As an economic and cultural system, __________ focuses on the individual and his or her behaviors as primarily economic in their impacts.

Question

As an economic and cultural system, __________ focuses on the individual and his or her behaviors as primarily economic in their impacts.

Answer 1

Economic Anthropology (i.e., a cultural construction of economic systems). In general, economic anthropology focuses on exchange. Some different approaches or theoretical systems applied to this study include:

Formalism

Described economics as the study of that broad aspect of human activity which is concerned with resources, their limitations and uses, and the organization whereby they are brought into relation with human wants (Firth, 1958). Burling (1962) applied formal economic theory to economics as the logic of rational action and decision-making, as rational choice between the alternative uses of limited (scarce) means.

Substantivism (Polyani, 1944) is an interpretation of economics that refers to how humans make a living interacting within their social and natural environments. It presupposes neither rational decision-making nor conditions of scarcity. It simply refers to the study of how humans make a living from their social and natural environment. A society's livelihood strategy is seen as an adaptation to its environment and material conditions, a process which may or may not involve utility maximisation. The substantive meaning of 'economics' is seen in the broader sense of 'economising' or 'provisioning'. In this theoretical system economics is simply the way members of society meet their material needs. Anthropologists embraced the substantivist position as empirically oriented, as it did not impose western cultural assumptions on other societies where they might not be warranted.

 

The Formalism vs Substantivism debate defined that early era in Economic Anthropology (Hann and Hart, 2011). 

 

Other approaches incorporated Cultural Relativism (re: Boas) or the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture) and another approach was defined as:

 

Culturalism (Gudeman, 1986) which focuses people's own conceptualizations or mental maps of economics and its various aspects.