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Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is an amalgamation of economics and anthropology . It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. [ 1 ]
Political economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology, including but not limited to non-capitalist societies. Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture.
The Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) is a group of anthropologists, archaeologists, economists, geographers and other scholars interested in the connections between economics and social life. Its members take a variety of approaches to economics: some have a substantivist perspective, while others are interested in the new institutional ...
Some have influenced feminist economics. The basic premise is that economic activities can only be fully understood in the context of the society that creates them. The concept of "value" is a social construct, and as such is defined by the culture using the concept. Yet we can gain some insights into modern patterns of exchange, value, and ...
In Bledsoe's framework, people can be understood as resources, and the way society is ordered therefore is the result of rational choice. In the 1990s, the concept of wealth-in-people became a widespread conceptual tool not only in anthropology but also history. [7] In the beginning of urbanization in Africa, they created mobile cities. If the ...
Samuel Popkin defines a 'moral economic' approach to the political economy of peasants as one which "focuses on the relation between economic and social institutions". [14] In the context of the peasantry in Vietnam, moral economists argue that Confucian and Vietnamese cultural values underpin peasant society, and that this ultimately was the ...
An elaborate example of this in a non-market society is the potlatch, where large amounts of personal resources are ceremonially given away to others in the community according to social status, with the tacit expectation that other members of the community would themselves give away large amounts of their own property in the future.
Anthropology studies political economy by investigating regimes of political and economic value that condition tacit aspects of sociocultural practices (e.g. the pejorative use of pseudo-Spanish expressions in the U.S. entertainment media) by means of broader historical, political and sociological processes. Analyses of structural features of ...