ANTHROPOLOGY

Dr. Zujaja Wahaj

Topic: Exchange and Economics (Part III)
 Objectives
By the end of the session you will be able to:
 Critically locate their presence in modern capitalist

economy.
 Strategies of resistance
 Exchange: Forms of Distribution
Market Principle: is based on a contractual
relationship between the exchangers. The
market is anonymous and involves abstract
rules about contractual liberty (that is, one
can choose one’s trading partners). It
normally creates an impersonal form of
interaction.
 significant contrasts between industrial and
nonindustrial economies
Industrial societies Non-industrial
societies
(1) When factory workers In nonindustrial
produce for their employer’s societies, by
profit, they may be alienated contrast, people
from the items they make:
usually see their
They don’t feel strong pride
work through from
in or personal identification
with their products. They start to finish and
see their product as feel a sense of
belonging to someone other accomplishment.
 significant contrasts between industrial and
nonindustrial economies
Industrial societies Non-industrial societies
(2) In industrial nations, In nonindustrial societies
people usually don’t the economic relation
work with relatives and between coworkers is
neighbors. If coworkers just one aspect of a
are friends, the personal more general social
relationship often relation. They aren’t just
develops out of their coworkers but kin or in-
common employment laws in most of the cases
rather than being based though this trend is
on a previous changing now.
 Significant contrasts between industrial and
nonindustrial economies
Industrial societies Non-industrial
societies
(3) industrial workers In non-industrial
have impersonal societies, however, the
relations with their relations of production,
products, coworkers, and distribution,
employers. People sell and consumption are
their labor for cash, and social
relations with
work stands apart from economic aspects.
family Economy is not a
 Significant contrasts between industrial
and nonindustrial economies
Key Point: Alienation is at the core of
the difference between industrial and
non-industrial economies .
 Example: A Case of Industrial Alienation

(1)For decades, the government of Malaysia

has promoted export-oriented industry,
allowing transnational companies to install
manufacturing operations in rural Malaysia.
 Example: A Case of Industrial Alienation

(2) In search of cheaper labor, corporations

headquartered in Japan, Western Europe,
and the United States have moved labor-
intensive factories to developing countries.
(3) Malaysia has hundreds of Japanese and
American subsidiaries, which produce
garments, foodstuffs, and electronics
components. Thousands of young
Malaysian women from peasant families
now assemble microchips and micro
components for transistors and capacitors.
 Example: A Case of Industrial Alienation
(4) Aihwa Ong (1987) did a study of electronics
assembly workers in an area where 85 percent of
the workers were young unmarried females from
nearby villages.
(5) Ong found that, unlike village women, female
factory workers had to cope with a rigid work
routine and constant supervision by men. The
discipline that factories value was being taught in
local schools, where uniforms helped prepare girls
for the factory dress code. Village women wear
loose, flowing tunics, sarongs, and sandals, but
factory workers had to don tight overalls and heavy
rubber gloves, in which they felt constrained.
Assembling electronics components requires
precise, concentrated labor.
Example: A Case of Industrial Alienation
 Exchange: Industrial Economies

(6) Labor in these factories illustrates the

separation of intellectual and manual activity—the
alienation that Karl Marx considered the defining
feature of industrial work. One woman said about
her bosses, “They exhaust us very much, as if they
do not think that we too are human beings” (Ong
1987, p. 202). Nor does factory work bring
women a substantial financial reward, given low
wages, job uncertainty, and family claims on
wages. Although young women typically work just
a few years, production quotas, three daily shifts,
overtime, and surveillance take their toll in mental
and physical exhaustion.
 Exchange: Industrial Economies
(7) Spirit possession as a site of resistance
 Unconscious protest against labor discipline

and male control of the industrial setting.

 To deal with possession, factories employ local

medicine men, who sacrifice chickens and goats

to fend off the spirits. This solution works only
some of the time; possession still goes on.
 Ong argues that spirit possession expresses

anguish at, and resistance to, capitalist

relations of production. By engaging in this
form of rebellion, however, factory women
avoid a direct confrontation with the source of
their distress.
 Resistance and Survival
James Scott book Weapons of the Weak (published
in 1985)
 According to Scott (1985)In studying systems of

domination, we must pay attention to what lies

beneath the surface of evident public behavior.
 In public the oppressed may seem to accept their

own domination, but they always question it

offstage.
 James Scott (1990) uses the terms public transcript

and hidden transcript to describe, the tactics of

the ‘weak’ to challenge the powerful. These tactics
go offstage: where the power holders can't see or
hear it.
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 Resistance and Survival
 In the book Weapons of the Weak, Scott writes
about situations in which a silent resistance is
taking place. Such resistance he says is subtle
and disguised rather than collective and defiant.
 Scott (1985) uses Malay peasants, among whom

he did field work, to illustrate small scale acts of

resistance-which he calls "weapons of the
weak.“
 From his fieldwork he found that the Malay peasants
used an indirect strategy to resist an Islamic tithe
(religious tax).

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 Resistance and Survival
 The goods (usually rice) that peasants had to give
went to the provincial capital. In theory, the tithe
would come back as charity to the peasants, but
it never did.
 Peasants working on leased land didn't resist the

tithe by rioting, demonstrating, or protesting.

instead they used a "nibbling" strategy, based on
small acts of resistance. For example, they would
not declare their land or lied about the amount
they farmed. They underpaid or delivered rice
contaminated with water, rocks, or mud, to add
weight. Because of this resistance, only 15
percent of what was due was actually paid (Scott
1990, p. 89). 16
 Resistance and Survival
 The peasants working on the land of big
landlords would also use various strategies to
resist publicly, but again usually in disguised
form . Discontent from the amount of rice
receives from the landlords (which they though
was very little as compared to the amount of
work they did) would be expressed in the form of
spreading gossip, and stealing the bags of rice
from the go downs.

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Resistance and Survival
Similar to Scott, Gardner (2010)
wrote about the resistance strategies
of migrant workers to the Gulf
region. While doing so, he exposed
the white-collar resistance strategies
as different from the blue-collar
workers’ strategies.

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 Time to Reflect
Can we now?
 Critically engage with different

forms of ‘exchange’ and

critically locate their presence in
modern capitalist economy?
 Strategies of resistance