due in 5 hours

Whatever happened to economic anthropology?1

Chris Gregory

Archaeology and Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University

In the 1970s, economic anthropology, along with kinship and ecological anthropology, was

regarded as a core discipline in the teaching of anthropology. The centrality of all these

subjects was reflected in the debates of the time. For economic anthropology, understanding

the articulation of modes of production was the problem; the holy trinity—tribe, peasant,

capitalist—provided the key terms of the debate. These terms, and this problem, are history.

The discipline of anthropology has been de-cored over the past 30 years: economic anthro-

pology, kinship and ecological anthropology are not even on the agenda in many universities

today (ANU included). This presents us with a paradox because these academic trends are in

inverse proportion to the importance of contemporary developments in the economy, the

family and ecology as global problems facing humanity. This paradox must be addressed not

by arguing for a rehabilitation of the core subjects of the 1970s—those days are long gone—

but by taking a critical look at the implicit theories of value that inform anthropological

thinking about the economy, the family and ecology today. I shall argue that, along with

neoliberalism, ‘agency’ has been the key term of the new paradigm that emerged in the

1970s, that this paradigm is about to become history and that new ways of thinking about

the economy will have to emerge as we all become victims of the ‘financialisation’ of Europe,

the industrialisation of Asia and the desiccation of Australia.

INTRODUCTION

When the history of twentieth-century economic thought comes to be written, the

contribution of anthropologists to our understanding of the idea of the economy

will, I believe, stand out as something truly significant. I refer to that tradition

which begins, ethnographically speaking, with the pioneering research of Malinowski

and Firth and, theoretically speaking, with the work of Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins.

Indeed, it was this tradition of thought that attracted me to anthropology from eco-

nomics in the 1970s. Economic anthropology was where the action was then. It was

an exciting time of sparkling debates as scholars from different ethnographic regions

were united in a common theoretical goal of understanding the present by critiqu-

ing ideas from the past.

How things have changed! How fast they changed! No sooner had I got my job

here at ANU in 1983 than the debates of the 1970s were seen as ancient history and

new agendas were being proposed. In 1983, an anthropology major involved four

The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2009) 20, 285–300 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2009.00037.x

ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society 285

core subjects in the classic tradition of British Social Anthropology. These included

kinship, religion and ritual, political and economic anthropology. By the 1990s this

‘core’ was no more—a change that has occurred in universities everywhere. As for

ecological anthropology, the thriving sub-discipline in the 1960s, this was on the

decline in the fashion stakes even before economy and kinship.

While that post-war tradition is now long gone—and rightly so I should add—

it is of interest to me that the question of the economy is now back on the agenda.

This is the third international conference on the economy I have addressed in the

past eighteen months, a remarkable fact given that nothing of this kind has

happened for thirty years. This has caused me to ponder the question of whatever

happened to 1970s’ economic anthropology and what is happening today. Under-

standing the present is a notoriously difficult task. It is relatively easy to look back

over the past century and see what the main trends have been. It is also easy to look

ahead and to develop a doom-and-gloom scenario of the future, but the present is

much harder to grasp because, like goldfish in a bowl, the water we swim in is the

last thing we know about. It is, then, with some trepidation, that I approach the

question of whatever has happened to economic anthropology.

My argument, in brief, is not that interest in the economy has died out in

anthropology since the 1980s, but that a new idea of the economy was smuggled

into the discussion under a new label. A new paradigm emerged in the 1980s that

negated the pre-1970s tradition. As someone who has been ‘negated’ many times by

this new paradigm, I believe that I am in a unique position to be able to define it.

It is not my intention to develop a critique of this new paradigm of the economy.

My aim is simply to identify it before it, too, disappears from the radar. The immi-

nent fall of this paradigm will come about for the same reason that all intellectual

fashions come and go. This has nothing to do with the relentless progress of the sci-

entific method but because of the fact that political and economic changes in the

wider world pose new questions that render old paradigms obsolete. Anthropologi-

cal ideas about the economy, religion and ecology do not lead the agenda but

follow in the wake of bigger changes set in motion by the imperial powers.

Anthropological theories are not a simple reflection of these underlying political

forces but, like all theories, lag behind the times. I say this with some seriousness

because, as I have said before, understanding the present is notoriously difficult.

From my perspective, the anthropological approaches to the economy fall into three

phases: pre-1970s, the 1970s and post-1970s. I had the misfortune to come of aca-

demic age in the 1970s and to contribute to a paradigm that was over before it

began. But before I tell you why, let me begin with a quick sketch of the defining

characteristics of the paradigm that we in the class of the 1970s sought to deny.

EXCHANGE AND RECIPROCITY

The dominant paradigm in economic anthropology in the pre-1970 era was that

lineage of thought defined by Mauss (1925), Polanyi (1944), Lévi-Strauss (1949)

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and Sahlins (1972), among others. These thinkers synthesised the pioneering work

of ethnographers such as Malinowski (1922) and Firth (1929, 1939) to define a par-

adigm that shared a common theoretical language. The keyword of this paradigm

was reciprocity and the theories these scholars developed were specific variations on

the general theme of exchange. What united them was their opposition to the

notion of ‘natural economy’, an idea found in Aristotle’s writing on the economy

and developed by Adam Smith (1776), the father of Political Economy and also of

the labour theory of value.2

The concept of ‘reciprocity’ was an answer to Mauss’ question about the obliga-

tion to repay to a gift. The word itself gains popular currency with the theories of

Polanyi and Lévi-Strauss, but it is in Sahlins’s (1972) that the theory of reciprocity

reaches its highest point. Adam Smith’s ‘natural economy’ is found to be governed

by the cultural principles of positive reciprocity. Negative reciprocity, the unsociable

extreme, is the world of the market, capitalism and all things ‘bad’.3 With this nega-

tion of the idea of natural economy, the reciprocity paradigm reaches its zenith and

now itself becomes something to be negated.

PRODUCTION AND ARTICULATION

Sahlins’s book was published in 1972 but several of its essays were published in the

1960s, the decade when demonstrations against the Vietnam War were at their

highest. The economic and ideological consequences of the Vietnam War were pro-

found. It was the most expensive war in human history and there is a sense

in which we are still paying for it. It shaped the financial superstructure of the

global economy in the post-1970 era and unleashed the ideology of neoliberalism.

As I have devoted a chapter of my book Savage Money (Gregory 1997, ch. 8) to

this question let me briefly summarise my argument here.

Measured in terms of tonnes of gold, the cost of the war was around 300,000

tonnes. The United States of America paid for this by running down its stocks in

Fort Knox. However, it was these very stocks of gold that formed the basis of the

dollar-gold standard of fixed exchange rates. The United States paid for the war by

the time-honoured method of debasing the currency. This happened on 15 August

1971 when Nixon was forced to break the US promise to exchange gold for dollars

at the fixed rate of US$35 per ounce. Gold prices soared, which meant that gold-

holding developed countries gained and dollar-holding poor countries lost, thus

bringing about a massive redistribution of wealth on a scale never known before,

but one which passed largely unnoticed. The era of flexible exchange rates began on

this day and so did trade in the buying and selling of state-issued money. In other

words, state-issued paper emerged as a global commodity for the first time in eco-

nomic history. This was a massive victory for the free-market ideas of Milton Fried-

man and a massive defeat for the welfare-state ideas of Maynard Keynes. Thatcher

and Reagan, both Friedmanite disciples, were elected in 1979 and 1981, respectively

and the rest, as they say, is history.

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The impact of these changes on anthropological thought is yet to be assessed

but the legacy is there for all to see. As the distinguished philosopher Feyerabend

(1978: 155) famously put it in a 1978 article entitled ‘Marxist Fairytales from Aus-

tralia’, ‘Sydney has but one opera house, one arts centre, one zoo, one harbour, but

two philosophy departments’. He was referring to the University of Sydney but

what he did not notice was that it also had two Economics departments and one

Anthropology department that was split into two over the question of the funding

of the Tribal Research Centre in Northern Thailand, which some people believed

was a CIA-funded outfit to collect intelligence on counter-insurgency activities in

the highlands of Thailand. Although the truth or falsity of these claims is beyond

the point of this talk, what is beyond dispute is that the 1960s and 1970s were a

period of profound disruption both institutionally and intellectually.

This was the background to the rejection of the reciprocity paradigm in eco-

nomic anthropology. The keyword of the new paradigm was articulation. Theories

of articulation that developed were within a Marxist-inspired conceptual framework

that gave primacy to production over exchange. What the articulationalist opposed

was the denial of coevality that the reciprocity paradigm assumed.4 ‘What is Sahlins

up to?’ we asked. ‘He is bravely putting his body on the line in the streets of

Chicago demonstrating against US imperialism in Vietnam, but his head is in a

pre-imperialist era’. Anthropology of this kind was seen not only as the child of

imperialism,5 but a century behind the times in that it did not problematise the fact

of European economic conquest in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The new problem

was to understand the articulation of the modes of production, and the holy

trinity—Tribe, Peasant, Capitalism—were the conceptual tools we used to under-

stand exploitation, unequal exchange and conflict.

This paradigm was still-born. It was over before it started but it is only with the

benefit of hindsight that I can see this. The beginning of the end of this paradigm

was on 23 April 19756 when Ford announced the pullout of troops from Vietnam,

but its last gasps took another fifteen years.

CONSUMPTION AND AGENCY

The end of the Vietnam War era marked the end of the Age of Aquarius; young

revolutionaries of that era found themselves out of work as they had nothing to

oppose. Some old lefties7 found that the meaning of life lay in negating what they

previously stood for; meanwhile, those in the academy took different paths and

defined yet another paradigm. Some call it ‘post-modernism’, but I think that this

label is an empty swear word, a distracting red herring that leads us in the wrong

direction. The keyword that defines the new paradigm is agency.

This word agent is, of course, an ancient one but its use-value skyrockets in the

post-Vietnam era. The ANU library catalogue, for example, lists forty-two books

with the word ‘agency’ in the title. All of these were published after 1980 and most

use the word ‘agency’ in the modern theoretical sense of the word. A search on the

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database Anthroplit told the same story. I got 996 hits, of which 97 per cent were

published after the 1970s.

This tradition of thought has its origins in the work of Giddens and Bourdieu

and has branched off in many directions under the umbrella terms of ‘globalisation’

and ‘hybridity’. Insofar as economic anthropology is concerned it has seen consump-

tion replace production as the privileged economic concept and the rise of the ‘spirit’

of the commodity as the new problem of global value to be investigated. Like all

new paradigms, the rhetoric of negation was used as a means of self-definition of

this new one.

The problem now was not to understand the articulation of tribe, peasant and

capitalism, but the interaction of the local in the global and the global in the local

in a way that transforms the victims of early imperialism into agents in the new

post-imperialist era of globalisation. The popularisation of the paradigm within

anthropology owes much to the work of Ortner (1984) who was one of the first to

notice the emergence of agency as the keyword of a new debate. It took me much

longer to realise the significance of what had happened, but when the Journal of

Peasant Studies changed its name to the Journal of Agrarian Change8 in 2001 it

finally dawned on me that this was the administering of the last rites to the Marx-

ist-inspired thought of the articulation era. Now, it was not only down but out.

Along with it went the popularity of the term and the subject ‘economic anthropol-

ogy’ because, for many, it conjured up images of the now-discarded articulationist

paradigm.

This new agency paradigm has informed ethnographic research and debates in

economic anthropology over the past three decades and the results have been

impressive. The iconic figures of this new cultural economy are no longer the Mela-

nesian big man9 and his moka, but the poor West African sapeur whose rite of pas-

sage to manhood obliges him to take a journey from the streets of Brazzaville with

its cheap clothing to Paris where he must acquire a real haute couture wardrobe.10

This paradigm necessarily poses the question of how this agent indigenises moder-

nity. It also poses the question, ‘What is an agent?’

The neoclassical economists—the formalists as they are called in anthropol-

ogy—first developed an answer to this question in the 1870s and the word ‘agent’

has been a central concept for them ever since. The Friedmanite neoliberal econom-

ics is, therefore, the most influential branch of theory within the agency paradigm.11

Leading agency theorists such as Ortner and Douglas were well aware of its connec-

tions to neoliberal economics. As Ortner notes, the ‘model is that of an essentially

individualistic, and somewhat aggressive, actor, self-interested, rational, pragmatic,

and perhaps with a maximising orientation as well’ (Ortner 1984: 151). Her concern

was not so much to reject the notion but to modify and develop it by giving it a

cultural gloss.

So too it was with Mary Douglas. Her book, How Institutions Think, is explicitly

concerned to bring together the theory of rational individual action with the Durk-

heim–Fleck theory of collective action (Douglas 1986: 8). As the title of Douglas’s

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book suggests, the agency is not restricted to human agency.12 Subsequent theorists

have argued that commodities (Appadurai 1986), symbols (Wagner 1986), animals,

plants13 and even glaciers (Cruikshank 2005) have agency. The agency paradigm,

then, is committed to a theory of value that turns the labour theory of value on its

head: things as agents give value to people rather than the other way around.

The idea of agency necessarily implies the idea of victimage, but so concerned

have anthropologists been to assert that our informants have agency that we have

overlooked the fact of victimage. It strikes me as a paradox that the idea of agency

has risen to dominance in an era of globalisation when all of us have become

victims of the deeds of our recently deceased ancestors who started to warm things

up globally.

History tells us that the agency paradigm will not last forever. Given that it has

reigned for over thirty years, and given that the length of this reign compares

favourably with that of other paradigms such as evolutionary theory and functional-

ism, my guess is that the idea of agency as a dominant paradigm has not got long

to run.14

The existence of a dominant paradigm presupposes the coexistence of a number

of subordinate paradigms, and if economic anthropology as the name of a sub-

discipline has all but disappeared under the general banner of consumption and

agency, it has continued to thrive in the practice of ethnographers working on spe-

cific regional problems related to economy, ecology and kinship. There is little theo-

retical unity to this work, but given the diversity of problems confronted

by different people in different parts of the world today this should not come as a

surprise.

Economic anthropology used to have two ‘sacred’ field sites—one in Melanesia,

the other in Central America—and the empirical data gathered from these sites set

the original theoretical agenda for the sub-discipline. Malinowski conducted seminal

fieldwork in both of these areas and the respective subjects of his investiga-

tions—gift exchange in Melanesia, rural marketing and commodity exchange in

America—revealed as much about the socio-economic concerns of people in both

areas as it did about Malinowski’s interests. This regional division provided the

exemplars for the old distinction between tribal economy (Sahlins 1968) and peas-

ant economy (Wolf 1966). Recent economic history has rendered this distinction in

comparative economy obsolete but there is a sense in which it has also entrenched

it, because the old dichotomy has been the basis on which new regionally specific

questions have emerged. The title of Akin and Robbins’ edited collection, Money

and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia (1999), exemplifies contem-

porary concerns of the Melanesianist, whilst Cook’s Understanding Commodity Cul-

tures: Explorations in Economic Anthropology with Case Studies from Mexico (2004)

captures the essence of the contemporary Americanist’s preoccupations. The ethno-

graphic and theoretical literature from both areas has grown so rapidly over the past

five decades that regional specialisation has become necessary, as Scott’s scholarly

review of the intellectual history of the prominent anthropologists who have written

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290 ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society

on the commodity economy of Central America reveals. His concern is ‘to set the

groundwork for new theoretical approach to economic anthropology’ (p. 11) and

he does this by means of a thoroughgoing critique of the extant ethnography, one

informed by his lifetime’s work in the area. His work invites comparison with other

recent theoretical contributions to the area by Gudeman (2008), Wilk (1996) and

others. These contributions do not even pretend to address the specificities of the

Oceanic debates where issues of ‘customary’ land tenure and development have

become the centre of much policy debate15 alongside neotraditional debates about

attempts by the state to control the flourishing trade in shell money, whale’s teeth

and the like.16

Oceania and America are no longer the ‘sacred’ sites anymore. Chris Hann and

Caroline Humphrey have carved out a new terrain in Eastern Europe. This began

with their pioneering work on collective farms in Hungary (Hann 1980) and the

USSR (Humphrey 1983) respectively, and has continued apace over the past

twenty-five years as they have become heads of large research teams of young schol-

ars who have become specialists on the economies of post-socialist states (Hann

2002, 2003; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Hann et al. 2005). Meanwhile, work on

the economic anthropology of Africa and Asia has continued to flourish and create

yet further regional sub-fields of specialist interest.17 Theoretical interests, too, have

sub-divided and become specialised. There is now a large body of theoretical litera-

ture on the specificities of the ‘Indian’ gift, for example (Heim 2004).

If there is one topic that brings all this disparate literature together then it is

money. Keith Hart has almost single-handedly devoted himself to the rehabilitation

of economic anthropology by pursuing this theme with characteristic boldness in

his recent book, Money in an Unequal World (2000). This is nothing less than an

anthropological analysis of the present moment in world economic history, which

Hart sees as caught between the institutions of agrarian civilisation and a machine

revolution. This is associated with rapidly growing socio-economic inequality on

the one hand and the transformation of paper money into electronic digits on the

other; but, he argues, the key to overcoming the former problem is to be found in

the opportunities that the latter presents for repersonalising economic life in a

world of cheap information.

Few anthropologists have followed Hart’s lead. Instead, the topic of money and

finance has led to the creation of yet another ethnographic field site, a move that

has taken economic anthropologists from the peripheries of capitalism to its dead

centre at Wall Street in New York, the City in London and the Tokyo financial

markets. We now have ethnographic studies on topics like financial derivatives

whose mystical workings make formerly exotic exchanges like kula seem intimately

familiar.18

This, then, is what I see has happened to economic anthropology in the post-

1970 era: the development of a new theory of value using the conceptual language

of agency and consumption on the one hand, and the ethnographic conquest of the

globe on the other. The former has constructed the semblance of a theoretical unity

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whilst the latter has divided the sub-discipline into ethnographic regions with its

own specialist discourses that share little in common. The dominant paradigm is, of

course, a minor variation on a general theme that has permeated most disciplines

in the social sciences. History tells us that dominant paradigms do not last forever,

as key terms become debased of semantic value through overuse and overextension.

Given that the referent for the term ‘agency’ has been expanded from its primary

referent Homo sapiens to include other animals along with vegetables, minerals and

even ideas, it would seem that, by this criterion, the end is nigh for this paradigm.

DISTRIBUTION AND … (?)

What will happen to economic anthropology in the future? It is clear that economic

anthropology, considered as a general theory of the interrelationship between econ-

omy, kinship and ecology from a subaltern19 point of view can never go away; but it

is also clear from the forgoing discussion that the particular theoretical form this

study takes will vary over time along with historical changes in the political economy

at large. The dominant theoretical paradigms in economic anthropology will also

reflect broader historical changes in socio-cultural thought because a small sub-

discipline like anthropology is a trend-taker rather than a trend-setter. These histori-

cal changes have affected, and will continue to affect, the dominant terms of debate.

Exchange, we have seen, emerged as the privileged concept in the pre-1970 era;

this was replaced by consumption in the post-1970 era with production having a brief

reign in the Marxist-influenced interregnum. Reflections on value in the pre-1970 era

focussed on the ‘norm of reciprocity’ and ‘obligation’ in kinship-based societies and

opposed this to ‘negative reciprocity’ in the so-called market economies. From the

perspective of the neo-Marxist, ‘negative reciprocity’ is another way of talking about

surplus value and capitalist exploitation, values that are not just logically opposed to

the ‘norm of reciprocity’ but in a relation of political domination over them. The

post-1970 paradigm privileged consumption and culture,20 freed the victims of capi-

talist imperialism from their fate by giving them agency and some freedom to choose

their own lifestyle and, in so doing, were able to develop new insights into the

human condition of the subaltern in the late twentieth century. I make no value

judgement when I assert that this theory of value has a parallel-cousin-type relation-

ship to the neoclassical economic theory of value because it is equally obvious that

the value theory that rose to dominance in the 1960s and 1970s had a similar rela-

tionship to Marx’s labour theory of value. These claims are empirical assertions

which, from the point of view of the leading theorists of the time, are obvious, for

their explicit intention was to modify and develop the respective theories of Marx

and Friedman.

The question now arises as to what will become of economic anthropology for,

as I have argued, the dominance of the agency paradigm seems to be coming to an

end. What are the keywords of the emerging paradigm? What ideas will replace

consumption and agency as the new terms of debate? I do not know, but on the

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assumption that anthropological theory is a little behind the economic times, then

distribution should become the privileged economic concept. The past fifty years has

seen massive redistributions of wealth not just from poor countries to the rich fol-

lowing the breakdown of Bretton Woods, but also from poor to rich within every

country. The iconic figure of this era is the 30 million dollar man, the top executive

who writes his own pay cheque. Keith Hart’s (2000) focus on money in an unequal

world is, I believe, on target. So too, perhaps, is his argument about the ‘repersonal-

isation’ of economic relationships that the internet revolution offers.

But what should become the dominant paradigm on theoretical grounds is one

thing, while what will actually become the dominant paradigm is quite another.

This is because the emergence of a dominant paradigm is the subject of forces

beyond the control of a single academic or even a group of academics. The history

of ideas in social science does not progress according to the principle that good

ideas drive out the bad; nor is it the case that some Greshman-type law operates to

ensure that the bad drives out the good. New paradigms have their origin in new

questions. These questions do not fall from the sky; they arise from the prevailing

politico-economic situation people find themselves in.21 Negation of the ideas of

the past plays a role too but, by definition, a negative one. The clues to the emer-

gence of a new paradigm are to be found in the new terms of debate that arise from

time to time. Ortner, as I argued before, was perceptive enough to realise that

‘agency’ was the new term of the post-1970s debate and she did much to popularise

the term in anthropology. One recent neologism that is gaining currency is ‘finan-

cialisation’ and this term may be indicative of something significant that is happen-

ing to the economy at large.

Dore is credited with coining the term ‘financialisation’ in his Stock Market

Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism (2000: 2–6). He introduced the term to describe

what he perceived to be a new phase in the development of capitalism: the increas-

ing dominance of the finance industry in the sum total of economic activity and

the pursuit of shareholder value as the main objective of corporate executives. One

recent commentator on Dore’s work finds it:

really strange that, while there is a heated discussion on liberalisation, neoliberalism,

privatisation, etc., the most important dimension of globalisation—financialisation—is

almost completely ignored. Why this is done is a mystery. The recent global crisis

given rise by sub-prime mortgages in America has underlined that, without looking

into the history of the rise and proliferation of financialisation, it is difficult to under-

stand the crisis and its implications (Mishra 2007).

What the word captures is not so much the fact of the importance of the finance

sector but its increasing dominance in recent years. The evidence for this, as Mishra

(2007) notes,

… is indicated by the fact that the share of the financial sector in total corporate profit was 14 per cent in 1981 and it reached 39 per cent in just two decades. This has led to

greater prosperity for financial middlemen and corporate elite. Their close connection

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has enabled them to influence country’s socio-economic life. To co-opt the new

entrants to the service of a company, stock options are offered so that they have inter-

est in pushing up the value of its shares.

Perhaps the most telling case for taking the notion seriously is the fact that the

international trade union movement does. This is because financialisation has bro-

ken the link between wages and industrial productivity and forged a new one

between executive salaries and share price. Unions are concerned with the welfare

of industrial workers and they see that the enhanced importance of financial capital,

as opposed to ‘real’ or industrial capital, in determining the rhythm and returns

from investments as having profound consequences for their members and society

at large. A recent report by the International Union of Food Workers (IUF 2007),

for example, argues that the focus on maximisation of shareholder value and pur-

suit of short-term, high rates of returns of around 15–20 per cent are unsustainable

in the long run. They see it as leading to declining real rates of investment, rising

dividends to shareholders as managerial pay is linked to short-term stock market

movements. This has seen the injection of enormous amounts of money into pri-

vate equity funds that set targeted rates of return of 25 per cent. The private equity

funds buy companies and de-list them to avoid the regulatory framework that

constrains listed companies. They restructure them by slashing costs, retrenching

workers and maximising borrowings and then re-sell them. The consequences of

this, as the unions see it, is the expropriation of industrial capital stock and rising

levels of socio-economic inequality.

There are, of course, many different interpretations of the meaning of

‘financialisation’.22 Crotty (2003), for example, draws attention to what he calls the

‘neoliberal paradox’: the fact that intense competition makes it impossible for non-

financial capital to achieve high earnings at the most, but that financial markets

demand that they generate ever-increasing earnings or face falling stock market

prices and the threat of hostile takeover. Whatever way one looks at it though, the

global trends in capital movement over the past three to four decades are there for

all to see: the ‘city’ in London has doubled in size as the United Kingdom has

de-industrialised. In Asia, on the other hand, industrialisation is developing at

breakneck speed, with China and India leading the way. Agriculture, the leading

economic sector in Asia for millennia, has lost its economic and cultural status; its

percentage share of gross domestic product has fallen dramatically in most Asian

countries. This has had profound socio-cultural consequences as the young leave

the country in droves in search of work and adventure in the cities and overseas;

meanwhile farming is maintained by an aging population. This has had, and will

continue to have, a profound impact on the ethnographic work of anthropologists.

Multi-sited ethnographic research in urban areas, often of an international kind, is

now the default method.

There is, of course, a long history of urban-based work and some of the pio-

neering work of economic anthropologists on this topic dates back decades—Hart’s

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(1973) classic study of the informal economy being one such example—and work

of this kind will have to be revisited and revised in the light of the changing condi-

tions today.

In my opinion the classic definition of the economy that Polanyi (1957: 250)

gave us—‘that the human economy is an instituted process’—will have to be

redefined and modified to suit the new conditions that have developed over the past

few decades. This definition of our subject matter has served us well. Generations of

economic anthropologists and economic historians have used it to guide their

empirical research and to think in a new way about the economic data they have

collected. It has enabled them to get beyond the formal aspects of economic analysis

to a consideration of its substantive features: the historically specific ways in which

the economy is embedded in social relations between people. These substantive fea-

tures of the economy as a human process are not in question; it is the qualitative

changes in the substantive features that need rethinking.

For Polanyi (1944: ch. 4), a trinity of institutions defined the ‘substantivism’

of his approach: the self-regulating market, the state and the moiety. The market

provides the institutional structure for the principle of money making to flourish,

the institution of the state gives us redistribution and the exogamous moiety pro-

vides the institutional structure for the reciprocal exchange of gifts. This concep-

tual toolbox has proven to be very useful, for not only does it have great

generality, it admits of fine-tuning to handle culturally specific cases from the

kingdoms of Dahomey to the chieftainships of Fiji, and from the exogamous

moieties of the Australian Aborigines to the clans of highland PNG. The problem

with these tools is that they cannot handle the non-institutional forms that have

emerged today.

An institution is a form of social organisation that is, by definition, above and

beyond people; as such, institutions outlive people but, as historical entities, can

arise, pass away and ⁄ or change over time. Take Polanyi’s concept of the self-regulat- ing market, for example. The centrepiece of this institution in the twentieth century,

he correctly argued, was the gold standard (Polanyi 1944: ch. 1). Different eras have

employed different metallic standards of value of one form or another—silver stan-

dards, gold standards, bimetal standards and the US$-gold standard. Their principal

function was to facilitate a measure of fixity in exchange rates. The Bretton Woods

system, founded after the Second World War, was the most recent institutional

basis of the world market. However, the breakdown of this system in 1971 turned

the world market into the part non-institutional form we struggle to understand

today using a neologism such as ‘financialisation’. Flexible exchange rates provided

the grounds for the speculative trade in currencies on a scale never seen before in

world history; the development of computers enabled the development of new

forms of money of such complexity that they are quite literally beyond the grasp of

the human imagination.

The institution of the state has gone through profound transformation too. The

era of ‘functionalism’ in anthropology flourished under the protective umbrella of a

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ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society 295

strong colonial state whose presence in shaping the lives of the people anthropolo-

gists study was not always acknowledged or understood. Today, anthropologists

working in Africa and Oceania have no choice but to acknowledge the presence of

a post-colonial state often described as ‘failed’ or ‘failing’. Chabal and Daloz’s

(1999) controversial Africa Works: The Political Instrumentalization of Disorder, sug-

gests a need to move from studying the functionalism of order to the pragmatic

workings of disorder.

The third institution in Polanyi’s trinity, the moiety as the foundation of the

dual organisational structure that enables reciprocity to flourish, is becoming

increasingly irrelevant in today’s world where the transnational family has emerged

as the social form to be reckoned with. The classically bifurcated village in Amazo-

nia or Oceania can still be found but many of its younger residents have left—some

permanently, some temporarily—to pursue employment and education in the cities

and abroad. The same is true of those villagers whose kinship organisations were

dominated by clans and lineages of some kind or other. These transformations have

weakened family ties in some cases but strengthened them in others. The social

cement that has united families in the latter case has been money, usually in the

form of remittances. What is of significance about remittances is not that they are

new but that, like financialisation, their importance has grown in recent years. In

2004, for example, Indian remittances totalled US$21.7 billion, the largest in the

world. Singh (2006: 375) argues that the ‘emergence of a transnational Indian family

also means the development of a special kind of transnational family money, where

money is equated with or measured against filial care’.

My own work (Gregory 1997) on the ‘family money’ of migrating Indian mer-

chants leaves me in no doubt that non-institutional, kindred-like kinship structures

are the key to understanding this new ‘transnational’ family. Among the Halbi

speakers of Bastar this kindred-type grouping is called a ‘brotherhood’ (dadabhai).

This is an ego-centric grouping rather than socio-centric grouping of the kind that

defines the sense of the word ‘institution’. In other words, it is a relative grouping

whose shape and size varies depending upon the selected ego, rather than an

absolute grouping defined by some bird’s eye view above and beyond people. Socio-

logically speaking, the brotherhood is defined by the historically contingent

circumstances people find themselves in. For a merchant family, the us-group is

defined by those among whom the elder brother (‘ego’) decides to share trading

capital. Generally speaking, kinship distance is the deciding factor but the meaning

of this notion is determined by the pragmatics of face-to-face relations in daily life.

The transnational family today obviously assumes a myriad of different forms

that only empirical research can define, but we can only hope to understand this if

we relinquish some old modes of thought. Perhaps the key proposition that needs

revising is the ancient one that money-making begins on the boundaries of kinship-

based economies because, in the case of the transnational family, monetary tran-

sactions are not opposed to kinship, they help define and reproduce it. This is not

to say that the old theories are wrong; but it does mean that when we broaden

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296 ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society

Polanyi’s definition of the economy to include non-instituted economic processes

we must allow for apparent paradoxes of this kind. The study of economic anthro-

pology is ahead of us, not behind, but we must look back if we are to move for-

ward. Economics has the ancient question of value at its core. Economic

anthropology has broadened our conception of this problem by drawing attention

to the coevality of contradictory value regimes. Economic history reminds us of the

ever-changing nature of the problem, a challenge that anthropologists need to, and

are beginning to,23 confront.

NOTES

1 This is a revised version of a paper presented to the Australian Anthropological Society

Annual Conference, ‘Transforming Economies, Changing States,’ Canberra, 31 October

to 2 November 2007. Keith Hart and Francesca Merlan have provided useful comments

on an earlier draft. Jon Altman and Nicolas Peterson have helped in finding some refer-

ences. The anonymous referees provided insightful comments and questions. The author

thanks them all. The usual caveat applies.

2 ‘Labour … is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is

their nominal price’ (Smith 1776: 29).

3 ‘Indicative ethnographic terms include ‘‘haggling’’ or ‘‘barter’’, ‘‘gambling’’, ‘‘chicanery’’,

‘‘theft’’, and other varieties of seizure’ (Sahlins 1972: 195).

4 Fabian (1983: 31) defined this denial as ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place

the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of

anthropological discourse’.

5 As Kathleen Gough (1969: 128) famously put it: ‘modern anthropology, as a university

discipline, is a child of Western capitalist imperialism’.

6 An economic historian might see the relevant date as 15 August 1971 when Nixon was

forced to close the gold window that suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into

gold at the fixed rate of US$35 per ounce.

7 Prominent among this group in Australia are Ron Brunton, Keith Windschuttle and

Paddy McGuiness.

8 See Bernstein and Byres (2001) for a full discussion of this name change.

9 I refer here to Ongka, the big man whose fame owes much to his book (Strathern 1979)

and to the ethnographic film of his ‘big moka’ (Nairn and Strathern 1983).

10 As described by Friedman (1994) in his fascinating study.

11 Milton Friedman is famous for his textbook account of price theory (1962), his theory

of money (Friedman and Schwartz 1963) and his argument for flexible exchange rates

(Friedman 1953), among many other writings.

12 Becker—who won a Nobel Prize in Economics ‘for having extended the domain of

microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including

nonmarket behaviour’—argues that neoclassical economists’ model of the economic

agent is applicable not only ‘to persons from all walks of life’ (ix) but also to non-

human forms of biological life as well because ‘nonhumans as well as humans allocate

scarce resources while competing in various situations’ (x). In other words, his analysis

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ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society 297

extends beyond homo sapiens to include the great apes; and beyond primates in general

to include birds and fish.

13 The extension of agency to animals, vegetables and minerals is part of a global move-

ment called ‘deep ecology’. Ferry (1992) provides an informative history and penetrating

critique of the ideological roots of this movement.

14 It will, of course, persist as a subordinate paradigm along with structuralism, and other

previously dominant paradigms.

15 See, for example, Fingleton (2005) for a spirited attack on the neoliberal agenda to pri-

vatised land in the Pacific. Sutton (2003) is a comprehensive review of the situation in

Australia.

16 In PNG, for example, moves have been made to convert the shell money of the Tolai

into legal tender (Post Courier 1999).

17 The essay would become a long reading list if an attempt were made to survey this liter-

ature. It suffices to note the work of leading scholars, such as Jane Guyer on West Afri-

can economic history and anthropology (see http://anthropology.jhu.edu/Jane_Guyer/

index.html) and Jonathon Parry’s contribution to the theory of the Indian gift as well as

his recent ethnographic work on steel workers in central India (see http://www.lse.ac.uk/

collections/anthropology/whosWho/parry.htm).

18 Maurer (2006) has reviewed this literature and made an important contribution of his

own to our understanding of Islamic banking (Maurer 2005).

19 This, historically, has been the perspective taken by anthropologists since the beginning;

the elite perspective is an equally valid point of view to take and Marcus (1983) has been

a pioneer on this front.

20 Weber associated production with class and consumption with culture in the following

way: ‘one might say that ‘‘classes’’ are stratified according to their relations to the pro-

duction and acquisition of goods; whereas ‘‘status groups’’ are stratified according to the

principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘‘styles of life’’ ’

(Gerth and Wright Mills 1948).

21 The question of the resurgence of interest in economic anthropology in recent years

admits of no simple answer. It is one thing to observe what has happened, quite

another to explain why. An historical study that located the recent history of ideas

within its broader political and economic context would be needed to develop some

plausible hypotheses.

22 The Wall Street crash is happening as I prepare the final draft of this paper for publica-

tion. If the remarks of the pundits can be relied on, this event could very well signal the

end of the era of financialisation.

23 As evidenced by the recent upsurge of interest in the value (Graeber 2001; Gudeman

2008; Pedersen 2008).

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