ANTHRO 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Frederic Pryor, Social Stratification, Overgrazing
Document Summary
Anthropologists call it exchanges or transactions in which the prices are subject to supply and demand, whether or not the transaction occurs in the marketplace. Involves not only the exchange of goods but also labor, land, rentals, and credit. Societies with monetary exchange usually have inequities in wealth and power. Our society has general purpose money for which nearly all goods, resources, and services can be exchanged. The earliest coins were made by the lydians in asia minor and the chinese in the 7th century ad. Many peoples whose food production cannot support a large population of nonproducers of food have special purpose money. Commercial exchange is the dominant form of distribution in the modern world. What anthropologists call peasant economies are more commercialized than transitional subsistence economies such as the luo. Peasants produce food for their own consumption but sell part of their surplus to others. Money is invented or copied from another when bartering becomes increasingly inefficient.
