Area of inquiry (group 3): production, exchange and consumption practice questions.

Malinowski, working in the Trobriand Islands between 1915 and 1918, recorded canoe voyages in which men carried shell necklaces in one direction around a ring of islands and shell armbands in the other, handing them on to named partners after a time and never keeping them permanently. Ordinary provisions were bartered alongside these voyages. His account treats the shell exchange as

• a circuit that creates and maintains lasting partnerships between men on the different islands
• a form of long-distance trade in which each partner sought out the most favourable terms available
• a ritual whose religious meaning was quite separate from the practical business of the voyages
• an early currency, since the valuables could be exchanged against any other category of good

Answer: a circuit that creates and maintains lasting partnerships between men on the different islands

Malinowski distinguished kula from the barter conducted on the same voyages precisely in order to show that the valuables circulate to sustain relationships and reputation rather than to accumulate goods. Treating kula as trade or as money is the standard misreading.

Mintz's 1985 study followed sugar from Caribbean plantations worked by enslaved and later indentured labour to the tea tables of English households, where by the nineteenth century it had moved from a costly rarity to a cheap source of calories in the diet of factory workers. The study is most often cited to show that

• tastes in food spread outwards from the wealthiest households to poorer ones without any change of meaning
• the consumption of a good is explained by the nutritional advantages that consumers recognise in it
• consumption and production are formed together across long distances, neither one explaining the other
• sugar mattered less to English industry than the trade in cotton and other textile fibres did

Answer: consumption and production are formed together across long distances, neither one explaining the other

Mintz links plantation slavery, the working day in English factories and the meanings sugar acquired at either end of the chain, so that production and consumption cannot be studied apart. The claim that meanings simply trickle down ignores how the significance of sugar changed as it became a staple.

Nash carried out fieldwork among Bolivian tin miners around 1970 and published her study in 1979. Miners made offerings of coca, alcohol and cigarettes to a figure they called the Tio inside the shafts and addressed the Pachamama in rites on the surface, holding that ore is yielded only where the underground owner has been satisfied. Her analysis reads these practices as

• a set of beliefs held over from before the arrival of Christianity and largely unrelated to work
• an obstacle to safety training that the mining company had a clear interest in removing
• an individual response to danger with no bearing on relations between miners and the company
• a commentary on the terms under which the miners work and on who is owed for the ore taken out

Answer: a commentary on the terms under which the miners work and on who is owed for the ore taken out

Nash treats the underground rites as a way of stating and negotiating the relations of extraction, which is why the Tio appears as an owner who must be paid rather than as a superstition attached to the mine. Reading the practices as leftovers detaches them from the labour relations they describe.

Daniel Miller spent a year in the mid-1990s accompanying households on a north London street as they shopped for groceries, publishing the study in 1998. Shoppers routinely bought for absent others, weighed treats against restraint on behalf of children and partners, and described their choices in terms of thrift and care rather than of pleasure. He concluded that everyday shopping is best analysed as

• an expression of individual preference through which shoppers display personal taste and standing
• an activity through which the relationships inside a household are sustained and made visible
• a routine so habitual that its meaning for shoppers can safely be set aside in the analysis
• evidence that advertising determines what the households of a given street will end up buying

Answer: an activity through which the relationships inside a household are sustained and made visible

Miller argues that provisioning is largely work done for others, closer to devotion than to hedonism, which is why a shopping list records obligations. The assumption that consumption expresses individual identity is precisely what his material qualifies.

Parry and Bloch compared societies in which money had been in use for generations without dissolving the obligations of kinship and religion that commentators had expected it to corrode. They accounted for this by arguing that such societies distinguish two orders of transaction, and that

• money is confined by law in these societies to particular categories of goods and cannot be used elsewhere, a restriction enforced by the religious authorities of each
• earnings from short-term individual gain can be converted into the long-term order that reproduces the community
• the people concerned had not yet understood the uses to which money could be put
• the two orders never come into contact, so that no transaction of one kind ever bears on the other

Answer: earnings from short-term individual gain can be converted into the long-term order that reproduces the community

The classic instance is the migrant whose wages pay for a funeral, a bridewealth or a temple contribution: money earned in the individual short-term cycle is transformed into standing in the enduring one. Corrosion is reported where that conversion is blocked, not where money simply arrives.

Ho carried out fieldwork among investment bankers in New York, having worked in the industry herself. She found that the bankers' own employment was insecure and organised around continuous restructuring, and that they advised the companies they handled to restructure in the same way. Her argument connects the two facts by claiming that

• the bankers' advice was formulated without reference to their own working conditions, which they regarded as a separate matter
• the industry's advice to others reproduced the experience of impermanence that was normal within it
• the bankers had no influence on the firms they advised, whose decisions were taken independently
• the insecurity of employment in the industry began only after the restructuring of the firms it advised had become widespread

Answer: the industry's advice to others reproduced the experience of impermanence that was normal within it

This is the point of studying up: a market practice that appears as a law of economics turns out to be a working culture with a recruitment pattern, a career structure and a set of assumptions about how an organisation should be treated. The claim is about how the advice becomes obvious to those giving it.