1. Definitions from
The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Hande Işık
METU
ID 501 Literature Review
2. Outline
• Capitalism
• Consumption
• Political Economy
• Technology
• Time and Space
3. CAPITALISM
1. Production for a global market in which goods, services
and labour are priced in which ownership is private and
alienable, and profits are sought in market
exchanges, making available for further investment
2. A particular system of socioeconomic organization
(contrasted with feudalism and socialism)
• The acquisitive spirit of profit-making enterprise
focused on developments occurring in the 16th, 17th
and early 18th centuries.
4. CAPITALISM AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL
STUDY IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• Fieldwork conducted among peasants after
WW2
• France, British social anthropologists asked if
– The structure of inequality had preceded capitalist
economic development
– Capitalist modes of production were substantially
different from those that did not make profits.
(Shift of field)
5. CAPITALISM AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL
STUDY IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• Money, commodity, religious resistance and
identity formation through the construction of
mass markets break out of the easy definitions
of capitalism
• Gender studies, corruption, smuggling, trade
in illegal substances, inter ethnic
conflicts, resistance and rebellion were
studied within the concept of capitalism
6. CAPITALISM AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL
STUDY IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• Contemporary capitalism stimulates three modes of
corporate organization:
– Those organized for profit
– Those which govern
– The non-profitmaking
• For Marx, capitalism = ‘mode of production’ made by two
classes of producers:
– The capitalists, own the means of production (capital or
land), make the strategic day-to-day economic decisions on
technology, output and marketing, and appropriate the profits
of production and distribution.
– The labourers, who own no property but are free to dispose of
their labour for wages on terms which depend on the numbers
seeking work and the demand for their services.
7. CONSUMPTION
• Consumption is the meaningful use people
make of the objects that are associated with
them. The use can be mental or material; the
objects can be things, ideas or relationships;
the association can range from ownership to
contemplation.
*Very important term for our project outcomes
8. BASIS OF CONSUMPTION
• Needs have a material basis, but need and demand reflect
social relationships which define social identities.
• Objects carry significant social meanings. The meanings
pronounced in the West with the rise of capitalism and
mass production;
– West became a consumer society
• In capitalist societies, individuals transform objects from
being impersonal commodities into things with distinctive
meanings for the consumers and distinct places in the
consumers’ social lives.
• For individuals the first step in consumption is
appropriation, establishing a mental association with the
objects to be consumed.
9. BASIS OF CONSUMPTION
• Ex. The clothes one wears can be important
for defining one’s
– Gender, social rank, ethnic identity and a host of
other social attributes.
• Cumulatively, the structure of consumption
reflects and recreates the identities of social
groups that consume in distinctive ways
• Consumption creates the distinction between
different entities like classes
10. BASIS OF CONSUMPTION
• Spread of western consumables into 3rd World countries
lead to homogeneous Westernization national hybrids
• Hybrids consist of interpretations and adaptations of
Western products developed and shared by indigenous
people themselves. Common national consumption
communities that displace pre-existing subnational or
colonial patterns, and so are important in creating the
nation itself as a social and cultural entity.
– Mc Donalds vs Pitte
• Researchers tend to investigate the ways that people
impose meaning on the objects in their lives. Pre-existing
meanings affect those who consume the objects that carry
them.
11. POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ‘Political’ +‘Economy’ invention of the concept of capitalism.
• The term came into use in the 18th century and meant the
measures taken by governments to regulate
trade, exchange, money and taxes (SSE)
• Analogical difference: ‘economy’ is in a family, political economy is
in a state.
• Based on experience with expanding industrial capitalism, scholars
argued that capitalism did not simply adjust to, but positively
required, crisis. The endurance of political economy owes much to
its emergence within capitalism as a discourse on crisis.
• Status emulation, class formation, demographic change, female
purity, the seclusion of women and dowry systems as liquid wealth
in regional spheres of exchange are all linked in the analysis of the
changing social topographies.
12. POLITICAL ECONOMY
• Engels argued that the new economic
thinking, favouring competition and free
trade, which began by not questioning private
property, was guilty of covering up the fact
that capitalism necessarily led to social and
economic evils.
• By political economy Marx meant the body of
science of economic thinking
13. TECHNOLOGY
• Technology can be defined as the particular
domain of human activity. it refers to:
– Physical objects or artefacts, for example, a car.
– Activities or processes—the system of car
production, the pattern of organization around
vehicle technologies, the behaviour and
expectations of car users.
– The knowledge and skills.
14. • ‘Natural’ technical actions – like walking, carrying a
load or giving birth can vary from culture to culture, it
has become clear that every technique is a social
production learnt through tradition.
• Techniques (or material culture) are embedded with all
kinds of social relations, practices and representations.
• They are solely for their effect on the material life of
society or for the social relations surrounding their
application.
• Techniques always have a systemic elements:
matter, energy, artefacts, gestures and a specific
knowledge (representations) – and these elements
interact.
15. • Technical behaviour has two related functions:
– a physical one,
– one which communicates information and plays a symbolic role in
social life
• Social representations of action on the material world appear as the
most important link between technology, culture and society,
– Because any technique, a gesture, a simple artefact, is always a
physical manifestation of mental schema of how things work, how
they are to be made, and how they are to be used
• Social representations of technology are embedded in a broad
symbolic system: people and societies put meaning into the very
creation, production, and development of technology techniques as
well as make meaning out of existing technical elements
16. • Societies seize, adopt or develop only some technical
features (principles of action, artefacts, gestures), and
dismiss others, because technical actions and changes
in technology are in part determined by, and
simultaneously the basis for, social representations or
relations that go far beyond mere action on matter.
• Invention is a process of discovery and creation of
ideas and things. no society lives in total isolation, so
borrowing technical features always exists.
17. TIME AND SPACE
• Durkheim: Time and space can only be conceived reflecting the social structure of
particular societies.
• Awareness of extension as space and duration as time is only possible by
distinguishing different regions and moments and by encountering their associated
boundaries and intervals. These divisions and distinctions have their origins in
social and collective life. ‘We cannot conceive of time, except on condition of
distinguishing its different moments … It is the same thing with space’ (Durkheim
• In cultures where time is represented and experienced predominantly as
repetitive, it is conceived of as static. Life is merely an alternation between two
contrasting states, and time has no depth, no beginning or end. Geertz (1973)
has, for example, argued that given, among other things, their complex
calendar, for the Balinese time is ‘a motionless present, a vectorless now’.
• Social anthropologists study time as a matter of cultural representations.
