Raymond Firth - Themes in Economic Anthropology

Routledge Library Editions

THEMES IN ECONOMIC
ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY

Routledge Library Editions
Anthropology and Ethnography

RAYMOND FIRTH: COLLECTED WORKS
In 6 Volumes

THEMES IN ECONOMIC
ANTHROPOLOGY

EDITED BY RAYMOND FIRTH

First published in 1967

Reprinted in 2004 by
Routledge
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

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1967 Association of Social Anthropologists of the
Commonwealth

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Themes in Economic Anthropology
ISBN 0-415-32556-0 (set)
ISBN 0-415-33019-X
ISBN 978-1-136-53787-5 (Kindle)

Mini set: Raymond Firth: Collected Works

Series: Routledge Library Editions Anthropology and Ethnography

THEMES IN
ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Edited by Raymond Firth

First published in 1967
by Tavistoch Publications Limited
11 New Fetter Lane, London,E.C.4
This book has been set in Modern Series 7
and was printed by T. & A. Constable Ltd.
Edinburgh
Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth,
1967

This volume derives mainly from material presented at a conference
on economic anthropology sponsored by the Association of Social
Anthropologists of the Commonwealth and held at St Antonys
College, University of Oxford, 28-30 June 1965

Distributed in the U.S.A. by
Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This book originated in a conference on economic anthropology held by the Association of Social Anthropologists at Oxford in June 1965. To Raymond Firth was given the task of organizing the conference, and he was able to enlist as contributors the authors of the papers here published. It was agreed that discussion of each of the papers should be opened by a member of the Association who had been able to prepare a critical evaluation of the paper concerned, and that the results of this and of the general discussion should be used by the authors in the revision of their contributions for publication. In a very real sense, then, this book takes account of the thinking of two score or so social anthropologists on some aspects of economic anthropology.

Major acknowledgement must be given to the primary contributors: Lorraine Baric, Fredrik Barth, Percy Cohen, Mary Douglas, Scarlett Epstein, Ronald Frankenberg, Leonard Joy, and Sutti Ortiz. Cheerfully they contributed ideas to the planning of the conference, and undertook the preparation and revision of their papers amid the many other calls upon their time. To the discussants of the papers: Edwin Ardener, Burton Benedict, Ronald Berndt, Abner Cohen, loan Lewis, and Barbara Ward, substantial thanks are also due for the care they devoted to their evaluations and the generous way in which they have allowed their ideas to be merged with others for this publication. A special word of appreciation should go to two contributors. Fredrik Barth, a member of the Association, took the trouble to travel over from Norway to deliver his paper, and played a very active part in the conference. Leonard Joy, an economist and not a member of the Association, spared time from a very busy teaching and research programme to prepare a paper of his own and to comment constructively upon the other contributions and upon the general discussion. Apart from giving this economic backing to the arguments, his advocacy of linear programming developed into a cooperative effort with Barth, which appears in this volume as an experimental inquiry into some of the possibilities of this method for economic anthropology.

To Edward Evans-Pritchard and other Oxford hosts of the conference grateful thanks are due for many facilities and much hospitality.

The gratitude of the conference goes also to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. In pursuance of its policy of supporting growing points in anthropology, the Foundation sponsored a conference on economic anthropology at Burg Wartenstein, in August 1960. (Some results of this appear in the volume on Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies, edited by Raymond Firth and B. S. Yamey, London, 1964.) In 1965 this Oxford conference used part of a grant-in-aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to the Association of Social Anthropologists; the Foundation has thus facilitated further exploration of empirical and theoretical issues in this important but still underdeveloped area of anthropology.

R. F.

London, May

In the Introduction to earlier volumes of this series, presenting results of the Anglo-American Conference of 1963, Eggan and Gluckman point out that technical economics has had less influence on social anthropological research than other social sciences have had. They oifer the opinion that this is possibly because of the highly abstract nature of the economic discipline (A.S.A. Monographs, 1, 1965, p. xv; 2, 1965, p. xvii; 3 and 4, 1966, p. xvii). I am no economist but, granting this, I think that other factors have also been involved in the relative lack of development of economic anthropology.

The radical difference in the nature of the empirical phenomena has clearly been one impediment. The characteristic Western institutional framework of business enterprise, with its machine technology, impersonal labour market, profit orientation, limited liability companies, international trading, banking and credit, shows marked contrast to the small-scale, highly personal, subsistence economic systems, with little in the nature of a market economy and perhaps even no money medium, with which anthropologists have traditionally been concerned. Small wonder that economists have tended to ignore these simpler societies and most anthropologists have seen little in common between primitive and civilized versions of an economy. Even Karl Marx, with his structural interest in pre-capitalist formations could find relatively little primitive material for his early studies and focused attention primarily on Western and Oriental peasant and feudal or quasi-feudal systems. Again, anthropologists have often been so concerned to demonstrate the contribution which economic behaviour makes to the maintenance of social systems that they have tended to take the economic phenomena for granted and to concentrate mainly on the social side of the equation.