Economics usually begins with markets: buyers, sellers and prices. Anthropology asks a wider question: how do people provide for themselves and one another in every kind of society, including those with no money at all? The answers reveal that exchange is never only about goods. It is also about relationships, status and fairness.

Ways of making a living

Anthropologists group subsistence strategies into broad types. Foragers hunt, fish and gather wild foods. Pastoralists herd animals such as cattle, camels or reindeer. Horticulturalists grow gardens with simple tools, often moving their plots as soil wears out. Agriculturalists farm the same fields intensively with plows, irrigation and draft animals. For most of the human past, people lived by foraging: hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods. Farming began only around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and it arose independently in several regions, including Southwest Asia, China, Mesoamerica and highland New Guinea.

Foraging was long imagined as a desperate struggle. In the 1960s the Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee studied the Ju/'hoansi, sometimes called the !Kung, in the Kalahari Desert and estimated that adults spent surprisingly few hours a week getting food. Drawing on such studies in 1966, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins gave foragers the label original affluent society. Sahlins argued that foragers were affluent because their limited wants could be met with modest work. Critics replied that the hour counts left out food processing and tool making, and that Kalahari foragers were not untouched survivors of the Stone Age but people with long histories of contact with herders and traders. The debate continues, but it unsettled the assumption that more goods always mean a better life.

The gift

In 1925 the French scholar Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim's nephew, published his Essay on the Gift. He argued that in many societies gifts are never simply free: they create bonds and obligations. Mauss identified three obligations: to give, to receive and to repay. Refusing a gift can be an insult, and failing to repay lowers one's standing. A market purchase ends a relationship once the price is paid. A gift opens or renews one.

Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) described the most famous example. In the kula, men from a ring of islands off eastern New Guinea sailed long distances to exchange shell valuables with partners. In the kula, shell necklaces travel clockwise around the ring of islands and armshells travel counterclockwise. No one keeps a valuable for good. Prestige comes from the famous pieces that have passed through one's hands and from the partnerships themselves. Ordinary trade in useful goods happened alongside the kula, but the ceremonial exchange was what gave it meaning.

On the Northwest Coast of North America, the Kwakwaka'wakw and neighboring peoples hold the potlatch, a feast at which hosts give away large amounts of wealth to guests to mark births, deaths, marriages and the passing of names and rank. Missionaries and officials saw it as wasteful and as an obstacle to assimilation, and Canada banned the potlatch by law from 1885 to 1951. Communities kept it alive in secret, at real risk of arrest. Today it is practiced openly again.

Kinds of reciprocity

In 1972 Sahlins sorted reciprocity into three types along a scale of social distance. Generalized reciprocity is giving without keeping track or expecting a specific return, as parents give to children. Balanced reciprocity expects a return of roughly equal value within a reasonable time, as in trading favors or wedding gifts. Negative reciprocity is trying to get something for nothing, from hard bargaining to theft, and it is most common with strangers.

The Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi, writing in 1944, had earlier described three ways of moving goods: reciprocity, market exchange and redistribution. In redistribution, goods flow to a center, such as a chief or a state, and are then given back out. Taxes that pay for schools and roads are a modern form. Polanyi argued that through most of history economies were embedded in kinship, religion and politics, and that a society run mainly by markets is a recent invention.

Insulting the meat

In a well-known 1969 essay, Lee described buying a huge ox to thank the Ju/'hoansi at Christmas, only to hear everyone mock it as skinny and worthless. He eventually learned that this was how they treated any successful hunter. Insulting the meat was a leveling custom that kept successful hunters from growing arrogant, protecting a society in which no one was supposed to rank above anyone else. The lesson: generosity is valued, but so is humility about it.

Worked example: a neighborhood food network

During a local crisis, neighbors start a shared food shelf. At first people give freely and take what they need: generalized reciprocity. Later some members begin swapping specific items, eggs for bread, and keeping rough track: balanced reciprocity. A few people take far more than they give, and resentment grows. The organizers set up a simple rule: donations go to a central table and are handed out by volunteers according to need. That is redistribution. An anthropologist watching would notice that each shift in the rules is also a shift in relationships, which is exactly what Mauss predicted.