Week 2: Gifts, commodities, and spheres of exchange
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2025)
August 12, 2025
Main reading: West (2012)
Other reading: Eriksen (2015); Lyon (2020)
Notes
No person is an island. Everyone who has ever lived was also a member of a larger community from the day they were born. By acquiring the cultural patterns of one’s community, one is also recruited to play a part in that community as a system. To understand people’s lives, we must see them as components of a total system.
This week, we examine a major theory of societies which argues that societies are total systems. This means that a society is always more than the sum of its parts, and that people in society are tied to each other and the whole social system. This theory is developed by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim’s student, Marcel Mauss, applies this theory to economic behavior. Mauss observes that most exchanges are not trade or barter, let alone buying and selling, but gifts. He asks why people often feel an oobligation to reciprocate, to respond to a gift with another gift. Mauss concludes that the gift and its obligations are a very basic form of social integration.
Mauss’s theory of the gift provides an important conceptual touchstone for comprehending the many different forms of life people have created. While each society is different in lots of ways, every society is an expression of the fact that people are incomplete. They need other people, and those other people need everyone else in the community as well. We feel the force of reciprocity because we are always playing a role in what Mauss calls a system of total services (Mauss [1925] 1990, 5).
Yet, perhaps more importantly, with the theory of the gift we are also able to understand a fundamental conflict in global history, one that has influenced every society and every person alive today, although in different and unequal ways.
In the contemporary era, the gift is haunted by another, completely different kind of social institution, a market in which people buy and sell commodities, and in which people accumulate capital that they own as private property. This alternative way of organizing societies is actually relatively recent when considered in light of about 100,000 years of human history. Yet, its ideas are powerful and have had a huge influence. Everyone today is in one way or another part of a global capitalist system, and they participate in this one system in many different and unequal ways in the context of their own local communities.
Anthropology has generally taken its concept of the commodity form from Karl Marx. Importantly, for Marx, a system in which people meet their needs through the buying and selling of commodities is not a system that liberates people. Individual freedom and enterprise in the market is a fantasy which the ruling class of the capitalist system promotes. In a capitalist system, everyone is governed by the logic of the commodity, and thus must conform to a specific institutional pattern in order to participate in this system.
This is not only true in affluent, industralized, mass societies. Capitalism and the system of commodity exchange has also reached out to every place on earth. The institutional rules of capitalism, the logic of commodities and commodification, also enter into communities where people have other ways of meeting their own needs and their community’s collective needs. We can understand this world in all its diversity as many different variations on a theme: the encounter between two distinct systems, the gift and the commodity. In this and next week we will explore the complexity of these interactions in depth. What we find is that this encounter leads to many different outcomes. While it is true that the global capitalist system does not destroy local systems of cooperation, gifts and commodities are fundamentally different and each threatens the other when they meet.
Keywords
reciprocity, commodity, capital, private property, capitalism, spheres of exchange
Learning outcomes
- Understand the obligations of students to each other and their teachers, and the teachers’ obligations to the students
- Understand reciprocity as a triple obligation that emanates from a social totality
- Understand how a Marxist approach to capitalism can be described as the antithesis of a total social fact of reciprocity
- Understand the Tiv spheres of exchange in terms of Maussian reciprocity
- Be able to identify an empirical example of reciprocity in an ethnographic description
- Be able to apply the concept of exchange spheres to one’s own life and social environment
Discussion questions
- What can students expect from their teachers?
- What can students expect from each other?
- What can teachers expect from students?
- What are some good principles that everyone can agree on to make this tutorial successful?
- What happens when you refuse a gift?
- Look at this quotation from West’s ethnography of Gimi coffee farmers in Maimafu, a village in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: “The first sweet potato came from the forest, from kore maha (wild land and ancestor land). In one Gimi story a man died and his children buried him. That night one of his daughters (his son’s wife) dreamed of her father’s grave. In the dream a vine was growing from the grave that she had never seen before. When she woke up the next morning she and her co-wives went to investigate and found that there was a unique and unknown plant growing from the center of the grave. They nurtured the vine, and once it was mature they cut bits of it and replanted it all around their village. The first sweet potatoes came from this vine” (West 2012, 119–20). Recall also that when asked where coffee plants come from, Kobe, one of West’s informants said, “They are from somewhere else, Australia at first, I think” (West 2012, 121). What can you infer about the difference between coffee and sweet potatoes from these ethnographic facts?