Practice question · True or false
Ethnographic evidence shows that most pre-modern economies were organized around barter between strangers.
Hints
- Ask what the field evidence actually shows about early exchange.
- Obligation and redistribution appear where the textbook expects barter.
Show the answer
False
Why
The barter origin story survives in textbooks, not in ethnography. Field evidence shows gift, obligation, and redistribution doing the work; barter appears mainly at the edges between communities. Polanyi’s point exactly.
Practise Economic Anthropology and Reciprocity
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Economic Anthropology and Reciprocity
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- Match each of Sahlins’s reciprocity grades to its example.
- Sort each flow of goods by Polanyi’s mode of integration.
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