Disembeddedness as Invalidated by Gender

[Chelsea Hayman]

After thoughtfully considering some of the comments made on my last post regarding Sahlins and Polanyi's infamous 'disembedded economy' thesis, I have been considering this line of argument even more carefully. Although there are inherently many issues with Sahlins's initial premise of 'affluence' among hunter-gatherers, I think it's crucial to point out that what his argument states, in a latent fashion, is that our society is not altogether different from those of the so-called 'primitives.' I'd argue that the disembedded economy is mythical because no purely 'embedded' economy exists. The concept has had tremendous import in early economic anthropology because of its poignant critique of capitalist interests, but the model fails to seriously grapple with measures of status and kinship, which even Mauss goes on to demonstrate as integral to the analysis of economies (albeit at a different level than market capitalism). On a superficial assessment, it may appear that kinship systems and the like are 'embedded,' and therefore, more ideal or supposedly egalitarian than market capitalism and in some senses, this is correct, at least in the sense that these structures mutually reinforce cultural beliefs of a particular kind. However, kinship, by its very essence, provides a structure through which women are subjected to inequalities and gendered expectations that actually subordinate them regardless of the economic ideology that pervades a particular time period.

In summary, I am probing the question: How can the disembedded economy idea (at least as it pertains to market capitalism) contain any value in contemporary anthropology when gender is remiss from its initial analysis?

I've been thinking of this in relation to Leslie Gates's argument in The Strategic Uses of Gender in Household Negotiations, which argues that women employ a model of 'doing gender' in the household to bargain for particular interests that might contradict their gender identity. Employment provided some sense of liberation for women from the repressive elements of home life that plagued them, while also furthering their leverage power over men. I find Polanyi's argument problematic on the basis that gender does not configure historically or culturally in his analysis, at least based on what I have read.

Could this provide evidence of work serving a self-empowering function in societies, at least in the case of women? Does this contradict with the central point advanced in Polanyi's thesis?

I know that his claims have largely been debunked, but his work is of great interest to many precisely because it defines a profit motive that most find to be a reprehensible aspect of market capitalism and the global system. Well, unless of course, you detach any moralistic perspective from monetary gain, which is observable in Hinduism, to cite one example.

Anyways, just some ideas. I better get back to revision. These blog posts are more of an attempt to condense my ideas into something that seems manageable and more comfortable, but I appreciate any feedback that will challenge or reform my own thoughts.

[Huon Wardle]

You are right, I have not read the opera magna of David Granovetter; one question specifically relevant to the discussion Chelsea started, though, is whether the people who read Granovetter have bothered to read Polanyi. The thing about precision, mathematical or otherwise, is that precision is as precision does.

[John McCreery]

It was late last night when I wrote my last comment. No excuse for being rude, though. Allow me, instead, to approach the question differently: If embeddedness is a useful concept, what evidence supports its utility. In a network analysis context, "embeddedness" suggests all sorts of questions that lead to testable hypotheses. Consider, for example, the hypothesis that networks channel transactions. We should, then, expect the frequency of transactions between pairs of actors (individuals or groups) to be significantly different than they would be if transactions were randomly distributed. This expectation can be tested by comparing actual transactions to randomly generated graphs. If the difference appears significant, we can ask why this should be so and may wish to introduce other social or cultural factors to explain it. Thus, for example, ethnography might suggest that all transactions take place between established cliques, based on kinship, race, religion or other factors. Our data may show overlap between cliques—and, in addition, allow us to measure it. Are cliques joined by only occasional, irregular transactions that create only a weak web of relationships? Are there enough transactions between members of different cliques to suggest more substantial and enduring relations? All of these become researchable, testable questions. Has every question been answered? No. Are the results consistent with a particular political philosophy or morality? Possibly, but unlikely. Have we learned something we didn't know by bracketing other considerations and focusing on relationships where data is ready to hand? Almost certainly true. Are the hypotheses to which our analysis leads more or less precise than the ideas we started with. More precise (and, therefore, more likely to be missing something) than the ideas we started with? No question about it.

[John McCreery]

Only someone who isn't familiar with the relevant literature could imagine that Granovetter's version of embeddedness is a vague abstraction. It may be simplistic (and here I agree with the review that Keith provided for us); but,  it is, being grounded in mathematical graph theory and Simmel's sociology, far more precise than anything we anthropologists have on offer. 

[Huon Wardle]

So, according to the paper Keith posted, the answer is that a sociologist called David Granovetter is responsible for inventing this vocabulary of embeddedness and disembeddedness. I think that is a good paper by the way because it points to how the substance of what Polanyi was saying, and the anthropological comparative arguments he uses, have been turned into a vague abstraction.

[Chelsea Hayman]

John,

What you discuss is an excellent extension of Polanyi's ideas and I wholeheartedly agree. I just posted a video of a lecture at the University of Warwick that focuses on 'retooling' some of Polanyi's ideas in the contemporary era and it discusses themes along the line of what you have observed. I just wrote a paper arguing that Polanyi's ideas, truly, are only valuable insomuch as they can be made malleable to the global flows that are observable in contemporary society. With that being said, it is important not to avoid how some global flows can be beneficial to some, rather than duplicating the bleak portrait of market capitalism that Polanyi so heavily believes in.

I am particularly intrigued by the ecological argument that you are making here - it kind of reminds me of some of Setha Low's work on Latin America in the sense that this could inform or productively contribute to an ecological economics argument. Could it be that socioeconomic status can be reinscribed on particular environments by way of ecological and pre-existing colonial constraints? I suppose that would just be a hypothetical question completely, because, as you have helped me realize before, purely dichotomizing models between West vs. Non-West, Colonial vs, Pre-colonial vs. Indigenous, etc. can all be problematic to a great extent.

Could it be that the household is completely isolated from market capitalism and flows of capital, though? I suppose the first example that randomly comes to mind is the products that are marketed towards women in particular that aim at creating an 'economically sustainable' version of home life that suits particular expectations of cost effectiveness and efficiency that are already in-built to particular household arrangements.

All great ideas to consider though, I want to thank you verily for sharing.  

[Chelsea Hayman]

Huon,

Thank you for all of your great commentary, I really appreciate it. From what (little) I have read of Polanyi, it seems that the only distinctions he makes are between formalism and substantivism, which Scott Cook is keen to critique him on. But yes, you are right, and actually, this might be a matter of me either misinterpreting the knowledge I learned from a lecturer or a lecturer using the term 'disembedded' and 'embedded' to refer to themes in Polanyi's argument. I suppose a better characterization would be to deploy the terms that Polanyi himself uses in his original work.

[Huon Wardle]

Chelsea, I took a quick look at the GT again and I am pretty sure Polanyi never uses either 'disembedded economy' or 'disembedded markets' in the book. 

I can roughly understand what is meant by these phrases - from a situation where markets are an 'embedded' aspect of society (specifically a meeting place) instead society itself becomes (or is understood by the ideologues to be) one big market.

I wonder where these phrases came from, though?

[John McCreery]

I find myself wondering about the use of "disembedded" in the phrase "disembedded economy." Is it simply a new buzzword for what used to be called differentiation in models of social evolution in which institutions with specifically economic, political, legal, religious or other purposes (art worlds, for example)  become more distinct as societies become more complex? The differentiation in question does not rule out interaction or imply complete autonomy; but does become increasingly clear in, for example, the spatial and architectural settings of different institutions. In the USA, for example, stock exchanges and legislatures conduct their business in not only spatially distinct but visibly different places. More generally speaking, the division of urban space into distinct residential, workplace, and recreational zones is seen as a characteristic feature of modernization. 

The relation of gender to space as a marker of institutionalized differentiation is a particularly interesting issue. My parents, for example, exemplified a classic pattern in one-income families in which the husband/father was the principal breadwinner, but the home was the wife/mother's domain. That was, itself, a change from an earlier farm and craft household economy regime in which the patriarch was home most of the time and the wife/mother a perpetual minor, albeit entrusted with certain distinctively "feminine" tasks. Now, at least in some households, my own and my daughter's, for example, both spouses work and both perform household and child-rearing as well as work-relaed tasks. A closer look at these various situations may reveal a variety of other arrangements, joint or separate bank accounts, or one parent dropping off kids at school while the other picks them up, for example. Single parent (with or without active involvement of the other parent) and combined households (step-parents and step-children) introduce additional complications. Variations in the domestic economy seem, however, largely independent of the institutional structures of banks, stock markets, supermarket chains and other economic entities. 

All of this makes me wonder what "disembedded" is supposed to mean.

[Huon Wardle]

Interesting arguments; I enjoyed reading these posts. Polanyi's point was that the version of economics that both liberals and marxists basically agreed on had been invented in the late 18th Century and was in effect a description of conditions at that time. E.g. theories of individual rational choice were a distorted reflection of the process by which hundreds of thousands of people were being forcibly displaced off the land, out of kin-centred economies, to become isolated units of an urban society. The liberals took as an abstract base for their 'economic laws' what was in fact a historically specific event. I think you are right about the sentimental view of kinship based economics in anthropology. That said, the fact that kinship systems can have unjust results (as they often do) doesn't mean that liberal economics is either right or wrong - Polanyi's argument was that laissez faire capitalism was a fantasy and a moral dead end.

   Remember the chronology - Mauss wrote before Polanyi who wrote before Sahlins and none of them thought about gender as such because they all wrote the books you are talking about before the wave of feminist writing that coined the difference between sex and gender. Which doesn't mean that you can't rethink what they were doing in gendered terms.