Political economy in anthropology
Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture.
Steward's research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work.
Steward quickly developed a coterie of students who would go on to develop Political Economy as a distinct approach in anthropology, including Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Eleanor Leacock, Roy Rappaport, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Morton Fried, Robert F. Murphy, and influenced other scholars such as Elman Service, Marvin Harris and June Nash.
The second area was concerned with the vast majority of the world's population at the time, the peasantry, many of whom were involved in complex revolutionary wars such as in Vietnam.
[5] To Harris, cultural materialism "is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence".
Harris' method was to demonstrate how particular cultural practices (like the Hindu prohibition on harming cattle) served a materialistic function (such as preserving an essential source of fertilizer from being consumed).
French structuralist Marxism melded Marxist political economy with Levi-Strauss's structural methodology, eliminating the human subject, dialectical reason and history in the process.
Primary anthropological theorists of this school included Maurice Godelier, Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray and Pierre-Philippe Rey.
[11] As anthropologists embraced "mode of production" analysis in the 1950s, they struggled to adapt its evolutionary model to the groups that they had traditionally worked with.
[12] Richard B. Lee's work amongst the Dobe !Kung of Botswana provided a detailed case study of the argument, even in one of the most hostile desert environments.
[17] Political economists such as Morton Fried, Elman Service, and Eleanor Leacock took a Marxist approach and sought to understand the origins and development of inequality in human society.
According to Hann and Hart, the short lived success of the theory was that it produced a version of structural-functionalism at once sufficiently different from the original to persuade English-speakers that they were learning Marxism and similar enough to allow them to retain their customary way of thinking, which had been temporarily discredited by its role in the administration of empire.
[21] The book begins in 1400 with a description of the trade routes a world traveller might have encountered, the people and societies they connected, and the civilizational processes trying to incorporate them.
Wolf differs from World Systems theory in that he sees the growth of Europe until the late eighteenth century operating in a tributary framework, and not capitalism.
He examines the way that colonial state structures were created to protect tributary populations involved in the silver, fur and slave trades.
The final section of the book deals with the transformation in these global networks as a result of the growth of capitalism with the industrial revolution.
Anthropologists working in a wide variety of current situations have documented that the incidence of bonded labour is much greater than capitalist ideology would lead us to expect.
[26] An early study of debt bondage was Ann Laura Stoler's Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 (1985).
The Deli company imported large numbers of Chinese indentured labourers to Sumatra, Indonesia, where they were treated not as employees, but as contractors.
They were kept in perpetual debt, unable to change employers, in working conditions that resulted in extraordinarily high death rates.
[28] Jan Breman extended this analysis of the "Coolie regulation" (which allowed for indentured labour) to the Dutch mining industry in the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia).
Dishonest individuals would have money baptized, which would then become an active agent; whenever used to buy goods, it would escape the till and return to its owner.
Thompson wrote of the moral economy of the poor in the context of widespread food riots in the English countryside in the late eighteenth century.
According to Thompson these riots were generally peaceable acts that demonstrated a common political culture rooted in feudal rights to “set the price” of essential goods in the market.
[33] The concept was widely popularized in anthropology through the book, "The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia" by James C. Scott (1976).
Secondly, Scott argues that peasant society provides "subsistence insurance" for its members to tide them over those occasions when natural or man-made disaster strikes.
