Week 7 — Who Holds Authority? Reading the Market's Governance — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 7 of the term — work four short problems from the market's governance and coded tally, read them as an anthropologist, and explain power and authority to someone who has them mixed up.

This week you met power, authority, and legitimacy, Service's band, tribe, chiefdom, and state as a model, Fried's egalitarian, rank, and stratified societies, social control and law, three routes of dispute resolution, and the market's governance. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them mixed up. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 6's redistribution and Week 2's idea of a norm.

The task

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls, constructed for this course, not a real place. The market manager assigns stall locations, collects a weekly stall fee, and rings the opening bell at 8:00 a.m., and the vendors' association votes on the market's rules. From one visit (illustrative):

• 2 of the 10 field-note entries show the manager acting: entry 3, the bell at 8:00 a.m., and entry 9, loading the Pantry crate at 9:20 a.m.;
• 4 of the 50 coded exchanges were redistribution, unsold goods pooled in the Pantry crate and passed on by the manager, and 33 of the 50, or 66 percent, were market exchange;
• in the illustrative interview, a vendor says, "You sell before the bell, people talk."

A friend sees your notes and says, "The manager is the boss, so power and authority are the same thing, and the only rules that matter are the ones someone can punish you for." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative farmers' market, 2 of the 10 field-note entries from one visit show the market manager acting. What percent of the field-note entries show the manager acting?
2. In the market's coded tally of 50 exchanges, 4 were redistribution through the Pantry crate. What percent of the coded exchanges was redistribution?
3. In the market's coded tally, market exchange was 66 percent of the coded exchanges and redistribution was 8 percent. What is the gap between them, in percentage points?
4. Suppose, as an illustrative case, the market manager reassigns 6 of the market's 24 stall locations before the next visit. What percent of the stalls would get new locations?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: name the manager's stall assignments as power and explain why the vendors' acceptance makes that power authority, and name the vendors' association vote on the rules as the source of the legitimacy.
• Problem 2: define redistribution in the course's words and explain why it runs through someone with the authority to collect and give out, and explain why the market is still not a chiefdom, since Service's types describe whole societies.
• Problem 3: explain why a difference between two percentages is stated in percentage points rather than percent, and name one means of informal social control at the market, such as the gossip the interviewed vendor describes, with the rule it keeps.
• Problem 4: say what would make the vendors accept the reassignment as rightful, naming legitimacy, and describe how a dispute over it could be settled by negotiation, mediation, or adjudication, naming who decides in the route you pick.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks power and authority are the same and that only punishable rules matter. Write a 3–5 sentence message that tells power from authority, names the vendors' association vote as the source of the manager's legitimacy, names gossip as social control that works alongside law, and names one limit, such as that the notes come from one illustrative visit and one interview. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a teammate who says the captain of an illustrative intramural volleyball team "has power, which is the same as authority." Model answer: "The team voted for the captain, so when the captain sets the serving order we go along because we agreed to it; anthropologists call that authority, power that people accept as rightful. If a player grabbed the ball and refused to play until we used his serving order, he would also be making us act, but that is power without authority. One caveat: if the captain started playing favorites, the team's acceptance, its legitimacy, could wear away."

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, telling power from authority, naming the vendors' association vote as the source of the manager's legitimacy, and naming gossip as social control alongside law, 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 who does what at the market 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 only as the course describes it, 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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