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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 ...
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 wealth by examining previous societies.
In this branch of anthropology, the term development refers to the social action made by different agents (e.g. institutions, businesses, states, or independent volunteers) who are trying to modify the economic, technical, political, or/and social life of a given place in the world, especially in impoverished, formerly colonized regions.
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 ...
The formalist vs. substantivist debate was not between anthropologists and economists, however, but a disciplinary debate largely confined to the journal Research in Economic Anthropology. In many ways, it reflects the common debates between etic and emic explanations as defined by Marvin Harris in cultural anthropology of the period.
He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World and Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes. His written work focuses on the national limits of politics in a globalised economy.