Week 3: Spheres of exchange, in comparative and historical perspective
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2025)
August 19, 2025
Main reading: Swanson (2014a)
Other reading: Swanson (2014b); Deomampo (2019)
Notes
In this week, we continue to look at the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the encounters between the logic of the gift and the logic of the commodity, private property, and capitalism.
To begin, we consider Paul Bohannan’s concept of “spheres of exchange” as one corollary of Maussian reciprocity (Bohannan 1955). Like any good theory derived from ethnographic description, “spheres of exchange” is a mirror one can hold up to oneself. If there is a society that classifies valuable things in separate spheres, then one is compelled to ask what spheres of exchange does my society impose on my use of valuable things? Does my society have spheres of exchange, and if it doesn’t, why not?
Many ethnographic pictures of what one might call a gift-based society can read anew when we think about the larger historical context in which anthropologists formulated this model of society. The society in which Bohannan worked was at the time of his research also involved in a colonial market economy based on cash. What does money look like for a person who is socialized in a normative system of spheres of exchange?
Capital and community are necessarily always in conflict, but paradoxically they depend on each other too. When people explain contemporary society, they often talk in terms of dichotomies. Some is either one thing or another:
- Either–or
- Traditional–modern
- Reciprocity–commodity exchange
- Collective–individual
- Village–city
Now we see that real life is not either-or, but both one thing and its opposite. We will develop this perspective in this and next week.
Keywords
commodification, alienation, embeddedness
Learning outcomes
- Understand the significance of history in holistic models of society
- Be able to restate ethical dilemmas of commodification as a problem of spheres of value in history
- Be able to argue for an interpretation of an empirical example in an ethnographic description as evidence for a sphere of exchange
Discussion questions
- What cannot be sold? Or, can every material thing that has value also be exchanged for money? How do you interpret this fact about your own world?
- How would your life be different if you had to pay for some things you needed in Australian dollars but other things you needed could only be bought with gold coins?
- How would society be different if income taxes were abolished but a compulsory system of national service was instituted (with exceptions or modifications for people with qualified conditions)?