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Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable...

Purpose -- This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capi-talist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activ-ities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach -- This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory -- "embeddedness" and "the informal economy." These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology's engagement with...

This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the anti-middleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece. I explore their efforts to turn the food...

The University of Pretoria's Human Economy project began at the end of 2010. To date it has involved eighteen post-doctoral fellows, drawn from around the world, and eight doctoral candidates, all from Africa. This paper reviews the project's progress, drawing attention to how its participants have come to construe the notion of a 'human economy' and the main social theorists on whom they have drawn in doing so. The development of our thinking regarding a human economy is explained by...

Penseur au parcours très singulier, Karl Polanyi est l’un des fondateurs d’une discipline nouvelle, l’anthropologie économique, qui se consacre à l’étude des échanges dans les sociétés anciennes et ambitionne de théoriser, à l’échelle de l’humanité, ce qu’il en est des rapports entre société et économie.?Pourtant, son œuvre la plus célèbre, La Grande Transformation, ne sort pas du cadre de l’histoire... Plan of the article: Radical liberalism versus social life The free market: an...

The author deals with two interconnected features of contemporary Hungarian rural family life from a historical perspective based on fieldwork carried out in Varsány in the early 1970s and between 2000 and 2005. The first is the intertwining of the lives of successive generations of families in a period when other segments of Hungarian society were becoming more individualistic. This case puts into question whether economic models of the direction of the flow of goods between generations...

This article applies Karl Polanyi's observation of a double movement of law in the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe to an analysis of Bali's integration into the global cultural economy. It describes how the increasing disembedding of the island's tourist industry from local norms and institutions, and the parallel disjuncture between Balinese religiosity and Indonesian state religion have created a condition of increasing collective anomie that has in turn provoked...

The world economic crisis should be seen as an episode in the history of money. “National capitalism” was the main way of organizing money in the twentieth century and its symbol was national monopoly currency. This system has been unravelling since the US dollar de-pegged from gold in 1971. The result is a disconnect between politics which are still largely national and the money circuit which is decentralized and global. The work of Georg Simmel and Karl Polanyi is enrolled to explain this...

Acclaim for the first edition: 'The volume is a remarkable contribution to economic anthropology and will no doubt be a fundamental tool for students, scholars, and experts in the sub-discipline.' _ Mao Mollona, Journal of the Royal Anthropologica

Na raiz do pensamento Polanyiano, encontra-se a distinção entre economia no sentido substantivo e economia no sentido formal. Com efeito, a concepção substantivista que define a economia como um processo instituído de interação entre o homem e o ambiente natural e social que o rodeia e resulta em contínua oferta de meios para satisfazer as necessidades humanas constitui a base do método preconizado pelo autor: a análise institucional. Com tal distinção, Polanyi (1977a) pretende evitar a...

The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi-national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved-land, labor and money-and the always-uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such...

The management of environmental pollution has traditionally been accomplished via the regulatory power of the state, but more recently the rise of a new, market-based form of governance has been observed. This article examines the sector of water quality trading, in which caps are placed on surface water pollution and polluters can purchase “offset credits” from farms or other polluters who are under their cap. Using a content analysis of program case studies and federal and state trading...

Whether the Bronze Age Aegean economies can be described as "redistributive" depends on how one defines the term. The concept of redistribution itself has undergone several decades of critical archaeological analysis, much of it stemming from my early work in Polynesia. I consider here how Polanyi's ideas about redistributive economies have been expanded since the 1970s. My review complements the article in this Forum by Nakassis et al. and the contribution by Haistead, who discusses why and...

Nakassis et al., in their contribution to this Forum, argue that the term "redistribution" has been used with a range of meanings in the context of the Aegean Bronze Age and so obscures rather than illuminates the emergence and functioning of political economies. They call for detailed empirical investigation rather than reliance on ambiguous idealized types. Lupack and Schon concur, arguing respectively that the palace shared control of the Mycenaean economy with sanctuaries and local...

This book is a new introduction to the history and practice of economic anthropology by two leading authors in the field. They show that anthropologists have contributed to understanding the three great questions of modern economic history: development, socialism and one-world capitalism. In doing so, they connect economic anthropology to its roots in Western philosophy, social theory and world history. Up to the Second World War anthropologists tried and failed to interest economists in...

The argument focuses on the corporate state as an increasingly significant political assemblage that has enabled new configurations of power with related social effects. Here the discussion proceeds from Karl Polanyi's thesis in The Great Transformation. A critical idea that Polanyi pursued related to the state production of economism and individualism, which prepared the ground for the expansion of capital in its globalizing form. The essay develops this idea, indicating that the...

KM: We want to bring to the attention of English readers some currents of economic theory and practice that have flourished in non-Anglophone countries over the last two decades, particularly in France, Brazil, Hispanic America and Scandinavia. To these we have added significant work by English-speaking authors that was sidelined during neoliberalism’s heyday and deserves to find a wider audience now. We have brought these strands of new thinking together under the umbrella concept of ‘the...

Many popular conceptions of economy now delimit what counts as the ‘real’ economy by capitalist enterprises, market transactions and wage labour. Anthropologists describe such ideas of economy as abstract, dis-embedded (Polanyi 1957a, b) or virtual (Carrier and Miller 1998), arguing that these conceptions are not adequate to the empirical realities of lived experience. Beyond anthropology, there is a growing literature that theorises the ways academic accounts have themselves brought a...