Chapter 7

• Anthropologists recognize the interrelationships of the physical, biological, economic, and cultural aspects of human existence
• Human culture is part of the natural world, not separate
• Anthropocene


  A geological epoch in which the earth is so significantly altered by the actions of humans, including climate change, that evidence of human action is detectable in all aspects of the environment
• Economy


  The culturally specific processes used by members of a society to provide themselves with material resources
• Economic anthropology


  The part of the discipline that debates issues of human nature that relate directly to the decisions of daily life and making a living
• Three dominant explanations of economies based on different assumptions of human nature

  • Self-interested model
  • Social model
  • Moral model
• Self-interested model


  Individuals are interested in their own well-being
• Social model


  How people form groups and exercise power. Focus should be on institutions, which are stable and enduring cultural practices that organize social life
• Moral model

  Human motivation is shaped by culturally specific belief systems and values
• The three phases of economic activity

  • Production
  • Distribution
  • Consumption
• Production


  The transformation of nature's raw materials into a form suitable for human use
• Consumption


  Using up material goods necessary for human survival
• Labour


  • The activity linking human social groups to the material world around them
  • Overlaps with what anthropologists refer to as subsistence strategies, the different strategies used by members of a society to meet their basic material survival needs
• Forms of production


  • Hunting and gathering
  • Agriculture
  • Industrial revolution
• Different forms of production have rarely existed in isolation and communities often use multiple forms of production at the same time, seasonally, or over long periods of time
• Food collectors


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


  A form of cultivation that depends on slash-and-burn (swidden) techniques, rainwater, human muscle power, and a few simple tools, such as digging sticks, hoes, and/or machetes
• Intensive agriculture


  A form of cultivation that employs plows, draft animals, irrigation, and fertilizer to bring a large amount of land under cultivation at one time
• Mechanized industrial agriculture


  Large-scale farming that is highly dependent on industrial methods of technology and production
• Mode of production


  A specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge
• Means of production

  The tools, skills, organization, and knowledge used to extract energy from nature
• Relations of production


  The social relations linking the people who use a given means of production within a particular mode of production
• Examples of modes of production

  • Kin ordered mode
  • Tributary mode
  • Capitalist mode
• Capitalist mode of production

  Becomes dominant during the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, features include private property, wage labour, profit, class division, and commodity production
• Modes of exchange


  • Reciprocity
  • Redistribution
  • Market exchange
• Reciprocity


  A mode of exchange in which individuals exchange goods and/or services (1) under the assumption that the exchanges will eventually balance out, (2) with the expectation of immediate balance, or (3) in the hope that at least one party will get something for nothing
• Redistribution


  A mode of exchange in which a centralized social organization receives contributions from all members of the group and redistributes them in a way that provides for every member
• Market exchange


  A mode of exchange in which the exchange of goods (trade) is calculated in terms of a multi-purpose medium of exchange and standard of value (money) and carried on by means of a supply–demand–price mechanism (the market)
• Neoclassical economic theory is a formal attempt to explain the workings of capitalist enterprise, with particular attention to markets (supply and demand, scarcity, etc.,) and became the foundation of the self-interested model
• In non-capitalist economies goods and services are often distributed not just between individuals, but within and between groups (including kin groups and communities) and non-human beings such as animals, spirits, and ancestors
• Differences between gifts and commodities

  • Gifts: Social or Moral Model, Tied to relationships, Kin-important, Dependent value
  • Commodities: Self-Interested Model, Asocial - Not tied to relationships, Class-important, Independent value
• Representation of exchange between Indigenous people and Europeans in colonial encounters is often misrepresented as barter, a type of exchange in which two parties are attempting to maximize value
• Accepting items was often a social signal of establishing a relationship, or refusing one (e.g., Niue)
• Contemporary anthropological studies of making a living focus on the impact of capitalism, colonialism, and the environment, including extractive economies and their effects on local cultures, ecologies, climate, and indigenous rights