W hile 10,000 or more years ago economic action in small-scale societies

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1 VARIATION IN ECONOMY Richard E. Blanton Cross-Cultural TOC W hile 10,000 or more years ago economic action in small-scale societies no doubt reflected primarily, but not entirely, the rights and obligations inherent in kinship ties, within the past approximately 5,000 years, the scale of economic action often transcended kin-based social groups, including those in which economic transactions take place between anonymous buyers and sellers engaged in market transactions. The highly commercialized economies of the capitalist nations and the modern world-system are the product of the general social evolutionary trend toward larger scale, but, in spite of the pervasive influence of European capitalism in today s world, there remain substantial cross-cultural differences in economic systems. Comparative research in economic anthropology (based on both ethnographic and archaeological data) has the goal of elucidating the nature of variation in space and time and proposing explanatory theories to explain differences and similarities. Developing suitably robust concepts and methods for comparison has proven to be a challenging task. However, over a period of more than fifty years, social scientists have made substantial progress in cross-cultural economic understanding. 1 PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, AND CONSUMPTION Western social philosophers and social scientists have been arguing for centuries about the degree to which social action is primarily the product of a conscious thought leading to rational choice rather than reflecting habit or normative causes of behavior. 2 If we accept the consciousness argument, then most human behavior can be understood by reference to economic ideas since they address how people make rational choicest by considering costs and benefits (below I describe an approach to economic study, substantivism, that does not make the economizing assumption in all cases). Typically, however, the behaviors addressed by economic anthropologists center around production, distribution (i.e., the allocation of goods and services among members of society), and consumption. 3 Because production, distribution, and consumption are found in all societies, it would seem to follow that cross-cultural comparison of economic systems would be a relatively straightforward and focused analytical task. Instead, the study of variation in economy severely challenges the researcher. A vexing problem faces those social scientists whose interests lead them into the domain of cross-cultural economic study, namely: To what extent may we apply our Western (i.e., capitalist) economic theory (that is based on the economizing assumption), in non-western situations? Superficially, the answer to this question seems obvious.

2 Because many features of capitalist economic systems are not found in other sociocultural settings, they have limited value for cross-cultural comparison. Institutions such as stock markets and incorporated firms are unique to the capitalist economies. The real difficulty in conducting cross-cultural economic analysis goes to the determinants of economic behavior. In neoclassical economic theories developed in the capitalist nations since the latter nineteenth century, 4 it is assumed that society benefits most from the economizing individual economic actor, unencumbered by social relations, pursuing utilitarian self-interest by making prudent choices between desired ends, given a scarcity of means. 5 In the economic behavior assumed by this economizing framework, costs and benefits are assessed in measurable quantities in order to arrive at optimal solutions to problems faced in production, distribution, and consumption. In firms, for example, this means identifying an optimal combination of inputs to production (land, labor, and capital), in order to maximize profits. Households are assumed to consume an optimal mix of goods and services that will maximize their utilities (i.e., satisfactions such as health and material well-being). This does not mean that all individuals and institutions are carefully and objectively engaging in economizing behavior at all times. But, to the degree possible (given the limited information available to economic actors, and given that cultural values may at times constrain optimization), an economizing theory is thought to provide a powerful means for explaining cross-cultural and temporal variation in economy. This kind of rational, calculative and individualistic behavior, when elaborated to its fullest extent, is argued to provide the individual behavioral basis for the development and functioning of the strongly commercialized (and supposedly highly rational, see below) economic systems of modern capitalism. 6 In anthropology, cultural materialists such as Marvin Harris make use of a similar utilitarian theory. 7 In this approach, sociocultural change as a general process in all human societies, is seen as the outcome of choice-making that aims at primarily material benefits. Yet, many anthropologists have been severe critics of the cultural materialist and economizing approaches as applied to situations outside of capitalism. 8 Critics of utilitarian theories, whether derived from neoclassical economics or from cultural materialism, argue that economizing behavior is particular to the western, strongly commercialized, capitalist economies, and that economic theories developed in this particular sociocultural milieu should not be applied elsewhere. This difference of theoretical orientation has produced a division in economic anthropology between those who see possibilities for the broad use of an economizing theory and those who reject it as a general economic theory. Formalist economic anthropologists argue that there are advantages to a broadly-applied economizing theory, while the substantivist camp argues that non-capitalist systems are best understood through the study of local institutions of production, distribution, and consumption peculiar to particular times and places. 9 Substantivists argue that comparative economic inquiry should be primarily a factual, historical, descriptive endeavor, rather than part of a theoretically-inspired economic science sees human behavior as a product of rational choice. The central difficulty of cross-cultural economic study is captured in the formalist-substantivist debate. Is the economizing

3 approach ethnocentric, or is it a powerful tool for cross-cultural economic analysis? The formalist-substantivist debate has had a beneficial outcome for cross-cultural research in that it has prompted much thought and writing, as well as problem-oriented research. As a result, we have a much better understanding of these issues now than when they were first brought to light over fifty years ago, although issues surrounding the applicability of western economic science in other societal settings have not been entirely resolved. Advances in cross-cultural study of economy can be summarized by viewing differences and similarities in economies in terms of three facets of human behavior as seen in sociocultural context, namely: (1) the cross-cultural applicability of the concept of rationality, (2) the degree of embeddedness of economy in society and culture, and (3) the distinction made between exchanges involving gifts and commodities. A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON ECONOMIC RATIONALITY Are market economies, especially capitalism, the most commercialized of them all, more rational than the economies of foragers, tribal societies, or early civilizations? This is an exceedingly difficult question to answer because rationality is an intricate and difficult concept for cross-cultural consideration. 10 The difficulty is that no particular aspect of behavior, of society, or of culture can be considered rational in any absolute sense, nor is it meaningful to compare whole sociocultural systems as being more or less rational overall. The degree of rationality is always relative to the situation at hand, and any aspect of human activity that one may consider will exhibit both rational and irrational dimensions. The rationality of economizing behavior that operates in capitalist economies is expressed as prudent choices made to maximize profits or other utilities. In this conceptualization, utilitarian benefits are realized within the context of a particular bounded social entity, such as a firm or household. However, we might extend the analysis to a consideration of the rationality of the social entity in question when viewed in its larger societal and environmental context. An American farm, for example, may prudently deploy an optimal combination of land and capital (chemicals and farm machinery), according to the dictates of accepted capitalist practice, in order to maximize profit. But, as a consequence of these optimizing practices, the farmer may pollute ground water and surface water with fertilizer and pesticide residues (known as "negative externalities" 11 ). These external environmental consequences, which eventually constitute a cost to society in terms of a degraded environment and perhaps health hazards, are not taken into consideration in assessing the farm s profitability. Is this rational? Yes, but only in the limited, bounded, economizing sense that is typical of Western economic analysis. When viewed from a larger perspective of the farm in nature and society, there is a strong element of irrationality at play, which economic science chooses to ignore. In fact, if capitalist farms did aim to minimize environmental impacts, they might not be 12 profitable.1 Anthropologists studying Western-inspired agricultural development programs in developing countries often have pointed to similar kinds of unanticipated social and environmental

4 costs resulting from the use of a narrow economizing approach to farm management and technology. 13 For example, when Latin American peasants are removed from their land in order to convert it to commercial cattle grazing for export, is this rational behavior? The cattle ranches can become successful commercial enterprises, and the export of beef improves a country s balance of payments. These are both rational outcomes when counted in economistic terms. However, the benefits of capitalist farming often accrue to only a small number of wealthy landowners, while the peasantry removed from their land experiences a declining standard of living. 14 Again, from a narrow perspective of the economic maximization of a capitalist enterprise, cattle ranching in cases like these is rational, but there are at the same time unaccounted external costs of social disruption and poverty in society. The well-described "Big-Man" competitive pig distribution systems of highland New Guinea 15 provide interesting insights that allow us to evaluate some of the rationality assumptions found in economic theory. In these "neotechnic" 16 cultures, households strive to produce or obtain through social exchange large numbers of well bred and fattened pigs which are butchered and distributed in the context of competitive feasting events that certify the social standing and prestige of the "Big Man" and his household or faction. Here, we see highly strategic and economizing efforts for the control of pig breeding, as we see in the methods used to intensify food production that include the careful control of moisture, soil nutrients, and temperature, to maximize agricultural production. But what is being maximized or economized? The economic rationality at play does not aim to provide material benefits or the efficient use of scarce resources, and, instead, aims to maximize the production of valuable prestige goods, especially pigs, that serve primarily to enhance the social standing of household heads and their families or factions. 17 Additionally, the costs of intensive pig domestication entail what might be considered "negative externalities" in the sense that pig production and agricultural intensification result in environmental degradation and protein malnutrition, the latter because so much of the food produced is used to fatten pigs, not people. 18 THE EMBEDDED ECONOMY In a particular society, the degree to which economic decisions are normally influenced by a person's participation in social networks and structured social groups is referred to as the degree of embeddedness of the economy 19 To many economists, and substantivist anthropologists, embeddedness is thought to dominate in pre-modern (or non-capitalist) societies. In these cases, economic action reflects primarily the obligations of kinship ties, patron-client relations, obligations to community, or other personal ties. 20 In contrast, according to these same theories, modern commercial economies are characterized by economic transactions that take place primarily among autonomous, unrelated individuals, allowing economic actors to pursue their objectives free of the constraints of personal ties, a situation that is optimal for economic development. But, as Mark Granovetter reminds us, all economic action is socially embedded, although in varying degrees. 21 He proposes that rather than assume that types of societies will display differing degrees of embeddedness, the goal of the cross-cultural investigator should be to explain variation in embeddedness and its consequences for individuals and societies. This approach will allow us to avoid the fallacy of assuming that

5 in premodern economies people are oversocialized (i.e., always attentive to group norms), while being undersocialized (i.e., unaffected by norms of group relations) in modern economies. 22 In Popkin s study of rural Vietnam, for example, the development and maintenance of an embedded economy in peasant villages was found to be the result of rational, self-interested behavior in a conflictive and economically uncertain social environment. 23 He thus disagreed with those who argue that peasant village economies constitute a kind of naturally-occurring moral economy. 24 Popkin's example suggests the possibility that embeddedness is an outcome of self-interested calculation rather than simply a characteristic feature of a type of society ( primitive or premodern ). In my opinion, this theoretical suggestion deserves the attention of future cross-cultural research on economy because it gets away from static typological thinking, and permits the researcher to focus on processes that would allow an explanation of variation and change. In this line of inquiry, a reasonable question is: What social and environmental conditions favor inhibit the embeddedness of economic transactions? In an example described by Mark Granovetter, one environment favoring embeddedness was found to be the commercial economies of southeast Asia and elsewhere, where overseas Chinese businesses are successful precisely because they emphasize embeddedness. As he put it: Chinese businesses experience dramatically lower costs because the close-knittedness of their community promotes a high level of trust: credit is extended, capital pooled and authority delegated without fear of default or deceit. The social structure makes malfeasance not only difficult to conceal and costly to engage in, but even hard to imagine. This problem of trust is one that indigenous groups find hard to overcome, and in this respect, the Chinese example belies traditional development theory s argument that the entangling of business with kinship and friendship is backward and inefficient. 25 GIFTS AND COMMODITIES IN EXCHANGE RELATIONS The study of the social exchange of goods and services is a fundamental approach in the cross-cultural comparison of economies. Economic anthropologists have written extensively about exchange in its varied forms, although, at present, there is not complete agreement about ways to classify exchange behaviors. Most researchers make use of a scheme that identifies a spectrum of exchange transactions ranging from gift exchange, at one end, to commodities, at the other. 26 In any exchange transaction, there is an expectation of a return of some kind, at some point, for what is given (but see the discussion below of what are called transfers or generalized exchanges ). The idea of a spectrum of possible exchange transactions, rather than rigidly defined categories, implies the possibility than in any given situation an exchange transaction may embody features of both gift and commodity. However, it is still possible to identify difference in both the logic of exchange and the social milieu within which exchange takes place that are reflected in the gift and commodity distinction. In gift exchanges the expectation of reciprocity (a return gift) between giver and receiver creates or reproduces

6 an enduring social relationship between the exchanging parties (individuals or groups). Further, as first noted by Marcel Mauss, the goods exchanged maintain a kind of animate character embodying the person giving it, making it less likely to be alienated (sold or otherwise disposed of) and more likely to be reciprocated. 27 Reciprocal gift exchanges form the essential basis for the embedded economic systems discussed previously, although reciprocal gift exchanges also are pervasive in more complex societies. Commodity exchanges take place between exchanging partners who may be completely unknown to one another, and no residue of social relationship necessarily persists between exchanging parties following the completion of the transaction. Here, social interaction is voluntary ( disembedded ), and is based on the mutual benefit that will accrue from an exchange of a particular set of goods (or services). A calculative assessment of the comparative values of exchanged goods or services is integral to commodity transactions, and it is possible to identify two major forms of value determination. In the form of commodity exchange known as barter, which is found in a wide range of societies, including small-scale, technologically simple, foraging or tribal societies, the exchanging parties arrive at a mutual, ad hoc, agreement concerning value equivalencies for the particular goods or services exchanged. In market exchanges, barter as a value-determining mechanism is replaced in whole or part by prices that reflect the interaction of forces of supply and demand. Markets will only develop when social institutions (rules, laws, and values) are developed as behavioral guides and organizations are developed that provide valid information concerning market conditions so that market participants can optimize their production, sales, and consumption decisions. 28 In his massive cross-cultural study of exchange, Pryor makes use of the concept of transfers as an additional category of exchange. 29 In transfers, there is no counterflow of gifts (reciprocity), or the counterflow has an inexact relationship to the original transfer, for example, in an altruistic gift from parent to child. It is not clear at this point whether transfers, including those that are viewed as altruistic, constitute a distinct category of transaction, or whether, like gift exchange, they actually embody some kind of a social relationship manifested by an enduring reciprocal exchange interaction with some expectation of a return benefit, however vague or indirect. 30 Thus commodity transactions focus on the exchange of things (goods or services) themselves, while gift exchange emphasizes the social relationship that is initiated and maintained through the process of reciprocated exchange. Most theories of economic development relate reciprocal gift exchange to primitive economies, and commodity transactions to commercialized, modern economies. An economistic interpretation of the eventual growth of commodity transactions, and the corresponding decline of gift exchange points to the disadvantages of the onerous transaction costs of the personalized gift exchanges, compared with the efficiency of the impersonal commodity transactions. In this romantic ideal view of primitive society, economic efficiency is sacrificed for social solidarity. But reciprocal gift exchange is by no means divorced from rational calculation, nor does it always aim at a static social reproduction of egalitarian personal ties. It can, in fact, be highly competitive and can serve to establish and socially reproduce systems of social differentiation when the exchanging parties control vastly different resource endowments ("unbalanced exchange"). In the tribal

7 New Guinea Big-Man societies mentioned above, gift exchange is the basis for the determination of social standing through competitive distribution of valued items. In situations like this, gift exchange aims at the comparative valuation of persons, not commodities. 31 Further, the actors in competitive exchange relations 32 can exert powerful pressures to increase surplus production, resulting in the intensification of production and potentially transforming technological systems. 33 Finally, it should be noted that the replacement of embedded gift exchange economies by more commercialized systems may reflect the playing out of a political strategy as much as the result of economizing behavior. Central elites building large states must break down the local domains of powerful patrons whose control of their client populations is based on highly unbalanced reciprocal gift exchanges. Establishing markets and encouraging the growth of commercial transactions can be a political strategy aimed at weakening the power of the traditional local elite and at destroying the autonomy of the localized patrimonial domains. 34 The latter example expands the scale of reciprocal gift exchange into the domain of a society's governing institutions, and, in this case as well, a consideration of the nature and consequences of social exchange can throw light on the causes of cross-cultural and temporal variation in state formation. In all complex societies, although to varying degrees, taxpayers and governments maintain a relationship of reciprocal gift exchange involving tax payments in exchange for government-provided services ("public goods"). The likelihood that a taxpayer will comply with his or her payment obligations, and that the state will provide public goods, is thought to be influenced, in part, by the force of the reciprocal obligations. 35 In states that are comparatively collective, principals (the key decision-makers of a polity) allocate resources to provide benefits to the polity's population, while, in turn, most of the revenues that can be allocated are provided by taxpayers. By contrast, in polities where there is not a high level of social exchange, taxpayers play a lesser role in producing the polity's revenues. Rather than from taxpayers, principals may gain resources from their control of foreign trade, or have direct control over land and coerced labor, such as slaves or landless tenants. 36 In these less collective situations, since they are not the polity's main revenue source, taxpayers will be in a comparatively weak position vis à vis principals and hence unable to demand services or other concessions from them. As a result, principals are predicted to be comparatively indifferent to the demands of commoners and to behave in an autocratic fashion. The more collective polities present interesting problems for human social actors that must be considered when evaluating the costs and benefits of rational choice in social action (as would be the case in any organization predicated on reciprocal cooperation of participants). Although providing mutual benefits to the governing institution and to taxpayers, in more collective polities the state-taxpayer reciprocity implies that both categories of political actors taxpayers and governing officials--will face a cooperator's dilemma. 37 The problematic nature of collective action stems from the potential for selfish behavior, for example, rational (but amoral) taxpayers may benefit from public goods while not complying with tax payments (free riding), whereas principals (and their administrative cadre) may allocate resources for personal rather than collective benefit (the agency problem). As Mancur Olson pointed out, these kinds of problems make it extremely difficult to build and maintain successful collective social organizations even when, potentially, they provide benefits to all. Overcoming the sometimes rational but amoral behavior of rational social actors to build a collective polity presents problems that are overcome by developing moral codes accompanied by a political organization that permits both taxpayers and principals to accurately assess the degree to which participants are adhering to their moral obligations, and that allows for the detection and punishment of free riding and official agency. 38 CONCLUSIONS Cross-cultural economic study is rapidly moving away from an earlier static typological thinking which argued for a fundamental

8 distinction between the primitive embedded economies and the modern disembedded market economies. The actions implied by systems of reciprocal gift exchange systems are now viewed as having considerable potential for dynamic change, including pressures for surplus production, and, as discussed above, form the basis for important aspects of group formation including the development of the more collective states. The obvious expansion of descriptive knowledge and theoretical understanding is important for those social scientists and applied practitioners whose goal is to understand and perhaps influence the ongoing processes of economic change in developing areas. Uniquely, economic anthropologists and similar researchers fill the sometimes conflicting roles of academic writers, field researchers, advisors to development agencies, and representatives of indigenous peoples whose lives are being fundamentally altered, not always beneficially, by development projects and other forces of modernization. Developing improved theory through cross-cultural comparative, ethnographic, archaeological, and historical research is not only important for its own sake, but is needed to better cope with the problems presented by a rapidly changing world. NOTES 1. Recent summaries include Sutti Ortiz, ed., Economic Anthropology: Topics and Theories (Society for Economic Anthropology, Monographs In Economic Anthropology 1, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), Stuart Plattner, ed., Economic Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), Richard Wilk Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). 2. For example, see the summary by Ira Cohen, "Theories of Action and Praxis," in B. Tuner, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp These are the central themes of economic analyses, although different schools of economic thought may emphasize one or another domain. Marxists, for example, emphasize social relations of production, as discussed in Alice Littlefield and Hill Gates, eds., Marxist Approaches in Economic Anthropology (Society for Economic Anthropology, Monographs in Economic Anthropology 9, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991). Those who borrow from standard or neoclassical economic analysis often emphasize distribution or consumption; see, for example, Carol A. Smith, Exchange Systems and the Spatial Distribution of Elites: The Organization of Stratification in Agrarian Societies, in Carol A. Smith, ed., Regional Analysis, Volume II: Social Systems (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp See, for example, Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), Chapters 7 and Oddly, this "bourgeois individualism" philosophy has been traditionally subscribed to by economists even though economizing decisionmaking typically is made by groups, especially households and firms, not individuals, e.g., in Robert Bates, "Social Dilemmas and Rational Individuals: An Essay on the New Institutionalism," in James Acheson, ed., Anthropology and Institutional Economics, Society for Economic Anthropology, Monographs In Economic Anthropology 12 (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1994), p This argument is elaborated in Max Weber, General Economic History (New York: Collier Books, 1966), and Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). A useful summary of Weber s theory of capitalism is presented by Randall Collins,

9 Weber s Last Theory of Capitalism: A Systematization, American Sociological Review 45 (1980): Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism (New York: Random House, 1979). 8. For example, the idea of the highly individualized rationalizer is described as a Western "folk model" in Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp See, for example, Harold K. Schneider, Economic Man: The Anthropology of Economics (New York: The Free Press, 1974, reprinted by Sheffield Press, 1989), takes a largely formalist approach. The substantivist position was promoted by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944); and by Karl Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg, and Harry Pearson, eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (New York: The Free Press, 1957). The status of the formalist-substantivist debate is summarized in Edward E. LeClair, Jr., and Harold K. Schneider, eds., Economic Anthropology: Readings in Theory and Analysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968); see also Stuart Plattner, Introduction, in Stuart Plattner, ed., Economic Anthropology (in fn. 1), pp Useful comments on the current status of concerns with rationality are found in Sutti Ortiz, Introduction, in Sutti Ortiz and Susan Lees, eds., Understanding Economic Process. Society for Economic Anthropology, Monographs in Economic Anthropology 10 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), pp For example, in Robert Bates 1994, p. 46 (cited in fn. 5). 12. Bob Holmes, Can Sustainable Farming Win the Battle of the Bottom Line? Science 260: (1993). 13. A good example is described in J. Stephen Lansing, The Balinese (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 1995), chapter See, for example, James D. Nations and Daniel I. Komer, Indians, Immigrants, and Beef Exports: Deforestation in Central America, Cultural Survival Quarterly 2 (1982): See, for example, Andrew Strathern, The Rope of Moka: Big-Men and Exchange in Mount Hagen New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 16. Neotechnic implies a technological system similar to those of the Neolithic Period, making tools of chipped and ground stone and fiber. 17. For example, in Andrew Strathern, ""A Brother is a Creative Thing:" Change and Conflict in a Melpa Family," In H. Medick, and D. W. Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 18. Paula Brown, Highland Peoples of New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp Embeddedness is usefully discussed in Mark Granovetter, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness, American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): ; Mark Granovetter, The Nature of Economic Relations, in Sutti Ortiz and Susan Lees, eds., Understanding Economic Process (in fn. 10), pp In some cases, substantivists appear to have adopted the rhetorical argument made by Marx that in their "natural" state (before capitalism) humans lived in the context of primitive communes in which people were spontaneously cooperative and egalitarian, as when, for example, Eric Wolf writes of a way of life "Once led by all men and still by some, a life richer and more intensely human than our own." Eric Wolf, "Foreword", in Stanley Diamond, ed., In Search of the Primitive (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974), pp. xiii. 21. Granovetter, The Nature of Economic Relations, (in fn. 19), pp

10 22. See Dennis Wrong, The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology, American Sociological Review 29: (1961); Granovetter, The Nature of Economic Relations, (in fn. 19), p Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 24. See, for example, Frank Cancian, Economic Behavior in Peasant Communities, in Stuart Plattner, ed., Economic Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp Granovetter, The Nature of Economic Relations, (in fn. 19), p There is a large literature on exchange in comparative economic study; in part, I follow the suggestions of C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (New York: Academic Press, 1982). 27. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), chapter Reciprocal gift exchange, by contrast, maybe less determined by market conditions, and may be based to a considerable degree on customary equivalencies Although the comparative values of items in reciprocal gift exchange transactions may weakly reflect supply-demand forces (i.e., price formation), as in the example in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, (fn. 27), Chapter Frederic L. Pryor, The Origins of the Economy: A Comparative Study of Distribution in Primitive and Peasant Economies (New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp Sahlins s concept of generalized reciprocity, like Malinowski s pure gift, is an altruistic transaction that creates none or only a vague sense of return obligation: See, for example, Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (in fn. 27), pp ; Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), pp ; cf. Jonathan Parry, The Gift, The Indian Gift, and the Indian Gift, Man (New Series) 21: (1986). 30. Even altruistic exchanges are assumed to involve some expectation of a future benefit in Oded Stark, Nonmarket Transfers and Altruism, in Sutti Ortiz and Susan Lees, eds., Understanding Economic Process (in fn. 10), pp. 9 20; Annette B. Weiner, Reproduction: A Replacement for Reciprocity, American Ethnologist 7: (1980). 31. Strathern, The Rope of Moka (fn. 15); Marilyn Strathern, Qualified Value: The Perspective of Gift Exchange, in Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds., Barter, Exchange, and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 170; Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (fn. 26), p A description of the competitive exchange events referred to as tournaments of value, is found in Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p See, for example Richard Blanton and Jody Taylor, Patterns of Exchange and the Social Production of Pigs in Highland New Guinea, Journal of Archaeological Research 3: (1995); Brian Hayden, Nimrods, Piscators, Pluckers, and Planters: The Emergence of Food Production, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9: (1990); Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, Eds., Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 34. This argument is developed in S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires: The Rise and Fall of the Historical Bureaucratic Societies (New York: The Free Press, 1969); Richard E. Blanton, Factors Underlying the Origin and Evolution of Market

11 Systems, in Sutti Ortiz, ed., Economic Anthropology: Topics and Theories, (in fn. 1), pp Margaret Levy, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 36. Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States (New York: Springer, 2007), chapter Mark Lichbach, The Cooperator's Dilemma (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996); Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 38. See Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States (fn. 36) SUGGESTED READINGS Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Develops a useful cross-cultural approach to exchange, commodities, and the determination of value. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Toward an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: W. W. Norton, Develops a theory of consumer behavior applicable cross-culturally. Ortiz, Sutti, ed. Economic Anthropology: Topics and Theories. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, A collection of papers from the first meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology that represents the recent state of the art of economic anthropology, including the status of the Formalist-Substantivist debate. Plattner, Stuart, ed. Economic Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, An up-to-date textbook exploring many aspects of contemporary economic anthropology. Schneider, Harold K. Economic Man: The Anthropology of Economics. Salem, WI: Sheffield, A reissue of the original 1974 publication, this book is one of the classic sources for a Formalist economic anthropology. It is highly readable and is still useful as an introductory source. Cross-Cultural TOC