Economic Anthropology

Has the revolution that led from the economy of the gift, characteristic of most precapitalist societies, to the economy of modern societies been accomplished in all spheres of life, as tacitly assumed by those who claim to apply the model of the profit-optimizing agent to every practice – to art, to education and even to marriage, seen as an exchange of economic services of production and reproduction? And is it totally accomplished even at the heart of the sphere most directly concerned with economic activity – the world of business?

These and many other questions are absent from the dominant economic theories, which fail to take account of the economic and social conditions under which economic agents and their universe arise. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1987-89, Pierre Bourdieu laid bare the assumptions of the imaginary anthropology that underlies economics in its dominant form and put forward an alternative view. He replaced the notion of a pure and perfect market with the notion of an economic field structured by the unequal distribution of different forms of capital and by relations of force and symbolic struggle. He replaced homo economicus – that sovereign individual with no qualities or qualifications other than a capacity for rational calculation – with an agent endowed with enduring dispositions, fashioned by social background and experience, both individual and collective. Thus, without having to appeal to a perfectly lucid calculating mind or to the logic of bounded rationality, he was able to account for the alignment of subjective expectations and objective opportunities that confers on the great majority of economic behaviour its 'reasonable' character.

Bourdieu's trenchant critique of dominant economic thought and his development of an alternative way of understanding economic activity, rooted in his notion of field and his theory of practice, will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, economics and throughout the social sciences and humanities.