Exploring the Fault Lines: Introduction to the Minisymposium on the History of Economic Anthropology

This HOPE minisymposium has been prompted by a question I have been asking friends in anthropology for some time now, namely, where are the writers who are revisiting and rethinking the history of economic anthropology? Lest one wonders if this question asks for something that no one wants, or else is hopelessly naive, let me quickly add that, in stark contrast to economics, anthropology has welcomed a wider range of philosophical reflections on its problems and prospects; has recently pioneered within its ranks the development and legitimization of a specialization in the history of anthropology, best represented by the work of George Stocking Jr. in America and Adam Kuper in Britain; and in general has revealed greater tolerance for inquiry into revisions of the fundamental tenets of the discipline. But having acknowledged these facts, some years of experience have convinced me, at least, that there is a serious lacuna in modern American anthropology having to do with an unwillingness to confront the heritage and status of their subfield known as “economic anthropology.” To put the case in a perhaps overly dramatic fashion, I suspect that the history of the specialization of economic anthropology has not been an altogether happy one for anthropologists in the recent past (while for economists it has been mostly invisible), and that this has had more than a little to do with long-standing tensions between the disciplines of anthropology and economics, as well