Exchange is the transfer of things between social actors. The things can be human or animal, material or immaterial, words or things. The actors can be individuals, groups, or beings such as gods or spirits. Cast this broadly, exchange pervades social life. Villagers getting foodstuffs at a local market, like city-dwellers at a supermarket, are engaged in exchange. Corporations that contribute to political parties, enemies who hurl insults at each other, hunters who placate the spirit of their prey, and parents who prepare meals for their children, all are engaged in exchange. It should be no surprise that some argue that exchange is a key to social life. For Levi-Strauss, true human existence begins when groups begin to exchange women in marriage, while for Mauss exchange is the earliest solution to the Hobbesian war of all against all.
Exchange is a central topic in anthropology, but it is more important in the ethnography of some regions than in others. Likewise, exchange is central to all people’s lives, but its consequences and cultural elaborations are more marked in some regions than in others. It is in Melanesia that people and anthropologists have stressed exchange most, and many of the examples used here are drawn from the ethnography of that region.
Structural perspectives
Taken in the aggregate, exchanges can exhibit structure, patterns and regularities. Like Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand, these regularities can have consequences whether or not the actors involved intend them or are even aware of them. Perhaps the most famous example is kula exchange in Melanesia, described by Malinowski (1922: ch. 3). The Trobriand Islanders who participate in the kula give and receive ornamental armshells and necklaces to and from partners in other villages. However, with their partners in one direction they give only armshells and receive only necklaces, while the situation is reversed for their partners in the other direction. Seen as a whole, the kula trade exhibits a clear structure that is unintended by participants, a giant circle covering hundreds of miles, with armshells travelling in one direction around it and necklaces travelling in the other.
Another sort of structure is defined by the things that can be exchanged against each other. Even in societies permeated by money, there are things that should be, and typically are, transacted only for certain other things. In the West, for example, this includes promotions, academic degrees and honours of all sorts, which are given in return for merit and should not, and typically cannot, be given in return for money. When exchange is restricted in this way, there is a structure of spheres of exchange. A classic example of such spheres is the Tiv, a society in Nigeria. Bohannan (1955) describes three Tiv spheres of exchange. One concerns everyday foodstuffs and petty consumables, traded freely against each other. Another and more restricted sphere includes slaves, cattle, metal bars and a type of cloth — items of prestige rather than subsistence. The most restricted consists of rights in people (other than slaves, who are part of the middle sphere), such as dependent women and children. Typically one cannot exchange across spheres; exchange, for example, cattle for a daughter in marriage, or petty consumables for metal bars. However, these spheres have decayed somewhat. The colonial imposition of a money economy has meant that items from different spheres can be traded against each other, using cash as an intermediate step. However, in many societies money does not dissolve spheres altogether, but becomes incorporated into one sphere or another.
Probably the most renowned structural analysis of exchange is Levi-Strauss’s (1969 [1949]) work on patterns of marriage, which he casts as the exchange of women between descent groups that are dominated by men. Levi-Strauss argues that rules about whom a woman should marry produce structures of relationships between groups and so produce a larger social order. One set of rules, those of restricted exchange, produces pairs of groups linked to each other through the exchange of women and so produces a social order that incorporates only a small number of groups. The other sort is generalized exchange, where groups are linked more widely through the irregular giving of women in marriage. This can order a large number of descent groups in an extensive social system.
Relational perspectives
Complementing the structural approach is the relational. This approach is concerned with how exchanges reflect and shape the identity of the social actors involved, as well as the relationship those actors have with each other, with the thing exchanged, and even with the act of exchange itself. Two themes in work on the relational aspects of exchange are the way that exchange can create groups within a society, and the way that exchange links people and objects.
One example of the way exchange creates groups is the Big Man system found in Melanesia, described by "Sahlins. In this system, aspiring leaders use generosity to attract a body of supporters, and so create a social group. In the relationship between leader and group, supporters give material objects and allegiance to their leaders. In return they get the prestige of being in the Big Man’s faction. They also get a share of what is given to their leader by competing Big Men, for Big Men and their factions are in competition with other leaders and their associated factions. Consequently, these groups do not only emerge through exchange; their survival and renown depends upon their success in exchange with other such factions. This example points out how, as exchange creates groups, so it creates boundaries between groups. When these sorts of socio-political structures become stable, exchange can be a way of marking allegiance and obligation between leader and group, as with the jqjmani system in South Asia.
Exchange can also create relationships of kinship, for in many societies membership in a kin group is not, and even cannot be, defined solely by birth. In defining these kin relationships, exchange thereby creates kinship groups. Among the Daribi, in Melanesia, people do not become members of a kin group because they are descended in the appropriate way from group members. Instead, they become members, and hence the group is constituted, because other people make the appropriate exchanges on the behalf of those individuals and because those individuals exchange in the appropriate ways with the appropriate people in the appropriate circumstances (Wagner 1967).
Types of exchange and types of relationship between actors reinforce each other, with the result that types of exchange are a part of the creation of groups and the boundaries between them. Sahlins (1974: ch. 5) makes this point when he notes that, generally, exchange within the group is tinged with generosity and without stipulation of when and how a return is to be made; exchange at the boundaries of the group is balanced, with a concern for adequate and timely reciprocation; exchange with strangers tends toward ‘negative reciprocity’, the desire to get something for nothing, and it ranges from sharp bargaining to theft (see reciprocity). However, it is important to remember that negative reciprocity is itself a social relationship, distinct from sheer indifference. Moreover, the exchange of blows by raiding and warfare can be a basis of social groups and relationships, for defining adversaries can be as important for the group as defining members.
Other work describes how exchange links actors to each other and to objects. In his discussion of the fetishism of commodities, Marx addressed this issue, observing that commodity exchange masks the real relation between actors and the objects they exchange. For many anthropologists, however, the formative statement is Mauss’s (1990 [1924]) analysis of exchange in societies in Melanesia and elsewhere. Mauss’s classic formulation states that parties to a relationship of gift exchange are obligated to give gifts, to receive them and repay them in the appropriate ways. In such relationships, the object given bears the identity of the giver, which the recipient acquires along with the object itself. Mauss made this point particularly with regard to the Maori hau, the ‘spirit of the gift’ that demands the return of the gift to its owner. Mauss’s interpretation is important in work on exchange, and has been subject to extensive debate (e.g. Sahlins 1974: ch. 4; Weiner 1980; Parry 1986).
The relational approach has been taken to its extreme in Melanesia, pre-eminently by "Marilyn Strathern (1988). Melanesians do not, it is argued, conceive of objects and persons as independent entities that are involved in exchange. Rather, persons and objects acquire their identities from the relationships in which they are transacted. The person who gives does not exist prior to the giving and the relationship in which it occurs, but has an identity only as part of and as a result of that relationship. Consequently, people bear the identities of the people and things that were involved in the relationships that created and maintained them, and the same is true of objects.
Work on the relational aspects of exchange, particularly in Melanesia, is bedevilled by a number of problems. Foremost among these is a tendency to focus on cultural principles at the expense of attention to social practice. Too often, the result is sweeping generalizations about how people think, in the absence of detailed and qualified analyses of the various ways that people actually act (see Bourdieu 1977: ch. 1; Davis 1992). Without such analyses, assertions about the spirit of the gift or the link between people and exchange relationships must be treated with extreme caution. It is not possible to know the degree to which these generalizations are more than ideal types constructed by anthropologists (though often they are presented as valid generalizations), types that are subverted frequently in people’s daily lives. More scholarly attention to social practices of exchange would allow a consideration of when such abstract statements apply and when they do not. This in turn would open a range of questions about how circumstance affects people’s thinking about exchange, identity and relationship, and what are the practical consequences of these effects.
Exchange and economy
The relational approach is involved in what is perhaps the most popular recent topic in the analysis of exchange, the relationship between exchange and economy. This topic springs from an old question: why do people spend so much time and energy to exchange items that seem worth so little? This question reveals an implicit assumption that exchange ought to be about individuals transacting objects of utility and value.
This topic appears as a debate about how we should approach exchange, a debate that exhibits two general orientations (Parry 1986). One is more social and is associated with Mauss, who stressed the way that actors are linked and obligated to each other and who saw the things exchanged as bearers of social identities and relationships. Much of the relational work on exchange reflects the more social thread, and there is no need to describe it again here.
The other is more individualistic and is associated with Malinowski, who saw actors as relatively self-interested and autonomous, and concerned with equivalence, with getting as good as they give. Much of the classic sociological work on exchange falls into the Malinowski stream (see Emerson 1976). Writers such as Blau, Gouldner and Homans describe exchange in terms of the costs and benefits that accrue to actors. Thus, they root exchange in an individual, utilitarian calculus, even if that utility can be esteem or self-satisfaction rather than just money or material utilities. While this approach has an individualist foundation, some writers who use it base social relationships and social order on these exchanges.
Although it has produced interesting arguments, the conflict between the Maussian and Malinowskian perspectives is probably pointless. For one thing, the more individualistic approach frequently becomes a philosophical position rather than a falsifiable hypothesis: it is always possible for the determined analyst to discover some reward or satisfaction that the giver gets in return, even if the giver neither anticipated nor was aware of it (Davis 1992). Equally, though a view of individuals concerned with equivalence may accord with Western utilitarianism, it tends to ignore the fact, documented in studies of consumption, that value and utility themselves are not naturally given, but are products of social and cultural identities and relationships. Finally, the varieties of exchange that anthropologists have described cannot be understood adequately from either viewpoint alone.
However, the ‘differences among writers who make this last point are interesting. Some seem to argue that, in different sorts of societies, exchange is routinely of the more social or utilitarian sort. Consequently, for them ‘exchange’ is broad, but only because it varies across types of societies – typically Western capitalist societies and non-Western, often village-based, societies (e.g. Gregory 1982; Strathern 1988). Others challenge the idea that exchange within any given society is in fact relatively uniform. One challenge asserts that in most societies some exchange is more individualistic and concerned with short-term gain, while other exchange is more social and concerned with long-term cultural values and goals (Bloch and Parry 1989). Another challenge asserts that it can be misleading to classify exchanges, as there may well be disagreement among people in a society over whether a particular transaction is more relational or utilitarian. Most telling is the objection, echoing Mauss, that the very notion that material gain and social identity and obligation are or can be distinct is peculiar to Western capitalist society.
Conclusion
Two general trends in anthropology are likely to influence the study of exchange in the near future. One is a growing concern with complex societies, especially the West. This is leading to a more critical investigation of the Occidentalist assumption that exchange in the West is overwhelmingly of the Malinowskian sort, as well as attacks on the economists’ notion of the market itself. Another general trend in anthropology is the growing interest in the symbolic aspects of consumption. This increasing interest in objects as bearers and creators of cultural meanings may lead scholars to approach exchange in terms of the symbolism of the things that people transact.
