Cultural Anthropology in a Globalizing World #SSC327

BALANCED EXCHANGE  The category of balanced exchange contains two subcategories based on the social relationship of the two parties involved in the exchange and the degree to which a “return” is expected.  Generalized reciprocity  is a transaction that involves the least conscious sense of interest in material gain or thought of what might be received in return, and when. Such exchanges often involve goods and services of an everyday nature, such as a cup of coffee. Generalized reciprocity is the main form of exchange between people who know each other well and trust each other. Therefore, it is the main form of exchange in foraging societies It is also found among close kin and friends cross-culturally.A  pure gift  is something given with no expectation or thought of a return. The pure gift is an extreme form of generalized reciprocity. Examples of a pure gift might include donating money for a food drive, or a blood drive, donating one’s organs after death, or giving money to disaster relief and religious organizations. Some people argue that a truly pure gift does not exist because one always gains something in giving, no matter how difficult to measure—even if it is just the good feeling of generosity. How selfish is that! Parental care of children is said to be a pure gift by some, but others do not agree. Those who say that parental care is a pure gift argue that most parents do not consciously calculate how much they have spent on their children with the intention of “getting it back” later on. Those who do not consider parental care a pure gift say that even if the “costs” are not consciously calculated, parents have unconscious expectations about what their children will “return” to them, whether the return is material (care in old age) or immaterial (making the parent feel proud).

is the exchange of approximately equally valued goods or services, usually between people of roughly equal social status. The exchange may occur simultaneously between both parties, or it may involve an understanding about the time period within which the exchange will be completed. This aspect of timing contrasts with generalized reciprocity, in which there is no fixed time limit for the return. In expected reciprocity, if the second party fails to complete the exchange, the relationship will break down. Balanced reciprocity is less personal than generalized reciprocity and, according to Western definitions, more “economic” in that it may involve consideration of costs and benefits.

The kula system as found in the Trobriand Islands (review Culturama, Chapter 2) is an example of an expected reciprocity. Men throughout a vast region of Melanesia exchange necklaces and armlets, giving them to their exchange partners after keeping them for a while. Partners include neighbors as well as people on faraway islands who are visited via long canoe voyages on high seas. Trobriand men are distinguished by the particular armlets and necklaces that they exchange, and certain armlets and necklaces are more prestigious than others. One cannot keep one’s trade items for long because the kula code dictates that “to possess is great, but to possess is to give.” Generosity is the essence of goodness, and stinginess is the most despised vice. Kula exchanges should involve items of equivalent value. If a man trades a very valuable necklace with his partner, he expects to receive in return a very valuable armlet as an equivalent gift. The equality of exchange ensures a strong bond between the trading partners and is a statement of trust. When a man arrives in an area where it may be dangerous because of previous raids or warfare, he can count on having a friend to give him hospitality.

Redistribution  is a form of exchange in which one person collects goods or money from many members of a group and provides a social return at a later time. At a public event, even several years later, the organizer “returns” the pooled goods to everyone who contributed by sponsoring a generous feast. Compared to the two-way pattern of exchange involved in reciprocity, redistribution involves some “centricity.” It contains the possibility of inequality because what is returned may not always equal, in a material sense, what each individual contributed. The pooling group may continue to exist, however, because it benefits from the leadership skills of the person who mobilizes contributions. If a neighboring group threatens a raid, people turn to their redistributive leader for political leadership (discussed further in Chapter 8). Over time, redistribution should balance out, with givers of goods and sponsors of festivities both feeling they benefited from the arrangement. But, as we will discuss later in this book, the leader tends to gain more in prestige than the followers.

UNBALANCED EXCHANGE  Debt, in industrial/digital societies, differs from balanced exchange in terms of the lack of a personal connection between the parties involved and the possibility that a debt may become so large that it may never be repaid (Graeber 2011). In this sense, according to David Graeber, author of a monumental study entitled Debt, modern debt did not emerge until a period when settled states began to engage in warfare in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago. Graeber argues that contemporary patterns of massive national debt are inextricably linked to warfare and a pervasive value of military solutions to national security of major world powers.

Market exchange , a prominent form of unbalanced exchange, is the buying and selling of commodities under competitive conditions in which the forces of supply and demand determine value and the seller seeks to make a profit. In market transactions, the seller and buyer may or may not have a personal relationship. They may or may not be social equals. Their exchange is not likely to generate social bonding. Many market transactions take place in a marketplace, a physical location in which buying and selling occur. The market system evolved from other, less formal contexts of  trade , formalized exchange of one thing for another according to set standards of value, in which the party with the sought-after good seeks to make a profit from the party seeking the good.

The market system is associated with regional specialization in producing particular goods and trade between regions. Certain products are often identified with a town or region. In Morocco, the city of Fez (see Map 4.2) is famous for its blue-glazed pottery, whereas the Berber people of the Atlas Mountains are known for their fine wool blankets and rugs. In Oaxaca, Mexico (see Map 4.3), some villages are known for their blankets, pottery, stone grinders, rope, and chili peppers (Plattner 1989). Increasingly, producers of regionally distinct products, such as champagne, are legally copyrighting the regional name to protect it from use by producers of similar products from outside the region.

Marketplaces range from informal, small stands that appear in the morning and disappear at night, to huge multistoried shopping centers. One variety found in many parts of the world is a periodic market, a site for buying and selling that takes place on a regular basis (for example, monthly) in a particular location but without a permanent physical structure. Sellers appear with their goods and set up a table with perhaps an awning. In contrast, permanent markets are built structures situated in fixed locations. Marketplaces, however, are more than just places for buying and selling. They involve social interactions and even performances. Sellers solicit customers, shoppers meet and chat, government officials drop by, religious organizations may hold services, and traditional healers may treat toothaches.

Scenes at Two Permanent Markets

For a research project, learn more about Ted Bestor’s research on Tsukiji.

Ted Bestor conducted research over many years in Tsukiji (tsee-kee-jee), the world’s largest fish market, located in Tokyo (2004). Tsukiji connects large-scale corporations that supply most of the seafood with small-scale family-run firms that continue to dominate Tokyo’s retail food trade. Bestor describes the layout of the huge market, with inner and outer sections, as a basic division. The outer market attracts younger, hipper shoppers looking for unusual, trendy gourmet items and a more authentic-seeming shopping experience. It contains sushi bars, noodle stalls, knife shops, and chopstick dealers, as well as temples and graveyards. The inner market contains 11 fresh produce market subdivisions. The seafood section by far overshadows the “veggie” markets in size and transaction level. It is subdivided into several main buildings where auctions occur, activities such as deliveries and dispatches take place, and rows of retail stalls serve 14,000 customers each morning. Bestor gained insight into the verbally coded conversations between experienced buyers and sellers in the stalls that are more likely to yield a better price than what an inexperienced first-time buyer will get. Stalls do not typically post prices, so buyers and sellers have to negotiate them. The verbal codes involve phrases such as “morning mist on a white beach” which, depending on the number of syllables in the phrase, conveys a price offer.

Gambling Gambling, or gaming, is the attempt to make a profit by playing a game of chance in which a certain item of value is staked in hopes of acquiring the much larger return that one receives if one wins the game. If one loses, that which was staked is lost. Gambling is an ancient practice and is common cross-culturally. Ancient forms of gambling include dice throwing and card playing. Investing in the stock market can be considered a form of gambling, as can gambling of many sorts through the Internet. Although gambling may seem an odd category within unbalanced exchange, its goals of making a profit seem to justify its placement here. The fact that gambling within “high” capitalism is on the rise justifies anthropological attention to it.

Indian tribal gambling establishments in the United States have mushroomed in recent years. Throughout the United States, Indian casinos are so financially successful that they are perceived as an economic threat to many state lotteries. The Pequot Indians of Connecticut, a small tribe of around 200 people, now operate the most lucrative gaming establishment in the world, Foxwoods Resort and Casino, established in 1992. Through gaming, many other Indian tribal groups have become successful capitalists. An important question is what impact casinos will have on Indian tribal people, and anthropologists are involved in trying to answer this question (see Anthropology Works).Theft is taking something with no expectation or thought of returning anything to the original owner for it. It is the logical opposite of a pure gift. Anthropologists have neglected the study of theft, no doubt a reasonable response because theft is an illegal activity that is difficult to study and might involve danger.

from neighborhood trees. Bledsoe at first dismissed cases of food stealing as exceptions, but then she realized that she “rarely walked through town without hearing shouts of anger from an adult and cries of pain from a child being whipped for stealing food” (1983:2). Deciding to look into children’s food stealing more closely, she asked several children to keep diaries. Their writings were dominated by themes of tiefing, the local term for stealing. Fostered children, who are temporarily placed in the care of friends or relatives, do more food tiefing than children living with their birth families do. Such food stealing can be seen as children’s attempts to compensate for their less-than-adequate food shares in their foster homes.

While much theft worldwide is motivated by skewed entitlements and need, much is also driven by greed. Cultural anthropologists, for obvious reasons, have not done research on high-level theft involving expensive commodities such as drugs, gems, and art, nor have they examined corporate financial malpractice as a form of theft. Given the ethical requirement of informed consent, it is highly unlikely that any anthropologist would be given permission to study such criminal activity.

A rare study of theft focused on food stealing by children in West Africa (Bledsoe 1983). During fieldwork among the Mende people of Sierra Leone (see Map 4.5), Caroline Bledsoe learned that children in town stole fruits such as mangoes, guavas, and oranges from neighborhood trees. Bledsoe at first dismissed cases of food stealing as exceptions, but then she realized that she “rarely walked through town without hearing shouts of anger from an adult and cries of pain from a child being whipped for stealing food” (1983:2). Deciding to look into children’s food stealing more closely, she asked several children to keep diaries. Their writings were dominated by themes of tiefing, the local term for stealing. Fostered children, who are temporarily placed in the care of friends or relatives, do more food tiefing than children living with their birth families do. Such food stealing can be seen as children’s attempts to compensate for their less-than-adequate food shares in their foster homes.

Exploitation Exploitation, or getting something of greater value for less in return, is a form of extreme and persistent unbalanced exchange. Slavery is a form of exploitation in which people’s labor power is appropriated without their consent and with no recompense for its value. According to many scholars, it still exists in the form of human trafficking, in which ruthless people exploit the labor, sexual or otherwise, of other people through international as well as within-country networks of human smuggling. Slavery is rare among foraging, horticultural, and pastoralist societies. Social relationships that involve sustained unequal exchange may exist between members of different social groups that, unlike pure slavery, involve no overt coercion and entail a certain degree of return by the dominant member to the subdominant member. Some degree of covert (hidden, indirect) compulsion or dependence is likely to be present, however, in order for relationships of unequal exchange to endure.

Relationships between the Efe (eff-ay), who are “pygmy” foragers, and the Lese (less-ay), who are farmers, in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo are an example of such sustained unequal exchange (Grinker 1994) ( Map 3.7 ). The Lese live in small villages. The Efe are seminomadic and live in temporary camps near Lese villages. Men of each group maintain long-term, hereditary exchange partnerships with each other. The Lese give cultivated foods and iron to the Efe, and the Efe give meat, honey, and other forest goods to the Lese.

The story begins with the eruption of a mysterious disease, with the local name of kuru

American medical researchers revealed that kuru was a neurological disease. Australian cultural anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum pinpointed the cultural cause of kuru: cannibalism. Kuru victims had eaten the flesh of deceased people who had died of kuru.The first signs of kuru are shivering tremors, followed by a progressive loss of motor ability along with pain in the head and limbs. Kuru victims could walk unsteadily at first but would later be unable to get up. Death occurred about a year after the first symptoms appeared. Most victims were women.

Why were most of the kuru victims women? Lindenbaum learned that among the Fore, it was considered acceptable to cook and eat the meat of a deceased person, although it was not a preferred food. The preferred source of animal protein is meat from pigs, and men receive preferential access to the best food. Fore women had begun to eat human flesh more often because of increased scarcity of pigs. Population density in the region had risen, more land was being cultivated, and forest areas had decreased. Pigs live in forest areas, so as their habitat became more restricted, their numbers declined. The Fore could not move to more pig-abundant areas because they were bounded on the east, west, and north sides by other groups. The south was a harsh and forbidding region. These factors, combined with the Fore’s male-biased system of protein consumption, forced women to turn to the less-preferred protein source of human flesh. By eating the flesh, including brains, of kuru victims, they contracted the disease.“Race” and Children’s Shopping in New Haven

How could this happen in a country dedicated to equality of opportunity? A large part of the answer lies in the simple fact that, in a capitalist system, inequality leads to more inequality through the transfer of wealth and property across generations. Those who have wealth and property are able to establish their children’s wealth through college tuition payments, house down payments, and other financial gifts. The children of poor parents have to provide for their education and housing costs from their wages alone, a fact that makes it far less likely that they will be able to pursue higher education or buy a home.

As a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, Elizabeth Chin decided to do her dissertation research on consumption patterns among schoolchildren in a poor, African American neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut (2001). In terms of per capita income, Connecticut is the wealthiest state in the United States. It also harbors some of the most severe poverty and racial inequality in its major cities. New Haven exemplifies this racialized inequality in its clearly defined neighborhoods in the fear and suspicion with which Whites and Blacks view each other. During her research in a Black neighborhood, Chin found that 50 percent of the children age five and under were living in poverty.

Chin formed a relationship with one fifth-grade class of 22 students. She spent time in the classroom, visited the children and their families in their homes, and accompanied the children on shopping trips to the mall. While the children are bombarded with media messages about consumption, they have little money to spend. Some receive an allowance for doing household chores; some receive small amounts of pocket money on an ad hoc basis; and some earn money from small-scale ventures such as a cucumber stand. They learn about the basics of household finances and the costs of daily life early on. Seeing their families strain every day to put meals on the table teaches them about the negative effects of overindulgence: “From divvying up the milk to figuring out where to sleep there is an emphasis on sharing and mutual obligation” (2001:5).

These practical lessons shape how the children spend their money when they go to the mall. Practicality and generosity guide their shopping choices. To learn about the children’s decisions, Chin would give a child $20 and go with him or her to the mall. Most of the girls spent over half their money on gifts for family members, especially their mothers and grandmothers (2001:139). The girls knew their mothers’ shoe sizes and clothing sizes. One boy, just before school was to start in the fall, spent $10 on a T-shirt to wear on the first day of school, $6 on a pair of shorts, and the rest on school supplies: pencils, pens, notebook paper, and a binder (2001:135). In her two years of research, Chin never heard a child nag a caretaker about buying him or her something

Modes of Consumption

Consumption has two meanings: First, it is a person’s “intake” in terms of eating or other ways of using things; second, it is “output” in terms of spending or using resources to obtain those things. Thus, for example, “intake” is eating a sandwich; “output” is spending money at the store to buy a sandwich. Both activities fit within the term consumption.

People consume many things. Food, beverages, clothing, and shelter are the most basic consumption needs in most cultures. People also may acquire tools, weapons, means of transportation, computers, books and other items of communication, art and other luxury goods, and energy for heating and cooling their residence. In noncash economies, such as that of foragers, people “spend” time or labor in order to provide for their needs. In money-based economies, such as industrialized contexts today, most consumption depends on having cash or some virtual form of money.

In categorizing varieties of consumption, it makes sense to consider two contrasting modes, with mixed modes in the middle ( Figure 3.6 ). They are based on the relationship between demand (what people need or want) and supply (the resources available to satisfy demand):

1. Minimalism : a mode of consumption characterized by few and finite consumer demands and an adequate and sustainable means to achieve them. It is most characteristic of free-ranging foragers but is also found to some degree among horticulturalists and pastoralists.

1. Consumerism : a mode of consumption in which people’s demands are many and infinite, and the means of satisfying them are never sufficient, thus driving colonialism, globalization, and other forms of expansionism. Consumerism is the distinguishing feature of industrial/digital economy cultures. Globalization is spreading consumerism throughout the world and, in some cases, leading to hyperconsumerism, as among the very wealthy people around the world. Hyperconsumerism is consumption for its own sake, often driven by the perceived need to purchase certain brands and related to constructing and maintaining identity in a socially competitive context.

Figure 3.6

Modes of Livelihood, Consumption, and Exchange

How and what people consume, with whom, where, and how, and the meaning of consumption to individuals and groups vary cross-culturally. Consumption patterns are related to livelihoods. As noted previously, foragers are generally egalitarian, whereas social inequality characterizes most agricultural and industrial/digital societies. In foraging peoples, sharing within the group is the norm, and everyone has equal access to all resources. Among the Ju/wasi (review Culturama in Chapter 1): “Even though only a fraction of the able-bodied foragers go out each day, the day’s return of meat and gathered foods are [sic] divided in such a way that every member of the camp receives an equitable share” (Lee 1979:118).

The distribution among the group of personal goods such as clothing, beads, musical instruments, or smoking pipes is also equal.  Leveling mechanisms  are unwritten, culturally embedded rules that prevent an individual from becoming wealthier or more powerful than anyone else. They are maintained through social pressure and gossip. An important leveling mechanism among the Ju/wasi requires that any large game animal killed be shared with the group, and its killer must be modest, insisting that the meat is meager (Lee 1969). Ju/wasi hunters gain no social status or power through their provision of meat. The same applies to other foragers. Leveling mechanisms are important in horticultural and pastoralist societies, too. For example, when someone’s herd grows “too large,” that person will be subject to social pressure to sponsor a large feast in which many of the herd animals are eaten.

The mode of consumption that contrasts with minimalism is consumerism, with the United States being the major consumerist country of the world. Since the 1970s, consumption levels in the United States have been the highest of any society in human history, and they show no sign of decline. Since China adopted features of capitalism, it has quickly become a consumerist giant. In the world’s poorest countries, too, rising numbers of middle- and upper-class people pursue consumerism.

As consumerism spreads throughout the world, changes in the social relations involved in consumption also occur. In small-scale societies—such as those of foragers, horticulturalists, and pastoralists—consumption items are typically produced by the consumers themselves for their own use. If not, they are likely to be produced by people with whom the consumer has a personal, face-to-face relationship—in other words, personalized consumption. Everyone knows where products came from and who produced them. This pattern contrasts markedly with consumption in our contemporary globalized world, which is termed depersonalized consumption. Depersonalized consumption, by distancing consumers from workers who actually produce goods, makes it more 

possible for workers to be exploited.

Even in the most industrialized/digital economy contexts, though, depersonalized consumption has not completely replaced personalized consumption. The popularity of farmers’ markets in urban centers in North America is an example of personalized consumption in which the consumer buys produce from the person who grew it and with whom the consumer may have a friendly conversation, perhaps while sampling an apple.

CONSUMPTION MICROCULTURES  This section provides examples of three consumption microcultures: class, gender, and “race.” Microcultures have distinct entitlement patterns, related levels of health and welfare, and identity associated with consumption. Depending on the cultural context, social inequality may play an important role and have major effects on human welfare.

Women’s Deadly Diet in Papua New Guinea Consumption patterns are often marked by gender and related to discrimination and inequality. Specific foods may be considered “men’s food” or “women’s food.” An example of lethal gender inequalities in food consumption comes from highland Papua New Guinea (Map 3.5 ).