Alternative Views of Economy in Economic Anthropology

The methodological controversies and conflicting theoretical posi­tions in economic anthropology can be viewed as particular cases of much more general epistemological issues. It has unfortunately become commonplace in social science to contrast scientific, formal approaches as being somehow opposed to humanistic, phenomenological approaches, and furthermore to distinguish micro from macro levels of abstraction about social reality. These dichotomies are in fact false, as each one of these problematics are embedded within the domain that each discrete school of thought should address. Instead of examining these wider issues within any given approach, scholars have become polarised on the basis of discrete polemics, and scholarship has increasingly become confined within narrowly circumscribed sets of assumptions. The production of papers and monographs then often becomes devoted to the erection of intellectual barriers around inadequate or incomplete schools of thought, which then become mutual admiration societies of limited vision.