Concept

Reciprocity (cultural anthropology)

Overview

In cultural anthropology, reciprocity is the non-market exchange of goods or labour ranging from direct barter (immediate exchange) to forms of gift exchange where a return is eventually expected (delayed exchange) as in the exchange of birthday gifts. It is thus distinct from the true gift, where no return is expected.

When the exchange is immediate, as in barter, it does not create a social relationship. When the exchange is delayed, it creates both a relationship as well as an obligation for a return (i.e. debt). Hence, some forms of reciprocity can establish a hierarchy if the debt is not repaid. The failure to make a return may end a relationship between equals. Reciprocal exchanges can also have a political effect through the creation of multiple obligations and the establishment of leadership, as in the gift exchanges (Moka) between Big Men in Melanesia. Some forms of reciprocity are thus closely related to redistribution, where goods and services are collected by a central figure for eventual distribution to followers.

Marshall Sahlins, an American cultural anthropologist, identified three main types of reciprocity (generalized, balanced and negative) in the book Stone Age Economics (1972). Reciprocity was also the general principle used by Claude Lévi-Strauss to explain the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), in one of the most influential works on kinship theory in the post-war period.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Reciprocity (cultural anthropology) is discussed.

There the several organs and functions are similarly seen to stand to each other in the relation of reciprocity. Reciprocity is undoubtedly the proximate truth of the relation of cause and effect, and stands, so to say, on the threshold of the notion; but on that very ground, supposing that our aim is a thoroughly comprehensive idea, we should not rest content with applying this relation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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In § 20 it has already been shown, that the law of causality does not admit of reciprocity, since the effect never can be the cause of its cause; therefore the conception of reciprocity is, in its right sense, inadmissible. Reciprocity, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason of knowing, would only be possible between equivalent conceptions, since the spheres of these alone cover each other mutually. Apart…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
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The price of obedience is protection. There is or ought to be a reciprocity of interest between the governed and the governor: whenever this reciprocity is wanting, society is in that state of confusion of which we spoke in the fifth chapter: it is verging on destruction. No society upon earth was ever willing or competent to confer irrevocably upon its chiefs the power, the right, of doing it injury.
Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
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be not so high as to exceed all that remains of the advantage of the trade, and put an end to importation altogether, causing the article to be either produced at home, or imported from another and a dearer market.” By “reciprocity” is meant that, when one country admits goods free of duty from a second country, this latter country will also admit the commodities of the former free of duty; or, as is often the case…
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy
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When two people, who are continually drawing and redrawing upon one another, discount their bills always with the same banker, he must immediately discover what they are about, and see clearly that they are trading, not with any capital of their own, but with the capital which he advances to them. But this discovery is not altogether so easy when they discount their bills sometimes with one banker, and sometimes…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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Related ideas

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Part of Anarchism.

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