a handbook of economic anthropology - james g. carrier

A HANDBOOK OF ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY

A Handbook of Economic
Anthropology
Edited by
James G. Carrier
Senior Research Associate in Anthropology, Oxford Brookes
University, UK and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology,
Indiana University, USA
Edward Elgar
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© James G. Carrier 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
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A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 84376 175 0 (cased)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
List of contributors viii
Preface and acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
James G. Carrier
PART I ORIENTATIONS
Introduction 13
1Karl Polanyi 14
Barry L. Isaac
2 Anthropology, political economy and world-system theory 26
J.S. Eades
3 Political economy 41
Don Robotham
4 Decisions and choices: the rationality of economic actors 59
Sutti Ortiz
5 Provisioning 78
Susana Narotzky
6 Community and economy: economy’s base 94
Stephen Gudeman
PART II ELEMENTS
Introduction 109
7 Property 110
Chris Hann
8Labour 125
E. Paul Durrenberger
9 Industrial work 141
Jonathan Parry
10 Money: one anthropologist’s view 160

Keith Hart
11 Finance 176
Bill Maurer
12 Distribution and redistribution 194
Thomas C. Patterson
v
13 Consumption 210
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld
PART III CIRCULATION
Introduction 229
14 Ceremonial exchange 230
Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart
15 The gift and gift economy 246
Yunxiang Yan
16 Barter 262
Patrick Heady
17 The anthropology of markets 275
Kalman Applbaum
18 One-way economic transfers 290
Robert C. Hunt
PART IV INTEGRATIONS
Introduction 305
19 Culture and economy 306
Michael Blim
20 Gender 323
Maila Stivens
21 Economy and religion 339
Simon Coleman
22 Economies of ethnicity 353
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

23 Environment and economy: mutual connections and diverse
perspectives 370
Eric Hirsch
PART V ISSUES
Introduction 389
24 Economic anthropology and ethics 390
Peter Luetchford
25 Households and their markets in the Andes 405
Enrique Mayer
26 Peasants 423
Mark Harris
27 Value: anthropological theories of value 439
David Graeber
vi A handbook of economic anthropology
Contents vii
28 Value: economic valuations and environmental policy 455
Catherine Alexander
29 Anthropology and development: the uneasy relationship 472
David Lewis
PART VI REGIONS
Introduction 489
30 South America 490
Terry Roopnaraine
31 Africa south of the Sahara 500
Mahir aul
32 The Near East 515
Julia Elyachar
33 South Asia 526
John Harriss
34 East Asia 537

J.S. Eades
35 Postsocialist societies 547
Chris Hann
Index 559
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Contributors
Catherine Alexander teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London.
She has worked in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Britain on issues of urban
governance, privatisation, property and the built environment. Her recent
publications include Personal states: making connections between people and
bureaucracy in Turkey (2002) and contributions to the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology (special
issue on cultural property) and the collection edited by C. Humphrey and K.
Verdery, Property in question: appropriation, recognition and value
transformation in the global economy (2004).
Kalman Applbaum teaches anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee. He has conducted research in Japan, Israel and the United States.
Among his publications are The marketing era (2003), Consumption
and market society in Israel (2004, ed. with Y. Carmeli) and Knowledge
and verification (Social Analysis special issue, Volume 47, 2003, ed. with
I. Jordt).
Michael Blim teaches anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. He is the author of Made in Italy: small-scale
industrialization and its consequences (1990) and of the forthcoming Equality
and economy: the global challenge (2004). He is the co-editor of
Anthropology and the global factory (1992, ed. with F. Rothstein).
James G. Carrier has studied exchange processes in Papua New Guinea, the
United States and Great Britain. He has taught at universities in those
countries, and is presently Senior Research Associate at Oxford Brookes

University and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. His
main publications in economic anthropology include Wage, trade and
exchange in Melanesia (1989, with A. Carrier), Gifts and commodities:
exchange and Western capitalism since 1700 (1995), Meanings of the
market (1997, ed.) and Virtualism: a new political economy (1998, ed. with
D. Miller).
Simon Coleman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His
current research areas include the global spread of conservative Protestantism,
pilgrimage and the politics of hospital architecture. His publications include
The globalisation of charismatic Christianity (2000), Reframing pilgrimage
viii
Contributors ix
(2004, ed. with J. Eade) and ‘The charismatic gift’ (Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 2004).
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld teaches anthropology at the University of Iowa.
His past research examines connections among consumption, economic
change and indigenous politics in the Ecuadorian Andes. More recently he has
investigated the ways economic competition can build and test community
identity. Recent publications include The native leisure class (1999) and ‘An
ethnography of neoliberalism: understanding competition in artisan
economies’ (Current Anthropology 2002).
E. Paul Durrenberger has done fieldwork among highland tribal people and
lowland peasants in Northern Thailand, on industrial fishing and farming in
Iceland, medieval Iceland, fishing in Mississippi and Alabama, on industrial
agriculture in the US Middlewest, on alternative agriculture in Pennsylvania
and on labour unions in Chicago and Pennsylvania. His most recent books
include State and community in fisheries management: power, policy, and
practice (2000, with T. King) and Tell us something we don’t know: activism
and anthropology in a union local (2004, with S. Erem). He has recently
edited the Society for Economic Anthropology’s work on labour,

Anthropology of work (2004, ed. with J. Marti).
J.S. Eades is Director of the Media Resource Center at Ritsumeikan Asia
Pacific University, Japan, and Senior Honorary Research Fellow in
Anthropology at the University of Kent. After working for many years on
West Africa, his current research interests are migration, urbanisation, tourism
and higher education in the Asia-Pacific region. Recent books include Tokyo
(1999), Globalization and social change in contemporary Japan (2000, ed.
with T. Gill and H. Befu) and Globalization in Southeast Asia (2003, ed. with
S. Yamashita).
Julia Elyachar is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in
Near Eastern Studies at New York University. She is the author of ‘Mappings
of power: the state, NGOs, and international organizations in the informal
economy of Cairo’ (Comparative Studies in Society and History 2003) and
‘Empowerment money: the World Bank, non-governmental organizations,
and the value of culture in Egypt’ (Public Culture 2002). Her book Markets of
Dispossession is forthcoming (2005) with Duke University Press.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Oslo. He has done fieldwork in Trinidad and Mauritius, and has
published extensively on ethnicity, nationalism, globalisation and general
x A handbook of economic anthropology
anthropology. His most recent books in English are Tyranny of the moment
(2001), A history of anthropology (2001, with F.S. Nielsen), Ethnicity and
nationalism (2nd ed., 2002) and Globalisation: studies in anthropology
(2003).
David Graeber teaches anthropology at Yale University. He has written on
political anthropology in Madagascar, manners, value theory, and is currently
working on a project involving the ethnography of direct action. His recent
work includes Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of
our own dreams (2001).
Stephen Gudeman, Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Minnesota, carries out fieldwork in Latin America. Some of his works,
emphasising the relation between culture and economy, include The
anthropology of economy (2001), Conversations in Colombia (1990, with A.
Rivera), Economics as culture (1986) and The demise of a rural economy
(1978).
Chris Hann is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Halle, Germany. He is a specialist on rural eastern Europe (see, for example,
Tázlár: a village in Hungary, 1980) and has also carried out fieldwork in
North-West China and in Turkey (Turkish region: state, market and social
identities on the east Black Sea coast, 2000, with I. Béller-Hann). Most of his
current projects focus on postsocialist transformation in Eurasia (for example,
The postsocialist agrarian question, 2003, with the ‘Property Relations’
Group).
Mark Harris teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is writing on
colonial and imperial Brazil. His main publication is Life on the Amazon: the
anthropology of a Brazilian peasant village (2000).
John Harriss is Professor of Development Studies and Director of the
Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics, and is
affiliated with the Department of Anthropology. His current research interests
are in institutional theories, in representation and the poor in Indian cities and
in the social and cultural implications of globalisation in India. His recent
publications include Reinventing India: liberalization, Hindu nationalism and
popular democracy (2000, with S. Corbridge) and Depoliticising
development: the World Bank and social capital (2002).
Keith Hart lives in Paris and teaches anthropology part-time at Goldsmiths
College, London. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to
Contributors xi
development studies and has taught in many universities around the world. His
latest book is Money in an unequal world (www.the memorybank.co.uk).
Patrick Heady is a research associate of the Max Planck Institute for Social

Anthropology in Halle, Germany. His research interests focus on the
conditions for cooperative action and on the relationship between the
pragmatic and symbolic aspects of social organisation and behaviour, and he
has conducted research in the Italian Alps and more recently in Russia. His
publications include The hard people: rivalry, sympathy and social structure
in an alpine valley (1999), Conceiving persons: ethnographies of procreation,
fertility and growth (1999, ed. with P. Loizos) and Distinct inheritances:
property, family and community in a changing Europe (2003, ed. with H.
Grandits).
Eric Hirsch teaches anthropology at Brunel University, London. His research
focuses on the historical anthropology of landscape, power and property
relations in Melanesia and on the mutual influences of new technologies and
domestic relations in Greater London. Among his publications are Consuming
technologies: media and information in domestic spaces (1992, ed. with
R. Silverstone), The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and
space (1995, ed. with M. O’Hanlon), and Transactions and creations:
property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia (2004, ed. with M. Strathern).
Robert C. Hunt is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at Brandeis
University, Waltham, Massachusetts. His current research interests include the
analysis of allocation (including markets and money), property, production
and the social structure of canal irrigation. His publications include ‘The role
of bureaucracy in the provisioning of cities: a framework for the analysis of
the Ancient Near East’ (1987 in M. Gibson and R.D. Biggs (eds), The
organization of power: aspects of bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East),
‘Bundles of assets in exchanges: integrating the formal and informal in canal
irrigation’ (1990 in M.E. Smith (ed.), Perspectives on the informal economy),
Property in economic context (1998, ed. with A. Gilman) and ‘Labor
productivity and agricultural development: Boserup revisited’ (2000, Human
Ecology 28, 2003).
Barry L. Isaac is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Cincinnati. He was editor of Research in Economic Anthropology from 1983
to 2000. At present, he is co-authoring a book on the evolving social
stratification and economic systems of Central Mexico from 1500 to 2000.
David Lewis is Reader in Social Policy at the London School of Economics.
xii A handbook of economic anthropology
His research has mainly been focused on Bangladesh and he has specialised in
the study of agrarian change, international development policy and the rise of
non-governmental organisations. His publications include Anthropology,
development and the postmodern challenge (1996, with K. Gardner) and The
management of non-governmental organisations (2001).
Peter Luetchford recently completed his PhD at the University of Sussex,
where he now teaches economic and political anthropology. His research
focuses on meanings and practices surrounding Fair Trade deals among coffee
producers and cooperatives in Costa Rica. He is currently working on
publications that offer an ethnographic perspective on Fair Trade.
Bill Maurer teaches anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His
research focuses on cultural formations of finance. His book, Recharting the
Caribbean: land, law and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997)
explores an offshore financial services economy. Other research on offshore
finance, Islamic banking and alternative currencies appears in the Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Ethnologist, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space and Economy and Society.
Enrique Mayer specialises in Andean agricultural systems and Latin
American peasants. He began his career in Peru, worked for the Organization
of American States in Mexico, and in universities in the United States. He is
now Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. His most recent book is
The articulated peasant: household economies in the Andes (2002).
Susana Narotzky is Professor Titular of Social Anthropology at the
Universitat de Barcelona. Her research has focused on issues of work, gender
and the construction of cultural hegemonies in Europe, and stresses a historical

approach to present-day economic relations, political tensions, struggles and
cultural constructs. She has done fieldwork in Catalonia and Valencia, and is
presently doing research on memory and political agency in Galicia. Among
her publications are Trabajar en familia. Mujeres, hogares y talleres (1988),
New directions in economic anthropology (1997) and La antropología de los
pueblos de España. Historia, cultura y lugar (2002).
Sutti Ortiz is Professor Emerita at Boston University. She is the author of
Harvesting coffee, bargaining wages: rural labor markets in Colombia,
1975–1990 (1999) and two essays on the topic of labour: ‘Bargaining wages
and controlling performance: harvest labor in coffee and citrus’ (2004 in E.P.
Durrenberger and J.E. Marti (eds), Anthropology of work) and ‘Laboring in the
factories and the fields’ (Annual Review of Anthropology 2002). Her earlier
research focused on decision making in peasant agriculture.
Contributors xiii
Jonathan Parry is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of
Economics. He has done field research in various parts of north and central
India on various different topics. His publications include Caste and kinship
in Kangra (1979), Death in Banaras (1994), Death and the regeneration of
life (1982, ed. with M. Bloch), Money and the morality of exchange (1989, ed.
with M. Bloch), The worlds of Indian industrial labour (1999, ed. with
J. Breman and K. Kapadia) and Institutions and inequalities (1999, ed. with
R. Guha).
Thomas C. Patterson is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Anthropology
at the University of California, Riverside. His current research interests are
comparative political economy, archaeology, Marxist social theory and the
history of anthropological thought. His recent publications include: Marx’s
ghost: conversations with archaeologists (2003), A social history of
anthropology in the United States (2001) and Change and development in the
twentieth century (1999).
Don Robotham is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City

University of New York. He was educated at the University of the West Indies
and the University of Chicago where he obtained his PhD. He has done
fieldwork and published on mineworkers in Ghana and the development
problems of the English-speaking Caribbean. He is currently completing a
book entitled Culture, society, economy: bringing the economy back in (2004).
Terry Roopnaraine has research interests in extractive industries, develop-
ment and economic transformation in Amazonia. Major research projects have
included a study of gold and diamond miners and work on palm heart
extraction in Guyana, published as ‘Constrained trade and creative exchange
on the Barima River, Guyana’ (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
2001). He has held a Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge and
has lectured in anthropology at the London School of Economics. Since 2001,
he has worked as a freelance development consultant in Kosovo and
Nicaragua.
Mahir aul teaches in the department of anthropology at the University of
Illinois, Urbana. He has published articles on West African rural domestic
organisation, trade, agriculture, ecological history, land holding and Islam, in
American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, Africa, Journal of Modern African Studies and
Journal des Africanistes. His most recent book is West African challenge to
empire: culture and history in the Volta-Bani anticolonial war (2001, with
P. Royer).
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xiv A handbook of economic anthropology
Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern are partners who conduct research
in Papua New Guinea, Scotland, Ireland and Taiwan. They are both in the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and they have
published many articles and books on wide-ranging topics. Their most recent
co-edited books include Landscape, memory, and history: anthropological

perspectives (2003), and Terror and violence: imagination and the
unimaginable (2005, ed. with N.L. Whitehead). Their recent co-authored
books include Violence: theory and ethnography (2002), Witchcraft, sorcery,
rumors, and gossip (2004) and Empowering the past, confronting the future
(2004). They co-edit the Journal of Ritual Studies and are Series Editors of
Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific (Ashgate
Publishing).
Maila Stivens is Director of Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne
and a fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore in 2004. Her research
has included gender and underdevelopment in rural Malaysia, the new Malay
middle classes and the Asian family. Her main recent publications include
Matriliny and modernity: sexual politics and social change in rural Malaysia
(1996), Gender and power in affluent Asia (1998, ed. with K. Sen) and Human
rights and gender politics: Asia-Pacific perspectives (2000, ed. with A M.
Hilsdon, M. Macintyre and V. Mackie).
Yunxiang Yan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,
Los Angeles. He is the author of The flow of gifts: reciprocity and social
networks in a Chinese village (1996) and Private life under socialism: love,
intimacy, and family change in a Chinese village, 1949–1999 (2003). His
current research interests include urban consumerism and the impact of
cultural globalisation on Chinese society.
Preface and acknowledgements
Those who work in economic anthropology are aware of the importance of the
economy in public thought and debate. In retrospect, Adam Smith might well
have titled his book The health of nations, for in our day, if not in his, it seems
that the health of a country is defined by its wealth, just as the final judgement
of an activity is its bottom line, how it gains or loses money. And overweening
in our day is economics, whether the formal, theoretical economics of scholars
like Gary Becker, the more applied economics of bodies like the Federal
Reserve Board or the Bank of England, or the less rigorous economics of

public thought and debate.
This state of affairs is likely both to exhilarate and to distress
anthropologists who work on economy. It exhilarates because it points out the
importance of what they study, which is, after all, economic life. It is likely to
distress because the economic life that they see in their research often looks so
different from the world construed by those theoretical, applied and popular
economics. And the word ‘world’ is not simple hyperbole, for economics, talk
of economy, touches on and assumes so much about human life: what it means
to be a person, how people think and act, what value is and what is valued,
how people relate to and deal with one another.
Perhaps the exhilaration, or maybe just the prospect of it, outweighs the
distress at the start of the century. The end of history that was foretold with the
fall of the Berlin Wall has not come to pass. The economic policies and
assumptions that came to predominate in the United Kingdom and the United
States, and the Washington Consensus that sought to make those policies and
assumptions global, look much less secure panaceas than they did when they
were presented, bright and shiny, by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The neoliberalism and free trade of the World Trade Organisation, the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund attract significant dissent.
In such times, it is understandable that economic anthropologists would
have some hope that their view of the world, the world implied in their view
of economic life, might stimulate those who think not just about the wealth of
nations, but also about their health. Indeed, in the past few years there has been
a minor boom in works by economic anthropologists that, explicitly or
implicitly, challenge not just specific elements of conventional economic
thought, but also the fundamental ways that it construes economic life and
social life more generally.
Thus it is that this handbook is timely. Saying this does not mean that
dissent strides across each page, parading itself in capital letters. That is not
xv

xvi A handbook of economic anthropology
the purpose of this work, which is one of reference rather than advocacy.
Rather, what the contributors do in their chapters is present the texture of the
sub-discipline’s view of economic life. Moreover, that texture does not
uniformly provide grounds for dissent: careful readers will see much that
accords with conventional economic thought of one sort or another. However,
those careful readers also will see that even the chapters that accord with that
thought exhibit a more profound questioning. This questioning sees that
thought not as a self-evident truth or a valid statement about human nature, but
as a rough model that seems to work in specific areas of specific people’s lives
and, moreover, that seems to do so for social and political reasons. But this is
to be expected of economic anthropologists, who are concerned not with the
nature of economic thought and action in themselves, but with the place of
economy in people’s lives and thoughts.
This handbook is unlike any project I have undertaken. This is true not only
of its scope, but also of its purpose and intended readership. I am used to
works that revolve around a central argument or theme; this one, instead, is
more one of reference and consultation. I am used to works that have a fairly
narrow focus; this one covers a sub-discipline. I am used to works that have
seven or eight contributors at most; this one has over thirty. I am used to works
that are aimed at fellow anthropologists who might be interested in its theme;
this one is aimed at those outside the discipline who might be interested in
what economic anthropologists have to say about one or another aspect of
social or economic life.
All these differences mean that I have had to draw on the advice and
knowledge of many people. Almost all the contributors were helpful in
suggesting people I might approach for other contributions; and all of them
were not only tolerant of my editorial nervousness, but also helped me to see
where I was wrong, and did so gracefully. The contributors have my thanks.
There are, however, people whom I pestered for help more than others, and

who provided help in surprising amounts. These people deserve special
mention, not least because some of them were unable to contribute to this
handbook because of the burden of their existing work. They are John
Comaroff, Fred Damon, Jerry Eades, Richard Fardon, Stephen Gudeman,
Chris Hann, Keith Hart, Danny Miller, Alan Smart and Richard Wilk. I hope
that they are satisfied with the results of their help, and with my modest
thanks.
1
Introduction
James G. Carrier
This is a handbook. So, it is not something that lays out a coherent argument
in an extended form. Rather, it is a set of chapters that cover economic-
anthropological work on specific topics and in specific regions of the world.
At the same time, however, these chapters all revolve around economic
anthropology. It seems appropriate, then, to include in this introduction to the
whole a presentation of what I think economic anthropology is, if only because
this thinking has shaped the organisation of this handbook. Because this work
is oriented to those unfamiliar with economic anthropology, and perhaps
unfamiliar with anthropology, that presentation will cover some material that
may seem common sense to those familiar with the sub-discipline or the
discipline as a whole. Those who are not novices may want to skip the opening
section of this Introduction and go to the section titled ‘Approaching economic
life’. Those wholly familiar with the field may want to skip to the final section
of this Introduction, which explains the orientation of this work.
Economy anthropologically
At the most basic, economic anthropology is the description and analysis of
economic life, using an anthropological perspective. This is self-evident and
not very helpful, so I want to explain briefly what ‘anthropological
perspective’ and ‘economic life’ mean. What I write here is only a sketch of
the terrain revealed more fully in the chapters in this handbook, and as these

chapters show, different sub-parts of economic anthropology address different
aspects of economic life differently, as, of course, do different individual
scholars. This divergence needs to be kept in mind. While much of what I say
here refers rather blandly to ‘economic anthropology’, I write of tendencies
that characterise the whole, which is the result of the interchange among
different individuals and schools (many of which are presented in the chapters
that make up this handbook). While I think it best to consider economic
anthropology as a collaborative, and combative, field, no one scholar need
exhibit all the characteristics that I present.
The anthropological perspective approaches and locates aspects of people’s
individual and collective lives, which is to say their lives and societies, in
terms of how these aspects relate to one another in an interconnected, though
not necessarily bounded or very orderly, whole. The aspects at issue can be
different elements or fields of people’s lives, such as religious belief,
2 A handbook of economic anthropology
consumption, household organisation, productive activities or the like. So, for
example, an anthropologist might want to study how household organisation
among a particular set of people is related to, say, religious belief, and vice
versa (in an ideal world that anthropologist would want to know how all the
elements of people’s lives and societies are related to one another). As this
suggests, anthropologists tend to want to see people’s lives in the round.
A different set of aspects of people’s lives and societies is important as well,
one that cuts across the sort of aspects I pointed to in the preceding paragraph.
Anthropologists tend to want to know about the relationship between what
people think and say on the one hand, and on the other what they do. These
two aspects can have different labels as disciplinary interest and fashion
change, but they can be cast as culture on the one hand and practice on the
other. These can be approached to see the extent to which practices shape
culture (and vice versa) and how they do so. This can be part of an effort to
understand how, say, exchange practices affect people’s understandings of the

kin groups involved in exchange (and vice versa), or how, say, practices in
brokerage firms affect people’s understandings of stock exchanges (and, once
more, vice versa).
However, there is another way that culture and practice can be approached:
the differences between them can be important for helping the researcher to
achieve a deeper understanding of the lives of the people being studied. For
instance, if we talk to those who manage pension funds, we may hear them say
that they evaluate investment firms carefully in terms of their performance
before deciding whether to use them to invest a portion of the pension’s funds.
From this, we may conclude that fund managers are relatively rational
calculators who use objective data to reach their decisions; after all, that is
what they tell us, and it makes sense in terms of what everyone knows about
investing money. However, we may observe that, once hired by fund
managers, an investment firm is almost never fired, even if its returns are poor
(see O’Barr and Conley 1992). This anomalous relationship between what
people say and what they do can offer the researcher an insight into the nature
of fund management that is more rewarding than is available if we attend only
to what managers say or what they do.
What I have said thus far points to two further features of the
anthropological perspective that are worth mentioning. The first of these is
that the perspective is fundamentally empirical and naturalistic. It rests on the
observation (empirical) of people’s lives as they live them (naturalistic). The
discipline, at least in its modern form, emerged in the person of Bronislaw
Malinowski, who taught at the London School of Economics early in the
twentieth century. And he is the origin of modern anthropology because he
carried out, and demonstrated the significance of, extended fieldwork; in his
case, several years living in the midst of a set of people in what is now Papua
Introduction 3
New Guinea, observing and participating in their lives (see Malinowski 1922,
1926, 1935). Extended participant observation, empirical naturalism, has

come to define the field. Thus, anthropologists are uneasy with the sort of
experiments that have been common in social psychology, are found to a
lesser degree in sociology, and that appear from time to time in economics.
They might be intrigued by the finding that people in an experimental setting
are willing to spend surrogate tokens of wealth to reduce the token holdings of
some of their fellow experimental subjects (Zizzo and Oswald 2001). Given
that it is based on experiment, this finding is empirical. However, because the
experimental setting is precisely not naturalistic, anthropologists would be
likely to take it as little more than an interesting idea that could be investigated
through fieldwork.
The second further feature I want to mention is of a different order. In part
because of the importance of extended participant observation and in part
because of the concern to approach people’s lives in the round, anthropologists
generally are reluctant to think in terms of social laws and universals.
Anthropologists have studied a large number of societies in different parts of
the world, and have come up with almost no social laws that apply throughout
specific regions, much less that apply globally. Put differently, anthropology
tends to be an idiographic or particularising discipline, rather than a
nomothetic or generalising one. As this might suggest, anthropologists tend to
be unhappy with things like the assumptions that underlie the idea of utility
maximisation. They are even unhappy with things like Adam Smith’s (1976
[1776]: 17) famous assertion that there is ‘a certain propensity in human
nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’. Certainly
anthropologists would agree that people transact things, and indeed the study
of such transactions is a central aspect of a great deal of anthropological work.
However, they might well point out that this work indicates that people in
different situations in the same society, not to mention in different societies,
transact in different ways and understand what they are doing in different
ways. Consequently, while they might well see the logic and attraction of
generalisations and even universal laws, they would be prone to think that

these are of little use in the practical disciplinary task of seeing how people
live their lives: they would have to be qualified and elaborated so much in
terms of local context that they would be almost unrecognisable as universals.
I have laid out some of the pertinent features of the anthropological
perspective, through which economic anthropologists generally view
economic life. I turn now, and more briefly, to the definition of that life
common in economic anthropology. Economic life is the activities through
which people produce, circulate and consume things, the ways that people and
societies secure their subsistence or provision themselves. It is important to
note, though, that ‘things’ is an expansive term. It includes material objects,
4 A handbook of economic anthropology
but also includes the immaterial: labour, services, knowledge and myth, names
and charms, and so on. In different times and places, different ones of these
will be important resources in social life, and when they are important they
come within the purview of economic anthropologists.
In other words, where some economists have identified economic life in
terms of the sorts of mental calculus that people use and the decisions that they
make (for example, utility maximisation), which stresses the form of thought
of the person being studied, most economic anthropologists would identify it
in terms of the substance of the activity; even those who attend to the mental
calculus are likely to do so in ways that differ from what is found in formal
economics (for example, Gudeman 1986; Gudeman and Rivera 1991). This
substance includes markets in the conventional sense, whether village markets
in the Western Pacific or stock markets in the First World. However, these
markets are only a sub-set of economic life, and in accord with their tendency
to see the interconnections in social life, economic anthropologists tend to
situate things like markets or other forms of circulation, or production or
consumption, in larger social and cultural frames, in order to see how markets,
to continue the example, affect and are affected by other areas of life.
This contextualisation operates at a more general level as well. So, while

anthropologists would recognise the growing importance of the economy in
how people in Western societies understand their world over the past couple
of centuries (Dumont 1977), they would not take the nature of ‘the economy’
as given or its growing importance as self-evident (for example, Carrier 1997;
Carrier and Miller 1998; Dilley 1992; Friedland and Robertson 1990). This
indicates that for many economic anthropologists, it is not just economic life
that merits investigation. So too does the idea of economy, its contents,
contexts and saliences, and the uses to which it is put.
Approaching economic life
In the preceding paragraphs I have sketched conceptual aspects of the ways
that economic anthropologists approach economic life. The main features of
this are the concern to place people’s economic activities, their thoughts and
beliefs about those activities and the social institutions implicated in those
activities, all within the context of the social and cultural world of the people
being studied. This reflects the assumption that economic life cannot be
understood unless it is seen in terms of people’s society and culture more
generally. However, the sub-discipline’s approach to economic life has more
aspects than just the conceptual. Here I want to describe some other aspects,
beginning with what I shall call methodology.
Economic anthropologists approach the relationship between economic life
and the rest of social life in different ways, but these can, without too much
distortion, be reduced to two broad types, the individual and the systemic.
Introduction 5
While these types characterise the sub-discipline as a whole when viewed over
the course of time, their visibility has varied historically and, to a degree, it has
varied among different national anthropological traditions.
The individualist methodology, as the label indicates, approaches the
relationship of economic and social life through the study of the beliefs and
practices of individual members of the group being investigated. This
individualist method is old, for it characterises the work of the man who, I

said, is arguably the founder of modern anthropology, Malinowski. His most
famous book is Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski 1922); its focus
is economic life, exchange in the Trobriand Islands of eastern Melanesia;
through it Malinowski sought to challenge important elements of popular-
economic thought in his day. To say that Malinowski’s methodology in
Argonauts was individualistic is not to say that he described Trobriand
Islanders independent of their society and culture. Rather, what marks his
methodology as individualistic is the way that he portrays the focus of the
book, which is a form of the ceremonial exchange of valuables called the kula.
Malinowski portrays the typical activities that make up the typical stages of
the typical kula exchange, and this typicality is cast as what the typical kula
exchanger does. Trobriand economic life and its relationship to society more
generally, or at least this aspect of it, are construed and presented in terms of
the individual islander writ large. Moreover, as Jonathan Parry (1986: 454)
notes in his discussion of Malinowski, in Argonauts the kula exchange system
is presented in terms of what are ‘essentially dyadic transactions between self-
interested individuals, and as premissed on some kind of balance’ (original
emphasis).
While this individualistic methodology is old in anthropology, the other, the
systemic methodology, characterises one of the key forebears of the discipline,
Émile Durkheim (for example, 1951 [1897], 1965 [1915], 1984 [1893]). One
of Durkheim’s important goals was to establish sociology as an academic
discipline in France, and to do so he argued that society is more than just a
collection of individuals (or even Malinowskian individuals writ large).
Rather, he treated society as a superordinate system or set of inter-related
parts, with properties of its own. In this he was doing what Malinowski was to
do later, challenging important elements of the popular-economic thought of
his day, though he did so in a very different way. His methodology, like his
challenge, is most apparent in The division of labour in society (1984 [1893]).
The title says it: individuals do not have a division of labour, groups or

societies do. In this work, Durkheim classified societies in terms of the degree
of their division of labour, which he related to a range of other societal
attributes, especially their legal systems.
Durkheim’s systemic methodology influenced anthropology directly
through his own works, and also through the writings of his nephew, Marcel
6 A handbook of economic anthropology
Mauss, especially in The gift (1990 [1925]). A more recent, influential
example of this methodology is in Maidens, meal and money, by Claude
Meillassoux (1981). In this book, Meillassoux addresses, among other things,
the question of the nature of village societies in colonial Africa, societies that
he views as systems and as explicable in terms of their relationships with other
systems. He argues that the village and the colonial orders are in a symbiotic
relationship. In other words, it is the interest of colonial governments and
firms in inexpensive labour of a certain sort that leads to a relationship
between urban and village sectors in colonial Africa that brings something that
looks very close to the creation of ‘traditional villages’, with their kinship and
age structures, exchange systems and the like (a similar argument is in Carrier
and Carrier 1989).
I said that the individualist and systemic methodologies vary in their
visibility in economic anthropology. This variation is a consequence of the
fact that economic anthropologists are affected by larger currents within
anthropology and the larger world. Broadly, though, American economic
anthropology has tended towards the individualist pole. British anthropology,
more heavily influenced by Durkheim, tended towards the systemic pole until
the 1980s, at which time the individualist methodology became popular. As
well, there have been differences among different schools of anthropology:
structural functionalism, predominant in Britain for decades but also apparent
in some American anthropology, tends to a systemic approach, as do the
Marxist and political-economy schools within the sub-discipline.
The differences among economic anthropologists that I have presented thus

far are cross-cut by others, two of which I want to mention. These concern the
scope of analysis and the structure of the field.
Like its parent discipline, economic anthropology is based on the empirical
naturalism of sustained fieldwork. Historically, this has been expressed in the
ethnographic monograph, of which Malinowski’s Argonauts is an excellent
example, in which the author presents a sustained and detailed description of
the set of people being studied. However, the attention to local detail
expressed in descriptive ethnography has always been complemented, albeit in
varying degrees, by a more encompassing concern with regional variation.
How do these people resemble or differ from other people, whether near by or
more distant?
Several decades ago, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown laid out the difference between
these two forms of anthropology, and what he said applies as well to economic
anthropology. He drew a distinction between ethnography and what he called
‘comparative sociology’: ‘a theoretical or nomothetic study of which the aim
is to provide acceptable generalisation’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 3). While
detailed ethnography may characterise the discipline in the eye of outsiders,
the comparative element has always been present and influential. However,
Introduction 7
this comparative element often sits uneasily in a discipline the members of
which establish their credentials through their ethnographic knowledge and
publications concerning a place that is different from others.
The structure of the field is a different matter. Members of the sub-
discipline, like anthropologists generally, are influenced by two different
intellectual orientations. One of these springs from the ethnographic context:
not just the particular place where the researcher has done fieldwork, but the
ethnographic region where that place is located: Lowland Latin Americanists
think about things differently from East Asianists. The cause may lie in
differences between different parts of the world; alternatively, it may lie in
differences in the interests and approaches of influential researchers and

publications concerned with different regions. But whatever the cause, there
are clear differences between the topics that are important in the anthropology
of different regions. If this were all there is, of course, the discipline would fall
apart, dissolving into groups focused on different parts of the world. This is
prevented, in part, by the second orientation I want to mention. That is the
intellectual models and arguments that become fashionable generally within
the discipline. When the relationship between kinship and political influence,
or the difference between gifts and commodities, is in the air, specialists in
different regions can and do talk to each other about it, and ethnographic work
on a particular region can cross the regional boundary and be read more
widely.
Orientation of this work
I have devoted some pages to describing features of the discipline and sub-
discipline. I have done so because this handbook is intended to make sense to
those outside of anthropology. As well, the desire to have it make sense has
led to certain judgements about how the work should be organised and about
how chapter authors ought to be encouraged to frame their contributions.
The work as a whole has been divided into a number of parts, each of which
has its own brief introduction. I chose this way of doing things because I
thought that an orderly presentation would help the whole to be more
accessible to readers. This is important if the result is to convey a sense of the
sub-discipline as a whole. Concern for accessibility shaped as well the
guidance given to contributors. They were urged to remember that readers
would not be fellow economic anthropologists, and frequently not
anthropologists at all. So, they were urged to avoid specialist terminology as
much as possible. As well, they were urged to focus their contributions on a
handful of themes pertinent to their specific topics, so that readers would get
a sense of the overall orientation of work on a topic rather than be confronted
with a less comprehensible welter of details. Finally, they were urged to
leaven their thematic presentation with descriptive material, to make the

8 A handbook of economic anthropology
analytical points at issue clearer to those who had not spent years reading and
thinking about the analytical issues involved. The result of all of this is that
chapter authors could not say all that they wanted to about their topics.
However, they have presented the central features, and their presentations can
be read by those other than their fellow specialists.
Throughout this Introduction I have pointed to the diversity within
economic anthropology, and this handbook reflects that diversity. The
overarching analytical orientations considered in Part I of the handbook give
way to more descriptive material in the second and third parts, which present
work on the core elements of economic life (Part II) and on a feature of those
elements that has been of especial interest to anthropologists, circulation (Part
III). Part IV addresses the social contexts and correlates of economic life, such
as religion, gender and the like. Part V deals with specific and important
contemporary issues in economic anthropology, such as the nature of peasants,
the relationship between anthropology and development, and so forth. Finally,
Part VI describes work on different ethnographic regions.
I hope that the result will serve a range of different readers, however
imperfectly. This includes readers who are interested in what economic
anthropology has to say about a specific topic, readers who are interested in
the intellectual foundations of the sub-discipline, those interested in a specific
region, and those interested in the orientation and nature of the sub-discipline
as a whole.
References
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Carrier, J.G. and D. Miller (eds) 1998. Virtualism: a new political economy. Oxford: Berg.
Dilley, R. (ed.) 1992. Contesting markets: analyses of ideology, discourse and practice.

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