Week 6 — Gifts, Swaps, and Sales: Reading the Market's Tally — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 6 of the term — work four short problems from the market's coded tally and the exchange set, read them as an anthropologist, and explain gifts to someone who has them wrong.

This week you met reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange as a model, the three kinds of reciprocity, the illustrative exchange set, the kula, the three obligations of the gift, the potlatch and Canada's potlatch ban, two kinds of money, and the market's coded tally. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's two-column field notes and Week 5's question of how people get their food.

The task

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market constructed for this course, not a real place. On one two-hour visit, an observer coded 50 exchanges by type, and set 3 borderline exchanges aside to discuss rather than count. The coded tally (illustrative) was:

• market exchange (purchases at posted prices): 33;
• generalized reciprocity (coffee shared among neighboring vendors; change and bags lent between stalls): 8;
• balanced reciprocity (vendor-to-vendor swaps of matched value): 5;
• redistribution (unsold goods pooled in the "Pantry" crate and passed on by the manager): 4;
• negative reciprocity: 0.

The illustrative exchange set (Dataset C) is twelve everyday transactions constructed for this course, keyed as 3 generalized reciprocity, 3 balanced reciprocity, 2 negative reciprocity, 2 redistribution, and 2 market exchange.

A friend sees your notes and says, "A gift is free; nobody owes anything for it. And that potlatch thing was a party where people threw their stuff away." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers in the tally.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative farmers' market, 50 exchanges were coded on one two-hour visit, and 33 of them were market exchange. What percent of the coded exchanges was market exchange?
2. In the market's coded tally, market exchange was 66 percent of the coded exchanges and generalized reciprocity was 16 percent. What is the gap between them, in percentage points?
3. In the market's coded tally of 50 exchanges, 8 were generalized reciprocity and 5 were balanced reciprocity, and no negative reciprocity was coded. What percent of the coded exchanges was reciprocity of any kind?
4. In the illustrative exchange set of 12 transactions, 3 are keyed as generalized reciprocity, 3 as balanced reciprocity, and 2 as negative reciprocity. How many of the 12 transactions are keyed as some kind of reciprocity?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: explain that market exchange is one form of exchange among three in the model, not the natural or universal way people trade, and name one exchange from the tally that was not market exchange, with its form.
• Problem 2: explain why a difference between two percentages is stated in percentage points rather than percent, and name one limit of the tally, such as that it is illustrative, comes from one two-hour visit, and set borderline cases aside.
• Problem 3: define generalized reciprocity and balanced reciprocity in the course's words, and link each to how closely vendors who stand side by side every week keep count.
• Problem 4: read one documented case, the kula of the 1910s or the potlatch, with the three obligations of the gift, to give, to receive, and to give back. Write the kula in the past tense with its decade, and use the people's own name, Kwakwaka'wakw, for the potlatch.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks a gift is free and the potlatch was waste. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains the three obligations of the gift, reads the potlatch as a feast at which hosts gave away goods to validate names, rank, and rights before invited witnesses, states Canada's potlatch ban as a documented law that was dropped in 1951, and names one limit, such as that a tip or a gift registry can carry two meanings at once. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who says the office coffee fund, where everyone chips in and a volunteer buys coffee for the whole team, is "the same as buying coffee at a café." Model answer: "When everyone pays into one fund and one person buys coffee for the whole office, the goods are collected at a center and given out again; anthropologists call that redistribution. Buying at a café is a one-time purchase at a set price, with no tie afterward. One fair caveat: if the volunteer keeps careful track of who paid, the fund also starts to look like balanced reciprocity."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the figures in the problems without guessing which figures or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the friend, explaining the three obligations of the gift, the potlatch as validating names, rank, and rights, and Canada's potlatch ban as a documented law dropped in 1951, with one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the figures you used, so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the tally with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the market and the exchange set only as the course describes them, name people only by role, and do not borrow a custom or a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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