Karl Polanyi argued that in every society goods travel along one of three paths, and that you can tell them apart by the shape of the flow rather than by what is being moved. Things go back and forth between two parties who know each other; or they go in to a centre and out again; or they change hands at a price between people who need no relationship at all. Learn the three shapes, then sort twelve real transactions into them.
The three shapes
Three questions that tell them apart
1Do the two sides stand in a lasting social relationship — kin, partners, neighbours — that the transfer is meant to keep alive? Then it is reciprocity.
2Does everything pass through a centre — a big man, a chief, a temple, a treasury — before any of it comes back out? Then it is redistribution.
3Was the rate set by what others would pay, with no relationship required before or after? Then it is market exchange.
Two hands · a hub · a price. Polanyi called these forms of integration, not stages of history. Every society runs all three at once; what differs is which one carries the bulk of the goods, and whether land and labour themselves are priced.
Three shapes of flowtap a shape to open it
Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). Writing about the whole human record rather than one society, Polanyi noted that marketplaces are ancient and almost universal — but a society in which the market principle sets the price of land and of labour itself is very recent. Tap each shape to see how it works and where it dominates.
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HouseholdCampVillagePartnersStrangers
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (1972). Reciprocity is not one thing. Sahlins plotted it against social distance: the closer the tie, the more freely goods flow toward need; the further out, the harder the bargain. Drag the slider outward from ego.