Inalienable Possessions - Related Anthropologists On Exchange Theory

Related Anthropologists On Exchange Theory

• Emile Durkheim "describes how exchange involves an intensive bonding more formidable than mere economic relations. Social cohesiveness occurs because one person is always dependent on another to achieve a feeling of completeness". This comes into being via the domain of the sacred ritual that involves communal participation even as it encompasses the moment in a higher order of sacredness.

• Bronisław Malinowski wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Malinowski was a pioneer of ethnographic fieldwork in the Trobriand Islandes and researched Kula exchange. His work was later re-analyzed by Mauss and subsequently by other anthropologists.

• Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift. He was a pioneer in the study of gift exchange. Mauss was concerned only with the relations formed by the circulation of things that men produce, and not with the relations that men form while they produce things. He is concerned, in particular, with why people give gifts, and why they feel the obligation to make a return. In fact, he contended that inalienability is based on or legitimized by the belief that there is present in the object a power, a spirit, a spiritual reality that binds it to the giver, and which accompanies the object wherever it goes. This spirit then wishes to return to its source the original giver.

• Marshall Sahlins wrote Stone Age Economics. Sahlins disagreed with Mauss on several points and contended that "the freedom to gain at others' expense is not envisioned by the relations and forms of exchange." Moreover, "The material flow underwrites or initiates social relations…. Persons and groups confront each other not merely as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute these interests."

• Claude Lévi-Strauss applauded Marcel Mauss for his efforts even as he criticized him of not perceiving that "the primary fundamental phenomena (of social life) is exchange itself." He believed that "society is better understood in terms of language than from the standpoint of any other paradigm." Moreover, he thought that anthropologists and ethnographers, particularly Mauss, were becoming confused by the languages of those they ethnographically studied, resulting in obscure theories that didn't really make sense. He advocated structuralist analysis in an attempt to clear up certain confusions caused by Mauss' work.

• Maurice Godelier wrote The Enigma of the Gift. Godelier expanded on Weiner's work by maintaining that society requires not keeping-while-giving, but "keeping-for-giving and giving-for-keeping."