The Capitalism of Chambri Cosmology: The 2017 Sir Raymond Firth Memorial Lecture

Abstract

Britain and Ireland was titled "Social Organization and Social Change." It concluded with this advice (in paraphrase): To understand social change-whether in structure, "in which basic elements of the society alter," or in detail, "in which social action while not merely repetitive, does not alter the basic social norms"-it is necessary to study closely "the setting and results of individual choice and decision" (Firth 1954, 17). In other words, it is necessary to look carefully at social organization. Indeed, as stated earlier in his address and implicit in his emphasis on long-term fieldwork, although structure provides a framework for action, circumstances may lead to "fresh choices" and "fresh decisions" (Firth 1954, 4). These choices and decisions may ripple throughout a structural framework and, sometimes, beyond it. When this departure from a structure becomes permanent, the result is social change.Thirty-four years later, social change was still on the mind of another distinguished scholar delivering another influential address. This was Marshall Sahlins in his 1988 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, "Cosmologies of Capitalism." It reflected his earlier formulation of the "structure of the conjuncture" as "the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historic agents, including the microsociology of their interaction" (Sahlins 1985, xiv). This process, with its focus on choices, decisions, and motivated engagements, is, as Sahlins explicitly referenced, "reminiscent of Firth's distinction between a de facto 'social organization and a de jure or underlying 'social structure '" (1985, xiv). Sahlins's