Basics - Economic Anthropology

Economic anthropology is a scholarly field that attempts to explain human economic behavior(production,distribution,consumption and exchange) in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope.Economic anthropology, broadly defined, is the study of material processes in their social relations.It is a sub-discipline with blurred boundaries as it cross-cuts theoretical paradigms and other sub-fields within anthropology. 

As a field of study it is as old as anthropological fieldwork itself.Economic anthropology has gained its identity from its studies of hunter-gather societies, and the following transitions to subsistence production, cash economies,and the market. In the past ten years, the field witnessed also the incursion of new methods, such as field experiments.

According to Dalton, economic anthropology comprises different sets of topics, such as the structure and performance of traditional pre-colonial, preindustrial, colonial, and postcolonial tribal and peasant economies. Bronislaw Malinowski's famous Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), challenged the neo-classical assumptions of self-interested and rational motives by illustrating the social and symbolic nature of the Kula exchange system of the Trobriand Islanders. Other early anthropologists focused on the analysis of economic systems, among them Firth (1939), Goodfellow (1939), and Herskovitz (1940). Unlike the approach of Malinowski, these anthropologists employed aspects of neo-classical economics, portraying economic decisions as individual actions based on individual motivation.

Post-World War II, Economic Anthropology was highly influenced by the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi. Polanyi drew on anthropological studies to argue that true market exchange was limited to a restricted number of western, industrial societies. Applying formal economic theory (Formalism) to non-industrial societies was mistaken, he argued. In non-industrial societies, exchange was "embedded" in such non-market institutions as kinship, religion, and politics (an idea he borrowed from Mauss). He labelled this approach Substantivism. The Formalist vs Substantivist debate was highly influential and defined an era.

As globalization became a reality, and the division between market and non-market economies (or between "the west and the rest") became untenable, anthropologists began to look at the relationship between a variety of types of exchange within market societies. Neo-substantivists examine the ways in which so-called pure market exchange in market societies fails to fit market ideology. Economic Anthropologists have abandoned the primitivist niche they were relegated to by economists. They now study the operations of corporations, banks, and the global financial system from an anthropological perspective.

Economic anthropology is not only a way for us to look at past and modern less "civilized" cultures, but a way to analyze "modern" economies. It analyzes the very things that make up an economy, people.

Areas to be covered for civil services exam : 

-Meaning,scope and relevance of economic anthropology;

-Formalist and Substantivist debate;

-Principles governing production, distribution and exchange (reciprocity, redistribution and market), in communities, subsisting on hunting and gathering,fishing,swiddening,pastoralism,horticulture,and agriculture;

-globalization and indigenous economic systems.

Education - An Enlightening Experience

It must be recognized that a real education is an experience and a process, not the summative end that can only be measured by a limited test. 

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabindranath Tagore

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.
John F. Kennedy

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Carl Rogers

Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Anthony J. D'Angelo

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm Forbes

To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.
A. A. Milne

Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison

Man is what he reads.
Joseph Brodsky

It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.
Harvey S. Firestone

Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Albert Einstein

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
Confucius

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.
Aristotle

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
Plato

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
Peter Drucker

The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.
Herodotus

Knowledge is the life of the mind.
Abu Bakr

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers,desires.
Plato

Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon

Education Is The Best Friend. An Educated Person Is Respected Everywhere. Education Beats The Beauty And The Youth
Chanakya

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.
Chanakya

As knowledge increases, wonder deepens.
Charles Morgan

Who is an Educated Person (Part 2)

Other important ingredient is 'abilities'.We also expect an educated person to be able to do certain things. For instance, we expect an educated person to be able to add up a few two digit and three digit numbers without using a calculator, to read and understand a newspaper report, and to make an informed reasoned guess (verdict) about the guilt of the "accused" in a law court after a careful consideration of available evidence. When faced with familiar as well as novel situations, we expect an educated person to be able to perform required tasks, make informed intelligent decisions and arrive at informed rational conclusions. We also expect him/her to deal rationally with disagreements, choose from alternative beliefs and courses of action, and recognize when information is insufficient to make a reasoned choice from competing alternatives.

Neuropsychologists use the term declarative memory to refer to the know-that type of knowledge, and procedural memory to refer to the know-how-to type of knowledge. For instance, knowing that the square root of four is two is a form of declarative knowledge, while knowing how to find the square root of a number is a form of procedural knowledge. An educated person should be able to function effectively in familiar and novel situations in personal and intellectual life. To satisfy this requirement, one needs both declarative and procedural forms of knowledge.

An educated person should possess mastery of the general thinking abilities required for making informed intelligent decisions, estimates, assessments, and inferences.

For instance, in addition to the specialized thinking abilities that their respective professions call for, educated lawyers, engineers and historians should possess the general thinking abilities that are crucial for functioning as intelligent lay people, when weighing advice from their doctor to perform an operation, when helping their children decide which university to apply to, or when making an intelligent assessment of the credibility of a newspaper report.

Observe that thinking ability, whether general or domain-specific, presupposes knowledge. In order to think critically about a doctor's recommendation, one needs medical information of the kind that is generally available in a good medical encyclopedia. In order to assess the credibility of the claim that there is life on Mars, one needs a minimal amount of information about the environment of Mars, and how scientists make inferences from fossil remains.

Educatedness as the enhanced capability to cope successfully with novel situations: Now, novel situations may demand additional or advanced information and additional or advanced thinking abilities. Moreover, the information and thinking abilities that one can draw upon to meet the demands of life keep expanding, and hence there is no point at which the acquisition of knowledge, skills and abilities can be said to be complete. It follows therefore that an educated person should have the capability to enhance and modify their knowledge and thinking abilities on an ongoing basis so as to cope with novel situations and to cope with them in a more successful manner. This is a requirement on the capability for independent learning.

An educated person should be capable of independent learning that facilitates coping with and adapting to the changing environment.

A person who does not have the capability for independent learning cannot be considered educated. Independent learning is not merely the ability to use the library and internet to acquire the knowledge that others have generated. It also involves the ability to generate knowledge on one's own, either based on an existing body of knowledge, or creating knowledge where none existed. The ability to generate knowledge is research, which calls for the mastery of the modes of rational inquiry which have evolved over a long time in academic disciplines.

Learning involves the expansion, modification, and rectification of existing information, and the expansion and strengthening of thinking abilities.The educated sociologists should be able to pick up a couple of textbooks on neuropsychology and expand their existing knowledge of how the brain works, motivated either by curiosity, or by the need to understand social behaviour in terms of the functioning of the human brain. They should also be able to modify their existing beliefs about society on the basis of new information. In many cases, it may also involve rejecting some of the beliefs which were once held to be correct.

Starting our exploration of educatedness with knowledge,it is found that the abilities of thinking and learning are closely tied up with knowledge.

Along with ability to think, the ability to learn,ability to use language is another ingredient of the education.Language plays a central role in constructing, critically evaluating, transmitting, and receiving knowledge.Language is also used for aesthetic purposes (as in poetry), persuasion (as in advertisements and political speeches), and so on, but the primary role of language in higher education is epistemic.

An educated person should be capable of using language clearly, precisely and effectively for epistemic purposes.

-A different mind set can be observed in an educated person.The following are some characteristic features :

-An awareness of the uncertainty and fallibility of human knowledge (including so called "objective" scientific knowledge).

-The willingness to doubt and question propositions that are claimed as knowledge, by others (including "authorities") as well as by ourselves, and the unwillingness to accept knowledge claims that are unaccompanied by sufficient evidence.

-An openness of mind that allows one to modify and abandon earlier beliefs on the basis of new evidence, as well as the willingness and ability to look for such evidence.

-Intellectual curiosity and enjoyment of knowledge, thinking, and learning in themselves. A student becomes an independent learner only when learning becomes its own reward. Independent learning cannot flourish in an educational environment where knowledge, thinking, and learning are associated with pain and boredom, pursued only for the pragmatic goals of material success in life.

-The ability to subject one's own beliefs to the process of critical thinking requires special emphasis. Critical thinking requires the capacity and predilection to seek rational grounds for accepting or rejecting beliefs.

There are at least three successively difficult levels of the critical scrutiny of beliefs, expressible in terms of the following questions:

A.How can I show that I am right and my opponent is wrong? (What kind of rational grounds would support my beliefs and refute my opponent's beliefs?)

B.How can I check if the authority I trust (teacher, textbook, community) is right or wrong? (What kinds of rational grounds would justify my acceptance or rejection of the beliefs that I am exposed to?)

C.How can I check if I am wrong or my opponent is right? (What kind of rational grounds would refute my beliefs and support my opponent's beliefs?)

However, since the human intellect in reality is closely tied up with emotional states, we find it easier to engage in A and extremely difficult to engage in C. The highest form of critical thinking is the auto-critical thinking of type C that demands liberation from emotional attachment to the self.

The kind of critical thinking needed in debating competitions is of type A. In a debate, each of the two competing parties are expected to decide which side they are on prior to the debate, and then go on to show that whichever side they have chosen to support is the right one. We do not win debating competitions by pursuing truth, with the willingness to pursue evidence that may show that our original position was wrong. The practice of argumentation in the law court is also of type A. Lawyers who pursue truth and end up arguing against their clients' interests are unlikely to continue as lawyers. In contrast, critical thinking in science crucially demands the detachment that allows one to pursue evidence against one's own original convictions.

We expect education to nurture the physical, emotional, interpersonal, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of human development, but when it comes to the concept of educatedness, only the intellectual dimension appears to be relevant.Take the moral dimension as an example. Let us imagine that Einstein was an extremely immoral person who was ready to cheat, lie, and kill in order to achieve his own selfish goals. Would we consider him uneducated? Chances are that we would say no. The word "educated" is biased towards the intellectual dimension of education, probably due to the historical accident of educational institutions focusing on the intellectual aspect of education.Inability to engage in moral reasoning is a gap in educatedness.Having made the rational inference, choosing an action that is morally good or morally bad is not a matter of the intellect, but of moral values.

On a lighter note we can say that an educated person possess three characteristics.He/she can entertain oneself, one who can entertain another, and one who can entertain a new idea.

Qualities of an Educated Person  :

1. A broadly knowledgeable mind
2. Self confidence
3. A life purpose
4. A touch of class
5. Good leadership skills
6. The ability to work with a team
7. Patience
8. Good public speaking skills
9. Good writing skills
10. Resourcefulness
11. A desire for responsibility
12. Honesty
13. A public spirit
14. The ability to work well alone
15. An eye for details
16. The ability to focus at will
17. Perseverance
18. The ability to handle pressure
19. Curiosity
20. An attractive personal style

Who is an Educated Person

Finished your education? What are you doing now ? This is what most of the people ask to get an idea about our position in life and education for them is a means for employment.For many people the importance of education lies in future job prospects, for others it's quality of citizenship, and others just want literacy, critical thinking, and/or creativity.

The definition of education guiding mainstream schools today is that education is the delivery of knowledge, skills, and information.While the metaphor—education as a delivery system—sounds reasonable, it misses what is most important about education.It should be an enlightening experience.It gives a person the abilities to think and execute things logically,rationally. Behind all the differences of opinion about what it means to be educated is one very basic idea: an educated person is someone who perceives accurately, thinks clearly, and acts effectively on self-selected goals.

Providing a proper definition of education is complicated by the fact that there is not a clear consensus about what is important about being and becoming educated.

Characterization of the educated person involves four essential ingredients, namely: knowledge, the ability to think, the ability to learn, and the ability to use language. In addition, the mental make-up of an educated person also includes relatively elusive qualities such as an awareness of the uncertainty and fallibility of knowledge, openness of mind, willingness and ability to doubt and question, personal involvement in knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and the joy of learning.

Ingredients of Educatedness

Knowledge

The most obvious ingredient of "educatedness" is knowledge.

When determining what goes into the background information of an educated person, it would be useful to distinguish between general knowledge and specialized knowledge. We expect a physicist to know that in the quark theory, the only elementary particles are quarks and leptons, but it is hardly necessary for a lawyer, doctor, or sociologist to have this information, and hence we would treat it as specialized knowledge. In contrast, we agree that the idea that matter consists of molecules and molecules consist of atoms is part of the general knowledge of any educated person in modern times.It is also important to bear in mind that what is regarded as knowledge keeps changing over time. The concept of the functional asymmetry of the left and right brains was not part of human knowledge in the seventeenth century, but today it is part of not only the knowledge of the specialist, but also the lay educated person. A few centuries ago, specialists and non-specialists alike believed that the sun revolves around the earth. We do not expect an educated person in modern times to subscribe to this belief. Even the division between specialized and general knowledge does not remain static. The concept of sensitivity-to-initial-conditions in chaos theory used to be part of specialized knowledge in the physical sciences, but it is fast becoming part of the general knowledge of educated people.

Finally, we must remember that even at a given time, general knowledge has both a universal component and a culture specific component. For instance, if a person who was born and brought up in India has no knowledge about Carnatic music and Hindustani music or monsoons, he/she would be regarded as lacking in education, but this would not apply to a person born and brought up in Australia. Similarly, one would expect an educated person in Singapore to be familiar with the history of Singapore, but there is no reason to expect this of an educated German. Granted that certain aspects of general knowledge are culture specific, we still need to acknowledge a core of universal ingredients of knowledge in the modern world. Twentieth century individuals who believe that a two day old human embryo has very small arms and legs have a gap in their education, independently of the culture they come from.

Based on this , we may formulate our first requirement of "educatedness" as follows:

An educated person should possess the general knowledge needed for making informed rational decisions and inferences on familiar and novel situations in personal and intellectual life.

The term "decisions" in the above statement covers decisions on what to do (i.e., pragmatic decisions) as well as decisions on what to believe (i.e., epistemic decisions). Also, the term "information" in this context applies not only to what are considered facts (e.g., matter expands when heated, things fall when dropped) but also to theories and theoretical interpretations (e.g., matter consists of molecules, expansion of heated matter is the result of the increased speed of molecular motion, things fall because of gravity).

The requirement articulated above may give the misleading impression that the information that an educated person should have is what is important for practical matters. Given that ideas about the expanding universe and the evolution of the species are not relevant for practical decisions in life, is it necessary for an educated person to be familiar with them?

The answer, which is a clear yes, calls for a distinction between foundational knowledge and non-foundational knowledge. The foundational knowledge, refers to leading ideas and metaphors of any discipline that have had far reaching consequences not only in transforming the whole discipline but also have transcended disciplinary boundaries to affect a wide range of human knowledge.

These ideas shape our perception of reality, yield metaphors for ordering and making sense of our experience, and guide further inquiry by influencing the questions we ask and the answers we provide, in a way that go beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines. When philosopher Thomas Kuhn talked about the paradigms that guide scientific inquiry, one of the concepts he was pointing to was that of the leading ideas that shape world views. In contrast, information about the chemical composition of common salt, the function of biceps and triceps in the action of the human arm, and the role of the limbic system of the brain in human emotions are matters of detail which do not qualify as foundational knowledge.

Given the centrality of foundational knowledge in shaping both the rest of human knowledge and further inquiry, it is important for educated people to have the foundational knowledge of their times, with an awareness of the evolution of this knowledge, as well as the evidence that justifies the belief in the foundational propositions