Economic anthropology
In an earlier German context, Heinrich Schurtz has been cited as a “founder of economic anthropology" for his pioneering inquiries into money and exchange across different cultural settings.
Polanyi drew on anthropological studies to argue that true market exchange was limited to a restricted number of western, industrial societies.
Bronislaw Malinowski's groundbreaking work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), posits the question, "why would men risk life and limb to travel across huge expanses of dangerous ocean to give away what appear to be worthless trinkets?"
[5] In the 1920s and later, Malinowski's research became the subject of debate with the French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift (Essai sur le don, 1925).
[6] Contrasting Mauss, Malinowski emphasised the exchange of goods between individuals, and their non-altruistic motives for giving: they expected a return of equal or greater value.
They were not simple, alienable commodities to be bought and sold, but, like the Crown jewels, embodied the reputation, history, and identity of a "corporate kin group".
Based on an improved translation, Jonathan Parry has demonstrated that Mauss was arguing that the concept of a "pure gift" given altruistically only emerges in societies with a well-developed market ideology.
As a consequence, women hold a great deal of economic and political power, as inheritance is passed from mother to daughter through the female lines.
[9] Albert Schrauwers has argued that the kinds of societies used as examples by Weiner and Godelier, such as the Kula ring in the Trobriands, the Potlatch of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, or the Toraja of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, are all characterized by ranked aristocratic kin groups that fit with Claude Lévi-Strauss' model of "House Societies" where "House" refers to both noble lineage and their landed estate.
Marshall Sahlins, a well-known American cultural anthropologist, identified three main types of reciprocity in his book Stone Age Economics (1972).
This idea was taken up lastly by Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, who argued in Money and the Morality of Exchange (1989) that the "transactional order" through which long-term social reproduction of the family takes place has to be preserved as separate from short-term market relations.
They built an ornate temple dedicated to sacralizing the giving of charity; this was eventually institutionalized as a mutual credit organization, land sharing, and co-operative marketing.
A similar approach is taken by Nicholas Thomas, who examines the same range of cultures and the anthropologists who write about them, and redirects attention to the "entangled objects" and their roles as both gifts and commodities.
Formalists such as Raymond Firth and Harold K. Schneider asserted that the neoclassical model of economics could be applied to any society if appropriate modifications are made, arguing that its principles have universal validity.
While conceding that substantivism rightly emphasises the significance of social institutions in economic processes, Gudeman considers any deductive universal model, be it formalist, substantivist or Marxist, to be ethnocentric and tautological.
Marxists argue that culturalists are too idealistic in their notion of the social construction of reality and too weak in their analysis of external (i.e. material) constraints on individuals that affect their livelihood choices.
If, as Gudeman argues, local models cannot be held against a universal standard, then they cannot be related to hegemonic ideologies propagated by the powerful, which serve to neutralise resistance.
[24] Pedlars and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns by Clifford Geertz compared the entrepreneurial cultures of Islamic Java with Hinduized Bali in the post-colonial period.
In accepting that these forms of productions were there to stay, scholars began using the term informal sector, which is credited to the British anthropologist Keith Hart in a study on Ghana in 1973.
In processes of clientelization the cultivation of personal relationships between traders and customers assumes an equal or higher importance than the economic transactions involved.
Others have pointed out, however, how alternative currencies such as Ithaca HOURS in New York state are used to create new community based spheres of exchange in western market economies by fostering barter.
[35] David Graeber argues that the inefficiencies of barter in archaic society has been used by economists since Adam Smith to explain the emergence of money, the economy, and hence the discipline of economics itself.
[36] "Economists of the contemporary orthodoxy... propose an evolutionary development of economies which places barter, as a 'natural' human characteristic, at the most primitive stage, to be superseded by monetary exchange as soon as people become aware of the latter's greater efficiency.
"[37] However, extensive investigation since then has established that "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.
Her book, Liquidated: an ethnography of Wall Street, provides an insiders view of how "market rationality" works, and how it is embedded in particular kinds of social networks.
[49] Bill Maurer has examined how Islamic bankers who are seeking to avoid religiously proscribed interest payments have remade money and finance in Indonesia.
His book, Mutual Life, Limited, compares these Islamic attempts to remake the basis of money to local currency systems in the United States, such as "Ithaca Hours."
For example, in traditional Mexican villages, those of wealth would be called upon to fulfill "cargo offices" in the church, and host feasts in honour of the saints.
[54] Her work inspired a generation of anthropologists who have examined the incorporation of women within corporate economies, especially in the new "Free trade zones" of the newly industrializing third world.
[57] Daromir Rudnyckyj has analyzed how neo-liberal economic discourses have been utilized by Indonesian Muslims operating the Krakatau Steel Company to create a "spiritual economy" conducive to globalization while enhancing the Islamic piety of workers.
