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Chapter Summary
Cultural anthropologists who study economic anthropology are interested in the material realities of peoples’ day-to-day existence as well as the connections between culture and livelihood. Human economic activity is divided into three phases: production, distribution, and consumption.
Economic anthropologists explore exchange systems in both capitalist/market economies and in non-capitalist societies. Non-capitalist societies tend to rely upon non-market modes of exchange, like reciprocity and redistribution, which still play limited roles in societies that are dominated by a capitalist market.
Marxian economic anthropologists view production as more important than exchange in determining the patterns of economic life in a society. They classify societies in terms of their modes of production. Each mode of production contains within it the potential for conflict between classes of people who receive differential benefits and losses from the productive process.
In the past, some anthropologists tried to explain consumption patterns in different societies either by arguing that people produce material goods to satisfy basic human needs or by connecting consumption patterns to specific material resources available to people in the material settings where they lived. Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that both of these explanations are inadequate because they ignore how culture defines our needs and provides for their satisfaction according to its own logic. The self-interested model that characterizes the Enlightenment approach to economic exchange has been supplanted in economic anthropology by focusing not just on social institutions but also cultural constructions of reality and moral models for action.
Particular consumption preferences that may seem irrational from the perspective of neoclassical economic theory may make sense when the wider cultural practices of consumers are taken into consideration. In the twenty-first century, those who Western observers might have expected to reject Western market commodities often embrace them, frequently making use of them to defend or enrich their local culture rather than replace it.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, the student should learn to do the following:
- explain how the concepts of livelihood and culture are connected;
- define the concepts of production, distribution, and exchange;
- understand how redistribution operates within primarily non-capitalist economies;
- define and provide examples of the three patterns/explanations of consumption;
- define the concept of an “original affluent society”;
- outline the relationship between changing notions of consumption and people’s relationships with food.