Paradigms for Studying Economies across Cultures

Abstract

The analysis of economies across cultures has been grounded in economic anthropology, a subfield of anthropology that deals with the entire range of economies and cultures found in the prehistoric, historic and ethnographic records.¹ If we think of economic anthropology in this broad sense, then it is the subfield with the greatest potential for creating a cross-cultural science of the economy. Such a science would be able to describe, explain, and, perhaps, eventually to predict pattern, variability and change in economic processes and systems through time and across cultures.