Richard Thurnwald · 1932
This is a single-author scholarly monograph, the third volume of Thurnwald’s comparative ethno-sociological project. Its scope is “Wirtschaft” as a social institution: production, distribution, exchange, property, market order, pastoral tenure, valuables, and the norms that make these arrangements durable. The main thesis is that economy is not reducible to tools, barter, utility, or linear technical progress. It emerges when human capacities are socially organized.
Was wir Wirtschaft nennen, kommt erst durch die Organisierung der Menschen eines bestimmten technischen Könnens zustande.
English translation: What we call economy comes about only through the organization of people possessing a certain technical capability.
This proposition anchors the volume. Technical skill alone does not constitute an economy; it becomes economic only through coordinated persons, recognized rights, duties, expectations, sanctions, and forms of authority. Thurnwald’s core conceptual move is therefore to shift analysis from technique to social organization. Work, exchange, and provisioning are embedded in household, rank, gender, kinship, political command, prestige, and reciprocal obligation.
The book also rejects explanations that make growing division of labour the chief engine of economic development. Thurnwald’s objection is not that specialization is unimportant, but that it cannot explain itself: one must ask who divides tasks, under what authority, by what incentives, and within which moral order.
Es ist also unrichtig, wie Durkheim und, ihm folgend, Bücher meinten, daß die „Entwicklung“ der Wirtschaft auf wachsende Arbeitsteilung zurückzuführen sei.
English translation: It is therefore incorrect, as Durkheim, and following him Bücher, held, that the "development" of the economy is to be traced back to a growing division of labor.
Against such developmental reduction, the work treats labour division as one outcome of wider social formation. Economic arrangements depend on trust, coercion, custom, rank, and psychological orientation; they are not mechanical effects of increasing complexity.
Denn das Wirtschaften ist nichts Mechanisches, sondern ein psychisch und sozial bedingter Vorgang.
English translation: For economic activity is nothing mechanical, but rather a psychically and socially conditioned process.
This sentence gives the volume its strongest theoretical profile. “Wirtschaften” is a process shaped by mental dispositions and institutional forms. People produce, lend, give, save, consume, and trade under conditions of honour, fear, dependence, obligation, and recognition. Thurnwald thus anticipates later concerns of economic anthropology: value and property are not merely material facts, but social relations stabilized through practice.
The ethnographic examples serve this argument. Markets, for instance, are not treated as naturally self-regulating arenas of impersonal exchange. They require supervision, credibility, punishment, and accepted authority.
— Die Frauen des Häuptlings und der Bezirksvorsteher überwachen die Marktehrlichkeit und sorgen für eine rasche Sühne aller Marktvergehen.
English translation: — The wives of the chief and of the district heads supervise honest dealing at the market and see to the swift punishment of all market offenses.
The market’s functioning here depends on political and gendered guardianship. “Honesty” is an institutional achievement, not a spontaneous by-product of exchange. Similarly, pastoral cattle relations show that ownership is layered rather than absolute: usufruct, dependence, patronage, and emergency claims coexist.
Die Kühe, mit denen ein solcher verarmter Angehöriger des Hirtenstammes belehnt wurde, betrachtete dieser auch als sein Eigen, und der Lehensherr hatte kein Recht auf deren Milch; nur in Fällen der Not mochte der Herr etwas von seinem Viehpächter erbitten.
English translation: The cattle with which such an impoverished member of the herding tribe was enfeoffed were regarded by him as his own, and the feudal lord had no right to their milk; only in cases of need might the lord request something from his cattle-tenant.
The passage reveals Thurnwald’s sensitivity to divided rights. The borrower treats the cattle as his own, the superior holder lacks ordinary claim to milk, and only exceptional need activates a request. Property appears as a bundle of socially distributed powers.
The volume’s structure moves between definition, critique, and comparative case analysis. It begins from the claim that economy is organized technical capacity, disputes single-factor theories of development, and then follows diverse arrangements—market regulation, pastoral tenure, exchange goods, valuables, and systems of entitlement—to show how material life is formed by social order. Its relevance lies in that anti-reductionist move: economy is neither an autonomous mechanism nor a merely technical system, but a historically variable complex of organized relations through which work, goods, rights, and obligations become meaningful.
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