Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins's
Stone Age Economics has established itself as a classic of modern
anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological
economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to
study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of
the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to
be the original "affluent society."
Sahlins examines notions of production, distribution and exchange in
early communities and examines the link between economics and cultural
and social factors. A radical study of tribal economies, domestic
production for livelihood, and of the submission of domestic production
to the material and political demands of society at large, Stone Age
Economics regards the economy as a category of culture rather than
behaviour, in a class with politics and religion rather than rationality
or prudence. Sahlins concludes, controversially, that the experiences of
those living in subsistence economies may actually have been better,
healthier and more fulfilled than the millions enjoying the affluence
and luxury afforded by the economics of modern industrialisation and
agriculture.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by David
Graeber, London School of Economics.
