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Comparative and critical, Anthropology and Economy offers a uniquely cross-cultural view of economy. Using examples from market and non-market situations, the book shows how economies are built on five increasingly abstract spheres, from the house to community, commerce, finance, and meta-finance. Across these spheres, economy incorporates a tension between self-interested rationality and the mutuality of social relationships. Even when rational processes predominate, as in markets, economies rely on sociability and ritual to operate, whether as cronyism, pleas to divinities or the magical persuasions of advertising. Drawing on data and concepts from anthropology and economics, the book addresses wealth inequality, resource depletion, and environmental devastation especially in capitalism, providing an understanding of their persistence and ideas for controlling them. Given the recent financial crash, Gudeman offers a different understanding of the crisis and suggestions for achieving greater economic stability

As the transition from socialism to a market economy gathered speed in the early 1990s, many people proclaimed the final success of capitalism as a practice and neoliberal economics as its accompanying science. But with the uneven achievements of the "transition"the deepening problems of "development," persistent unemployment, the widening of the wealth gap, and expressions of resistancethe discipline of economics is no longer seen as a mirror of reality or as a unified science. How should we understand economics and, more broadly, the organization and disorganization of material life? In th

Why are we obsessed with calculating our selections? The author argues that competitive trade nurtures calculative reason, which provides the ground for most discourses on economy. But market descriptions of economy are incomplete. Drawing on a range of materials from small ethnographic contexts to global financial markets, the author shows that economy is dialectically made up of two value realms, termed mutuality and impersonal trade. One or the other may be dominant; however, market reason usually cascades into and debases the mutuality on which it depends. Using this cross-cultural model

Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Original Title Page; Original Copyright Page; Table of Contents; List of Illustrations; Preface; Love's Labour's Lost; The Satire; The Division of the Play; Part I (Act I, Sc. 1: Act I, Sc. 2: Act II, Sc. 1); Part II (Act III, Sc. 1: Act IV, Sc. 1: Act IV, Sc. 2: Act IV, Sc. 3: Act V, Sc. 1); Part III (Act V, Sc. 2); Location of the Scenes; Analysis of the Characters; The King of Navarre and his Court; The Princess and her Ladies; Berowne and Rosaline; Don Armado and Moth; Boyet; Costard and Jaquenetta; Dull, The Constable.

According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re- )entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that muc

Self-sufficiency of the house is practiced in many parts of the world but ignored in economic theory, just as socialist collectivization is assumed to have brought household self-sufficiency to an end. The ideals of self-sufficiency, however, continue to shape economic activity in a wide range of postsocialist settings. This volume's six comparative studies of postsocialist villages in Eastern Europe and Asia illuminate the enduring importance of the house economy, which is based not on the market but on the order of the house. These formations show that economies depend not only on the macro