Economic Anthropology - Culturalism

Culturalism

For some anthropologists the substantivist position does not go far enough in its criticism of the universal application of Western economic models on societies all around the globe. Stephen Gudeman, for example, argues that the central processes of making a livelihood are culturally constructed. Therefore, models of livelihoods and related economic concepts such as exchange, money or profit must be analyzed through the locals' ways of understanding them. Rather than devising universal models rooting in Western understandings and using Western economic terminologies and then applying them indiscriminately to all societies, one should come to understand the 'local model'. In his work on livelihoods Gudeman seeks to present the "people's own economic construction" (1986:1); that is, not just examining the cultural construction of values as in which products people like to buy and how much they value leisure, but people's own conceptualizations or mental maps of economics and its various aspects, i.e. their understanding of concepts such as exchange, property or profit. His description of a peasant community in Panama reveals that the locals did not engage in exchange with each other in order to make a profit but rather viewed it as an "exchange of equivalents", with the exchange value of a good being defined by the expenses spent on producing it. Only outside merchants made profits in their dealings with the community, and it was a complete mystery to the locals how they managed to do so...

Gudeman not only rejects the formalist notion of the universal 'economic person'; he also criticizes the substantivist position for imposing their universal model of economics on all preindustrial societies and so making the same mistake as the formalists. While conceding that substantivism rightly emphasises the significance of social institutions in economic processes, Gudeman considers any derivational model that claims to be of universal nature, be it formalist, substantivist or Marxist, to be ethnocentric and essentially tautological. In his view they all model relationships as mechanistic processes by taking the logic of natural science based on the material world and applying it to the human world. Rather than to "arrogate to themselves a privileged right to model the economies of their subjects", anthropologists should seek to understand and interpret local models (1986:38). Such local models may differ radically from their Western counterparts. To quote Gudeman: "Gaining a livelihood might be modelled as a causal and instrumental act, as a natural and inevitable sequence, as a result of supernatural dispositions or as a combination of all these." (1986:47). For example, the Iban only use hand knives to harvest rice. Even though the use of sickles would speed up the harvesting process, their concern that the spirit of the rice may flee is greater than their desire to economize the harvesting process.

Gudeman brings post-modern cultural relativism to its logical conclusion. Generally speaking, however, culturalism can also be seen as an extension of the substantivist view, with a stronger emphasis on cultural constructivism, a more detailed account of local understandings and metaphors of economic concepts, and a greater focus on socio-cultural dynamics than the latter (cf. Hann, 2000). Culturalists also tend to be both less taxonomic and more culturally relativistic in their descriptions while critically reflecting on the power relationship between the ethnographer (or 'modeller') and the subjects of his or her research. While substantivists generally focus on institutions as their unit of analysis, culturalists lean towards detailed and comprehensive analyses of particular local communities. Both views agree in rejecting the formalist assumption that all human behaviour can be explained in terms of rational decision-making and utility maximisation.