Trade - Approaches To The Study Of Trade, The Formalist/substantivist Debate, Trade And The Development Of Civilization
exchange expectation reciprocity individuals
Trade is one of the basic processes that link individuals and groups. Trade binds people to one another through the expectations of reciprocal giving, through the formal calculus of wages and markets, and through the desires or needs to obtain items not locally available. In this way, trade is a fundamental element of human culture.
Trade and exchange are often used synonymously, but there is a basic difference. Trade refers to the movement of goods between individuals or groups where there is a general expectation of reciprocity and where the purpose is basically utilitarian. Exchange has a broader meaning, encompassing all movements of goods. The general expectation of reciprocity need not be a part of exchange, nor does exchange have to be utilitarian in nature. In contrast, both are central to trade.
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Various perspectives can be applied to understanding trade. Here it is discussed as reciprocity, exploitation, and adaptation, and in the context of globalization. The earliest anthropological approaches to trade focused on reciprocity and how the expectations of reciprocity shaped social relations. In the classic ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), for example, Bronislaw Malinows…
In the 1950s a group of social scientists, the most prominent among them being Karl Polanyi, proposed that trade was a social construction like the rest of culture and could not be usefully examined outside of its unique social setting. This perspective came to be known as "substantivism." The substantivists argued that economic analyses of noncapitalist trade employing concepts like…
With trade being such an important concept for anthropologists and other social scientists attempting to understand the historic and contemporary cultures of the world, it is not surprising that trade has been an important concept to scholars attempting to understand the evolution of cultures and, in particular, the development of civilization.
Elman Service (1962) saw trade as a basic element in…
Immanuel Wallerstein developed world systems theory in the early 1970s as a new way of looking at the rapid expansion of capitalism. Wallerstein posited that in capitalism a clear geographical hierarchy of trade evolved. Europe was the core, the area where raw materials were converted into finished products. The rest of the world was the periphery, the area where raw materials were obtained and fi…
Trade is the movement of goods between individuals or groups where there is a general expectation of reciprocity and where the purpose is basically utilitarian. Anthropologists have long been interested in trade because it is an important factor in shaping social relations. The earliest anthropological approaches to trade focused on reciprocity and how the expectations of reciprocity shaped social…
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Belshaw, Cyril S. Traditional Exchange and Modern Markets. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965. Brumfiel, Elizabeth M., and Timothy E. Earle. "Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies: An Introduction." In Specialization…
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