TL:DR
I’ve created a business running on forgotten hybrid economics. Four models simultaneously: exchange/barter, pay-it-forward, crowd-patronage, and direct sale – all in one micro pottery practice. Each economic model’s origins have been researched through a century of economic anthropology. I draw upon research by Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, David Graeber, Igor Kopytoff, Jon Swords, and Bonifacio, Hair, and Wohn to create a sustainable business that allows me to work at a human pace, and put a little good back into the world. Each economic model still exists in most people’s daily lives today. I hold space for diverse economic systems and keep them alive to inspire and offer altertive business models.
Business done differently
I’m doing business differently by embracing forgotten hybrid economics. Four models blended for a fair, life-centred business that connects people and encourages a sustainable relationship with things. Exchange/barter, pay-it-forward, crowd-patronage, and direct sales. Starting up Kiskapu Pottery, I set out to create a space that worked for my life. And make handmade pottery available to people who value things made to last. Irrespective of financial means. While making a living, to you know… eat. A tall order.
So I turned to economic anthropology for ideas, as one does.
Economic anthropologists have spent a century mapping how people exchange goods and services via gift, obligation, negotiation, crowd-patronage, and market trade. All tend to exist simultaneously within a given society, serving different essential functions, at varying levels. The ideal of a marketplace, of commodity, as the main economic system is a fairly recent idea in human history. (One proving to be disastrous for most of us, I digress.)
Marcel Mauss’s work on gift exchange across the Pacific and North America in 1925 helped me better understand the nature of relationships as the foundation for exchange. Sahlins, building on Mauss’ work in 1972, illuminated how the form an exchange takes tracks social distance. David Graeber’s book The History of Debt talked me through the origins and main uses of credit, debt, and a market economy. Kopytoff, in 1986, traced how objects move between commodity and singular thing, classifying commodification and market capitalism as a moral crisis. And, more recently, generalized reciprocity through research on crowd-patronage by Bonifacio, Hair, and Wohn sparked the questions, How can I build a business that facilitates many types of relationships at the same time? And, How can I build flexibility, aka resilience, into a micro business working at human pace?
Exchange and Barter
The first mode of forgotten hybrid econmics is a straight exchange or barter. I trade pottery for a skill, service, handmade or homegrown goods. We set the terms ourselves: update my website, take home a set of mugs…. Deliver a box of vegetables, take a pair of bowls… And such. Barter as direct and immediate exchange is among strangers. This direct, 1:1 mode works until we know each other better. Once a relationship develops, the nature of the barter changes. We might exchange at the time, or later, when it’s possible. You read that right. Later, when it’s possible for you. Because, barter isn’t historically quite what we’ve been led to believe it is.
Economics textbooks often describe an early stage of barter before money as immediate, one-for-one trade with no memory past the trade itself. David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), traces this idea to Adam Smith and finds no ethnographic record for it. Direct swaps in the moment show up primarily between strangers, or once money already exists and runs (briefly) short.
Exchange between people who already know each other happens differently. Sahlins, in Stone Age Economics (1972), calls this balanced reciprocity – a mid-zone governed by fairness, negotiated directly, where the relationship carries forward past the trade. The reciprocal arrangement slackens for flexibility in time and space; the exchange is no longer one for one in the moment. An unspoken mental system of debits and credits forms for people to offer what they can, when they can. And ask for help when needed.
Which is what Graeber describes as human economies – economic systems with the purpose of shaping relationships, not distributing goods and services, not maximizing profit. The idea is to build a circle of mutual aid and trust. I’d say a life-centred economy to account for life in general; the purpose remains the same.
A mug-for-marketing help type of trade is a start. Ideally, it’s an exchange that creates an ongoing relationship, broadening into a web of relationships.
Pay-it-forward
The second mode is pay-it-forward. Someone pays forward the price of a mug, a set of bowls, a teapot… I set one aside for someone who’d love something handmade and can’t stretch to the price right now.
Sahlins names this generalized reciprocity: giving with no ledger, no return date, trusting the balance over time within a group. Graeber calls it baseline communism, the foundation of all human sociability. Hold on, it’s not THAT communism. It simply means that people help each other simply because they are human and need it.
Mauss, in The Gift (1925), traced the obligation’s structure: give, receive, reciprocate. In Mauss’s cycle, the return goes back to the giver. Pay-it-forward shifts that. The obligation moves sideways, from the person who paid forward to a stranger who receives the piece. I get nothing back. The obligation keeps travelling, to whoever needs it next.
A generosity that starts with one customer, moves through me, lands with a stranger who needed it.
Crowd-patronage
The third mode is crowd-patronage. Patrons commit to ongoing support. A standing YES! to the practice itself, renewed month to month. The patron page on kiskapu.xyz is built around this idea: ongoing support for the ethos, output, and sustainability of my practice.
Jon Swords, in Crowd-patronage—Intermediaries, Geographies and Relationships in Patronage Networks (2017), names crowd-patronage as distinct from crowdfunding’s all-or-nothing campaigns. Support arrives on a regular, ongoing basis. Shifting the relationship between creator and patron. Control over what gets made and how shifts toward the artist and away from the patron, a reversal of older patronage models where the patron called the shots. Swords also traces the geography of these networks: patrons and artists connect across real distance, well past whatever gallery or shop would once have stood between them.
Bonifacio, Hair, and Wohn, in Beyond Fans (2023), interviewed twenty-one Patreon creators and found relationships ranging from purely transactional to close and familial. Patrons who feel seen as a person, not a subscriber number, offer more than money. Staying in touch, showing up for patrons, pays back in both financial and emotional support for creators. Patrons come to see themselves as part of the process, backing the work itself. While the creator retains the independence of practice.
Sahlins ties balanced and generalized reciprocity to people who already know each other: family, neighbours, a shared place. Crowd-patronage stretches that same closeness across distance. A patron who’s followed the work for months, through test glazes, fired losses, and the pieces that made it, can end up closer to the practice than someone who’s bought a single piece in person and never come back. The relationship doesn’t need geography to exist and sustain. It needs attention, paid regularly, in both directions.
A patron who backs my practice: exploring fairer ways of doing business, future apprentices, skill growth and learning as a potter, as well as creating functional pottery.
Made to Last
The fourth mode is simple market exchange, with a twist. I make and sell pottery. In micro-batches, thirty or forty pieces at a time. Each piece made for daily use, gathering meaning the longer someone keeps it. The way a favourite mug becomes an essential part of our days, marking place and time, through years of ordinary mornings. This process can’t be replicated, duplicated or manufactured. It happens gradually, individually, because the mug means something. So, if a beloved piece of pottery breaks, I recommend a specialist to repair it. And will develop that skill in my own business over time. Buy it once, for life. #BIFL
Four Models, One Hybrid Practice
Building a business around just one economic model is neither fair nor sustainable. Especially for a micro business scaled to the needs and capacity of a one-parent family. A business that works with people, and lives the values.
By intentionally running a hybrid business, I support multiple relationship types. This creates survival opportunities for my practice and its values, while reconnecting people to forgotten ways in economic life. Barter, pay-it-forward, crowd-patronage, and direct sale let me hold space for four types of economic relationships in one practice: the neighbour with a skill to trade, the customer helping a stranger, the patron backing the practice over time, the customer buying a bowl to use every day.
Conclusion
This short adventure into economic anthropology inspired me to create the multi-dimensional business I am proud to call Kiskapu Pottery. A micro pottery that produces everyday art to live with.
References
Bonifacio, R., Hair, L., & Wohn, D. Y. (2023). Beyond fans: The relational labor and communication practices of creators on Patreon. New Media & Society, 25(10), 2684–2703.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
Graeber, D. (2017). Foreword. In M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Routledge Classics ed.). Routledge.
Kopytoff, I. (1986). The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (pp. 64–91). Cambridge University Press.
Mauss, M. (1925/1990). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Routledge.
Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. Aldine-Atherton.
Swords, J., 2017. Crowd-patronage—intermediaries, geographies and relationships in the arts. Cultural Trends, 26(3), pp.211–221.