Transfers

Abstract

This paper reinterprets core issues in economic anthropology by exploring transfers as a theoretical resource. After describing deliberate usage of the term "transfer" in anthropology and economics, transfers are defined as movements of economic matter, while transactions are the forms arising from their configuration. Transactional categories such as Maussian gift exchange or market exchange become second-order reifications. Examining the politics of creating and sustaining transactional categories by first looking at the elementary transfers out of which they are constructed places "one-way transfers" of wealth on the same conceptual plane as reciprocal and market transactions, instead of being a derivative or a remainder of either or both. Gifts and gambling are considered as examples. Gambling and "pure gifts" are one-way transfers engineered to possess only one component transfer, and Maussian gifts explicitly connect transfers together in a particular politics. Anthropological literature that employs an incipient version of the transfer strategy is detailed, demonstrating its nascent explanatory promise. The article concludes by suggesting renewed engagement with contemporary economics on the basis of transfers.

‘He who relies on relatives and friends die poor’: class closure and stratagems of civility in peri‐urban Kenya

“…Such views have produced strategies that value civility, the need to ‘keep quiet’, avoid conflict, and keep relationships open. Exploring how our interlocutors endeavour to ‘see transfers through’ (Retsikas 2016: 5; see also Pickles 2020) by maintaining co‐presence encourages us to trouble the anthropological theorization of relationality with acknowledgement of interest's presence in social life. F.G. Bailey's emphasis on ‘stratagems and spoils’ seems rather more germane here than post‐Maussian relationality.…”

Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland

“…Neither am I going to pursue the partial overlap between the timebankers' terminology and an anthropological core concept, intriguing though it be. 'Exchange' is used in the literature as a genus that branches out to species such as 'gifts' and 'commodities' (Gregory 1997: 44), or distinct spheres (Bohannan 1959) and modalities (Robbins and Akin 1999), in a way that makes anthropological analyses predisposed to favour reciprocity and relationality (Pickles 2020). This is evident in the ease with which the concept of exchange is allied with the Timebank's project.…”

“…This preference for the two-way concept of exchange over the one-way concept of transfer parallels one of anthropology's disciplinary biases. Anthony Pickles (2020) has called attention to the established anthropological convention of using different varieties of exchange as the ideal-typical category of economic transactions. This is in marked contract with economics, where unidirectional transfer predominates as the elementary unit of analysis.…”

The spirit of gifts: Public housing, citizenship and the ambiguities of home in South Africa

“…Mauss contrasts the spirit of the gift in such societies with the impersonal utilitarian nature of market capitalism or commodity exchange. Many have read his book as a critique of the alienating effects of French capitalism in the 1920s (see Hart 2007;Fassim 2015;Frank 2016;Pickles 2020) In Veyne's (1990) account of the decline of Rome, market and gift exchanges had come to coexist in a context where non-market mechanisms (gifting and redistribution) acquired increasing salience as the urban underclass in Rome became more marginal economically and dangerous politically. In this case, political and economic centralisation did not eradicate gift exchange but reinvented it as institutionalised forms of redistribution to hold the crumbling city of Rome P A G E 1 6 5 together.…”