Olivia Harris

Olivia Jane Harris (26 August 1948 – 9 April 2009) was a British social anthropologist whose work focused on the study of the Bolivian highlands.

Her writing includes analyses of fertility, gender,[1] money, conceptions of work[2] and of time, the relation between law and custom, as well as the Inca and Spanish colonisation of current-day Bolivia.

[3] Olivia Jane Harris was born on 26 August 1948 and read classics at St Anne's College, Oxford.

As part of her studies, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork from 1972 to 1974 among Aymara speaking communities in Potosí, Bolivia.

She thereby argues that the question of what makes people work is central to understanding human existence, and that it cannot be understood with neoclassical concepts of economic analysis.