socieites are utterly unlike to make him do the analytical work they need. In next weeks lecture we will look at how this great divide style anthropology misrepresents modern capitalist market transactions.