The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture

The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture. Stephen Gudeman. Williston, VT: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 189 pp.

In the social sciences, economics has long been viewed as one of the more methodologically elegant and theoretically driven disciplines that attempt to explain human behavior. Stephen Gudeman seeks to moderate this perspective by developing a cross-cultural model of economies that highlights insights from economic anthropology. His goal is to broaden our understanding of material life beyond that of conventional market theory by bringing a more nuanced understanding of community to contemporary discourse about economic processes.

Gudeman begins with a personal history in which he describes his own intellectual struggles to explain his field work data with various economic anthropology models. Readers not familiar with his previous work will find this a useful introduction to his scholarly career, which moved from an initial attraction to neoclassical economics to dependency theory and Marxism, finally culminating in a relativistic position that viewed all models of economy as cultural constructions. In this book, this latter relativism is maintained, but augmented with a series of concepts that offer a humane and reasonable perspective for discussing and analyzing a range of contemporary economies.

Gudeman's basic premise is that economies should be viewed as composed of two realms that are dialectically related. The community realm refers to social relationships, values, and imagined solidarities between individuals. From this perspective, people are motivated by "social fulfillment, curiosity, and the pleasure of master" (p. 1). The market realm, in contrast, is abstract, often global, and impersonal. Here, people are motivated by the desire to accumulate profit and by competitive or instrumental goals. In real life, individuals and even corporations mix the two dimensions of the economy in their practices and depend on community relations and resources to achieve success.

Economies are constituted within these two realms, and can be understood as consisting of four value domains: the base, social relationships, trade, and accumulation. The significance of any one of these domains varies through time and across societies as values are contested and shift. Although neoclassical economics defines value in terms of individual preference or the price of a good or service, Gudeman argues that the world is...