ANTH_100_LECTURE_11_PART_I_SPRING_2023_

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ANTH 100 - LECTURE #11, PART I (SPRING, 2023).mp4 Speaker 1 [00:00:04] Oh, hey, everyone. Welcome back to. And through apology 100. It's me. I'm back. I'm picking up where my beautiful and extremely intelligent wife Alexis left off. I don't know if I can do as good a job as she has been doing, but I will try. And at this point in the course, things will take a markedly or marked shift from looking at biological anthropology and archeology. And now we're nudging over into socio cultural anthropology and a little bit of of linguistics, which we'll do a little bit later on. So, you know, things are going to are going to be a little bit different. Yes, there will be terms to understand and sometimes there are a lot of them, but they're not. It won't be like the first half of the course in terms of memorizing dates and being able to apply those in multiple choice questions. So these are, you know, we're dealing with the realm of the cultural, the social, the political, economic. And so I'm hoping that these definitions in these terms might be a little bit more intuitive because many of you will have first hand experience with some, if not all, of. So here. Here we are. It's a fantastic day outside. I'm sitting here with our dog, Atticus, who's a standard golden doodle. Who with this? This. This is a tail. Yeah, he's. He's. He's tired with his. With his puffed up. We got him shaved a little while. Oh, my gosh. A little while ago. Who. Who was this? Well, this just. I know. So he's probably going to. Oh, join me for a little bit, and I'm sure he'll get bored and run off. How is everyone doing today? Hopefully. Well. Yeah. So what are we going to do today? Well, we're going to be talking about the significance of the economy, economic processes, economic relations. And they're really broad sense. This idea of political economy, which is not something we're going to want to be too concerned with now, but we'll end the lecture with the definition of what political economy is studying, Economic impacts on politics and political impacts on the economy, I guess, is a really quick definition there. We're going to take a look at just a few things. Right. You know. I never use textbooks. I think I told you this right at the beginning. And there's a reason. And it's because you're cramming so much information. And I wouldn't want to write one of these things. Maybe I should. I don't know how it would take forever. But anyways, cramming so much information and selectively. Obviously picking and choosing what you discuss. That you're always going to leave things out. And I find that in textbooks they kind of sometimes, unless it's a textbook like in this section, we have the first half of it for biological. It's okay. I know Alexis had some issues with it, but I've got some issues because it seems like with the more cultural oriented chapters, it's sort of jarring because it jumps around to places and leaves some things overly defined and then some things under defined and in undertreated and under emphasize. Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I'll be using this textbook again. I know we both had some regret, but it's always for men. It's always difficult. But once you get into the upper your courses that I usually teach, I never I just use in my classes. Ethnography is even the bigger courses that I used to teach when I was in the School of Public Health and Health Systems, which has now been changed, I think the School of Public Health Sciences perhaps. But I used to teach, used to cover the social determinants of health class, which was a huge class, and I refuse to use a textbook and I just chose representative articles and book chapters and loads of examples from work, and it worked out really well. But owing to budget cuts, it's ridiculous. Anyways, I won't complete that sentence. So anyways, I don't like the textbook. It jumps around in. Some of the transitions seem like there's some sequitur is going on there. So something that logically doesn't follow from what was just talked about. So if I complain, you know, I'm not trying to be cranky for the sake of being cranky, but okay, so we're going to look at how anthropologists understand economic processes, broadly defined economic relations and in some ways how those affect conditions, social relationships. We're going to consider how we understand these ideas of production, distribution and consumption, that anthropologists being academics are always hilarious or always splitting hairs. It is something we need to only focus on production. No, we need to

just focus on distribution now. We need to focus on consumption. Well, dudes, how about we focus on them all because they're all very important. We'll consider these things. I've got an itchy beard. We're going to look at how goods are distributed, how they're sort of transferred between parties, individuals and groups otherwise known as exchange. And we'll look at the effects of these on people in their everyday lives. In a modern, late modern capitalist, more specifically neo liberal context that we're living in now. There's a lot of violence that. Occurs out of distribution, production and consumption. And that violence manifests itself in the form of poverty, whether absolute or relative. And it's really quite. Unfortunate sometimes, and this is a direct consequence of our socioeconomic system and how exclusionary and structurally violent the system can be. Sure. Of course, there are people who are winners. I'm seeing every day. Much to my annoyance, sometimes on my Instagram feed, you know, former professional skateboarders or current professional skateboarders who are, you know, who have lucked out. One such individual. His name is Rob Dyrdek. He had he had a fairly successful, successful show on MTV called Rob and Big with his bodyguard. And, you know, Rob Dyrdek used to be a pro for a company called Alien Workshop, which if you see the board right on the end there. This one here, this is a GNC neo blender pro model. Giant stands for Gordon Smith. Neil Blender went on to develop Alien Workshop, which was or code development anyways which was it was is a fairly successful skateboard company. But anyways, this Rob Dyrdek individual was a pro writer. I had his board in 1992 and now he's kind of ventured into all kinds of things. He's he's, you know, a bona fide entrepreneur and is really driven by this good old American entrepreneurial spirit make money in whatever. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think his show, Robin, they got canceled. Then he had a newer one called Ridiculousness, which is dumb because they just watch Fail Army with some B-list celebrities and just laugh at it. I don't know how that turned to do a show, but it's MTV or whatever. But they went and now he makes cheese balls and sells them and he does these inspirational podcasts about how to make money and be successful. And I'm just like, Dude, what are you doing? It's always these cheesy things like, Know, here he is. I don't know why I've got them on here. This is Rob Dyrdek. How's it going, bro? So that's backwards for you. But basically it's a true wealth can bias how much your time is worth, what the value of your time is, and where is you're going to actually spend money to get time back? Because believe me, a true success is when you understand time at such a level that you know exactly where you could spend money to do it. He's talking it out of his asshole. Rob I agree with you and I don't want to. Mm. He's on the other side of. Production, distribution and consumption. He's had a series of accidents. He's had his name sort of sort of carry him through shoe sponsors by DC, pretty big company. He's on the side of the haves, not the have nots. None of this is possible on the side of the have nots, contemplating time, thinking about investments. Give me a break. There are people in our city who are having a very difficult time making ends meet and don't have the the luxury to sit back and watch these sort of, you know, financially focused self-help videos. We're going to look at some in some ways not so much the different ways people consume material goods. And I'll I'll make a crack at the textbooks. Definition. I've got allergies and it just came into my nose. Sorry, Atticus, I'm going to use your tail. I'm just kidding. I do have allergies and they're annoying, but I'm going to make a crack at or take a take issue with the textbook definition of consumption. Then we're going to turn our computers off. Do it. Do it. And then how? Like a great day. Thinking about anthropology, economic relations. What's so. Humans. When we gather into social groups, when we're thrown into the world, we're thrown into social groups. By default, we don't really have any choice. And we're an interesting species. Because we have basic needs. But then we have too many other needs. And that's what really, if you ask me, marks us off from our sort of close relations. Genetically and biologically, humans have too many needs, and this is what causes trouble. But we're able to meet these needs and create new ones through social organization. I feel like

we're starting from scratch here. Right. But what is social organization? Exactly. And I'm really sorry. You know, I don't I don't want any of you to think this is condescending by looking at these really basic terms here. But we've got people in fourth year in this class. You know, we've got people in first year in this class. We've got people who have taken anthropology courses before, and we've got people, let's say, from computer sciences, engineering, math never, ever taken an entire course in their lives. And now that we're we're sort of really bringing about a shift here. I feel like I've got to do my due diligence and really cover these things. Social organization. What is it? Well, it's just patterned social relations. The textbook definition, you know, the patterning of human intended independence in a given society through the actions and decisions of its members. So members come together. They understand that in order to solve problems, in order to go about the needs and requirements of everyday life, people need to come together and form social relations, you know, whether it be extended families, nuclear families. Oh, my gosh. Families based on, let's say, what's called fictive kin networks, like in my own field work most. Let's say, of the homeless youth I was working with all the time, every day. I didn't really have blood relations either their parents had died or they didn't want anything to do with them. So they created relationships with friends that were stronger or just as strong as blood ties. And we call this fictive kin networks. But so social organization really is just people being interdependent on each other. And, you know, what defines relationships are based on cultural understandings, norms, and moors of, you know, what's appropriate, what's not, etc.. So sorry, societies living in certain contexts will come together in certain ways to meet these demands of everyday living. So let's say going back in time, whether it be and maybe we'll make some Canadian references here. First Nations banned war. We'll go back in time, let's say, to a round contact, maybe 15, 1600s, well into maybe 100 years after that. First Nations bands typically who weren't sedentary like the hereon would participate in something called fusion fusion. And so there would be groups of sometimes, oh gosh, maybe ten, 20 families. And if this could increase to 50, sometimes to 100 at points, depending on the season, and then they would disperse into smaller, more nuclear units throughout the year, depending on, you know, what what was happening at the time. So in the winter, people would come together and stayed together and they would need that interdependence in order to survive. So food storage is would have to be access would have to be added to food, would have to be distributed, redistributed in shared. But then in the summertime, families would disperse and this would be that sort of fusion aspect. They would go off and start collecting berries. Oh, my gosh, whatever, whatever food, stuff, hunting, deer or whatever. Flora and fauna would assist in help them get by. And so they were really in a constant state of flux in living a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence in the Inuit. Much, much the same in some ways as well, you know, would come together in the summers around Hudson's Bay trading posts around the time of contact. Of course, this really precipitated and caused a lot of socio economic change, which was in a lot of ways fairly disastrous biologically with bringing diseases from which the indigenous population had zero immunity to and then 100% deadly disastrous after due to the effects of colonization and colonialism. So depending on the environment, people would approach these problems and find solutions in distinct ways which were obviously socially and culturally resonant. Economic anthropology really is that subbranch a socio cultural anthropology that considers economic life economic relations processes in the effects on social aspects of everyday life to be. This is what economic anthropologists focus on. But it's interesting because when you're looking at the textbook, they make it sound like only economic anthropologists look at this in socio cultural anthropologists. Medical anthropologists don't. But that's not true. And it kind of I'm just I was underlining it, you know, with a few attacks and it's like, well, you know, from my dissertation as someone who is a socio cultural but also a medical anthropologist, I had to look in-depth at economic aspects of Ontario and the Ontario Works legislation and the

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Ontario Works Act. And I didn't take any classes in my undergrad, my master's, or at the doctor level in strictly economic anthropology. So that's a little bit of a misconception. Lionization there textbook textbooks, but. Like. No offense. Lavender salts and za'atar. It's okay. Okay. So let's let's get into a couple of of lost you definitions here. So production, distribution and consumption. What are they? And that's why I've got the question mark in the title. Well, they're aspects of economic activity. And over the decades, economists and economic anthropologists and sociocultural and maybe medical anthropologists have all debated. What do you focus on first and what do you hone in on to the exclusion of other things? And is that detrimental? Well, we'll find out. So production is simply really, as it is, the production of things that you use either on their own or that you transform into other products. Distribution is after. Processes of production have taken place and there has been or have been some kind of transformation of raw materials into a product that someone wants. It's how do you get these products to people, you know, transportation, logistics, etc.. And that's what we can understand is distribution. And these are kind of no brainers. Simply consumption is the use of products in whatever way. And products can range from things that are products of commodity chains, like are shirts or clothing, which have a very interesting sort of lifecycle unto themselves or foodstuffs where there we go, heading out, Adi, don't shoot. So every time he gets off of a chair, sometimes he'll do this sort of lean in is like, Yeah, I'm just going to bust one out for you. And then he just yet he leads. Okay. Luckily, I don't smell anything and they're pretty violent rank. So as I said, you know, anthropologists, if you can see my cursor, they're always debating, you know, which ones are more important. And they'll get heated and angry at conference presentations. And I'll say right off the bat, I think it's sort of silly to look at one to the exclusion of the others. I think they all need to be understood as a piece and all altogether. But we'll look at the economic activity. And here we have this sort of the three pillars of economic experience in activity in life. So production, again, is the collection of resources. Processing of resources, the manufacture of products at whatever level, depending on what it is, you know, things can be more complicated. The distribution, which again, is really just the transportation logistics of bringing products to places, you know, historically, you know, some products could travel great distances, They can travel, you know, great distances now, but with much more efficiency in transport, logistics, consumption, is the purchase in use or in some ways the literal consumption of goods, if we're talking about foodstuffs. So it's just a little bit of history here. And I know this is fairly dry to many individuals, and it's not because it's not economics proper. We won't get into this in detail. This is a gloss, but the discipline of economics as an economic. Academic focus didn't really happen. And I'm sure, you know, obviously historians had their their selective focus on this over the millennia. But really, typically in Europe and North America, it didn't come into being as a specialized focus until the industrial revolution and capitalism really started to make inroads. And I really use that term, you know, specifically here and on purpose. And so we're talking about the 1700s, late 1700s. And so around the time that Adam Smith had his go with the Wealth of Nations. So, you know, this is, again, a gloss, but capitalism came to eclipse in replace the feudal economic system where as many of you probably know, you know, you would have a land owner and he would say to a serf or peasants, you can have this plot of land, which, if my memory serves me correctly, is referred to as a fief. And you can work it, but it's not yours, it's mine. And I have it by the sheer fact that I have a title which I got from my family, and it's sort of immovable and, you know, there's no how can you say fluidity in terms of mobility, Right. Things are kind of frozen. In status. And so you would have to work for a feudal lord in vassal. I think if my my understanding is correct and there was a hierarchy here. And so, you know, a Lord could own the land, but he would have to pledge allegiance to a king, Knights could as well. And in return for owning that land, if there was a war, they would have to fight on behalf or alongside the king, on behalf of the king. Usually in this cause, tension, in problems and alliances and allegiances

would sometimes shift in going in unforeseen directions, leaving King sometimes in interesting positions where it's like, well, I thought you had allegiance to me. You know, in this adventure we gave way to over many years, this idea of of capitalism where people could own private property and sell it as a commodity, you know, and sell products and things and didn't have to have that sort of weight of of title or birth birthright behind them to sanction this enabling and allowed allow it. Capitalism, as we know, is based on what's understood as a free market system. And I don't really like that term. The market, sure, in some sense is is an entity unto itself with its own. Laws and processes of. How can we say function or operation, But it's constantly tampered with, constantly finagle by interested individuals, but all of it this free market system anyways, however you want to put free and scare quotes is dependent on this system that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about called supply and demand. So things are apparently more in demand. In supply is not the greatest prices can can jump and we're seeing this, oddly enough, with with gasoline. So the Russian contribution has been curtailed or whatnot, but it's been full on stopped. They're not contributing to this global pot of oil and demand goes up. I'm not sure the percentages of Russian oil contributions. I'm still a little confused as to how these things work. But then all of a sudden, gas just sort of doubles overnight and then keeps going up. Very interesting. Neoclassical economics. As for the textbook anyways, provided the foundation of what is formal economics as it's understood from an academic perspective today, and singles out its focus on distribution of goods, but seeks to explain, you know, not in a holistic perspective by any stretch of the imagination, but the function and the workings of capitalism as as a socioeconomic system. And again, as referred to in our textbooks, Wilke and Colgate, maybe I'm fortunate, sought to look at three theoretical approaches that can be situated within the subfield of economic anthropology. Does anyone remember what those are? That would be interesting if this were a traditional in- class course. One is what good old Jacksonian rugged American individualism is based on, and that's the self-interested model. Go figure. This centers exclusively on the individual to the exclusion of the social. And, you know, this is one approach that has kind of popped up now and again, sometimes very aggressively. And it popped up quite loudly and clearly with Margaret Thatcher and her American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, who were in power when I was my son's age. So I wasn't obviously paying attention to politics. But my dad, you know, who's since passed away many years ago now, was a diehard leftist and was always complaining about Thatcher and Reagan and rigid, you know, uncritical individualism. But this approach, anyways, was born in the Enlightenment. So we're looking at the 18th century and, you know, as the name of the model explains this based on this idea that individuals are first and foremost. Always calculating, always rationalizing, and always thinking about their own socioeconomic or really more so financial well-being. I think Margaret Thatcher was very famous for saying there is no such thing as society. There are only individuals. And she she caused a lot of damage in the UK with some of her very exclusionary policies selling off council houses for those who needed subsidized housing. Coal miners strike, etc.. You know, and these people, these are all tactics, very political tactics that involve ideological sleight of hand and subterfuge, but essentially trying to really inculcate or brand down into people's minds that human selfishness is natural. So we're all just natural. And I think there was a dick philosopher named Thomas Hobbes who said humans are humans in a human existence. Human life is nasty, brutish and short. And we're sort of at our hearts, at our core as humans, nasty, selfish, horrible individuals, which, you know, coming from a European slash British perspective, you know, maybe speak for yourself globally. You know, the world isn't like that. I mean, yes, there are people who are like that. But historically and from a cultural perspective, there are many groups going all the way back in history, millennia, even up to now, who aren't like this naturally. So this is a cultural construction, but this is all based on this idea that goes back to 1776 with a Scottish Enlightenment economic philosopher

whose name is Adam Smith, who had this idea, and he had written about a lot of things, and some of them were actually good in the wealth of nation, that being that education should sort of be covered by the government and should be the government's problem. And I still think it's odd how in North America, and particularly in Canada, we copy the Americans and charge money in the form of tuition for university. When. That's really weird to me. And I had spent a lot of time, obviously in Iceland with my field work and speaking to a lot of people who had spent a lot of time in Denmark and learned quite a lot about Denmark, oddly enough. And so I'd how you don't pay tuition in Denmark and the state pays you to go to university and they pay each student a stipend to attend university, which is more or less a living wage or the equivalent there to have to go to school because they see that investing in youth is a good thing instead of saddling people with debt. Like, Oh, stop being forced to pay that back sometimes over 20 years. It's ridiculous. But anyways, Adam Smith had written in the Wealth of Nations about this idea of the invisible hand and how this guides not only individuals but also societies and know nations to seek out their own sort of regulatory processes and acquire profits and to live well at the individual, but also the societal level. So, you know, these fingers here, profit seeking producers will make more needs of society are automatically met if profit seekers produce more because there are more things to buy, you know, competition will be great, I guess, and prices might be kept in some sort of narrow margin. Government does not get involved. That's sort of hilarious. It always leads to trouble. Competition keeps quality high, competition keeps prices low, and then it says competition and self-interest act as an invisible hand that regulates the free market. Yeah, well. Oh, okay. So there's our invisible hand. He actually. That's not so invisible, but maybe it's an invisible waste. And this leads to this. It leads to usually, you know, white people getting rich like. Elon Musk. Maybe a little bit of trouble. And Bill Gates, who has a philanthropic side. A lot of problems there. Maybe this is more for my social determinants of health class where I start really ripping into these individuals in ideas like this. Anyways. The second one. So we're leaving this model of self-interest, going to the social model of human nature. Our textbook talks about human nature and I'm like, Guys. You know, there is no such thing as human nature. Human nature is a plastic construct. In what I mean by plastic is it's bendable, it's malleable. It changes from context to context and bears the impressive culture every time. So we'll pluralist it and get rid of that. Singularity. It's not a singularity. That's a black hole, isn't it? That the king of enemies. You know what I'm talking about. My gosh, it's a monday. The social model of human nature focuses on social institutions. And the main question here is not focusing on individuals and how individuals are constantly supposedly rationalizing and calculating, calculating, and, you know, trying to maximize and understand how. The best they can live their lives. It's really about how people form groups and institutions that can regulate and orient and keep those groups in check. So financial institutions, economic institutions, institutions like marriage, etc., and how people can exercise power within these contexts. So it's a little bit more complicated. The second aspect to this is that. It really tries to understand how individuals. Understand who they are in relation to the groups with which they belong in our apart and how. Quite opposite to the self-interested model. They couldn't really even conceive of having itself with interests that diverge from the overall group's interests, which in turn which really involves group well- being. And. Duration over time, you know, so and so really what you could sort of do is the first one is like an egocentric model focusing on the self only. The second one, if I can use my own terms, because sometimes I don't like textbook terms, it's like a socio centric model looking at the broader good of a group. Anyways. And so, you know, as an example of this, you know, we can use good old. Fashion for the first one American. Rigid individualism. Right. Like the American dream, number one counts. I want to make money. And if it involves me stepping on other people, I don't care. It's all about me. I don't really like that. I think that's actually kind of lame. And that's been the cause of many problems

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on this planet. This one is, you know, a little bit more beautiful and socio centric where, you know, this is an historic photograph of the Sami. I can sort of tell these are inland Norwegian. Sami The group is very important. There is an economic institution which is reindeer herding huge. The mode of subsistence which capitalism, late modern capitalism, neo liberalism is destroying. I don't mean to sound glum, but essentially deer by deer and, you know, affecting a series of erasures on this group who are indigenous to Norway, Sweden, Finland and the peninsula of Russia. But. Reindeer and the help of the reindeer were very important to Sami as families who would come together sort of similar to efficient fusion. They were semi-nomadic and sometimes nomadic. You know, reindeer would be used as transportation, as foodstuff, as capital. And this was very important and it was difficult. I think at this point for these larger families to think of sometimes their combined herds and to think of themselves as individuals with divergent interests to their group. Now, of course, now in modern day Sweden and Norway and in parts of Russia, where people are still trying to eke out an existence by reindeer herding, it's basically based on nuclear families owning herds and having that title and right to be sanctioned by laws of their respective countries. But anyways, back in time things were or more socio centric and difficult for people to, you know, take themselves apart from their their groups. Lastly, we have the moral model, and this is focusing on cultural beliefs and systems and values, so how culture affects and inflects economic processes. And again, according to our textbooks or a textbook, this is looking at complex, changeable, but yet sometimes enduring cultural forms that influence and organize social life. And economic motivations are understood by this model to be fully oriented and directed and undergirded by cultural beliefs in value systems. But you see, it's interesting because even going through this, I sometimes have a problem. Academics, they make things seem so. Exclusive and mutually exclusive and separate. But the moral model has a lot to do with individual model that we just talked about for number one here, because those motivations of individualism, of supposed selfishness are shaped by sometimes toxic American culture, which again puts the individual first and puts acquiring capital and making money. That is the objective, you know, and those are sort of inseparable. So saying they're very different, I don't like that. But, you know, for all intents and purposes, we're sticking to the textbook. That's what they say. But anyways, this this model explains that these specific processes undergirded by culture. Are oriented and members of particular groups follow these processes to go about acquiring material resources, whatever those might be. And again, I'm having a lot of trouble I don't really like. How this is separated. But that's that's how it is sometimes, according to our textbook, again, referred to as the holistic view, because it's sort of looking at a broad based perspective of how culture can influence group behavior, but also individual behavior in blended the stuff of meaning, right modes of exchange. So, you know, we're kind of. Getting a little bit past these models here. Some anthropologists, whether economic anthropologists or otherwise, understand that using capitalism as a frame of reference to understand other socioeconomic systems in other parts of the world used by other people is thoroughly ethnocentric. So does anyone remember what ethnocentric ethnocentrism means? And remember, its opposite was cultural relativism. Well, ethnocentrism. I can't talk today. Maybe this is why I'll have some period. That'll fix everything. Ouch. Gosh. Is the view of other cultures according to one's own cultural frame of reference, where judgments are made usually negative judgments. And someone might say, well, that culture is wrong and they don't do things really as efficiently as we do. And so I'm going to use my culture as a gold standard to assess, moralize and judge other cultures. And this is what gets many people into trouble. The opposite. Cultural relativism understands the uniqueness of each cultural context and says, Well, mine's just different, but it's one among many, not the final arbiter of existence. Right. But rightly so. And this is one of those captain obvious moments. Of course, anthropologists are going to argue that, you know, late modern capitalism should not be the prototype of human rationality

because it is ethnocentric. And it's ethnocentric insofar as or to the extent that it is a recent cultural invention. And it's. Associated with a particular kind of way of being, which, you know, is oriented by culture, but comes along with particular values, particular ideas of what social institutions or economic institutions are in really particular assumptions about human nature. Right. That being, you know, inherent selfishness, individualism, etc.. But to counter this, we have to understand that not everybody sees this. The sense and I can't do a glottal stop or these are linguistic terms, but that, as you can see of Africa, don't understand existence to be like this. And these were referred to in our textbook, right. You've all read this. Hopefully if you haven't, you will only find a piece of America. Yeah. Yeah. Like 228. Right. And these are sort of understood as more socio centric groups, but they've. Adapted to and constructed different ways to disperse material goods that is resonant with their own understandings, their own values, and their own cultural institutions in assumptions about human nature. And that's being more egalitarian, more equal, and redistributing things so that everyone has a similar amount. And if people need more, let's say the elderly or the sick, they can have more. You know, unlike this sort of competitive, almost pathologically competitive ethos in context in North America, you know, where it's it's understood, I guess, as a mistaken version of Darwinism. But social Darwinism, right. Only the strong survive, even though these sort of in the biological sense, these mutations are random sometimes. But according to a social Darwinist perspective, the idea is that the strong survive because they put in more effort and they bootstrap. They pull themselves up on their boots more and more efficiently. But that's that's not how things work when structural violence sort of interrupts and interferes with that. You know, I just added these two photos here at the bottom to show the Innu peoples an often overlooked indigenous group in Canada who typically can be found in Quebec and Newfoundland or Labrador, sorry, it's now called Newfoundland and Labrador, but it's in Labrador. And this was a very beautiful Indigenous group, distinct linguistically from First Nations and distinct distinct linguistically from the Inuit. And this is a historic sort of rendering, probably 18th century of individuals in a group. But the idea was that. Production was a social process, as it always is, but it was always aimed toward the social that hunters would go and procure or find meat to bring back for the group, not for that hunter themselves. Right. And these the meat would be processed, you know, would be transformed and redistributed to the group, you know, which is such a beautiful way of doing things. And it's fairer. And it's it's based on a very different sort of ethical orientation. But of course, contact happened in colonialism and its counterpart colonization happened is still happening and interrupted and interfered with this natural perspective for all first nations, but the Inuit in it as well, and introduced this idea of private property and individualism, which shifted and brought a profound alteration of political institutions at the time. And these are modern in the kids today and unfortunately. There are high rates of drug use. Alcoholism and social problems are rampant. And so I had the privilege back in 2009, the year a daughter was born to fly to the Arctic. But on my way I had to touch down in an Innu community called Network. Sheesh. Which. Has a very horrible history to it. This was a community that was moved not once, not twice, but three times by the government. With no consultation with themselves. You're moving. 50 kilometers this way. 75 kilometers that way. And we're not really going to provide you with, you know, sanitary amenities and your lives are pretty much going to be hell and you're going to be in a remote cut off place. Fly in access only, and we're going to create the conditions for your lives to essentially unravel. So anyways, I have gone off on a tangent there, but I want everyone to understand that capitalism and individualism are not natural. They might seem natural because we've all been socialized into it, into thinking this way and what most it. I want all of you to question the shit out of this and to understand that there are groups now and have been groups historically who don't understand the world on these terms and see other people as just as important families, broader social groups, just as important as the

self in terms of well-being, etc. and having needs met. We're going to. We're moving along. Who is this? Does anybody know? Well, he was talked about a little bit in our textbook. This is Marcel Proust or Mos. And he wrote an influential text called The Gift Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Now, this was published in written back in 1925, and it was stitched together with observations from other people. And so we don't talk about it much in this class. But this is more an effort. And if Moussa would have considered himself a sociologist and not an anthropologist back then, but. This is an I guess. An example of what you call armchair anthropology, where the social scientist draws on other individuals works and then puts them together and makes an argument. But in 1950, which was you know, the textbook says 1950 is when the gift was published. It wasn't. But most found that capitalist commodity exchanges were impersonal. Exchanges of here goods for money. Where here comes the crux where the partners of the exchange had impersonal terms, where they didn't even have to know each other to exchange goods for for money. Right. So there was no prior need or no need for a prior relationship. Think about it. You know, you go to the store to buy something, you don't need to know the cashier, anything. Furthermore, you're no idea who made the product you're buying, whether it's like a pair of shorts. Which was actually stitched together and made with a pair of human hands. You're not going to know them. You're not going to know the person selling them. So. There are all levels of alienation happening here. This is a mark story and we won't get into that now. But anyways, you just don't need to know who's making your stuff. It's just not a requirement. But he contrasted that non capitalist gift exchanges or exchanges of things. We're super embedded in social relations and or based on either family networks or broader networks of kin relations or friends and weren't impersonal to the extent where you can just go and buy something or. Have something maybe, I don't know, given to you without any need to return anything? No. These were based on this requirement of you. Give me something that I made or you know who made it. And then that will be returned in with something else by someone you know. You know who made it. So it's really, really a different kind of exchange. And so one the first one is capitalist commodity exchanges based on mass production, etc. The other is a non capitalist, more personal gift exchanges. And of course, you know, the textbook really goes into this. I don't have time here to to basically do a complete recap. But moving along further, we also have martial solons and hero. Back in 1972, a book about economic life from an anthropological perspective called Stone Age Economics. And I had to read things by solons. Oh, my goodness. Way back in third year. And that's going back to 1999. So a long time ago. But he identified three patterns, according to which distribution occurs called modes of exchange. So he's sort of, you know, taking what Moss had said, but then really, really pushing it further. So he said, you know, there are modes of exchange based on reciprocity or reciprocity, modes of exchange based on redistribution and modes of exchange based on market exchange. Right. So these bear the inflection or the influence of the personal really in the impersonal. So what I'll explain here is different modes of exchange can actually coexist. So I like this acknowledgment in the textbook and it's saying, Yeah, there for the sake of academic purposes, they're mutually exclusive in definition, but they can actually exist in one place at one time, and they kind of exist in our society like this, albeit in different ways and all I'll explain. I think this is going to be my last slide because I can already see them at an hour and 8 minutes and they didn't really. I think, you know, now that we're all kind of getting used to these online lectures, I find personally when they go over an hour and a half, people are just sort of like, oh, in a live classroom environment, it's different, but it's a bit much. So I won't go much further, if you don't mind, but we'll consider. So we'll go back and as a mode of exchange, we'll consider each of these in turn. But reciprocity, you know, is the exchange of things, but it could also be a service of equal value. And this can be further split into three forms of reciprocity. The first is generalized. And so this is, you know, there's an exchange carried out, but that

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exchange doesn't specify the time or the value of the of return. And so the textbook gives this Meissen individual or my sent people a Papua New Guinea, you know, parents and children. So, you know, there's this idea that parents give their children things, but there's an expectation that at some point, you know, these gestures will be returned, you know, but the value in the exact time isn't really specified. That's why it's general. Right. And in some senses we have that here. And I think our textbook pointed that out to, you know, we're parents. And as a parent, you know, you're always giving your kids things. There's never any expectation like, okay, here's a Christmas present. In order for me to give this to you, you've got to give me something right now. Like if my kids didn't get me anything, I'd like, okay, whatever. But sometimes there is that expectation of, you know, with a lifetime of provision or of providing your children with things that as you as parents get older, your kids will be there, you know, to help you as you get older. But it's like the time isn't specified. And obviously the value, it's not like you're keeping tabs of everything. And this happens sometimes. Sometimes it does, but I'll just use myself. You know, like every gift that Alexis and I have given our kids. We're not keeping a tab. Like, Okay, you know, here, all the receipts for years, one through ten, we're going to keep those in a binder, and then we're going to width. Now, when your guys are 25, you have to return everything of the equivalent value, maybe a different form. Anyways, you've got this to be contrasted with something called balanced reciprocity. So this is when a return of the exact value for equal value is is laid down at a specific time. Right. So it's like, okay, you know, you given me this gift and in some ways when I think about some of my friends, you know, wedding gifts, I think work this way. So I remember, oh my gosh. So Alexis may have been married for 17 years now. When I when we got married, I had a friend who wasn't a super good friend, but he gave he gave us 200 bucks as a wedding gift, which I thought was kind of random and weird to just give money, but whatever. And so when he got married the year after, I made sure because it would look weird, it would compromise that, that sort of. Moral envelope that sealed us both in. After he gave that gift, I made sure to give him $200. Because it would be weird, right? Many of you can sort of see this. If I gave him, like, 50 bucks because then he'd be like, We want I give you 200 last year. What is that? So you're getting drawn into almost like a transaction. But instead of being purely financial, there's now a socio social and moral aspect to it. You know, and I wouldn't want to give him more because then it would seem like I'm flexing, right? So if I gave him double a year for it's like, well, dude, what? Okay, that's great. But like, oh, now I feel crappy for just giving you. And that can kind of compromise things morally, too. Right. So that's just a maybe a lame example of what balance reciprocity. It's lastly and I'll end now, but negative reciprocity is when there's sort of an underhanded exchange. Right. So the textbook defines it as like one group or one party attempts to get something for nothing and without penalty. Right. So like stealing, you know, I think one good since we just recently watched Roald Dahl's Matilda, my son really likes that movie. The dad. What is he say? You're dumb. You're stupid. I think it's Danny DeVito. I can't really do a Danny DeVito impersonation anyways. He's a used car salesman, and he's always trying to get away with shady and shifty things. Right? So at one point, he gets a car. I can't remember the dollar amounts. I'm just going to make it up. But he, like, he buys a car for 500 bucks and then he fills the engine with sawdust to quiet down the moving parts because they had been squeaking. It takes a drill and, you know, rolls back the odometer, which is like completely illegal and then sells it for like 2 to 3 times to maximize profits. Well, this is an example of negative reciprocity because he's totally in an underhanded way, selling what is a total lemon of a used car and trying to pass it off as like, oh, the engine purrs. It's so quiet, even though it's totally filled with sawdust to dampen down that engine noise and the odometer or the section of the panel that. Measures and tracks the amount of kilometers or miles on the car has been rolled back. So it's it's definitely a shady, shady practice there. But this would be understood as negative reciprocity where he's trying to get to the. The most amount of

money he can edit is that of his clients and really selling them a piece of crap. Okay everyone, I will pick up where we left off here.