The Anthropology of Economy Community, Market, and Culture Stephen Gudeman BLACI<WELL l3 Publishers Copyright© Stephen Gudeman 2001 The right of Stephen Gudeman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Blackwell Publishers Inc. 350 Main Street Malden, Massachusetts 02148 USA Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF UK All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, withotlt the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN 0-631-22566-8 (hardback); 0-63 1-22567-6 (paperback) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Community, Market, and Culture 1 The Values of Economy 5 Two Transaction Realms 9 Commensuration: Panama in the 1960s 12 Separations and Dialectics: Other Perspectives 15 From Community to Globalization 20 2 Economy at the Base 25 The Base 27 Common Constructions 34 Situated Reason 38 Self-sufficiency 43 A Fragmented World 47 3 Sharing the Base 52 Allotment 53 From Stock to Flow 55 Apportionment 56 Reallocating the Base 57 Sharing and Social Value 58 Reapportionment and Exchange Rates: Aristotle's Solution 60 Managing Generosity at Home 63 4 The Great Estate: Power, Extraction, and Expansion 68 Models and Historical Change 69 vi CONTENTS Self-sufficiency, Rations, and Reason 75 Contemporary Estates 78 5 Reciprocity and the Gift: Extending the Base 80 Genealogies of the Gift 81 Extending and Retracting the Base 86 Sister-Exchange 90 The Badge of Society 92 6 Trade and Profit 94 The Trade Domain 94 The Puzzle of Profit 97 A Theory of Profit 102 Accumulation 104 7 Profit on the Small 110 A Potter's Profit 110 Innovation in Groups 113 Extending the Base and Profit 116 Profit, Base, and Capital 117 8 Realms and Dialectics: Values in Production, Trade, and Use . 121 From Base to Base: Tra nsforming Objects, Relationships, and Trade 122 From Base to Capital: Appropriation, Production, Trade 126 From Capital to Base: Resilience and Resista nce 132 Trade Within the Base: Circuits and Budgets 133 The Base in Trade 137 9 Political Economy Today 144 Innovating Relations 146 The Rationality of Capitalism and Socialism 149 The Questions Today 155 References 165 Index 183 Acknowledgments I began research for this book while on a single quarter leave from the University of Minnesota, and I am grateful to the University as well as the College of Liberal Arts for their support in the past years. The initial draft of the book was written during the year I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; I thank the Center for that special opportunity, and the National Science Founda­ tion for financial support (grant #SES-9022192). The book's thesis - that we live in multiple communities which nour­ ish endeavors - is supported by its own history, for I am indebted to many colleagues and friends. My special thanks go to Alberto Rivera, with whom I have undertaken fieldwork in Colombia and Guate­ mala. We have published articles and a book together, but that public authorship does not sufficiently express my debt to him. The eth­ nography on Guatemala and Colombia comes from our shared field­ work, which he has allowed me to use, and I have gained enormously from our many discussions about the ethnography and larger issues. In June 1995, Arjo Klamer and Phil Mirowski spent a humid weekend in Minneapolis while we discussed economic anthropology; they will recognize themes from that conversation in this volume. In the past decade, I have also had excellent discussions with scholars from other disciplines, and I thank Jack Amariglio, Stephen Cullenberg, Antonio Callari, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Larry Lohmann, Deidre McCloskey, John Richards, David Ruccio, Vernon Ruttan, and James Scott. I also owe special thanks and appreciation to Frederique Appfel­ Marglin and Stephen Marglin for their support and suggestions. In anthropology, I have received encouragement, interest, references, cri­ tique, and suggestive ideas from Nurit Bird-David, James Carrier, Scarlett Epstein, Arturo Escobar, Adam Kuper, Keith Hart, Michael Herzfeld, Alf Hornborg, Mark Mosko, Ben Orlove, Gfsli Palsson, Rick Shweder, and Richard Wille My Minnesota colleagues John Ingham and Mischa Penn have been ever-supportive, and I appreciate their viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS help and good colleagueship. At Minnesota, I also want to thank Amy Porter and Kathleen Saunders. At home, Roxane, Rebecca, Elise, and Keren have been great commentators, listeners, and readers over long periods of time. The author and publishers are grateful to several sources for per­ mission to reuse previously published material: some of the material in chapter 7 was first presented in my 1992 article, "Remodeling the House of Economics: Culture and Innovation," American Ethnolo­ gist, vol. 19, no. 1: 141-54; an earlier version of some of the informa­ tion offered in chapters 1, 2, 7, and 8 was published in Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera, "Sustaining the Community, Resisting the Market: Guatemalan Perspectives," in john F. Richards (ed.), Land, Property and the Environment (Oakland: ICS Press); a version of chap­ ter 5 was published as "The Postmodern Gift," in Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio, and David Ruccio (eds), Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2001). Chapter One Community, Market, and Culture Economic anthropology attends to industrial life as well as ethnographic: situations, because comparable processes in securing and managin valued things are found everywhere. But economy, which revolves about making, holding, using, sharing, exchanging, and accumulating val­ ued objects and services, includes more than standard market theoryJ suggests. Anthropology plays a special role in broadening our under­ standing of material life, for the less-recognized processes are displayed with special clarity in the situations ethnographers study. In this book I offer a cross-cultural model of economy drawn from anthropology, written theories, and contemporary life. My purpose is to develop a lexicon or language for discussing economic processes as well as en­ vironmental, welfare, distributional, and other contemporary issues. I argue that economy consists of two realms, which I call community v and market. Both facets make up economy, for humans are motivated by social fulfillment, curiosity, and the pleasure of mastery, as well as instrumental purpose, competition, and the accumulation of gains. By community, I refer to real, on-the-ground associations and to imag­ ined solidarities that people experience. Market designates anonymous, short-term exchanges. We might call these two aspects of economy, the Up-close and the Far-distant. In one guise, economy is local and specific, constituted through social relationships and contextually de­ fined values. In the other, it is impersonal, even global, and abstracted from social context; this dimension consists of separated but interact­ ing agents. Both realms are ever-present but we bring now one, now the other into the foreground in practice and ideology. The relation­ ship is complex: sometimes the two faces of economy are separated, at other times they are mutually dependent, opposed or interactive. But always their shifting relation is filled with tension. This book is about the dialectical relation of economy's two realms. I shall especially try to portray the multiplicity of the community realm with its grounding in local values, and show how it and market 2 COMMUNITY, MARKET, AND CULTURE are connected in institutions and practices. The motor of capitalism is profit-making, but I shall suggest that even the most market-driven actor - the national or global corporation - mixes the two realms and relies on the presence of communal relations and resources for its suc­ cess. Economic anthropology, I think, uniquely displays the double face of economy and the importance of the up-close. The politics of this book stem from this demonstration of the importance of the com­ munal realm, thus obliging us to rethink our ways of distributing new wealth. I arrived at this model slowly, for, as I found in the course of my studies, economic anthropology itself is divided theoretically. My own intellectual trail led me right through the discipline's conflicting theo­ retical perspectives, because each time I thought I had solved a puzzle in economic anthropology, the answer prompted new questions that led to a shift in my course and to fresh inquiries about the connections between sociality and impersonal exchange. A brief recounting of these experiences and perplexities provides a miniature map of the field and its fissures. My first research, in the 1960s, was carried out in a small village of rural Panama. I went there filled with confidence that my business school training in decision theory and game theory, combined with anthropology, would yield deep insights into the local economy. Wear­ ing the hat of a neoclassical economist, I intended to apply concepts from the theory of markets to the activities of subsistence farmers.1 My goal was to elicit their agricultural choices and plot them on deci­ sion trees, attaching their subjective valuations and probabilities to the outcomes.