Economics and Morality

Anthropological Approaches

The chapters explore economic systems from a variety of diverse indigenous and capitalist societies, focusing on moral challenges in non-Western economic systems undergoing profound change, grassroots movements and moral claims in the context of capitalism, and morality-based movements taking place within corporate and state institutions. The anthropological insights of each chapter provide the value of firsthand fieldwork and ethnographic investigation, as well as the tradition of critically studying non-Western and Western societies. Because the moral challenges in a given capitalist society can no longer be effectively addressed without considering the interaction and influences of different societies in the global system, the international ethnographic research in this book can help document and make sense of the changes sweeping our planet.

"An exciting, innovative, and carefully crafted collection of papers that speak to the  core issues of social and economic life. The contributions are rich and varied. This is one of the very best recent books in economic anthropology— fascinating case studies on the very cutting edge of the changing global community."
—Richard Wilk , Professor of Anthropology,  Indiana University

"Notions of the economic and the moral have long been intertwined, but recent changes in the world and in social theory have newly problematized the interrelationship. Economics and Morality is a wide-ranging and superbly edited collection that revitalizes an anthropological tradition, making it speak to new concerns."
— Donald L. Donham , University of California, Davis

"Economic activity involves more than rational, calculating individuals buying and selling with each other as amply demonstrated by the essays in this collection, impressive in range…”
— James G. Carrier, Oxford Brookes University, Indiana University

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