Course title: Economic Anthropology

Course code: 203

An Assignment on:

1. Economic Anthropology
2. Development and Economic Anthropology:
The Contributions of Economic anthropology to
International development practice

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Jannatul Naiym Motiur Rahman
Lecturer, Roll no: 19123639
Department of Anthropology Department of Anthropology
Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University
Trishal, Mymensingh. Trishal, Mymensingh.

Date of Submission: 25th September 2021

 Economic Anthropology
In order to understand what economic anthropology is, let‟s first know what Economics is.
Economics is a social science concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of
goods and services. It studies how individuals, businesses, governments, and nations make
choices about how to allocate resources. Economics focuses on the actions of human beings,
based on assumptions that humans act with rational behavior, seeking the most optimal level of
benefit or utility. The building blocks of economics are the studies of labor and trade. Since there
are many possible applications of human labor and many different ways to acquire resources, it
is the task of economics to determine which methods yield the best results.

Economics can generally be broken down into macroeconomics, which concentrates on the
behavior of the economy as a whole, and microeconomics, which focuses on individual people
and businesses.

Now let‟s discuss what economic anthropology is. Economic anthropology is study of societies
where people provide the material goods and often provides services. Typically, economic
processes have divided into production, distribution, circulation and consumption. Although the
categories themselves are a product of scholarly Western tradition, these analytical categories
respond to observable social interaction in all societies. Many of the elements present in Western
economy, such as, money and a market system, were absent in the economic life of primitive
peoples and that‟s the place where economic anthropology mainly focuses on.

There have been some debates in economic anthropology over (a) the universal applicability of
western generated categories of analysis, (b) the question of value, (c) The question of history
and connectedness between polities and (d) weight of culture in economic processes.

The main debate took place between those anthropologists who considered that the postulates of
marginalist economics, that is, the rational (optimizing) allocation of (scarce) resources between
alternative uses, were of universal application (Firth 1970); and those anthropologists who,
following Polanyi (1957), thought that the theory of rational action in regard to economic
decision making was only valid in the context of Western market economy, and that a real
definition of the economy should be meaningful in any society whatever its process of allocation.

The question of value is a function of exchange, of the need to reach some equivalency through
comparison. Some aspects of value have constituted constant sources of debate within
anthropology.

Another issue that became increasingly central was the need to think historically about the
transformation of social relations and the need to study the interconnection between different
societies through time. These problems were especially salient to those anthropologists
influenced by dependency and world system theories, by European Marxist anthropology, and by
what came to be known as the political economy perspective in anthropology (Roseberry 1988).
The classical three categories of production, distribution and consumption, will be followed
in order to present briefly the main concepts and theoretical developments that have unfolded
within economic anthropology.

Production:

Production generally is understood to be the human transformation of matter, through work, into
some useful, consumable good. Sometimes, as in foraging and hunting, human work uses very
simple technology to select and get whatever food is available in the environment. In most
societies, the process of production requires the use of complex technology and the design of
cooperative labor processes. Cultural meanings attached to concrete tasks and} or collective or
personal identities such as gender, age, caste, or ethnic group also contribute to shape work
processes.

Distribution:

The concept of distribution refers to the allocation of goods between different individuals or
groups, while the concept of circulation refers to the movement of goods. Economic
anthropology has developed a typology of forms of distribution that was proposed originally by
Polanyi (1957). The concept of reciprocity had an early start in Mauss ‟ 1923–4 (1968) essay on
the „gift‟. ciprocity. The concept of redistribution as an institutionalized process refers to
centralized polities that concentrate goods through tribute or taxation systems and reassign them
later between groups, individuals, and specific domains.

Consumption:

Consumption can be defined simply as the use of a good or service. Use sometimes implies the
destruction of the good and precludes further use; otherwise, a good can be used in multiple
ways, successively or simultaneously by different persons. The allocation of food to different
ends among household members traditionally has been the focus of attention. Gender and age
biases that seriously affect the intake of nutrients of certain members of a society have been
studied. Issues of power, of cultural and long-term institutional constraints have come to the
forefront as ethnographic research has explored the actual processes of consumption (Mintz
1986).

Suggestive contributions have been made by anthropologists studying nature. They point to the
methodological need to go beyond the duality nature} society in the study of human}
environment interaction. Ethnographic research also underscores the blurring of the natural}
artificial boundaries, as biotechnologies become capable of producing life while
commoditization reaches nature in unprecedented ways (marketing organs, cells, genetic
material). Groundbreaking concepts are bound to emerge from these new realities. Focus on the
informal sector of the economy has also contributed a major breakthrough by expanding the
concept of „work.‟ Research on informal relations (economic or otherwise) is bound to prove
fruitful as the realities of flexible production, the weakening of the nation-state model, the
informational revolution, and massive population movements point to the increasing value of
personal networks in the structuring of contemporary societies. The discussion between
formalists and substantivists did not end, but fizzled out. There is a discrepancy at the heart of
this debate that was never fully resolved, between distinct scientific visions: one deductive and
formal (formalism) and the other empirical and inductive (substantivism) (Kaplan, 1976).
Although these ideas can be found in earlier anthropologists, the fundamental positions can in
fact be traced to a much older debate, that of the Methodenstreit (the German word for the
“method dispute”), the controversy around economic methodology that started in the 1880s and
lasted for more than a decade between the Austrian and German (Historical) Schools. The debate
was concerned with the place of general theory in the social sciences and the use of history to
explain the dynamics of human action.
DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF
ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY TO INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE

Introduction

The international development discipline started taking shape after World War II. This particular
discipline had a goal to reduce world poverty by stimulating growth and raising living standards,
especially in newly independent countries. Anthropology, which seeks to understand societies
and cultures throughout the world, is well placed to address questions about development. By
contextualizing economic systems in relationship to their political, social, and cultural
environments, anthropology considering economies in isolation from the rest of society. All the
attention was directed at inequality and spreading benefits more widely after it became clear that
economic growth alone did not lead to improvement for all. Achieving better living standards
means way more than economic growth and increased equality has been recognized the field
recently. Whoever wants to understand the societies and culture throughout the world is well
placed to address questions about the development. By contextualizing economic systems in
relationship to their political, social, and cultural environments, anthropology avoids considering
economies in isolation from the rest of the society. Moreover, this chapter describes how the
contexts, concepts and the methods of economic anthropology, sub disciplines of economic
systems, have contributed to international development.

Economic Anthropology

Economic development is an important focus of anthropological work in rural and urban

communities around the world, and in this volume the contributors offer expert analyses on the
theory and practice of development. A contemporary society in which the dominant mode of
exchange is the market is primarily studied in economics. Economic anthropology is the use of
anthropological tools to understand diverse structures of production, distribution, exchange and
consumption. Anthropologists seek to understand economic systems and economic behavior that
may follow rules different from those in contemporary market-based economies. There are three
different paradigms (social, self-interest and cultural models) that economic anthropologists have
used to understand economic structures and behavior.

Social Models

Social models focus on groups, the standard disciplinary concern of anthropologists (Wilk and
Cliggett 2007:83-115). Groups are focused on social models starting from the assumption that
human being are social animal, they live and act in groups.
Economy or societies, none of them are the aggregate of individual behavior, but something
greater with its own logic and rules. There are two major varieties of social models, these are
following:

1. Social-structural model

2. Political-economic model

Social-structural model:

The social-structural model is the way of social life as a source of harmony and strength where
the human society depends on cooperation and in turn it requires suppressing self interest in the
goals of the groups. The values of society that shaped and reinforced through human interaction,
enhanced the conditions that maintained societal existence, that‟s how social systems existed in
an equilibrium that privileged preservation over change.

Political-economic model:

The political-economic model focuses on societal conflict and inequality. The unequal
distribution of private property across classes is the basic source of conflict in this political-
economic model. Mode of production structured the inequality which facilitates or constrains
access to resources including land, labor, and capital. Political struggle over distribution of
resources and power took place between classes because social class was the primary form of
differentiation within a society.

The Self-interest Model

The self-interest model focuses is on the individual as a rational decision-maker. It allocates

scare resources to alternative goals which overlaps substantially with the approach of
contemporary microeconomics. Utility is the primary goal in contemporary economic models.
Anything that brings satisfaction to and individual is generally familiar as utility. Contemporary
economists do not recognize the utility as same as money and often measured it in monetary
terms, such as, maximizing the profit. Self-interest model has attracted many economic
anthropologists because of their concern about strong determinism of social models. Differences
and conflict within societies and people‟s manipulation of social and cultural norms are showed
in empirical research.

Formalist-substantivist debate over whether analyst should privilege a social model that focused
and constrained human choice or whether they should privilege choice making self-interested
individual and this particular formalist-substantivist debate dominated economic anthropology in
mid-twentieth century. The self-interest model and some formal analytic methods are used by
many economic anthropologists today and at the same time they are working on development
and social change. They also use social-structural model and political-economic mode
simultaneously that show how self-interested people are being influenced by social and political
economic circumstances.

The cultural Model

The cultural model/the cultural economic model is the third paradigm which is rooted in the
work of max weber who sought to understand the ideas and values that motivated actions of
people. Symbolic communication and systems of meaning is focused on the cultural modal by
the cultural economists, such as, Weber concentrated on the religious beliefs which provided
shared motivations. For example, Weber is best known for his essay on the new ethic of secular
asceticism introduced by the Protestant religion, which permitted the accumulation and
reinvestment of economic resources fundamental to the growth of capitalism (Weber 2005). The
cultural model is found primarily within interpretative anthropology within contemporary
anthropology draws attention to values and symbolic systems as the foundation of meaning and
action. Interpretative anthropology has been little used by economic anthropologists or
development practitioners in part because it offers few strategies for intervention while it has
become important for the discipline of anthropology as a whole. Self-interest models might
suggest how incentives could be modified; social models would propose structures to change.
Cultural models suggest that values and how people think may need to be changed directly. The
idea that backward cultures create conditions for underdevelopment has been reinforced by the
cultural mode, in use. For example, Weber is best known for his essay on the new ethic of
secular asceticism introduced by the Protestant religion, which permitted the accumulation and
reinvestment of economic resources fundamental to the growth of capitalism (Weber 2005).

Conclusion

Economic anthropologists who work in the development field use social models and self-
interested models or sometimes they combine both. Questioning the dominance of economic
models that view individuals as maximizers, development anthropologists offer a distinctive
contribution to development studies as they use social models or a combination of social and
self-interest models so far.