Towards a Comparative Science of the Economy — Defining Units of Analysis

Abstract

Studying economies across cultures is an increasingly challenging and urgent task. In a world in which jet-age technology and its products quite literally land upon stone-age cultures, factories are plunked down in the midst of farms and tropical paradises (Kottak, 1983), and the informal economy can become the primary source of livelihood (Halperin, n.d.), we must create new analytical tools for dealing with changing combinations of economic processes, with multiple survival strategies and with pluralism in both production and distribution processes. Economic anthropology has treated the agrarian sectors of the industrial United States (Chibnik, 1987; Halperin, 1987) as well as ‘the gardens of prehistory’ (Killion n.d.).

‘Goods are neutral, their uses are social; they can be used as fences or bridges.’ — Mary Douglas, The World of Goods (1979:12)