Economic Anthropology
History, Ethnography, Critique
Chris Hann and Keith Hart
This book is a new introduction to the history and practice of economic anthropology by two leading authors in the field. They show that anthropologists have contributed to understanding the three great questions of modern economic history: development, socialism and one-world capitalism. In doing so, they connect economic anthropology to its roots in Western philosophy, social theory and world history.
Up to the Second World Waranthropologists tried and failed to interest economists in their exotic findings. They then launched a vigorous debate over whether an approach taken from economics was appropriate to the study of non-industrial economies. Since the 1970s, they have developed a critique of capitalism based on studying it at home as well as abroad.
The authors aim to rejuvenate economic anthropology as a humanistic project at a time when the global financial crisis has undermined confidence in free market economics. They argue for the continued relevance of predecessors such as Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, while offering an incisive review of recent work in this field.
Economic Anthropology is an excellent introduction for social science students at all levels, and it presents general readers with a challenging perspective on the world economy today.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1Introduction: Economic Anthropology
Some Issues of Method
The Human Economy
Critical Anthropology
Organization of the Book
Chapter 2Economy from the Ancient World to the Age of the Internet
Economy as Household Management
Medieval and Early Modern Roots of Economic Theory
The Rise of Political Economy
The Economic Anthropology of Karl Marx
National Capitalism and Beyond
Conclusion
Chapter 3The Rise of Modern Economics and Anthropology
The German Tradition
The British Tradition
The American Tradition
The French Tradition
Conclusion
Chapter 4The Golden Age of Economic Anthropology
Karl Polanyi and the SubstantivistSchool
The Formalists
Conclusion
Chapter 5After the Formalist-Substantivist Debate
Marxism
Feminism
The Cultural Turn
Aspirations to Hard Science
The Anthropology of Money
Conclusion
Chapter 6Unequal Development
Development in an Unequal World
Anthropologists and Development
The Anthropology of Development in Africa
The Informal Economy
Beyond Development?
Conclusion
Chapter 7Socialism, Postsocialism and Reform Socialism
Socialism
Postsocialist Transformation
Reform Socialism
Conclusion
Chapter 8One-world Capitalism
The Development of Capitalism
Industrial Work
Consumption
Corporate Capitalism
Money and the Financial Crisis
Conclusion
Chapter 9Where Do We Go From Here?
History, Ethnography, Critique
Economic Anthropology as a Discipline
Farewell to Homo economicus
References
A Note on Further Reading
Preface
This book began life as a position paper for a conference we convened in June 2006. When we came to prepare those papers for publication (Hann and Hart 2009), it was clearly too long to fit into that volume. In the meantime it has continued to grow. Completion has been delayed not only by competing commitments (the usual academic excuses) but by the impact of the latest, most serious crisis of the world economy, which has diverted some of our energies and inspired us to give the subject of money even greater prominence in the text than it already had. This crisis may have taken most of the world by surprise, including the economists, but it should not have been a surprise to economic historians or anthropologists, who have long been familiar with notions like“creative destruction” and “unequal development”. It has not led us to change the rationale and structure of this book, which remains first and foremost a history of the discipline of economic anthropology. This latest crisis may, however, help to explain why we do not see this book as a work of antiquarian scholarship.
Nor do we offer a partisan polemic. Our account of the history and present state of economic anthropology is offered as a contribution to understanding economic life, a field in which many scholars, not only economists and anthropologists but also historians and sociologists (and many varieties under each of those labels) must come together. Some economists claim a special status for their discipline and locate it closer to the “hard” sciences than to “soft” disciplines in the humanities. We take a critical and historical view of such claims. Previous accounts of economic anthropology linked it to the founding fathers of modern social theory – Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Occasionally the history was traced back to the political economists of the Enlightenment. We argue that the core questions are much older than this. Ultimately, economic anthropology addresses questions of human nature and well-being, questions that have preoccupied every society’s philosophersfrom the beginning. We make a case for an economic anthropology that is able to investigate this “human economy” anywhere in time and space, as a creation of all humanity. But, there have been tremendous changes in the world economy over the last half-century, especially since the end of the Cold War, and we therefore give the highest priority to addressing these on-going transformations.
We are grateful to Sophie Chevalier, Horacio Ortiz and Vishnu Padayachee for permission to use collaborative material. Thanks also to …. (to be completed)
Chapter 1
Introduction: Economic Anthropology
Anthropologists aim to discover the principles of social organization at every level from the most particular to the universal. The purpose of economic anthropology in the nineteenth century, even before it took shape as “the economics of primitive man”, was to test the claim that a world economic order must be founded on the principles that underpinned Western industrial society. The search was on for alternatives that might support a more just economy, whether liberal, socialist, anarchist or communist. Hence the interest in origins and evolution, since society was understood to be in movement and had not yet reached its final form. Anthropology was the most inclusive way of thinking about economic possibilities.
The universities expanded in the twentieth century and knowledge was compartmentalized as so many impersonal disciplines modelled on the natural sciences. Anthropology found itself pigeon-holed as the study of those parts of humanity that the others could not reach. The job of theanthropologistswas to accumulate an objectified data bank on “other cultures”, largely for consumption by insiders and a few other experts, rather than the general public. The profession became fixed in a cultural relativist paradigm (every society should have its own culture), by definition opposed to the universalism of economics. Anthropologists based their intellectual authority on extended sojourns in remote areas and their ability to address the world’s economic trajectory was much impaired as a result.
We identify three stages in the development of economic anthropology as a discipline. In the first, from the 1870s up to the 1940s, most anthropologists were interested in whether the economic behaviour of “savages” was underpinned by the same notions of efficiency and “rationality” that were taken to motivate economic action in the West. They first devoted themselves to assemblingcompendious accounts of world history conceived of as an evolutionary process. Later,in the years following the First World War,the practice of fieldwork became ever more dominant, and ethnographers sought to engage the more general propositions of mainstream (“neoclassical”) economics with their particular findings about “primitive societies”. They failed, mainly because they misunderstood the economists’ epistemological premises.
In the second stage, during the 1950s and 60s – when the Cold War was at its height, the world economy was booming and governments everywhere committed themselves to expanding public services –economic anthropologists argued among themselves about the theories and methods needed to study their special preserve, which was now extended to include the world’s peasants alongside its dwindling number of tribesmen. “Formalists” held that the tools of mainstream economics were adequate to this task, while “substantivists” claimed that institutional approaches were more appropriate. By institutional they meant that economic life in societies that were not dominated by impersonal markets was always “embedded” in other social institutions, ranging fromthe household to government and religion.
In retrospect, this formalist-substantivist debate was a golden age for economic anthropology. It ended in a stalemate, thereby opening the way for Marxists and feminists to exercise a brief dominance, but they too at first mainly drew on the traditional subject matter of exotic ethnography. The third stage of our general account takes us from the watershed of the 1970s through three decades of neoliberal globalization. We examine new critical perspectives, the “cultural turn” in economic anthropology, and fresh aspirations to the mantle of hard science, notably in the guise of “New Institutional Economics”. This period has seen anthropologists expand their inquiries to address the full range of human economic organization, which they study from a variety of perspectives. So far, they have preferred in the main to stick with the tradition of ethnographic observation. We argue that the time is ripe for anthropologists to go further and address the world economy as a whole.
The most basic issue remains whether or notthe forms of market economy that have allowed North Atlantic societies to dominate world economy over the last two centuries rest on human principles of universal validity. Argument about sameness and difference have plagued economic anthropology throughout these three periods. We can be proud of anthropologists’ commitment to joining the people where they live in order to find out what they think and do. But fieldwork-based ethnography needs to be integrated once more with the perspective of world history that it abandoned in the twentieth century.
Some Issues of Method
Any concept put forward as presumptively universal has its own particular history. The word “economy” originates in the Ancient Greek oikonomia, where it referred to the management of a household, usually a manorial estate. Of course the Ancient Greeks were not the first human beings to live as members of small domestic groups. In the sense that such groups have reproduced themselves in their environments since the origins of our species, we can say that the human economy is as old as humanity itself. Since the evidence of modern ethnography can shed only very limited light on this history, we must look instead to other disciplines, especially to archaeology. Even when archaeological data offer rich clues to ancient modes of subsistence, however, inferences concerning how their members conceptualized and managed their material tasks are often problematic. Modern anthropologists have shown that the idea ofearly humanity’s economy as a continuous struggle for survival may be wide of the mark. The discovery of agriculture entailed an intensification of labour inputs and the routine experience of drudgery.
The fact that “economy” has a particular origin in the history of European social thought need not prevent anthropologists from investigating the human economies of groups with different material endowments and ways of perceiving them. One of the most fertile strands in economic anthropology in recent decades has been to explore “local models” of economy, for example those of food collectors who see the forest where they live as a benevolent source of security (Chapter 5). Western notions of hard work, scarcity and uncertainty areunfamiliar to them. To complicate matters further, the word economy has repeatedly been combined with other terms, such aspolitical, moral, cultural and even spiritual. In the next chapter we provide a historical account of its meaning from ancient times to now. This will not eliminate biases in our use of one of the keywords of modern civilization, but it should serve to make us more aware of them.
Amore serious limitation is our decision to place economic anthropology in the context of Western intellectual history and this in turn within a particular view of world history. Our account is heavily skewed towards a North Atlantic perspective, reflecting European and American dominance of both world society and its academic representation in the modern period. Economic anthropologists have worked around the globe for over a century, but a specialist field began to take shape in countries with colonial concerns. A self-conscious community of economic anthropologists emergedjust half a century ago, and then very much with the United States as its centre. For a couple of decades they had a high profile within anthropology and none at all outside it. The point ofour book is to call for a reinvigoration of this intellectual community as a self-conscious discipline. In doing so, we seek to define the field more carefully and comprehensively than before, but also more flexibly and widely, since our aim is to build bridges to other disciplines and to provide a broad framework for charting a way ahead. Many of those on whose work we draw would not have classified themselves as economic anthropologists, even after this label became available in the second half of the twentieth century.
A third, related issue concerns language. We focus primarily on English language materials, reflecting its dominance in recent decades. We note major contributions in French and German, but wherever possible, out of consideration for the reader, even these are cited in English translation.
TheHuman Economy
The dominant usage of the term economy since the late nineteenth century refers to the aggregate of goods and services bought and sold in a national territory: hence “the British economy”. Often the term is joined with a term meaning “people”, such as German Volkswirtschaft or Hungarian népgazdaság. This economy is quantifiable and production usually takes priority, as in key indicators such as “gross national productper capita”, but this may also be expressed as income. The two are linked by processes of exchange and distribution. All of these domains constitute the economists’ territory and theyare in turn often highly specialized (energy markets, foreign exchange, housing etc). Such an economy is conventionally divided into private and public sectors, where the market and the state hold sway respectively, setting profits from sales against taxes and welfare payments. Property rights have long been at the core of disputes over competing models of economic organization that once defined the battle lines in the Cold War; but this familiar division has eroded in recent decades and the line between public and private sectors is becoming blurred.
Within continental Europe, some traditions of economics continue to emphasize political order and regulation. An influential socialist traditionfocused on centralized planning, but this ceased to exist with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dominant tradition since the nineteenth century has grown out of English utilitarianism. It privileges free markets and individual maximization of “value” within budgetary constraints. Value is usually conceived of in terms of costs and benefits expressed in monetary terms. Whenever individuals are evidently not maximizingvalue in the market sense, as when they make gifts to family and friends or to charity for example, they are still held to be making choices to maximize utility, although economists do not claim to shed further light on what this mysterious substance might be. As we shall see, some economists have pushed “rational choice” into the most intimate domains, such as the family, arguing that their theory can yield a satisfying account of all exchanges, between and within generations. If economics is defined as the study of the choices people make and all action is held to follow from such rational choices,then this discipline evidently embraces the whole of human life and its evolution, even the evolution of the animal world. Economics would then explain not only our particular patterns of transacting with kin, but why we have the kinship systems or religions we do. Biology would be its only rival as a masterdiscipline; and exchange between the two is indeed flourishing today, for example in the field known as evolutionary economics.
When defined in this way, the approach from economics is conducive to formal, mathematical treatment at a sophisticated level; but, to the extent that it leaves preferences and underlying moral values unexplained, it is tautological. It dehumanizes the economy and removes the Volk from Volkswirtschaft. Our understanding of economy is very different, though no less broad in scope. The human economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) refers to well-being, to the satisfaction of all human needs – not just those that can be met through private market transactions, but also the need for public goods, such as education, security and a healthy environment, and for intangible qualities such as dignity that cannot be reduced to dollars spent per capita. We live in an era when market mechanisms (alwaysthe result of social construction, as we shall see, and never “free”) have been extended into new sectors, with the aim of increasing “economic efficiency”. But more people now realize that making a market for education is not morally neutral and often gives rise to misleading statistics, which obscure the reduction in quality that sets in when teachers are treated like any other provider of commercial services. We may agree that economy does indeed shape kinship and religiousinstitutions in the long run. But we are sceptical of evolutionary models grounded in notions of efficiency and abstract individual rationality, and argue instead for a more rounded approach to economic organization.