Reddit reviews The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
No problem, it is a fascinating topic. I don't know what to suggest, there's way way too many books.
Really top of my head, any anthropologist here will probably crucify me for forgetting something, I would suggest the following :
Some are more or less technical and harder to read without a background, I remember Malinoswki, Descola and Mead to be fairly easy to read. Tristes Tropiques is also very easy, it's like a novel. Mauss, Clastres and Savage Mind can be a bit more "advanced" but they are very readable.
EDIT : Fun fact about something similar to cargo cult. Some tribes, don't remember if it's in Africa or Oceania, value foreign objects as possessing supernatural powers. As such, they cover their shields (which are absolutely amazing) with stickers, such as beer brands. The anthropoligist that told me this said that he tried to tell them that they are ruining the beautiful shield and they just thought he was an idiot, the shield looked much nicer with the stickers.
Well he actually goes a step further, a good deal of Graeber's anthropological work goes towards examining alternatives to capitalist and state capitalist economic arrangements. Gift economies, markets, etc.
His anthropological work shows that there are different origins for currency but I think you might be interested in stuff like "Towards An Anthropological Theory of Value"
>This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.
Or some of the work done by his forebears like Mauss' "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies"
>Since its first publication in English in 1954, The Gift, Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure, has been acclaimed as a classic among anthropology texts.
>A brilliant example of the comparative method, ?The Gift? presents the first systematic study of the custom—widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia—of exchanging gifts. The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees the gift exchange as related to individuals and groups as much as to the objects themselves, and his analysis calls into question the social conventions and economic systems that had been taken for granted for so many years. In a modern translation, introduced by distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, ?The Gift ?is essential reading for students of social anthropology and sociology.
I'm just gonna leave a link to Marcel Mauss's book about gift-exchange (though you can read the wikipedia entry which will totally give you the gist of it). I know a lot of anthropology can seem pretty effete, but despite the phrase "archaic societies" in the title, even in today's society we see a lot of social ties acted out by acts of reciprocal exchange in the form of gift-giving. I've noticed this in particular with women in tight-knit communities. I used to think it was kind of dumb to give gifts because you have to, or for specific occasions... I'd rather opportunistically buy a gift that fits the recipient as an individual. But now, I think these little rituals do help us bond with one another. The women that I see regularly exchanging seemingly meaningless gifts with my mom (and sometimes me) are the ones who come through if she (or I) gets sick, or moves, or needs help with something serious.
Another great is "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies" By Marcel Mauss. This book changed my life. It opened the door to a whole new stream of thought dealing with 'ecomonies' or relationships people create and the obligation to reciprocity that bind people not only to other people to create culture but also binds people to objects within a time and space.
http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Reason-Exchange-Archaic-Societies/dp/039332043X#_
The answer you are looking for is either:
Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams by David Graeber
or
Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein
but
The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss is the cornerstone of the field and very enjoyable, though shorter than the other two. It may be helpful to have read Mauss in order to understand the previous two mentioned.