Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Distribution

Sharing

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 17:07:51 +0000

University of Cologne

Initially published 28 Apr 2021

Abstract:

Sharing is a particularly versatile and widespread human practice that features in all domains of life, including religion and politics, family life, and economics. It has a long ethnographic record but it is only recently that it has reached centre stage in social theory and in public awareness. However, not everything that is called ‘sharing’ qualifies as such in a comparative and more technical sense. This entry seeks to distinguish sharing from other transfers, such as alms- and gift-giving, resource pooling, and redistribution. Sharing is here defined as ‘allowing others to access what is valued’, an activity that is not necessarily initiated or desired by the person who gives. Sharing can help humans solve problems of resource distribution, but it may also generate problems that require culturally specific answers: What can or should be shared, with whom and under which conditions? What are the social prerequisites and the social implications of sharing? This entry presents some comparative cases of sharing found across the world and looks at how sharing is also a means to level differences and to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power. It equally considers the current inflational use of the label ‘sharing’ and on-going attempts to establish alternative forms of economic transfers in the so-called ‘sharing economy’.

Introduction: the currency of sharing

Not everything that is called ‘sharing’ actually constitutes sharing in practice. When you use a ‘car-sharing’ system, for example, you may in fact be renting a car part-time, as this involves a straightforward rental contract with a company in return for a monthly fee or charges incurred per kilometre driven. This may therefore be a market transaction, akin to buying and selling. The company may want to call it ‘sharing’, as the term has positive connotations in the urban West where it is associated with saving resources and with giving you a sense of being engaged in a morally right activity. However, this may just be part of marketing discourse in what is otherwise a competitive commercial set-up. At the same time, you may have given your colleague or neighbour a lift in that rented car. Was that sharing, even though you may not have thought or talked about it that way? Or was it rather like a gift, if the other person now feels obliged to give you some sort of return at a later stage? And although you have not met the previous person renting this car, driving a car from a ‘car-share company’ may not feel like having a car exclusively to yourself, since you have sat in the same seat, touched the same steering wheel, and breathed more or less the same air as other users. So, was that part of it sharing, or was it something more like ‘pooling’, i.e. using a common property or infrastructure?

Questions such as these illustrate that anthropological analyses of sharing need to go beyond what people may call ‘sharing’ to distinguish different modes of transfers according to the difference they make with regard to the social relationships involved. This is what this entry on sharing focuses on: How can we distinguish sharing from similar but different transfers on the basis of their capacity to change our social relations? And how constitutive are these modes of transfer for our sociality? Many definitions of sharing tend to focus on the objects that are being transferred, so that sharing is seen above all as a means of distribution. This entry, by contrast, focuses on the social implications of sharing by defining sharing technically as practices of ‘extending the circle of people who have access to what is valued’ (see Widlok 2017: xvii). The three elements of this definition will be discussed in turn, firstly the question of ‘what is valued’, secondly the interplay of ‘gaining access’, ‘demanding access’, and ‘granting access’ that constitute sharing as access, and thirdly the question of how exactly and how far the circle can be extended, especially in the growing platform economics.

Given the ubiquity of sharing today, it may be somewhat surprising that it has only recently gained prominence in social theory. This is largely because many other approaches have subsumed sharing under various other labels: Influential has been Marshall Sahlins’ formulation that sharing is a form of ‘reciprocity’ (1988), hence closely related to gift-giving, and fusing sharing with other forms of redistribution (Polanyi 1944) or pooling (Price 1975). Later definitions, by contrast, highlighted that sharing was often ‘uni-directional’ (Hunt 2000) and that it did not have the contest-like quality of gift-giving, which also goes with careful account-keeping that is considered offensive in most sharing contexts (Graeber 2011: 99). While gift-giving can be explained as a strategy for creating dependency, obligation, and status accumulation for the giver, the same explanation does not hold for sharing practices. This intrigued evolutionary scholars who sought to explain sharing with reference to its evolutionary utility even though it seemed to benefit the survival of others rather than of oneself. Evolutionary approaches focus on the function of sharing to create a social resource buffer for lean times, as a risk-reducing strategy (Ichikawa 2005), and on its ‘costly signalling’ function, i.e. signalling to potential partners that we share and therefore care for others.

The growing interest in sharing today is at least partly due to the fact that it is considered a very promising candidate when exploring alternatives to the dominant modes of commercial, extractive, and exploitative economising. This makes sharing an anthropological concern not only for its role in human evolutionary past (see Kelly [2013] for this issue, which is beyond this entry) but also in terms of the transformation of the current and future political and economic order. The currency of sharing, as we shall see, lies not only in its redistributive capacity but also in its social challenges. Anthropologists are adamant in pointing out that much of what today is called ‘sharing’ in the more appropriately named ‘crowd-based’ or ‘platform-based’ economy may not be sharing at all. However, even the misnomers have helped to put sharing, as a practice, back on the research agenda. It took considerable time to understand the change brought about by the rise of capitalism and the extension of markets and commodity logics to all spheres of life in the ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 1944). Today the claim that after the collapse of communism ‘there is no alternative’ to the capitalist market economy has sparked a new interest in exploring the full repertoire of transfer modes that humans have at their disposal.

Sharing and value

The main anthropological problem with sharing is not that it is a rare or somehow ‘exotic’ practice that we are unfamiliar with. Rather, it is ubiquitous and everyone has experienced it. In that, it is different from other human practices that work for some groups but are strange for others. For instance, think of living with several partners, marrying your cousin, moving around nomadically, organising social order without a centralised government, making a living outside capitalist production, and so forth. In these cases, anthropology has had the function of making the seemingly strange familiar, for a long time with a European bias defining what needed ‘de-exoticising’. But not everything cultural is peculiar in this way, and sharing is a case in point. Here, the role of anthropology is to make the mundane intriguing to us so that we can take a fresh comparative look at what seems familiar and unproblematic. With regard to sharing, this means to make sure that we do not mistake the rather peculiar notion of sharing, that we may hold as a result of our own cultural upbringing, with sharing as it emerges across a diversity of human contexts. A common bias that arises from living a particular way of life that we label ‘modern’ is to think of sharing as something that is only done with a few very close relatives, an altruistic exception in an otherwise selfish existence. Moreover, the dominant evaluation of sharing is in many ways disparate: On the one hand, there is a romantic yearning towards sharing as something that should be done, but often is not (or no longer). Alternatively, sharing is despised as something bad or backward that needs to be overcome. In Australia, for example, the government has tried for a long time to organise welfare payments to indigenous Australians in a way that they prevent recipients from sharing ‘too much’. Demand sharing in particular has been targeted as a root problem by state administrators intervening in Aboriginal communities (Altman 2011: 196).

Groups that practice frequent and wide-ranging sharing are subject to this bifurcated preconception, being romanticised and discriminated against. I have encountered this frequently in field research with present-day hunter-gatherers under processes of change (see Widlok 1999, 2020). Nearby farm owners, government officials, and agro-pastoralist neighbours in many of these instances feel that hunter-gatherers have to abandon sharing in order to more effectively accumulate property and adopt a market- and investment-oriented way of economising. Sharing is considered an obstacle in that process. For instance, farm workers in Namibia who used to be hunter-gatherers and who tend to be lumped together under the ethnic label San, have been encouraged by colonial bosses to save up some of their salaries so that they could buy individual property items such as bicycles, cars, or houses (Widlok 1999: 123). The social pressures of sharing their income widely, in this view, prevents the ‘uplifting’ of San to mainstream culture. This has many parallels in the ways in which the landed gentry in Europe looked down on proletarians who lived in permeable domestic units, spending and sharing space and income rather than accumulating and insulating within families. It also has parallels with the concerns of middle-class parents who see the youth as ‘oversharing’ in the social media, by which they mean ‘disclosing too much of oneself in public’ (see Widlok 2017: 165).

In my field research I often encountered doctors and development workers who kept cautioning the San and other hunter-gatherers not to share their tobacco pipes, drinking vessels, and sexual partners since this increases the danger of contracting contagious diseases. In the Covid-19 pandemic, again the dangers of sharing are being invoked, not limited to sharing (bodily) fluids but more generally to sharing the same space, even breathing the same air. The dominant view amongst those who have become unfamiliar with sharing is to delimit it rigidly. By contrast, among skilled and frequent practitioners, sharing tends to operate without rigid adherence to abstract principles of altruism, alms giving, or narrow kin support. It is often more open than that, and can be broadened but also at times narrowed. This raises questions, such as: Under which conditions may it be considered desirable to share? What are the limits and affordances of sharing? And how are these limits and opportunities culturally constructed and socially enforced?

Comparative studies across a variety of societies show that sharing regularly goes beyond individual households, and that repeated food crises lead humans to share more frequently but not automatically more widely (see Ember et al. 2018). When trying to answer the above questions properly, we therefore need to turn to individual cases studies. These are often taken from the ethnography of current and former hunter-gatherers around the world. This is not because the phenomena observed were limited to these societies but rather because theoretically interesting features were observed in these contexts that question recurring cultural preconceptions. For instance, the prevalent romantic but misleading idea that sharing is either a result of pure altruism or pure necessity has been put into question by observations made in Aboriginal Australia. The biased view includes the assumption that if you have at times too much of a certain item, you share it in order not to waste it. However, there is a different lesson that Fred Myers (1988) was taught by a Australian Aboriginal Pintupi man called Jimmy, which is mirrored in many ethnographic contexts: Sharing is not simply the consequence of economic needs and the ecological distribution of resources but rather it is instrumental in producing the underlying social conditions in the first place. It typically does not target what people are happy to give away anyway, but rather what they value and would like to keep. Jimmy asked Fred for cigarettes to be shared even though he did have some himself – which he, in the end, gave to Fred when he found out the anthropologist had given all of his cigarettes away already.

He also taught Fred to make sure to hide some of his resources so that he can dodge the constant demands and requests to share. In Aboriginal Australia, as in many contexts among (former) hunter-gatherers, sharing and demands do not contradict one another. Moreover, demands can take the form of accepted and conventionalised prompts that initiate sharing, but they can also take the problematic form of constant nagging and out-of-proportion asking and pretending to be in need (‘humbugging’ in Aboriginal English). Myers concluded that sharing was often initiated not by those who had something or had too much of something, but rather by those who were asking, an activity that Nicolas Peterson called ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993, see also Altman 2011). In these contexts people are granted the right to ask for things, and they find it morally difficult to reject a demand if one was seen to be able to satisfy it. This suggests that the practices of sharing were not simply a mode of resource allocation but all about dealing with social relationships in a particular way. While this is true for transfers between humans more generally, sharing seems to be characterised by a particular tension between autonomy and dependency (Myers 1988) in contrast to varying evaluations of dependency in societies dominated by market and gift-exchange (see Martin 2021).

Myers’ ethnography also debunked the assumption that sharing was an automatism that followed out of collective ownership or out of a lack of property rights in things. By contrast, the items that Pintupi foragers brought back to camp, such as gathered fruits or small game animals and whatever else their ‘country’ (the land they belong to) was providing, were quite clearly subject to very specific property rights. These rights were partly obtained through labour, when collecting for example, or through kinship and a sense of belonging to a particular country. And there was no automatism that translated these rights into transfers, but rather they were subject to protracted negotiations. Allocations and (re-)distributions of foraged foods, household and ritual items constantly changed. In most societies in which a lot of sharing is being practiced, people do have a choice either to include others in the sharing or to hide items from them. At the same time, they feel that what they part with is not ‘extra’ (like second-hand clothing that well-to-do urbanites in the Global North readily give away) but something that they readily and happily could use themselves. They may therefore only let go of it begrudgingly. The social rules of what constitutes forms of ‘co-ownership’ do vary culturally and so do the actual strategies of asking, taking, and ‘allowing to take’. The occurrence of sharing behaviour cannot be sufficiently explained by the economic and ecological pressures of a resource situation, even though these play a role. The same is true for absence of sharing: Sharing may break down under conditions of extreme shortage and it may thrive when things are abundant, but there is a lot of leeway in between, with culturally specific forms emerging in different contexts. On the one hand, sharing is an adaptive problem-solver for uneven resource distribution, but on the other hand it also involves problems since both nagging requests and inacceptable responses can become divisive. At the same time, the tolerance for open demands but also for attempts to hide and keep have been noted by ethnographers working in societies with a high incidence of sharing.

In other words, if sharing is neither an inevitable product of constant shortage, nor of boundless affluence, it depends critically on dealing successfully with an abundance of requests, on a sense of what constitutes a good response to requests and on what is appropriate access to items of value. It is in this context that being economically in need (or being in the position to provide) becomes relevant for judging which requests are appropriate. Sharing not only redistributes resources but it also recalibrates the social problems of navigating through multiple expectations, entitlements, relationships, and demands. Comparatively speaking sharing depends on what is of value to humans, as humans share more than they need to - and less than they are being asked for.

Sharing and access: gained, granted and demanded

If it is not scarcity or abundance by itself that explains sharing, what are the conditions that enable and encourage, or disable and discourage, sharing? The subject matter of what is being shared is an important factor. Some things are easier and more readily shared than others, and some things lend themselves to be used for other forms of transfer such as gift-exchange or buying and selling. Amongst hunter-gatherers, ‘country food’ items are more readily shared than purchased items, and small items collected while foraging are more readily kept for individual consumption than larger ‘bulky’ items such as big hunted animals, elephants, or whales, for instance (Widlok 2017: 92-8, see also Ready & Power 2018: 76). The latter may invite more specific forms of distributions because they typically involve more of a collaborative effort or investment and more elaborate infrastructure such as boats or traps that need to be maintained.

Many more things can be shared in an economic system than what those who are living in a market economy may think. Researchers working with the Aché people of South America noted that they received more than 80 per cent of all their goods through sharing transfers (Kaplan & Hill 1985). Food collected was more readily shared when out collecting than food bought back to the mission settlement, but it seems that the permeability of domains is again subject to social negotiation as items can move from the domain of buying to that of sharing and vice versa. Even in a capitalist market economy there are many transfers which are not buying and selling. About 60 per cent of the population in post-industrial societies make a living not by buying and selling their labour but rather through ‘other’ transfers (see Ferguson [2015: 20] and Widlok [2017: xiii]). These transfers include state-orchestrated payments of social security, the individual support of dependent family members, and other forms of ‘giving’ like inheritance or neighbourhood assistance, for example.

What is important to keep in mind for those living in a highly materialist society, however, is that sharing is not only and not always primarily about objects that change hands, but at least as much about those involved in the giving and receiving. It is as much about ‘sharing in’ the social relations of givers and receivers as about ‘sharing out’, i.e. the transfer of objects. Among prime objects that can be shared are also immaterial things such as time and visits, knowledge and skills, and experiences more generally. However, what is subject to sharing and what is not cannot always be predicted. Mbendjele central African foragers are happy to share most personal items but they sell songs and rituals (Lewis 2015). San share knowledge about the whereabouts of game animals and not only the meat of hunted animals (Biesele & Barclay 2001). And hobbyists and professionals in industrialised societies may be happy to share their informal insider-knowledge (see Lave & Wenger 1991) without sharing their salaries. In fact, it seems that much sharing takes place under the radar of economic thinking because it often takes immaterial forms and it involves many unmarked and mundane social interactions.

One of the common motivations of sharing is that it prevents accumulation, including the accumulation of power and the creation of dependencies. East African hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania are well-known for their sharing of meat. But even though their situation is one of relative equality, tendencies towards accumulation exist for them as well: Initiated Hadza men are reported to try to reserve some meat for themselves (see Woodburn 1998). Although they do not always succeed in it and although the quantity of meat may actually be limited, this shows a general problem that sharing responds to, namely the potential of turning the allocation of items into a tool for power play and privilege. In some cases, for instance the present-day mixed economy of Canadian Inuit, sharing is tacitly transformed into public and marked acts of generous gift-giving that invokes obligations and supports inequality (see Ready & Power 2018).

James Woodburn, who provided the Hadza ethnography mentioned, insists that sharing has to be distinguished from other forms of transfer, such as gift-giving, because of its social implications: While gift-giving can serve as a tool for gaining status (as a generous and affluent person) and for creating dependencies and obligations, sharing works in the opposite direction. Gift-giving allows people to accumulate status and to create followers through giving and this holds for reciprocal gift-giving with obligatory counter-gifts as well as for gifts that are not returned (Yan 2020). It is well understood as a system for creating mutual obligations, even dependencies, and for marking relationships between giver and receiver as special, also among hunter-gatherers. San foragers of southern Africa are known for cultivating friendships over time and distance through their hxaro exchange systems (Wiessner 1982) and the literature on potlatch in North America and on kula gift giving in Oceania and elsewhere is enormous (see Yan 2020, Widlok 2017). This literature has played such a major role in anthropology’s drive towards pointing at alternatives to the dominant market economy that accounts of sharing were initially often subsumed under forms of ‘reciprocal gift exchange’ (see Mauss 2004). However, sharing as a social practice runs counter to many features of gift-giving, such as public display, strategic dependency, status accumulation, and the creation of obligations, in so that it is now considered a social institution in its own right (Woodburn 1998; Widlok 2017).

It is therefore important to point out that not all reports about giving are instances of sharing – nor are they all about gifts. Gifts are predicated on the obligations of giving, receiving, and returning (Mauss 2004). Sharing, by contrast, can be unidirectional (Hunt 2000). Even if it is mutual, it does not create the same obligations to accept and the same calculated and anticipated returns. Rather, it can effectively decouple giving from receiving; it is not framed as ‘I give so that you will give in return’. This is typically achieved by simply allowing others to take, by not preventing them from taking an object or a share. It is granting a share without necessarily handing over things. This underlines the rightfulness of the share and understates the fact that it was provided by a ‘richer’ party towards a ‘poorer’ party. Leaving things for others to take decouples receiving from returning. It highlights the entitlement of the recipient to what is given rather than the entitlement of the giver on what is to be expected as a return. The mutuality we find in sharing is a far cry from the calculated reciprocity that characterises other transfers, including many forms of gift-giving. Although things often flow both ways in sharing, these flows can be very uneven, they can be delayed and diffused in many ways, and they do not allow for the conversion into accumulated political capital that serves to steer obligations. Hunter-gatherer ethnography does report on various ways of dividing an animal and to allocate specific pieces of meat to specific kinsmen. But this should always be read in the context of two important conditions: firstly, the processual nature of ‘waves of sharing’ and secondly, the levelling power of sharing to undermine lasting obligations.

‘Waves’ and ‘rounds’ of sharing have been observed in many cases (see Ichikawa 2005: 155). Frequently, a hunter is not the person allocating hunted meat and allocation rules may apply in a first wave of sharing that may privilege some (close kin or in-laws of the hunter, for instance). However, this does not prevent meat from being divided further and indiscriminately in subsequent waves. As a result, the resource may ultimately get distributed widely, not only to immediate or specific kin but frequently to anyone who happens to be present. ‘Sharing as levelling’ not only refers to the fact that sharing broadens the circle of people who have access to a good, but also that efforts are typically made to disconnect the act of giving from that of taking. This is most readily achieved by using intermediaries: Children are often sent to carry food from one house to another (Widlok 2017: 7). Others are frequently allowed to take rather than making them wait until they are being given. Thus there are moral rules but also simple practical features that prevent individuals from using sharing as a tool for converting what is given into specific obligations and as a means for ‘investment’ aimed at receiving specific returns. This is very different from prototypical gift-exchange systems (both in pre-colonial Oceania and in bourgeois birthday gift-giving) which is not incompatible with a careful record being kept of what is given, what is received, and what is returned as a gift. Sharing, by contrast, helps to diffuse the attempts to turn, for instance, hunting luck into a tool for dominating others and is therefore an important levelling mechanism to make societies more egalitarian. The combined effect of the waves of sharing and of levelling is that sharing basically continues until there is no more ground for making demands (e.g. when the animal is consumed) while gift-giving continues because it creates the ground of making more gifts in the future.

Drawing a sharp distinction, we could say that the obligation to give, receive, and return gifts is replaced by the opportunity to ask, to respond, and to renounce (Widlok 2017: 79). The opportunity to ask is enabled not only by accepted ways of requests and demands but also by a permeable ordering of space that allows potential recipients to make themselves present to those who have something to share (see Widlok 2021). The opportunity to respond shows in the debates that people have about what is a rightful share or what might be an outrageous demand. And finally, the opportunity to renounce allows people to let go of things that they cannot keep for themselves forever anyway. But this sharp analytic distinction does not preclude that, in practice, people shift and combine different modes of transferring all the time.

Sharing and expansion in online and offline communities

Ethnographers have observed many instances in which people tried to hide and insert into commercial transfers what was expected to be shared with others (see Widlok 2017: 94). ‘Borrowed’ clothes or other personal items often ended up being shared, in that they were never returned even though the givers were for a long time hoping to receive them back. In some contexts reported from Oceania, what missionaries considered ‘stealing’ was called ‘borrowing’ by local boarding school students and could at the same time be categorised as ‘sharing’ by the anthropologist (Strathern 2011). The rules for dividing ‘bulky’ resources such as whales and other big animals that are being distributed among Inuit and other Nordic hunters are another case in point where sharing and other modes of transfer come together. Having contributed to a collective effort such as a whale hunt gives individuals rights in certain parts of the animals. In Alaska, the captain, the harpooner, and the owner of the harpoon all get specific shares, but for the rest of the crew shares are equal independently of whether they participated for a few days or for the whole season - and about a third of the whale are ‘designated as the community share’ at feasts where everyone receives something (Bodenhorn 2005: 84). For smaller animals such as seals, there are elaborate gift-exchange partnerships that people cultivate and which should not be mistaken for sharing (as pointed out above, see Widlok [2017: 53-5]). Inuit examples of sharing from the literature have been important also in other respects. Inuit researchers were the first ones to point out that sharing often does not always ‘even out’. In other words, there may be net receivers and net providers in sharing systems (Pryor & Graburn 1980). Calculated ‘reciprocity’, giving so that one can calculate on a more or less equal return, is not what is motivating these transfers, since they occur without calculation and without things balancing out. Instead, a sense of ‘mutuality’ is indeed involved in that there is a strong expectation that everyone would need to share if they find themselves in the position to do so despite the common experience that some find themselves in that position more regularly than others. In terms of net results and in terms of motivation, strict reciprocity thus seems unnecessary for a sharing system to work, but a degree of mutuality is. This is particularly clear with regard to immaterial sharing, for instance, sharing time or a place to live and work, which requires mutual engagement, attentiveness, and recognition of equal entitlements as social persons despite inequalities. This mutuality that is built into sharing should not be confused with a logic of ‘do-ut-des’ (I give so that I receive). It is not a balancing ‘tit-for-tat’ expectation with balance-keeping (I give as much as I have received). Consequently, Inuit researchers have pointed out the importance of ‘non-material’ forms of sharing, above all sharing time with one another through visiting (Pryor & Graburn 1980). This is echoed by research elsewhere, for instance the importance of sharing a place to sleep in Aboriginal Australia (Musharbash 2008).

It is tempting to continue along these immaterial lines and also include forms of sharing that take place on digital platforms (see below). However, even in digital environments, established and distinctive modes of transfer can be observed. Thus, many transfers among software developers are akin to gift-giving (see Zeitlyn 2003), providing the accumulation of status. The developers of ‘shareware’ software such as Ubuntu also face a situation in which there is a threat of code being appropriated and abused for corporate ‘hoarding’ and accumulation by some while it is defended as freely accessible by others (see Widlok 2017: 159). At the same time, the sharing of content on many internet platforms is accompanied by the accumulation of marketable data by a third party that operates in the background. It seems, therefore, that the interplay of different modes of transfer is as much a bone of contention on large digital platforms as it is in small hunter-gatherer groups. The question that remains is whether sharing as ‘enlarging the circle of those who access what is valued’ is compromised by the size of the group within the circle.

Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), in which participants offer one another goods or services without the exchange of money (Hart 2000), are sometimes considered examples of sharing. That is because these modes of transfers provide members access to goods without participating in the general market or the money economy. Members can sign up to a platform or a noticeboard where they can trade in their particular skills or assets for what they need (e.g, a particular tool or someone to cut the lawn, take the dog out etc.). An internal currency often helps to store in a ‘time bank’ what can then be used in the form of vouchers to receive support from other members (see Widlok 2017: 145). LETS do not constitute sharing in a narrow sense because they are more like barter systems, as detailed records are being kept, often based on alternative currencies or vouchers. It has also been repeatedly reported that these systems only work up to a specific size that guarantees mutual trust (Widlok 2019a: 32). In any case a set membership tends to be a prerequisite for them, ideally supported by local, personal knowledge of each other that prevents free-riding. The primary goal of LETS is often not to extend the circle of participants but, to the contrary, to make sure that it does not extend beyond control and beyond the circle of trusted members. Correspondingly, these systems only provide small niches within the larger market economy. Recently, neighbourhood platforms have emerged which seek to carry the LETS system into the digital domain (Widlok 2019a). This has happened to sharing, too. What is new here is that online platforms are not only the tool for exchanges or transfers in the non-digital world but constitute an arena of sharing in itself, with individuals sharing knowledge in ‘how-to’ videos, as well as sharing ideas and swapping or copying music, pictures, and other forms of digitised messages. This has created the impression that sharing practices have received a boost beyond previous limits, to the extent that parts of the digital economy are sometimes called ‘the sharing economy’. However, it is important to be precise here, as the English term ‘sharing’ glosses over important differences.

Some acts of digital communication effectively concentrate attention instead of distributing anything or granting access to what is valued. In fact, sharing content via social media may be more like a demand on others to share attention, time, or support. It can also serve to accumulate followers and ‘hoard’ support. Just like spam messages, it is part of the often unsolicited and unwanted giving of what is not a value, but rather a burden. Thus, free software, sometimes known as ‘shareware’, frequently turns out to be malicious in that its recipients find it difficult to detect on or de-install from their computers. Moreover, social media publishing often confers value and status to the giver rather than being realised by the receiver who is literally degraded to being a ‘follower’ and not someone with a rightful share in a resource. Digital publishing and distribution can therefore be very unlike sharing, and more like gift-giving, initiated by the giver as an attempt to oblige the recipient to receive and return (see Zeitlyn 2003). Its precedent in the analogue world may be where surplus goods are put on the street for anyone to pick up – in many cases, things not particularly valued or wanted by others. The social implications of such acts of ‘getting rid of things’ are primarily the status creation for morally self-righteous providers who expect the supposedly needy to owe them gratitude (Widlok 2017: 147-51).

The English term ‘sharing’ has undergone a very peculiar development in recent years which confuses these modes of transfer, at least in part purposefully. English language corpora show that the notion of sharing has been widened to include many more objects in recent decades (John 2017: 26). Google analytics shows an increased pairing of ‘sharing’ with ‘caring’, and the sense of ‘sharing your feelings with’ others, which were not much used before but became widespread through the internet and social media (John 2017: 103). Communication scholars like Nicolas John conclude from this that the usage of ‘sharing’ has changed from a distributive sense to a communicative one. Here ‘being on a digital platform together’ is enough to constitute ‘sharing’, exemplified by the notorious ‘share’ button in several online social networks. By contrast, many anthropologists working in social environments in which distributive sharing is very strong noted that there was not one single term that would correspond to the English notion of ‘sharing’. Instead, people would speak about ‘helping out’, ‘supplying’, or ‘lending’ (see Widlok 2017: 19-20). Clearly, to talk about sharing and to practice it are two different things. But the problem we are facing is that talking about sharing is to some extent implicated in sharing practices. For instance, regular complaints about people no longer sharing can be part of a strategy of eliciting a share. In the Arctic case study mentioned above (Pryor & Graburn 1980), it emerged that those who talked most about the importance of sharing were not necessarily those who did the most of it and vice versa. Studying sharing may thus imply establishing technical terms that distinguish it from buying and selling and from gift-giving, rather than simply adopting the labels used by the agents themselves.

We are therefore well-advised not to be too ‘logocentric’, too hung up on labels, but rather to put the practices of sharing and its social implications at the centre of our attention. This includes paying attention to the language strategies that form a part of these practices. People may disagree on what to call a transfer, but their actions usually speak louder than their words. Moreover, given the moral connotations of various labels, they may be part of strategies to re-classify transfers. In the above mentioned cases from the Pacific, locals spoke of ‘lending’ what missionaries classified as ‘stealing’ (Strathern 2011). Similarly, when ‘car sharing’ first entered the market for short-term rentals, there were initially reservations to actually use the term ‘sharing’ as it was feared to carry negative connotations (John 2017: 7). Since then, many enterprises in the platform-based economy have employed the misnomer ‘sharing economy’ because of the positive sentiments that it has accumulated. The ‘disruptive’ economic strategies of UBER, AirBnB, Mechanical Turk, and so forth are primarily commercial and are not examples of sharing in a more technical sense. They make profit by opening up domains of life to market transactions that were previously not: for instance, giving others a lift as in hitchhiking or helping others out with odd jobs. The qualification ‘primarily’ is necessary here, because the combination and articulation between economic interests, moral aspirations, and change is an on-going dynamic (see Widlok 2019b). It is tempting to label everything ‘sharing’ or ‘gift-giving’ that does not look like a typical market exchange. But especially in complex transfers involving givers, takers, providers, revenue-recipients, and onlookers, several modes of transfer may be involved. What is central from an anthropological perspective is that different modes of transfer are interwoven with one another. Sharing may be a particularly old human practice. As a cultural practice, it has not disappeared when markets were introduced but it also does not automatically re-emerge when markets are shaken, disrupted, or expanded onto digital platforms. For sharing to be successfully (re-)instated or combined with other modes of transfer in the future, a number of preconditions will have to be in place.

Conclusion: the future of sharing

Sharing food or pressing a share button on a digital platform are not the same thing, as the latter too often amplifies ‘leader-follower’ and ‘influencer-influenced’ constellations and ultimately aims at generating profit. Actual sharing practices, by contrast, presuppose and reproduce positions of mutuality. So-called ‘peer-to-peer transactions’ on the internet may provide a degree of mutuality as well, but they often remain compromised, not least because platform providers accumulate information and keep knowledge about algorithms that structure digital interaction to themselves. There is typically no mutuality between platform users and those who hoard status or money as part of online publishing. Permeable public space is another prerequisite for sharing, again often compromised by gated communities and by ‘hoarding’, in the double sense of the word as accumulating and as concealing behind a fence (see Widlok 2021). Taxation may thus be a form of sharing when allowing poorer citizens access to collective wealth, but it also runs the danger of the third, redistributing party abusing access to the pooled resources. With respect to sharing, public control of state power may thus be comparable to public access to algorithms in the platform economy.

Some features of the digital environment may open up new space for sharing. After all, sharing has become cheaper, as creating digital copies and providing wider access to digital resources often comes at relatively little additional cost in comparison to creating and sharing material items. It is therefore not surprising that many digital platforms that are vast and allow ‘peer to peer’ exchange set high hopes in developing sharing both online and offline. However, not every initiative that uses the label ‘sharing’ manages to bring about actual social benefits, and several come with social and individual costs. So, the future will tell whether or not the expansion of the digital world will enable transactions that reduce strategic status aggrandising, foster personal autonomy, limit centralised resource control, and value renunciation rather than an economic ideology of endless growth. Such actual forms of sharing would limit boundless accumulation and could allow us to deal productively with inevitable asymmetries. Since sharing allows potential recipients to initiate transfers through requests and to avoid obligations to be used in power plays, it broadens access to material and immaterial items of value. As such, it has the potential to foster sociality between people - and maybe to improve on it, too.

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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Tax

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 23:04:37 +0000

Miranda Sheild Johansson

University College London

Initially published 14 Dec 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20tax

Abstract:

Paying tax or avoiding tax is part of everyday life across the globe. But what kinds of payments are taxes, and how do fiscal systems shape society? Taxes are often conceived of as a nexus of state-citizen relations and an intrinsic part of a social contract where they are exchanged for political representation and a level of state protection. But ethnographic evidence demonstrates that separating out taxes from other payments is not straightforward, and the motivations for paying tax, or collecting tax, are far from universal. In addition to shaping national and international economies, taxes construct social and political relations which cast citizens and communities in particular roles, such as ‘contributor’ and ‘wealth creator’, or ‘dependant’ and ‘scrounger’. As such, taxes are political tools that are wielded in processes of governance. Yet fiscal systems are also crafted from the bottom up, through taxpayer action and taxpayer logics, and gain meanings from the broader historical and cultural contexts in which they exist. In recent years, and in the context of multiple financial, environmental, and health crises across the globe, discussions about how we might build better futures have put the spotlight on taxes as a tool for redistribution. The logics that drive new tax policies and laws are embedded in specific concepts of tax justice and tax competition, as well as the relation between the sovereign state and the international community. Tax is a locus of many important themes, both academic and political. Understanding tax is crucial to understanding our societies.

Introduction

Taxes are ubiquitous in the lives of people around the globe, whether they are hailed or hated, paid or evaded; they are an unavoidable part of contemporary statecraft and everyday economic exchanges. But what kinds of payments are taxes—what is being exchanged, how do taxes gain meaning within their cultural contexts, and how do they structure our economic and social relationships? Why is inheritance tax—supposedly one of the great tools of redistribution—referred to as the ‘death tax’ in the US? Why do rural-to-urban migrants in Bolivia studiously avoid paying value-added tax (or VAT), but make great efforts to pay property tax? What is the difference between paying tithes to a church and taxes to a government? What do people expect in return for their taxes paid, and how do they justify their evasion of tax?

In the simplest terms, and in theory, taxes are a legally legitimated means by which to transfer wealth from individuals and businesses to governments, and then on to targeted areas of public provision, such as education and health, or to service national debt. Taxes are commonly levied on labour (income tax), profit (corporation tax), wealth and property (inheritance tax, wealth tax, property tax), and consumption (VAT), among other things. They are divided into direct taxes, such as income tax, which are collected directly from a person and business, and indirect taxes, such as VAT, which are collected on transactions and by intermediaries. Taxes are generally progressive (higher rates for higher incomes), or flat/regressive (the same rate for all, meaning those on lower incomes end up paying a larger share of their income if the tax is indirect).

Beyond these defining characteristics, taxes exist in political and cultural contexts where they shape social relationships and take on diverse meanings. The anthropology of tax explores these processes and ultimately how people make and unmake society through fiscal relations. This includes a focus on both the oppressive and liberating effects of tax. As a tool for oppression and subject-making, tax policies and practices have been analysed as Foucauldian disciplinary technologies that mould people into self-policing taxpayers (Hobson 2004; Likhovski 2007); they have also been scrutinised as part of hegemonic colonial systems where they are, at best, out of touch with taxpayer logics (Sheild Johansson 2018), and at worst, instruments of racist oppression (Willmott 2020). But taxes are also held as tools of redistribution in a battle against growing global inequality (Maurer 2008; Piketty 2014), the key to sovereign power in the face of dominant financial logics, and the means through which economically just and environmentally sustainable futures might be built.

In anthropology, tax has been approached in broadly three different ways: scholars have investigated fiscal systems, including politics, policy, and finance; they have studied tax collectors and the state’s desire for compliant taxpayers; and they have explored the perspective of taxpayers. These three areas of focus have all benefited from other areas of anthropological concern, such as the study of the state, citizenship, financial systems, money, bureaucracy, and law, as well as from considerable cross-disciplinary efforts. For instance, the work with and on tax collectors draws on business studies, organization studies, tax administration, and science and technology studies (Björklund Larsen 2017; Boll 2014a, 2014b; Oats & Wynter 2018). Likewise, scholarship focusing on taxpayer perspectives builds on both compliance work and social psychology (Kirchler & Braithwaite 2007).

In addition to these influences, fiscal sociology is the most apparent forerunner of anthropology of tax. In fiscal sociology, as popularised by the early twentieth century economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, taxes are recognised as having power beyond that of shaping obvious areas of influence such as policy and socio-economic relations to include the ‘spirit’, ‘cultural level’, and ‘social structure’ of a nation (Schumpeter 1918: 101, in Makovicky & Smith 2020: 4). More recently, and in the face of a growing global gap between the 1% and the 99% (the wealthy few and the majority rest), fiscal sociology has focused on how tax policies may structure race, class, and gender inequalities, as well as how they can be productively employed to battles these same inequalities (Martin & Prasad 2014).

While fiscal sociology certainly addresses many of the topics that are of import to anthropologists, it approaches tax somewhat ‘narrowly’. While it looks widely and inventively for the impact of tax, fiscal sociology often takes for granted that it is clear what kinds of payments taxes are, what kind they are not, and that all this is defined by governments (Meagher 2018). By contrast, an anthropological approach to tax tackles fiscal questions both broadly and narrowly. In a broad sense, anthropology does not work with one single definition of tax. Nor does it assume how tax works or what it means in different contexts. Its starting point tends to be that people’s definitions of tax will always be informed by a larger cultural context, including, but not limited to, other financial exchanges and the diverse ways that public goods and services can be produced (Bear & Mathur 2015; Kauppinen 2020). In other words, the meanings attached to taxes, the relationships and values they produce and are produced by, are deeply cultural. In a narrow sense, anthropology often explores how an official category of tax is defined and legitimised in a particular setting, as well as the power implications of these definitions.

The social contract and governmentality

A narrower understanding of the role of taxes in society often presupposes an origin story where tax is foundational to the social contract and the making of ‘civilised’ society, as imagined by Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes (1968 [1651]) and John Locke (1988 [1689]). In this view, citizens submit to the authority of majority rule and its associated institutions, relinquish certain rights (such as total freedom and self-determination), and pay tax to their state in return for social order, protection of themselves and their property, and political representation. In theory, paying tax within the context of a social contract marks inclusion and privilege. Its core logic involves a reciprocal relationship between states and citizens who are unified in their understanding of the aim of taxes—the creation of an agreed-upon communal world. Across time and space, expectations of what this supposed social contract should include has varied, although public infrastructure, services, and the defence of some human and social rights are often expected in return for submission to authority and taxes paid.

However, not only do these Anglo-European models of state formation provide just one story of state-society relations, they also naturalise the relationship between taxation, property rights, and political representation (Guyer 1992). This raises the question of whether the social contract and taxes have to go together at all, or whether their link is a mere ‘traveling idea’, albeit persistent and far-reaching, disconnected from ethnographic realities and with limited explanatory power (Makovicky & Smith 2020: 8). One does not have to look far to find examples where tax does not function as one side of a positive social contract. In particular, work in postcolonial societies has demonstrated the multiple and at times diverging trajectories of the historical emergence of tax use, policy models, or ideas of representation and democracy (Guyer 1992; Roitman 2005, 2007).

In her work on fiscal relations in West Africa, Kate Meagher (2018) argues that taxes in colonial Nigeria were not collected to pay for public services, but instead to cover the cost of the administration that created ‘order’ and protection for a select few. As such, the tax system hinged on an extortion logic, rather than one of a fair exchange. Another example can be found in highland Bolivia. Here, a social contract framing of taxes did not resonate with Indigenous populations because tribute and taxes were historically paid not in return for services or representation, but rather for protection of land and livelihood in a context where it was the state itself that was threatening to take these away (Sheild Johansson 2018, 2020). This resonates with the work of Mohawk sociologist Kyle Willmott, which details the resistance of First Nations peoples in Canada to the assimilationist project of tax-based citizenship by the settler state, and the preposterous offer of having to pay for one’s own subjugation (2020). In these contexts, paying tax does not confer citizenship, mark inclusion, or signal a state-citizen endeavour to bring about an agreed upon collective world. In fact, the opposite is often closer to the truth.

Beyond criticism of taxation by people who feel short-changed or oppressed by their states, high taxes and high public spending are also critiqued from a different political vantage point—that of libertarianism. From this perspective, a ‘big’ state that redistributes resources is unethical as it violates individuals’ economic freedom (Venkatesan 2020). While tax on property is perhaps the most galling to classic libertarians for whom the foundational principle of self-ownership, a kind of ‘natural’ liberty, generates unassailable rights to property (Venkatesan 2020: 143), so called ‘sin taxes’—taxes placed on goods which are deemed undesirable, or considered to have a significant cost on society, such as alcohol and sugar—have recently resulted in heated public debates in many countries about the legitimate reach of government. ‘Sin’ taxes open up questions of biopolitics, the disciplining and management of bodies and life processes by the government, and the ethics of employing taxes to do this (Venkatesan 2020: 143).

These discussions dovetail with explorations of tax and governmentality (the powerful processes by which the state makes governable subjects through the shaping of habits, aspirations, and beliefs), although the latter’s approach is driven not by libertarian ideology, but by an analytical focus on power. In this body of work, tax relations are understood as both a means through which to shape citizens into governable subjects (that is, tax relations as tools for governmentality), and the goals of broader processes of governmentality which will result in compliant taxpayers (Likhovski 2007). An early Foulcauldian analysis of tax as a disciplining technology is Alistair Preston’s ethnography of a music production company in the United Kingdom (1989). Here, accounting practices became the nexus for both surveillance and self-disciplining, with the business absorbing implicit and explicit injunctions of a tax collection authority, rendering itself legible to the state. These injuctions included complex bookkeeping systems, new financial language, and the revised organization of time. A more comprehensive claim about tax as a mode of governmentality is that the taxpayer identity is, by its very nature, not just a self-governing political subject, but one that legitimises the liberal state (Wilmott 2017: 259). The ‘taxpayer’ is a political actor and an idea, one that holds the government to account through scrutinising public investments, denouncing overspending, voting, and being invested in the government. In this sense, the taxpayer supports and morally justifies a liberal state and its associated limited public spending.

Why do people pay or evade taxes, and why does the state collect them?

Within the broader tax literature, the topic of compliance, or why people pay, is a significant area of study, often connected to political projects that aim to increase fiscal revenue. It predominantly considers compliance to be a societal good, as long as it is ethically enforced. In anthropology, questions of exchange logics are motivated not by a commitment to compliance, but by an interest in understanding how fiscal logics are culturally embedded, how they relate to ethical conversations about a ‘good’ society (Venkatesan 2020: 142), and how diverse fiscal perspectives shape economic landscapes and economic subjects. The allocation and movement of resources within societies, and the political implications of this, has always been a core topic of anthropology, with the discipline exploring theories of redistribution (Polanyi 1944, 1957), sharing (Ferguson 2015; Widlok 2017), mutual taking and demand-sharing (Bird-David 1990; Peterson 1993), payment (Maurer 2008), and systems of immediate return amongst egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities who resist accumulation and property relations (Woodburn 1982). In particular, exchange and reciprocity are classic fields of study in anthropology relating to the socio-politics of resource management (Malinowski 1922, 1935; Mauss 1954 [1925]; Lévi-Strauss 1971 [1949]). Anthropologists tend to consider reciprocity as key to a pre-capitalist social contract that created stability and society itself. In this thinking, reciprocity is not simply motivated by material interests, but also by a moral order and sense of mutual dependence.

Building on anthropology’s rich scholarship on reciprocity to look at taxes, Lotta Björklund Larsen (2018) has shown how taxpayers in Sweden approach their fiscal relationship from a perspective of reciprocity and a ‘fair share’. For instance, one of her interlocutors, a self-employed plumber called Anders, justified taking occasional jobs off the books by pointing to the frivolous spending of politicians. His tax evasion was not rooted in a rejection of taxation as such, but rather concerned with a re-balancing of the fiscal relationship, ensuring it was fair. Anders thus perceived his occasional evasion as an act that protected, rather than undermined, the moral integrity of the fiscal system. Björklund Larsen’s ethnography demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal thinking in Swedish fiscal cultures, and the imagining of the fiscal system as a moral one. The taxpayer view that fiscal exchanges must be connected to a mutually-agreed-upon moral order is also illustrated by Mireille Abelin’s work on Argentine elites who justify their tax evasion by arguing that the Argentinian state gives nothing in return. Nor, they claim, has it succeeded in becoming the ‘modern’ state, or moral order, that they wish to contribute to (Abelin 2012a: 333-7). Tax evasion, or fiscal disobedience (Roitman 2005), can thus be a political act which aims to criticise a range of state behaviours perceived as falling short of the desired moral order.

Reciprocity is one fiscal logic that may undergird tax, but as anthropologists have explored, the perceived and desired character of fiscal relations can vary widely. For instance, on the Istrian peninsula, Croatian business owners lamented the introduction of a digitised VAT system, not because they did not wish to pay, but because the immediate debiting technology built into the system took control away from them over the timing of payments and credits (Smith 2020). This, in turn, left them automatically out of pocket at the moment of transaction and then vulnerable to the whims of their buyers, large businesses who often did not settle their bills for long periods of time. The Istrian business owners lost trust in the state and rejected the VAT tax, not because they did not see a return for their taxes in terms of services, but because the state was unable or unwilling to promote a fiscal structure and a wider economy which ensured larger companies honoured their debts in a timely fashion, or looked out for the small business owner. This case also shows that technology and policy design play out in socio-economic and politicial contexts, and opposition to a particular tax may be rooted in its mechanics, as opposed to whether the exchange itself is appealing.

In peri-urban, highland Bolivia, recent rural-to-urban migrants eagerly paid property tax and commercial licence tax in order to secure living and selling space in the city and the ability to pursue a livelihood beyond the state, not in exchange for representation or public services (Sheild Johansson 2020). In Nigeria, recent fiscal expansion meant that receipts of ‘land use charge’ paid became crucial to secure fragile property claims (Goodfellow & Owen 2018 ). In this case, regular payments of land use charge produced letters issued by Lagos State declaring that a citizen was ‘a good one’; these letters, which evidenced occupancy and moral standing, could be mobilised against threats of eviction as well as occasionally used to claim relocation compensation if state-enforced eviction did happen. In the examples from Bolivia and Nigeria, utilitarian desires to ensure security and make a living were the motivating logic of paying tax, as opposed to a notion of a fair return. Notably, in Bolivia and Nigeria, taxpayers disaggregated their fiscal systems and examined the different exchanges that each tax implied, as opposed to viewing their taxes as part of one overarching moral exchange with the state.

Paying tax has also been explored as a technology through which to shore up citizenship claims by migrant workers, both in order to gain legal rights in their place of residence and to satisfy a yearning to have their labour validated as productive by their host states and fellow residents (Vicol 2020). Conversely, paying tax can be experienced as a form of forced submission and inclusion into oppressive regimes, as exemplified by the relationship between First Nations peoples in Canada and the colonial settler-state (Willmott 2020). Finally, tax scholars have argued that fiscal behaviour may not just be rooted in any particular motive or exchange logic, but that it fundamentally depends on a combination of material entities, such as bureaucratic forms and IT systems, and social actors. Studying tax relations by focusing on ‘socio-material assemblages’ foregrounds that taxation is a distributed form of action that involves multiple actors, habits, character traits, accounting systems, larger structures, such as the procedures for receiving social benefits, and even popular discourses, like that on the financial crises (Boll 2014b: 300).

A crucial point for the analysis of the fiscal policy of contemporary governments and for any deeper understanding of fiscal exchange is to appreciate the fact that a state’s motive for taxing a population is not simply one of fiscal revenue. Instead, fiscal policies are employed by governments to structure and influence the national economy and a range of social relations, including those of health and education, family finances, gender and work, property ownership, consumer habits, cross-generational sharing of wealth, and many more. In the case of the UK government, for example, it has been suggested that the income that tax brings to the treasury is secondary to its role in stimulating the economy and managing demand—through re-distribution, subsidies, and levies—as well as investing citizens in their nation-state and encouraging electoral participation (Murphy 2015: 53-65). In this way, fiscal policy can be purposefully used to create both markets and citizens.

What are taxes? Meanings, imaginaries, and values

How taxes and fiscal relationships are imagined, both as real and ideal, depends on their wider economic and cultural contexts, including other ‘tax-like’ exchanges. Research on ‘informal economies’ has offered insight into the myriad unofficial payments that populations all over the world make to state and non-state actors and which are categorised by interlocutors and scholars as ‘tax-like’, as they offer representation, infrastructure, service provision, and security, amongst other things. Some examples of these payments include bribes to local state representatives (Roitman 2007: 202-3), fees to unions who offer political representation (Lazar 2008; Sheild Johansson 2020), contributions to community organizations (Meagher 2018), and tithing to churches (Kauppinen 2020; Meagher 2018). While these payments are not made directly to the state, they are made and claimed in order to finance communal worlds. As Meagher has noted in Nigeria, these payments by ‘informal’ populations to non-state actors, as well as unoficially to state-actors, contribute considerably to the public sphere, including public sector salaries (through bribes), and security (2018), and confound the state-citizen axiom of taxation by displacing the state. They also contribute to collapsing the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors as separate spheres of economic action, by showing how state insitutions rely on both ‘informal networks’ and sources of funding to produce and deliver public services and infrastructure (Owen 2018). Lastly, they challenge a narrow definition of public goods as state-delivered resources (Bear & Mathur 2015).

While these tax-like payments may not always be made with the aim of supplanting taxes, they make up a universe of monetary transfers within which taxes exist and therefore function as a contextual evaluation of official taxes (Kauppinen 2020: 39). One such payment that has been explored anthropologically is tithes in Ghana (Kauppinen 2020). The tithe payers’ assessments of the ethics of the fiscal exchange with the state was profoundly shaped by their perception of their reciprocal relationship with God, who offered divine favour and eternal life, and led them to expect the state to deliver ‘decent lives’ in a broad sense.

The vitality of these ‘tax-like’ payments begs the question: is there analytical purchase in blurring the boundary between taxes, as defined by governments, and the collective pooling of resources beyond the state? Recent work on a Catalonian anti-capitalist cooperative explores this possibility (Bäumer Escobar 2020). The cooperative was set up to create an alternative economic space, with its own banking system, currency, distribution network, and exchange of goods and services. It also supported tax evasion by allowing members to use the cooperative’s tax registration number when conducting business. In this way, self-employed people could exchange a hefty minimum tax payment to the state for a far lower fee to the cooperative. Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar introduces the concept of ‘fiscal commons’ to talk about the common pooling of resources beyond the purview of the state, arguing for the recognition of multiple and interconnected fiscal systems.

What kind of payment a tax is, and what kind of activity should be taxable, is in part a question of values. The indeterminacy of values (Guyer 2004), and the inherent problem of commensuration in tax systems—that is, the problem with making different activities and values equivalent with one another—is explored in Matti Eräsaari’s study on Helsinki timebanks (2020). In the Helsinki timebanks, time was accumulated and exchanged. Here, one hour of work of any sort was ‘worth’ one ‘while’, and the local marketplace was constituted by ‘whiles’. Thereby, labour was demonetised and re-valued through the measure of time. In a move to formalise the timebanks, the Finnish government demanded the whiles be converted to a taxable form (such as labour or traditional currency) and calculated according to what the associated professional service might cost on the labour market, arguing that by exchanging whiles of professional services, the timebank members were in fact evading tax. This example demonstrates that what and who is deemed as taxable is a question of negotiation—when does a favour in return for a favour become a job ‘off the books’? It also reveals that governments need fixed values in order to tax, such as a currency, and a common mode of commensuration, such as a market, to manage a fiscal system.

Tax policy, tax payment, and tax evasion are all acts that create and reflect state-society relations, financial flows, and imaginaries of them. As Viviana Zelizer (1994) has shown in relation to household budgets, people experience money differently depending on where it comes from and where it is going—money is ‘earmarked.’ In the same way, larger flows of money are named and variably understood, with different moral and social elements attached to them. For instance, direct and indirect taxation produce very different sets of relationships and responses. Paying ‘sin’ taxes, such as VAT on alcohol, tobacco, or sugar might be experienced as very different from paying income tax, which is a tax on a person’s labour. The taxes paid by a small business, a so-called ‘wealth creator’, may be viewed as a different money flow from the income tax paid by a health worker in the public sector (whose wages can be construed as being paid for by the taxpayer).

Inheritance tax is another emotive example of how taxes are experienced as more than just flows of money. While inheritance has been shown to be a key driver for wealth inequalities (Piketty 2014), and clearly counters societal aims of meritocracy, it is often referred to in the United States as the ‘death tax’ (Yanagisako 2018: 5). This is because it is experienced as a levy on the moment of death, rather than the wealth itself. Its critics also claim that inheritance tax intervenes inappropriately in the unity of the family (Hegel 1991 [1821]: 178, in Beckert 2008: 254). For instance, at a moment of death, a house, which may already be experienced by the deceased’s family members as their home, is suddenly ‘in transfer’, taxed, and then re-ascribed as belonging to the heir/s, or lost if the tax bill cannot be paid. In this way, inheritence tax individualises property relations. While all these taxes are just movements of money, plusses and minuses on a ledger, the money flows are experienced through broader values such as productivity, bodily autonomy, work, and kinship—as Zelizer (1994) argues, the notions of provenance and acts of earmarking matter.

Fiscal landscapes are not just imagined by taxpayers, but also by collectors, both the policy-makers and the enforcing officers. Tax collection depends on legibility, and as tax collectors often navigate partially blind through fiscal landscapes, with much of the informal economy hidden from them, they need to construct representations which allow them to act (Boll 2014a). The constructions of these representations, which are both utilitarian and ideological, matter to how these collectors then conduct their jobs, such as which buinsess sectors they choose to investigate (Boll 2014a). This in turn shapes fiscal behavior by creating a greater opportunity to evade tax within certain sectors (Kirchler & Braithwaite 2007).

Debt and credit

Imaginaries and value-inflected meanings of taxes gain character through their roles in relationships of debt and credit. Talking about taxes in terms of credit and debt, benefits, and the broader national economy, tends to invoke moral acts and positionalities. For instance, public employees may be cast as indebted to private sector taxpayers. Similarly, benefit recipients might be viewed as receiving a credit from the taxpayer (private and public sector ones), while in a monarchy, the royal family could be said to owe their standing to the taxpayer, as they are funded by ‘taxpayer money’, a morally charged flow of money which signals a demand for frugality and virtuous spending (Willmott 2017: 256). At first glance, relations of credit and debt appear to be the opposite of reciprocity as they are about the prolonged absence, or the deferring, of exchange. But are these exchange relations really materially different to those that get labelled as reciprocal, such as paid income tax for access to public health service, or is this difference a product of power and imagination? Self-employed day labourers may argue that it is in fact they who are owed, due to their provision of cheap labour or their continued payment of VAT, a regressive tax. Alternatively, large business owners often use the logic that they produce wealth and jobs and therefore should not be excessively taxed. In their mind, in fact, the government or society owes them. One does not have to think long to realise that debt and credit are not natural, clear-cut categories but instead defined through government policy and enforced through law. The designation of debt, therefore, requires power-laden stories to make clear who owes whom (Graeber 2011).

As well as creditors and debtors often being interchangeable, it is not obvious that one position is desirable and the other undesirable. Whether and what kind of debt is cast as ‘bad’ depends on the social context. As Janet Roitman argues, there is socially sanctioned wealth that has its roots in debt, while other types of debt are just seen as a negative economic indicator (2003: 212). Additionally, the notion that the debtor is the subjugated and the creditor the one in power is simplistic. As Marcel Mauss (1954 [1925]) showed almost a century ago, the ability to borrow can be a sign of being enmeshed in social relations and of holding a certain status. Moreover, debt is often linked to investment—a wealth generator with positive connotations. Since debt and credit are thus social categories, rather than purely financial ones, the study of tax tracks how some actors in a fiscal relationship come to be marked as debtors and others as creditors, as well as investigating the moral baggage, and political impact, of this.

These discussions about the moral character of debt can equally be applied to the debt relations of nations. While the popular debate in many countries indicates that national public debt is currently viewed as a failure of proper budgeting, this has not always been the case; at times, state endebtedness has enjoyed the reputation as a positive cornerstone of society. In the wake of the British ‘Financial Revolution’ in the late seventeenth century, when the Bank of England was established and public debt was first created through the issuing of government bonds, the ‘national debt was not only positively valued but celebrated’ (Daunton 2001: 119, in Abelin 2012b: 76). Public debt gave birth to public credit, which allowed investment in society, and agreed upon ‘goods’. Taxes were fundamental to international debt relations, as they paid the interest of public debt, not because they financed public goods directly (Brantlinger 1996). Public and political attitudes to national debt have thus shifted through history, and the labelling of debt relations in moral terms always need to be examined as partially political acts.

Global flows

In the face of powerful global financial markets and growing economic inequalities, both within and between countries, cross-disciplinary conversations about how we organise and how we should organise our economies have become increasingly poignant (Ferguson & Li 2018; Haskel & Westlake 2018; Piketty 2014). As a powerful tool for redistribution, tax plays a central role in these conversations. A series of recent events have brought international attention to systemic failures of contemporary capitalism, and the inadequacies of fiscal systems to redress them. Amongst them are the bailouts of large banks by taxpayers after the 2008 financial crisis; the public scrutiny of large multinationals such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google in 2012 and 2013 who had to defend their unfeasibly low tax bills and creative accounting in televised hearings; and the 2016 leak of the Panama Papers, which exposed the tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance of high-net individuals. These events laid bare the extent to which the wealthy evade taxes, and the complicity of much fiscal policy that in the last four decades have protected financial markets through deregulation and the cutting of multiple taxes (Piketty 2014, 2019; Stiglitz 2012). Indeed, governments have long been instrumental in the making of offshore tax havens. For instance, British colonial authorities, backed by London money markets and the British civil service, created the first offshore tax havens in the Pacific in the early 1970s (Rawlings 2004: 340).

Tax is one obvious technique by which governments may intervene in global financial flows, ensure wealth redistribution, and close loopholes to battle the ‘paper games’ of the very rich. But while fiscal complicity between governments and the rich has often been the norm, fiscal intervention, and policing tax behaviour, is also not so simple in the twenty-first century. The fundamental problem with taxing our way to more just economies is that taxes are levied by national governments, whilst capital moves swiftly beyond borders. Concerns about how national governments can feasibly tackle large scale ‘tax avoidance’, ‘tax havens’, international ‘tax competition’, and the fear that these phenomena would erode governments’ abilities to reallocate resources for public benefit are not new. But digitalised, contemporary capitalism make these challenges even more significant.

To respond to the demand by nations to share taxing rights, whilst also protecting businesses and organizations from being doubly taxed, international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been tasked with developing global approaches to tax policy (Mugler 2019: 381-2). The OECD’s work, such as the Harmful Tax Competition initiative, which attempted to name-and-shame, peer pressure, and ‘blacklist’ tax havens—including small, postcolonial non-OECD states—into compliance with international norms, has became a fruitful object for anthropological investigations (Grinberg 2016; Maurer 2008; Mugler 2019; Rawlings 2007). This work asks questions about the making of ‘soft law’ (non-binding norms, agreements, and standards of practice), the relationship between private arbitration, international norm-making, fiscal sovereignty, and democracy. It also explores how international tax experts negotiate new rules and regulations for an increasingly digitalised economy (Mugler 2019). As part of analysing and implementing new tax rules, these international experts need to accommodate the demands of structurally privileged actors that shape the international tax debate, such as tax professionals working in multinational enterprises. Yet they are also tasked with curbing such privileges in an increasingly politicised field and under the scrutiny of the international community. While tax debates have long focused on the relationship betweent the nation-state and its citizens, this emerging work asks the important question: what do people owe each other beyond the state?

Conclusion: an anthropology of tax

Tax plays a powerful role in organising national economies and shaping social relationships. Fiscal systems also shape peoples’ perceptions regarding who contributes to society; where wealth is created; the place of the state in the lives of people; the place of people within money flows; and the moralities of profit, debt, and sharing. The anthropology of tax has only recently consolidated as a field of study and all these themes offer fertile avenues of further exploration. This line of research will produce both a deeper understanding of tax itself and a chance to use tax as a lens through which to explore wider state-society relations. As an ethnographic object, tax involves the explorations of multiple scales, from the individual taxpayer’s perspective, and the logics of policy makers, to the functioning of large financial systems. As such, the discipline of anthropology uniquely brings these different scales of fiscal life into the same conversation, enabling us to understand tax as a simultaneously personal, political, economic, and ethical aspect of our social lives.

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Note on contributor

Miranda Sheild Johansson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL Anthropology and holds a PhD in anthropology from The London School of Economics. Her work explores the dynamics of fiscal systems and the sociality of tax, with a particular emphasis on the Andean region. Miranda is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the anthropology of tax.

Dr Miranda Sheild Johansson, UCL Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW, 07540 581 975, m.johansson@ucl.ac.uk

Cooperatives

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:23:57 +0000

Theodoros Rakopoulos

University of Oslo

Initially published 20 Aug 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20coops

Abstract:

Cooperatives are a main means of organization for economic activity, generally operating on principles of equal membership and members’ democratic control of their means of livelihood. Co-ops have developed as modern institutions aiming to tackle problems created by contemporary capitalism and its associated dependency on wage work. Co-ops operate and interact in context, mobilising ways of human contact that anthropologists usually study (kinship, community, ethnicity, and local belief systems). Anthropologists have expressed interest in co-ops since the origins of their discipline. They tend to investigate the ways that members interact within co-op organizations, as well as the ways co-ops interact with and within broader social frameworks. Key issues arising in understanding cooperatives are how co-ops negotiate industrial democracy, how they respond to market influences, and how they interrelate with broader civil society and social movements. Anthropological critiques of cooperatives distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis, and highlight cases where institutional cooperation does not work in favour of local communities. However, anthropologists have equally celebrated cooperatives as institutional forms that shield communities off from exploitation and promote social solidarity.

Introduction

While cooperatives (co-ops) often stand in the shadow of private companies and state institutions, they do in fact constitute a major organizational form around the globe. According to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), a staggering ‘12% of humanity’ are cooperative members, and thus have an immediate livelihood relation to different forms of economic cooperation.^[1] The ICA defines cooperatives as ‘an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise’.

Although there is mindboggling variation as to what principles co-ops around the world actually follow and to what extent they do so, there are some main ideas permeating the cooperative movement globally. More specifically, cooperatives tend to adhere to a set of organizational beliefs and practices, often identified as ‘the Rochdale principles’. They were set out by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844 in Rochdale, England, where the first recognised cooperative operated (in that case a consumer cooperative). These principles can be summarised as follows: in terms of members, a co-op has to have voluntary and open membership, as well as democratic member control and members’ economic participation; in terms of operation, a co-op has to have autonomy and independence, while pursuing the education, training, and information of its members; lastly, in terms of its broader social ties, a co-op has to express concern for the community as well as cooperation with other cooperatives. The Rochdale principles are normative, if open to some interpretation. What is important to note are that their key ideas pretty accurately summarise the main issues that cooperatives face, as well as summon the key terms that social analysis has associated with cooperatives: democracy, autonomy, community, common needs, participation, and joint ownership.

Cooperativism can include a variety of free forms of association and common ownership of some means of production, distribution, or consumption. A good first way to classify cooperatives is thus to divide them into three sorts: cooperatives of production, worker cooperatives, and cooperatives of consumption and distribution. Co-ops are often producer-based, where autonomous holders – for example, farmers – share one asset, such as a winery. Such cooperative forms may focus on just one aspect of agrarian production (in this example, vinification) and they may not engage farmers in the whole year in a cooperative setting but only during the harvest and distribution period (Ulin 1996). Co-ops are sometimes worker-based, where workers co-own an asset such as land, or where they work on an asset owned by the state (Rakopoulos 2018). In industry, a workers’ co-op would own the whole array of the means of production, most often a factory (Azzellini 2015). Finally, co-ops can operate as consumption and distribution institutions: there, the members commonly own an asset, for instance a supermarket, and collaborate with producers that provide them with products. These consumer co-ops are particularly common in large cities of Europe and elsewhere, as well as in local food movements (Durrenberger 2018). They very often promote products of producer co-ops. This creates an ‘ecology of cooperation’: cooperation among co-ops, and thus implicit promotion of the principles of cooperation in wider society.

Co-ops can operate in agrarian or industrial contexts, as well as in the countryside or in the city; they can be gender-based, for instance by creating women’s co-ops (Stephen 2005), or focus on class or ethnicity. The variety of cooperative forms is therefore wide but what they tend to have in common is that they work on the premise of, as a minimum, two pillars regarding control. The first pillar is democratic control: co-ops employ a one person-one vote system in their member assemblies. These meetings organise their inner workings, and are foundational for any kind of cooperativism. The second pillar is collective control: co-ops work on the grounds of sharing an asset collectively across members – be it a factory, a shop, a plot, or even a set of practical ideas.

A history of anthropological and sociological interest

Anthropological interest in cooperatives has been evident since the early twentieth century, when Marcel Mauss wrote about them. Mauss, an anthropologist most known for his analyses of gift-giving, was actively involved in cooperativism. His participation in cooperative socialism is well-documented and remains relevant to this day (Hart 2014: 35; Graeber 2014: 67). In order to fully comprehend the political project of Mauss, we need to read his most famous work, The gift in tandem with his political writings (Hart 2007: 5, Hart & James 2014). In those, we encounter a person of action, who takes an active interest in cooperation (specifically, a cooperative bread-making factory), as he sees a horizon of social emancipation and egalitarianism in the phenomenon of co-op development in France.

Mauss insisted that cooperatives brought about ‘practical socialism’ (Fournier 2006: 125). This engaged relationship with a social organization that strives for workers’ rights and a fair distribution of resources is at the heart of his view of economic anthropology. After all, the anthropology of the economy explores the idea that different but possible ways of organising economic activity can not only be imagined in theory but can be brought to fruit in historical reality. This drive brought Mauss to engage with cooperatives in France and address the English Cooperative Association across the Channel. Speaking before the First National and International Congress of Socialist Cooperatives (in July of 1900), the young anthropologist-cum-activist stated,

We will educate him [the citizen] for his revolutionary task by giving him a sort of foretaste of all the advantages that the future society will be able to offer him. ... We will create a veritable arsenal of socialist capital in the midst of bourgeois capital. (Mauss cited in Graeber 2001: 151)

Mauss’s appreciation for the cooperative movement, which marks anthropology’s first engagement with the phenomenon, is not too different from the erstwhile take of Karl Marx on the issue. Like conventional wage labour, cooperativism commenced in Marx’s area of ‘ethnographic’ expertise – Northern Britain in the mid-nineteenth century (as noted, the first co-ops had come to life in Rochdale in the 1840s). Co-ops aimed to do away with distinctions between capital and labour, while Marx, then a young revolutionary yet to engage with Britain, was studying alienation from work (1844). Marx saw in cooperatives the dialectics of capitalism’s present contradictions and the seed of future social developments, a sort of future that is present already in current circumstances.

Marx, anticipating this future-in-present, criticised but did not denounce the cooperative movement. He saw, in the movement’s attempt to bridge capital and labour, firstly a preliminary victory of the latter over the former and, secondly, ‘the husks of the old system and the seeds of the new’ (Bottomore 1991: 111). However, for that victory to be complete, political power, and not localism, was required. Marx’s interest in cooperativism was underpinned by a belief in a dialectical relationship among state, society, and market. However important the particular local cooperative struggles, they needed to articulate upon a wider reality of mostly antagonistic politics. Therefore, an attention to scale is important for understanding cooperation. For Marx, cooperatives were founded upon a historical contradiction:

The cooperative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e. they use the means of production to valorise their own labour. These factories show how, at a certain stage of development of the material forces of production, and of the social forms of production corresponding to them, a new form of production develops and is formed naturally out of the old. (Marx cited in Bottomore 1991: 571)

That historical reality that engaged Marx and Mauss astounded the socialist and member of the Fabian Society Beatrice Potter Webb, who toured Lancashire in the late-nineteenth century and realised that co-ops were part of local culture (2016 [1920]). By then, Webb had already written a classic book on what was the reality of the vivid cooperative movement in Britain (2013 [1896]). She was a proponent of cooperative federalism as a political and economic system. It was to be a system of ‘cooperative wholesale societies’, in which all the members of federated cooperatives are cooperatives themselves. It might sound complicated but, especially among consumer cooperatives, it is very much a reality in many places: in Britain, for example, the Co-operative group (founded in Rochdale in 1844) is a cooperative wholesale society composed of hundreds of retail co-ops in over 3.700 locations. They employ more than 60.000 people, and amount to over 4.5 million members overall.

While Mauss’ life and work illustrate that economic emancipative experiments are not imagined or planned but experienced in the present, and Webb was interested in describing what we could call an actually existing cooperativism, Marx took a critical distance from this focus on the present. He favoured a more historical approach. Meanwhile, the sociologist Emile Durkheim, while investigating the division of labour in society (1891), established his own understanding of the idea of solidarity, a key principle in cooperativism. According to Durkheim, social solidarity is stretched across the distribution of labour in modern institutions and is part of the collective consciousness of members of society. This notion of solidarity is far more encompassing and general than common-sense versions of it. It can be seen to present a macro version of the social principle on which cooperatives operate. Durkheim has been described as ‘a kind of guild socialist’ (Morris 2005), that is, someone who does not favour class conflict but general cooperation according to trade skill. He is also known to have sympathised with cooperatives, seeing them as associations of social solidarity.

Key issues

Cooperatives have posed a variety of interesting questions since social theory first began engaging with them. They seem to supercede the antithesis between bosses and workers, something associated either with dreams about an egalitarian future (as in Marx) or with an original affluent society of people that work together in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Cooperatives have also been identified by many, including anthropologists, as a form of ‘industrial democracy’ (Holmström 1989), an idea that points to the desire of making an economy democratic, egalitarian, and participatory. They equally seem to work best within a wider ‘ecology’ of cooperative associations and federations (Ingram & Simmons 1995). There is a holistic aspect to the efficiency and influnce of cooperation: the more co-op units exist, and the more cooperation there is among them, the better this is held to be for social equality and democratic participation. A web of cooperation may allow, for example, to control as much of our own time and everyday experience as possible: working in cooperation with others in conditions we collectively choose, or shopping and consuming produce we collectively choose with other cooperators. This goal, of gaining greater democratic and egalitarian choice over the means of our social existence, suggests both an attention to local economic and social facts and an attention to how these scale up towards larger markets and networks of political power.

One way to understand how anthropology has dealt with cooperatives and their wide spread around the world is to consider three key issues: movement, scale, and egalitarianism. Anthropologists tend to discuss them with reference to the real, empirical realities studied through ethnographic work. Major findings arising from their studies include: that scaling up has been challenging for co-ops around the world; that there is indeed a tendency for co-ops to fuse within broader social movements; and that internal democracy in cooperatives is heatedly debated and contested.

Ethnographic attention to cooperatives has mainly focused on two regions, where many cooperatives operate today: Europe and Latin America. Latin American studies began already in the mid-1970s (Nash 1976) and stretch from Mexico (Ferry 2004) to Argentina (Bryer 2012). In Europe, as noted earlier, cooperatives were seen in the context of a variety of local claims, often in tandem and in dialogue with debates on ethnicity, political ideology, and worker mobilization. Contributions came principally from Spain (Kasmir 1996, Greenwood & Gonzalez 1992), as well as Italy (Holmström 1989, Sanchez-Hall 2019), France (Ulin 1996), and Greece (Rakopoulos 2014).

Democracy and egalitarianism

Co-op politics tend to be born of practitioners acting together in a collective fashion. They are less based on blueprints of overarching ideologies but instead they inform such ideologies through practice (Whyte 1999). The widely-discussed cooperativist experiment in Mondragón, the largest cooperative in the world, attracted much scholarly attention. Mondragón is based in the Basque country, and is active in a number of industries, including manufacturing, retail, and services, while emplyoing c.80.000 people today. Since its inception in the 1950s, the cooperative avoided being encompassed by totalising ideological systems: it was ‘a reaction against -isms’, like ‘socialism’ which was perceived as an ideology rather than a practice, but also Taylorist specialization and division of labour. Workers referred to the verse of poet Antonio Machado, ‘the path is made walking’ (‘se hace el camino al andar’), to explain their processual pragmatism (Whyte & Whyte 1991: 257). In that way, ‘cooperativism was true socialism—not just one way to achieve it’ (Whyte & Whyte 1991: 253). The difference to much political socialism lay in its model of practice: cooperation was defined as being about doing and experiencing a social reality, rather than applying or running after an idea.

Indeed, one of anthropology’s main contributions to cooperative debates has been to distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis. Ethnography is an empirical and realist approach to knowledge, one that does not primarily apply theory to reality, but that aims to be inspired by reality. This has proven ideal to witness the practical and hands-on economic democracy that cooperativism suggests. In many ways, ethnographies have provided ‘test cases’, fact-checking whether co-ops actually live up to ideals of social equality and worker democracy. While some research embraces current cooperativism as ‘horizontalist’ (Sitrin 2012), that is, being radically egalitarian as opposed to working on labour hierarchies, many other contributions are critical. Some have presented a ‘disenchanted’ vision of cooperative practice – including two important books that came out in the same year: Sharryn Kasmir’s classic study The myth of Mondragón (1996), but also Robert Ulin’s book Vintages and traditions: an ethnohistory of French wine cooperatives (1996). Kasmir’s study, focusing on a workers’ cooperative, presents the Basque experiment in Spain as a ‘myth’. The co-op’s leadership trumped labour rights but considered union representation to lie at odds with cooperative membership. This stalled the potential for social egalitarianism. Ulin, focusing on producers’ cooperatives in the Southwest of France, notes that there has been an anti-elitist tendency in winemakers’ cooperation. However, their internal division of labour is nothing short of capitalist, marginalising smaller wine growers. These insights from France and the Basque country have significantly nuanced our understanding of co-ops as institutions, shining light on the ways in which their immediate livelihoods are not necessarily egalitarian and might indeed reproduce capitalist exploitation. Anthropologists have accounted for the different cleavages caused across different lines of order and normativity in members’ lives (for instance, the schism between those who share common interests with management and those who do not [Kasmir 1996: 198]).

What is more, research has shown that co-ops can include practices that are outright socially and physically destructive. In Sicily, a co-op form has been created, as a group of Mafiosi decided to form their own wine-making cooperative and in so doing conjured autonomous producers around them (Rakopoulos 2017b). Reaping social consensus through co-op participation proved very beneficial for the local Cosa Nostra, until the co-op disbanded when its leaders were arrested. Catalonian examples also include a murky undercurrent to the local cooperative history, as the Franco regime saw in the cooperative the desirable work equivalent of the ‘home’ – a corporatist, close institution (Narotzky 1988). In Catalonia, fascism found in the ideology of the casa and the cooperativa two pillars of social cohesion that complemented a Francoist vision of society as an organic field, with no social upheaval or internal contradiction. In this picture, cooperatives worked well as institutions of further worker exploitation (1997). In these examples, co-ops do bring about labour democracy and egalitarianism because they never sought to do so: they were founded by hierarchical, violent institutions (the fascist state and the Mafia), to seeking to create sense of worker cohesion and a lack of class conflict.

Other critical analyses were initially not concerned with cooperatives, but focused on kinship (Ferry 2003), ethnicity, and struggles around identity instead (Kasmir 2002). These issues might, in the first instance, seem to draw attention away from cooperative forms. Yet, kinship and ethnicity can in fact be inherent aspects of how cooperatives function and how they are experienced. Cooperatives may pool from the immediate kin group to recruit members, and people may see the house as a cooperative. Both examples show that close interconnections between family and co-op life exist (Rakopoulos 2017a). The study of cooperatives may thus point out that efforts for greater democracy and egalitarianism can be based on communitarian and family-based underpinnings.

Other encouraging studies exist: in a recent book on the fascinating history of forty years of ethnographic engagement in a ‘Red’ area of Romagna, Italy, cooperatives have been celebrated as a great achievement for social equality and progress (Sánchez Hall 2019). As the author notes, ‘I came to feel like the first anthropologist in the history of the discipline whose informants thought she came from a backward culture to study their most advanced ways’ (2019: 2). Similarly, Mark Holmström presents a story of utter fascination with Italy’s industrial democracy (1989). He sympathised with cooperatives and went on to investigate them further in the Spanish context (Holmström 1993). Investigative journalist Robert Oakeshott even went so far as to marry his life commitment to cooperativism with making the ‘scholarly case’ for co-ops (1977).

Scale and markets

Engaging with world markets reshapes not just cooperatives themselves but also the localities in which they are situated. Markets may affect the very cosmology that surround resources and people. Mexican cooperative miners, for example, have been shown to attach a varied array of signification to the precious metals that they unearth, depending on where these metals are in the ground, in their homes, or in a global exchange circuit. Thinking about how co-op members in Mexico conceptualize the silver deposits they mine, as well as the ways that this mineral enters international markets, shows that idioms surrounding family and patrimony may help make sense of the deposits they work on (Ferry 2003). Their language that presents the silver they mine as inalienable, however, coexists with its commodification. When the silver enters commercial circulation, its exchangeability eventually triumphs over its inalienability, and relations of exchange trump relations of production (Ferry 2002: 342-3). These mutually exclusive idioms and tensions between lived community (with its environmental sensitivity) and abstracted market brings us to the core of current and, potentially, future anthropological concerns with cooperative worklives and industrial democracy.

Thinking about co-ops as part of wider markets highlights questions of scale and how cooperatives as local, community institutions relate to broader systems in which they and their members operate. This tension between local thinking about cooperative environments and the global changes influencing labour, work, and co-op products animates other Mexico-focused studies (Stephen 2005). In the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Mexico had signed, co-ops offered a shelter from global capitalism in its neoliberal form. Similarly, work drawing on Mexico (Chiapas), as well as Italy (Sardinia) shows how cooperatives can be both in dialogue with large-scale corporate forms and an expression of a more community-based economy (Vargas-Cetina 2011). They can provide their members with some engagement with the market, whilst attempting to improve people’s living conditions by protecting them from the market’s unbridled forces, standing in opposition to exploitative market pricing and protecting labor rights (Vargas-Cetina 2009: 128). Thereby they have historically provided buffer zones of sociality to abjure capitalism’s aggressive individualisation (Vargas-Cetina 2005; cf Curl 2009), and indeed shaping notions of collective selfhood (Stephen 2005: 254; cf Nash et al. 1976). The idea is that practices of cooperation are conducive to sentiments of belonging to forms of a ‘collective’ rather than an individual self.

While co-ops thereby often stand in opposition to market logics, this is not always the case. European food cooperatives, for example, both need markets and scale back from them, focusing on self-sufficiency during times of austerity (Homs & Narotzky 2019). While coops are most often aiming to reinvest locally only (indeed, they are at times legally obliged to do so), they can also be active proponents of global capitalism, investing in companies that are located offshore (Kasmir 2016).

In actual fact, then, there is a variety of praxes and different logics informing cooperatives: from self-sufficiency and an anti-capitalist, even anti-market tendency, to one that redirects co-op priorities from egalitarianism to a corporate logic. Having a clear understanding of this multifaceted nature of cooperatives is particularly pressing, as capitalist commodification often hinges on community economics, at times turning cooperatives into so-called ‘coopitalist’ institutions (Errasti et al. 2016).

The relation between cooperatives and the expansion of capitalist production is thus tenuous and open to modifications. On the one hand, cooperatives have become a key strategy of grassroots movements to improve the livelihoods of local populations. On the other, they are part and parcel of public policies in favour of growth-based development, rising productivity, and higher employment rates. The adaptability of cooperatives has become particularly obvious in Latin America during the decade of the 2000s, as cooperatives like unions had a great deal of interactions with politically progressive governments of the ‘Pink Tide’, an array of left-leaning yet often growth-based governments.

Movements and civil society

As the introduction has made clear, cooperatives are political institutions as much as they are economic ones. Frequently, they are therefore close to social movements, endorsing for example ‘postcapitalist and anticapitalist politics’ (Miller 2015). Co-ops may unite and fuse with other social movements or even antagonise them, as has been the case with the trade union movement (Kasmir 1991, 2000). Their explicitly political nature requires attention to the values co-op members and contractual workers endorse, not just at work but also in their lives and livelihoods. Co-op members’ attempts to better their livelihoods have been rooted in specific concepts, of which ‘community’ has been one of the most important. This is not least due to the fact that co-ops are tightly linked to the notion of ‘community economies’ (Gibson-Graham 2006: 110-27), expressing broader concerns and representing wider local interests, rather than those of their stakeholders as in the case of conventional corporations. Yet, relying on the notion of community can also be problematic, when it describes actual praxis that is is in fact detrimental to egalitarian principles (as in the Sicilian mafia, see Rakopoulos 2017b: 167-172).

The practicality of cooperatives is important, as co-ops are active parts of what has been recently called the solidarity economy (see, e.g., Laville 2010). Promoting social solidarity, they are potential channels of social change in times of crisis (Gibson-Graham 2013). Their capacity for ‘prefigurative’ politics, that is, to show how economic life beyond corporate capitalism and labour exploitation is indeed possible, brings them in coalition with social movements (Maeckelberg 2012). It is the social relations that are produced within and around cooperatives that inspire both a need to liaise with other movements and a need to survive by forming coalitions (Rakopoulos 2014). Cooperatives as community paradigms (Nash 1976), coalesce with similar grassroots collective organizations to become part of the broader milieu of movements galvanised in areas such as the Mexican Chiapas. Here the co-ops’ issues start taking the shape of wider civil society issues.

This broader influence of the cooperative movement speaks to the issue of whether, and to what extent, co-ops are resilient institutions. Anthropologists have been useful in pointing out that we need to see co-ops not only as institutional associations with innate durability, but actually as ephemeral associations in a state of flux and volatility (Vargas-Cetina 2005). For example, cooperatives tend to be associated with crises. They frequently come into being to salvage jobs that would otherwise be lost in economic downturns. This was the case in Argentinian recuperated factories, post-2001. The fluctuating nature of cooperatives may be one of the reasons why this institutional form has persisted over time.

The blend of co-ops into networks of similar grassroots organizations of care, provision, self-help, and mutuality has been called a ‘social economy’ (Bryer 2012). Co-ops in Argentina, for instance, have established this social economy by taking over factories and other corporations that had gone bust (see Lewis 2004), inspiring people in Italy to follow suit (Orlando 2019). The ‘social responsibility’ that cooperatives take on board is at once a source of inspiration and a struggle for their members (Bryer 2010), who wish to show that they are part of ‘something bigger’. The movements that inspire them can be historical utopias whose present residues have taken new paths – like Zionism in contemporary urban Israel (Russel 1995). They can even be residues of a utopian past, like collectives that still operate in the face of the Soviet Union’s collapse (Humphrey 1998). At any rate, cooperatives have necessarily always operated in a broader climate, an ‘ecology’ of mutual and necessarily political associations (Lomi 1995).

Conclusion

By mobilising participation and community engagement cooperatives teach us two interesting lessons. Firstly, they play a salvaging role for labour, land and its produce, in the name of local communities and in the name of democratic ideals. These protective features of co-ops are twofold: against external forces, such as the market or the state, coops are meant to salvage local life, while internally, they aim to protect their members and their means of production. They provide shelters from globalising, un-redeeming powers of greater scale (as, e.g., per Stephen 2005; Vargas-Cetina 2005) and save jobs in transition and crises (Sitrin 2012). Thereby, co-ops often play the role of enclaves from which people can defend themselves against dispossessions of all sorts. Security of people, safety for work, protection of labour rights and the environment, as well as a relative decommodification of some cooperatively-held assets are the main aspects of this protective function.

Secondly, co-ops elucidate important debates about political economy and social life at large. They enable people threatened by unemployment to procure labour, grounded in an ethos of self-help and often building on existing social relations. They thereby have evolved from a set of ideas that recognised the conflict of capital and labour, aiming to bridge what may be unbridgeable (Restakis 2010). It is for these reasons that the anthropological literature, by and large, is committed to questioning whether cooperatives actually promote egalitarian values, and why anthropologists are often sympathetic to co-ops. This entry has focused primarily on topics to do with democracy, scale and social movements. By way of concluding, it pays to reflect on how social science has possibly helped the actual development of cooperatives.

In criticising the distinction between civil society and the state, anthropologists have asked how cooperatives became a technology of government for working people and poor populations. This critique has helped some cooperative organizers reflect on how they should not lose sight of the egalitarian principles of Rochdale when developing their co-ops. What is more, the importance of ethnicity, kinship, gender and identity in shaping cooperative practice cannot be underestimated. People participate in co-ops as gendered persons and often through their kinship networks, and co-op practice cannot take place without accounting for these realities. This empirical insight has helped contemporary cooperative movements to embrace local kinship idioms, belief systems, and community forms. Highlighting local practices in similar movements has been part of engaged anthropological thinking (Durrenberger 2018). Thus anthropologists have been avid developers of participatory action research, which allows for exchanging knowledge and expertise between researcher and interlocutor, often both members of the same cooperative organization (Gibson-Graham 2006).

Cooperative platforms also exist in anthropological thinking and practice: the online forum known as ‘Open Anthropology Cooperative’ worked for a few years to bring together thinkers and practitioners of the discipline from around the world in a digital platform. Cooperative open access publishing has also been widely thought about and informally practiced, creating online scholarly communities that render their work available to the wider public. Locked behind paywalls, anthropological publishing is, like that of all academic publishing, under the control of corporate entities. Yet, cooperative open access publishing has been democratising knowledge to a good extent, even if often through informal means. It is this spirit of cooperation that characterises anthropology, a discipline that works not with ‘subjects’ or ‘samples’ but with ‘interlocutors’ and ‘research participants’. In many ways, anthropology is cooperative by definition.

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Note on contributor

Theodoros Rakopoulos is associate professor in the Social Anthropology department of the University of Oslo. His research has focused on cooperatives: antimafia co-ops in Sicily and co-ops in the Greek solidarity economy. He has also published on silence, conspiracy theory, austerity, and mafia. He is author of From clans to co-ops: confiscated mafia land in Sicily (Berghahn 2017) and editor of The global life of austerity (Berghahn 2018), while his new book project is on the commodification of citizenship (“golden passports”) in Cyprus.

Theodoros Rakopoulos, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. theodoros.rakopoulos@sai.uio.no

[1] International Cooperative Alliance (available on-line: https://www.ica.coop/en). Accessed 10 August 2020.

Money

Felix Stein — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:31:52 +0000

Allison Truitt

Tulane University

Initially published 27 Mar 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20money

Abstract:

Money is a formidable subject — an intimate object in our everyday lives, a claim over resources, and a topic of academic inquiry. Textbooks define money by its various functions, e.g., as a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a unit of account, and a store of value. While anthropologists also reckon with these functions, they are equally concerned with money as a social process, a material object, and a political token, concerns that lead them to emphasise money’s diversity and instability over its universality and coherence. This entry highlights four areas of inquiry in the anthropological literature on money: (1) debates over what counts as money; (2) investigations into money’s role in maintaining and overturning social boundaries; (3) studies of monetary pluralism in light of the failure of state-centric monopoly currencies; and (4) approaches that engage the role of technology in creating new platforms and networks for creating and distributing money. By way of concluding, the essay addresses how anthropologists reflect on the future of money.

Introduction

Most definitions of money begin with its functions. While varying in their elaboration, these functions usually include a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a unit of account, and a store of value. Upon closer inspection, we see how these functions are just starting points that open up additional questions, including how price or value is constructed; who or what authorises money; how people use different units to express hierarchies, solidarities, and identities; and even how money as a store of value or asset is protected. Because anthropologists confront a great diversity of objects that channel value, they are less concerned with identifying a universal conception of money, turning instead to wonder at the ‘breathtakingly ambitious project that [anthropologists] set out, simply by defining Melanesian and African currencies, the greenback and the “Euro” as part of the same domain’ (Guyer 1999: 245). Even archaeologists no longer assume coinage is a familiar medium to be studied in isolation from other contextual evidence—coins described in an archaeological context tell a different story than when any coin find is assumed to represent commercial value or exchange (Haselgrove & Krmnicek 2012). Challenges arise not simply because of the range of money objects or the diversity of their uses but because of how money travels beyond the horizon, along pathways not always visible to its participants (Hart & Ortiz 2014: 475). Given these dilemmas, scholars now argue money may be better understood as a process, ‘inextricably social, inherently dynamic, complex, and contradictory’ (Dodd 2016: 88), and one usefully approached through the material and political systems that create and govern money, whether payment systems (Maurer 2015), central banks (Holmes 2014; Riles 2019), or even mining for bitcoin (Ferry 2016; Zimmer 2017).

This entry considers debates about what counts as money, and then addresses how money mediates social relations and identities. It next examines what happens when people manage multiple currencies, particularly when state-centric monopoly currencies unravel and monetary pluralism is on the rise. Finally, the entry highlights those platforms and infrastructures that channel value, exposing the stubborn materiality of money.

What counts as money?

When we begin with the function of money as a means of exchange in the marketplace, we privilege utilitarian need over other values (Guyer 1999: 242). This starting point is reinforced by the popular view that money emerged out of barter, a resolution to the problem of the ‘double-coincidence of wants’, in which each participant fails to possess what the other wants and so requires a third medium to initiate and complete an exchange (Menger 1892). Anthropologists argue this story is better understood as a myth for several reasons. First, evidence for this claim is built not on the historical record but from examples conjured up by scholars themselves (Graeber 2011: 37). Second, archaeological records suggest that the idea of money preceded the object, a ‘virtual currency’ that encoded information in accounting systems, such as the knotted strings made by the Inca, or Mesopotamian clay tablets. Only later did money circulate as physical objects such as tokens (Graeber 2011: 40), a point made by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, who highlighted the role of the state in creating a unit of account to express value (e.g., a token) over money as a commodity (Hart 2005: 168). Finally, and most importantly, insofar as myths do political work, the claim that money originates in barter reinforces the dominant values of capitalism, including the sanctity of private property over inalienable possessions and the emphasis on exchanging equivalent rather than asymmetrical values (Graeber 2011; Hart 2005: 161; Guyer 2004). It also mystifies the role of the state or political authority in conjuring money. Anthropologists, as we shall see, have different stories to tell about money.

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists promoted empirical fieldwork as a method to avoid researchers’ biases and prejudices. They were concerned with documenting trade relations and other sorts of exchanges, such as ceremonial exchanges and life-cycle rituals. When confronted with the immense range of objects that people used in exchange, from shells to axe blades to cattle, anthropologists questioned whether such objects counted as money. Bronislaw Malinowski (1921: 14) famously declared that axe blades, shell necklaces and arm shells, and pigs—highly valued among the Trobriand Islanders—were not money. Nor were those objects likely to become money because, according to him, the islanders did not need a ‘common measure of value’. Instead, in the Pacific, shell necklaces and arm shells projected the reputation of men, demonstrating how their value was irreducible to a common standard. Elsewhere, however, shells did convey value over long distances. In Africa and Asia, cowrie shells served as a convenient currency—easily recognisable by their colour and shape, difficult though not impossible to counterfeit, and highly transportable (Şaul 2004). Malinowski’s contemporary, Marcel Mauss, cautioned that defining money in terms more relevant for European metropoles than Pacific Islands would only foreclose the possibility of focusing on its social significance in extending and even repairing relations (1990: Note 29, 100-2).

This debate set the stage for how anthropologists conceptualised non-state and non-standard objects that fulfilled some but not all of the functions of money taken for granted today. Such objects came to be called ‘primitive money’, in opposition to ‘modern money’ issued by a single issuing authority like a state bank (Dalton 1965). Other terms came into play, including ‘special-purpose money’ to denote objects restricted to certain kinds of people and types of relationships, in contrast to ‘general-purpose money’. Could, then, any object in circulation serve as ‘primitive’ money? Mary Douglas (1958) posed this question about cloth woven from the raffia palm. Among the Lele, a group in what was then the Belgian Congo, people wore the cloth, and while it quickly wore out, it could not be purchased; instead, people exchanged the material as peace offerings, gifts upon the delivery of a child, and even as a mortuary gift. These conventions ensured that older men received or wove the cloth, while younger men borrowed it, thus remaining indebted to their seniors. Raffia cloth, Douglas argued, had not evolved into a form of money because it circulated but without buying and selling; again, a claim that rested on an a priori definition of money as mediating market transactions, not social payments. Raffia cloth also raises the question of whether the physical stuff of money matters. If money represents exchange value (Menger 1892) or indexes social relationships of credit and debt (Graeber 2011), then the medium is either neutral or a ‘veil’ that conceals those underlying relationships. Yet the patterning of exchange relations, such as bridewealth, point to the specificity of relations and political processes that support money’s materiality. In societies where bridewealth involves paying respect to elders, even money and other goods are displayed so they are ‘seen by all, measured against one another, and displayed to function as memory devices about those prior obligations’ (Maurer 2018: 13).

These so-called ‘primitive currencies’—pigs raised by kin, raffia cloth woven by elderly men—circulated against the backdrop of an ever-widening set of state-issued currencies and expanding markets (Wolf 2010). Anthropologists analysing their difference initially drew on evolutionary paradigms, arguing that ‘primitive currencies’ would evolve into, or be displaced by, ‘modern’ ones. A well-known case is the model of co-existing ‘spheres of exchange’, in which Paul Bohannan (1955) described how members of the Tiv ethnic group in western Nigeria organised their transactions into three hierarchically-ranked spheres, each one defined by the object(s) that circulated as currency. The lowest sphere of exchange was concerned with subsistence. Here people exchanged foodstuffs and everyday utensils. The middle sphere mediated prestige through transactions with cattle and metal bars, and the highest sphere designated rights over dependent women and children. While these spheres were distinct, they were also permeable. People occasionally traded iron rods downward for foodstuffs or upward as social payments for marriage. In the nineteenth century, however, colonial administrators viewed metal rods as money and established a rate of exchange with the new coinage, which then circulated as an ‘all-purpose currency’, eventually collapsing the spheres, and, by extension, the social relations and cultural values held by the Tiv. Frustrated elders cursed money as bride payments increased and foodstuffs were trucked away to larger markets (1955: 69).

This story of money dissolving customary arrangements and social bonds has proven to be remarkably enduring among anthropologists, a myth that opposes culture and money (for a critique, see Maurer 2006). Like barter, Bohannan’s model also has significant limitations. For example, he does not account for how people came to possess metal rods in the first place. These objects did not just circulate in contained spheres; rather, some rods originated in Europe and then moved across Atlantic Africa as people converted them into assets with greater longevity and security than other currencies or objects (Guyer 2004: 30). Consequently, anthropologists now emphasise asymmetrical values, stressing how the value of objects shifts across different social and political landscapes (Appadurai 1986). People seek to realise gains in their conversions, propelled by competition, war, and conquest as much as by trade.

By the mid-twentieth century, as money proper coalesced into a paradigmatic form of state-issued national currencies, so did the story of money’s evolution from commodity-money to coins and paper notes backed by precious metals to state-issued currencies. Today, however, anthropologists recognise how debates over ‘primitive money’ staged other dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the assumed ‘savage’ and self-declared ‘civilized’, allowing standard monetary objects to signal the arrival of the ‘modern’—impersonal, objective, and impervious to the particularities of historical and cultural difference (Nelms & Maurer 2014: 45). Once we accord non-standard variants the status of money, we can address questions such as when something is money, where something is money, and for whom something is money (Agha 2017: 300). What comes into view in asking these question is ‘moneyness’ as a relational property between objects and subjects (Zickgraf 2017). It is not that alternative forms of money express solidarities, hierarchies, and differences, and modern money does not; instead, we may want to conceptualise not just what money is but also when and how things and ideas work as money (Maurer 2006; Nelms & Maurer 2014: 39).

Money at the threshold of persons and relations

Anthropological interest in money has engaged concepts of neoclassical economics as well as those of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century European philosophers, who reflected on money through the provocations of industrialization (Marx 1977 [1867]) and the seduction of urban metropoles (Simmel 1990). For anthropologists, the question was whether money gave rise to a particular worldview, or whether it reflected specific historical and social circumstances. In the book Money and the morality of exchange, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry argued that money had no intrinsic meaning; instead, it was an existing worldview that gave rise to ‘particular ways of representing money’ (Bloch & Parry 1989: 19). They also emphasised broader patterns, noting how across different societies, people evaluated the morality of transactions in relation to different temporal orders. In short-term activities, such as bargaining in the marketplace or spending a windfall from gambling, people tended to express values of competition and acquisitiveness. Over the long-term, however, they evaluated monetary transactions in relation to moral and even cosmological orders. Farmers in Kenya, for example, referred to the gains from the selling of land holdings that did not benefit them in the long-run as ‘bitter money’ (Shipton 1989), while young men in northern Madagascar working in sapphire mines spent their earnings or ‘hot money’ in daring ways, signalling their rejection of their place on the social landscape (Walsh 2003).

Through earning, spending, saving, and even investing, money mediates personhood in multiple ways, as we saw above with young men in Madagascar. In the post-Civil War United States (from the 1870s to 1930s), as household incomes increased and consumer goods became more widely available, the meanings associated with wages for men and women diverged (Zelizer 2017). Men were considered to earn a ‘family wage’, sufficient enough to support spouses and children, whereas women received ‘pin money’, even as wages, intended for incidental expenditures (Zelizer 2017: 27). In Southeast Asia, where scholars long associated women with markets and money, anthropologists found the wives of Malay fishermen and Javanese batik makers handled money, not because they had more power or status than their husbands, but because they were seen to domesticate money by channelling it for household expenses (Brenner 1998; Carsten 1989). Such gendered conceptions of money have spurred microfinance organisations to promote their activities as empowering women. Yet joint-collateral loans made to groups of women, in which all borrowers are equally responsible for repaying the loan, can heighten the vulnerability of female borrowers. Loan collectors in Bangladesh, for example, relied on social codes of honour and shame to recover loans, which has led to some women being ostracised from community life (Karim 2011). In Paraguay, microfinance organisations instrumentalised women’s social ties via group-based loans, whereas men were seen as autonomous subjects and so responsible for only their individual share (Schuster 2014).

The many ways in which money relates to worldviews and personhood shows that how we assign meanings to transactions matters. For example, measurements of the GNP (gross national product) exclude those activities that are said not to produce economic value such as government transfers, charitable donations, family gifts, and bequests, even though they involve money (Gibson-Graham 2006). Yet money is promiscuous, often crossing the interpretive boundaries that people seek to maintain (Akin & Robbins 1999: 7). In capitalist societies, people tend to oppose commodities and gifts for ideological reasons, an opposition that reasserts money’s proper place in the market (Bloch & Parry 1989: 9) and highlights gifts as subjectively constituted (Weiner 1992; Strathern 1988). However, money can be a powerful gift itself, evident in the energy that people expend to disguise the economic nature of transactions (Bourdieu 1977), or invoke the ‘perfect gift’, to resolve the contradiction between commodities in the marketplace and gifts in the family domain (Carrier 1990). For migrants, money now constitutes the ‘internal essence of the transnational family today’ (Gregory 2012: 392), evident in how remittances are intended to secure a place for the migrant, supplementing their absence (Cliggett 2005). This role of money is so powerful that in some countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, the overall economic value of remittances surpasses that of major exports in the home country.

Yet the meaning of money as gift is highly unstable. It may spur recipients to imagine idealised capitalist landscapes (Small 2019) or even to re-arrange social relationships. Young Thai women who migrated from rural farming communities to cities seeking work in factories are a case in point. They have been shown to try to reconcile their family obligations and roles as dutiful daughters who remit their earning to their parents with their desires to spend these earnings on expressing themselves as modern women (Mills 1999). Consumption practices enable them to constitute social selves, but they may bring about new forms of indebtedness. The expansion of shopping malls in Latin America and post-apartheid South Africa, for example, has contributed to growing consumer debt. Salaried individuals now enjoy new possibilities of enrichment as they become eligible for consumer loans that they, in turn, lend to others, creating a ‘money-go-round’ aimed at aspirational consumption (James 2014). In the face of the pleasures associated with the expanding consumer goods market, combined with a volatile banking sector, people come up with new strategies to improve their lives. For example, in Nepal, urban residents participate in dhukuti, whereby a group contributes a specific monthly sum to engage in consumption, much like rotating savings and credit associations yet redirected to allow members to participate in consumer markets (Bajracharya 2018: 94). Thereby, money extends sociality, even though its physical form is neither fixed nor constant (Dodd 2016; Yuran 2014). Its flows erode some relations but expand and extend others, potentially creating a ‘human economy’ (Hart 2017: 5).

Money mediates cosmological worlds as well. In China, people used different replicas of money as offerings to gods, ancestors, and ghosts, their hierarchy secured by specific material objects (Wolf 1974; Feuchtwang 2001: 19). In Vietnam, where a similar relationship to money prevails, people contend with a post-war landscape where they offer replica US hundred dollar bills to both gods and ghosts, materialising the changing relations with the dead in which the hierarchy of gods and ghosts no longer pertains (Kwon 2007). Likewise, in Cuba where political legitimacy rests upon the revolution, practitioners of Ifá, a divination cult, offer money to the orichas, deity-figures presumed to exert divine influence over people’s everyday life (Holbraad 2005). In the lowlands of South America, peasants forced to work on expanding sugar plantations sought to increase their earnings by drawing on the logic of capital—the power of money to beget more money. During baptismal rites conducted by Catholic priests, godparents-to-be would ask that peso notes be baptised instead of the child, a ritual that exposed the metaphysics of capitalism, where making money was elevated above human life (Taussig 1977: 137). In a princely polity of Madagascar, the ritual use of coins served a different purpose—to channel sacred ancestral power (Lambek 2001). The coins placed in the mouth of the deceased were not those issued by the contemporary state but ones that predated colonialism and mercantile trade, notably the slave trade, exposing how royal power ‘is derived ultimately from violence . . . a life for a life’ (Lambek 2001: 754). The use of money for metaphysical ends—appeasing ghosts, blessing coins, and conveying ancestral power—encodes not just cosmologies but also legacies of economic and political upheaval. No wonder, then, that people engage in gambling, an activity that reimagines money by decoupling value from labour, investment, and return (Pickles 2019).

Monetary pluralism

How people and institutions manage money’s various functions is a vital concern, especially in the Global South, where monetary pluralism has long prevailed. Monetary pluralism refers to how people juggle not one but many currencies. In postcolonial settings, state-issued currencies have never entirely displaced indigenous media. In Papua New Guinea, for example, shell valuables are still used in exchange, especially in contexts where young men have more access to cash than older men (Foster 1999: 221). Even the foundation of ‘hard currencies’, so called because they serve as storing and protecting wealth in money, can be unmade and remade. In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the US dollar-gold convertibility, a move that engendered new sources of insecurity and profit (Gregory 1997) and eventually ushered in a new regime of central banking based on inflation targeting and price stability (Holmes 2014).

Why, despite the multiple forms of money, do conceptions of it remain so stubbornly state-centric (Guyer 2012)? One answer may lie in that state currencies reinforce the idea of national markets and the nation as a collective body (Helleiner 2003). That said, national currencies have never been coterminous with the boundaries of modern states, some mediating trans-border exchanges, while others, like the US dollar and the euro, traverse state borders and challenge national sovereignty. In socialist and post-socialist states, the appearance of the US dollar signalled the ascendance of the market (Lemon 1998; Truitt 2013). However, in Haiti, people uphold the fictional ‘Haitian dollar’ (alongside the national currency known as Haitian gourdes) as a placeholder for national sovereignty, especially valued among those people not subject to international humanitarian efforts denominated in US dollars (Neiburg 2016).

Producing a standard measure of value, or unit of account, involves political work (Desan 2010). Just as individual households use strategies of enclosure, taboos, and concealment to protect their assets, states do as well, using central banks to maintaining reserves that bolster their credibility and confidence (Peebles 2008: 236). In Argentina, the 2001-2002 forced conversion of U.S. dollar-based accounts into pesos led residents to look for alternative assets for storing value, exposing the national currency as a failed state project (Muir 2011). If national currencies circulate as instruments of state power and symbols of popular sovereignty, they are also materials through which people assess the authority of the state and the legitimacy of markets. In the former Soviet Union, people attributed the reliability of the US dollar to the material qualities of the currency (Lemon 1998), while in Indonesia, citizens used the national currency in other representational forms such as advertisements and billboards, thus remediating it as a means of political communication (Strassler 2009). In Mongolia, state-issued currency is not standardised but valued within specific transactions; shopkeepers viewed the cash held by small-scale gold miners as ‘polluted’ (High 2013), underscoring how they assigned value through the status of its possessor. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, people likewise rejected the state’s authority to guarantee the value of its currency by relying instead on the material qualities of cash (Walker 2017). In Cuba, the state issued two different currencies: a domestic peso to represent collective labour, and a convertible peso for use by tourists; however, in everyday exchanges, people often handled the domestic Cuban peso in pursuit of profits (Tankha 2018). In such instances, money reveals its performative dimension, seen in how even indices that purported to simply measure money’s fluctuating values are used to adjust actual prices and wages (Neiburg 2006).

Monetary pluralism is a strategy by which people sidestep formal financial institutions, even though they are still ‘saving, loaning, hedging risk, and investing’ (Maurer, Musaraj & Small 2018: 2). These practices of so-called ‘low finance’ can be unexpectedly transnational. Somalis in Kenya draw on informal hawala money-transfer systems for remitting money and financing new businesses as well as meeting basic social needs. Hawala channels value over long distances through a network of brokers, and today it exists alongside formal banking systems, allowing people to remit money often more quickly and without the fees of formal financial institutions. Through this system, Somalis mobilise financial capital through their continued investment in family relationships that stretch from Africa to Europe and North America. It enables people to cultivate social capital that has been at the root of their business success in spite of the collapse of the Somali state (Omeje & Githigaro 2018).

Monetary pluralism challenges normative assumptions of the social foundations of money, namely trust and confidence. While textbooks may insist all monetary systems are equal, alternative voices such as Positive Money in the United Kingdom argue for new models that recognize that how money is created and governed is central to our collective life (Di Muzio & Robbins 2017). In Macedonia, for example, the authoritarian regime tightened its grip on power as vendors accepted in-kind payments—unfinished apartments or cars—that lost value over time (Mattioli 2018). At the same time, Wall Street stockbrokers, driven by a belief in maximising shareholder value, justify business practices that destabilised markets, companies, and jobs (Ho 2009). Anthropologists have consequently turned to investigating the material and political processes that create, regulate, and circulate money.

Networks, platforms and open questions

As people bypass financial institutions and state-issued currencies, they create new forms of money. Airtime, or prepaid cell phone minutes, is one of the most celebrated instances of how people’s strategies of channelling value became formalised as mobile money (Maurer 2012). In Kenya, people purchased airtime cards and sent the verification code to a recipient who would either use the airtime or sell those minutes to a vendor at a discount for cash, effectively bypassing formal financial institutions and their transaction fees. Alternative monetary forms and money-like objects now abound, uncanny descendants of the 'primitive monies' once described by anthropologists.

New money platforms and networks are successful only insofar as they draw on existing behaviours, moral frameworks, and socialities, a point that has been made about bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that first appeared as a critique of the 2008 financial crisis (Nelms & Maurer 2014). Unlike national currency issued by a centralised state, transactions with bitcoin are authenticated by a distributed bookkeeping function known as blockchain. Maintained on a far-flung network of computers, the blockchain logs and verifies transactions. People let the blockchain do this work from their computers because it enables them to receive bitcoin in return (a process known as ‘mining’). The blockchain as a platform provides an alternative to the power traditionally conferred on centralised record-keepers. Users, however, invoke familiar practices and moral discourses, or ‘digital metallism’, by attributing the value of bitcoin to its scarcity, much like gold (Maurer, Nelms & Swartz 2013). They also attribute their trust to the distributed network of the blockchain, thus conflating the object and the system that enabled it, exposing the importance of networks in materialising transactional activity, including the coin itself.

The rise of digital and mobile monies foregrounds the infrastructures through which value flows, especially the ‘currency interface’ or conversion of value across different platforms (Guyer 1994). Such infrastructures include a vast apparatus of objects and recording devices such as payment cards, mobile phones, networks of wire, and electronic point-of-sale terminals. The assemblages of transactional objects and ideas that make the transfer of value possible are often ‘forgotten, ignored, or operate in the background’ (Maurer & Swartz 2017) yet they operate as the ‘rails’ that carry value from one location to another. By noticing these payment systems, we can ask questions such as who owns the rails, who or what authenticates payments, and who bears the cost of supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. Today, for example, data breaches take on a ritual form. Corporations publicise the number, often in the millions, and then pledge greater surveillance of the vast amounts of data that still leave individuals exposed to data breaches.

Despite the growing importance of electronic and digital payments, cash persists as a vital part of monetary ecologies, especially in the Global South. One of the most spectacular examples of how cash operates was the demonetization campaign in India, in which the Reserve Bank withdrew high denomination rupee notes from circulation (Dharia & Trisal 2017). While the campaign was promoted as an effort to eradicate ‘black money’, or untaxed cash transactions, the withdrawal of cash had differential effects across India. Recipients of microloans, for example, could not repay or receive loans unless they participated in digital payments (Kar 2017). The campaign also exposed other inequities: people who hoarded cash hired those who were cash-poor to wait in line to deposit money, exposing how the scheme to reduce illegal practices and tax avoidance relied on the labour of already-marginalised citizens (Dharia 2017). Even while scholars agree that money is a ‘token’, more a concept than a thing, people still handle paper notes as though they were inherently valuable, a dilemma that asks how money as a social object relates to money as a physical object (Vasantkumar 2019: 318) and returns to the preoccupations of anthropologists over defining what counts as money (Maurer 2018).

Anthropologists have long highlighted the political and economic systems in which money circulates, from families that seek to maintain their kinship ties across space and time, to the performances of legitimacy among state actors like central bankers. They are thus well-positioned to investigate future monies, by asking how objects travel, generate prestige, and introduce new forms of inequalities. Anthropologists also continue to examine the role of beliefs that accrue to some monetary objects but not others. If money rests on a social foundation backed by its institutional authority, do the specific material properties bolster people’s confidence in money and its issuing authority? What is the difference between money and valuables or assets? Do asset-classes like houses and securities, for example, have attributes like valued shells when they serve as stores of wealth? By posing questions around the material practices of stockpiling and accounting and the means of channelling value across space and time, anthropologists will continue to ask questions that challenge our received wisdom about money.

Conclusion

Confronted with a range of objects that have money-like features, anthropologists have highlighted the multiple practices and beliefs animating the idea of money. Just describing the meanings people assign, however, is not enough to understand what money is. As the recent financial crisis has made clear, the nature of money is sometimes not even visible to or understood by its users and governing technocrats like central bankers. Today, it is imperative to recognize money’s malleability—its new objects, relations, and even platforms—that expose how it is continually being unmade and remade. If we acknowledge that money is ‘not bestowed upon us by nature or some god, and if it can be shown that the present monetary system is undemocratic, unfair and unstable’ (Di Muzio & Robbins 2017: 39), then what are the possibilities of remaking money? Anthropologists work with designers, engineers, and religious scholars who are also invested in creating alternatives to our present monetary systems (Rudnyckyj 2018). Their efforts to represent money in ever new ways parallel those of the ethnographer (Maurer 2005). The challenge is therefore not just to define what money is, but also to understand how the institutional and collective efforts to make, unmake, and remake money are on-going projects of human sociality.

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Note on contributor

Allison Truitt is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the author of Dreaming of money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Money: ethnographic encounters (Bloomsbury, 2007).

Dr. Allison Truitt, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, 6823 Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70118 US. atruitt@tulane.edu.

Revolution

Felix Stein — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:26:19 +0000

Alice Wilson

University of Sussex

Initially published 16 Oct 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19rev

Abstract:

Revolutions encompass political mobilizations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Although early anthropology rarely addressed such movements or programmes for change directly, in recent years longstanding anthropological insights have helped shape an emerging field of the anthropology of revolution. Ethnographers’ non state-centric approaches to studying political life have generated distinctive, and wide-ranging, insights into revolutionary movements and their attempts at social transformation. In-depth, long-term fieldwork highlights how revolutions involve not just transformations, but also continuities, contradictions, and slowly-unfolding legacies. Social life during revolution, even while experienced as exceptional and liminal, relates to political, economic, religious, and social phenomena before and after revolution. Ethnographic studies have also foregrounded contradictions and paradoxes surrounding official narratives of revolution as ordered teleology and emancipation from class-based, gendered, and racial marginalization. Finally, recent studies have foregrounded long-term legacies arising from divergent revolutionary outcomes.

Introduction

Whilst there are different ways of defining the term, revolutions as understood here encompass political mobilisations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Activist and scholarly discussions of revolution address both movements of revolutionary activists, and outcomes such as the achievement (or not) of rapid transformations for which militants mobilise (see Bayat 2017: 15). The anthropological study of revolution in both these senses has begun to coalesce as a field of research relatively recently. Early generations of anthropologists had usually focused on social stability, rather than revolution. As the discipline changed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, anthropologists developed distinctive insights into revolutionary contexts. In doing so, at times anthropologists drew explicitly on longstanding insights into social life. Thus, the anthropology of revolution is both new and, in a sense, has deep roots.

For reasons of space, the present discussion does not extend to a review of related topics such as organised political violence, guerrilla fighters, insurgencies, and the responses of non-combatants to them (e.g. Hoffman 2011, Coulter 2009, Nordstrom 1997, Burnyeat 2018). Rather, the focus of this entry is a review of ethnographic and similarly rich qualitative studies (e.g. Shayne 2004, Vince 2010) which show how anthropologically-minded, non-state-centric analyses illuminate lived experiences of revolution. Historical and political science approaches have often focused on the conditions which lead to revolution, and the causes and scope of revolutionary outcomes (e.g. Tilly 1978: 189-222). This scholarship acknowledges that seizing state power does not necessarily lead to the revolutionary transformation of society (Tilly 1978: 220). Anthropologists have also challenged the idea that revolutions entail the rapid transformation of social structures, in particular by highlighting their continuities, contradictions, and slowly-unfolding legacies.

This entry first addresses definitions of revolution. It then describes how longstanding anthropological accounts of ritual and kinship, and in particular the liminal stage of rites of passage (Turner 1967), provided for distinctive anthropological insight into revolution. The entry then identifies three areas of discussion which have emerged as a result of the way that anthropologists place revolution in wider social contexts. First, anthropologists have explored how social life during revolutions, even while experienced as exceptional and liminal, relates to political, economic, and religious life before and after they occur. Second, anthropologists have foregrounded contradictions and paradoxes surrounding official narratives of revolution as ordered teleology and emancipation from class-based, gendered, racial, and other forms of marginalisation. Third, ethnographic studies have highlighted long-term legacies arising from divergent revolutionary outcomes.

Defining revolution

‘Revolution’ has two, apparently quite different, meanings in English (see Donham 1999: 1-2). The older meaning of revolution, prevalent until the Enlightenment, refers to ‘re-volution’, in the sense of the restoration of things to their original place. Such an interpretation corresponds to an understanding of time as cyclical. Time, in such an account, functions like planets revolving around the sun and returning eventually to their original place. Another pre-Enlightenment understanding of re-volution is the notion of the ‘wheel of fortune’: the metaphorical wheel revolves, causing people’s fortunes to rise and eventually fall back to an earlier position.^[1]Prior to the Enlightenment, political events described as a revolution similarly referred to the restoration of a previous state of affairs. For example, in late sixteenth century France, Henri, King of Navarre (1553-1610 CE) was baptised a Catholic but raised by his mother in the Protestant faith. Nevertheless, when he became King of France in 1593, he converted to Catholicism in order to appease those opposed to a Protestant taking the French throne. Observers commented on his return to the Catholic faith as a ‘revolution’ (Donham 1999: 1-2).

A contrasting meaning of revolution came to the fore with the Enlightenment, however. This sense, which has become the predominant contemporary meaning, implies a reversal of social, political, and economic order. Thinking of revolution as reversal corresponds in turn to a notion of time as linear, not cyclical. From the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment values of belief in human rationality as a source of progress implied teleological understandings of time, and the assumption that humans could transform their political, economic, and social life for the better. Since the Enlightenment, the toppling of monarchical and imperial regimes are known as the American, French, Haitian, Mexican and Russian Revolutions etc., reflecting teleological notions of time, the human capacity for progress, and an understanding of revolution as reversal. One of the most influential theories of revolution, Marxism, similarly takes revolution to be a reversal and a means of achieving progress towards the end point of socialism.

In accordance with this second meaning, narratives of revolutionaries since the Enlightenment depict revolutions as bringing about a reversal of existing orders – political, social, and economic – and the establishment of an alternative order. Definitions of revolution within the social sciences have sought to capture this sense of achieving not only political change, but also wider social change. One approach for doing so distinguishes ‘social revolutions’ from both ‘political revolutions’ and ‘economic revolutions’ (Skocpol 1979: 4-5). In this account, political revolutions might take the form of a coup d’état, and produce a change in those occupying government; economic revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution, bring about a change in the organisation of production and distribution and, we might add, consumption. In theory, political revolution in this sense could take place without economic revolution, and vice versa. When two kinds of programmes for change combine, however, bringing together both change in the way that political authority (such as the state) is structured, and change in the way that social relations are ordered and inequalities legitimated (such as class, or gendered and generational relations), then this would amount to more than a political or economic revolution, but rather ‘social revolution’ (Skocpol 1979: 4-5).

The long-term, in-depth empirical inquiries of anthropologists and related scholars are well-placed to grant insight into those revolutions combining ambitions for political, economic, and social change. Revolutions thus defined entail

a fundamental and irreversible change in the organization of a society; the destruction, often rapid and violent, of a previous form of social and political organization, together with myths which sustained it and the ruling groups which it sustained, and their replacement by a new institutional order, sustained by new myths and sustaining new rulers (Clapham 1988: 1).

The scope of change extends to ‘a rapid, basic transformation of a society’s political structures’ and ‘an effort to transform not just the political institutions but also the justifications for political authority in society, thus reformulating the ideas/values that underpin political legitimacy’ (Thomassen 2012: 683). Importantly, anthropological studies draw attention to ways in which transformations take place as changes in everyday lives as ‘micro-processes’: that is, ‘a countlessly repeated uprooting of social relations, in thousands of local communities, in millions of lives’ (Donham 1999: 35).

The scope of revolutions necessarily varies across different contexts, as does the meaning of local terms used to mean ‘revolution’. Amongst the various terms used in other languages, several emphasise change moving in a singular direction. For instance, the Arabic term is thawra, from the root ‘to rise up’. The Chinese fanshen means ‘to turn the body’, used in the sense of standing up to oppression (Hinton 1966). The Quechua/Aymara term pachakuti, though, is more ambiguous: it combines ‘upheaval’ (kuti) and a term spanning both ‘world balance’ and ‘space-time’ (pacha). Pachakuti has been used since the sixteenth century to describe the catastrophe of Spain’s invasion, but also since then to describe rebellions seeking to overcome colonial and neo-colonial rule and to restore indigenous world balance (Silva Rivera 1991, Swinehart 2019). Despite the emphasis on rupture/transformation across a range of terms as well as in definitions of revolution, echoes of the pre-Enlightenment understanding of revolution as a process of restoration nevertheless continue to haunt revolutionary movements and events in the post-Enlightenment period. Revolutions may re-establish the kinds of hierarchies that revolutionaries originally attempted to question – a sense of ‘revolution as restoration’ to which anthropological approaches have pointed.

A field takes shape

Early to mid-twentieth century anthropology focused on colonised peoples on the margins of capitalist economies. The early years of the discipline thus at first seem unpromising terrain for assessing revolutions. Nevertheless, one of anthropology’s founding figures, Marcel Mauss, analysed Russia’s Bolshevik revolutionary government as it unfolded in the years following the October 1917 revolution (Mauss 1984 [1924-5]). It was Mauss’ work on gifts, though, rather than on Bolshevism, which became foundational in anthropology. Arguing that gifts can create strong and lasting bonds between givers and recipients, Mauss stressed – crucially for his own and subsequent work on revolution – that some fields of social life, such as gift giving, interconnect with so many other aspects, such as politics, law, economics, religion, kinship, etc., that they are a ‘total social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1990 [1923-4]). Mauss recognised that revolutions – like gifts – connect many areas of social life: he saw the Russian Revolution as ‘of special interest to the sociologist’ because it was ‘a gigantic social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1984 [1924-5]: 336). Subsequent ethnographic accounts of revolution similarly embed the analysis of revolution in wide-ranging areas of social life.

Despite Mauss’ interest in Bolshevism, early to mid-twentieth century anthropology neglected revolutionary movements. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the dominant theoretical school in British social anthropology was structural-functionalism. It assumed that persons and social institutions ultimately served the function of reproducing and maintaining the prevailing social order, and that society functioned as an isolated whole. Consequently, structural-functionalist studies sought to explain social stability and the reproduction of hierarchy in apparently unchanging societies. For instance, in the context of richer agriculturalists’ dominance of poorer cattle herders among the Kpelle of central Liberia, a mid-twentieth century anthropological study analysed social rituals (Gibbs 1963; Gibbs, Breitrose & Silverman 1970). From a structural-functionalist perspective, Kpelle rituals – such as public dispute resolution councils and the accompanying slaughtering of a calf for wide distribution of the meat – dissipated social tension whilst legitimising, reproducing, and entrenching existing hierarchies. To the extent that this kind of anthropological inquiry engaged with revolution, it did so indirectly by explaining why and how societies managed to avoid it.

Similarly, theoretical predisposition to see certain societies as static and unchanging prevented some anthropologists from recognising how revolutionary conditions emerge. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a flourishing field of Andeanist studies. Andeanismo, or Andeanism, as a theoretical perspective assumed that Andean societies were largely pristine, unchanging cultures (Starn 1991). Andeanism was one of the factors which meant that most scholars during this period failed to acknowledge that in Peru there were growing connections between rural and urban communities, and that many Andean Peruvians desired to fight against conditions of poverty. Andeanism left ‘hundreds’ (Starn 1991: 63) of anthropologists surprised by, and struggling to explain, the outbreak in 1980 of Peru’s Maoist armed guerrillas, the Shining Path.

Although andeanismo clung to notions of social conservatism, in the 1960s and 1970s the problematic assumptions underpinning structural-functionalism became clearer. Anthropologists were increasingly critical of static notions of culture and social order (Geertz 1975, Clifford 1988), and of complicity with colonial domination of non-Western peoples (Asad 1973). Yet during this period, some earlier anthropological work on the reproduction of social structures emerged as the background for insight into revolution as a social process entailing – like other forms of ritual – rupture with, temporary suspension of, and then restoration of social order.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1950s with the Ndembu of then Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia), Victor Turner studied the role of ritual in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Turner took inspiration from the work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage from one stage of the life course to another. Van Gennep (1960 [1909]) had suggested three stages in the rites of passage through the life course: separation, liminality, and re-aggregation. Turner (1967) suggested that four stages were at stake in ritual for transitioning to a new stage in the life course: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. He emphasised that during the phase of crisis (van Gennep’s liminal phase), there was a particular quality of social experience. Those involved experienced a temporary suspension of ordinary forms of hierarchy. During this crisis/liminal phase, persons acquired intense feelings of camaraderie for one another, which Turner called communitas. These feelings of communitas continued to underpin strong bonds between members of the same age set. These bonds lasted even after the phase of liminality ended, and ordinary social hierarchies were restored with each person taking up his or her place within those hierarchies.

Later, Turner (1988) applied his ideas about liminality and communitas to contemporary political contexts of revolution (see Thomassen 2012: 688). He suggested that movements seeking to reverse social order, such as revolutions, created spaces of liminality and communitas. From the anthropology of ritual, then, emerged one of anthropology’s most distinctive contributions to the analysis of revolutions: revolutionaries often experience their mobilisation as times and spaces of liminality or as the temporary cancellation of ordinary hierarchies. As is the case for the liminality of rites of passage (Turner 1967), revolutionaries may experience communitas, the intense solidarity amongst those who have shared extraordinary liminal circumstances. For instance, in the early 2000s, feelings of communitas bolstered young Iranians who engaged in rebellious acts that defied the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic (Mahdavi 2009). These young people considered themselves to be taking part in what they called a ‘sexual revolution’ (enghelāb-e-jensi) by dancing, party-going, wearing attention-grabbing styles of clothing, and engaging in extra-marital sexual relations – activities all forbidden by the Islamic Republic. They were convinced that cumulatively these small acts of resistance questioned the legitimacy of the state. In the words of one young woman,

If any member of the morality police tries to touch me, I will scream at him, and everyone will support me. I can wear my nail polish, and my lipstick too! That means something. That means that we are getting to them, that we do have power (Mahdavi 2009: 122).

Anthropology’s turn away from the static to the dynamic, and its increasing attempts to interrogate global and local power structures, saw late twentieth and early twenty-first century analyses of revolutions blossom in their thematic, temporal, and geographic coverage. To mention but a few studies, anthropologists have examined revolutionary life in: socialist societies and movements in Eastern Europe (Verdery 1996, Ledeneva 1998); Latin America (Rosdendahl 1997, Montoya 2012, Härkönen 2016); Asia (Humphrey 1983, Luong 1992, Yan 2003) and Africa (Lan 1985, Davis 1987, Donham 1999); the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran (Haeri 1989); the 1994 Zapatista guerrilla uprising against Mexico’s neoliberal policies (Nash 2001, Speed 2008); and the Arab Spring revolutions (Bayat 2017). This scholarship takes inspiration from Turner’s and Mauss’ insights into the ways in which revolutions – even when participants experience them as liminal – connect with wider social, political, and economic structures and values.

Placing revolutions in wider social contexts

We might expect that, as movements aspiring to achieve social and political transformations, revolutions rework political and economic life. But it is worth stressing the multiple ways in which revolutions draw upon religious life. Some religious orientations have famously inspired revolutionaries. Liberation theologists in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s took inspiration from Christian faith to encourage political action to counter socioeconomic inequities (Gutiérrez 1974 [1971]). Connections between religious life and revolutionary action also exist for revolutionary movements which directly challenge institutionalised religion.

Turner’s work established that revolution shares characteristics of religious ritual. Revolutions also connect with other aspects of religious and moral life. Their discourse can assume the qualities of demand for self-sacrifice. In socialist Cuba, revolutionary subjects experience, talk about, and at times put into practice a commitment of self-sacrifice for the revolution, even to the point of expressing the righteousness of being willing to die for it (Holbraad 2014). Cubans distinguish between the revolutionary principles to which they feel loyal, and disappointment with everyday living conditions in revolutionary Cuba. Their views that the revolution deserves self-sacrifice withstand their complaints about everyday shortcomings (Holbraad 2014: 6).

Another parallel between religious and revolutionary social life concerns injunctions to preserve ‘purity’. Just as some devotees are meant to keep themselves ‘pure’ from threats such as sin and pollution, revolutionary cadres may face pressure to keep themselves ‘pure’ by distinguishing themselves from the masses who have not yet acquired sufficient revolutionary credentials. This was the case in Sri Lanka in the 1980s for cadres serving with the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the areas under the movement’s control (Thiranagama 2011: 212). Overtly, the LTTE sought to distance itself from Hinduism and its taboos about specific categories of people maintaining their social purity through the avoidance of contact with polluting persons and matter. Nevertheless, the movement itself engaged in ‘constant purification’ to reinforce cadres as a special category distinct from the wider population – with this separation ultimately constraining the movement’s ability to transform Tamil society (Thiranagama 2011: 212).

Revolutionaries can also echo devotees in their concerns to respect a higher moral order. In the northwest Sahara, from the 1970s to the present day, Sahrawi revolutionaries hailing from the Polisario Front, the liberation movement which seeks to liberate the disputed Western Sahara from Moroccan annexation, have sought to transform Sahrawi society. These revolutionaries live in exile in autonomously run refugee camps in southwest Algeria. On the one hand, the refugees and their government experience their revolution as a new social contract introducing a new governing authority – their (partially recognised) Sahrawi state authority – which replaces tribal authority (Wilson 2016b).^[2]On the other hand, though, Sahrawi refugees also experience their revolution as a new moral contract between governing authorities and governed constituencies (Wilson 2016b: 238-43). This moral contract emphasises that each party expects the other to put the interests of national liberation and the revolution above narrower interests of personal or familial gain. This moral contract determines whether or not refugees consider the government’s discretionary distribution of resources, such as extra rations and travel opportunities, as corruption or not, and whether officials consider refugees to have deserving claims on them. This notion of revolution as a moral contract has proved enduring in exile. Over time, tribes have partially re-emerged amongst Sahrawi refugees as influential in areas of governance such as dispute resolution and elections, suggesting that the revolution as social contract has modified. But the sense of revolution as a moral contract, entailing injunctions for parties to live up to moral norms, has persisted.

Another link between religion and revolution is that religious dispositions can provide pathways for joining a revolutionary movement. In India in the 1970s, a Maoist guerrilla movement, the Naxalites, emerged to oppose the Indian state. With the Indian state fighting back against them, by the 2000s Maoist militants were operating under cover in terrains such as the jungles of Jharkhand. The marginalisation of Jharkhand’s tribal populations also motivated locals to support, and sometimes join, insurgents who were intent upon challenging that marginalisation (Shah 2014). The guerrillas were expected to give up personal ties; but before becoming revolutionaries, many senior guerrilla leaders had in their youth been religious renouncers who had already abandoned personal possessions and ties. Religious orientation can thus prepare the way for revolutionary commitment.

To explain the endurance of the Naxalite movement, Shah (2014) nevertheless stresses both cultural factors (such as religious practice) and political and economic factors (such as the exploitation and marginalisation of India’s tribal communities in Jharkhand). She echoes Mauss’ emphasis on the interconnection in revolutions of cultural, religious, political, and economic life. In addition to the many ways in which revolutions can resemble religious life, they also draw on longstanding political and economic forms.

The revolutionary reworking of existing political forms can be seen in a Shiraz village during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 (Hegland 2013). Villagers perceived political life as a set of potential conflicts between taifeh (tribal) groups. Villagers understood these groups to be dynamic coalitions of persons with shared interests that brought together and surpassed kinship groups. When conflicts arose, belligerents mobilised taifeh connections until one group prevailed and the conflict was resolved. In the build-up to 1979, the Shah’s increased political repression had disposed most villagers towards revolt; nevertheless, the specific way in which male and female villagers took the decision to join in protests derived from their understanding of taifeh conflicts. A villager associated with the Shah’s supporters assaulted another villager opposed to the Shah. This incident led other villagers to mobilise, just as they would have for a conflict between taifeh groups, and join anti-Shah protests. Pre-existing political values and structures, here entailing tribal conflict, shaped participation in the revolution, even though the latter came to present itself as a form of rupture with the past. Interestingly, longstanding political values both facilitated, and at the same time were transformed through, revolutionary participation. Where villagers had not previously recognised women’s contributions to village political networks, they acknowledged women’s contributions to revolutionary action (Hegland 2013: 189).

Previous economic forms influenced the shape of revolutionary structures amongst Western Sahara’s revolutionaries in exile in Algeria (Wilson 2016b: 136-40). From the formation of the refugee camps in 1976 into the 2000s, the refugee government and liberation movement, Polisario Front, recruited unwaged labour from refugees to staff social services and ministries. By the 2000s, however, refugees expected to earn money to compensate for decreasing rations. By the mid 2000s, Polisario Front was having to pay teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats (low and irregular) wages. Yet amid expectations of wages, one form of unwaged labour survived: ‘work party’ events known as a ḥamla (campaign). These work parties were a reworking-cum-transformation of local labour-pooling known as twiza. Ḥamla and twiza shared characteristics such as sex-segregation, a light-hearted atmosphere, and an expectation that organisers provide some drink/food as hospitality. The transformation was that where twiza had relied on tribal networks, the revolutionary government recruited ḥamla participants (and also provided the hospitality). In sum, the creation of revolutionary forms of state power can rely on recycling pre-existing economic, political, and social forms.

Paradoxes and contradictions within revolutions

Revolutionary activists and leaders typically stress their intentions to achieve social, political, and economic change – and anthropological work often challenges this by showing how revolutions rework existing social forms. This combination of rupture and continuity constitutes a contradiction among the many paradoxes within revolutions. Anthropologists are not alone in observing these contradictions. Many revolutions – the American (1765-1783), French (1789), Russian (1917), amongst others – have claimed to promote emancipation but have nevertheless preserved or established forms of subjugation. It is also well known that revolutionaries who in theory support, for example, women’s emancipation may expect women to put gender-specific demands ‘on hold’ whilst the ‘higher’ goals of capturing state power are achieved, as was the case amongst Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s (Molyneux 1985). Revolutionary vanguards also tend to mobilise mass supporters less well-versed in revolutionary discourse than cadres. These supporters may have rebelled for the ‘wrong’ reasons, leading to the paradox that vanguards who seize power expunge revolutionaries deemed ideologically deficient from historical narratives (Scott 1979). Further revolutionary paradoxes and contradictions come to light through ethnographic studies.

There have been many paradoxes concerning the revolutionary promotion of gendered forms of emancipation. Socialist revolutionary societies have focused on increasing women’s labour force participation, assuming that achieving (more) equal rights for men and women as workers will achieve broader gender parity. Nevertheless, women are usually still left with the main responsibilities of homemaking, in addition to being political activists. This leaves women in revolutionary societies with a ‘triple burden’ of waged labour, domestic duties, and political activism (Verdery 1996: 65). In socialist Cuba, another paradox is that the state’s provision for women’s practical needs, such as labour force participation and childcare, has, in some Cubans’ eyes, diminished the possibilities for the development of autonomous feminist activism (Shayne 2004: 152). Revolutionary agendas to promote gendered emancipation can be fraught with contradiction.

It is far from guaranteed that women who participated in revolutionary action, including by taking up arms, feel recognised for their efforts either by a revolutionary government or by peers. Women revolutionaries may afterwards be treated by peers as if they are polluted, as was the case for some Algerian female revolutionaries whose moral propriety male peers questioned (Vince 2016: 140-1). Former members of Mozambique’s elite female Frelimo detachment similarly bemoaned that male co-fighters were unwilling to choose female combatants as spouses, preferring instead to marry women whom they perceived would be more compliant (West 2000). Egalitarian values do not always travel smoothly from slogans to everyday lived experience.

Just as promises of revolutionary gendered emancipation meet contradictions in practice, official narratives of revolutionary origins and outcomes can face competing personal experiences. The 1974 Ethiopian revolution established a Marxist-Leninist state. After the coup, Amharic-speaking members of the revolutionary vanguard set out to bring the revolution and its promise of modernisation to remote regions, including that of the Maale people in the South (Donham 1999). Maale subjective experiences, however, disrupted the narrative that the revolution brought modernisation. The Maale had already experienced a ‘pre-revolution’ of rupture to their traditional social order during Protestant missionary activity (Donham 1999: 82-101). Furthermore, Amharic conquest in the late nineteenth century had already so transformed Maale traditional kingship that when revolutionary students destroyed symbols of Maale kingship, some locals interpreted this as the restoration of earlier (pre Amharic-conquest) tradition (Donham 1999: 59-81). The Maale case also contradicted theoretical expectations that the relatively affluent ‘middle’ level of peasants would be more likely to embrace revolution than their more indigent, oppressed peers. Eric Wolf (1969) theorised that the poorest peasants would be too downtrodden to rebel. In fact, those Maale who most readily mobilised as revolutionaries hailed from the poorer converts to Christianity rather than middle-ranking Maale traditionalists (Donham 1999: 46). Popular experience of revolution can contradict officially promoted intentions and expectations.

One consequence of the origins and results of revolutions playing out quite differently from participants’ expectations is that many revolutionaries end up feeling disillusioned. They feel disappointed with the outcomes after their extraordinary and painful efforts and sacrifices. Revolutionary disappointment stretches from former female fighters in Mozambique (West 2000) to mid-level cadres and rank-and-file activists in El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí liberation front turned peacetime political party (Sprenkels 2018). In a Mexican town that was one of the first to join the country’s 1910 revolution, locals in the 1980s felt like ‘spent cartridges of revolution’ because they found themselves still fighting the same struggles over land and labour (Nugent 1993). The emotional experience characteristic of revolution can shift over time from communitas to disillusion.

Yet paradoxes can emerge even in cases of revolutionary disappointment: those who are disenchanted with socialism in Cuba still feel loyalty to the revolution (Holbraad 2014). In Egypt, many who mobilied in 2011 to depose President Mubarak felt, once the military deposed democratically elected President Morsi in 2013, that the revolution had failed to transform state power and social life. But many still experienced enormous change in their personal lives – as if there was a lasting, intimate effect of communitas as people questioned old bonds and forged new ones. One Egyptian activist noted,

[S]o much was revealed about people around us... irreconcilable differences in values were revealed. When a group of people are killed and one person reacts by celebrating and the other by mourning… what happens next? There were divorces, estrangement, other big rifts within families (Fernández-Savater et al. 2017: 146-7).

Personal and national experiences of revolutionary rupture and continuity intersect and can indeed contradict one another.

A further, and profound, revolutionary paradox lies in the merging of the two meanings of revolution as transformation and restoration. Revolutionary movements which seek to undo old hierarchies frequently end up creating new kinds of hierarchies, such as between vanguards and to-be-enlightened masses (Donham 1999, Thiranagama 2011) or between those given priority for accessing resources and those excluded (Wilson 2016b: 233-4). In diverse ways, revolutions can end up establishing at least in part a re-aggregation or reintegration of social and political hierarchy.

Legacies of revolution

Anthropologists have studied revolutions as participants and activists (Cabarrús 1983, Speed 2008), as concerned locally employed researchers (Bourdieu & Sayad 1964), and as fieldworkers who happened to be there when revolution erupts (Donham 1999, Hegland 2013). Being in situ during a revolution can nevertheless mean being one of the ‘hidden majority’ excluded from accessing iconic demonstration spaces – such as Cairo’s Tahrir square during the 2011anti-Mubarak protests – and who instead encounter promises of political transformation whilst confined to safer domestic spaces (Winegar 2012). But even when anthropologists cannot conduct fieldwork during revolution, their long-term engagements with interlocutors lead to rich understandings of the legacies of revolutionary movements across varied outcomes not limited to self-proclaimed revolutionary states.

Revolutionary legacies play out in contexts of ambiguity in revolutionary outcomes. The end of revolutionary insurgency and its control over state power does not necessarily mean the end of revolutionary influence. In Nicaragua during the 1990s, a neoliberal government proposed policies that would undo many forms of social protection and progressivism achieved during Sandinista revolutionary rule in the 1980s. Nevertheless, new social movements emerged through which people mobilised to resist neoliberal policies and preserve revolutionary social achievements (Babb 2001). Thus ‘it may be precisely after the revolution that the long struggle for democratisation and economic justice will be waged’ (Babb 2001: 15-6). In El Salvador in 2009, the Farabundo Martí liberation front became the first revolutionary movement in Latin America which, having failed to achieve power through insurgency, took power instead through elections. The ties between erstwhile combatants and revolutionary activists lent themselves to being recycled into ties of electoral clientelism which contributed to the party’s success – despite the fact that many El Salvadorans at the same time felt disillusioned with the recognition they received from their movement-turned-party (Sprenkels 2018). Just as revolutions rework existing social relations, people rework revolutionary social forms and ties as they build post-revolutionary lives and projects.

Close attention to the everyday lives of former revolutionaries opens up the question of when and how revolutions end. In Algeria, official historical narratives focus on the National Liberation Front’s successful achievement of independence and takeover of the government. Life histories of female revolutionary activists from independence in 1962 to the 1990s nevertheless show the many challenges that these women faced in gaining recognition for their contributions and in participating in political and economic life. Yet the women concerned did not necessarily experience this as a sign that the revolution failed, but rather that it had not ended (Vince 2016: 174).

The everyday sociality of defeated revolutionaries who live in conditions of political marginalisation and repression can also call into question the ending of defeated revolutions. In Dhufar, southern Oman, four decades after the 1975 defeat of Dhufar’s erstwhile revolutionary liberation movement, former members socialised in mixed-race, mixed-tribal gatherings that reproduced social egalitarian values associated with the revolution (Wilson 2019). Bonds of communitas between those who experienced revolutionary liminality can outlive the revolutionary liminal period itself. Furthermore, Dhufar continues to produce new platforms for progressive politics in elections and during Oman’s Arab Spring protests (Wilson 2016a). The defeat of a revolution, then, does not preclude later mobilisation echoing earlier demands for social, political, and economic inclusion and participation. Meanwhile in India, former Maoist Naxalite militants demonstrate lasting social consequences of their militancy. When they were Naxalite revolutionaries in their youth in the 1970s, these men questioned conservative norms of masculinity. Decades later, aged in their fifties to eighties, these men continued to question conservative gender norms even after political defeat. They avoided conforming to dominant models of South Asian masculinity of renouncers (those who renounce personal possessions and attachments) or householders (those who take on the responsibilities of heading a household) (Donner 2009). Defeated revolution can have a ‘social afterlife’ (Wilson 2019) whereby networks, values, subjectivities, and identities produced through it ‘cannot just be resolved or cast away’ but ‘have to be negotiated anew’ (Thiranagama 2011: 12).

The long-term legacies of the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the revolutions-turned-civil-wars in Syria and Yemen, are still in the making. Egyptian workers set up revolutionary institutions to organise labour after the 2011 anti-Mubarak revolution. President Sisi’s counterrevolution repressed workers’ organisation – but younger workers’ adoption during their revolutionary organisation of new values of egalitarianism created a legacy of novel values with the potential to outlast more transient institutions (Makram-Ebeid 2014). In Tunisia, the world watched the dramatic events of the Jasmine revolution in 2010-2011, which deposed President Ben Ali. Media stories subsequently moved on, but years of work lie ahead in creating the political aperture for which protesters mobilised. Youth activists who seek to support their country’s transition to democracy through participation in democracy-promotion workshops must strike a balance between making their efforts legible for international funders whilst maintaining locally meaningful forms of engagement (Boutieri 2015). Whatever revolutions’ successes and failures in the eyes of their participants and opponents, legacies of movements and militants’ plans for social change unfold over years.

Anthropologies of revolutions

From having been a discipline which mostly overlooked the possibility for revolution, anthropology has produced distinctive insights into the social, political, economic, and moral lives of revolutionaries. A sub-field of an anthropology of revolution – or rather anthropologies of revolutions, given the range of approaches therein – is emerging in anthropologists’ teaching and writing for audiences in the academy (e.g. Thomassen 2012, Holbraad et al. forthcoming) and beyond (Shah 2018, Starn & La Serna 2019). Anthropological accounts of revolution both underscore the tension between revolutionary liminality and connections with wider social life, and foreground ambivalent experiences of revolution: rupture and continuity intersect, transformation overlaps with restoration of hierarchical social order, and lived experiences contest clear beginnings and endings. Ongoing studies of revolution in anthropology, and beyond, are strengthened by placing the experiences of those living through, with, and after revolution in wider social and temporal contexts.

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——— 2016b. Sovereignty in exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

——— forthcoming 2019. Invisible veterans: defeated militants and enduring revolutionary social values in Dhufar, Oman. Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 5, 132-49.

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Note on contributor

Alice Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research examines legacies of radical projects for social change in revolutions and liberation movements in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Sovereignty in exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs (University of Pennsylvania, 2016).

Dr Alice Wilson, Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, United Kingdom. alice.wilson@sussex.ac.uk.

[1] British Library 2012. The wheel of fortune. Medieval Manuscripts Blog (available on-line: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/02/the-wheel-of-fortune.html).

[2] The English term ‘tribe’ and its derivatives have problematic connotations when it comes to translating and theorising indigenous social forms, such as Sahrawis’ qabīla or Iranians’ taifeh. See Sneath, D. 2016. Tribe. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/tribe).

Gambling

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Anthony Pickles

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16gambling

Abstract:

Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gambling, but I do not cover that literature here. Anthropology has made valuable but often overlooked contributions to the study of gambling based on both comparative examples drawn from small-scale societies and marginalised peoples and by engaging critically with the gambling industry and concepts drawn from policy-oriented disciplines such as psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, statistics, and the health sciences. In this entry four pioneering anthropological studies of gambling are summarised and compared. I then review current regional and thematic trends in the anthropology of gambling. Thereafter I review the anthropology of the gambling industry itself and the relationship of both to other disciplinary perspectives on gambling. I delineate some causes for the two-decade-long surge in the anthropology of gambling, and lastly suggest that the field has become rich enough to support new and original syntheses that would significantly enhance ‘gambling studies’.

Introduction

Gambling is not a universal human activity. Betting is restricted to a subsection of any given population, and there are some areas of the world, most notably the Pacific Islands and Inuit communities, where gambling was once unknown. Many intentional communities, religious orders, and nation states ban gambling or discourage it, and most states impose variously effective regulations and prescriptions on the legitimate forms of gambling, the contexts where it is permitted, who may play, the odds that may be offered and the proportion of revenue to be appropriated by states, independent bodies, and charities. The dominant discussions in the study of gambling are therefore who gambles and on what, why they gamble, and why some people (ethnic and/or cultural groups, genders, income brackets, etc.) gamble more frequently and/or with higher stakes. Ancillary debates centre on the relationship between games and gambling, the perceived causes of wins and losses, the correlation of gambling to other activities perceived as ‘risky’, and the role of gambling in redistributing valuables within and across societies. Anthropology has played a key role in moving beyond a problem-oriented approach to gambling by virtue of its attention to the context and symbolism of gambling within cultures. Oftentimes the ethnography itself challenges broadly held assumptions such as the idea that gambling addiction is to be understood as an individual failing, and the notion that humans calculate risk like (not very proficient) economists. As the anthropology of the Global North has matured, and the gambling industry has become more corporate than mob-run, there is now a growing body of literature that tackles gambling ‘at home’ ethnographically. These have generated excellent ethnographic insight into the mutual construction of gamblers as ‘addicted’ or ‘compulsive’.

Pioneering anthropological studies

Studies by three twentieth-century anthropologists loom large over contemporary anthropological studies of gambling. These are Clifford Geertz (1973), James Woodburn (1982), and Gregory Bateson (1973). The first two are primarily ethnographic accounts in which gambling plays an illustrative role in demonstrating and enacting broader social dynamics, while Bateson provides a theoretical framework for the study of play as a field that encompasses gambling. Another, almost completely forgotten antecedent which is of at least equal value, is Alexander Lesser’s pioneering account of Pawnee (Native American) hand games (1969 [1933]).

Geertz analyses cockfighting in Bali and the two forms of gambling that surround it. Once two cocks have been matched as evenly as possible, in the centre a large even bet is assembled by two coalitions built around the two cocks. These people appear subdued. In contrast, small individual bets are then made around the periphery at odds that are shouted boisterously across the arena. Drawing on the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Geertz argues that the stakes are so high among the central group that the benefit of winning (marginal utility) is less than the cost of losing (marginal disutility), which can be devastating, and that therefore gambling is a display of fixed status performed through a deliberately even playing field that instead of benefitting any one party simply excludes those who lack the wealth to participate. Peripheral, low-status gamblers are the itinerant class. The fixed status of people in Bali is therefore reinforced, and the game plays out their rigid hierarchy as ‘a story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geerts 1973: 448). The fame of Geertz’s account is such that most later literature cites it simply to refer to the fact that gambling practices can be a microcosm for cultures as a whole, whatever form the later argument takes.

Woodburn is concerned with the maintenance of egalitarian societies in Africa, and how gambling on a low-skill game can have redistributive effects that even out accumulations of wealth. The Hadza are nomadic hunter-gatherers. Woodburn observed that Hadza men spend most of their time in camp gambling with valuables such as metal-headed arrows whose origins are geographically restricted. By tossing bark discs against a tree and reading which way up they fall, men circulate a range of items that are unevenly distributed. By a combination of keeping the items one wins and wants and staking what one doesn’t, and by pressuring winners into playing again until they lose, desirable items slowly become distributed evenly. Woodburn’s research has had a lasting influence on anthropological studies of small-scale societies that gamble; it has become emblematic of gambling as a mechanism for enforcing egalitarianism.

Bateson’s theory is of a different order. From observing monkeys playing, he derives that play is bounded up by ‘metacommunicative’ signals. Each player communicates to other players that what is happening when they play does not have the same consequences that it would were they not playing. Threat is another example of ‘metacommunicative’ action: the person doing the threatening implies that their threat might become reality if the threatened does not comply. For Bateson, gambling is to be understood as a combination of threat and play (1973: 154). The point is unelaborated, but we may take it to mean that when stakes are introduced to forms of play in which there are winners and losers, the imperative to pay up after a loss is backed by an implicit threat of violence. Despite its un-anthropological origins and level of abstraction, Bateson’s theory is often invoked in a manner similar to Geertz’s, to suggest that gambling is a site of special ‘meta-’significance. An advantage of Bateson’s formulation over Woodburn’s and Geertz’s is that it preserves the thrill of the game, which, after all, is why people say they play, and why gambling appears preferable to more sober forms of ritual or redistribution. As a form of play/threat, gambling is set apart from everyday life, thereby introducing a theoretical space in which one can comprehend the excitement of gambling.

Alexander Lesser, a student of Franz Boas, made a truly remarkable (but very much overlooked) longitudinal study of an indigenous gambling game among the Pawnee of the Great Plains (1969 [1933]). Pawnee ‘hand games’ were complicated games of chance revolving around teams of players who hid counters in their hands and actively deceived opponents who tried to guess which hands contained the counters. What sets Lesser’s account apart from the simple descriptions of games that often appear in early anthropology is his attention to the historical transformation, or ‘temporal career’, of this particular cultural trait over forty years (1969 [1933]: 334). Hand games before 1890 were used by Pawnee for recreational gambling, but through a tumultuous period of US domination, the games fell into disuse only to be resuscitated as an integral part of the Pawnee version of the revivalist Ghost Dance religion^[1] that swept through Native American communities in the subsequent years. The hand games were, in the process, transformed from gambling game to ritual performance. Then, when the Ghost Dance religion gave way to Christianity, the hand games became mundane Pawnee equivalents of the domestic card games favoured by whites in the US. Lesser’s book offers the first and still the most comprehensive account of how the games that support gambling shift roles and forms in order to adapt to contemporary concerns.^[2]

Contemporary regional foci

A surge in anthropological accounts of gambling in the last two decades has forged new ground by highlighting the sheer variety of games in their myriad social contexts. Because the field was initially narrow, many anthropologists studying gambling address themselves more to regional cultural concerns than the topic of gambling per se. Inevitably, therefore, the problematics are to some extent a product of the regions where they conduct fieldwork. I have picked three regions as examples: the Mediterranean, East Asia, and Oceania, but what follows is by no means a comprehensive overview.

Mediterranean-based anthropological studies of gambling are few but influential. The main examples stem from Greece (Herzfeld 1991; Malaby 2003; Papataxiarchis 1999), and all situate gambling as a form of valorised resistance. For Herzfeld, aggressive masculinity is demonstrated through nonchalantly submitting one’s wealth to mocking chance at illegal coffeehouse gambling. Players boast of their losses rather than their wins. They walk a knife edge between a devil-may-care attitude towards money and perceived irresponsibility to one’s wife and family. If they lose too badly or too often, men experience a collapse in male status as they are forced to surrender financial power to the woman of the house. Papataxiarchis similarly foregrounds bravado in his description of gambling on the island of Lesbos, but locates it instead in the antagonism between local society and encompassing orders that are embodied in people’s dependence on state-issued currency. Gambling allows for disinterested sharing and the public renunciation of money as a symbol of external state domination. Malaby’s book-length ethnographic monograph on Cretan gambling continues this masculine tenor. He describes the local repertoire of gambling games (backgammon, dice, poker, and lotteries) and the way these games situate gamblers, non-gamblers, and the state in relation to each other, and how gambling allows people to construct the self around a stance to the various manifestations of contingency. A recent contribution by Scott (2013) complicates the issue of valorising resistance through her research on Cyprus, a contested island divided between Greece and Turkey. Scott evaluates the role of casino gambling in Turkish-controlled territory as a space where Greek and Turkish Cypriots construct stereotypes of each other. The stereotypes are literally played out through the kinds of choices each group is thought to make during hands of blackjack in what appears a relational elaboration on the idea of gambling as resistance.

Gambling in Asia is a vast, temporally deep, and socially salient topic. History reveals attempts to ban gambling in China as early as the fourth century B.C., and gambling is mentioned in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. There is some evidence that cards were brought to Europe from China. What comes across from contemporary literature on East Asia is a diverse and thriving gambling scene which I cannot do justice to here, and which requires much more research. East Asia boasts a lively and localised repertoire of card games used for both high and low stakes gambling, together with a range of legal and illegal lotteries and casino and horse race gambling meccas in Hong Kong, Singapore and especially Macau, which has taken over from Las Vegas the designation as the global centre of gambling. Bosco, Liu, and West review the rural and peri-urban phenomenon of an illegal lottery that became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s, and has links to neighbouring Taiwan (2009). Employing accepted social-scientific reasoning, they cast lottery gambling as a form of symbolic resistance to economic paternalism. Again based in rural China, Steinmüller writes against this narrative, claiming that (among other games) zha Jinhua, a game similar to poker, connects to the widespread equation of social exuberance with ‘heat’, foregrounding a mid-level, regional preoccupation with hotness and coolness (2011). By situating his analysis at this scale, Steinmüller gains greater explanatory purchase than an appeal to abstract terms like ‘resistance’ in China, where it seems not to hold anything like the same cultural cachet as in the Mediterranean.

Overseas Chinese communities figure prominently in anthropological accounts of the way gambling contributes to minority communities’ collective self-definition. This is perhaps unsurprising given their fame as gamblers, their role as migrant labourers and traders in various colonial regimes, and the prevalence of Chinatowns in metropolitan centres (Basu 1991; Loussouarn 2010; Papineau 2005). Loussouarn is emblematic of the wider literature in challenging the consensus that because (in her case, Chinese) minorities gamble more they are irrational, instead providing a cultural analysis of peoples who value confrontations with contingency in a context of risky migration choices and minority status.

For all these specifics, Mahjong remains the most famous and probably the most played of East Asian gambling games, both at home and abroad, though it has not received proportional attention (Festa 2006). Four players use a set of 144 tiles and each player attempts to gain a winning set of four melds and a pair. The discourse emerging from China centres on the transition from socialism to capitalism and the transmogrification of traditional attitudes to hospitality and efficacy through gambling practice. The explosion in popularity of the mechanical game pachinko in Japan after the Second World War also cries out for anthropological treatment (Schwartz 2006); superficially the game resembles pinball but with potentially hundreds of balls in play at any one time. The aim is to get as many small metal balls as possible, which may be exchanged for prizes.

To the indigenous peoples of Oceania (including New Zealand and the best part of Australia), gambling was a novel practice; in Australia it arrived 300 years ago, but in parts of Papua New Guinea people learnt of gambling as late as the 1960s. As such, gambling had to be placed within a repertoire of imports such as Christianity, money, wage labour, and a swathe of new technologies and commodities. Initial guiding concerns for anthropologists were the role of gambling in integrating new practices, especially as modes of redistribution, and the association of gambling with young men who were rebelling against patriarchal control (Zimmer 1987). Given the novelty of gambling, the Pacific literature also contains a trove of freshly invented and constantly transforming games and a fresh exploration of gambling’s possibilities (see Laycock 1966; Pickles 2014a). Elsewhere I have described how in Highland Papua New Guinea, the games that were initially introduced bifurcated into two streams of card games, one fast and one slow, and have since been supplemented by slot machines and betting on Australian horse racing at a bookies (Pickles 2013; 2014a). These latter forms of gambling have introduced a ‘house edge’, meaning the house always wins in the long run, a feature that was otherwise absent in games that didn’t have a ‘house’. Given that a proportion of house revenues are given to the state through taxation, it is worth noting that it is only these games that are legal. Recent studies concentrate on the capacity of unseen forces and the gambling games in which they operate as ways in which Pacific people explore a wide range of ideas about efficacy (Mosko 2014; Pickles 2014b). In a context where gifting and demand sharing play a pivotal role in social life, gambling has also served as a means to explore the potential of state-issued currency, another introduction (Pickles forthcoming).

Gamblers playing a card game called bom in Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea

The gambling industry and the wider field

Anthropological studies of the gambling industry represent an area of proven analytic potency and considerable growth. They are not restricted to one region, but they are conceptually united because they deal with: (1) technologies and mathematics that are often very similar or the same; (2) international consortia; (3) shared legal frameworks; and (4) parallel interest from other academic disciplines that can be glossed under ‘gambling studies’.^[3]

As a commercial industry that relies heavily on permissive state regulation, the gambling industry funds a significant amount of social science research, exercising soft power over the theoretical paradigms within which academics operate. Tied as they are to evidence-based policy, the gambling field is consequently dominated by psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, and the health sciences. With some commendable exceptions (Cassidy 2014a; Schüll 2012), anthropological writings and the works they reference sometimes choose to circumvent this literature, pointing out the historically and geographically contingent development of the concepts involved (Hacking 1990; Reith 1999). One of the most valuable attributes of anthropological studies of the gambling industry is the ethnographic necessity for critical engagement with the same concepts that are used by the industry, by related academic fields, and in the lives of gamblers themselves (e.g. ‘leisure’, ‘addiction’, ‘responsible gambling’, ‘problem gambling’, ‘compulsive gambling’, and ‘pathological gambling’).^[4] Critical appraisals of social science approaches to gambling stemming from anthropology and sociology represent a potent counter narrative, but these accounts are rarely taken seriously in the more instrumental, policy-oriented ‘gambling studies’ literature (McGowan 2004).

The most prominent case of socio-cultural anthropology actively resisting industry-promoted concepts and trends is Natasha Dow Schüll’s outstanding Addiction by design (2012), an ethnography of the machine gambling (slot machine) industry in Las Vegas. Schüll uncovers the thin margin between gambling machine and person, riffing on the interstitial space that constitutes them both as models for each other within a machine-formatted head-space that is known as ‘the zone’. Schüll follows the affective link from players to machines and through to the architects of escape, those who make the machines, process the data, and engineer the casino floors. And it is escape that is offered; not something for nothing, but nothing as something. Schüll’s informant-players are beyond the desire for a win; they wish to kindle a space where ‘you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with’ (2012: 2). There is no escape, for addiction and its treatments are shown to be couched in the same language of actuarial self-management as gambling. Schüll refuses to shy away from exposing industry-affiliated research; she reveals the means by which the gambling industry manipulates opportunities for funding so that research is forced to concentrate on individuals’ propensities to addiction and to steer clear of the interplay of machine and person. She argues that the lack of an obvious intra-bodily aspect in this ‘behavioural’ kind of addiction has either led or enabled researchers to put their focus on the biological make-up of individuals, and drawn attention away from the substantive manipulation of people by gambling machines. What results from the analysis is a nuanced theorization of a society-wide cognitive dissonance between self-regulation and addiction.

A flourishing subdiscipline

From sluggish beginnings, the anthropological literature on gambling is surging. Part of this phenomenon must be put down to the expansion and maturation of anthropology as a discipline, but a more important factor is the increasing visibility and public acceptance of gambling within the Global North, where the vast majority of anthropologists receive their training. Set against this background, anthropology’s response to a global gambling phenomenon appears belated, and the centre ground of gambling analysis has been effectively co-opted by problem-oriented disciplines that generate quickly digestible instrumental outcomes. The flourish of anthropological publications in the last two decades has its roots in ethnographic particularism and regional concerns, but the result has been a wealth of cases that, if harnessed, speak to a single identifiable phenomenon. Of this they are on the cusp. It remains to be seen whether anthropologists will be able to make good on their unrivalled breadth of experience and produce the paradigm-changing analyses that are required in order to account for the diversity in gambling practices and perceptions seen across the world.

As things stand, anthropologists tend to produce qualitative analyses centred on the gambling experience and the relationship of gambling to the broader socio-cultural context, emphasising that what we know about gambling is irreducibly tied to how we come to know about it (see Cassidy, Pisac & Loussouarn 2013). These contributions are important but undervalued. Ethnographic particulars have yielded excellent data that has been used to plot the presence of gambling against other social phenomena, the best cross-cultural correlation for gambling being presence of state-issued currency and high levels of inequality (see Binde 2005; Pryor 1977). This data is intriguing, but insufficient. Above all, anthropological studies of gambling have shown that the local meanings, uses, strategies, efficacies, symbolism, and effects of gambling can be so manipulated and transformed as to destabilise consensus on what gambling represents as a sociological phenomenon. What emerges instead is gambling as a space of socio-cultural introspection, an underdetermined ritual which privileges form in order to interrogate possibility. It is above all this insight which must figure in broader syntheses. By beginning from an anthropological perspective, broad statistical correlations offer just the merest (but nevertheless profoundly enticing) glimpse into the real boundaries of cultural difference.

References

Altman, J. 1985. Gambling as a mode of redistributing and accumulating cash among Aborigines: a case study from Arnhem Land. In Gambling in Australia (eds) G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson & L. Sylvan, 50-67. Sydney: Croom Helm.

Basu, E.O. 1991. Profit, loss, and fate: the entrepreneurial ethic and the practice of gambling in an overseas Chinese community. Modern China 17, 227-59.

Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. New York: Paladin Books.

Benjamin, W. 2006. Notes on a theory of gambling. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 211-4. New York: Routledge.

Binde, P. 2005. Gambling across cultures: Mapping worldwide occurrence and learning from ethnographic comparison. International Gambling Studies 5, 1-27.

Bosco, J., L.H-M. Liu & M. West 2009. Underground lotteries in China: the occult economy and capitalist culture. Research in Economic Anthropology 29, 31-62.

Brady, M. 2004. Regulating social problems: The pokies, the Productivity Commission and an Aboriginal community. Discussion paper submitted to the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, National Australian University, Canberra, Australia.

Caillois, R. 1961. Man, play, and games (trans. M. Barash). London: Thames & Hudson.

Cassidy, R. 2002. The sport of kings: kinship, class, and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: University Press.

———, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn 2013. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Fair game? Producing and publishing gambling research. International Gambling Studies 14, 345-53.

——— 2014b. Afterword: Manufacturing gambling. Oceania 84, 306-14.

Dostoyevsky, F. 1996 [1866]. The gambler (trans. C.J. Hogarth). New York: Dover Thrift.

Festa, P.E. 2006. Mahjong politics in contemporary China: civility, Chineseness, and mass culture. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, 7-35.

Gariban, G., S.F. Kingma & N. Zhorowska 2014. Never a dull day: exploring the material organization of virtual gambling. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 107-21. London: Routledge.

Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Goffman, E. 2006 [1969]. Where the action is. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) A.F. Collins, 225-54. New York: Routledge.

Goodale, J.C. 1987. Gambling is hard work: card playing in Tiwi society. Oceania 58, 6-21.

Hacking, I. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: University Press.

Herzfeld, M. 1991. A place in history: social and monumental time in a Cretan town. Princeton: University Press.

Huizinga, J. 1970 [1949]. Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Paladin.

Laycock, D.C. 1966. Three native card games of New Guinea and their European ancestors. Oceania 37, 49-53.

Lesser, A. 1969 [1933]. The Pawnee ghost dance hand game: ghost dance revival and ethnic identity. New York: AMS Press.

Loussouarn, C. 2010. ‘Buying moments of happiness’: luck, time and agency among Chinese casino players in London. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Malaby, T.M. 2003. Gambling life: dealing in contingency in a Greek city. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

McGowan, V. (ed.) 2004. How do we know what we know: epistemic tensions in social and cultural research on gambling, 1980–2000. Journal of Gambling Issues 11.

Mosko, M.S. 2014. Cards on Kiriwina: magic, cosmology, and the ‘divine dividual’ in Trobriand gambling. Oceania 84, 239-55.

Papataxiarchis, E. 1999. A contest with money: gambling and the politics of disinterested sociality in Aegean Greece. In Lilies of the field: marginal people who live for the moment (eds) S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis & M. Stewart, 158-75. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Papineau, E. 2005. Pathological gambling in Montreal’s Chinese community: an anthropological perspective. Journal of Gambling Studies 21, 157-78.

Pickles, A.J. 2013. ‘One-man one-man’: how slot-machines facilitate Papua New Guineans' shifting relations to each other. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 171-84. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Introduction: gambling as analytic in Melanesia. Oceania 84, 207-21.

——— 2014b. ‘Bom bombed Kwin’: how two card games model kula, moka, and Goroka. Oceania 84, 272-88.

——— forthcoming. The other face of money: gambling, transfers and the economic frontier, Papua New Guinea. Unpublished book manuscript.

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2002. Between China and Europe: person, culture, and emotion in Macao. Oxford: Berg.

Pisac, A. 2013. Croupiers’ sleight of mind. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 59-73. London: Routledge.

Pryor, F.L. 1977. The origins of the economy: a comparative study of distribution in primitive and peasant economies. New York: Academic Press.

Reith, G. 1999. The age of chance: gambling and western culture. New York: Routledge.

Rizzo, J. 2004. Compulsive gambling, diagrammatic reasoning, and spacing out. Public Culture 16, 265-88.

Sallaz, J. 2009. The labor of luck: casino capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schüll, N.D. 2012. Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: University Press.

Schwartz, D.G. 2006. Roll the bones: the history of gambling. New York: Gotham Books.

Scott, J. 2013. ‘Playing properly’: casinos, blackjack and cultural intimacy. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 125-39. London: Routledge.

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Note on contributor

Anthony J. Pickles is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph is entitled The other face of money: gambling in Papua New Guinea. Other publications include a special issue of Oceania on gambling in Melanesia (2014).

Dr Anthony J. Pickles, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ajp225@cam.ac.uk

[1] In dire times, the Ghost Dance movement synthesised new religious strictures with existing beliefs and above all emphasised the power of formal dances (long considered socially efficacious) to bring about a utopic transformation of Native American circumstances, generating prosperity and unity across Native American communities and release from colonial oppression.

[2] Other important influences include the following: anthropologists were late on the scene when it came to gambling, and often therefore trace their intellectual heritage from the philosophers Walter Benjamin (2006), Johan Huizinga (1970 [1949]) and Georg Simmel (2006 [1911]), the works of sociologists and cultural theorists such as Thorstein Veblen (2007) and Roger Caillois (1961), as well as Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The gambler (1996 [1866]). With the exception of Roger Caillois, these thinkers were concerned with the development of European and American gambling under the capitalist system or the proclivities towards gambling of a universal human subject modelled on European cosmologies. They therefore figure more prominently in anthropological studies of gambling in the context of capitalism and in the Global North.

The sociologist Erving Goffman is that discipline’s first point of reference on gambling, and his influence has been important to anthropology as well (2006 [1969]). Based on research in the US, he generalises about gamblers everywhere. Goffman begins by distinguishing between the objective mathematical risk of a given bet and the subjective risk experienced by players, and as a sociologist he is primarily concerned with the latter. Unlike anthropological accounts of gambling, which would by and large dismiss the relevance of statistical risk at this point, Goffman retains this mathematical framing for the problem of subjectively understood risk. His primary insight stems from this combination of statistical probability and perception. For Goffman, the ‘expected utility’ of a pot (i.e. the usefulness accorded to the money one might win by a player weighted by the probability of their winning it) is shot through with other subjective factors. These include the excitement of gambling and the ability of a pot to make a consequential difference to the player’s life after the game is concluded. Goffman defines the thrill of risk as ‘action’, and describes sociological reasons why people are attracted to ‘action’ in whatever form it can be found. The approach is a natural ally to Bateson’s in that the thrill of gambling is seen as a necessary, nigh fundamental part of the analysis of gambling.

Roger Caillois was an anthropologically informed French intellectual and critic, and a colleague of Marcel Mauss. Unlike Goffman, who begins with the assumption of conceptual hegemony during cognitive processes that are on the surface perceived differently by different actors, Caillois takes human diversity and divergent cultural history as the starting point for the development of approaches to games. His open-ended approach in making a global typology of games in Man, play, and games (1961) is in some respects still innovative today. For Caillois, all human play begins with paidia, which he defined as ‘spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct’ (1961: 28), from the Greek, but this is the extent of human similitude. Paidia is disciplined to various extents by a concept from Latin, ludus, the ‘pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed’ (Caillois 1961: 29). The resultant game takes a form that lies within a matrix of four tropes: directed contest, chance, mimesis, and disorientation. Caillois was also at pains to point out that ludus is not the only conceivable metamorphosis of paidia into social forms of prescription, and he takes the closest Chinese-language equivalent to paidia, wan, as his example. Wan is ‘oriented not toward process, calculation, or triumph over difficulties [as ludus is] but toward calm, patience, and idle speculation’ (1961: 33). For Caillois this was evidence of how China wisely worked out a contrasting philosophical destiny for itself, and that cultures’ destinies could be read from their games. Though dated, Man, play, and games remains the most ambitious attempt yet to model games across all cultures.

[3] Quantitative and instrumental accounts of gambling have a functional policy role backed by state and industry funding in wealthy nations of the Global North. It has been left largely to anthropologists to study small-scale societies’ gambling practices within their own social contexts, as well as gambling in nations which do not have the financial resources to support their own research. There are three notable points of intersection between these poles, the first being the wholesale adoption of gambling policy designed in the Global North by nations in the Global South (Cassidy 2014b). These are often driven by commercial interests and good-governance drives, and are a field ripe for anthropological study. The second is the development of gambling enclaves that attempt to entice gamblers from wealthy states to spend money offshore (Pina-Cabral 2002). Thirdly, the study of minority communities in settler states (particularly in the United States and Australia) are often tackled using quantitative and instrumental techniques, but have also been the subject of anthropological analyses (Altman 1985; Goodale 1987), and the results often represent stark and problematic contrasts (e.g. Brady 2004).

[4] Exemplars of such studies include horse racing in the UK (Cassidy 2002), croupiers in a Slovenian casino (Pisac 2013), casino gambling in the United States and South Africa (Rizzo 2004; Sallaz 2009), and participation in the South African lottery (Van Wyk 2012). The emerging field of online gambling is as yet somewhat of a blind spot (but see Gariban, Kingma & Zhorowska 2013).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Distribution

Sharing

Introduction: the currency of sharing

Sharing and value

Sharing and access: gained, granted and demanded

Sharing and expansion in online and offline communities

Conclusion: the future of sharing

References

Note on contributor

Tax

Introduction

The social contract and governmentality

Why do people pay or evade taxes, and why does the state collect them?

What are taxes? Meanings, imaginaries, and values

Debt and credit

Global flows

Conclusion: an anthropology of tax

References

Note on contributor

Cooperatives

Introduction

A history of anthropological and sociological interest

Key issues

Democracy and egalitarianism

Scale and markets

Movements and civil society

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Money

Introduction

What counts as money?

Money at the threshold of persons and relations

Monetary pluralism

Networks, platforms and open questions

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Revolution

Introduction

Defining revolution

A field takes shape

Placing revolutions in wider social contexts

Paradoxes and contradictions within revolutions

Legacies of revolution

Anthropologies of revolutions

References

Note on contributor

Gambling

​Introduction

Pioneering anthropological studies

Contemporary regional foci

The gambling industry and the wider field

A flourishing subdiscipline

References

Note on contributor

Introduction