Analyzing Economic Systems:
- Economic system: methods of allocating resources, and the production, distribution, consumption, and exchange of goods and services
- Economic processes: allocation -> production -> distribution -> consumption
- Economic anthropologists stuffy economic systems and economic behaviours cross culturally
o Compare economies of exchange, how societies organize their labour, etc
- Industrial agriculture: land is privately owned
- Horticulture: land publically owned
Allocating Land and Resources:
- Ideas and rules about rights to resources
- Valuation, allocation, and use
- Political, religious, and other cultural considerations
o May effect land tenure (=ownership)
o Ex: fraternal polyandry
- Fraternal = brothers
- Polyandry = many men
- One woman marrying a set of brothers
- Plays into the ideas of land use rights, communal ownership, private property
- Land use rights, communal ownership, or private property
o Ex: Nepal/Tibet - land is scarce
o Normally: dividing land among the brothers within a family, land you get is very small
o With fraternal polyandry: land is kept intact because there is only one eldest son because there is one woman
Organizing Labour:
- Assignment of work roles
o According to age, gender, social status
o “Gender division of labour”
- Domestic production (non-industrial societies)
o Labour organized by households
- Industrial and post-industrial economies
o Commoditized labour - “job market”
Sweatshops and Child Labour:
- “I'm sitting in a nice, air conditioned office. Why should people in Vietnam really have to work in those terrible factories?”
- You've got to compare things with the alternatives that people actually have in their own countries
- Swedish economist - Johan Norberg
- People have a very ethnocentric view of child labour (but they were earning money they needed for their family to survive, and without those jobs they turn to be sex workers)
o These factory jobs are good for their culture and countries
Capital Goods and Social Capital:
- Capital goods: items produced not for consumption but for the production of other goods
o Ex: factories that produce machines, that produce other goods
o Ex: raw rubber
- Social capital: bonds of reliable friendship, support, and obligations acquired within a community
o Ex: friendships, alliances, gift giving (bond and obligation)
Distributing and Exchanging Products and Services:
- Types of reciprocity:
o Generalized - don't keep track (I give you something, you give me something - friends)
o Balanced - more formal (specific values) - opposite of generalized (what I gave you, I want back the same)
o Negative - one of the people makes a profit
- Ex: when we buy something
o Barter - trade
- Example of balanced reciprocity:
o Trobriand Islands (South Pacific)
- Kula - two step process
- Step 1:
n Men travel in circular patterns, island to island, stop along the way
n Give their hosts a shell necklace or armband (depending which direction their traveling - clockwise or counter clockwise)
n Kula builds bonds, alliances, and friendship, although the shells have no value
n Ritual exchange of the objects
- Step 2:
n Once they have established friendships, then they can ease into real trade (rubber, coffee, etc)
n Once you are apart of a Kula, always a Kula
Redistributive Networks:
- Food and other goods collected by an organizer
- Distributed to community members
- Redistribution often occurs at large public gatherings
o Feasts, ceremonial events
o Example: potlatch, pacific Northwest First Nations
- Redistribution in modern states: taxes
Markets and Trade:
- Immediate and impersonal exchanges
- Goods are bartered or bought and sold for money
- Does not reflect or create social ties or obligations
- Based on forces of supply and demand
- Competitive exchange
General and Special Purpose Money:
- Money: a medium of exchange used to acquire goods and services, and held as store of value for later use
Market Economies and Capitalism:
- Market economies
o Allocation and distribution according to prices determined by market forces o General purpose money - currency
o Commodities
o Commodification
■ Essentially non-economic things turned into saleable items
n People, their talents, events in their lives, their DNA, etc
- Capitalism
o Workers do not control means of production
o Workers earn incomes through wages
o Workers produce surplus value
Industrial Economies:
- Based on capitalism and market system
- Developed through Industrial Revolution
o Late 18th-Early 19th centuries
o Began with textile industry in Great Britain
o Quickly spread to North America and Europe
- Social implications
o Massive urban migration
o Increased inequality
- Consumerism
Impacts of Colonial Expansion, Industrialism, and Globalization:
- Colonialism propelled by European capitalism
- Closely tied to nation building
- Expansion of control over resources, labour, and markets
- Transformation of traditional economies based on foraging, pastoralism, and horticulture
Impacts of Colonial Expansion, Industrialism and Globalization
- As colonialism grew so did the need for resources
- Imperialism = Broad indirect control, mostly economic
- Colonialism = Much more direct, setting up shop in the country you control
- 3 waves:
o Discovery - 15th-17th century, Columbus, etc
o Early industrial - 18th century, needed raw material - Britain
o Industrial colonialism - late 19th/early 20th century - US, France, Germany, Japan, etc
Commoditization of people
- 1) Direct slave trade
- 2) “Blackbirding” Kidnapping
- 3) Conscripted labor - signed contract in home country and then shipped off
- 4) Dispossession of land - get people to them work for you
5 Impacts:
- Depopulation
o Disease
o War
o Genocide a white mans burden to civilize
- Dispossession of the land
o Indian removal of 1830 a took away land and put them on reserves
o Privatizing ownership of land - corporate ownership
- Abusive forms of labor control
o Slavery
- Environmental degradation
o Coffee plantations on mountains a hillsides stripped of everything and literally fell off into the ocean
- Language
o Changes to local language and culture
o Indigenous languages were forbidden
Colonialism and the Exploitation of Labour:
- Slavery
- Forced labour
- Poll taxes
- Resource extraction and plantations
Post-Industrial Society:
- Based on expansion of service economy, especially knowledge sector
- Globally organized corporations and institutions
- Liberalization and privatization
- Technological innovations
- Complex impacts on local communities