Social anthropology
Social anthropology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is subsumed within cultural anthropology. In contrast to cultural anthropology and its continuity have been traditionally seen more as the dependent "variable" by social anthropology, embedded in its historical and social context, including its diversity of positions and perspectives, ambiguities and contradictions of social life, rather than the independent one. Topics of interest for social anthropologists have included customs and political organization and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange and family structure, gender relations and socialization, while present-day social anthropologists are concerned with issues of globalism, ethnic violence, gender studies and local experience, the emerging cultures of cyberspace, can help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments.
British and American anthropologists including Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall Street provided an alternative explanation for the financial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory. Differences among British and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Social and cultural anthropologists, some who integrate the two, are found in most institutes of anthropology, thus the formal names of institutional units no longer reflect the content of the disciplines these cover. Some, such as the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology changed their name to reflect the change in composition, such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent became Anthropology. Most retain the name. Long-term qualitative research, including intensive field studies has been traditionally encouraged in social anthropology rather than quantitative analysis of surveys and brief field visits used by economists, political scientists, sociologists.
Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as economics or political science by its holistic range and the attention it gives to the comparative diversity of societies and cultures across the world, the capacity this gives the discipline to re-examine Euro-American assumptions. It is differentiated from sociology, both in its main methods, in its commitment to the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies, it extends beyond social phenomena to culture, art and cognition. Many social anthropologists use quantitative methods, too those whose research touches on topics such as local economies, human ecology, cognition, or health and illness. Specializations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and as new intellectual paradigms appear. More recent and cognitive development; the subject has been enlivened by, has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines, such as philosophy, the history of science and linguistics. The subject has both reflexive dimensions.
Practitioners have developed an awareness of the sense in which scholars create their objects of study and the ways in which anthropologists themselves may contribute to processes of change in the societies they study. An example of this is the "hawthorne effect", whereby those being studied may alter their behaviour in response to the knowledge that they are being watched and studied. Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including ethnology, folklore studies, Classics, among others, its immediate precursor took shape in the work of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer in the late 19th century and underwent major changes in both method and theory during the period 1890-1920 with a new emphasis on original fieldwork, long-term holistic study of social behavior in natural settings, the introduction of French and German social theory. Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important influences on British social anthropology, emphasized long term fieldwork in which anthropologists work in the vernacular and immerse themselves in the daily practices of local people.
This development was bolstered by Franz Boas's introduction of cultural relativism arguing that cultures are based on different ideas about the world and can therefore only be properly understood in terms of their own standards and values. Museums such as the British Museum weren't the only site of anthropological studies: with the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories" the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from the colonies were displayed
The Anti-Politics Machine
The Anti-Politics Machine is a book by James Ferguson. This book is a critique of the concept of "development" in general, viewed through the lens of failed attempts the Thaba-Tseka Development Project in Lesotho from 1975–1984, he writes about the countless "development agencies" that have their hand in the so-called "Third World" but points out the consistent failure of these agencies to bring about any sort of economic stability. This is. At a critical juncture in the early nineteenth century the state began to connect itself to a series of groups “that in different ways had long tried to shape and administer the lives of individuals in pursuit of various goals” rather than extend the absolutist state's repressive machinery of social control. Michel Foucault's work on the prison, the clinic, the asylum – on the development of "bio-power" – analyzed the plurality of governing agencies and authorities who developed programs and technologies that were deployed to optimize the health and life of populations.
He referred to this process with the neologism "governmentality". One of the last of these new applied sciences was the "development apparatus", the post-world war extension of colonial rule after the independence of third world states. Ferguson utilized the governmentality framework in The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, the first in many similar explorations. Ferguson sought to explore how the "development discourse" works, that is, how the language and practices used by development specialists influence the ways in which development is delivered, the unintended consequences it fosters, he found that development projects which failed on their own terms could be redefined as "successes" on which new projects were to be modelled. The net effect of development, he argues, has been to "de-politicize" questions of resource allocation and to strengthen bureaucratic power. In his analysis of a development project in Lesotho between 1978 and 1982, he examined the following discursive maneuvers.
We must ask: "why statements are acceptable in'development' discourse that would be considered absurd in academic settings, but why many acceptable statements from the realm of academic discourse - or from that of common observation - fail to find their way into the discursive regime of'development'" Ferguson points out that a critical part of the development process is the way in which the object of development is defined. In defining this object, it is severed from its historical and geographic context, isolated as a "Less-Developed Country". In the case of Lesotho, its history as a grain exporting region was ignored, as was its current role as a labour reserve for the South African mines. Not wanting to deal with the apartheid South African regime, development agencies isolated the "independent" Lesotho from the regional economy in which it was entrapped in their project rationales and reports. Artificially taken out of this larger capitalist context, Lesotho's economy was described as "isolated", "non-market", "traditional", thus a proper target for aid intervention.
Ferguson underscores that these discourses are produced within institutional settings where they must provide a charter for governmental intervention. Any analysis which suggests the roots of poverty lie in areas outside the scope of government are dismissed and discarded since they cannot provide a rationale for state action, and since the capitalist economy is one such area, ideologically set outside the scope of governmental action, the discursive creation of a deformed ‘native economy’ creates the required opening for that intervention. The development project at the heart of Ferguson's analysis sought to introduce "improved livestock management." Development professionals noted that pastures were overgrazed, the cattle raised were not sold in markets. Indeed during a prolonged drought, the farmers of Lesotho refused to sell; the project managers rationalized this in terms of what Ferguson calls the "Bovine Mystique": that local farmers were bound by traditional values that prevented them from entering the market.
Their solution was to introduce markets, "superior" breeds of cattle, privatize pasture. Ferguson provides an alternate explanation of the Bovine Mystique, by placing Lesotho in its place in the regional economy of South Africa. Lesotho's rich farmlands had been taken by South Africa, leaving it a land-locked, resource-poor country, whose citizens could make money only by working in South African mines; the work was dangerous and sporadic, limited to men. These men had no bank accounts in which to invest for retirement - brought on by injury, they thus invested in cattle left with family in Lesotho. These cattle thus became placeholders for absent men, keeping them involved in local social networks, they refused to sell the cattle. They refused to sell in the drought because they realized that the dumping of all cattle on the markets would depress prices and they would earn next to nothing; the principal error of the development workers was to view cattle rearing as farming, rather than a retirement investment.
The development workers sought to resolve the problem of poverty and overgrazing in Lesotho by introducing development by introducing markets, "improved cattle" (Western breeds that were incapable of re
Political economy in anthropology
Political Economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology, but not limited to, non-capitalist societies. Political Economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Most anthropologists moved away from modes of production analysis typical of structural Marxism, focused instead on the complex historical relations of class and hegemony in regions undergoing complex colonial and capitalist transitions in the emerging world system. Political Economy was introduced in American anthropology through the support of Julian Steward, a student of Kroeber. Steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, technology, social structure, the organization of work; this emphasis on subsistence and production - as opposed to exchange - is what distinguishes the Political Economy approach. Steward's most theoretically productive years were from 1946-1953, while teaching at Columbia University.
At this time, Columbia saw an influx of World War II veterans who were attending school thanks to the GI Bill. Steward developed a coterie of students who would go on to develop Political Economy as a distinct approach in anthropology, including Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Eleanor Leacock, Roy Rappaport, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Morton Fried, Robert F. Murphy, influenced other scholars such as Elman Service, Marvin Harris and June Nash. Many of these students participated in the Puerto Rico Project, a large-scale group research study that focused on modernization in Puerto Rico. Three main areas of interest developed; the first of these areas was concerned with the "pre-capitalist" societies that were subject to evolutionary "tribal" stereotypes. Sahlins' work on hunter-gatherers as the "original affluent society" did much to dissipate that image; the second area was concerned with the vast majority of the world's population at the time, the peasantry, many of whom were involved in complex revolutionary wars such as in Vietnam.
The third area was on colonialism and the creation of the capitalist world-system. More these political economists have more directly addressed issues of industrial capitalism around the world. Cultural materialism is a research orientation introduced by Marvin Harris in 1968, as a theoretical paradigm and research strategy. Indeed, it is said to be the most enduring achievement of that work. Harris subsequently developed a defense of the paradigm in his 1979 book Cultural Materialism. To Harris, cultural materialism "is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence". Harris' approach distinct from Marx. Harris' method was to demonstrate. Economic behavior has a cultural side which indicates that the works of anthropologists is relevant to economics; the Motivation behind cultural materialism is to show that cultures adapt to the environment they're produced in. Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students.
It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, came to influence philosophers, political theorists and anthropologists outside France during the 1970s. French structuralist Marxism melded Marxist political economy with Levi-Strauss's structural methodology, eliminating the human subject, dialectical reason and history in the process. Structural Marxists introduced two major concepts, mode of production and social formation, that allowed for a more prolonged and uneven transition to capitalism than either dependency or World systems theory allowed for. A mode of production consisting of producers, non-producers and means of production, combined in a variety of ways, formed the deep structure of a "social formation." A social formation combined several modes of production, only one of, dominant or determinant. Primary anthropological theorists of this school included Maurice Godelier, Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray and Pierre-Philippe Rey. Structural Marxism arose in opposition to the humanistic Marxism that dominated many western universities during the 1970s.
In contrast to Humanistic Marxism, Althusser stressed that Marxism was a science that examined objective structures. Critical influences on Structural Marxism from the British Marxist historical tradition, included E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams, they criticized the functionalist emphasis in Structural Marxism, that neglected individuals in favour of the structural elements of their model. The British school was more interested in class and politics, placed human subjects at the centre of analysis. Where mode of production analysis was abstract, they focused on people. Where world-systems theory had little to say about the local, the Cultural Materialists began and ended there. Others connected with this school of thought concentrated on issues such as ethnic formation, labor migration, household formation, food production and the processes of colonialism; as anthropologists embraced "mode of production" analysis in the 1950s, they struggled to adapt its evolutionary model to the groups that they had traditionally worked with.
While Marxist analysis was developed to account for capitalist society and its class dynamics, it had little to say about "pre-capitalist" so
Debt
Debt is when something money, is owed by one party, the borrower or debtor, to a second party, the lender or creditor. Debt is a deferred payment, or series of payments, owed in the future, what differentiates it from an immediate purchase; the debt may be owed by local government, company, or an individual. Commercial debt is subject to contractual terms regarding the amount and timing of repayments of principal and interest. Loans, bonds and mortgages are all types of debt; the term can be used metaphorically to cover moral obligations and other interactions not based on economic value. For example, in Western cultures, a person, helped by a second person is sometimes said to owe a "debt of gratitude" to the second person; the English term "debt" was first used in the late 13th century. The term "debt" comes from "dette, from Old French dete, from Latin debitum "thing owed," neuter past participle of debere "to owe," "keep something away from someone," from de- "away" + habere "to have". Restored spelling after c.
1400. The related term "debtor" was first used in English in the early 13th century; the -b- was restored in French, in English c. 1560-c. 1660." In the King James Bible, various spellings are used. Interest is the fee paid by the borrower to the lender. Interest is calculated as a percentage of the outstanding principal, which percentage is known as an interest rate, is paid periodically at intervals, such as monthly or semi-annually. Interest rates may be floating. In floating-rate structures, the rate of interest that the borrower pays during each time period is tied to a benchmark such as LIBOR or, in the case of inflation-indexed bonds, inflation. There are many different conventions for calculating interest. Depending on the terms of the debt, compound interest may accumulate at a specific interval. In addition, different day count conventions exist, for example, sometimes each month is considered to have thirty days, such that the interest payment due is the same in each calendar month; the annual percentage rate is a standardized way to calculate and compare interest rates on an annual basis.
Quoting interest rates using APR is required by regulation for most loans to individuals in the United States and United Kingdom. For some loans, the amount loaned to the debtor is less than the principal sum to be repaid; this may be because upfront fees or points are charged, or because the loan has been structured to be sharia-compliant. The additional principal due at the end of the term has the same economic effect as a higher interest rate. Riskier borrowers must pay higher rates of interest to compensate lenders for taking on the additional risk of default. Debt investors assess the risk of default prior to making a loan, for example through credit scores and corporate and sovereign ratings. There are three main ways repayment may be structured: the entire principal balance may be due at the maturity of the loan. Amortization structures are common in mortgages and credit cards. Debtors of every type default on their debt from time to time, with various consequences depending on the terms of the debt and the law governing default in the relevant jurisdiction.
If the debt was secured by specific collateral, such as a car or home, the creditor may seek to repossess the collateral. In more serious circumstances and companies may go into bankruptcy. Common types of debt owed by individuals and households include mortgage loans, car loans, credit card debt, income taxes. For individuals, debt is a means of using anticipated income and future purchasing power in the present before it has been earned. People in industrialized nations use consumer debt to purchase houses and other things too expensive to buy with cash on hand. People are more to spend more and get into debt when they use credit cards vs. cash for buying products and services. This is because of the transparency effect and consumer's "pain of paying." The transparency effect refers to the fact that the further you are from cash, the less transparent it is and the less you remember how much you spent. The less transparent or further away from cash, the form of payment employed is, the less an individual feels the “pain of paying” and thus is to spend more.
Furthermore, the differing physical appearance/form that credit cards have from cash may cause them to be viewed as “monopoly” money vs. real money, luring individuals to spend more money than they would if they only had cash available. Besides these more formal debts, private individuals lend informally to other people relatives or friends. One reason for such informal debts is that many people, in particular those who are poor, have no access to affordable credit; such debts can cause problems when they are not paid back according to expectations of the lending household. In 2011, 8 percent of people in the European Union reported their households has been in arrears, that is, unable to pay as scheduled "payments related to informal loans from friends or relatives not living in your household". A company may use various kinds of debt to finance its operations as a part of its overall corporate finance strate
Marshall Sahlins
Marshall David Sahlins is an American anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Sahlins was born in Chicago, he grew up in a secular, non-practicing family. His family claims to be descended from Baal Shem Tov, a mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Sahlin's mother was a political activist as a child in Russia. Sahlins received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at the University of Michigan where he studied with evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White, he earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1954. There his intellectual influences included Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney Mintz, the economic historian Karl Polanyi. After receiving his PhD, he returned to teach at the University of Michigan. In the 1960s he became politically active, while protesting against the Vietnam War, Sahlins coined the term for the imaginative form of protest now called the "teach-in," which drew inspiration from the sit-in pioneered during the civil rights movement.
In 1968, Sahlins signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, he spent two years in Paris, where he was exposed to French intellectual life and the student protests of May 1968. In 1973, he took a position in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, where he is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, his commitment to activism has continued throughout his time at Chicago, most leading to his protest over the opening of the University's Confucius Institute. On February 23, 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest the call for military research for improving the effectiveness of small combat groups and the election of Napoleon Chagnon; the resignation followed the publication in that month of Chagnon's memoir and widespread coverage of the memoir, including a profile of Chagnon in the New York Times magazine. Alongside his research and activism, Sahlins trained a host of students who went on to become prominent in the field.
One such student, Gayle Rubin, said: "Sahlins is a brilliant thinker. By the time he finished the first lecture, I was hooked."In 2001, Sahlins became publisher of Prickly Pear Pamphlets, started in 1993 by anthropologists Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, was renamed Prickly Paradigm Press. The imprint specializes in small pamphlets on unconventional subjects in anthropology, critical theory and current events, his brother was comedian Bernard Sahlins. His son, Peter Sahlins, is a historian. Sahlins is known for theorizing the interaction of structure and agency, his critiques of reductive theories of human nature, his demonstrations of the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions. Although his focus has been the entire Pacific, Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji and Hawaii. Sahlins's training under Leslie White, a proponent of materialist and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Michigan, is reflected in his early work. In his Evolution and Culture, he touched on the areas of cultural neoevolutionism.
He divided the evolution of societies into "general" and "specific". General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities; this leads cultures to develop in different ways, as various elements are introduced to them in different combinations and on different stages of evolution. Moala, Sahlins's first major monograph, exemplifies this approach. Stone Age Economics collects some of Sahlins's key essays in substantivist economic anthropology; as opposed to "formalists," substantivists insist that economic life is produced through cultural rules that govern the production and distribution of goods, therefore any understanding of economic life has to start from cultural principles, not from the assumption that the economy is made up of independently acting, "economically rational" individuals. Sahlins's most famous essay from the collection, "The Original Affluent Society," elaborates on this theme through an extended meditation on "hunter-gatherer" societies.
Stone Age Economics inaugurated Sahlins's persistent critique of the discipline of economics in its Neoclassical form. After the publication of Culture and Practical Reason in 1976, his focus shifted to the relation between history and anthropology, the way different cultures understand and make history. Of central concern in this work is the problem of historical transformation, which structuralist approaches could not adequately account for. Sahlins developed the concept of the "structure of the conjuncture" to grapple with the problem of structure and agency, in other words that societies were shaped by the complex conjuncture of a variety of forces, or structures. Earlier evolutionary models, by contrast, claimed that culture arose as an adaptation to the natural environment. Crucially, in Sahlins's formulation, individuals have the agency to make history. Sometimes their position gives them power by placing them at the top of a political hierarchy. At ot
Barter
In trade, barter is a system of exchange where participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. Economists distinguish barter from gift economies in many ways. Barter takes place on a bilateral basis, but may be multilateral. In most developed countries, barter only exists parallel to monetary systems to a limited extent. Market actors use barter as a replacement for money as the method of exchange in times of monetary crisis, such as when currency becomes unstable or unavailable for conducting commerce. Economists since the times of Adam Smith, looking at non-specific pre-modern societies as examples, have used the inefficiency of barter to explain the emergence of money, of "the" economy, hence of the discipline of economics itself. However, ethnographic studies have shown that no present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, nor have anthropologists found evidence that money emerged from barter, instead finding that gift-giving was the most usual means of exchange of goods and services.
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, sought to demonstrate that markets pre-existed the state, hence should be free of government regulation. He argued. Markets emerged, in his view, out of the division of labour, by which individuals began to specialize in specific crafts and hence had to depend on others for subsistence goods; these goods were first exchanged by barter. Specialization depended on trade, but was hindered by the "double coincidence of wants" which barter requires, i.e. for the exchange to occur, each participant must want what the other has. To complete this hypothetical history, craftsmen would stockpile one particular good, be it salt or metal, that they thought no one would refuse; this is the origin of money according to Smith. Money, as a universally desired medium of exchange, allows each half of the transaction to be separated. Barter is characterized in Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" by a disparaging vocabulary: "higgling, swapping, dickering." It has been characterized as negative reciprocity, or "selfish profiteering."Anthropologists have argued, in contrast, "that when something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is always between strangers."
Barter occurred between strangers, not fellow villagers, hence cannot be used to naturalistically explain the origin of money without the state. Since most people engaged in trade knew each other, exchange was fostered through the extension of credit. Marcel Mauss, author of'The Gift', argued that the first economic contracts were to not act in one's economic self-interest, that before money, exchange was fostered through the processes of reciprocity and redistribution, not barter. Everyday exchange relations in such societies are characterized by generalized reciprocity, or a non-calculative familial "communism" where each takes according to their needs, gives as they have. Since direct barter does not require payment in money, it can be utilized when money is in short supply, when there is little information about the credit worthiness of trade partners, or when there is a lack of trust between those trading. Barter is an option to those who cannot afford to store their small supply of wealth in money in hyperinflation situations where money devalues quickly.
The limitations of barter are explained in terms of its inefficiencies in facilitating exchange in comparison to money. It is said that barter is'inefficient' because: There needs to be a'double coincidence of wants' For barter to occur between two parties, both parties need to have what the other wants. There is no common measure of value In a monetary economy, money plays the role of a measure of value of all goods, so their values can be assessed against each other. Indivisibility of certain goods If a person wants to buy a certain amount of another's goods, but only has for payment one indivisible unit of another good, worth more than what the person wants to obtain, a barter transaction cannot occur. Lack of standards for deferred payments This is related to the absence of a common measure of value, although if the debt is denominated in units of the good that will be used in payment, it is not a problem. Difficulty in storing wealth If a society relies on perishable goods, storing wealth for the future may be impractical.
However, some barter economies rely on durable goods like sheep or cattle for this purpose. Other anthropologists have questioned whether barter is between "total" strangers, a form of barter known as "silent trade". Silent trade called silent barter, dumb barter, or depot trade, is a method by which traders who cannot speak each other's language can trade without talking. However, Benjamin Orlove has shown that while barter occurs through "silent trade", it occurs in commercial markets as well. "Because barter is a difficult way of conducting trade, it will occur only where there are strong institutional constraints on the use of money or where the barter symbolically denotes a special social relationship and is used in well-defined conditions. To sum up, multipurpose money in markets is like lubrication for machines - necessary for the
The dictionary definition of sedentism at Wiktionary