Economic anthropology

Economic anthropology studies how people produce, exchange, distribute, and consume goods and services across societies, emphasizing their social and cultural settings.

Substantivism: An approach that studies economic activity as embedded in social institutions and cultural relations. It defines economic activity through its social organization rather than universal market logic.
Bronisław Malinowski: A Polish-British anthropologist known for extended fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. His account of the kula exchange made ceremonial exchange central to economic anthropology.
Gift economy: An economic arrangement in which goods and services circulate through giving and social obligation. Gift exchange exposes how material transfers can create enduring bonds and duties.
Homo economicus: A model of a person who makes consistent choices to maximize personal utility. It represents the universal optimizing actor that many ethnographic accounts complicate.
Development anthropology: The study of development policies and interventions through anthropological methods and perspectives. Economic anthropology helps assess how development projects meet local livelihoods and institutions.
Formalism: An approach that applies models of rational choice and resource allocation across economic settings. It challenges substantivism by treating economic reasoning as broadly comparable across societies.
Marcel Mauss: A French sociologist and anthropologist whose work examined gifts, obligations, and social ties. His theory of the gift shaped analysis of exchange beyond market transactions.
Potlatch: A ceremonial feast practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, involving giving and public display of wealth. Its competitive giving illustrates how distribution can establish status and political authority.
Neoclassical economics: An economic tradition that explains choices through preferences, scarcity, and marginal allocation. Its abstract models provide a contrast to culturally situated accounts of economic life.
Globalization: The intensification of connections among people, economies, and institutions across the world. It makes transnational flows and local responses central objects of economic ethnography.

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