ABSTRACT
The term “exchange” is used by economists to refer to the sphere of activity that mediates production and consumption, but anthropologists have given the term a radically new meaning. They severed exchange from its relation to production and consumption, gave it a life of its own, and called it “reciprocity.” The words “exchange” and “reciprocity,” along with “gift,” became synonyms. This redefinition of exchange, and the classical paradigm of which it was part, marked a high point in the history of anthropological thought. It was the intellectual fruit of a century of ethnographic description, comparative analysis, and theorizing. Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics serves to define the state of debate at the end of the 1960s. It is a masterly synthesis of over a century of anthropological scholarship on “primitive” exchange and trade and its relationship to production in the clan-based, “stone age,” tribal economies of Africa, Oceania, and America.
