Commentary on Ghosh ‘Relational Inequality and Economic Outcomes’

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Jayathi Ghosh’s (2024) incisive paper opens new horizons for interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion across the social sciences. If we follow the leads that Ghosh outlines in her paper, we can discover fruitful pathways for tackling the world’s ‘wicked problems,’ together.

Ghosh begins by provocatively suggesting that, while economists have long studied distributional effects and their impact on social inequality, they have been less focused on studying the reverse; that is, the manner in which pre-existing modes of social inequality can consolidate and build on unbalanced distributional results. As she succinctly states, ‘I argue that social and relational inequalities have provided the basis for work distribution, labour segmentation and differential remuneration in both formal and informal labour markets.’ As a result, she argues that accumulation may well be based on ‘the extraction and exploitation of social difference’ rather than helping to diminish it.

When explaining that these pre-existing hierarchies and social categories are ‘derived from “primordial identity”,’ her argument will readily find a home among anthropologists. Indeed, two other papers (Baviskar forthcoming; Chong forthcoming) both rely on a similar argument. In anthropological terminology, we would follow Ghosh by referring to such pre-existing categories as ‘embedded’ in the market field. Contrariwise, the dream of free market proponents would be to assume that such age-old institutions can gradually become ‘disembedded’ from the marketplace, and thus have no impact on pricing. An example, famously tracked by Thompson (1971), discusses the ‘just price’ — a pricing mechanism that considers the individual social position of purchasers rather than supply and demand.

But Ghosh, at least as I understand her, is taking an even more exciting jab at the ideologies that have driven free-market reforms over the centuries. Simplifying a bit, we can say that the ideology of free trade has always been grounded in the deductive logic that ‘ipso facto, both parties in a free exchange benefit.’ Otherwise, why else would the trade occur? This understanding comes from Adam Smith, and forms the basis of Hobbes’ immensely influential ideas about the social contract. What if, Ghosh is asking, everyday trades are not based on equality prevailing on a neutral marketplace, but rather an enforced hierarchy where any sense of neutrality is but a fever dream? If true, then the act of exchange itself can be ‘extractive,’ benefiting one party over another, rather than our happier understanding that everyone must benefit.

One of the founding fathers of ‘economic anthropology,’ Marcel Mauss, famously ended his landmark text, The Gift, by insisting that ‘Homo oeconomicus is not behind us; he is in front of us’ (Mauss 2016, 190). In stating this, Mauss was pithily encapsulating his overarching argument that the standard forms of credit and trust that governed most daily exchange prior to the evolution of the modern state were based not on in-group communitarian kindness, but rather on firm senses of obligation within existing hierarchies. Ghosh takes this same logic further when she tells us that ‘India’s economic growth trajectory has actually been dependent upon the relational inequalities that superficially appear to exist in a separate social sphere.’ Ultimately, what this means is that the Kuznets-Clark curve presumed an economic world that would somehow become — again in the language of economic anthropology/sociology — ever more disembedded as the free market marched onward. Ghosh presents a stream of empirical data that insists the opposite — countless social fields not only refuse to become irrelevant to, or ignored by, the market, but which the market in fact operationalizes in order to discover new spaces of accumulation. In short, her inductively-grounded argument challenges an age-old deductive axiom, just as great scientific work always should.

More recently, anthropologists have voiced similar arguments to Ghosh, pointing out that social differences are not gradually eradicated by ‘neutral’ trade, but are instead sustained by it. In particular, a strong strand of research that would be mightily interested in Ghosh’s findings would be the new work on ‘racial capitalism.’ Echoing Ghosh, Jenkins and Leroy (2021, 3) tell us that ‘the violent dispossessions inherent to capital accumulation operate by leveraging, intensifying, and creating racial distinctions.’ Feminist anthropology has made similar claims to those made in the racial capitalism literature. A recent article bluntly stated: ‘A central finding of feminist anthropology has been this positive fact: Class does not exist outside of its generation in gender, race, sexuality, and kinship’ (Bear et al. 2015). The point of all this dovetailing research, from Ghosh and from anthropologists, is that exchange not only leverages difference on behalf of an interested party, but it also allows a purportedly equal exchange to be, in fact, colored by unequal extraction.

Ortner (1972) and Weiner (1992) stand as two particularly influential feminist anthropologist who, like Ghosh, ‘re-read’ the extant literature in light of new theories. Ortner influentially probed why we find women, consistently, having a lower status in labor markets worldwide and in countless societies. Relying on a theory known as ‘structuralism,’ she reveals the ways — again, much like Ghosh — women are consistently seen as ‘closer to nature,’ whereas men get the privileged ability to claim to be transcending nature by creating ‘culture.’ Weiner flipped this on its head, noting that humankind universally seeks to keep certain vital community treasures away from market exchange. These community treasures, according to Weiner, are precious precisely because they are associated with the social reproduction of the community over multiple generations, which is, of course, famously attached to the feminine sphere. Nevertheless, while raising up the value of a given set of women in a society, Weiner’s notion of ‘inalienable possessions,’ like Ghosh, is founded on the idea that everyday exchange is premised on sustaining social hierarchy.

If Weiner and Ortner both ask us to notice instances of ‘universal’ human behavior, Federici’s (2014) influential text, Caliban and the Witch, has provided a step-by-step recounting of the birth of European capitalism that centers its particularity. In other words, Federici refuses to think of this watershed moment as ‘natural’ and/or ‘necessary’ in the unfolding of history. As with Ghosh, she traces brutal modes of oppression that themselves created new modes of extraction. In particular, she notes how the infamous ‘destruction of the Commons’ pushed women out of a viable zone of labor and social reproduction and pushed them into a newly circumscribed domestic sphere. Precisely as Ghosh informs us for India, Federici documents the manner in which these women were then often refused a wage, as their work came to be seen as ‘volunteer’ work, or at least vastly undervalued compared to a standard wage. Likewise, Ghosh (2024) finds ‘a significant decline in women’s recognised employment,’ even though, as she explains, ‘actually more women work in India than men’ once we account for hidden domestic ‘volunteer’ labor.

Given these strong overlaps with the story that Federici tells, it would be fascinating to learn more about the potential role of the ‘commons’ in India’s history. Some of the material in her article tantalizing suggests that the expropriation of the land of ‘scheduled and backwards tribes’ may have followed a similar trajectory to that outlined by Federici. If so, this would suggest that(as with all past examples) the destruction of the Indian commons would have played a role in the creation of an ‘industrial reserve army’ of new workers, suddenly tossed onto the labor market after having lost their access to traditional lands. This would fit — tragically, but convincingly — with Ghosh’s overarching arguments about an uneven playing field based on social differences ‘outside the market,’ upon which increased extraction is enabled.

Having outlined the many harmonies across our broad disciplinary divide and how Ghosh takes them to another level, I would like to close my commentary by asking what additional phenomena a typical anthropologist might search for in India. As Ghosh surmises, anthropology explores the many modes of ‘informal regulation.’ For example, an exceedingly common ‘informal tax’ that emerges when people witness atypical modes of extraction is what I have called ‘the dirty money complex’ (Peebles 2012). In these instances, individuals who are seen to have ‘taken more than their ‘rightful’ share’ are expected to pay the community back in (sometimes terrifying) ways — often involving ritual specialists and/or brute violence and seizure. Importantly, the dirty money complex is an ethical phenomenon, not a ‘scientific’ one; it definitively does not reflect ‘reality’ and can often be based upon quite dangerous local prejudices. For example, while there are countless examples of the dirty money complex documented in the ethnographic record, a good example for our purposes here would be Federici’s aforementioned witch hunts. Across widely varying cultural and historical instances, we find that witchcraft accusations are all too frequently leveled against women who are suspected of having used magical means to become ‘unjustly’ rich (e.g., Munn 1986). Given the massive extent of expropriations and extractions that Ghosh traces in her article, we might expect to find some variations of the dirty money complex. If we did, how would economists approach this very standard informal regulatory technique?

Another highly common phenomenon found during transitions to new modes of accumulation is the so-called ‘cargo cult.’ In fact, one of the most famous was documented in India itself (see Worsley 1968). These cults center around charismatic leaders who promise magical access to the many riches that their impoverished followers see being accumulated in their midst. Having failed to secure these riches through market trade, followers of cargo cults hope to acquire them via magic (and sometimes, violence). In this regard, Ghosh mentions a Maoist group, fighting against new modes of extraction in the zone where it operates; could this political movement be read against and within the cargo cult literature? From one perspective, cargo cults are a magical method of seeking what we today would call ‘reparations,’ which is another vitally important topic that would greatly benefit increased interdisciplinary work. Given this, would tracking the emergence of cargo cults be interesting for economists; and if so, what would be the methodological challenges of doing so?

Whether these examples prove intriguing to economists or not, they still allow us to further consider the pathway laid down by Ghosh in this provocative article. First, if anthropology often focuses on things that seem a bit ‘hidden,’ how might we join forces with economists to measure and elucidate them more effectively? Second, this methodological challenge is matched by a moral one. If, as Ghosh convincingly documents, ‘tradition’ plays a profound role in the unequal distribution of economic resources, how can we seek more fair outcomes without challenging the viability of some traditions, while enshrining others that we might actually hope to see challenged? Regardless of any potential future success in answering these questions, I can think of no better place to start the discussion than with Ghosh’s incursion into this generative interdisciplinary space.

Acknowledgements

I would like to use this opportunity to acknowledge and thank the reviewers who reviewed this article and aided in its publication. I would also like to thank the Wenner Gren Foundation for its generous hosting of our symposium, The Price of Wealth (August 2022), which cultivated some of the articles and comments published here. Aside from all of the participants, special thanks are due to Donna Auston, Kathryn Derfler, Teresa Ghilarducci, Richard McGahey, Laurie Obbink, and Danilyn Rutherford, all of whom were instrumental in bringing the symposium to fruition.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).