Samenvatting Economic Anthropology (door Bas)
Economic Anthropology
Chapter 1
Purpose economic anthropology 19th century: to test the claim that a world economic order
must be found on the principles that underpinned a Western industrial society striving for
universality → largely for insiders and experts, not for general public
Three stages in the development of economic anthropology:
1. 1870s – 1940s: idea of evolutionary process → anthropologists were interested in
whether the economic behavior of savages was underpinned by the same notions of
efficiency and rationality that were taken to motivate economic action in the West
2. 1950s – 1960s: Formalists (the concepts and tools of mainstream economics were
adequate to the studying of tribesmen and peasants) ↔ Substantivists (institutional
approaches were more appropriate; economic life in societies other than ours
(impersonal markets) was always embedded in other institutions (like household and
religion))
3. 1970s - …: idea of neoliberal globalization → New Institutional Economics; new
inquiries addressed the full range of human economic organizations, studies from
different perspectives
→ now time for a 4th period: going further and addressing the world economy as a whole →
economic anthropology would then finally emerge as a discipline in its own right
Economy → oikonomia (Greek: management of household)
→ studying of local modes of economy important for the discipline
Serious limitations to the book:
-
Economic anthropology is often placed in the context of Western intellectual history
and this in turn is linked within a particular view or world history
- Language: focusing primarily on English-language materials
Dominant use of the term economy nowadays: the aggregate of goods and services
bought and sold in a national territory → often joined with one meaning ‘people ( like
German: Volkswirschaft)
This economy → quantifiable and priority is often production → modern economies depend
mostly on consumer demand → goods are valued for personal and social ends
Exchange (an universal principle of economic life but it take many forms and not all flows of
resources should be categorized as exchanges) ↔ Distribution (a new form of sharing
rather than exchange)
→ the dominant tradition since the 19th century has grown out of English Utilitarianism (it
privileges free markets and individual maximalization of value within budget constraints)
Anthropology: from Greek Anthropos (man) → any systematic study of humanity as a whole
Critical (critique = to examine the foundations of contemporary civilization by having
recourse to judgement (judgement = the ability to form an opinion on the basis of careful
consideration)) Anthropology → Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): idea of Nascent
society: disasters and economic shortage must have been responsible for a prolonged period
whose economic base can be summarized as hunter-gathering with huts → thereafter,
cultivation of the land led to incipient property institutions whose culmination required the
development of political society
On the other hand: Herder (1744-1803) laid the basis for relativist ethnography, which was
more consistent with a world society fragmented into nation states → in the time of Herder,
rationalist thinkers divided the world in Naturvölker and Kulturvölker (who had entered
history by discovering civilizations)
→ in beginning 20th century anthropologists like Malinowski and Boas devoted themselves
to close up studies of particular society → they broke new ground; the major gain for
Economic anthropology was a much better understanding of complex motivations for
behavior in the domains of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, and of how
this human economy was connected to behavior in other domains → downside:
anthropologists lost any perspective on the big picture, in both time and space
So in general
Focus on the universal (economics and cognitive psychologists) ↔ focus on the particular
(anthropologists and historians)
Important contributions to economic anthropology :
Marcel Mauss: the Gift + Karl Polanyi: Great divide theory
Economic Anthropology
Hst. 3: The Rise of Modern Economics and Anthropology
John Stuart Mill → Utilitarian liberalism (1848) → refashioned from the 1870s to the
neoclassical paradigm (it was neoclassical in that it still celebrated the market as the main
source of increased economic welfare → but it replaced the classical view of Mill and Marx
that saw economic value as an objective property of produced commodities, to be struggled
over by the different classes, with a focus on the subjective calculations of individuals
seeking to maximize their own utility)
→ the idea of the economic man: value not as a social average, but as an increment at the
margin, given an actor’s total assets ( a dollar is worth more to a man with ten dollars then it
is worth to a millionaire )
Alfred Marshall (1890) and Francis Edgeworth (1881): economics began to rely more on
numerate methods, though nothing like the same degree as today
4 leading traditions of that time (19th century):
1. The German Tradition
→ tended to emphasize the particular historical paths followed by different countries
Karl Bücher → Three-stage theory
-
1st stage: the emergence of household as the key coordinating unit of production and
consumption in preindustrial societies
nd
- 2 stage: the City State → from this stage onwards, the market becomes very
important
- 3rd stage: the contemporary national economy (Volkswirschaft)
→ Bücher recognized the fundamental importance of exchange (the Gift) in the
establishment of the human economy
→ also Bücher emphasized, like Aristotle did, the closed, autarkic nature of the subsistenceoriented systems
→ Bücher also emphasized the contextualizing of economic life: the principles of the market
and the new methodological individualism could not explain all economic behaviour, not
even in newly unified Germany
Max Weber (1922) → based his ideas upon the dialectical premise of Hegel and Kant →
form (arising from the operations in the mind) ↔ substance (perception of the material
world through the sense) → very different rationalities
Thurnwald (1932) and Polanyi (1930s) → demonstrated the significance of reciprocity
through ethnographies
2. The British Tradition
Bronislaw Malinowski → founder of economic anthropology → fieldwork in a single location
(trobriands) and on detailed portrayal of individual human actors → he showed that a
complex system of inter-island trades could be organized without markets, money or states
and on the basis of generosity rather than greed (Kula)
→ also, Malinowski noted the importance of cooperation: it would serve more general
social ends, but he didn’t lost eye of the room for individual choice
→ critic on Malinowski: he portrayed traditional activities of natives and ignored the extent
to which they had already been incorporated by government officers, missionaries etcetera
into new colonial systems
→ Malinowski’s functionalism established a new school of Anthropology in Britain → A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown’s Structural-Functionalism (1952): comparative science of society; Firth
(1939): one of the first formalists
3. The American Tradition
The notion of institution was central to North American economic scholarship (Veblen and
Commons) → more explicitly political version of economic science
In anthropology: Franz Boas important ( however, their aversion to the evolutionist
paradigm of the 19th century led them unable to theorize the relationship between economy
and society )
→ Rural Mexico convenient for American anthropologists, who lacked a large overseas
empire replete with tribes
George Foster (1942,1948): image of the limited good: the idea that the good things in life
were understood to be scarce, so that one man’s gain was likely to be another’s loss
4. The French Tradition
→ Marcel Mauss → The Gift (1925) → critique on Malinowski → his attack on economic
individualism emphasized the personal, social and spiritual dimensions of exchange in all
societies, including our own
→ Durkheim (1893): reaction on Adam Smith (the idea of economic progress through
specialization) and Herbert Spencer (Social Darwinism) → the individual is the result of its
social development, and not its source
Mauss and Durkheim → at one line → focusing explicitly on the non-contractual element of
the contract
Mauss eliminates the two utilitarian ideologies that purport to account for the evolution of
contracts, namely natural economy (Smith’s idea that individual barter was aboriginal) and
the notion that primitive communities were altruistic
Mauss:
Prestation: a service performed out of obligations, something akin to community service as
an alternative to imprisonment
→ systèmes de prestations totales: the earliest form of exchange took place between entire
social groups and involved the whole range of things people can do for each other
Chief conclusion Mauss: the attempt to create a free market for private contract is utopian
and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism → human
institutions everywhere are founded on the unity of individual and society, freedom and
obligation, self-interest and concern for others
Malinowski (through the Kula trade in the Trobriands, the Economic man was absent) ↔
Mauss (that isn’t true, primitive valuables are like money in that they have purchasing power
and this power has a figure set on it)
Economic Anthropology
Chapter 4: The Golden Age of Economic Anthropology
→ the decades after World War II: Economic Anthropology flourished at this time → focal
point: formalist ↔ substantivist debate
Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) → undisputed founder of the substantivist school → 1957 →
formal meaning of economic (means-end relationship; the mental process of economizing)
↔ substantive meaning of economic (concerned with the general provisioning of material
wants in society)
→ what make something formal is its conformity with an idea or rule → a formalist
approach emphasizes the regular operation of ideas, in this case the universal claims of
neoclassical economics, while a substantivist approach gives priority to the empirical content
of material circumstances and disputes that this diversity can be adequately grasped through
just one set of concepts
→ but both approaches recognized the important of markets for economic coordination
Polanyi: Reciprocity (symmetrical form of exchange between groups or persons of equal
standing; dominant in ‘primitive’ egalitarian societies with simple technologies) ↔
Redistribution (a principle of centricity, whereby resources were pooled and handed out
through a hierarchy; presupposed the possibility of storing a surplus and some degree of
social stratification)
→ Polanyi stated that, with industrialization and the creation of a market for free wage
labor, the economy disembedded (in ancient societies, economy was embedded in society,
commercial activity was concentrated in specific ports of trade, where it had little or no
direct impact on the bulk of population)
→ Polanyi identified a double movement: the economics of laissez-faire ↔ social
resistance and protectionism from the State
Polanyi also divided general-purpose money (our own) ↔ special-purpose monies
(enjoyed wide circulation in the non-industrial world)
→ Polanyi saw money as something introduced from outside, and not internal → he
distinguished: token money (designed to facilitate domestic trade) ↔ commodity money
(designed to facilitate foreign trade): two systems often came in conflict → only national
monopoly currencies combined the functions of payment, standard, store and exchange, and
this gave them the capacity to sustain the set through a limited number of ‘all-purpose’
symbols
Formalists: saw themselves as applying the refined instruments of mainstream economics to
unfamiliar settings → for them, the central concepts were in principle applicable
everywhere, because they defines economics in terms of the choices made by individual
actors under condition of scarcity
formalists (extended the idea of rational egoism to local settings) ↔ substantivists (didn’t
agree with this; they believed that reciprocity and redistribution were the dominant forms of
integration there rather than impersonal markets)
→ the non-industrial household was a good site for exploring the different approaches
Substantivists (how could the assumption of scarcity be generalized to all human behaviour
when it transpired that hunter-gatherers and others with very simple technologies tended
not to work much, while many farmers knew only drudgery from dawn to dusk?) ↔
Formalists (members of original affluent societies were maximizing their leisure options,
given the opportunities open to them → whatever consumer choices people make, they are
surely maximizing their individual utility)
→ formalism gradually broke up into a number of specialist approaches drawing on
information theory, game theory, cost-benefit analysis, rational choice, agricultural
development etc.
Economic Anthropology
Chapter 5: After the Formalist-Substantivist Debate
→ a few major figures in anthropology decided not to engage with the above mentioned
debate (Leach, Douglas, Dumont, Sahlins)
1970s → Marxism was rediscovered in economic anthropology, especially enjoying a cult
status in France → a deep structure of the ideal mode of production was outlined, with 3
central elements: (1) producers, (2) non-producers, (3) means of production → Reading
Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1965) → Latin America a focus on Marxist research
Last decades of twentieth century: Feminism at the forefront of cultural critique → fell on
fertile ground within anthropology:
-
-
Engels’ idea that patriarchal domination set in only after the dissolution of primitive
communism and the rise of private property and class conflict were taken over by
feminists → hunter-gather specialists showed that in those societies women’s
autonomy in production was also reflected in a more general parity of status
Scholars like Leacock, Mead and Benedict were proof that women had long achieved
parity inside the discipline of anthropology
1980s: decade of deconstruction → conventional categories of modernity became confused
and discredited → feminist critique on valorization of production for the market ( which
often men did ) above the expense of domestic reproduction ( which women did ) → their
goal: bringing women into view when discussing the economy, to grant them an explicit
quality with men
→ feminism has spawned a new focus on the place of sex in society, especially in capitalist
societies (nice example page 82 in book) and it has torn apart conceptual pairs ( like
individual ↔ society, nature ↔ culture, public ↔ private )
So in general: 1980s: dissolving of Polanyi school → many anthropologists went their own
way → this period is called the cultural turn (the idea that denied the possibility of a
comparative anthropological economics, since material life everywhere was structured by
incommensurate local symbolic orders, of which bourgeois economics was just one
→ this cultural turn was preceded by German pioneers of primitive economics (looking at
local ways of arranging economics) → during this cultural turn the notions culture and
morality replaced notions as class and society + former dichotomies of the substantivist
school (like capitalist societies ↔ non capitalist societies) were thought to be irrelevant
Dangers of the culturalist approach → there is a tendency to neglect history and political
economy + immersion in the local cosmology is pushed to such an extreme that comparison
and generalization come to seem impossible
End twentieth century: New Institutional Economics (NIE) → shared a commitment for hard
science (so more formalist) and viewed all economic institutions as markets, defining
institutions as the rules of the game → property attracted a lot of attention around the turn
of the century (which is often taken to provide the fundamental incentive structure for all
economies)
Widespread disagreement over Property:
Economists (efficiency of economic organization must be decisive) ↔ legal scholars
(property systems have many other social functions that are not reducible to economic
efficiency) → economic anthropologists take in middle ground (how people hold objects of
various kinds varies greatly, but property rules are everywhere significant in constraining
production and consumption)
Anthropology of money: anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal
approach to money and markets offered by mainstream economists → people everywhere
personalize money, bending it to their own purposes through a variety of social instruments
(Money and The Morality of Exchange (Bloch & Parry 1989))
Underlying idea Durkheim (1912): Money, such as he argued for Religion, is the principal
means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experiences and a society
whose wider reaches are impersonal → this idea was taken up later by Polanyi and echoed
by Hart (token money (token of an authority issued by states) and commodity money
(made by markets))
Dominant view on money: it is a convenient means of exchange or barter between
individuals who hold private property in what they buy and sell
Economic Anthropology
Chapter 7: The Socialist Alternative
Basic issues for economic development in most regions of the Second World → most
important: the means of production passed into collective ownership
Collective ownership → State ownership (seen as ideologically superior) ↔ Cooperative
ownership (of farms and factories by their workers) → Western social scientist called this
totalitarianism
Anthropology in socialist countries was usually know as ethnology and it was associated
with the study of the primitive and the backward (neither of these orientations gave a high
priority to economic anthropology) → the latter ( the primitive and the backward had to be
overcome by the march of socialist progress
→ the Stalinist version of factories in the countryside and anthropologist ethnographies on
Western and Southern Europe weren’t so different (individualization of Marriage and Rural
Exodus) → the new system brought disproportionate prosperity to the countryside → in
event, members of cooperative farms would find some space for private commercial
activities
→ the categorizations of the Polanyi school suited to describing these socialist rural
economies (though Polanyi’s framework was at the time already out of fashion):
-
Redistribution was the most salient mode of integration (socialist officials formed a
new class. Although low-level bureaucrats in enterprises and farms who tended their
own gardens were obviously a different stratum from the all-powerful nomenklatura
at higher levels)
- Markets regulated this socialist redistribution (work point were replaced by salaries
and wages and private access to the market expanded)
- The Household remained a vital unit of production and consumption, thanks to the
generous allocation of plots and gardens
- Reciprocity linked households and socialist office-holder to each other through
mutual aid and connections (this applies to the latter)
→ in urban industrial contexts, working conditions were inhumane, but, since workers got
paid for the time they worked behind their machines, they retained at least one element of
control over their labour (so alienation (in Marxist terms) was reduced)
Kornai (1980) → theory of the over-centralized economy → Soft Budget Constraint (it
rendered bankruptcy almost impossible; the expectation was that production units would
always be bailed out by central authorities)
Katherine Verdery (1996) → a more general theory of socialism → the entire system was
driven by an impulse to maximize not money or capital, as a Western firm would, but what
she termed the allocative power of State officials (so State officials wanted to keep in power)
1990s → fall of the 2nd world → it became easier for Western researchers to do research in
former 2nd world countries + there were no more heating debates between opposing
theoretical schools → the postsocial transformation (early analysis distinguished 2
alternative paths to his):
1. Shock Therapy (Sachs 1989): the benefits of the market would be forfeited unless
there was full and immediate privatization of state assets and the imposition of hard
budgets for all economic actors (so no half measures)
2. Gradualism: its advocates favored allowing the State to dispose of its property more
slowly, to intervene to maintain employment levels and to restrict or delay the influx
of foreign capital
→ process of transition was more brutally disruptive in those countries where the principle
of the market had been more consistently repressed over a longer period → the SU for
instance seemed to be moving towards feudalism rather than capitalism → Central planning
was not replaced by capitalism, but by barter transactions mediated by new forms of
patronage and corruption
→ small-scale marketing in capitalist countries became a survival strategy for trader tourists
(victims of decollectivization and factory closures, who sold whatever they could lay their
hands on in the workplace and even in their apartment to meet basic subsistence needs);
also intensification of subsistence production was another option
→ on the other hand, ethnographers documented the emergence of biznismen, who were
able to profit from the postsocial transformation → they found that new patterns of
stratification often led to a positive reassessment of the old socialist institutions
→ the new market economy was boosted by more or less rapid privatization of assets
previously owned by the state or by some lower form of collective → the gap between
expectations ↔ realities was often very great here
→ anthropologists focused on the countryside: Privatization had many forms in these rural
areas, but rural production levels and the productivity of land declined almost everywhere
(with the ending of socialist subsidies, many could not afford to purchase fertilizer or to
maintain their machinery + large areas of cultivated land fell out of production as the new
owners failed to use the parcels allotted to them
→ but also moral values were important → the idea of a free market for farm labour was a
foreign idea (land was owned for different reasons, than economical reasons, such as out of
respect for their forefathers, although the land didn’t offer any economic prospect → Karl
Polanyi: Land and Labour are fictitious commodities → he was proven right in this case
→ new elites soon began to emerge → these were often former communists, who had the
information and the social capital to make profitable use of their new property → in both
town and countryside, most goods were readily available, but only for those who could
afford it → the right networks were no longer enough to gain access to those goods, only
money could command the goods
→ numerous ethnographic studies suggest that the nature of the family and of social
networks has changed considerably since the socialist era, if only as a result of temporary
labor migration, the full extent of which is seldom captured in official statistics; yet there
remain significant differences from the dominant pattern of the more wealthy capitalist
economies → in the old shortage economy, information about the availability of goods was
a crucial resource; nowadays information about jobs and temporary accommodation in a
Western metropolis is just as critical; now as then, many people feel resentment towards
the elite for whom luxury goods seem to be available in abundance → but the sources of
this new wealth are less transparent than the privileges enjoyed by the socialist
nomenklatura
→ we spoke about a postsocial transformation (not transition, implying a new stable
condition) → but: stability is still nowhere in sight → anthropologists focused on particular
on symbolic orders: perhaps their major achievement was to document resilience: to probe
continuities neglected by other disciplines
Cuba, Vietnam, China → persistence of socialism: Reform Socialists → anthropologists place
key role on that the societies didn’t want to expand their allocative power (Verdery 1996),
but instead these governments respected the rights of autonomy and the rights of
entrepreneurs and citizen consumers → crucial feature: rural transformation → the massive
exodus of labour to form the floating population in the cities
Economic Anthropology
Chapter eight: One-world Capitalism
→ 1980s: Anthropologists no longer focus on primitive societies → we all seem to be living
in one world unified by capitalism → new ways were developed of studying globalization
everywhere
Three historical developments underpinned this shift:
-
The end of history (as Fukuyama would call it), with which they meant the end of the
Cold War
- The rise of China and India as worldwide powers, forming a challenge to Western
hegemony
- Digital revolution in communications → the internet
Marshall Sahlins (2002) → afterology (the post-studies) → the class system of the industrial
era had disappeared; people in rich countries became consumers, instead of producers
Development of capitalism → roots: Weber (1904/1905) and Sombart (1902); Graeber
2001: Capital is used to make more wealth, while wealth is all resources having economic
value → but in economics it usually refers to the sum of everything that can be measured by
universal equivalent, money → so the essence of capital is that it is wealth ( usually money )
capable of increasing its value
Stock (physical equipment, means of production) ↔ Identification (with the kind of money
prevailing in the modern economy)
Marx (1867) and Locke (1690) → human labour as the source of wealth and the addition of
machine to that labour to merely make it more productive
↕
Economists → stress the withdrawal of money from immediate consumption and the
enhanced productivity of factors other than labor in which the capitalist has invested → this
vision, however, can’t cope with historical change between production and the circuit of
money + it can’t cope with today’s financial crisis
Marx → Primitive Accumulation → modern capitalism as a form of making money with
money in which free capital was exchanged with free wage labor
Adam Smith (1776) → identified specialization and division of labor as the best way of
making capitalism work
Weber (1922) → didn’t agree with Marx → local people didn’t just go for capitalism → there
must have been a massive cultural revolution to persuade people to place their lives in the
hands of capitalists, whose principal orientation was to uncertain future profits
→ Weber came with the concept of Rational (the calculated pursuit of explicit ends by
chosen means) Enterprise (= undertaken with a view (speculative, but drive by a compulsion
to eliminate the risks entailed in relying on uncertain futures) to the future) → Rational
Enterprise, and capitalism, rests above all on the entrepreneur’s ability to calculate
outcomes
Capitalism is always modified by the specific conditions in which it grows → therefore
ethnography should inform the search for general principles of economic organization in our
world, for we need to explain not only the common form, but also its infinite variation
Pierre-Philippe Rey (1973): wherever capitalism developed, the new class was forced to
make compromises with the old property-owning classes in ways that made the resulting
hybrid something specific to that society
→ Economic Anthropologists have always forfeited the field of industrial work and
unemployment → sociologists and psychologists have done here the most ( Braverman
(1974) and Burawoy (1979) → Marxist sociologists; came with the concept of deskilling →
the process whereby artisans are reduced to tending machined that require little of their
traditional craft )
Study of consumption: Anthropologists again joined forces with sociologists and historians
→ focus on material culture and subject-object relations, of the way we mediate our
relationships with others and the world through objects → this mediation often has
practical, social and symbolic dimensions everywhere
France: Bourdieu (1984): consumer behaviour may be seen as an expression of habitus, and
the things people own, whatever they may be, are in fact the incarnation of objectified social
relations → differences in the goods we possess become a social language → while Bourdieu
grants consumers individual choice as actors, he links consumption to their social position by
assuming that every individual share the same code of meaning for these object-signs; this
code is somehow imposed abstractly from the outside
Britain: Douglas (1979): if economists were serious about consumer choice as the engine of
capitalist economy, they should turn to anthropologists for advice → later generation of
Anglophone anthropologists: took up the idea of a system of objects (Bourdieu), but
showed also that actors build up a private universe that has personal imaginative meaning
beyond serving to position them in society → concept of appropriation (Miller 1987): seeks
to capture a process whereby a domestic environment is built through mass-produces
commodities made personal by belonging to a specific way of life
People express as well collective as individual identities through these objects → Chevalier
(2010) → Social structure and organization make their appearance in the private sphere
through home decoration → process of internalization
→ basis institution capitalism = firm → small businesses that rely on the labor of family
members often remain extremely important + the role of kinship in facilitating and
frustrating rational enterprise remains under-researched
→ however: politically, as well as economically, family firms have long been overshadowed
by global organizations → flexible organization, which overlaps with those of governments
→ this has led to problems of managerial control and corruption, while control has passed
to a new class of directors, lawyers and accountants
→ (history of the corporations from Bills of Rights until now → page 157/158 book) → we
have now reached the moment that corporations are being granted the legal rights of
individual citizens → most ordinary citizens cannot compete with them on equal footing in
law or politics; never mind in the market (abstract entities like governments and
corporations can hold exclusive rights in something against the world)
→ not only has private property evolved from individual ownership to corporate forms, but
its focus has also shifted from real to intellectual property → from material objects to ideas
(partly caused by digital revolution)
The art or science of selling (getting people to spend their money on consumption): also a
rapidly expanding field → Applbaum (2003): emergence of shared meaning and goals in
economic action are critical in corporation’s success in controlling every aspect of the social
life of the commodities they sell
→ it has already become almost commonplace for anthropologists to work in financial
centres
Economic Anthropology
Chapter 9: Where do we go from here?
→ important to look at economic anthropology within larger histories (like world history or
Western social philosophy)
Academic institutions as presently structured do no favor this approach → it takes a lot of
investment for anthropologists and a lot of financing for institutions (staying in the field for
at least a year and learning local language)
→ but: as more anthropologists acquire complementary knowledge from outside their
discipline and indeed often work within a multi- or interdisciplinary framework, the situation
is changing → great obstacle: a pressure to publish fast, while historical breadth can only
come with experience
→ in order to face the challenges of the coming century, we should also be ready to lean
from predecessors such as Rousseau and Kant, whose eighteenth-century project was linked
to the drive for universal emancipation → notion of a human economy, which we conceive
of as being continuously remade by people in their everyday lives while it concerns the
interests of humanity as a whole
Mauss (to the need for establishing local limits on social action must always be added the
means of extending a community’s reach abroad (contesting the ethnography of Malinowski
in which he claimed to have studied the Trobriands and the Kula as a local society and local
practices) ; this is why markets and money in some form are universal) ↔ Polanyi (drew
attention to how economic institutions organize and are in turn organized by a plurality of
distribution mechanisms, that, in the modern world, affect the lives of millions of people
who participate in them without being granted any measure of control)
→ Polanyi and Mauss made sure that their more abstract understandings of political
economy were grounded in the everyday lives of concrete persons, thereby lending to field
research the power of general ideas
→ so there is a tension: impersonal conditions of social life ↔ the persons who inevitably
carry it out (blz. 168 for further information)
Foucault (1973) called anthropology a counter-science: it flows in the opposite direction,
always trying to unmake the versions of man that human sciences like economics insist on
making → Ethnography has been seen as the essence of this counter-science
so, in conclusion of this book: we can bury the concept of Homo Economicus (that
implausible creature whose activities are motivated solely by individual self-interest)