Explain how different modes of production have developed and changed over time.

6 Conclusion

The notion of a mode of production is a deliberate simplification. It provides a model of certain central relationships that define epochal forms. As such, the analysis of modes of production cannot substitute for the examination of particular cases in specific spatial and temporal contexts. In this sense, mode-of-production analyses do not constitute historical explanations.

In a larger sense, however, the concept of modes of production furnishes the necessary scaffolding without which all local historical explanation would be impossible. Comparison and contrast, whether explicitly or implicitly carried out, depend upon a common framework. This is what Marx's notion of ways of producing provides: a unified theory for viewing human society and history.

Conclusion

The notion of a mode of production is a deliberate simplification. It provides a model of certain central relationships that define epochal forms. As such, the analysis of modes of production cannot substitute for the examination of particular cases in specific spatial and temporal contexts. In this sense, mode-of-production analyses do not constitute historical explanations.

In a larger sense, however, the concept of ways of producing furnishes the necessary scaffolding without which local historical explanation would be impossible. Comparison and contrast, whether explicitly or implicitly carried out, depend upon an overarching framework. This is what Marx's notion of modes of production provides: a way of understanding society and history in the broadest terms.

The present is once again a moment of deep crisis in world capitalism. Accordingly, it would not be surprising if the social sciences produced another efflorescence of Marxist-inspired ideas, but if so, it will unlikely do so in reference to a comparative analysis of modes of production. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the elimination of socialism as a world model, nothing remains but capitalism. In 1968, it was possible at least to imagine large parts of the earth as ‘noncapitalist,’ but now there is, for the first time in human history, one truly globalized world capitalist system. Deepening the analysis of the present will require taking into account what was learned in the 1970s: namely, that capitalism is no more ‘economic’ than other modes of production and no less dependent upon a series of culturally peculiar ideas. Once the analysis of modes of production is truly leveled in this respect, we will have a more powerful approach to capitalism itself, one that does not naturalize capitalist culture.

Glossary of Terms

Capitalism

A particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the private ownership of the means of production (MP) and its operation for exchange value, and the related need for people to sell their own labor power (LP) to make a living.

From a Marxist dialectical perspective, society is personified by two fundamentally opposed classes (capitalist and proletariat). As an outcome of class struggle, society can be transformed through time, from one hegemonic mode of production to another (e.g., feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to communism) as the oppressed class (e.g., workers) seeks to overthrow and liberate itself from the oppressor (e.g., the capitalist class).

Surplus value is value created by the unpaid labor of wage workers, over and above the value of their LP (necessary labor time), and appropriated without compensation by the capitalist. For Marxists, the production and appropriation of surplus value is a fundamental aim of capitalism.

The term used critically by Marxists to describe mainstream economists' failure to acknowledge, and attempts to mystify, the social relations (and exploitation) that underlie the production of commodities.

The tendency under capitalism for some places to develop very rapidly while other places experience decline. The Marxist theory contends that the two countervailing tendencies—of growth and decline—are fundamentally related and intrinsic to capitalist forms of production.

The stabilization of capitalist production through geographical extension and reconfiguration via particular organizational place-based forms and locational arrangements for the purpose of expanded capital accumulation.

Industrialization and Capitalism

Capitalism is a mode of production. A mode of production is a particular way of organizing the economy and of allotting the costs and benefits of economic activities. Economic historians have identified modes of production other than capitalism (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, socialism, and advanced communism) and economic geographers have aptly noted that elements from these other modes of production can coexist, somehow “etched” in the fabric of the dominant mode of production today—capitalism. There is no relation of logical or causal necessity between capitalism and industrialization. This means that the two concepts do not entail one another either logically or causally. In plain language, capitalism does not necessarily lead to industrialization (although it has often been considered as a favoring factor for industrialization, especially in the scholarship on the first Industrial Revolution in England). Furthermore, industrialization can and has happened in noncapitalist regions (e.g., Stalin's Soviet Union, 1924–53; Mao's China; and Ceausescu's Romania). To look at these relations the other way around, it is worth noticing that industrialization does not necessarily lead to capitalism (see the cases of Cuba, China, or North Korea today) and that industrialization is not a necessary condition for the emergence of capitalism (e.g., Third World countries may have a capitalist economy based on agricultural export-oriented monocultures or on tourism). Statisticians' urge to remember that correlation does not imply causation is therefore particularly relevant when studying the relation between capitalism and industrialization: both across historical times, and across geographical spaces the two economic processes tend to go together. At first glance, one could speculate that they are mutually reinforcing processes, although counter-arguments to this hasty speculation can also be easily conceived.

To understand the issues involved, note that the most prominent argument for the virtues of capitalism consists in the neoclassical economic theorizing of free markets as best means for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to many needs. That argument, in turn, depends on the assumption of atomistic (innumerable) economic agents forced to coexist and fight with one another in a condition of perfect competition (i.e., none of them is powerful enough to be sheltered from competition). In other words, the alleged virtues of free markets collapse if the assumption of perfect competition is severely put into question by economic realities. The process of industrialization systematically does exactly that: on the one hand, technologies (one type of fixed capital) for the industrial process become yet more expensive (because they embody more and more knowledge), and this need for larger initial investments of capital encourages the concentration of capital in fewer hands (monopolies or oligopolies); on the other hand, the need for economies of scale acts as a catalyst for the further integration and concentration of capital.

It is not only the case that the logic of industrialization can subtly move capitalist realities far away from their idealized virtues: as Marxist geographers have amply documented, the logic of capitalism renders industrialization a very fragile achievement. Just as the logic of industrialization favors concentrations of capital, which in turn undermine the free-market conditions of healthy capitalism, so too the logic of capitalism favors the geographical relocation of capital, which in turn undermines industrial activities in old industrial regions. In the initial stages of the industrialization of a new region, the prospects of continuous growth seem safe and sure. Nevertheless, as time goes by, there is a tendency for the rate of profit of local capitalists to fall because of factors such as exhaustion of raw materials, new competitors entering the market, saturation of the market, increasing rent, new taxes (e.g., green taxes to internalize environmental externalities), increasing cost of labor because of unionization, etc. Since the logic of capitalism is the making of profits for profits' sake, the local capitalists can choose to close the now-unprofitable local plants and reinvest their money elsewhere, in regions where they can make higher rates of return on their investment. These new regions benefit from industrialization, whereas the older ones suffer the costs of the opposite process—deindustrialization.

In a long-term perspective, three observations become self-evident: the first is that, any apparent beneficiary of capitalist industrialization has its prosperous days counted before turning into one of capitalism's victims. Sometimes, these victims, because they are victims (i.e., high unemployment, therefore oversupply of labor, therefore cheaper labor) might attract new rounds of capitalist investment. Second, from a spatial perspective, industrialization and deindustrialization are processes that together express the historical geography of capitalism, its highly dynamic and uneven nature that so much impressed Marx and his followers. Third, from a political perspective, it becomes clear that the state has a crucial regulatory role to play in deciding the fate of industrialization. Many of the contemporary struggles over economic globalization emerge precisely because of the conflicts of interest between states and capitalists: the former care for economic development, high employment, and national flourishing, whereas the latter obey the different (transnational) logic of capitalist competition.

Industrialization and Capitalism

Capitalism is a mode of production. A mode of production is a particular way of organizing the economy and of allotting the costs and benefits of economic activities. Economic historians have identified modes of production other than capitalism (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, socialism, and advanced communism) and economic geographers have aptly noted that elements from these other modes of production can coexist, somehow ‘etched’ in the fabric of the dominant mode of production today – capitalism. There is no relation of logical or causal necessity between capitalism and industrialization. This means that the two concepts do not entail one another either logically or causally. In plain language, capitalism does not necessarily lead to industrialization (although it has often been considered as a favoring factor for industrialization, especially in the scholarship on the first Industrial Revolution in England). Furthermore, industrialization can and has happened in noncapitalist regions (e.g., Stalin's Soviet Union, 1924–53; Mao's China; and Ceausescu's Romania). To look at these relations the other way around, it is worth noticing that industrialization does not necessarily lead to capitalism (see the cases of Cuba, China, or North Korea today) and that industrialization is not a necessary condition for the emergence of capitalism (e.g., Third World countries may have a capitalist economy based on agricultural export-oriented monocultures or on tourism). Statisticians’ urge to remember that correlation does not imply causation is therefore particularly relevant when studying the relation between capitalism and industrialization: both across historical times, and across geographical spaces the two economic processes tend to go together. At first glance, one could speculate that they are mutually reinforcing processes, although counter-arguments to this hasty speculation can also be easily conceived.

To understand the issues involved, note that the most prominent argument for the virtues of capitalism consists in the neoclassical economic theorizing of free markets as best means for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to many needs. That argument, in turn, depends on the assumption of atomistic (innumerable) economic agents forced to coexist and fight with one another in a condition of perfect competition (i.e., none of them is powerful enough to be sheltered from competition). In other words, the alleged virtues of free markets collapse if the assumption of perfect competition is severely put into question by economic realities. The process of industrialization systematically does exactly that: on the one hand, technologies (one type of fixed capital) for the industrial process become yet more expensive (because they embody more and more knowledge), and this need for larger initial investments of capital encourages the concentration of capital in fewer hands (monopolies or oligopolies); on the other hand, the need for economies of scale acts as a catalyst for the further integration and concentration of capital.

However, it is not only the case that the logic of industrialization can subtly move capitalist realities far away from their idealized virtues: as Marxist geographers have amply documented, the logic of capitalism renders industrialization a very fragile achievement. Just as the logic of industrialization favors concentrations of capital, which in turn undermine the free-market conditions of healthy capitalism, so too the logic of capitalism favors the geographical relocation of capital, which in turn undermines industrial activities in old industrial regions. In the initial stages of the industrialization of a new region, the prospects of continuous growth seem safe and sure. Nevertheless, as time goes by, there is a tendency for the rate of profit of local capitalists to fall because of factors such as exhaustion of raw materials, new competitors entering the market, saturation of the market, increasing rent, new taxes (e.g., green taxes to internalize environmental externalities), increasing cost of labor because of unionization, etc. Since the logic of capitalism is the making of profits for profits’ sake, the local capitalists can choose to close the now-unprofitable local plants and reinvest their money elsewhere, in regions where they can make higher rates of return on their investment. These new regions benefit from industrialization, whereas the older ones suffer the costs of the opposite process – deindustrialization.

In a long-term perspective, three observations become self-evident: the first is that, any apparent beneficiary of capitalist industrialization has its prosperous days counted before turning into one of capitalism's victims. Sometimes, these victims, because they are victims (i.e., high unemployment, therefore oversupply of labor, therefore cheaper labor) might attract new rounds of capitalist investment. Second, from a spatial perspective, industrialization and deindustrialization are processes that together express the historical geography of capitalism, its highly dynamic and uneven nature that so much impressed Marx and his followers. Third, from a political perspective, it becomes clear that the state has a crucial regulatory role to play in deciding the fate of industrialization. Many of the contemporary struggles over economic globalization emerge precisely because of the conflicts of interest between states and capitalists: the former care for economic development, high employment, and national flourishing, whereas the latter obey the different (transnational) logic of capitalist competition.

3.3 Class Interests and Functional Explanation

Under the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie must strive constantly to maintain or increase their rate of profit to stay competitive. Since, to put it simply, the rate of profit is equal to the value of a product divided by the cost of its production, perhaps the best way to increase the rate of profit is to drive down the cost of production. However, part of these costs, such as raw materials and machinery, is fixed, according to Marx. Hence, the bourgeoisie must try to decrease the variable costs of labor, either by reducing wages or by replacing workers with machinery. However, as a greater and greater proportion of the costs of production go into the fixed costs of machinery and a decreasing proportion go into the variable costs of labor, it becomes increasingly difficult for the capitalist to find ways to cut costs. The capitalist is forced continuously to reinvest his profits in machinery in order to replace even more workers with machines and the remaining workers are reduced to a subsistence wage. According to Marx' law of capitalist accumulation in Capital (1867), the greater the wealth invested in fixed capital, the greater the misery of the proletariat. Class conflict is the inevitable result.

Economic class interests are not necessarily consciously thought by social actors, but rather are ascribed to these actors by the social scientist observing the situation. This is what Marx meant when he referred to them as ‘objective’ class interests. For example, to say that it is in the class interest of the bourgeoisie to reinvest their profits in new machinery is to say that those capitalists who thus reinvest their profits will remain in the bourgeoisie while those who do not act in this way will drop down into the proletariat. When Marx said that the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat conflict, what he seems to have meant is that the capitalist remains a member of the bourgeoisie only as a result of acting in a certain way which directly conflicts with the ‘objective’ interests of the working class. He did not mean to say that being a member of the bourgeoisie causes one to think in a certain way, which is different than the way in which the proletariat thinks; indeed, it is not all that important or relevant what individuals may actually be thinking. Thus, to say that the capitalist replaces workers with machines because it is in his interest to do so is to give a functional rather than a causal explanation (see Interest: History of the Concept).

Indeed, the alternative, causal determinist interpretation of Marx makes him out to be an incoherent thinker. If our ideas were really determined by our class membership, what would be the point of writing manifestoes? One might object that his writings were addressed only to the working class. However, in The Communist Manifesto (1848/1955) he described—with obvious reference to people such as himself and Engels—how a portion of the bourgeoisie, ‘who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole,’ ‘cuts itself adrift’ and joins with the proletariat. On the determinist reading of Marx, these claims appear embarrassingly ad hoc. A functionalist reading suggests merely that people like Marx have chosen a path in life that will not make them rich.

However, as Cohen (1978) points out, orthodox Marxists tend to resist the interpretation that Marx was offering functional explanations due to their tendency to associate such explanations with the functionalist tradition in the social sciences that began with Bronislaw Malinowski . According to this tradition, a society or culture forms an organic unit, every element of which serves a function that helps to sustain the whole (see Functionalism, History of). Marxists regard functionalist social science as resistant to social change and thus as politically conservative. However, as Cohen argues, the use of functional explanations does not necessarily commit one to this brand of functionalism.

Class Interests and Functional Explanation

Under the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie must constantly strive to maintain or increase their rate of profit to stay competitive. Since, to put it simply, the rate of profit is equal to the value of a product divided by the cost of its production, perhaps the best way to increase the rate of profit is to drive down the cost of production. However, part of these costs, such as raw materials and machinery, is fixed, according to Marx. Hence, the bourgeoisie must try to decrease the variable costs of labor, either by reducing wages or by replacing workers with machinery. However, as a greater and greater proportion of the costs of production go into the fixed costs of machinery and a decreasing proportion go into the variable costs of labor, it becomes increasingly difficult for the capitalist to find ways to cut costs. The capitalist is forced continuously to reinvest his profits in machinery in order to replace even more workers with machines and the remaining workers are reduced to a subsistence wage. According to Marx's law of capitalist accumulation in Capital (1867), the greater the wealth invested in fixed capital, the greater the misery of the proletariat. Class conflict is the inevitable result.

Economic class interests are not necessarily consciously thought by social actors, but rather are ascribed to these actors by the social scientist observing the situation. This is what Marx meant when he referred to them as ‘objective’ class interests. When he said that the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat conflict, what he meant is that a member of the bourgeoisie who acts in accordance with his objective class interests will thereby act in a way that directly conflicts with the objective interests of the working class. Marx did not mean to say that being a member of the bourgeoisie actually causes one to think in a certain way, which is different than the way in which the proletariat thinks; indeed, it is not all that important or relevant what individuals may actually be thinking. For example, to say that it is in the class interest of the bourgeoisie to reinvest their profits in new machinery is to say that those capitalists who thus reinvest their profits will remain in the bourgeoisie while those who do not act in this way will not remain competitive and will eventually drop down into the proletariat. Thus, to say that the capitalist replaces workers with machines because it is in his interest to do so is to give a functional rather than a causal explanation.

Indeed, the alternative, causal determinist interpretation of Marx makes him out to be an inconsistent thinker. If our ideas were really determined by our class membership, what would be the point of writing manifestoes? How could he have hoped to change people's ideas through rhetoric and persuasion? One might object that his writings were addressed only to the working class. However, in the Communist Manifesto (1848) he described – with obvious reference to people such as himself and Engels – how a portion of the bourgeoisie, “who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”, “cuts itself adrift” and joins with the proletariat. On the determinist reading of Marx, these claims appear embarrassingly ad hoc. A functionalist reading suggests merely that people like Marx have chosen a path in life that will not make them rich.

However, as G. A. Cohen (1978) points out, orthodox Marxists tend to resist the interpretation that Marx was offering functional explanations due to their tendency to associate such explanations with the functionalist tradition in the social sciences that has its roots in thinkers such as Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski. According to this tradition, a society or culture forms an organic unit, every element of which serves a function that helps to sustain the whole. Marxists regard functionalist social science as resistant to social change and thus as politically conservative. However, as Cohen argues, the use of functional explanations does not necessarily commit one to this brand of functionalism.

2.3 Marxist Studies of Craft Production

With its focus on modes of production, Marxist theory offers social anthropology a framework for the study of craft production. A mode of production consists of the productive forces (natural, material, and technical) and the social relations of production. Most work in this area is by French anthropologists, exemplified by an English collection of papers by French neo-Marxists (Seddon 1978). The goal of this volume is to lay the groundwork for ‘a truly scientific study of society … which will lead to the discovery of laws that underlie the development of … social and economic formations … (and) identify the relations of production characteristics of pre-capitalist formations’ (Seddon 1978, p. ix). There are chapters about self-sustaining agricultural societies, the peasant mode of production, the Asian mode of production, and an African mode of production. Based on detailed ethnography, most are rich and insightful discussions of the relations between economic and political factors, several foregrounding kinship in new ways; this is especially true of those in the section based on fieldwork in Africa. However, perhaps because their goal is the identification of general laws, craft production is not a focus of description or analysis.

Following the Seddon volume a number of anthropologists have written ethnographic studies of craft production from a Marxist perspective. Three can be noted briefly: Kahn's Minangkabau Social Formations (1980) is a study of village blacksmiths in Sumatra. He describes in detail technology, organization, and marketing—treating relations of production within the workshop, the pattern of learning craft skills, relations between blacksmiths, external influences such as imported materials, and tools. The analysis is set in the context of Minangkabau matriliny, a subsistence agriculture based on rice, and economic policies of colonial overlordship. Based on individual or small workshop production for a local market or to traders, this is petty commodity production.

The next example is a study of Scottish Hebridean Island weavers of Harris tweed. Ennew (1982) traces the development of this industry from the first sales of Harris tweed in 1881. From the beginning it was based on cottage-laborer production, with merchants supplying the wool, dyes, and often the loom, and deducting the cost from payment for the finished cloth. Demands from the external market (London, overseas markets) led first to the introduction of a wider, foot-powered loom, then to removal of warping to the spinning mills in order to control quality and patterns. ‘From the moment of wool-purchase the production process of Harris Tweed is entirely in the control of mill-owning capital, except for the slight loss of control during the outworking [weaving] phase’ (Ennew 1982, pp.189–90).

Very different relations of production characterize the manufacture of carved hardwood furniture in Hong Kong. In the factory which Cooper joined as an apprentice wood carver, identical sets of tables were carved for tourists and export. He speaks of the proletarianization of the industry. Workers were paid daily at an hourly rate; the factory products were standardized, carvers producing endless legs and tops for tables, with no involvement with design or contact with customers. However he does feel that seven months as a factory carver gave him insight into the Maoist distinction between manual labor and mental labor, into proletarian culture as well as ideology (Cooper, in Coy 1989).

It seems that craft production is incorporated in several modes of production: petty commodity, cottage laborer, and even as proletarian labor.

Mode of Production and Space

Marxist geography also looks at the relations between modes of production and space. In some of this work, especially in structural Marxist geography following the ideas of Althusser (Althusser and Balibar, 1968), space is seen as a ‘level’ or ‘instance’ in a mode of production. Each aspect of social life is theorized as having a particular relation with environmental space, each mode of production creates distinct spatial arrangements, and successions of modes of production alter the landscape in any given space – so medieval churches lie within four-lane highways leading out to super-shopping centers. The themes of social practice, consciousness, and space were developed originally by the Marxist philosopher and sociologist, Lefebvre (1991). He proposed an analysis of the active production of space to bring the various kinds of space and the modalities of their genesis within a single theory. Lefebvre's thesis, simply put, was that social space is a social product: every society, each mode of production, produces its own space. Space consists of natural and social objects (locations) and their relations (networks and pathways). Yet while space contains things, it is often thought of the relations between them. For him, people are confronted by many, interpenetrated social spaces superimposed one on top of the other, what he calls a ‘hypercomplexity,’ with each fragment of space reflecting, yet hiding, many social relationships (see also Soja, 1989, 1996).

A coherent version of this idea was developed by the urban sociologist Castells (1977). For Castells, any social form, like space, can be understood in terms of the historical articulation of several modes of production. By mode of production, Castells means the particular combinations of economic, politico-institutional, and ideological systems present in a social formation, with the economy determining the mode of the production of space in the last instance. In terms of this theory one can ‘read’ the resulting space according to the economic, political, and ideological systems that formed it. An economic reading concentrates on the spatial expressions, or ‘realizations,’ of production (factories, offices, etc.), consumption (housing, sociocultural institutions), and exchange (means of circulating goods and ideas). The politico-juridical system structures institutional space according to processes of integration, repression, domination, and regulation emanating from the state apparatus. Under the ideological system, space is charged with cultural meaning, its built forms and spatial arrangements being articulated one with another into a symbolic landscape. For Castells (1977: p. 127), the social organization of space can be understood in terms of the determination of spatial forms by each of the elements of the three instances (economic, politico-juridical, ideological), by the structural combination of the three (with economy determining which instance is dominant in shaping a particular space), but also (empirically and historically) by the persistence of spatial forms created by earlier social structures, articulated with the new forms, in interaction with the natural environment.

The intention behind this kind of work was to create a Marxist ‘structural science of space’ – that is an organized explanation of the structural order of the forces and relations that impinge on space. The idea was not how economy is ‘reflected’ in space, but how economy arranges the political, cultural, and social organization of space or, in a more sophisticated statement, how an economy is made up from its various spatial instances. Yet this kind of scientific abstraction sometimes gave structural work on space a quality of unreality, as though the contents of space were laid down by driverless social paving machines passing over it. Also the return effects of space on society are minimal and mechanical in some structuralist approaches. Basically the approach lacked the active mediation of human agency, people as individuals, organized by social relations into families, classes, and institutions, and informed by different kinds of consciousness (Gregory and Urry, 1985).

Transitions to Modern Economy

Economic anthropology came of age just as the capitalist mode of production and world market was lapping its tongue into the last remote corners of the earth, where anthropologists had only recently arrived. The discipline has devoted much attention to how these transitions are experienced and accommodated by non-Western peoples.

In 2000, the French social theorist, sociologist, and anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu, reflecting upon his fieldwork in Algeria in the 1960s (but surely with the present market fundamentalist turn in mind), wrote: “The principle of the overturning of the vision of the world in late colonial Algeria was nothing other than the acquisition of the spirit of calculation … To subject all the behaviours of existence to calculating reason, as demanded by the economy, is to break with the logic of philia, of which Aristotle spoke, that is, the logic of good faith, trust and equity which is supposed to govern relations between kin and which is founded on the repression, or rather the denegation, of calculation” (2000: 25).

If at the back of much economic anthropological theory lays a debate with economics, including over whether calculative rationality is a cultural–historical artifact or a universal caste of mind, the afflatus of the discipline's empirical work has often been to make sense of the effects on individuals, families, and communities of the broadening and deepening of capitalism. A dismal light often illuminates these studies because the observed reality from anthropologists' standpoint is that the impact of capitalist expansion is frequently deleterious to the lifeways and life chances of the economically humble.

Early studies of the transition to market society, so conceived, tended to be categorical and vectorial. Bohannan and Dalton (1962) described three types of local African economies: marketless, peripheral markets, and market-dominated. The economic characteristics of each were enumerated in terms of the principal source for subsistence livelihood, price formation for goods, money and money uses, external trade, and technology. The three types stood in a historical relationship with one another, with the implication of unidirectionality.

In an influential paper called ‘The impact of money on an African subsistence economy,’ Bohannan (1959) described the Tiv in Nigeria as having ‘a multicentric economy’ with mutually exclusive spheres of exchange. These separate spheres, which consisted of subsistence goods, prestige items, and rights in human beings, were “marked by different institutionalization and different moral values” (1959: 124) and were transacted with ‘special purpose monies.’ When the Tiv came to be forced to pay taxes in coinage, Bohannan said, they had to go about acquiring it through involvement in market transactions outside of their tribe. They started growing cash crops and thus became ensnared in the supply and demand system of distant trade. With this came the decline of special purpose money and its replacement with unitary currency, or ‘general purpose money,’ like dollars, which act as a unitary standard of value and can in theory exchange anything for anything. The breakdown of the multivariate economy, Bohannan lamented, spelt a decline in the traditional morality embedded in Tiv economy.

Today, Bohannan's depiction carries the air of a just-so story: factually dubious and theoretically simplistic. “It is not clear that money always flattens social relations, rather than creating new ones just as complex,” Bill Maurer comments (2006: 21). And of course, market societies are themselves replete with ‘special purpose’ currencies such as store coupons, subway tokens, gambling chips, and even online virtual worlds money, not to mention myriad forms of nonmonetized exchange. (Spheres of exchange are still taught to undergraduates because they broaden the minds of those unaccustomed to the thought that there were once societies where most things were not exchangeable for just anything else at a monetary price.)

Speaking just of money, early schemas like Bohannan's yielded to rigorous and sophisticated analyses of money's history, uses, and significance (Graeber, 2011; Guyer, 2004; Hart, 2001; Maurer, 2005; Parry and Bloch, 1989). Some of these still marginally concern themselves with the tensions associated with grand economic transitions (e.g., financialization, securitization, and depersonalization), while others resist or ignore this issue to focus on matters of purely local complexity. In either case, the accomplishment of the sub-subfield (‘the anthropology of money’) at least since the 1980s is hardly contingent on this narrative.

At present, the broadest umbrella under which economic transitions are studied in anthropology concerns neoliberal restructuring, referring to policies enacted upon the belief that the market is always superior to the state at managing and distributing public resources. Sometimes the procedure is called ‘rolling back the state.’ The trend in many places since the Reagan–Thatcher revolution has been toward the diminishment of the state's role in providing for health, utilities, education, environmental protection, and social insurances.

Case studies addressing themselves to the differing effects of and adaptations to neoliberal policies provide a rich corpus from which to compare outcomes and formulate generalizations. One key point where anthropological analysis of these trends is concerned is that inspection of them at the register of the local reveals aspects that are rarely discerned from afar. Few ethnographers neither end up endorsing unidirectional or unidimensional frameworks, nor do they invariably find that the decline of traditional economies always results in changes for the worse (Ensminger, 1992). Ground-level analyses show how macro-level terminologies (proletarianization, marketization, and trade concentration) are at best incomplete without reference to how these are experienced by individuals, families, communities, networks, institutions, and the culture-specific moralities that animate them.

History may prove that the long-term trend is as Bourdieu sketched for Algeria. There is benefit in any case to theorizing the processual mechanisms by which alterations in the fabric of economic consciousness conform to and actuate economic realities. Most anthropologists involve themselves with shorter range analyses, and at this level ’great transformation‘ schemes may be more diverting than helpful. At the axis point (the moment of articulation) of large systems, one finds economic actors operating “in the ambiguous boundaries between capital and labor, cooperation and exploitation, family and economy, tradition and modernity, friends and competitors …” (Smart and Smart, 2005). In many places, globalization has not cemented the role of formal capitalist institutions, but the reverse has occurred (Hart, 2012). A close look at entrepreneurs in many places reveals the contradictions of lives lived half in the local moral world of the village or tribal community and half in the aspirational world of the global market with its characteristic rationalities.

As ethnographers, anthropologists can observe the disruptions, ambiguities, and contradictions associated with economic change and stability (remembering that stasis is a social process). As global comparativists and long-range historians, anthropologists are well situated to track revolutionary changes as well as patterns of stable diversity in economic organization.

Underwriting and mediating the ruptures and continuities associated with economic change of whatever sort is the work of culture. Economic anthropologists have always minded the involvement of worldview, religion and cultural representation in their account of production, exchange, and so on. Starting particularly in the late 1970s, when symbolic and interpretivist anthropology crystallized into a permanent force in the discipline as a whole, a ‘cultural economic’ approach became more distinct (see, e.g., Geertz, 1979; Gudeman, 1986).

A signal culturalist position written in response to the world systems approach in anthropology (e.g., Wolf, 1982) is formulated by Sahlins in the following quote, which can suitably bookend that of Pierre Bourdieu at the opening of this section: “Western capitalism has loosed on the world enormous forces of production, coercion and destruction. Yet precisely because they cannot be resisted, the relations and goods of the larger system also take on meaningful places in local schemes of things. In the event, the historical changes in local society are also continuous with the superseded cultural scheme, even as the new state of affairs acquires a cultural coherence of a distinct kind. So we shall have to examine how indigenous peoples struggle to integrate their experience of the world system in something that is logically and ontologically more inclusive: their own system of the world” (1988: 10).