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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...

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...

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...

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...

Karl Polanyi considered that the relationship between the markets and their societies was a central feature of any social order. He studied what he called "ancient societies," to compare them with his own times, in an effort to understand that subject This paper aims to show, following Polanyi's work on Classical Greece, that it is possible to make a clear analogy between the Athenian state and economy with the modern Welfare State. First, we present Polanyi's study of the early Athenian...

This paper is based on an ethnography of ‘alternative’ consumption practices in the inner city of the former East Berlin. Non-monetary exchange networks (Tauschringe) and ‘free shops’ (Umsonstläden) have been examined. In Umsonstläden, the contemporary ideology of the ‘pure’ gift (Parry 1986; Carrier 1995) is at play: objects are freely given and totally alienated from their owners. In turn, Tauschringe sometimes induce gift-giving practices entailing mutual obligation, as a result of...

This article discusses the evidence of markets in the Ancient Near East. The major points are (1) the shortcomings of the misguided application of the Polanyi model and (2) the ensuing implications of the failure to integrate economic history into modern economic theory. The analysis concentrates on Ancient Egypt, as it presents the most significant problem for economic history and theoretical modelling. Detailed criticism of the means by which the Polanyi model is upheld is coordinated with...

This editorial considers the opportunities opened up for anthropologists by the financial crisis of 2008. The chief of these is the exposure of cracks in the intellectual hegemony of free-market economics which contributed to an unnecessarily defensive posture on the part of most anthropologists during the period of neoliberal globalization. The authors claim that anthropology can bridge the gap between everyday life and the world at large by combining the study of ideas and social actions....

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Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine offers a weak analysis of ‘neoliberalism’ linked to a defeatist ideology. If we wish to move beyond the global economic crisis, we should borrow ideas from Mauss, Polanyi and Keynes; but the political level for an appropriate response is not obvious.