31 Chapter 7: Economics
Learning Objectives
• Define economic anthropology and identify ways in which economic anthropology differs from the field of Economics.
• Describe the characteristics of the three modes of production: domestic production, tributary production, and capitalist production.
• Compare reciprocity, redistribution, and market modes of exchange.
• Assess the significance of general purpose money for economic exchange.
• Evaluate the ways in which commodities become personally and socially meaningful.
• Use a political economy perspective to assess examples of global economic inequality and structural violence.
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One of the hallmarks of the human species is our flexibility: culture enables humans to thrive in extreme artict and desert environments, to make our homes in cities and rural settings alike. Yet amidst this great diversity there are also universals. For example, all humans, like all organisms, must eat. We all must make our living in the world, whether we do so through foraging, farming, or factory work. At its heart, economic anthropology is a study of livelihoods: how humans work to obtain the material necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter that sustain our lives. Across time and space, different societies have organized their economic lives in radically different ways. Economic anthropologists explore this diversity, focusing on how people produce, exchange, and consume material objects and the role that immaterial things such as labor, services, and knowledge play in our efforts to secure our livelihood.1 As humans, we all have the same basic needs, but understanding how and why we meet those needs—in often shared but sometimes unique ways—is what shapes the field of economic anthro-pology.
Economic anthropology is always in dialogue (whether implicitly or explicitly) with the discipline of economics.2 However, there are several important differences between the two disciplines. Perhaps most importantly, economic anthropology encompasses the production, exchange, con-sumption, meaning, and uses of both material objects and immaterial services, whereas contemporary economics fo-cuses primarily on market exchanges. In addition, economic anthropologists dispute the idea that all individual thoughts, choices, and behaviors can be understood through a narrow lens of rational, self-interested decision-making. When ask-ing why people choose to buy a new shirt rather than shoes, anthropologists, and increasingly economists, look beyond the motives of Homo economicus to determine how social, cultural, political, and institutional forces shape humans’ everyday decisions.3
As a discipline, economics studies the decisions made by people and businesses and how these decisions interact in the marketplace. Economists’ models generally rest on several assumptions: that people know what they want, that their economic choices express these wants, and that th