Compare and contrast generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity. 2. Illustrate your answer with examples. (Anthropology question)

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Compare and contrast generalized, balanced, and negativereciprocity. 2. Illustrate your answer with examples. (Anthropologyquestion)

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In cultural anthropology reciprocity refers to the nonmarket exchange of goods or labour ranging from direct barter immediate exchange to forms of gift exchange where a return is eventually expected delayed exchange as in the exchange of birthday gifts It is thus distinct from the true gift where no return is expected Reciprocity is said to be the basis of most nonmarket exchange David Graeber argues as currently used reciprocity can mean almost anything It is very close to meaningless When the exchange is immediate as in barter it does not create a social relationship When the exchange is delayed it creates both a relationship as well as an obligation for a return ie debt Hence some forms of reciprocity can establish hierarchy if the debt is not repaid The failure to make a return may end a relationship between equals Reciprocal exchanges can also have a political effect through the creation of multiple obligations and the establishment of leadership as in the gift exchanges Moka between Big Menin Melanesia Some forms of reciprocity are thus closely related to redistribution where goods and services are collected by a central figure for eventual distribution to followers Marshall Sahlins a wellknown American cultural anthropologist identified three main types of reciprocity generalized balanced and negative in the book Stone Age Economics Reciprocity was also the general principal used by Claude LviStrauss to explain the Elementary Structures of Kinship 1949 in one of the most influential works on kinship theory in the postwar period The history of the norm of reciprocity in European economic thought Annette Weiner argued that the norm of reciprocity is deeply implicated in the development of Western economic theory Both John Locke and Adam Smithused the idea of reciprocity to justify a free market without state intervention Reciprocity was used on the one hand to legitimize the idea of a selfregulating market and to argue how individual vice was transformed into social good on the other Western economic theorists starting with the eighteenth century Scots economists Sir James Steuart and Smith differentiated premodern natural or selfsubsistent economies from civilized economies See Answer

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