What do we mean when we talk about "the economy" and "economic
activity"? How we answer that question and the tools we reach for to
analyse it, shape how we study it and how we are defined as
practitioners.
Conventional economic thought and talk see the economy as the sum of
market transactions carried out by rational individuals deciding how to
allocate their resources among the various things on offer that would
satisfy their desires. Economic anthropologists see things differently.
For them, the focus is the activities, relationships and systems through
which objects are produced, circulate among people and ultimately are
consumed, which will take different forms in different societies and,
indeed, even in different parts of the same society. In this way,
economic anthropology takes the rational market actors of conventional
economic thought and places them in the world of people, relationships,
systems, beliefs and values that begins with production and ends with
consumption.
In this accessible and authoritative overview of the subdiscipline of
economic anthropology, James G. Carrier brings his considerable
expertise and knowledge to bear on defining and framing the field for a
new generation of students in search of an inspiring and fresh way of
looking at the economic world.
