| From my limited number of anthropology courses, I can assure you that the suspicion between the anthropology and economics departments is often mutual. You know the joke about how physics is the study of spherical cows of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum? That's because intro level physics makes lots of simplifying assumptions. And if a physicist tried to use those assumptions to lecture a dairy farmer, the farmer might assume the physicist was a fool. Anthropology tends to assume that too many economists study "spherical humans of uniform density in a frictionless market," basically. One of my anthropology professors actually covered these disputes, including specific cases where U Chicago economics professors attempted to advise governments around the world, and wound up totally misunderstanding particular situations. Now, anthropology has its blind spots, too. Cultural anthropology has been a bit too willing to believe research describing exotic social structures. Archaeology is fairly sound on the nuts and bolts of pre-historical goods and food sources, but it is sometimes blind to how ideology shapes culture. (Which is a safely conservative stance to take when working with pre-historical cultures, to be fair.) The factors Graeber describes aren't totally surprising. Lots of real world economies run on complicated webs of personal relationships and favors—just look at investors, for example. Or look at the pre-modern property rights described in Seeing Like a State. Land ownership and harvesting rights in a medieval village could be ridiculously complex. Or the customary payments and "gifts" that people made. For another modern example, consider office politics in a large corporation. I think Graeber's basic case is plausible: complex debts and obligations seem to underly many band-level and village-level societies, especially when central state power is weak. These arrangements can seem bizarre: I remember a video of an interview with a pig farmer, probably about 60 years old, who was organizing a gift of hundreds of pigs to a neighboring village. This was apparently some kind of competitive gesture designed to elevate the status of the giver. And the farmer was really into this. He was complaining that kids these days were shockingly lazy, and that they had no appetite for hard work, and that they had no hope of putting together a proper gift of pigs. And how can you get anywhere in life if you can't embarrass a neighboring village by giving them more pigs than they gave you? It was a status display, similar to throwing conspicuously expensive parties to outdo your social circle. The anthropology literature contains a ton of odd behavior around debts, obligations, and complex traditional rights. In a pre-modern community of 60 to 5,000 people, only a fraction of the economy seems to involve currencies or direct barter. Currency is a fantastic simplifying technology. And as Graeber points out, complex traditional webs of debt can be pretty brutal towards people who don't fit in. |