5 - From Celebrations to Sales

Summary

People everywhere gather to eat, drink, and exchange things. Anthropologists term these moments “ceremonial exchanges” or “feasts.” Sometimes they are called “social displays,” and when public consumption with destruction seems excessive, they are labeled “potlatches.” These rituals often mark moments for pooling and redistributing wealth. Goods flow to a center and then out, sometimes on the basis of equal return for what was put in but often not. The exchanges have many forms. An individual or house may hold a distribution that others reciprocate. Some are linked to work events, as in Panama and Colombia, where the celebration encourages efforts of the participants. Not all redistributions are ritualized, such as household budgets, government tax systems, and the Nambicuara sharing of manioc and meat in a village.

A comparative view of these celebrations shows that figurative reason gives way to calculative reason as material exchanges shift from the mutual to the market domain. Celebrations do not disappear when markets articulate economy, for mutuality expressed not only through the use of market goods (as illustrated in the prior chapter) but also through festive gatherings support the market part of economy. Connecting to others provides a structure for markets through institutions inside markets such as the house, outside markets such as governance systems, within markets through commodities that relate people, and by celebrations on which market demand depends. In this chapter I present celebrations that illustrate the increasing role of abstraction and the expansion of calculative reason yet the paradoxical importance of festivities when markets dominate material life.

Seeing how ritual celebrations and figurative reason support markets does not fit the normal presumption that self-interest provides the motor of markets. According to Adam Smith,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

My view of self-interested exchange is different. Even if self-interested calculation is an innate capacity, it enlarges in markets that encourage its growth and hastens market expansion. Through feedback from market competition, we increasingly invigilate our actions and sharpen our practices. In markets calculative reason expands through a reflexive process.