EXCHANGE 331
Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life, London.
—— (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in
Relation to Sex, London.
Fodor, J. (1998) In Critical Condition, Cambridge, MA.
Gould, J.M. and Marler, P. (1987) ‘Learning by
instinct’, Scientific American 256: 62–73.
Gould, S.J. (1991) ‘Exaptation: A crucial tool for an
evolutionary psychology’, Journal of Social lssues 47:
43–65.
Lorenz, K. (1965) Evolution and Modification of
Behavior, Chicago.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, London.
Plotkin, H. (2002) The Imagined World Made Real:
Towards a Natural Science of Culture, London.
Spencer, H. (1855) Principles of Psychology, 2 vols,
London.
Tooby, J and Cosmides, L. (1990) ‘The past explains
the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure
of ancestral environments’, Ethology and Sociobiol-
ogy 11: 375–424.
Further reading
Broughton, J.M. and Freeman-Moir, J.M. (1982) The
Cognitive-Developmental Psychology of James Mark
Baldwin, Northwood, NJ.
Duchaine, B., Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (2001)
‘Evolutionary psychology and the brain’, Current
Opinion in Neurobiology 11: 225–30.
Richards, R.J. (1987) Darwin and the Emergence of
Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chi-
cago.
SEE ALSO: genetics and behaviour; human
evolution; population genetics
EXCHANGE
Exchange is interesting for five reasons: it is the
means by which useful things pass from one
person to another; it is one of the ways in which
people create and maintain social organization; it
is always regulated by religion, law, convention
and etiquette; it is always meaningful because it
carries a symbolic load, and is often a metaphor
for other kinds of activities; finally, in many
societies people speculate about its origins, about
the motives for and the morality of it, about its
consequences and what its essence might be. It is
rare to find a scholar who gives equal attention
to each of these aspects of the topic.
Exchange is universal: we know of no peoples
who admire individuals who do not exchange, or
who expect a category of people to refrain from
it. Although people in industrial and market-
organized countries sometimes imagine the at-
tractions of self-sufficiency, and try to achieve it,
it would be a new creation if they succeeded. It is
true that in every social group some individuals
are more engaged in exchange than others, but it
is probably a mistake to imagine that some
peoples exchange more than other peoples.
People distinguish among kinds of exchange:
in English-speaking countries they talk of altru-
ism, barter, charity, commerce, gifts, taxation
and theft, among others. These distinctions are
based on expectations of return: whether there
should be one, whether it should be immediate or
after a period of time, whether it should be
equivalent or greater or less. This too is univer-
sal, although the kinds available to different
peoples are variable. People also categorize kinds
of goods as being more suited to one kind of
exchange than another: some peoples have goods
which are exchanged only as gifts (greetings
cards in many countries, vaygua in the Tro-
briands, and so on). They also prohibit the
exchange of certain kinds of goods: in Christian
thought, for instance, the purchase of spiritual
office is distinguished as a named sin (simony).
People also often categorize kinds of exchange as
particularly suited to kinds of relationships:
friends and family should give gifts in Britain,
judges and litigants should not. Where a kind of
exchange is reserved to a kind of relationship,
people may try to establish the relation by
making the exchange. Marcel Mauss (1954
[1925]) noted that a refusal to accept a gift, or
to return one, caused great offence, and could be
equivalent to a declaration of war.
Social scientists, and in particular anthropolo-
gists, have tried to identify systems of exchange.
They have done this in various ways. The pioneer
was Mauss, who explored gift-giving as a type of
exchange based on three obligations: to give, to
receive and to return; these are still taken to be
the key principles. Mauss’s archetypal gift was
one so heavily laden with symbolic meaning and
consequence that it involved the ‘total social
personality’ of the exchangers (who might be
either individuals or groups of people), and
success or failure in making exchanges affected
their social standing. The potlatch (in which
groups try to overwhelm competitors with gifts)
was thus interested, but not directly profit-
motivated. This is the first attempt to identify a
non-market system of exchange by the principles
on which the exchanges are made. Malinowski’s
(1922) exploration of kula exchanges between a
number of Melanesian islands showed that cere-
monial goods circulated by reciprocal gift-giving
332 EXCHANGE RATE
in the kula ring affording the opportunity for
trade and establishing peace between neighbour-
ing islands as well as maintaining hierarchy on
particular islands: some people were more suc-
cessful in the kula than others. Studies suggest
that the ring was less systematic than Mal-
inowski thought (Leach and Leach 1983). In
later elaborations, deriving also in part from the
work of Karl Polanyi (1944), the principle of
reciprocity has been taken to identify a kind of
economy: some economies are based principally
on reciprocity, others on markets, others on the
redistributive activities of chiefs and govern-
ments. Sahlins (1972) is noted for his unique
attempt to show that different principles were
consequential, and were not just amusettes folk-
loriques: economies performed differently as a
result. This was especially important because
economists and others attempted to show that
forms of rational profit-seeking underlay all
exchange, and that the differences shown in the
ethnographic record were either imperfections
(this a term of art of economists) or a manifesta-
tion of false consciousness.
The attempt by Lévi-Strauss (1969 [1949]) and
his followers to link formal structures of kinship
and marriage to systems of exchange of women
has proved most fruitful in kinship studies.
The principle of rational exchange was the
basis of exchange theory, derived from the work
of von Mises, and elaborated in sociology by
Homans (1961) and Blau (1964), and in anthro-
pology by Barth (1966) and Bailey (1969). The
attractiveness of such theories derived in part
from the shock of describing all social activity as
profit-motivated. It also probably derived from
the apparent ease with which market principles
diffused so quickly in the 1950s and 1960s. This
process was widely recorded, perhaps most suc-
cessfully in the analysis by Bohannan and Bo-
hannan (1968) of the decline of Tiv categories of
exchange, when confronted with national mar-
kets: the apparent success of ‘the modern econ-
omy’ seemed to justify the adoption of a modern
economics to explain everything. Anthropologists
and some economists are now less sure. It is
possible that some valuable lines for future
research have already been established: these
include Appadurai’s (1986) investigations of the
ways that things change meaning as they change
hands, and Strathern’s (1988) work on symbo-
lism; Gregory’s (1982) exploration of the distinc-
tion between gift and commodity, and work by
economists and others on the mixed motives with
which people engage in exchange, even in so-
called market economies.
J. DAVIS
ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD
References
Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things,
Cambridge, UK.
Bailey, F.G. (1969) Stratagems and Spoils: A Social
Anthroplogy of Politics, Oxford.
Barth, F. (1966) Models of Social Organisation, Lon-
don.
Blau, P.M. (1964) Exchange and Power in Social Life,
New York.
Bohannan, P. and Bohannan, L. (1968) Tiv Economy,
Evanston, IL.
Gregory, C.A. (1982) Gifts and Commodities, London.
Homans, G.C. (1961) Social Behaviour: Its Elementary
Forms, London.
Leach, J.W. and Leach, E.R. (eds) (1983) The Kula:
New Perspectives on Massim Exchange, Cambridge,
UK.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969 [1949]) The Elementary Struc-
tures of Kinship, London.
Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western
Pacific, London.
Mauss, M. (1954 [1925]) The Gift, London.
Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation, New
York.
Sahlins, M.D. (1972) Stone Age Economics, Chicago.
Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley,
CA.
Further reading
Davis, J. (1992) Exchange, Milton Keynes.
Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange,
Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific,
Cambridge, MA.
SEE ALSO: economic anthropology
EXCHANGE RATE
The nominal bilateral exchange rate is the price
of one currency in terms of another currency, as
established by the foreign exchange market. Each
currency is associated with at least one country
and it is generally the case that the domestic
currency is used for domestic transactions. Ex-
change rates, by defining the relative price of
currencies, facilitate the role of money as a
medium of exchange in international trade and
financial transactions.
The exchange rate is expressed as the domestic
price of the foreign currency, which is the
number of units of domestic currency that are