Ebook: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES OF SOLIDARITY AND RECIPROCITY

The concept of solidarity is ambiguous: it includes mechanisms of taxes and redistribution, charity, altruistic contributions and political support, social policies, concessions, grants, funds, food, clothes, social entrepreneurship, sponsorship, NGOS, etc. Communitarianism, equality and progress are their ideological pillars. Anthropology initially used the expertise of European sociology, political science, law and economics. Anthropologists have reported about internal balance, "social security" and cooperation in a number of non-European and preindustrial communities, which have been by default referred in the west as archaic.
Anthropology never definitively adopted the concept of solidarity, at least not in the same manner as sociology and economics. Economic anthropology proposed the concept of reciprocity – a continuum of moral obligations along the processes of exchange. Reciprocity has ever since been loaded with meanings and usages. Reciprocity has become a general concept, specific moral obligations of primitive, preindustrial societies, which must be recognised and used in our time. For Marcel Mauss, reciprocity was a “third-way” political project as alternative to “two extremes”: individualist liberalism and collectivist communism.
A hundred years after Malinowski and Mauss, and after several decades of neoliberalism, the anthropological third-way appeared in the form of human economy, related to alter-globalisation movement from Puerto Alegre. In France, the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (M.A.U.S.S.) promotes a similar approach. Prior to that moral economy dealt with questions of social scope and ethics.
From a point of view of economic anthropology, it is worth studying reciprocity and solidarity as forces of integration and group building. The volume brings together articles on different kinds of group building and bonding. The authors use various concepts to describe specific scopes of (economic) activities: human economy, moral economy, solidarity economy, even leisure commodity, or higher cause.
Volume also seeks to contribute to recent discussions on socio-economic crisis by employing anthropological theory and ethnographic experience.