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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 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.
The concept of economic distribution is at least as old as the advent of the pharaohs. Anthropologists have noted many such systems, from those of tribesmen engaged in common subsistence economies of various sorts to complex civilizations, such as that of the Inca Empire , which assigned segments of the economy to specific villages.
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 ...
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.
In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. In market societies, in contrast, economic activities have been rationalized, and economic action is "disembedded" from society and able to follow its own distinctive logic, captured in economic modeling.
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 ...