Economic ethnology

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The economic anthropology or economic anthropology examined as part of the field of anthropology (Ethnology), the economic organization of ethnic groups and indigenous peoples and their supply of goods and services ; it tries to explain people's economic behavior using economic and anthropological methods and theories .

In general, the connections between social structures in the economic and political-social area are considered. Questions are, for example, the economic basis of social stratification , the characteristics of the division of labor in society , the design of property , the production and distribution of goods, the valuation of material and immaterial goods, and the effects on society and the economic system.

According to some theories, the respective economic system is fundamentally embedded in cultural framework conditions ( English embeddedness ), which is still the case above all with traditional economic forms of non- industrialized societies.

Theoretical approaches in economic ethnology

Economic ethnology consists of three main paradigms: formalism, substantivism, and culturalism.

formalism

The formalistic model is that model in economic ethnology that has the closest connection to neoclassical theory . It defines economics as the study of utility maximization under conditions of scarcity . Since formalistic economic ethnology tries to research subjects outside of their traditional environment by means of neoclassical theory, it is related to the new institutional economics . This makes the following central assumptions:

  • Individuals pursue utility maximization by choosing between alternative means and always choose the alternative that maximizes their utility. They are mostly subject to restrictions due to incomplete information or transaction costs .
  • Individuals decide rationally . You use all available information to weigh the costs and benefits of all options and to estimate the opportunity costs that arise compared to other benefit maximization strategies. Individuals are able to carry out the necessary calculations - be it through conscious anticipation, instinct or tradition .
  • Resources are always scarce, while the needs of all individuals are unlimited.

Some formalists use game theory as a model of rational behavior under certain cultural or interpersonal constraints. Formalists such as Raymond Firth and Harold K. Schneider claim that the neoclassical economic model could be applied to any society if the necessary adjustments were made. So you consider the above principles to be universally valid. So all individuals always make choices between alternative means of achieving their goals, the goals being culturally defined goals. They refer not only to economic benefit or financial advantage, but to everything that is valued by the individual - whether leisure, solidarity or prestige .

The role of anthropologists under these premises would then be to examine each culture in terms of its culturally appropriate means of attaining culturally recognized and cherished ends. Assuming economically rational behavior, individual decisions are guided by individual preferences , while the culture and preferences of others are perceived as a restrictive environment. Such analyzes should reveal the culture-specific principles underlying the rational decision-making process. In this context, anthropologists have applied economic theory primarily to societies without price-regulating markets (e.g. Firth, 1961; Laughlin, 1973).

Nounism

From the point of view of the substantivist position, which was first developed by Karl Polanyi in his work The Great Transformation , the term economy has two meanings: The formal meaning refers to economy as the logic of rational actions and decisions, as a rational choice between alternative uses of scarce resources . The second, substantivistic meaning, on the other hand, does not require rational decision-making or a scarcity of resources. It relates solely to the study of how people survive in their social and natural environment. The survival strategy of a company is regarded as a process of adaptation to their environment, maximizing the benefits may or may not include. Economy in the substantivistic sense thus refers to the way in which a society meets its needs.

Polanyi's term great transformation refers to the distinction between modern, market- oriented societies and non-western, non- capitalist pre-industrial societies. Polanyi claims that only the substantivist meaning of economy is appropriate for the analysis of non-capitalist societies. Without a system of price-oriented markets, formalistic economic analysis would not be applicable. Individual decisions are based less on maximizing economic profits and more on social relationships , cultural values, moral considerations, politics or religion . In most rural and tribal societies, subsistence farming is practiced. This means that production takes place for the producers themselves - in contrast to market-oriented production, which aims primarily to maximize profits. These two types of production are so different from each other that no single theory can explain both.

According to Polanyi, the concepts of formalism and substantivism overlap in modern capitalist societies as people organize their lives on the basis of rational decisions. In non-capitalist societies, on the other hand, this is not the case, as these are not geared towards the market but towards redistribution and reciprocity. Reciprocity is defined as the mutual exchange of goods or services as part of long-term relationships. Redistribution implies the existence of a strong political center such as kinship- based leadership that receives subsistence goods according to culture-specific principles and then redistributes them. In non-market-oriented societies, reciprocity and redistribution usually occur together. Conversely, the exchange in the market is seen as the dominant mode of integration in modern industrial societies, while reciprocity in family and household relationships persists and redistribution is partly carried out by the state or by non-profit organizations. However, each distribution concept requires its own set of analytical concepts.

Another key concept in nounism is that of embeddedness . In this context, the economy is not viewed as a separate and delimitable sphere of activity, but is embedded in economic and non-economic institutions . Exchange takes place within society, not in a social vacuum . For example, religion and government can be as important to the economy as economic institutions themselves. Socio-cultural commitments, norms and values ​​play an important role in people's survival strategies. As a result, any analysis of the economy as an analytically delimitable unit isolated from its socio-cultural and political context is flawed from the start. A substantivistic analysis of the economy, on the other hand, focuses on examining the various social institutions on which people's survival is based. The market is only one of the many institutions that determine the nature of economic transactions . Polanyi's central argument is that institutions are the primary organizers of economic processes.

The concept of "embedding" has been very influential in economic ethnology. For example, in his study of ethnic business relationships among Chinese in Indonesia , Granovetter found that economic actions of individuals are embedded in networks of strong personal relationships. The cultivation of personal contacts between dealers and customers takes on an equal or more important role than the economic transactions themselves. Economic exchange processes do not take place between strangers, but rather between individuals who have a long-term relationship with one another. Granovetter describes how the neo-liberal perspective on economic activity separates the economy from society and culture and thus neglects the social component of the economy.

Culturalism

For some anthropologists, the substantivist position in their criticism of the universal application of Western economic models to societies around the world does not go far enough. Stephen Gudeman, for example, claims that the central strategies for survival are culturally constructed. Therefore, the analysis of models of survival and related economic concepts such as exchange , money or profit must be completed by the application of locally oriented social science perspectives. Instead of formulating universal models based on a Western understanding of the economy and Western economic terminology , and applying them arbitrarily to all societies, anthropologists should try to understand the “local model”. In his work on livelihood strategies, Gudeman tries to represent the construction of the economy from the perspective of the population (people's own economic construction) . In doing so, he not only examines the cultural construction of values ​​with the perspective of the products that people want to buy or the value of leisure time, but also primarily the local concepts of the economy and its various aspects, such as the understanding of exchange and property or profit (profit). His description of a farming community in Panama shows that the population was not in an exchange relationship with one another because everyone wanted to make a profit, but because they saw the exchange as an "exchange of equivalents", whereby the exchange value of a good was determined by the expenditure for the Production was determined. Only outside traders made profit in their exchange relationship with the community.

Gudeman not only rejects the formalistic idea of ​​the universal "economic man"; he also criticizes the substantivist position for applying its universal economic model to all pre-industrial societies and thus making the same mistake as the formalists. While conceding that substantivism rightly emphasizes the importance of social institutions in economic processes, Gudeman sees any derived model that claims universal validity as ethnocentric and essentially tautological . From his perspective, all of these perspectives model human relationships as mechanistic processes, taking the logic of science based on the material world and applying it to the human world. Instead, anthropologists should try to understand and interpret local models that can be quite different from their Western counterparts. For example, the Iban people only use knives to harvest rice. Although the use of sickles would speed up the harvest enormously, their concern that the spirit of the rice might flee is greater than their desire to rationalize the harvesting process.

Gudeman brings postmodern cultural relativism to its logical conclusion. On the other hand, culturalism can also be seen as an extension of the substantivist perspective, with a stronger emphasis on cultural constructivism, a more detailed description of local perspectives and economic concepts, and a greater focus on socio-cultural dynamics. Culturalists also tend to be less taxonomic and more culturally relativistic in their descriptions , while reflecting critically on the power relations between the scientist and the research subjects. While substantivists mostly choose institutions as the unit of analysis, culturalists tend to describe specific local communities in detail. What both perspectives have in common, however, is that they reject the formalistic assumption that all human behavior can be explained in terms of rational decision-making and utility maximization.

Criticism of the approaches

There are numerous critics of the formalist position. Their central assumptions about human behavior have been heavily challenged. In particular, it was argued that the models of rational decision-making and utility maximization cannot be applied in all cultures. But economic reductionism in explaining human behavior has also been criticized with regard to contemporary Western societies . Prattis emphasizes that the premise of utility maximization is tautological ; Whatever a person does, whether work or leisure, is declared as maximizing utility (see Prattis, 1989). For example, may a person risk their own time, finances, or health to help others. According to formalists, the person would do this because he attaches great importance to helping others and thus maximizing their benefits by sacrificing their own goals (e.g. satisfaction after giving help, recognition from others, etc.). But this is just an assumption - the person's motivation may or may not coincide with this explanation. Similarly, Gudeman argues that Western economic anthropologists will always "find out" that the people who study them will behave "rationally" because the model they employ leads them to do so. Consequently, the formalism regards any behavior that does not appear to maximize utility as irrational. To the acting individual, however, these "non-maximizing actions" may appear rational and logical, since the motivation for his actions may be derived from a completely different spectrum of meanings.

Ultimately, the substantivists emphasize that both economic institutions and individual economic actions are embedded in the socio-cultural space and therefore cannot be analyzed in isolation. Social relationships play an essential role in people's survival strategies; therefore, a narrow focus on individual behavior to the exclusion of the person's socio-cultural background can only be flawed.

But there was also criticism of nounism. According to Prattis (1982), the strict distinction between primitive and modern economies is problematic. Transaction-type constraints are much more situational than system- based (it therefore assumes that substantivism neglects the analysis of individual actions while focusing on the study of social structures ). Non-maximizing adaptation strategies occur in all societies, not just "primitive" ones. Similarly, Plattner (1989) argues that some generalizations across different societies are still possible and that Western and non-Western economies are not entirely different. In the age of globalization there may hardly be any "pure" pre-industrial societies. Conditions of resource scarcity now exist all over the world and for anthropological field research it is important to show that there is also rational behavior and complex economic decisions in peasant societies (compare Plattner, 1989: 15). Also, individuals in, for example, communist societies can still rationally maximize their utility, for example by maintaining relationships with bureaucrats who control the distribution of resources, or by using small plots of land in their garden to supplement official food rations.

While exchange dominates the market in the West, redistribution can also play a major role in the more socialist or welfare states in the West - for example in France , Germany or Sweden . The state and non-profit or religious organization collect donations and then distribute them to groups in need (or use the funds to offer social benefits for free or at a low price).

Culturalism can also be criticized from different perspectives. Marxists would argue that culturalists are too idealistic in their idea of ​​the social construction of reality and too weak in their analysis of external (i.e., material) constraints on individuals influencing their decisions. If, as Gudeman argues, local models cannot be objectively assessed or opposed to a universal standard, they cannot be deconstructed using the ideologies of the powerful , which serve to neutralize resistance through hegemony . This is made even more difficult by the fact that in the age of globalization most cultures are integrated into the global capitalist system and influenced by Western ways of thinking and acting. Local and global discourses are mixing and the lines between the two are blurring. Even if people retain aspects of their worldviews, universal models can be used to study the dynamics of their integration with the rest of the world.

The German economists Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger argue that market exchange is not universal and begin their analyzes with Karl Polanyi's distinction between systems based on reciprocity, redistribution and market. Nonetheless, both criticize the nouns and the formalists for the lack of a satisfactory explanation for market rationality and its historical origins. They developed a novel explanation for the origins of property, contracts, credit, money and markets, which they call the "property theory of interest, money and markets". They also apply their model to development economics , where an understanding of dynamic markets is essential, since the central task of development economics is to guide the building of markets in places where none existed before.

See also

literature

  • Martin Rössler: Economic Ethnology. An introduction. 2nd Edition. Reimer, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-496-02773-7 .
  • Economic anthropology. Special issue of the historical anthropology journal . Culture, society, everyday life. Volume 17, No. 2, 2009.

Web links

Commons : Economic anthropology  - Collection of pictures and media files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephen Gudeman: Economics as Culture. Models and Metaphors of Livelihood. Routledge, London 1986, p. 1.
  2. ^ Compare Christopher Hann : Social Anthropology. Teach Yourself, London 2000.
  3. ↑ a b c S. Plattner: Economic Anthropology. Stanford University Press, 1989.
  4. ↑ Prattis, JI: Synthesis, or a New Problematic in Economic Anthropology . In: Theory and Society . 11, 1982, pp. 205-228.
  5. ^ Gunnar Heinsohn (2003): Karl Polanyi's Failure to Exploit his Success: Why the Controversy between Substantivists and the Neoclassical Protagonists (Formalists) of an Eternal and Universal Market was Never Solved. ( Memento from September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Paper presented at an International Symposium on the Economic Role of Property. ( Memento from June 4, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) at the University of Bremen, Nov. 28-30, 2003 ); also published under the title Where does the Market Come From? In: Otto Steiger (Ed.): Property Economics. Creditor's Money and the Foundations of the Economy. Metropolis, Marburg 2008.
  6. ↑ G. Heinsohn, Otto Steiger: Property, Interest and Money. Unsolved puzzles of economics. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996 (English: Property, Interest and Money. Routledge, London); G. Heinsohn: private property, patriarchy, money economy. A social-theoretical reconstruction of antiquity. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1984; see also Gunnar Heinsohn, Otto Steiger: Money, Markets and Property. In: Giacomin, Alberto and Marcuzzo, Maria (Ed.): Money and Markets. A doctrinal approach. Routledge, New York 2007, pp. 59-79.
  7. ↑ See Gunnar Heinsohn / Otto Steiger: The chapter on accumulation. In: The Same: Property, Interest, and Money: Unsolved Riddles of Economics. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996; see also Otto Steiger: Property Rights and Economic Development: Two Views. Metropolis, Marburg 2007.