Economics and Anthropology

Molly Roth

From the inception of the discipline of anthropology, ethnographic monographs have dealt with the economies of the people under discussion as a matter of course. The evolutionists were fundamentally interested in levels of technology and environmental “adaptations,” and functionalists interpreted all social systems in terms of the satisfaction of basic human needs. Subsequently, anthropologists influenced by Marx would see a given society's “mode of production” as determinant, at least in the last instance, of politics, law, and ideology. Even though none of these theoretical paradigms dominates the field today, it is generally accepted that compelling accounts of social and symbolic behavior must relate them to the material organization of society. Ironically, it appears that economic anthropology loses relevance as a subdiscipline as the larger discipline concerns itself with economics. Malinowski's study of the Trobriand Islanders set the tone for an anthropological approach to economic phenomena with his functionalist analysis of ...

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