Revision summary
Production is household and lineage labour on common or clan land. Distribution follows reciprocity and redistribution more than wage. Exchange is gift, kula-like partnership, and spheres of goods. Polanyi and Sahlins name the principles. Price market is not the default law.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
In small-scale societies, production, distribution, and exchange are instituted in kinship and ritual. They are not a miniature stock market.
Body
Production
- Labour is largely household and kin, as Sahlins’s domestic mode of production stated.
- Land is often lineage estate, not a freehold commodity. Tools are simple; knowledge is seasonal.
- Gender and age divide tasks: Trobriand gardens, Nuer herding, !Kung foraging parties.
- Surplus is modest. Boserup still applies when fallow shortens.
Distribution
- Polanyi’s three principles: reciprocity, redistribution, and market.
- Redistribution sits on a chief or temple: potlatch, Trobriand yam display, Indian jajmani as a debated case.
- Sharing of meat among foragers, as Lee and Woodburn described, levels luck.
Exchange
- Reciprocity after Sahlins: generalised, balanced, negative.
- Malinowski’s kula and Mauss’s gift: the thing carries a person and an obligation to return.
- Bohannan’s spheres block conversion of all goods into one money.
- Barter and silent trade exist; they do not make the whole economy a price system.
Principle that governs
- Embeddedness: who you are to the other party decides the rate more than a posted price.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD E[Simple economy] --> PR[Kin household production] E --> DI[Share redistribute] E --> EX[Gift reciprocity spheres]
Conclusion
Simple economies produce through kin labour, distribute by sharing and chiefly or ritual pooling, and exchange as gift, balanced reciprocity, or bounded spheres. Market price is a late, limited principle.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Horticulture.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2015 · Q1(d)). View answer →
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Do people in simple societies never calculate?
They calculate labour and honour. They do not always calculate a single money price.
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Is jajmani a simple-society principle?
It is a caste-village redistribution debate, useful as a comparison, not a band model.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2016 · Q4(b) · Anthropology GS 1 · 15 marks
How do the concepts of binary opposites and exchange figure in Levi-Strauss' structural analysis of kinship? -
2021 · Q3(a) · Anthropology GS 1 · 20 marks
How do political organisations of simple societies establish power, authority and legitimacy? -
2016 · Q3(b) · Anthropology GS 1 · 15 marks
Discuss different social control mechanisms in simple societies.
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