Stone Age Economics1972 by Marshall SahlinsAldine de GruyterContents Acknowledgments.vii Introduction .xi 1 The Original Affluent Society . 1 2 The Domestic Mode of Production: The Structure of Underproduction 41 3 The Domestic Mode of Production: Intensification of Production .101 4 The Spirit of the Gift 149 5 On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange.185 6 Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade. 277 Bibliography .315 Index .337 -ix-Introduction I have written the several essays of this volume at various times over the past ten years. Some were written especially for the present publication. All were conceived and are here assembled in the hope of an anthropological economics, which is to say, in opposition to business-like interpretations of primitive economies and societies. Inevitably the book inscribes itself in the current anthropological controversy between formalist and substantivist practices of economic theory. Endemic to the science of Economics for over a century, the formalist-substantivist debate seems nevertheless lacking in history, for nothing much seems to have changed since Karl Marx defined the fundamental issues in contraposition to Adam Smith (cf. Althusser et al., 1966, Vol. 2). Still, the latest incarnation in the form of anthropology has shifted the emphasis of discussion. If the problem in the beginning was the naive anthropology of Economics, today it is the naive economics of Anthropology. Formalism versus substantivism amounts to the following theoretical option: between the ready-made models of orthodox Economics, especially the microeconomics, taken as universally valid and applicable grosso modo to the primitive societies; and the necessity - supposing this formalist position unfounded - of developing a new analysis more appropriate to the historical societies in question and to the intellectual history of Anthropology. Broadly speaking, it is a choice between the perspective of Business, for the formalist method must consider the primitive -xi-economies as underdeveloped versions of our own, and a culturalist study that as a matter of principle does honor to different societies for what they are. No solution is in sight, no ground for the happy academic conclusion that the answer lies somewhere in between. This book is substantivist. It thus takes on a familiar structure, as provided by traditional substantive categories. The first essays concern production: The Original Affluent Society and The Domestic Mode of Production. (The latter has been divided for convenience into two sections, Chapters 2 and 3, but these make up one continuous argument.) The chapters following turn to distribution and exchange: The Spirit of the Gift, On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange, Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade. But as the exposition is at the same time an opposition, this sequence harbors also a more concealed strategy of debate. The lead chapter accepts battle on formalist terms. The Original Affluent Society does not challenge the common understanding of economy as a relation between means and ends; it only denies that hunters find any great disparity between the two. The following essays, however, would definitively abandon this entrepreneurial and individualist conception of the economic object. Economy becomes a category of culture rather than behavior, in a class with politics or religion rather than rationality or prudence: not the need-serving activities of individuals, but the material life process of society. Then, the final chapter returns to economic orthodoxy, but to its problems, not to its problmatique. The attempt in the end is to bring the anthropological perspective to bear on the traditional work of microeconomics, the explanation of exchange value. In all this, the aim of the book remains modest: merely to perpetuate the possibility of an anthropological economics by a few concrete examples. In a recent issue of Current Anthropology, a spokesman of the opposed position announced with no apparent regret the untimely demise of substantive economics:The wordage squandered in this debate does not add up to its intellectual weight. From the beginning the substantivists (as exemplified in the justly famous works of Polanyi and others) were heroically muddled and in error. It is a tribute to the maturity of economic anthropology that we have been -xii-able to find in what the error consisted in the short space of six years. The paper.written by Cook ( 1966) when he was a graduate student neatly disposes of the controversy. Social science being the sort of enterprise ! it is, however, it is virtually impossible to down a poor, us