Assignment 2: Conceptual and Critical Thinking
Assignment 2: Conceptual and Critical Thinking
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Aim: This assignment is an analytical essay designed to get you thinking conceptually and/or critically. It requires you to engage with a concrete example of a consumer or anti-consumer practice and to analyse its assumptions or the logic that underpins it.
a) Applying a Concept: Gifts and Commodities
Choose one of the following examples: a wedding, the birth of a child, Valentine’s Day, Christmas Day or university study in Australia. Note: the university study one is harder. Only attempt it if you feel confident.
Write an essay examining the complex mix of gift and commodity logic at work in your chosen example. If you are doing a wedding or the birth of a child, you may want to specify a particular context (e.g. your home country, a particular ethnic group, or a gay wedding). If you are familiar with several contexts, or are otherwise in a position to compare and contrast different contexts, then you could choose to make your essay a comparison of, say, a traditional and a modern celebration.
Prompts for thought
What types of “things” (objects, symbols, emotions) are given or exchanged?
Don’t think of gifts only as objects. Think about gift-giving in the broader anthropological sense of offering and exchange (e.g. expected or gratuitous offers of help, shows of love, offers of support, displays of gratitude).
What obligations are involved on all sides?
Can you refuse to give or refuse to accept?
What are the obligations to repay or to reciprocate? What happens if these aren’t met?
How public or visible (and to whom) are the various forms of giving and receiving?
What happens if you don’t want a gift?
What social ties are made or reaffirmed through these exchanges?
What role do commodities play? Are non-commodified gifts acceptable, or prized. Or preferred, or looked down on?
What is the role of money?
What is the role of display and prestige? Is there “agonistic prestation” (i.e. competitive gift-giving) involved? Is Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption relevant, or is it less about class and prestige and more about the obligations of kinship?
What kind of sharing takes place?
Are these exchanges more about emotions or more about money?
What forms of sacrifice are involved?
Who has power – and power of what kind?
What is the role of pride and of shame?
Special note on the university example:
The gist of this example is that teaching and learning can be characterised as a gift exchange, involving many of the elements that Mauss talks about with relation to traditional gift-giving: a complex mix of obligations to other individuals and to groups, traditional roles (e.g. teachers, student, mentor), sacrifice, sharing, and repaying. But it also increasingly functions as a commodified transaction (paying for classes, courses, time, seeking value for money, hoping for a return on your investment, expecting a certain style and level of “service”). Your essay should examine this mixed picture in all its complexity. It should also strive for detail e.g. do you feel the pressure to share (or not to share) your ideas with other students?; is there some tension between different logics in assignments like group work, where you are asked to work with others, but might also be understood to be in competition with them?; do you see yourself as a student or as a consumer of educational services? Do you feel obligations to others in your tutorial groups (e.g. do you feel obliged to do the readings because you are all members of a student group, or because the quality of the discussion is part of their economic investment, or not at all, because you are an individual and it’s your choice as a sovereign consumer?)
Further Readings
Belk, Russell. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Research 36.5 (2010): 715-34.
Berking, Helmuth. Sociology of Giving. London: Sage, 1999.
Carrier, James. “Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange.” Sociological Forum 6.1 (1991): 119-36.
Carrier, James G. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700. London: Routledge, 1995.
Cheal, David J. The Gift Economy. London: Routledge, 1988.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. Halls, Translated by W.D. London Routledge, 1990 [1923].
Miller, Daniel, ed. Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Osteen, Mark, ed. The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. London: Routledge, 2002.
Schwartz, Barry. “The Social Psychology of the Gift.” American Journal of Sociology 73.1 (1967): 1-11.
Sherry, John F., Mary Ann McGrath, and Sidney J. Levy. “Monadic Giving: Anatomy of Gifts Given to the Self.” Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Ed. Sherry, John F. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995. 399-432.
Sykes, Karen Margaret. Arguing with Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift. London: Routledge, 2005.
Titmuss, Richard Morris. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1970.
Werbner, Pnina. “The Enigma of Christmas: Symbolic Violence, Compliant Subjects and the Flow of English Kinship.” Consumption Matters: The Production and Experience of Consumption. Ed. Stephen Edgell, Kevin Hetherington and Alan Warde. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
University education example specifically:
Allatt, Pat. “Consuming Schooling: Choice, Commodity, Gift and Systems of Exchange.” Consumption Matters: The Production and Experience of Consumption. Ed. Stephen Edgell, Kevin Hetherington and Alan Warde. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Cooper, Paul. “The Gift of Education: An Anthropological Perspective on the Commoditization of Learning.” Anthropology Today 20.6 (2004): 5-9.
