ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Sponsored by a Grant TÁMOP-4.1.2-08/2/A/KMR-2009-0041 Course Material Developed by Department of Economics,
Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest (ELTE) Department of Economics, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest
Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Balassi Kiadó, Budapest
2
Authors: Tamás Dombos, Viola Zentai Supervised by Viola Zentai
June 2011
Week 10
Distribution and redistribution The concept of redistribution
• Gathering goods and services in a centre and distributing them according to some principle
• Depends on the existence of a central power (distributive centre) (chief, king, state)
• Operates on different levels:
– household (pooling income) – religious groups (tithe) – state: central taxes
• Distributive principle rests on custom or law
• Reasons:
– levelling differences in soil or climate
– overcome temporal differences between production and consumption (need for storage)
3
Redistribution and state
• Redistribution one of the key functions of state
• State formation dependent on stabilizing redistributive function
• Tributary mode of production (Amin 1976):
– extracting labour and goods through extra-economic (political) means (coercion, violence)
• Modern redistributive state:
– provision of public goods
– reducing income inequality (monetary transfers)
– allocation of resources for “development goals” (branches of industry, strategic corporations)
The petrostate
• Coronil (1997)
• Political history of oil-funded development in Venezuela, 1936-1979
• Common aim after the fall of Gómez dictatorship (1936): modernizing society and increasing welfare through income from oil
• Two bodies of the nation:
– political body: citizens
– natural body: rich subsoil (oil)
• “magical power” of the state:
– intermediary between oil and foreign oil companies building up political capacity and financial resources to
– monopoly over violence + economy
• 1970s:
– Large-scale development plans
4 – economic independence, decreasing dependence on oil
– case studies: manufacturing vehicles locally, tractor producing firm owned by state and multinationals
– lack of success: permanent conflict between circulation of rent and production of value (rent circulation as source of state power permanently disguised)
• Growing financial speculation:
– state at mercy of open markets – abstraction from materiality of
oil as source of state power weakens the nation state
Social planned economy
• Bureaucratic redistribution (Verdery 1996)
– reducing role of the market principle: right to work + welfare through the central distribution of all goods produced
– nationalizing means of production + centralised distribution of goods – “the plan”: central plan detailing allocation of all resources
– social ties based on reciprocity is central in practice:
• horizontal reciprocity: system of favours among managers of firms (to deal with shortage)
• vertical reciprocity (clientelism ) (“protekció”, “blat”)
• Economy of shortage (Kornai 1980, 1993)
– soft budgetary constrains, generalised shortage – firms: hoarding of resources
– consumers: queuing
5
A soviet kolkhoz
• Humphrey (1983)
• Two agricultural cooperatives in Buryat region
• ”Manipulable resources”: good produced beyond those required by the plan, (legal, but illegitimate) surplus that can be used locally
• Used for:
– buying extra labour power – negotiating easy to fulfil plans
• Success: producing ”manipulable resources” (depends on plans)
• Public and private production inextricable linked
Market socialism
• Inability to satisfy social needs: limited market reforms
• Emergence of “second”, “normal”, “shadow economy”
• Differences in timing and depth
– Hungary: encourages from 1968 (“new economic mechanism”) – Romania: prosecuted even in 1980s
• Utilizing resources owned by the firm (machines, raw materials):
– “fusizás”
– high productivity subsidised by resources from first (“official”) economy – “grey economy”: legality is questionable
6
Socialism and the commodification of labour
• Lampland (1991, 1995)
• Commodification of labour in rural Hungary (Sárosd)
• Socialist state policies contributed to emergence of capitalist work culture
• Collectivisation: regulated, monetised labour
• Second economy (“háztáji”): emergence of entrepreneurial culture
• Differences between generations:
– elder: rivalry of diligence,
increase in traditional production – younger: labour as utility,
calculation of investment and profit
Anthropology of postsocialism
• New entrepreneurs, economic elites – Buchowski 1997, Eyal at al. 1998
• Transformation of property relationships
– privatization, “fuzzy property”, ”recombinant property” (Verdery 1999, Hann 2003, Stark 1998)
• „Coping” strategies:
– everyday livelihood under circumstances of economic disintegration and hardship (Humphrey 1995; Bridger&Pine 1998)
• Birth of consumer society:
– Western goods (Watson 1997; Fehérváry 2002; Rausing 2002); shopping tourism (Wessely-Dessweeffy 2002); nostalgic consumption (Berdahl 1999)
7
References
Amin, Samir. 1976. Unequal development: an essay on the social formations of peripheral capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Berdahl, Daphne (1999) „(N)Ostalgia for the present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” In Ethnos, Volume 64, Issue 2. 192–211.
Bridger, Susan and Frances Pine (eds.) (1998) Surviving Post Socialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge.
Buchowski, Michal (1997) Reluctant Capitalists. Berlin: Centre Marc Bloch.
Coronil, Fernando (1997) The magical state: nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Eyal, G., I. Szelényi, and E. Townsley (1998) Making Capitalism without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe. London: Verso.
Fehervary, Krisztina (2002) “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary.” In Ethnos, Volume 67, Issue 3.
369–400.
Hann, Chris (2003) The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition. Münster: LIT.
Hann, Chris: “Postsocialist societies.” In HEA 547–558
Hart, Keith: “Capitalism: The political economy of development” In MUW 121–151.
Humphrey, Caroline (1983) Karl Marx collective: politics, society and religion on a Siberian collective farm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humphrey, Caroline (1995) “Creating a culture of disillusionment: consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times.” In Daniel Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart:
Modernity through the Prism of the Local. London: Routledge. 43–68.
Kornai, János (1980) Economics of shortage. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Kornai, János (1992) The socialist system: the political economy of communism.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
8 Lampland, Martha (1991) “Pigs, Party Secretaries and Private Lives.” In American Ethnologist. Volume 18, Issue 3. 459–479.
Lampland, Martha (1995) The object of labor: commodification of agrarian life in socialist Hungary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Patterson, Thomas C.: “Distribution and redistribution.” In HEA 194–209.
Rausing, Sigrid (2002) “Reconstructing the ‘Normal.’” In Ruth Mandel and Caroline Humphrey (eds.) Markets & Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Oxford;
New York: Berg. 127–142.
Stark, David (1998) “Recombinant property in East European capitalism.” In Michel Callon (ed.) The Laws of the Markets. Oxford – Malden: Blackwell – Sociological Review. 116-146.
Verdery, Katherine (1996) What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Verdery, Katherine (1999) “Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization.” In Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery (eds.) Uncertain Transition. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield. 53–81.
Verdery, Katherine: “Socialist Societies: Anthropological Aspects.” In International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences 14496–14500.
Watson, James L. (1997) Golden arches east : McDonald's in East Asia. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Wessely, Anna and Tibor Dessewffy (2002) Consumption, shopping, tourism and informal trade in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. A Cultural Studies különszáma. Volume 16, Issue 1.
