Fresh off the field: Bartering and Selling Mats in Tonga

The following fieldwork report speaks to our conversation about barter in class today. Here the bartering goes hand in hand with other market exchanges. Further, the system is of a dual structure:

"Kau tou lālanga is a group of Tongan women who collectively weave one another’s fine pandanus mats to barter and sell. Their prime customers are Tongan women living in diasporic communities around the Pacific Rim. Our research has determined two business negotiations of kau tou lālanga: firstly, to weave per lineal foot, also known as ‘iate, and secondly, to weave towards a ‘gathering’, or kātoanga. An ‘iate negotiation starts with a customer, usually a local person, making an order to a collective to weave one or two mats—only a small quantity. The second negotiation, kātoanga, is a gathering between a number of weavers from a collective and a group of customers, who are mostly Tongan women from overseas. Before a kātoanga, the parties involved negotiate the large number of mats to be exchanged, the sum of cash for the order, and the date and venue of their gathering is also agreed upon. Kātoangaagreements reach higher annual returns than ‘iate negotiations." To read the full report follow link.

Favorite Twit of day (other than all the SOTU ones, of course)!

Experimenting with Debt Forgiveness in Iceland

Rejkjavik (photo from the Guardian)

As we start to read Graeber's Debt, here's a story from NPR on an interesting proposal for debt forgiveness of mortgage debt of homebuyers - debt that increased after Iceland's own financial crisis of 2008. We will see as we get further in the semester that the notion of debt forgiveness - or the Jubilee (after the biblical notion of universal debt forgiveness) - is crucial to the arch of Graeber's history of debt. Graeber proposes a Jubilee to the current rise in debt across the board. Iceland seems to be experimenting with putting this idea into practice.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/11/370156273/iceland-experiments-with-a-jubilee-of-debt-forgiveness

Welcome to the Economic Anthropology class blog!

Hi everyone and welcome to the Economic Anthropology class blog!

We will be using this space as a repository of thoughts, discussions, and shared resources on the general subject of economic anthropology and on specific topics such as money, value, wealth, credit, debt, markets, exchange, economic transactions.

Feel free to post questions, comments on class discussions, links to online resources relevant to our course, and, most your importantly, your blog posts on the reading material.

As this is a public common space, be sure to be respectful of one another's opinions and generous in your comments. Let's make this a constructive space for thinking anthropologically about money and economic life!