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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 ]
An anthropological approach to economic processes allows us to critically examine the cultural biases inherent in the principles of modern economics. Anthropological linguistics is a related field that looks at the terms we use to describe economic relations and the ecologies they are set within. Many anthropological economists (or economic ...
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.
Goods and services of specific types are relegated to distinct value categories, and moral sanctions are invoked to prevent exchange between spheres. It is a classic topic in economic anthropology. [1] Paul Bohannan developed the concept in relation to the Tiv of Nigeria, who he argued had three spheres of exchange.
Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of the potlatch on the Northwest North American coast).
Moral economy is a way of viewing economic activity in terms of its moral, rather than material, aspects. The concept was developed in 1971 by British Marxist social historian and political activist E. P. Thompson in his essay, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century".
Karl Polanyi emphasized that economic exchange in non-market societies is "embedded" in other social institutions. There is no distinct economic system. Exchanges such as Moka have both economic, kin, religious and political aspects; they must be analyzed holistically, in terms of the institutions (such as Moka) in which it is embedded. Gift ...
The "original affluent society" is the proposition that argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security to be considered affluent.