He began to read ethnographic literature on Papua New Guinea, and Marilyn Strathern's ethnography of rural migrants in Port Moresby, No Money on Our Skins, was an influence.
[6][7][8] Gregory developed a synthesis of classical political economists (such as Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and predominantly Karl Marx), which he found more useful than the prevailing economic theory, and classical anthropological theory (from the likes of Lewis Henry Morgan, Claude Levi-Strauss, and especially Marcel Mauss) in order to draw a series of contrasts between the logics of commodity and gift exchange.
Whilst some critics accused Gregory of making overdrawn binary contrast between industrialized countries and Papua New Guinea, Gregory answered his critics in his later book Savage Money, and in his preface to the second edition, explaining the book was intended precisely as an affirmation of the coexistence of gifts and commodities in late colonial Papua New Guinea (PNG), and particularly the paradoxical efflorescence of gift exchange during the colonial period.
After taking up a teaching position at ANU, Gregory made two return visits to India in 1985–86 (when he met with merchants in Rajasthan) and 1989– 90.
[4] Gregory deploys the term not to refer to ideas of 'primitive money' that had preoccupied many economic anthropologists of the past, but to the changes in the global economy after 1971,[9] and particularly the "free market anarchism" which dominated after Nixon's government unpegged the dollar from the gold standard.
Gregory's analysis, together with Michael Hudson's writings, inspired David Graeber's discussion of the present era in Chapter 12 his bestselling book "Debt: the first 5000 years".
Chris Gregory is married to Judith Robinson, a diplomat who served for a time as Acting High Commissioner to Fiji,[11] and has two daughters.