Making a Living

Question 1

Economic anthropology

Answer 1

• Related to aspects of human nature that deal with decisions of daily life and what it takes to make a living
• Examines needs, wants, demands of a society and how they are balanced against goods and services that are available
• Difference between formal economics and substantive economics

Question 2

What are the 3 different thereotical approaches to economic anthropology?

Answer 2

• Humans are self-interested and work to maximize individual benefits
• Humans are social and work together in groups
• Humans are moral and do not make decisions that go against their morality
  Each approach justifies a different subject of economic analysis

Question 3

Subsistence strategies

Answer 3

• Strategies used to meet basic material needs: food, shelter, clothing
• Distinction between food collectors and food producers
• Farmers are included as food-producers and can practice one of three kinds of agriculture

Question 4

Food collectors

Answer 4

People who gather wild plant materials, fish, and/or hunt for food

Question 5

Food producers

Answer 5

People who depend on domesticated plants and/or animals for food

Question 6

Economic activity

Answer 6

• 3 phases = production, distribution and consumption

- Anthropologists argue over which of these constitutes the most important phase

Question 7

Neoclassical economic theory

Answer 7

A formal attempt to explain the workings of capitalist enterprise, with particular attention to distribution

Question 8

Gift exchange

Answer 8

• Marcel Mauss (1950) argued for a method of exchange that is embedded in social relationships of kinship, partnerships, and acquaintances
• Rather than be linked by cash, people are linked by social relations
• Thought it was mostly observed in non-Western societies (‘savages’ and ‘barbaric’ people)
• But likely societies participated in both market exchange and gift exchange

Question 9

Reciprocity

Answer 9

• Generalized (e.g. modern day gift-giving, Ju/’hoansi hxaro): does not require a gift back on any kind of timeline
  Balanced (e.g. Kula exchange in Trobriand Islands): direct exchange without delay
  Negative (e.g. Kuria East Africa, Mbuti pygmies of Africa): impersonal and seeking to maximize gains; screws over the other party

Question 10

Redistribution

Answer 10

Goods and services are collected by a central figure for eventual distribution to followers
E.g. Potlatch among the Kwakiutl; Cherokee of Tennessee Valley; Canada Revenue Agency

Question 11

Market exchange

Answer 11

• Trade is calculated with a medium of exchange such as money
• Goal is maximizing profit
• Value determined by laws of supply and demand

Question 12

Organ transplantation as gift exchange

Answer 12

Based on Lesley Sharp’s ethnographic research in the U.S. (1995, 2006)

• What is being “transplanted” is more than a spare organ
• The valuation of one life over another life
• Organ is embedded in social relatedness and kinship ties
• Sense of the “tyranny of the gift” - the obligation you have after being given something so precious

Question 13

Organ transplantation as market exchange

Answer 13

• Fieldwork challenges of studying an illegal market
• Brokers use deceit to get sellers to agree
• Sellers are most often not ‘better off’ after (economically, physically, socially)
• Market works in buyer’s favour, but not the seller’s

Question 14

Production

Answer 14

• Anthropologists draw on the work of Karl Marx who concentrated on labour – both physical and cognitive
• Marx differentiated between the mode, means, and relations of production

Question 15

Mode of production

Answer 15

Set of social relations through which labour is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of skills, tools, organization and knowledge
Can be:
Kin-ordered
Tributary
Capitalist

Question 16

Relations of production

Answer 16

Social relations linking the people who use a given means of production within a particular mode of production

Question 17

Means of production

Answer 17

Tools, skills, organization and knowledge used to extract energy from nature

Question 18

Kin-ordered mode

Answer 18

Social labour is performed on the basis of kinship relations

Question 19

Tributary mode

Answer 19

Labourers control the means of production but must provide payment to some authority figure

Question 20

Capitalist mode

Answer 20

3 main features:

1. Means of production is property owned by capitalists
2. Workers are denied access to such ownership and must sell labour to capitalists to survive
3. This labour produces for capitalists surpluses of wealth that capitalists may retain or plow back into production to increase output and generate further surpluses

Question 21

Marxist approach to economic anthropology

Answer 21

• Highlights class struggles in production
• Reveals that conflict is part of material life
• Shows the role of ideology in justifying the relations of production and reproducing society generation to generation
• Questions why people have different quantities of resources to begin with
• Sees workers and owners as agents

Question 22

Consumption

Answer 22

• What is valued in one society may not be in another
• How we explain patterns of consumption:
  The internal explanation (e.g. Malinowski)
  The external explanation (e.g. cultural ecology and ecozones)
  The cultural explanation (e.g. Douglas and prohibited foods; Ju/’hoansi and preferred foods diet)
• How anthropologists see affluence

Question 23

Internal explanation

Answer 23

Basic human needs (biological or psychological)

Question 24

External explanation

Answer 24

Human consumption patterns are a response to what people can obtain in a given environment

Question 25

Cultural explanation

Answer 25

“Needs” are culturally defined