ANTH 3220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Mary Douglas, Barter
12 May 2015
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Focus on exchange relations (between relative equals) gift exchange, commodity exchange (and debt but not today) Gifts versus commodities [table not all information shown] Among strangers (1) commodity is alienable; gift possesses no qualities of the giver (2) commodity is immediate bought/sold requiring no relationship of lasting significance; impersonal (3) about economic value and commercial profit-making (maximization) Initial position in anthropology: these are very different activities and relationships. Consumers derive their social identities and sense of place in the world through their consumption activity. Buy what you think you are or want to be. Commodity can create reciprocal relationship and friendly feeling, long-term relationship. Commodity can possesses qualities of the giver (such as their identity) Author misses key aspect: personification of the corporation. Recent decades have brought increasingly personal approaches in commodity exchange that does not neatly fit into classical gift-commodity dichotomy.
