Gifts and Commodities

by Christopher A. Gregory

Hardcover. Jacket is lightly marked and scored. Spine and rear upper edge are faded. Spine ends, edges and leading corners are worn, creased and nicked. Spine head and leading corners are taped. Spine ends, edges and leading corners are bumped and faded. Boards are slightly bowed. One or two scores on rear board. Page block head is foxed. Light mark on page 27. Text is clear throughout. Binding is sound. HJW

Genres: Anthropology, Economics, Nonfiction

242 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2015

Reviews

[Federica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book because I was looking for some introduction to Economic anthropology and I was looking in particular for a reference on how commodities can transform into gifts and viceversa. I surely found what I needed and much more.
The author reviews, explains and critiques the most relevant theories in both economics and anthropology covering fundamental authors like Marx, Smith, Mauss, Levi-Strauss and others.
The book’s purpose is to provide a critique of neoclassical economy while demonstrating the relevance of social relationships in economic relations and how economic relations vary across cultures and time. As a student, I particularly appreciated how the author made complex theories and arguments accessible and took the care of defining each concept clearly. Gregory uses often graphs and images to represent visually theoretical complexities.
Most of the book is dedicated to the theoretical discussion aimed at building Gregory’s approach and theories, while the last two chapters cover his ethnographic data from Papua New Guinea. This case study is used to show that the status of things as gifts or commodities depends on their social context rather than to predetermined characteristics.
It is to consider that the book was written in the 80s and only recently republished, which makes it a classic that doesn’t show its age, and a point of departure for those interested in the study of economic anthropology.

[Dominique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gifts and Commodities is a foundational book which manages to do many things at once. Part critique of economic theory based on a universalising ‘theory of goods’; part unification of theories of commodities and theories of gifts as a ‘modified political economy approach’; part attack on overgeneralisation of concepts such as ‘The Big Man’ as typologies; part reframing of kinship terms 'as exchange relations analogous to prices’. Towards such an ambitious task Gregory choses foundational anthropological figures such as Morgan, Mauss, and Lévi-Strauss, and counterpoints their observations with the economistic theories of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Sraffa. The debt that much of contemporary anthropologies owes to the work of Gregory is clear both in the writing, and in the introduction by Marilyn Strathern. This work has now become classics of economic anthropology which is seen to have fundamentally shifted the debates on relationality and exchange. For Gregory, most important is that things can be gifts or commodities (and transfigure between)
depending on the social context. In this sense, it is also a foundational text in the Anthropology of Value, and the influence of Gregory on the work of David Graeber is evident in his re-reading of Marx in terms of understanding production to be the creation of new people and kinship. "The terms gifts, commodities, and goods are ancient words that are not going to fade away any time soon. This is because the three terms are the linguistic signs of quite different paradigms of value”. Here, Gregory’s ethnographic data from Papua New Guinea play against theories levelled by Andrew Strathern, Marshall Sahlins; and predates the concerns of relational anthropology and value theorists - which have become central to current anthropological debates. Thus this is a great book for any student of anthropology from to gain a grasp of a masterful balance of theoretical intervention and ethnography, or any reader interested in Melanesian Anthropology. A must read!

[Bhavika Mahtani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Gregory’s Gifts and Commodities, first published in 1982, heralded his foray into Anthropology. As the preface details, Gregory, a trained economist, was struck by the inability of neoclassical economics to explain the coexistence of a thriving gift economy with the colonial ‘commodity’ economy in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Hence, the text critiques the ubiquitous neoclassical ‘theory of goods’ highlighting the utility of the more flexible political economy approach.

In the first section, Gregory develops his framework by synthesizing the conceptual foundations of Marx and Sraffa with those of Morgan, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, to develop a model of the gift economy. He demonstrates how objects of exchange in a class-based society tend to assume the alienated form of a commodity while in a clan-based society they tend to assume the nonalienated form of a gift. Subsequently, in the second section, Gregory draws on historical sources to demonstrate the rise of the colonial commodity economy, characterized by widespread cash cropping across PNG. In chronicling this trend, he reveals that the persistence of clan ownership of land, and therefore of clan organization itself, enabled gift exchange to flourish.

Concluding, Gregory’s emphasizes the neoclassical model’s poor explanatory potential — this is in my opinion is the texts strongest contribution and renders it an enduring classic. He argues that the model incorrectly universalizes categories specific to Western capitalism, which have in turn resulted in dismissive explanations of gift exchange as a primitive form of capitalism, hindering the analysis of local realities. As the neoclassical model continues the reign unquestioned, Gregory’s lucid text (albeit occasionally dry), revealing its insufficiencies, ought to be read, especially by economists and policymakers, and students interested in economic anthropology.