Christopher A. Gregory’s Gifts and Commodities is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy in anthropology.
Gifts and Commodities is, at once, a critique of neoclassical economics and development theory, a critical history of colonial Papua New Guinea, and a comparative ethnography of exchange in Melanesian societies. This new edition includes a foreword by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and a new preface by the author that discusses the ongoing response to the book and the debates it has engendered, debates that have become more salient in our evermore neoliberal and globalized era.
About the Author :
C. A. Gregory teaches anthropology at the Australian National University and the University of Manchester. He is the author of Observing the Economy, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange, and Lachmi Jagar: Gurumai Sukdai's Story of the Bastar Rice Goddess.
Review :
"Gifts and Commodities is one of only a small handful of books from the latter part of the last century that fundamentally shifted the foundations of anthropology.... [T]he book now returns to wide circulation in this second edition with its thought-provoking new preface. Gregory's power to shake things up and to lift the bar for anthropological debate in a wide range of areas remains as strong as ever."--Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge, author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a a Papua New Guinea Society
"Despite the difficulty the reader may have with this text, the original work remains an inspiration for any student wishing to publish anthropological theory that reaches and engages with debates outside the discipline. As Gregory states, many countries have been 'developed' based on economic theories. Economics as a discipline is an, if not the, authoritative voice in domestic and global politics (cf. the 2010 documentary Inside Job). Hence the charge outlined by Gregory, that the economic method is insufficient, has potentially huge ramifications. Yet, as Gregory notes in the preface to the second edition, much of the book's reception has remained within in the discipline, and to his disappointment it 'has had no impact on the thinking in the dominant mainstream paradigm: members of the economics discipline have simply ignored it' (p. x1iv). This new edition, we hope, will maintain and perhaps help to elevate the work's status as a rigorous counter -argument to theories that remain largely unquestioned in political decision-making."
--Cynthia Sear
"If we want to move from recording the form of the world that we see to asking ourselves why it has taken that form, this book offers an inspiring approach."
-- "Anthropological Forum"
"Although he pays his respects to Mauss in constructing this broad category, Gregory's gift economy has only tenuous links to the ethnography of Maori hau or to ceremonial exchange systems such as kula. A gift economy is one which does not artificially demarcate production from consumption, as the neoclassicals do in their models. Unlike commodity economies, which emphasize production and productive consumption, gift economies (correctly identified by Mauss as an earlier evolutionary stage) privilege consumption and consumptive production. The agents of the gift economy are not driven by profit maximization but pursue self-replacement (social reproduction), exemplified through inter-clan exchanges, and above all through the gift of women in marriage. Echoing Stephen Gudeman's contemporaneous interest in the cultural construction of material livelihoods, Gregory pays close attention to ethnographic accounts of food and commensality, of fertility, sexuality, and cosmology. He argues that in a gift economy classificatory kin terms are the analogue of prices in a commodity economy, ingeniously linking Morgan to Levi-Strauss and illustrating with a wide range of ethnography in which every continent is represented."
--Chris Hann "Journal of the Royal American Institute"
