Ten years later, at the end of the s, the starting point of the controversy — the distinction between embedded and disembedded, primitive and modern economies — was itself challenged by the growing ethnography of capitalism and the market as cultural phenomena. Next post: French anthropology. Previous post: Food Anthropology. Formalism and substantivism Anthropology. Next post: French anthropology Previous post: Food Anthropology. Political economy and anthropology: 6.
World systems and anthropology: 6. Recent synthesis: 9. Further reading: At the most basic, economic anthropology is the description and analysis of economic life, using an anthropological perspective. It is therefore important to understand what an anthropological perspective in economic life of people mean? Economic anthropologists study how humans use the material world to maintain and express them-selves in social groups.
Researchers examine both the material practices in which humans engage and the ideas they hold about them. As a field, economic anthropology developed in the twentieth century, but it encompasses studies of the past and draws on theories from earlier eras. A single opposition informs much of the subject: either humans live by what they produce or they produce to exchange with others from whom they secure their livelihood.
All economies represent combinations of the two practices, but the patterns vary, and their interpretation occasions controversy. Economic anthropology focuses on two aspects of economics: 1 provisioning, which is the production and distribution of necessary and optional goods and services; and 2 the strategy of economizing, often put in terms of the formalist-substantivist debate. Earlier anthropologists devoted almost all their time to the study of provisioning, but in the last half-century economizing has received substantially more attention.
The first of the approaches that gained prominence in anthropology is that the perspective is fundamentally empirical and naturalistic. Extended participant observation, empirical naturalism, has come to define the field. Their findings report how humans gain their livelihood? The answer was a thorough understanding of Production, distribution and consumption.
Subsistence strategies including agriculture, pastoralism, fishing, hunting and gathering and industrial production has been locus and focus of study. Ethnographers gather information about these and other economic features through intensive observation, through lengthy conversations and by using a variety of sampling techniques to secure quantitative data. They have been especially alert to how people are recruited and rewarded for their work, to the gender division of labour, and to the ways that burdens and rewards for women shift as the market expands into new areas.
Since the early studies of Mauss [] and Malinowski , exchange has also been of special interest to anthropologists who have explored how transactions may range from pure gifting to obligated gifting to barter, theft and market trade; this research in turn has stimulated studies on consumption and display.
Economic anthropologists have examined as well the many ways that resources are distributed, goods are allocated, and political regimes are supported. Early on, this led to lengthy discussions concerning the conditions under which a surplus is produced in society, who secures it, and how it may be measured in non-monetary contexts.
More broadly, economic anthropologists focus on the ties between material life and power, ranging from gender control of food in households to financial control of monopolies in capitalist markets. Much ethnographic data defies our common sense categories, however: for example, today farmers on marginal land may work the earth with wooden implements and seed potatoes for home consumption, while listening to tapes on headphones.
Karl Polanyi — was a Hungarian lawyer turned journalist and economic historian whose reading of anthropology, especially the work of Bronislaw Malinowski and Richard Thurnwald, led him to produce work that made major contributions to economic anthropology, classical Greek studies and post-Soviet eastern European social policy Polanyi, , Polanyi attempts to explain the causes of great depression and the fascism of the s and s Goldfrank, His larger aim was to lay the groundwork for a general theory of comparative economics that would accommodate all economies, past and present see Polanyi ; Halperin , a; Stanfield , This new economy was unique in being disembedded from the social matrix; in ideal form, at least, it commercialised and commoditised all goods and services in terms of a single standard, money, and set their prices through the self-adjusting mechanism of supply and demand.
Instead, access to land and labour was gained through ties of kinship birth, adoption, marriage and community. Many pre-capitalist economies had marketplaces, but they did not have self-regulating, supply-and-demand market economies. Similarly, many employed money but only in transactions involving a limited range of goods and services. These countermeasures accomplished their purpose politically, by partially re embedding the economy, typically culminating in state socialism or the welfare state.
Formalists contend that because all economies involve the rational pursuit of, access to, and use of, scarce resources by self-interested, maximizing social actors, formal economic rules can be used to explain them H. Schneider Herskovits endorsed this position in the reissue of his text The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. Scarcity, he maintained, is universal, as is maximizing behavior on the part of the individual.
It is only the cultural matrix within which these occur that varies. The same means are everywhere applied to achieve different ends. The opposing view was championed by Polanyi and a group of his students from Columbia University. Polanyi analyzed the identity of the economy in contemporary capitalist society and argued that the extent of its autonomy was an absolutely novel historic development.
Therefore, not only could other societies not be assumed to have assigned the same independence to economic processes, but the science premised on that independence was, ipso facto , only appropriate to our own society. It contends that different forms of exchange have different sets of rules and expectations Dalton Following Karl Polanyi the substantivists argue that there are three major forms of exchange: reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange K.
Polanyi et al. By this view, the rational, maximizing strategizing that lies at the heart of neoclassical economics and formalist economic anthropology is characteristic only of market economies. The underlying methodological question was that of the proper unit of analysis. Because the formalists focused upon choice, which is always individual, their approach necessarily entailed methodological individualism. The substantivists, on the other hand, focused upon the institutional matrix in which choice occurs see Cancian To illuminate their diverse findings, anthropologists draw upon four theories or approaches to economy, three of which were developed outside the field.
Most economic anthropologists employ concepts from neo-classical economics to interpret their data. Material behaviour is seen as an organized way of arranging means to secure valued ends. The human is assumed to be self interested and rational; land, labour and capital are said to be the scarce and productive components in the economy. Because social arrangements in other cultures frequently limit the working of markets, neoclassical theorists find their challenge in showing how their model of behaviour can be adapted to diverse ethnographic contexts.
The Farming Systems Research:. This wider social perspective became necessary when agricultural research stations began to design programmes to increase the productivity of small farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It became clear that an economic evaluation of the technical packages designed by agronomists did not suffice.
To avoid failures, researchers had to incorporate in their analysis an evaluation of the ecological, social and political conditions of the region and the goals and preferences of farmers. They also had to consider the information that was available to producers and the risks that they had to assume.
This wider approach was known as Farming Systems Research and relied on interdisciplinary teams that included anthropologists and sociologists, though in secondary roles. One of the key findings that anthropologists and sociologists brought to Farming Systems Research was that, in non-Western societies, resources were often controlled by household or larger kin-based units rather than by individuals. Hence, production and investment decisions had to be made at the household or homestead level.
Farming Systems Research adopted their recommendation; the household became the unit of analysis in surveys and assessments of production decisions Mook ; Shaner, Philipp and Schmehl ; Turner and Brush Research on Problem solving actors:. Rational choice is the heart of the microeconomic model of economic man, who is portrayed as a logical thinker who evaluates options and inputs consistently and coherently, and selects those that maximise his utility.
If their decisions do not conform to predictions, it raises questions about social or market impediments to an efficient allocation of resources.
Some economists even argue that when rational choice is possible, it is unnecessary to protect individuals from the consequences of their choices. Anthropologists have challenged some of the assumptions of microeconomic models by focusing on how culture and social relations frame the decision process.
Appadurai shows that food provision decisions by Indian women are made as part of other decisions, in a pre-attentive manner except when the problem becomes crucial. Other anthropologists have focused on how power and social conditions define options. Psychologists, instead, have focused on how decisions are made. They have examined how individuals simplify information in order to attend to their preferences and how they evaluate the uncertain outcomes they experience.
Some of their findings and propositions have been used by some anthropologists to explore cropping decisions Gladwin , a, b, or marketing decisions Quinn Bargaining decisions:.
Most peasants are not lone decision makers. They are forced to interact with others in order to gain access to land or labour. Peasants can expand production by borrowing, renting or sharecropping land. However, unless they have a large family they will also need to hire labourers or negotiate a reciprocal labour exchange. In either case, peasants cannot solve their problem by simply evaluating costs, risks and preferences.
They have to negotiate a solution with others for labour and land. Bargaining peasants must cope with preferences and consider the transaction cost associated with each offer and counter-offer. Borrowing land may engage him in some future debt, sharecropping may limit how he can use the land. Studies on sharecropping by anthropologists focus on power imbalance in bargain.
A powerful landlord can limit access of inputs and bias the outcome of the bargain. This focus on production is in sharp contrast to various forms of exchange theory, which characterised the work of both the formalist and substantivist schools of economic anthropology and which continues unabated in recent work on anthropological theories of value Graeber This trend arose in the late s and exerted a major influence on economic anthropology and anthropology in general through the entire decade of the s.
Today all of these anthropologists have abandoned or substantially modified their theoretical outlook with the consequence that this once highly influential school of economic anthropologists is now largely defunct.
Where their influence is still strongly felt is in South African anthropology and social science, where structural Marxism was one of the inspirations leading to the efflorescence of neo-Marxist political economy Asad and Wolpe These approaches are: i Substantivism and ii Formalism.
The formalists are Raymond Firth, Herskovits and Burlings The substantive meaning holds good to primitive, peasant and advanced economic life.
The formal meaning holds good to the economies of advanced societies. Concept of insufficiency, scarcity and choice — Scarcity is insufficiency of means and choices be induced by that insufficiency.
Therefore scarcity is universal. Conclusion: The two approaches are two ends of a continuum. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Previous article. Next article. Uncategorized II.
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