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Economies: a cultural-economic perspective Nurit Bird-David* Introduction The material concomitant of social life and the social concomitant of things in human life are vastly complex. The subject of economic anthropology for three-quarters of a century, the field of study itself is complex. It is probably more complex than other fields within anthro- pology, as most anthropologists are natives of a bourgeois culture, whose core ideological notions &e embodied in and reproduced by neoclassical economic theory (Sahlins 1976, 1996; Dumont 1977). Under the surveillance and the intuitive grip of this per- vasive Western economic theory, economic anthro- pology has developed. It has never been easy to write an introduction to the study of economies, and it becomes even more diffi- cult as the field proliferates. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the of-the-art economic anthropology (as in Halp- erin, 1988); the field has gone far beyond it over the past three decades. The second approach has taken as an organizing structure the division between capitalist and tribal economies, and, within the latter, divisions between ‘modes of subsistence’ of various ecological types (hunter- gatherer, horticulturalist, pastoralist and peasant; as partly done in Sahlins, 1972, and Planner 1989). In today’s complex state of affairs, econ- Nurit Bird-David is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Haifa University, Haifa 3 1905, Israel, email: [email protected]. ac.il. Her fields of interest include econ- omic anthropology, the anthropology of hunting and gathering peoples, and cul- ture and environment. Her recent articles in professional journals and collections include ‘Sociality and immediacy’ (1 994); ‘Hunter-gatherers’ research and cultural diversity’ (199.5); and ‘Hunter- gatherers’ kinship organization’ ( 199.5). three -common approaches previously deployed are reaching the end of their shelf life. The first is anchored to the field’s notorious debate between Formalists and Substantivists,’ which climaxed in the late 1960s. This debate is now a matter for analysis by the history of economic anthropology - not least on how the debate paved the way for the present culturalist con- cern with ‘rational man’ - or even a matter for cultural analysis itself (see below). The debate can no longer be regarded as the axis of state- omies are tightly inter- woven (an accelerating trend, the beginning of which goes back to the four- teenth century, and perhaps even earlier: Wolf, 1982). Cultural communities close- ly interact with and mutu- ally influence each other. People participate simul- taneously in more than one economy, and often in more than one cultural community. While the traditional models are important - and some of them in diverse ways reassert and distinguish themselves in lieu bf and within the global web of links (e.g. Miller, ed., 1995; Povinelli, 1993) - they should never- theless be viewed within, not as, paradigmatic frames. The third approach has centered on ‘theory’, ‘production’, ‘consumption’ and ‘cir- culation of wealth’ as its separate themes (e.g. Gregory and Altman, 1989). It has dissected the world with a Western template, which renders unrecognizable many of the jigsaw’s pieces, including humans themselves as cultural agents. ISSJ 154/1997 0 UNESCO 19‘27. Published hy Blackwell Publishers. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. USA.

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Economies: a cultural-economic perspective

Nurit Bird-David*

Introduction

The material concomitant of social life and the social concomitant of things in human life are vastly complex. The subject of economic anthropology for three-quarters of a century, the field of study itself is complex. It is probably more complex than other fields within anthro- pology, as most anthropologists are natives of a bourgeois culture, whose core ideological notions &e embodied in and reproduced by neoclassical economic theory (Sahlins 1976, 1996; Dumont 1977). Under the surveillance and the intuitive grip of this per- vasive Western economic theory, economic anthro- pology has developed.

It has never been easy to write an introduction to the study of economies, and it becomes even more diffi- cult as the field proliferates. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the

of-the-art economic anthropology (as in Halp- erin, 1988); the field has gone far beyond it over the past three decades. The second approach has taken as an organizing structure the division between capitalist and tribal economies, and, within the latter, divisions between ‘modes of subsistence’ of various ecological types (hunter- gatherer, horticulturalist, pastoralist and peasant; as partly done in Sahlins, 1972, and Planner 1989). In today’s complex state of affairs, econ-

Nurit Bird-David is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Haifa University, Haifa 3 1905, Israel, email: [email protected]. ac.il. Her fields of interest include econ- omic anthropology, the anthropology of hunting and gathering peoples, and cul- ture and environment. Her recent articles in professional journals and collections include ‘Sociality and immediacy’ (1 994); ‘Hunter-gatherers’ research and cultural diversity’ (199.5); and ‘Hunter- gatherers’ kinship organization’ ( 199.5).

three -common approaches previously deployed are reaching the end of their shelf life. The first is anchored to the field’s notorious debate between Formalists and Substantivists,’ which climaxed in the late 1960s. This debate is now a matter for analysis by the history of economic anthropology - not least on how the debate paved the way for the present culturalist con- cern with ‘rational man’ - or even a matter for cultural analysis itself (see below). The debate can no longer be regarded as the axis of state-

omies are tightly inter- woven (an accelerating trend, the beginning of which goes back to the four- teenth century, and perhaps even earlier: Wolf, 1982). Cultural communities close- ly interact with and mutu- ally influence each other. People participate simul- taneously in more than one economy, and often in more than one cultural community. While the traditional models are important - and some of them in diverse ways

reassert and distinguish themselves in lieu bf and within the global web of links (e.g. Miller, ed., 1995; Povinelli, 1993) - they should never- theless be viewed within, not as, paradigmatic frames. The third approach has centered on ‘theory’, ‘production’, ‘consumption’ and ‘cir- culation of wealth’ as its separate themes (e.g. Gregory and Altman, 1989). It has dissected the world with a Western template, which renders unrecognizable many of the jigsaw’s pieces, including humans themselves as cultural agents.

ISSJ 154/1997 0 UNESCO 19‘27. Published hy Blackwell Publishers. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. USA.

464 Nurit Bird-David

The present article - at once an introduc- tion and an argument within the current dis- course in economic anthropology - focuses on the embeddedness of material life in culture, or the cultural constitution of material life. ‘Cul- ture’ here is used in the honoured anthropologi- cal sense of symbol-makers’ perceptions, world- view and symbology (as in Gudeman, 1986), and not as an external boundary-marker of study units (as in Halperin, 1988), nor a package-code to market an anthropological product (made by and for anthropologists, as in Wilk, 1996). The objective is to provide a cultural perspective on economies by drawing on current work. I argue that an underlying concern with the cultural constitution of material life unites many current studies - and not just the few works offered to date as studies in cultural economics. Such cur- rent work has to be recognized for what it is, namely an emergent, broadly-based culturalist school in economic anthropology. The article starts with a discussion of the epistemological problems involved in studying other economies, as these are embedded in diverse cultures. Then the social life of material things is discussed under the heading ‘gifts and commodities’, fol- lowed by a discussion of the material base of social life, under the heading ‘corporations and houses’.

Local modellers: peoples’ theories of material life

The cultural approach in anthropology that views human practice as inseparably connected with, and shaped by, symbols, has slowly made inroads into the study of economies, including our own economy. Marshall Sahlins has argued that Western capitalism is a cultural system whose uniqueness ‘consists not in the fact that the economic system escapes symbolic determi- nation, but that the economic symbolism is structurally determining’( 1976, p. 21 1). Sidney Mintz’ social history of sugar production and consumption (and, indeed, the production of consumption) provides a case study to the same effect. Mink traces the transformation of sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modem life, thereby changing the history of capitalism and industry (1985). And Louis Dumont has examined Western economic

thought as an ideology, tracing its historical emergence from Mandelville to Mam (1977).

If capitalism is a cultural system, is neo- classical economic theory (the theory currently used by most academically-trained Western economists) a Western cultural way of thinking about the economy? The beginning of Western economic theory is commonly traced to Adam Smith’s influential book The Wealth of Nations (1776), and its key notion of the ‘invisible hand of the market’. According to Smith, the pursuit of private ends works for the common good. This idea, a wholly moral one, has been central to ‘native Western cosmology’, especially since the eighteenth century (Sahlins, 1996), when Adam Smith lived. According to this cos- mology, man generally is ‘a scarcity-driven creature of need’ (Sahlins, 1996, p. 397), whose ‘self is anterior to the social’ (p. 402), and whose behaviour is geared towards self-satisfac- tion through the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. At the same time, the egotis- tic actions of a plurality of such individual actors amounts to a ‘providential whole’, unseen, beneficent and encompassing. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a logically con- sistent model of the economy as rational in some sense, was constructed by David Ricardo. Towards the end of the century, neoclassical theory appeared, and shifted the focus to the individual, regarding him as a rational actor: one who identifies as his goals that which he wants and then works out the best way of achieving these goals by weighing alternatives against each other in terms of their utility to himself relative to the cost. The rational, maxi- mizing man accordingly allocates his limited resources. This dualistic view of a mindhody actor whose ‘mind’ chooses between options available to the ‘body’ in its lived-in situation by a reasoning which transcends the situation, and which then makes the ‘body’ execute its choice is a Cartesian view and is central to Western epistemology, especially during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twen- tieth century.

Neoclassical economic theory is deeply rooted in Western epistemology, morality and cosmology, the influence of which is also appar- ent in methodological details. The idea of selfish parts, instructed each by the same ‘instrumental rationality’ and making up a providential whole,

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has the methodological implication that multiple actions of diverse individuals can be lifted out of their respective contexts and aggregated. Neoclassical theory offers a body of logically related concepts with which to understand, explain and predict both an individual’s econ- omic conduct and the working of the economy as a whole. The economy is doubly seen as an aggregate of individuals’ operations and an entity with laws of its own. ‘Demand’, ‘supply’ and ‘price’ are some of the basic concepts, referring to the aggregates of needs for, and availability of a resource and its ‘value’, as determined by the relation between these. The deeply held cosmological notion of the provi- dential whole that encompasses and consists of its self-interested parts ensured the viability, indeed the desirability, of such an economy.

If neoclassical economic theory is rooted in ‘native Western cosmology’, morality and epistemology, we must ask, with Stephen Gude- man (1986), to what extent it is self-defeating to try and understand other economies using that theory. A question close to this was fiercely debated in the 1960s. Until then, anthropologists had predominantly used neoclassical economic theory without questioning the theory’s focus on the individual and its master trope, the ‘rational and needful man’. They adapted it to their cases by, for example, extending the indi- vidual’s need-motivated goals to include pres- tige, having others in their debt, and excellence in ceremonial performance. Or, working as they commonly were in non-monetary situations, they centered on ‘time’ as a ‘scarce resource’ which has to be allocated between competing ends and used as a common denominator of value. Or, working in situations in which people commonly followed tradition, they explicated the decision-making, and choice between values, that are left implicit in what, on the face of it, appears to be simply following tra- dition. Their approach came to be called ‘for- malism’.

Criticism grew during the 1960s and early 1970s, but the contemporary concern, it is important to note, was not epistemological, as it was to be for Gudeman writing in the 1980s, namely: to what extent does the use of Western categories of knowledge bedevil the understand- ing of other economies. An epistemological concern of this sort requires the recognition that

neoclassical economic theory is not just a pro- duct of Westerners but a thoroughly Western creation (as anthropologists only started to recognize years later). Rather, the 1960s con- cern was methodological: to what extent can a theory developed within and for a capitalist institutional context work in other institutional contexts as different as small-scale subsistence economies? Do (Western) anthropologists have to develop another theory for these cases?

Dubbed ‘substantivism’ (and sometimes ‘institutionalism’), an alternative theory was growing during the 1970s, drawing for insights on the work of the economist-historian Karl Polyani (1957). Polyani, who was concerned with early empires, heightened the distinction between securing a livelihood and calculating choices, the first involving corporeal partici- pation in social and political processes (e.g. going to a market-place), the second, logical operations and constructs (e.g. the ‘market’ as the aggregate supply and demand for a good). In capitalist economies, Polyani argued, the two aspects collide (and a term such as ‘market’ is used in a twofold sense). In other societies, however, only the institutional aspect exists; material actions are always ‘embedded’ in social life. Therefore, for the purpose of studying non- capitalist economies, there has to be developed an alternative theory in appropriate terms, one which rids itself of the calculative, logical dimension that was grafted on to the economic in capitalist society. The theory could be applied to capitalist economies too, where the insti- tutional as well as the calculative dimension exists. To develop the new theory, Polyani focused on ‘exchange’ - as the physical move- ment of an object from person to person - arguing that we need to explore, the ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘what’ and ‘who’ of this instituted pro- cess. He typified economies by the exchange- forms that integrate society (exchange, redistri- bution and reciprocity) in .relation to types of polities. Anthropologists developed the topology further in relation to kinship structures. They contributed also by showing, for example, that some economies have separate spheres of exchange and limited-purpose money.

Substantivism (which concerned itself with the economy as an instituted process) and form- alism (which concerned itself with the rational individual and the economy at large, as the

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Auction at Drouot, Paris 1985. Michel Baret/Rapho

aggregate of such individuals) were fiercely opposed in the 1960s in one of the most heated arguments known in anthropology. At its extreme, proponents even argued over whether human beings are by their nature needful and rational, while this is only heuristically assumed by the economists. The fierceness of the debate, the extremes it reached, its lingering presence and appeal as the ‘great debate’, and its com- mon invocation as the creation myth of econ- omic anthropology - all these attest to its doub- ling as a native feuding on core cultural convictions in native Western cosmology. The debate was about the territory of ‘rational need- ful man’ and the Western construction of reality.

The current concern about the use of (any!) Western economic theory is, as mentioned above, epistemological: to what extent does the use of Western categories of knowledge hamper the understanding of other economies. Stimu- lated by Sahlins’ and Geertz’ work, Stephen Gudeman has pursued this question in Econom-

ics as Cultures (1986). He offered the ‘working hypothesis’ (1986, p. 37) that humans every- where - not just professional economists - model their material life. If this is so, he argued, then in each particular case it is by their respect- ive theories that we should try to understand, and explain, both the individual’s reasoning and conduct, and the economy at large. ‘Cultural economics’, or ‘ethno-economics’ as it is also called, contains as a case, capitalist economy with its neoclassic theory, at the same time as it advocates the use of local cultural theories in the analysis of other cases. While substantiv- ism deals with ‘the economy’ and neglects the ‘individual’, cultural economics aims to encompass and explain both the cultural agent and the cultural economy, much, it might be observed with a note of caution, as neoclassic theory does. Substantivism grew from outside- seeds, as did ‘formalism’ - and a host of other approaches which there is no room to discuss here (including Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches, dependency and underdevelopment

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theory, which have in common a concern with global and local power structures). Cultural eco- nomics is home-grown, a distinctively anthropo- logical approach, that can uniquely contribute to other disciplines.

As a relatively young approach, it has its achievements as well as its growing problems. In Economics as Cultures, Stephen Gudeman elucidated a variety of local models - some Western (the Physiocrats and Ricardo), some indigenous (the African Bemba, Bisa and Cogo, the Dobu of New Guinea, and the Iban of Sarawak), and some rural (peasants in Panama and Bolivia). I give a sense of these models by briefly summarizing two examples, which can- not but violate their ethnographic richness. The Physiocrats maintained that the land is economi- cally fertile, and causes wealth to increase, while manufacturing and crafts are ‘barren’, and work therein is an expenditure which gives no more return than itself. The Bemba, by compari- son, maintain that agricultural prosperity ‘is’ an ancestral volition, and to secure a livelihood from the land one has to please the ancestors, doing what they have been doing, and distribut- ing part of the yield to the chiefs, who are regarded as the living embodiment of the ances- tors. Such examples provide evidence that in diverse cultures there are different conceptualiz- ations of the logic of the economy. Furthermore, by comparing them with each other - rather than with Western theory, explicitly or implicitly - we can better map each, in ever greater detail, the more so the more cases are studied, providing more templates against which to ‘see’ further ones.

Following Economics as Cultures in Con- versations in Columbia (1990), Stephen Gude- man and Albert0 Rivera demonstrate the depth of understanding which can be achieved by pay- ing attention to folk-models, with specific refer- ence to Columbian ‘peasants’ (see further below). Suggesting that the Columbian folk- models resemble seventeenth-century European folk-models, they examine the conceptual shift involved in the emergence of modem economic theory from the latter. In parallel to this, Bird- David (1992) elucidated a Nayaka ‘hunter-gath- erer’ model, centered on the idea of sharing relationships with (animated) features of the natural environment. This cultural-economic model renders sensible an otherwise peculiar set

of behaviours, including a lack of acquisitive- ness and concern with the future, and satisfac- tion with whatever is available as long as it is being shared. Povinelli (1993) - while not using Gudeman’s model-terms - showed how an Aus- tralian Aboriginal model reproduces itself through negotiation with the Australian adminis- tration’s capitalistic model (cf. Gudeman, 1986,

The separate models presented in Econom- ics as Cultures are connected by an overall argument about, first, the common ontology of cultural models and second, their falling into two types, along the orthodox split: West against the Rest (to include early Western, rural and indigenous). Gudeman argues that all econ- omic models are extensions of one or a few intersecting metaphors (in Black’s (1962) sense of metaphor, as a cognitive means of thought, rather than an ornamental figure of speech). Western models, Gudeman argues, draw upon abstract, logical and mathematical schemes, and on schema taken from the domain of material objects. Models generated elsewhere, he says, are drawn on schema taken from the social and human world. Furthermore, the Westem models are universal, while the Rest are local, in idiom and scope.

This aspect of Economics as Cultures is too restrictive, and in any case, less convincing and less clear - which, perhaps, explains why cultural economics as a professed theoretical approach has not yet taken off, while much current work is in effect the kind of work which can be called cultural economic (see below). The argument unnecessarily reduces the per- spective the book offers into yet another univer- sal theory, which splits the ethnographic world dualistically, and totalizes and essentializes indi- vidual ethnographic cases. It calls unnecessarily for reifying models, built by the ethnographer, out of local ideas that are inseparably embedded in culturally constituted economic life. To an extent it contradicts in this way its own originat- ing insight. Furthermore, clouding the corre- spondence suggested between derivationallsocial models and Wesmest, Gudeman and Rivera themselves elsewhere disclose the organic ima- gery which underlies capitalistic modelling of corporations (1990, p. 13), and at the same time, the derivational entailments of local metaphors, such as the Columbian ‘house’, with its ‘base’,

pp. 1-28).

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‘door’, ‘getting things out of the door’, and ‘keeping them inside’ (1 990). Moreover, as Sah- lins (1996) showed, the capitalist imagery of a providential economy, while mathematically constituted, is also embedded in cosmological and religious beliefs, as is any local economic imagery that Gudeman (1986) discusses.

However, a simple corrective appears to suffice: regard analyses by local models as a heur- istic device. That is, as neoclassic economics heuristically presumes rational decision- making individuals, cultural economics ought heuristically to presume model-making and con- forming cultural economies. A cultural-econ- omic study would involve a preparatory heuris- tic abstraction of a model out of a cultural process and, ultimately, a production of ethno- graphy that in effect shows the model’s embed- dedness in the complex cultural process from which it was abstracted. The ethnographic approaches of Gudeman and Rivera (1990), Bird-David ( 1992), and Povinelli (1 993) amount to just this. The implication of this approach is that economic models are not to be compared globally, only as possibly helpful toolkits. Moreover, the approach is about the production of a particular kind of economic ethnography, one which retains the cultural sense of peoples’ thoughts, actions and institutions. Important in themselves, such ethnographies can be used as the primary substance for analyses of general issues and of diverse kinds: for example, Gude- man and Rivera (1990) analyse an ethnography of this kind, the Columbian ‘house’ economy, in terms drawn from modem economic theory: stock and flow, circulating and fixed capital, etc. Cultural economics, then, is not a comparative science but the science of producing ethno- graphy for meaningful comparisons of various kinds. Next, I turn to current issues which are pursued through the use of cultural-economic ethnography.

Commodities and gifts: the social life of material things

It has been Marcel Mauss’ gift to anthropol- ogists to distinguish between ‘gift’ and ‘com- modity’ as forms of circulating things between people. Mauss drew an opposition between

them in terms of the relationships between transactors, their respective relationships with the thing transacted, and less paid attention to, until recently, the cultural values and ideas which are embodied in the thing. His classic text, The Gift (1925), became the never failing subject of fresh interpretations, spanning gener- ations of anthropologists. According to the orthodox reading, The Gifl distinguishes between the ‘commodity’ as the exchange of an alienable thing between aliens and the ‘gift’ as the exchange of an inalienable thing between non-aliens (Gregory 1982, p. 43). Mauss argued an evolution from the gift-form to the com- modity form, by which archaic and primitive societies, and modem society, are held as gift and commodity economies, respectively. Mauss used the peculiar animistic expression ‘the spirit of the gift’, generalizing the Maori notion hau. In retrospect it can be read as the key cultural ideas which are embodied in the thing. Some recent studies enjoy use of this spirit idea - the ‘spirit of the commodity’ (Appadurai, 1986) and, after a fashion, the ‘morality’ of money (Bloch and Parry, 1989) may be included.

Current work advances the Maussian thesis in three directions. First, it explores the cultural world which the commodity inhabits and embodies. Second, it breaks down the exclusive Maussian association between capitalist society and the commodity economy, and between non- capitalist societies and gift economies. Third, current research attempts to go beyond ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ to explore other exchange forms. The first two directions have often been pursued in tandem, and I discuss them together.

Arjun Appadurai (1986) put together a fresh perspective on ‘commodity’ that recon- structs it as a phenomenon crossing historical sequences and economic types. This perspective leaves aside the Western intuitive assumption that a thing’s pre-existing value makes it an object of exchange. Combining Simmel’s and Marx’s insights, Appadurai maintains that the ‘value in a commodity’ is created by exchange, if not actual, then - and more commonly - a potential, imaginary exchange. That is, another person demands or desires the thing: the demand or the desire creates the value. Appadu- rai suggests, as a heuristic measure, regarding this value as if it is embodied in the commodity itself (describing the approach as ‘methodo-

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logical fetishism’ 1986, p. 5). In these terms, a thing can become and cease to be a ‘com- modity’. The ‘commodity’ is a thing in a cer- tain situation, wherein ‘its exchangability (past, present, future) for some other thing is its soci- ally relevant feature’ (1986, p. 13). Anything can be in such a situation, not just industrially manufactured products. Exchange situations need not be only those which involve the use of money. ‘Commodity’ so reconstructed, there- fore, spans capitalist and non-capitalist societies, contemporary and early economies.

The thrust of the economic study of ‘com- modities’ becomes: how the demand (or desire) is created that makes a thing into a commodity. It becomes a study of the cultural constitution of economic things, or how cultures produce the values which make things economic. (Appadurai (1986) calls it the ‘politics of value’ to direct attention to negotiation and processes.) This study constitutes a core part of a culturalist economic anthropology. As a perspective it opens up fresh ethnographic vistas. One is a study of the cultural biography (or the life- cycle) of a thing, namely the sequence of ‘situ- ations’ through which it progresses (Kopytoff, 1986). Another is a study of the cultural pro- cesses and events which are value-producers. Appadurai himself discusses the social paths of things and the diversifications from them, and the cultural performances that celebrate peak moments in these paths, which he calls ‘tourna- ments of value’ (1986, pp. 16-29). The Kula is an indigenous example of this, while Western art auctions constitute a capitalist instance. As another value-producer, one can mention associ- ating things with persons - in an interesting strategic play on ‘gift’ principles. ‘Home-made’ chocolate production (see Terrio, 1996) and emphasis on the personal in mail-order cata- logues (see Carrier, 1995, pp. 12645) can be taken as examples.

The consumption of commodities has become the subject of a thoroughly culturalist economic study. A vibrant field of study, some of its practitioners even claim it to be a suc- cessor to kinship studies as the core area of anthropology (Miller, 1995). Far from seeing consumption as the utilization of things, con- sumption is seen as a cultural activity that con- stitutes identity. Studies show that commodities are ‘appropriated’ by people to diverse cultural

designs, differing from place to place and between social groups. Imported commodities, including Western mass produced ones, do not often break down local cultures, as people ‘tame’ them, and make them part of their own cultures. Even modem money, a super-com- modity of sorts, is ‘tamed’. Malaysian women, for example, ‘cook‘ the money which their fishermen husbands earn, before it starts circul- ating within the community (Carsten, 1989) - which in Appadurai’s terms could be seen as a gender-mediated social path that produces and places a new value in the money.

Much less work has been done so far on the ‘gift’, as a cross-cultural phenomenon that inhabits both capitalist and other societies. According to Parry’s new reading (1986), Mauss had not argued that the ‘commodity’ was an evolutionary replacement for the ‘gift’ in modem society. Rather, the evolution of modern society involved splitting between ‘persons’ and ‘things’, which in the ‘primitive’ society are conjoined, and, correspondingly, splitting between interested and disinterested trans- actions. ‘Gift’ in modern society came to be regarded as a totally disinterested giving, out of love and with no strings attached. As an image, the ‘pure gift’ predominates in Western literature (see Carrier, 1995, pp. 145-68). Fur- thermore, it has been projected onto primitive society, eclipsing the temporal dymanics of gift- ing there, which involves calculative and inter- est-motivated strategies (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 171). Strategic gifting is probably a common practice in capitalist societies too. But with very few exceptions, gifting practices in capitalist society have been little studied. The native ideology of the ‘gift’ eclipsed a potentially rich field from the native ethnographer’s gaze (cf. Carrier, 1995, p. 145).

‘Persons’ and ‘things’ as constructs are among the important cultural notions which gift and commodity practices embody (especially in view of Parry’s interpretation of Mauss, 1986). Strathern has argued, in a study of New Guinea cultures (19881, that the ‘person’ in these cases is commonly constructed as a composite of social relationships. A gift embodies a particular relationship between donor and receiver and in this sense - as Mauss argued - it constitutes an inalienable ‘part’ of the donor. Other cultural visions of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ should be

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Aboriginal artists of Australia: Gillian Stockman and Nora Andy Napaltjarri painting in the lobby of the Sheraton hotel, Alice Springs, NT, Australia. Grenville TumerANild Light/Cosmos

explored, in their diversity, in relation to gifting and commodity-exchange.

Finally, I turn to the third direction which is currently being pursued, the study of multiple transaction forms. A diversity of exchange forms had been reified by anthropologists into either ‘gift’ or ‘commodity’, while in the con- creteness of social life - among indigenous people as among Westerners - there are mul- tiple kinds. These have to be studied too. Barter constitutes one such form; and a volume of papers has been dedicated to its study (Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992). To expand on barter as an example, it is not just a histori- cal institution, or one peculiar to archaic or ‘primitive’ economies. It is a contemporary phenomenon which covers both large and small- scale transactions and occurs within and between many different types of society (ibid, p. 5). Against Appadurai, who subsumes it under ‘commodity’ (1986, p. lo), Humphrey and Hugh-Jones argue that it is ‘a complex phenomena which, like the gift, includes ideas, values and visions of the transacting other’ (1992, p. 3). However, the ‘gift’ implies some compulsion - ‘people must compel others to enter into debt ... the recipient’s need is forced

upon him by the donor’ (Strathern, cited by Humphrey and Hugh-Jones, 1992, p. 11). In barter ‘each side decides their [sic] own needs, and the aim is to end the transaction feeling free of immediate debt’ (Humphrey and Hugh- Jones, 1992). Barter often bridges different ‘value regimes’, and involves dissimilar trans- acted things, and free and equal transactors.

Clearly, the study of economies in terms of the things which people use and pass among themselves, has become thoroughly culturalist. The study of economies in terms of how people secure their livelihood - to which, I turn next - while lagging behind, has started transforming itself in this direction.

Corporations and houses: the material base of social life

In Stone Age Economics, a ‘substantivist’ classic, Marshall Sahlins ( 1972) conceptualized the ‘domestic mode of production’ (DMPI, see- ing a general economic formation where pre- vious students saw only ‘modes of subsistence’ of various ecological types (hunter-gatherer, horticulturalist, pastoralist and peasant). He

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characterized the DMP - in dichotomous oppo- sition to the capitalist mode of production, if in some cases, leaving the contrast implicit - as economies organized by domestic groups and kinship relations. People therein underuse (the opposite of maximize) productive resources and labour capacity. Households produce for use (the opposite of exchange), or occasionally for exchange directed ultimately towards use. Each household is a micro-cosmos of the economy at large, in terms of labour division.

Sahlins’ DMP eclipsed separate studies of ‘hunter-gatherers’, ‘horticulturalists’, ‘pastoral- ists’, and ‘peasants’ - these being analytical labels by which ethnographers traditionally classified their respective study-groups. The lab- els originated from the cultural-ecology school of thought, but subsequently have also been used as conventional symbols of ways of life, without necessarily implying ecological deter- minism of any sorts. Ethnographers have stud- ied groups within the same category compara- tively, or just produced new ethnographies while paying attention to earlier ethnographies of the same kind, and have addressed common issues, besides those specific to their own parti- cular study-groups. Space precludes more than listing some of these common issues. For instance, ethnographers of ‘hunter-gatherers’ have discussed the affluence enjoyed by these peoples, their sharing practices, and their egali- tarian and peaceful ethos. Ethnographers of ‘horticulturalists’ discussed the culturally insti- tuted warfare practised by many of these peoples, their exchange systems and prestige economies. Students of ‘peasants’ addressed issues such as links with market-systems, homo- geneity of households, and life-cycle determi- nants of household production. In many cases (if not in all of them), a particular study-group would be regarded as a member of this or that subsistence category not because it exclusively pursued the subsistence activity in question, but because that activity was regarded by the local people - or the ethnographer - to be the ‘sig- nificant’ one, symbolically as much as practi- cally. Sahlins elsewhere argued that the bour- geois culture uniquely singles out the economy as ‘the main site of symbolic production’ at the same time that it represents its economy as a separate institution (1976, p. 21 1). With a meas- ure of caution, it can be said that ethnographers

in the same fashion represented subsistence economies as separate spheres, at the same time as effectively regarding them as the ‘privileged institutional locus of the symbolic process’ (to use Sahlins’ (1996) words).

‘Peasants’ have been conceptualized from the start as operating within broader systems (feudal, national or market ones). ‘Hunter-gath- erers’ and ‘horticulturalists’ have not; yet it is clear now that they, too, are complex heterogen- ous economies, which are constitutive parts of broader economies. (Their ideal projection as living autonomously and homogeneously by their subsistence activities has not emerged from the field, but from the presumed evolutionary scheme by which cultural ecology inspected the ethnographic cases.) Their members, however, nonetheless frequently retain distinctive cos- mologies and symbologies - which often enough even renew themselves through the changes undergone in the course of globaliz- ation and localization, processes that commonly accelerate in tandem (Povinelli, 1993).

A culturalist economic anthropology can- not afford to ignore these economies, and the diversity which they create. So it simultaneously faces these three connected challenges: (a) to integrate cultural values and meanings into the comparative analysis of material bases of social life; (b) to dissolve the orthodox reification of economy-types as total systems, each homogen- ous and fixed; and (c) to stop reproducing the master-division into wholly capitalist or wholly non-capitalist economy kinds. The study of ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’, which has been dis- cussed in the previous section, has stood up to similar challenges with great success, and sug- gests general directions in which this can be done. Gudeman and Rivera’s study of Colum- bian ‘peasants’ (1990) suggests a particular con- ceptual framework.

In contrast to the intuition propagated by Western economic discourse - that the individ- ual, as anterior to the social, is the economic agent - Gudeman and Rivera (1990) focus on people as they operate from within social group- ings, distinguishing between ‘house’ and ‘cor- poration’ as ideal images. To sharpen their dis- tinction, the house can be conceptualized as a socially constituted group, which in maintaining itself engages in material actions. The corpor- ation is viewed as a group constituted for

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material operations, some of which involve social engagements and relationships. The house works towards autarky, which sometimes involves exchange with others. The corporation exists for and through exchange (which in prin- ciple can be infinitely extended) though its transactions are sometimes contained within the community. Both operate economically in social life, while diametrically opposed in constitution and nature.

The opposition was intended by Gudeman and Rivera to cut through historical sequences (1990, p. 1 I ) , but it can additionally cut through ‘subsistence types’. It shifts the focus away from ‘modes of productions’ (or ‘modes of subsistence’) as total economies, to economi- cally operating social groups in which cultures of livelihood-making are embodied. Contempor- ary economies can be generally said to be constitutive of houses and corporations of vari- ous kinds. Economies range from the capitalist extreme, where corporations are at the centre, and draw on houses in ever expanding margins across political and cultural domains, to the remote local extreme, where houses are at the centre, being impinged on by outside corpora- tions, whose margins they came to be. With a degree of caution it can be said that ‘market economy’ as a system of corporations, and ‘indigenous economy’ as a system of houses, are opposite ideal images, not economies in history.

Gudeman and Rivera themselves examined the Columbian rural ‘peasant’ economy, in which the corporation and the house are mutu- ally dependent on each other for their respective operation and reproduction. The closer to the centre, the corporation predominates, while the further away in the periphery, the house does. Centre and periphery are shifting locations; the corporation keeps expanding, pushing the house further and further to the margins. As to the Columbian rural ‘house’, the rural folk talk about its material activities in terms drawn from their physical abode, the house, as a metaphor. Economic life, as they see it, primarily involves ‘supporting’ or ‘maintaining’ the ‘base’ of the house (which otherwise will fall into ‘ruins’, 1990, p. 11). The ‘base’ includes material assets, such as land, livestock and seeds, but also everything else (material and other) that holds the social group together. Not least, it

includes shared values and understandings,2 for example the view of land as the repository of ‘force’, created and sustained by God, a land that gives of its ‘strength’ to people who assist it by agricultural labour. This Columbian rural ‘house’ minimizes expenditure of money and exchange through the market (even if just for obtaining commodities it uses), as this involves ‘mov[ing holdings] through the doors from inside to outside’ and so reduces the ‘base’. Market involvement is incorporated only as a means of reproducing the ‘base’. The house, otherwise, avoids it by diversifying its pro- duction, and by labour-trade and barter with neighbours, which is ‘using holdings from the doors inwards’. Wage-work also is minimized (except occasionally in order to secure money for unavoidable market purchases) in favour of house production that in the local view supports and maintains the ‘base’. The house hoards the ‘remainder’ from its production, and ‘throws it forward’ for future maintenance.

The corporation described by Gudeman and Rivera is a text-book corporation - not Columbian (or other locally reaching) corpora- tions studied ethnographically, as the house.3 Notwithstanding, the contrast they draw between the two is instructive, and advances Sahlins’ implicit contrast between the domestic and the capitalist modes of production (at the same time that it shifts the focus away from ‘modes of productions’ as total economies, to economic operators as units in which cultures of production are embodied). The corporation, unlike the house, is imagined as an organism: a ‘body’, which must have ‘internal organ’- ization to ‘function’ properly. It has a ‘head’ with a ‘right-hand man’, and ‘circulating’ funds that sustain its ‘arms’, ‘organs’ and ‘members’. It can be ‘healthy’ or ‘sick’, and when it ‘grows’ it ‘issues stock’ (1990, p. 13). While the house’s project is to maintain its ‘base’, the corporation’s project is to make profit. While the house is thrifty, and diversifies itself in avoidance of participation in the market, the corporation specializes in order to increase its participation therein. The house’s ‘base’ (in for- mal economic terms) takes largely the form of ‘stock’, occasionally turned into ‘flow’, only to reproduce the ‘stock’. The corporation’s ‘capi- tal’, on the other hand, takes largely the form of ‘flow’, which is fictionally projected once a

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year as ‘stock’ by freezing flows of income and cost against each other, in calculating the profit and its rate of increase (1990 pp. 6668) .

A house takes other forms in diverse cul- tures. The ‘hunter-gatherer’ Nayaka ‘ h ~ u s e ’ ~ (to draw on Bird-David, 1992, 1994) - namely the socially-constituted group who in maintaining itself engages in material actions - is here a residential cluster of families, who see them- selves as ‘we, the relatives’. Their ‘base’, which they describe as ‘our place’, includes the forest within which they live, knowledge of its life, and companionship and sharing relationships with each other and with aspects of the natural environment seen as other-than-human ‘persons’ (devaru). To maintain the ‘base’ is to reproduce sharing relationships. As Povinelli richly describes for Aboriginal Australians in Beluyen (1993), labour is not seen as an expenditure of ‘force’ in order to maintain the ‘base’ (the Columbian ‘peasant’ way) but as socializing with the forest, and its ‘persons’, in order to maintain companionship. Maintaining the com- panionship is achieved by gathering and hunting in the forest, but also by simply spending time there, and by shamanistically keeping in touch with the forest devaru. A Nayaka house has no qualms about participation in the market - unlike the Columbian ‘peasant’ house - as long as sharing relationships are maintained in other ways among ‘us, the relatives’ and with the land ‘our place’. Market activities which involve spending time in the forest (e.g. col- lecting and selling minor forest produce, wage- work as forest watchmen and guides) has been a constitutive part of the Nayaka ‘house’ oper- ation for a long time. The Nayaka house neither saves nor hoards material goods, which would only corrode the sharing relationships with other people, that are constitutive of its ‘base’. Nor does it overexploit the forest, which undercuts sharing relationships with devaru. Shamanistic contact with devaru continues throughout the fluctuating economic engagements of the Nayaka house.

Houses populate also industrial economies. For example, along with industrial farms which are ‘corporations’, there are family farms in the USA - and in all other industrial countries - which are ‘houses’, and operate in a way closer to the Columbian ‘house’ than to the agricul- tural ‘corporation’. The ‘consumer’ of Western

economic discourse is often a family person, who is concerned to maintain the family ‘house’, whose ‘base’ may include a house, career prospects and various investments. (The bourgeois ‘house’ has a preference for invest- ment in consumable goods, like art, Persian carpets and holiday homes and time-shares.)

A culturalist economic anthropology should concern itself not only with the diversity of houses, their articulation, mixture and changes in economies, but also with the diver- sity of corporations with which they articulate and mix. In this brief space I have focused on houses, the more traditional subject-matter of anthropology. But there are also ethnographic studies of bureaucratic organizations and how respective cultures are embodied in them, and slowly there are beginning to appear ethno- graphic studies of economic corporations (e.g. Morean, 1996). Small businesses, which inhabit the space between ‘houses’ and ‘corporations’, at least in regarding self-reproduction as important as making profit, promise to be a fascinating field.

Houses and corporations have been pro- posed in this section not as a typological con- clusion, but as an invitation for ethnographic exploration of their complex life and changing forms in economies, and for the study of other forms beyond them, as happening in current economic anthropology with regard to gifts and commodities.

Conclusions

Concluding his essay on the ‘The Spirit of the Gift’ (1 972), Sahlins wrote:

The basic principles of an economics properly anthropo- logical, includ[es] the one in particular ... that every exchange, as it embodies some coefficient of the socia- bility, cannot be understood in its material terms apart from its social terms. (1972, p. 1x3, emphasis udded)

This expresses ‘the spirit of economic anthro- pology’ in past decades; a thoroughly substan- tivist view, that sees perceptiveness to the social as anthropology’s unique contribution to the study of economies. In this article I have argued that we are in the midst of a sweeping change, that should be carried through into the future. Initiated by Sahlins’ study of capitalism as a

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cultural system, this change involves a growing perceptiveness to the cultural (ideas, symbols, worldviews), which is anthropology’s unique omic.

contribution to the study of economies, and a critical perspective to understanding the econ-

Notes

*I thank Stephen Gudeman, Ingrid Jondt and Kalman Applbaum for their help.

I. For a recent statement of the positions of the two camps see Halperin (1988).

2. See Gudeman n.d. for an expanded and general theory of the ‘base’.

3. Such a study is a necessary complement, given the argument

that the economy is constitutive of both corporations and houses. However, the text book ‘corpor- ation’ critically features in another aspect of the book’s rich and complex argument, the continuity between seventeenth-century European rural models and modem economic theory.

4. The term ‘house’ is used as an analytic term, a kind of economic unit. In the Columbian case, the

word simultaneously evokes the concrete house, which is the essential part of the ‘base’ of the house as economic unit. In the Nayaka case, the concrete abode, a bamboo-and-grass hut, is insignificant in so far as the house as an economic unit is concerned. The house here is constitutive of the group of relatives (‘band’) who share domestic life, living in a camp made up of between one and five huts.

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