A–Z 523

religious discourse of mana in the nineteenth century. It is not surprising, for example,
that Marett wrote of mana’s relative ‘voltage’ (1909:138).
Anthropological interest in mana, however, has boosted that term’s modest popularity
beyond the discipline, particularly in the urbanized Pacific where Western understandings
of mana as a substance may now have overwritten more traditional Pacific notions of
mana as a quality. The Polynesian Cultural Centre in Hawaii billed one of its flamboyant
stage shows as ‘Mana’; and a glance through the Honolulu telephone directory discovers
Mana Productions, Mana Publishing and Mana Trucking.
LAMONT LINDSTROM
See also: evolution and evolutionism, Pacific: Melanesia, Pacific: Polynesia, power,
religion

Further reading

Codrington, R. (1891) The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folklore, Oxford:
Clarendon Press
Durkheim, E. (1915) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, London: George Allen and
Unwin
Keesing, R. (1984) ‘Rethinking Mana’, Journal of Anthropological Research 40 (1):137–56
Marett, R. (1909) The Threshold of Religion, London: Methuen & Co.

markets

The analysis of markets and marketing has been one of the central issues in *economic
anthropology, and of course it is a subject much theorized in economics. The relationship
between anthropology and economics is often uneasy, and this tension is apparent in the
attempts to reconcile exotic ethnographic material with the theoretical interests of
economics. Of major theoretical significance is the simple grammatical step of
contracting the plural form ‘markets’ to its singular ‘market’ to suggest a formal, ideal
model which some commentators take to explain culturally diverse types of markets and
trade practices.
A market, in its rudimentary sense, entails the buying and selling of things by persons,
as distinct from †barter or other forms of social *exchange that do not use an
intermediary token of common exchange value—namely, *money of some sort.
Characteristically, exchange of this former type is immediate and not delayed over time,
and is conventionally contrasted with †gift exchange. A market-place denotes an arena in
time and space to which these interactions are confined, and marketing generally denotes
the process of buying and selling not necessarily confined to one place. The fact that
people may or may not buy and sell things within or outwith a market-place is not simply
at issue; but whether what they do can be described in terms of Western market theory,
and whether such description sheds light or obscures the nature of people’s practices,
have been points of contention.
 Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 524

Formal models

Market models developed by economists have supplied many of the theoretical

underpinnings for those anthropologists attempting to find continuities between diverse
forms of trading practice in different cultures. For economists, a market is an arena of
‘perfectly competitive transactions’ between many buyers and sellers sharing complete
market information (about price, quality of goods and so on); thereby an efficiency in
production and distribution is achieved. Real markets only ever approximate to this ideal;
nonetheless, it is a model against which actually-existing markets and practices are
compared and explained.
Much of the *formalist-substantivist debate focused on the two referents of the term
‘market’: market-places as physical locations and market-principles as abstract factors
determining wider economic processes. The substantivists’ own position, however, was
perceived as increasingly untenable—as they themselves recognised—due to the spread
of market-principles over the global system. As Plattner (1985) argues, ‘the pretense that
theories of markets and marketing were irrelevant became less viable’ in a world that
increasingly resembled a market system.
Developments in theory in the 1970s were twofold: formal models grounded in a
broad anthropological knowledge of local contexts gained increasing sophistication;
*Marxist-inspired theory displaced an interest in systems of exchange alone to a concern
with local *modes of production and distribution and *world systems. Whilst these latter
trends deflected attention away from the issues of liberal economics and towards
questions of *political economy, the extent to which these approaches took market theory
for granted is, however, open to question.
Central-place analysis of *peasant markets was also developed (see *settlement
patterns), and G.W.Skinner’s work in 1964 on market-place systems in rural China was
particularly influential. The formal model was further elaborated by Carol Smith from the
early 1970s onwards in various publications, and she argues that centralplace theory
helps reduce the confusion of market activity to economic patterns through which a
complex commodity economy is integrated. As a formal model, the predictions of
central-place theory are reconciled to the ‘real-world deviations’, which are explained
with reference to social, political or geographical factors. The universality of central-
place theory provides a model against which actually-existing markets are compared.
Moreover, it concentrates primarily on the material flows of traded items, types of trader,
and the social integrative effects of these flows. Markets thus form part of a social system
and structure.
The micro-level behaviour of individuals in market contexts is also subject to formal
methods that attempt to make sense of market behaviour as rational, and of individuals as
decision-makers (see *individualism). Over-simplistic notions of †economic man as
individual maximizer of economic value have now receded in the face of theoretical
criticism that such assumptions provide few convincing explanations of socio-economic
action. The *rationality of economic action as a relationship of means-to-ends has been
increasingly contextualized, and these issues have been challenged by ideas about
intentionality of exchange and differing styles of reasoning. That it has to be shown that
rationality, however defined, is not confined to Western industrial society should be seen
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in some measure as part of a political debate in social anthropology that defends exotic
others from the charge of irrationality. Whether such a specific focus on forms of
individual behaviour leads to further insights into the differences in trading practice in
various cultures is moot. Indeed, questions about our own ‘rationality’ in economic
matters have also been raised.
The treatment of markets as systems of information is a further aspect of the analysis
of market behaviour. Evidence suggests that, contrary to market models, information is
not evenly shared, but it is differently allocated and is difficult to acquire not only for
local traders but also for ethnographers. These ‘inefficiencies’ in the flow of information
arise from particular kinds of social and cultural organization, such as traders dealing in
small quantities of unstandardized †commodities that are subject to variations in supply.
Various institutional practices are recognized as ways of dealing with such ‘inefficencies’
and ‘uncertainties’ in markets.
That issues such as information and uncertainty are defined as problematic arises from
assumptions deriving from our own market models, which are predicated on the perfect
distribution of information. A series of important publications from the mid-1980s by
Jennifer and Paul Alexander (e.g. Alexander and Alexander 1991), which focus on
bargaining, price-setting, market information and trading partnerships in Java, shows that
the control of the flow of information is strategically important for traders to make
profits. Market buyers and sellers are not autonomous individual agents, but are linked by
power relationships in which knowledge and †agency are intimately connected in trading
practice.
A formal definition of a market such as ‘any domain of economic interactions where
prices exist which are responsive to the supply and demand of items exchanged’ bears
perhaps little resemblance to any real market. Indeed, bargaining over prices in Javanese
markets may appear economically more efficient as a method of price-setting than
Western posted-prices (Alexander in Dilley 1992). What needs explanation, in
Alexander’s view, is the simultaneous presence in industrial economies of a dominant
ideology of market efficiency through the price mechanism, and a method of price-setting
that inhibits the efficient operation of the market. Prices in Western markets, he points
out, are less responsive to changes in demand than to changes in cost, and cultural
notions of ‘fairness’ are important in price-setting.

Cultural economics

Stephen Gudeman’s work represents a different approach, termed ‘cultural economics’,

to questions of economic theory and modelling. Formal analyses drawing on Western
economic models, he suggests, ‘continually reproduce and discover their own
assumptions in the exotic materials’ (1986:34). The centrality of culture must be
recognized in the analysis of economics. Culture does not stand opposed to economics
such that, say, cultural explanations are given to account for why their market practice
does not coincide with our market theory. Rather, culture and economics are mutually
constitutive. A more comprehensive and dialectical process of comparison between
 Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 526

actual market practices in both Western and non-Western markets is needed, and, as
Alexander argues, all markets are cultural constructs (see his chapter in Dilley 1992).
Gudeman focuses on the cultural models and metaphors produced by ourselves and
others to account for the economic practices we all engage in. By treating our own
economic theories as cultural models that are produced in specific sociohistorical
contexts (see his Conversations in Colombia, 1990), we see how models are generated
and how they form parts of longer conversations amongst ourselves, between ourselves
and others, and amongst others. Investigations of market models and practice from a
similar perspective include Dilley 1992 (see also Friedland and Robertson’s 1990 volume
which adopts a critical interest in the market). The inspection of market models, rhetoric,
and *discourse, as well as their deployment in specific social contexts, links with
concerns expressed by some economists about the metaphors and meanings within
economic discourse (see, for example, McCloskey 1986). One aim is to situate the
conversations we conduct about economics as well as those that other people conduct
about the systems they inhabit. Native accounts (including our own) of how people
conceive their engagement with a global system of trade and power relationships
(conventionally glossed as the ‘world market’) require further study. Knowledge of ‘local
models’ (Gudeman) not only adds to an understanding of how peoples may act in relation
to this global network, but the method contextualizes the processes of cultural-economic
modelling and reveals the ways these models are invoked in political activity.
This project moves beyond the early substantivist perspective, which accepted the
ideological separation of economy and society in Western *capitalism (a distinction that
may not hold at the level of practice); and which failed to seriously challenge the cultural
construction of market theory. The inspection of how we construct our notions of markets
is as important as the analysis of how other cultures construct theirs. A parallel
development is Appadurai’s work on the social life of things (1986), which traces the
social biographies of items as they move through different networks of exchange. The
conventional dichotomies labelling systems—for example gift versus commodity; non-
market versus market and so on—appear less relevant once it is seen that the processes of
social exchange within any one culture (or even between cultures) can transform the
status of an item.

Morality and the market

The great transformation in European society, for †Karl Polanyi, was the replacement of
morality by the market; similarly, for Bohannan and Dalton the †moral economies of
tribal or peasant peoples were being overrun by an amoral market system. But market
theory embodies its own special morality: economic action is seen as oriented towards
the common good; exchange is advantageous to all parties (cf. a gain for one is a loss to
another). The market as a self-regulating system of apparent discord produces a harmony
of interests and social co-ordination, through what economists take to be †Adam Smith’s
notion of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. These are two contrasting moral positions
relating to the market: on the one hand, market negates traditional moral systems; on the
 A–Z 527

other, it is a ‘civilizational process’ through which humans and societies reach their full
potential (see Blanton in Ortiz 1983).
The connection between the market and morality is also made by social agents
involved in exchange. Moral evaluations of trade and commerce—negative or positive—
must be viewed empirically as arising from the context of changing politico-economic
relationships (see also Appadurai’s notions of pathways and diversions, 1986). The
establishment of market systems is as much a political struggle as an economic matter,
and negative moral representations of trade practices arise from a loss of control over
previously known and indigenously transparent relationships. Moral outcries at the
introduction of market relationships are a response to a sense of uncertainty and
opaqueness often triggered by the activites of high-profile middlemen or women who
redefine the politics of exchange. The analytical positions of theorists over morality and
markets reflect native perceptions on the morality of exchange generated from
experiences in trading.

Power, agency and the market

The term ‘market’ carries a significant political weight in a post Cold War world
represented as the triumph of Western liberal market economics over state-planned,
communist economic systems. This marriage of market theory and political *ideology is
a potent union, and its forms of discourse dominate many local, national, as well as
global, debates about how we should conduct our lives. The apparent triumph of market
ideology in the 1980s has paradoxically spawned an increasing sense of unease about the
status of the market concept. Whilst the concept has become hegemonic, it is also in
crisis; and this crisis concerns one of the master concepts of social and economic science.
The †fetishization of the market as a powerful transformative social agent is an issue
which reveals the nature of our own cultural constructions of market phenomena. The
ideological strength and attractiveness of market rhetoric and its construction as an agent
of change connect with Western political agendas that dominate contemporary social
debate. To disentangle these complex matters has become an urgent issue for the analysis
of actual market practice, for the anthropology of *development, and for social theory
itself.
The market and the domain of market relations is a contested field of *power played
out through the medium of economic and cultural value. The market as an ideological
representation of capitalism fails to portray power in terms of either the imbalances
within individual exchange relations, or the connections between market structures and
political institutions. But the problem goes beyond conventional issues in political
economy.
The hegemony of market discourse reveals itself in the ‘power to name’ other people’s
trading activities in Western market terms; in its ability to intervene in other discourses
and to impose its own metaphors. The voices of non-Western cultures, speaking of their
participation in global relationships, has hitherto remained muted. The attention given to
alternative ways of making sense of, and making a living within, the global system not
 Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 528

only redresses the balance between our models and theirs, but also suggests the idea of
multiple discourses about ‘the market’. How these discourses are employed and invoked
in relation to social and political practices on local as well as global stages has, and no
doubt will have, continued relevance for all our lives.
ROY DILLEY
See also: capitalism, consumption, economic anthropology, money.

Further reading

Alexander, J. and P.Alexander (1991) ‘What’s a Fair Price? Price-setting and Trading Partnerships
in Javanese Markets’, Man 26 (3):493–512
Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Dilley, R. (ed.) (1992) Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Friedland, R. and A.F.Robertson (ed.) (1990) Beyond the Marketplace: Rethinking Economy and
Society, New York: Aldine de Gruyter
Gudeman, S. (1986) Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul
Gudeman, S. and A.Rivera (1990) Conversations in Colombia: The Domestic Economy in Life and
Text, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
McCloskey, D.N. (1986) The Rhetoric of Economics, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books
Ortiz, S. (ed.) (1983) Economic Anthropology: Topics and Theories, New York and London:
University Press of America
Plattner, S. (ed.) (1985) Markets and Marketing (Monographs in Economic Anthropology, no 4),
New York and London: University Press of America
Smith, C. (ed.) (1976) Regional Analysis (vol. I: Economic Systems; vol. II: Social Systems), New
York and London: Academic Press

marriage

The institution of marriage, which has been defined as ‘the union of man and woman
such that the children born from the woman are recognised as legitimate by the parents’
(Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1951:) has constituted a central area of
anthropological research, usually in the context of studies of the *family (Morgan 1871,
Westermarck 1921). *Claude Lévi-Strauss has made the most spectacular contribution to
the development of this field; by placing marriage *alliance at the very heart of *kinship,
he has shown how marriage is a structure of *exchange resulting from the *incest
prohibition. The prohibition of incest, which is universal and requires the avoidance of
union between close relations, has as its positive counterpart the institution of †exogamy,
the obligation to choose a marriage partner outside the close family group. Alliances are,
nevertheless, not made randomly: exogamy has its own counterpart in †endogamy, which
demands or recommends marriage within a prescribed group or locale. Modern societies,