Dialect Anthropol (2017) 41:97–112

DOI 10.1007/s10624-016-9445-2

What (if anything) can economic anthropology say

to neoliberal development? Toward new anthropologies
of capitalism and its alternatives

John Clammer1

Published online: 10 December 2016

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract Critiques of neoliberalism and associated forms of development are now

abundant. But few if any draw on the vocabulary or empirical work of economic
anthropology. This paper will attempt to rectify this absence through a number of
moves including examining recent work in economic anthropology and noting
possible applications to the study of larger systems of development based on this
foundation; the paper will attempt to define ways in which the comparative and
ethnographically based approach of economic anthropology can provide a powerful
tool for the critique of neoliberal development models and will seek to provide an
alternative mode of analysis through which this might be done.

Keywords Economic anthropology
Alternative development
Neoliberalism

It is the widespread consensus in many circles that the current world system, defined
by the near hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the forms of development that it
has inspired, is now untenable. Its outcomes, while certainly producing an
abundance of consumer goods for those able to access them and generating
enormous riches for a small minority, have proven to be socially and environmen-
tally highly destructive. The patterns of globalization that it has engendered have led
to widening social inequalities, displacement of peoples, the destruction of natural
economies and the societies and cultures with which they were integrated, and its
resource-extracting and waste-producing nature has generated pollution, destruction
of natural habitats and of the species that inhabit them, and ultimately climate
change on a scale unprecedented in human history. These effects, once thought by

& John Clammer

jrclammer@jgu.edu.in
1
Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat Narela
Road, Sonipat, Haryana, Delhi NCR 131001, India

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some to be cyclical and temporary, are now proving to be permanent and

irreversible, and of such a magnitude that they potentially threaten viable life on the
Earth. Recent events, such as the collapse of major banks and ‘‘securities’’ houses
and the sub-prime mortgage crisis beginning in the United States but with knock-on
effects on the whole global economy, have led to the intense scrutiny of the entire
neoliberal economic and financial system, the domination of much of the world’s
markets by a small number of huge corporations and the vast inequalities in wealth
and access to social resources (education, health care, housing) that such a system
has generated and perpetuated.
The existence and nature of such a vast and hegemonic system has quite naturally
not gone unnoticed, either in its original forms (preeminently my Marx and his
followers), or in its many evolved forms, whether of national varieties of capitalism
(Japanese, German, US and so forth) or of its uncanny ability to adapt, penetrate
previously non-capitalist economies and societies and to colonize ever more areas of
life (popular cultures, foods, fashions, the shaping of the body) and subjectivities, its
impact on patterns of ‘‘development’’ and its generation of what is now (rather than
in its older historical manifestations) termed ‘‘globalization.’’ The result has been a
vast literature of critique of historical and contemporary forms of capitalism
(neoliberalism clearly being one of the latter) whether from a socialist perspective,
from alternative forms of economics such as the emergent school of ecological
economics, from the environmental movement itself and many social movements
associated with it, from economic sociology and from development studies. Much
of the very large literature on globalization (a recent survey of titles of books alone
in English generated almost 3000 such works) is in fact a disguised form of critique
of capitalism by another name.
The interesting question then arises of where anthropology, and in particular
economic anthropology, is situated in relation to these debates. In general, I will
argue there have been historically three main perspectives: ignoring (often on the
grounds that such large-scale processes are not the natural province of
ethnographically based anthropology); attempting to assimilate such debates into
currently dominant paradigms of anthropological thinking (an approach very
much characteristic of the 1980s) whether Marxist or ‘‘interpretative’’; and
directly addressing the question of capitalism and its associated forms of
development and attempting to use the traditional tools of anthropology as a
discipline in new ways and in relation to new subjects (capitalism, multi-sited
ethnographies, peasants, the newly urbanized). In this essay, I will briefly
characterize the anthropological dimensions of each of these and explore their
relative power in addressing the current planetwide crisis largely engendered by
neoliberal capitalism and then suggest a fourth approach—notably relating
economic anthropology creatively to emerging alternative critiques of capitalism
and to the forms of action and post-capitalist reconstruction that they suggest. This
in principle allows anthropology to contribute not only to critique but also to the
shaping of futures.

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Economic anthropology and capitalism: a brief history

A reasonable baseline from which we might proceed is the historically significant

Association of Social Anthropology’s monograph Themes in Economic Anthropol-
ogy, first published in 1967 and reprinted three times between then and 1970 and
which did much to establish economic anthropology as a serious sub-discipline at a
time when its identity as such was weak. Edited by Raymond Firth, then recognized
as one of the pre-eminent anthropologists of his generation, Firth notes, in his
thematic introduction, no significant role for economic anthropology, except in such
marginal terms as the contact between ‘‘primitive and peasant communities’’ and the
industrial system, in addressing either development or the capitalist economic
system (Firth 1970, p. 22). The closest he allows for any engagement with
development is to suggest that both anthropologists and economists will need to
begin to confront what he calls the problem of ‘‘economic viability’’—the situation
in which people in the most remote ‘‘underdeveloped’’ areas of the world (his
phraseology) will have to confront the issues of modernization and the consumer
goods and services that it brings, and in which situation resources will have to be
realigned or redeployed (again Firth’s terminology) to integrate them into this new
world order. The substantive essays that follow do not deviate in any significant
respect from this kind of program and include studies of the relationships between
(conventional) economics and anthropology and in particular the issues raised in the
then topical formalist/substantivist debates, ‘‘primitive rationing,’’ economic
spheres, traditional labor relations and the response of ‘‘traditional’’ groups to
‘‘new economic opportunities.’’ Nowhere in the book is there any discussion of the
wider context of these ethnographically based cases, or of the possibilities that these
‘‘opportunities’’ might in fact be the highly destructive leading edge of a capitalist
and globalizing wedge.
This ‘‘initiating situation’’ has been subsequently modified, reproduced or
transformed in multiple directions, making economic anthropology one of the most
diverse subfields of the discipline. These directions can be essentially characterized
as follows:
A ‘‘traditionalist’’ approach largely reproduces the agenda of the 1960s. Texts
representing this tendency include the 1989 reader edited by Stuart Plattner which
innovates only insofar as it includes papers on marketing in urban areas, industrial
agriculture, the informal economy and Marxism (one case study of New Guinea
tribal salt producers) and does manage to raise the question of the relevance of such
Marxist approaches to kin-based societies, but without a single reference to the
existing literature on this subject which preceded the Plattner volume by as much as
a decade (Clammer 1978, 1985). This approach is continued in such texts as Susana
Narotzky’s New Directions in Economic Anthropology (Narotzky 1997) which
reproduces the traditionalist agenda (conventional issues of production, distribution,
exchange, consumption and social reproduction). While it does show an awareness
of the work of the major world systems theorist Emmanuel Wallerstein and of
critical social and economic historians such as Andre Gunder Frank and Eric Wolf
and Marxist-inspired anthropologists such as Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera,

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Narotzky does not use these insights to extend economic anthropology into a critical
engagement with capitalism, but falls back on the rather lame argument that the way
forward is to think both locally and globally, and also historically (Narotzky 1997,
p. 7). A detailed exemplar of this approach can be found in Daniel Miller’s book of
the same year: Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (Miller 1997), which in
practice is almost totally devoted to an analysis of advertising, branding, retailing
and shopping in Trinidad, with just one chapter devoted to attempting to delineate
the distinction between ‘‘pure’’ capitalism and the local example of ‘‘organic’’
capitalism allegedly captured by the ethnography.
Secondly, the emergence of the anthropology of development (e.g., de Sardin
2005) has de facto provided a forum in which the elucidation and critique of
capitalist economic and social relations and the whole nature of the ‘‘development’’
process subject to close examination, especially as it has impacted the smaller scale
societies in which anthropologists have for the most part specialized. The line
between development anthropology and the examination of capitalism as a specific
subject of anthropological analysis is consequently a fine one. This can be seen in
the trajectory of anthropologies of capitalism as totalities or as aspects of
globalization, or which have taken an aspect of capitalism or quasi-capitalist or
transitional economies as their focus: peasant economies encountering monetization
and market and the notion of the importance of ‘‘people without history’’ (Eric
Wolf), systems of barter and the penetration of imported goods and the ways in
which local marketing networks have adjusted to this (Benjamin Orlove), peasant
resistance (James Scott), examinations of the effects of capitalist-generated
economic crises on the ‘‘Global South’’ and attempts to learn from this to create
more ‘‘human’’ economies (Hart and Sharp 2015; Hart et al. 2010), food and food
security (Sidney Mintz), the analysis of the emergence of capitalist relations in
societies where they were formerly absent (Tania Li), commodities, value creation
economic rationality (Scott Cook), or the work of David Graeber and among other
things, his notion of ‘‘everyday communism’’ as a basis of social solidarity, a notion
very close, as we will shortly see, to emerging ideas in the area of Solidarity
Economy.
Such approaches can be thought of as collectively creating an anthropology of
the political economy of world systems, an attempt which might itself be divided
into two streams—that emerging from Marxist approaches, and that which
attempted to build a bridge between political economy and the emerging
‘‘interpretative’’ approach of the 1980s. The former represented the remarkable
flourishing of a Marxist-inspired economic anthropology in France, much of it
inspired by the then highly popular work of Louis Althusser and embodied in the
work of such Francophone anthropologists as C. Meillassoux, E. Terray, G. Dupre
and P.-P. Rey as well as in the more eclectic approach of Maurice Godelier,
particularly in his major book Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (1972).
(For a discussion in English of this literature, see Clammer 1978). However, much
of this work, despite its Marxist derivation or inspiration, was not directly concerned
with the issue of the anthropological analysis of capitalism, as with the problems of
the application of Marxism to pre-capitalist societies and to whether this was
actually possible. So while paradoxically Marxism was losing its critical edge,

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anthropology was regaining it through the introduction of the notion of anthropol-

ogy as ‘‘cultural critique,’’ a notion given its clearest expression in George Marcus
and Michael Fischer’s important volume Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986)
which appeared at a moment when hermeneutics was becoming a dominant
paradigm. With the question of ‘‘interpretation’’ becoming a central motif in
anthropology, Marcus and Fischer raised an important corrective challenge: that of
‘‘how to represent the embedding of richly described local cultural worlds in larger
impersonal systems of political economy’’ since ‘‘what makes representation
challenging and a focus of experimentation is the perception that the ‘outside
forces’ in fact are an integral part of the construction and constitution of the ‘inside’,
the cultural unit itself’’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 77).
The question arises as to whether this (1980s) model represents a still valid
program for an anthropological approach to capitalism and its products (including
most certainly globalization). The key to their model is the recognition that ‘‘most
local cultures are products of a history of appropriations, resistances and
accommodations’’ (1986, p. 78) and as a result, ethnography needs to move from
the classic (if long since deconstructed) ‘‘ethnographic present’’ to one that sees
cultural situations as always in flux and in a continuous process of negotiation with
those ‘‘outside forces’’ (globalization, the larger economy and political pressures)
that in fact are major constituting factors in the construction of the ‘‘inside’’ of
communities. The idea outcome of such a historically informed approach is both to
encourage anthropologists to attempt to ‘‘mesh’’ interpretative and political-
economy perspectives, and to make the resulting ethnographies attractive as sources
of insight to political science and economics, since they should uncover levels of
behavior and modes of explanation hitherto largely inaccessible to those disciplines.
Exemplary examples which they cite as demonstrating the ways in which political-
economy approaches have either expressed themselves as ethnographic projects or
draw on such approaches are (Willis’ 1981) study Learning to Labour (Willis 1981),
and Charles Sabel’s Work and Politics (Sabel 1982), and from the anthropological
side where a deeply political-economy approach has been incorporated into critical
ethnographies, Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South
America (Taussig 1980) and June Nash’s We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us
(Nash 1979).
Although these two latter books are different in approach, both exemplify, for
Marcus and Fischer writing in the mid-1980s, two key tasks of what they term ‘‘an
interpretative anthropology sensitive to issues of political economy’’ by ‘‘interpret-
ing the complex roles of ideological or cultural systems of belief in relation to a
system of political economy and second, reformulating them for effective textual
presentation in ethnographic accounts’’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 90).
Underlying this claim is the idea that ethnography can indeed be an effective tool
for both representing cultural responses to capitalist penetrations, and for showing
how complex and sophisticated such responses can be. The goal of Marcus and
Fischer’s project must be kept in mind here—the encouragement of ways in which
‘‘interpretative approaches and political-economy concerns can be merged in the
writing of single texts’’ (1986, p. 91). Their principle concern in other words was
with writing strategies and with the defense of anthropology as a discipline that can

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still be taken seriously in a world of almost total ‘‘capitalist penetrations.’’ But the
weakness of this is immediately apparent since the remainder of the chapter in
which they purport to address issues of political economy is actually taken up with
an examination of further ethnographies that deal primarily with what Marcus and
Fischer call ‘‘historicizing the ethnographic present’’ (history in other words) and
political economy as such disappears from their text, either because they could find
no other suitable ethnographies, or because of the implicit recognition that an
‘‘interpretative approach’’ was inadequate to the creation of an anthropology of
neoliberal capitalism and the development strategies that it has given rise to.
Underlying this general position are two unacknowledged problems. One is that
the default position of many economic anthropologists emerging from the Firth like
paradigm of the late 1960s—to fall back on a discussion of the relationship between
anthropology and economics—simply does not work when it is realized that if
neoclassical economics is what is meant here. For then, the real need is rather for an
anthropology of economics—the application of anthropological tools of analysis to
economics itself. The other is the overly modest conception of what anthropology
itself can do. In a paper published in 1990, Marcus, while rightly noting that
economics has to a great extent colonized our social imaginations, goes on to assert
that, however, culture ‘‘complicates’’ things and resists any project (economics
especially) based on reductionist thinking. His modest goal is then to ask ‘‘how far
cultural analysis can invade the territory of system modelers from the relatively
marginal roles that economic anthropology has played in the past [or to use less
martial language, how the contributions of ethnography can renegotiate new levels
of collaboration with hegemonic forms of theoretical discourse about major Western
economic institutions’’ (Marcus 1990, p. 333)]. A modest goal indeed (and note the
word ‘‘collaboration’’) and one that does successfully relegate economic anthro-
pology to the margins if all it can really do, as Marcus specifically suggests on an
earlier page, meekly represent the ‘‘natives’ point of view.’’ But does this exhaust
the scope of economic anthropology? I think rather that we can suggest a much
more expanded answer.

New anthropologies of capitalism?

The notion of ‘‘cultural analysis’’ is of course on the surface an attractive one. But in
the contemporary situation, it is not unreasonable to suggest that ‘‘culture’’ is now
largely an epiphenomenon of the neoliberal system, and not some autonomous arena
available for anthropological study apart from that system. If this is so, then any
future anthropology has to be in a sense the anthropology of capitalism. As much
was basically suggested as long ago as 1986 by Stephen Gudeman in his book
Economics as Culture (Gudeman 1986), an idea that needs filling out in a number of
ways. These are potentially many—the building on the analyses of the anthropo-
logical literature cited above, engagement with the work of those who are not
simply critiquing neoliberal forms of economy and development but attempting to
create actual alternatives (a literature and set of practices that has not yet received
systematic anthropological attention) and, as I will now attempt, a reappraisal of the

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resources of economic anthropology itself as a still underexploited source of ideas

and models for not only critique, but also of reconstructive alternatives to the
currently hegemonic system.
To do this, a not unreasonable place to begin is to enumerate the fundamental
characteristics of anthropology in general and economic anthropology in particular.
What can anthropology, beyond vague invocations of ‘‘culture’’ offer to the critique
of neoliberal development? Several things I would suggest:
1. By demonstrating in practice what Marshall Sahlins argued in his celebrated
Sidney Mintz lecture (Sahlins 1996) that Western economic categories, along
with many of its ‘‘scientific’’ ones, are simply one form of local knowledge
(among many others) that for complex reasons (mainly to do with colonialism,
missionary activity and other expansionary activities of the west) have become
apparently hegemonic. Such neoliberal economics, quite apart from its
theoretical validity (itself a subject of intense discussion), is quite literally
parochial, pertaining only to certainly historically bound socioeconomic
systems. It represents in fact what Carrier and Miller have called ‘‘virtual-
ism’’—the situation in which its extreme abstraction, assumptions and dis-
embeddedness generate apparently self-validating concepts and models which
are easily mistaken for the ‘‘fundamental reality that underlies and shapes the
world’’ (Carrier and Miller 1998, p. 2). In other words, it essentially invents
rather than actually describes the world that it purports to, and so naturally
distorts, in subtle but fundamental ways.
2. The vast body of ethnographic evidence, both comparative and historical,
accumulated by anthropology demonstrates empirically that there are and can
be many alternatives to both capitalism and industrial socialism, including
societies with trade and exchange that exist without the ‘‘market’’ as understood
in classical economics, in which the economy is fully embedded in both social
relationships and the local ecology with which it coexists in a non-exploitative
manner. Indeed, it shows clearly that there are a large range of economic or
rather socioeconomic–ecological models that have actually existed, and that in
its assumptions about human behavior, quite apart from its destructive and
extractive relationship to nature and resources, capitalism is in many ways the
historical anomaly. As Albert Hirschman showed at exactly the time when
economic anthropology was re-emerging as a re-energized sub-discipline, the
‘‘victory’’ of capitalism was by no means assured at its point of origin, and the
many objections to it, including moral ones (Adam Smith himself being a case
in point although this is not widely recognized) might well have led to its
abandonment as a project, or at least its fundamental transformation (Hirschman
1981).
3. Authentic economic life is embedded in social practices not abstracted from
them. Abstraction generates alienation, environmental irresponsibility, the
substitution of economics for real politics and the commoditization of culture.
The colonization of almost all areas of contemporary life, social, cultural,
sexual, has not only rendered economics the ‘‘master’’ rather than the ‘‘servant’’
of social life and civilizational development, but has so re-ordered modern

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subjectivities that there is little left ‘‘outside’’ (even or especially leisure, sports
and the arts) un-colonized by the mind set and practices of capitalism. Growth
rather than happiness, social solidarity, ecological appreciation and balance or
the creation of sustainable relationships has become the goal of economies that
have abandoned the principles embodied in many of the societies known to
anthropologists. The result has been the planetary scale destruction that we now
see all around us. (On all of the above, see Clammer 2016b).
4. Fundamental assumptions about human economic behavior cannot be derived
from one form of imposed economic system alone. Indeed, as the ‘‘virtualism’’
theory cited above notes, neoclassical economic theory does not so much
describe as create the very categories that it assumes to be universal
characteristics of human behavior and nature. Notions of ‘‘profit,’’ ‘‘efficiency,’’
‘‘productivity’’ and so on are highly cultural ideas, and while the words
themselves may have a dictionary definition, their actual content is a matter of
values and cultural preferences. This should be evident from the classical
anthropological record—the notion of the Potlatch, the Kula and other systems
of exchange and distribution which, while they may have a competitive
element, are essentially systems of long-term reciprocity, as is the case with
societies in which the gift is central to economic transactions (Godelier 1996) or
in which giving is a key element in the socioeconomy (Berking 1999). Absent
from neoclassical economics is any developed theory of the psychology and
sociology of things—why people desire material objects and certain kinds of
services, including those of a symbolic nature—and of the many functions that
seeking or providing those objects or services perform in different kinds of
society (Dittmar 1992). Even concepts central to contemporary capitalism such
as ‘‘consumption’’ prove on examination to be anthropologically complex and
to be related in deep ways to images of the body, to status and to many other
cultural levels and models of being that have little to do with profit or
maximization, as Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood showed as long ago as
1980 (Douglas and Isherwood 1980). Indeed, the fundamental position of that
book still stands today: ‘‘Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed
for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for
making visible and stable the categories of culture. It is standard ethnographic
practice to assume that all material possessions carry social meanings and to
concentrate a main part of cultural analysis upon their use as communicators’’
(Douglas and Isherwoood 1980, p. 59).

The result is not only the possibility of critique of the outcomes (the practices) of
neoliberal-led development, but of the very theoretical base from which those
practices emerge. The possibility of such an ‘‘alternative’’ socioeconomic theory
lies in economic anthropology. If the ‘‘universal’’ assumptions about human
economic behavior that fuel neoclassical economics can be shown to be false or
culturally specific rather than universal, then the enterprise fails. This suggests for
anthropology not only the role of critique, but also of collaboration with alternative
visions of the future, not only because of possible parallels, but even more so
because anthropology has the possibility of contributing to the creation of more

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realistic versions of post-capitalist society and economy precisely because of its (in
principle) holistic approach that recognizes from the beginning the integration of
economy, society and culture.

Anthropology and the ‘‘alternatives’’

Anthropology is the science of the possible. The ethnographic record, especially

when extended backwards in time, demonstrates the remarkable range of human
cultures, of adaptations to virtually all environments, enormous creativity in the
invention and elaboration of belief systems, political and economic structures,
artistic expressions, technologies, fashions and foods. Science fiction is really
redundant in the face of anthropology. If it can be agreed that capitalism is only one
form of economic system among many possible ones, then by definition, many
alternatives to it can exist and have done historically. Critiques of capitalism must
point toward these alternatives, yet social science is weak in this respect: strong on
critique, but weak on the articulation of fresh possibilities, a responsibility mostly
left to the utopians, social movements activists and either the remnant left or the
world of NGOs. The theme here then is that anthropology, as that only true science
of alternatives (its fundamental subject matter), can speak both as a critic of
capitalism along the lines indicated above, and as a powerful resource for assisting
‘‘alternative’’ economic models in strengthening their arguments and in proposing
viable future paths. A major problem in advancing socially and ecologically just
change is that neither side here speaks to the other. I will now attempt to sketch out
some of the possible elements in that conversation.
From the ‘‘alternative’’ side (understood here as attempts to articulate post-
capitalist futures and to generate new economic theories and practices not based on
neoclassical economic assumptions), the points of potential contact with economic
anthropology are many, as is the range of those alternatives themselves. A brief
typology of some of the principle ones might look as follows:
1. The group that Frankel (1987) calls ‘‘post-industrial utopians.’’ These include a
very diverse range, from the German anti-capitalist, anti-industrial and green
thinker Rudolf Bahro, the ideas of the post-industrial socialist Andre Gorz, the
Australian mixed-economy theorist Barry Jones and the well-known futurol-
ogist Alvin Toffler. Frankel himself favors some form of eco-socialism, the
roots of which he finds in Bahro and Gorz, who had witnessed both the
ecological devastation wrought by East German industrial socialism, and the
failure of the political model on which it was based—a ‘‘worker’s state’’ that
had degenerated into absolutely non-democratic totalitarianism of a strongly
Stalinist character. Yet Frankel himself finds all his exemplars wanting in some
respect or another, whether the radical de-industrialization of Bahro, or the
technological utopianism of Toffler and the untheorized relations between the
localism implied by all his sample and issues of post-capitalist trade, work and
globalization. A problem is that all exist only in the realm of theory and are not

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rooted in any ethnographic reality, and so in that sense are ‘‘utopian’’ in the
negative sense of the term (Clammer 2012, pp. 130–137).
2. While the first group of alternative thinkers makes no explicit use of
anthropology, a second group does, even if in oblique ways. Here, we might
cite the work of Thom Hartmann whose book The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late
(Hartmann 2004), while largely about climate change and, as its title suggests,
about the depletion and exhaustion of the fossil fuels on which our civilization
has built itself, posits a post-oil future based on the values and practices of tribal
communities, some actual examples of which Hartmann cites. Such societies, in
his view, have retained the values of community, ecological responsibility and
the embeddedness of their economies in their wider social organization, the loss
of which is both a symptom and a cause of our current planetary malaise. A
very similar position is taken by Wm. H. Kotke in his book The Final Empire:
The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future (1993) in which the
future of civilization is seen as a return to the organizational principles and
sustainable environmental practices of many of the societies studied by classical
anthropology, which is also the basis of the argument of Daniel Quinn who sees
the future of civilization requiring a rediscovery of the virtues of tribal cultures
(Quinn 1999). Also very much in this group should be placed the ethnograph-
ically informed work of Helena Norberg-Hodge whose best-selling book (a rare
achievement for what is basically a monograph in applied anthropology)
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh for a Globalizing World (2009)
describes both the traditional culture and ecology of that Himalayan world and
the destructive impact of the abrupt arrival of the ‘‘outside’’ world on that
culture. Also in this category might be placed examples of the ‘‘localism’’ and
bio-region movements (Shuman 2000), and most certainly the ‘‘subsistence’’
movement originating in Germany which sees traditional peasant agriculture as
the paradigm of sustainability and draws on anthropological and historical
material to support that conclusion (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1999).
3. Many of the most significant alternatives concern themselves with the critique
and deconstruction of classical economics (as in the pioneering work of
Henderson 1978, 1988), with promoting a serious alternative to expansion-
obsessed contemporary capitalism (Latouche 1993, 2010), or to doing both, as
in the anthropologically informed work of Keith Hart and colleagues (Hart et al.
2010). This latter example dovetails with emerging work in what is now being
called ‘‘Solidarity Economy’’ (Utting 2015), an important initiative that both
provide the basis for a potential post-capitalist economy, and, without
acknowledging it, has many parallels with economic anthropology and sets
about unwittingly re-creating many of the features of a range of societies
described from that perspective. Closely linked to such an approach are the
initiatives concerned with transition to a post-oil society (Hopkins 2008; Urry
2013), with the anthropology of sustainability (Clammer 2016b) and with the
ethics, politics and sociology of post-capitalist alternatives (Gibson-Graham,
Cameron and Healy 2013).

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This is inevitably only a partial list. There are numerous practical experiments
around the world in creating sustainable and convivial settlements, in various forms
of applied and development anthropology, in ‘‘bio-dynamic’’ and organic agricul-
ture, deriving from the various strands of the environmental movement, and such
like, and a substantial literature, much of it ‘‘below the radar’’ of conventional and
academic anthropology proposing alternative, futuristic, utopian or science fiction
versions of possible or desirable futures on this planet or on others. Far from being
outside of the realm of academic anthropology, such initiatives and such literature
should be as much a part of scholarly interest as now is the field of popular culture,
once a fringe area of concern, but now central to cultural studies and sociologies of
everyday life. But it does help to identify those that have been informed by
economic anthropology, are close to it in spirit or which implicitly parallel many of
its central concerns and ethnographic interest.
This suggests at least two levels of analysis. The first is the anthropology of
capitalism, regarded as a subject of ethnographic interest on a par with other
economic systems. Studies of consumption behavior for example, as represented by
the work cited earlier of Douglas and Isherwood and Daniel Miller, would fall into
this category, as would anthropological studies of work (e.g., Wallman 1979). The
other is the critical examination of the impact of capitalism on previously non-
monetized socioeconomic systems, much of which work, as noted above, falls into
the area usually called the anthropology of development (e.g., Escobar 1995). This
points to the possibility of a non-Marxist theory of both capitalism and
‘‘development,’’ the two, as should be apparent, being inextricably mixed. In the
1980s, at the same time as new initiatives in economic anthropology were being
announced, and as the possibility of a range of alternatives was becoming visible
(Schumacher’s seminal Small in Beautiful being published in 1979 at about the
same time as the work of Hazel Henderson and the ‘‘steady state’’ economics of
Daly (1973) and collaborators), neo-Marxist development theory (at the time the
only obvious contender to mainstream capitalist-led development obsessed with
growth, the expansion of the free market and the erosion of cultures that stood in the
way of mainstream IMF and World Bank styles) was announced as having reached
an ‘‘impasse.’’ It appeared in other words to be theoretically exhausted, with unclear
impact on the juggernaut of mainstream development, and with no obvious
successor in sight (Booth 1985). What that moment really suggests however is the
myopia of academic development discourse. Even as the impasse was announced, a
Marxist-inspired economic anthropology was flourishing in the Francophone world
and a large range of non-Marxist models were appearing (but never referenced in
neo-Marxist development theory), and while in anthropology, a variety of new
critical studies were appearing, this was in isolation from those very alternatives,
including the ones that rooted themselves to 1 or another in ethnography. Possibly
even more significant is that this period of the loss of confidence in the neo-Marxist
approach to development and the parallel flourishing of multiple alternative models
coincided with and was no doubt linked to the general cultural ferment of the
1970s–1980s—in music, fashion, the emergence of New Age ideas and the growing
popularity of ‘‘alternative’’ forms of medicine, anti-war movements (this being the
era of Vietnam), the attraction of Asian religions, especially Buddhism, the

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emerging interest in the ‘‘greening’’ of society and the whole counter-culture

movement that was generally opposed in principle (in so far as it had a political
agenda) to industrialism, globalization and militarism—the ‘‘system’’ in other
words, and which bred in turn a whole range of formal and informal social
movements (Starr 2000). And this was only in the west—elsewhere numerous
movements were afoot: so-called new social movements in Asia and Latin America,
the rise of liberation theology, principally in the latter, Gandhian initiatives in non-
Marxist socialism and a plethora of social, economic and agricultural experiments in
India and elsewhere. Yet the decline of the attraction of the neo-Marxist model was
not, to the best of my knowledge, linked to these cultural shifts, partly because of
the weakness of Marxist models in dealing with culture, an old problem. But this is
not all, since the cultural shifts signaled a major shift in the nature of capitalism
itself.
As forms of capitalism change (and it is certainly anything but a static system), so
appropriate modes of analysis need to change with it. The neo-Marxist model
assumed an industrial ‘‘productivist’’ resource-extracting capitalist system, not one
based increasingly on services, information and symbol generation, distributed
globally and with its centers of power diffused. While clearly manufacturing in the
older Fordist sense still continues (much of it located ‘‘off-shore’’), the production
of culture itself has become a main feature of contemporary capitalism. Hence, the
significance of the media, and of industries associated with it—film, declining print
media and rising digital media (in news sources for example), television, social
media, travel and tourism, advertising and the manifold functions of the Internet.
The neo-Marxist approach was hence not ‘‘wrong,’’ simply out of context. For this
reason, the French Marxist-inspired economic anthropology is not necessarily the
best model for exploring capitalism. Its preoccupations were primarily with the
issues of whether Marxism could work at all in ‘‘kinship-based’’ societies without
industry and without classes. In this respect at least, George Marcus’ argument in
his 1990 paper is valid: that it is through cultural analysis that anthropology can
show its strength. This I think is true, but there is a missing term here in the
anthropological analysis of capitalism—notably ecology.
In his ‘‘non-growth’’ model of sustainable futures, Tim Jackson suggests that
there are two keys to the realization of such futures—what he calls changing the
‘‘social logic of consumerism’’ away from unnecessary and ultimately destructive
wants, and the creation of ‘‘a new ecologically literate macroeconomics’’ (Jackson
2010, p. 157). Again, I think that he is basically right—the transformation of non-
sustainable consumption habits into ones that promote environmental sustainability,
social solidarity and communal harmony is a prerequisite of having a future at all
and is at fundamental variance with the logic of capitalism. But in addition to an
ecologically literate macroeconomics, there also needs to be an equally literate
microeconomics, one based in daily ethnographic practices, since that is where
actual behavior that impacts the environment takes place. This is precisely the realm
of economic anthropology. If the ‘‘alternative’’ movements to global capitalism
have largely insulated themselves from an anthropology that could have greatly
informed their endeavors, so too, to a great extent, has economic anthropology
insulated itself from both ecological anthropology and the wider ecological

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What (if anything) can economic anthropology say to neoliberal… 109

movement (both expressed in actual social movements) and in the thinking of

theorists in such areas as ‘‘deep ecology’’ which resonates strongly with
anthropology even if it rarely calls upon its insights. Some of this is simply a
way of restating the need for linking the macro and the micro, the local and the
global. In principle, anthropology aims for holism, and in the analysis of capitalism
and its alternatives, this perspective is vital.
While then anthropology has significant powers of critique, and a distinctively
ethnographic angle to add to the many other analyses of neoliberal capitalism,
globalization and development coming from many directions (development studies,
ecological economics, economic sociology, development sociology and many
others), it also has the potential for collaboration with emerging alternatives. A
common objection to anthropological approaches is that they deal with the small
scale, and so the possibility of ‘‘scaling up’’ to be applicable to large-scale
‘‘complex’’ societies is weak. This seems to me to suggest both a failure of
imagination and a rejection of the possibility that an equally urgent need is that of
scaling down the overly large, unnecessarily complex, risk-infected systems and
institutions that comprise contemporary capitalist economies with their built-in
tendencies to growth, expansion and gigantism. A good example of its potential can
be seen in relation to the rapidly growing movement of ‘‘Solidarity Economy’’.
Defined by one of its practitioners as the pursuit of ‘‘a socioeconomic order and a
new way of life that deliberately chooses serving the needs of people and ecological
sustainability as the goal of economic activity rather than maximization of profits
under the unfettered rule of the market. It places economic and technological
development at the service of social and human development rather than the pursuit
of narrow self interest’’ (Quinones 2009, p. 19). Its literature and practices circulate
around a number of goals—the enhancement of conviviality and equality,
ecological sustainability, creativity, trust, cooperation and community (Clammer
2016a, p. 3) often expressed, particularly in its many actual manifestations in Brazil
and elsewhere in Latin America, as cooperatives, sharing economies, organic
agriculture, a concern with building new face-to-face social ties and social and
cultural capital, revival of craft production and simplicity in life styles (e.g.,
Grasseni et al. 2015). These are in so many ways exactly the characteristics of many
of the smaller scale societies and economies that have been documented
ethnographically and were presumably among the values that attracted anthropol-
ogists to the study of such societies in the first place.

Economic anthropology and neoliberal capitalism

Anthropology has then a long history of engagement with capitalism, either as a

direct object of study or as the context in which other, and particularly,
‘‘development’’-related issues are framed. Other discourses of economic anthro-
pology have run parallel to this—the set of issues that emerged from the 1967 Firth-
edited volume for example. But assuming a critical perspective, a number of points
can now be summarized that suggest fruitful approaches from economic anthro-
pology. These certainly include the following:

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1. The documentation of ethnographic reality and its diversity shows itself a

number of important things—the sheer variety of human socioeconomic and
cultural possibilities; the many ways of articulating society and economy and
economy and ecology, by providing empirical examples of localism and bio-
regionalism, by drawing on forms of indigenous knowledge and practices to
suggest the basis of not only alternative economies, but also of potential
alternative forms of economics.
2. By reviewing the parallels between economic anthropology and many recent
and emerging alternative positions, to explore the possibilities of creative
collaborations, given that many of the features of such alternatives are
remarkably similar to the characteristics of societies, the study of which has
been at the heart of anthropology. This gives anthropology a constructive as
well as a deconstructive role and greatly expands the possible parameters of
‘‘applied’’ and ‘‘development’’ anthropology.
3. The revitalization of links between economic anthropology and ecological
anthropology. This is not only a theoretical necessity given the scope and
seriousness of the planetary environmental crisis, most of the origin of which
can be traced back to the nature of the capitalist economic system and its
attitude to resources, pollution, profit and nature in general, but also links
anthropology to the large emerging issues in twenty-first century civilization
and especially climate change and its multiple social, economic, environmental
consequences, not least among which are such issues as environmental refugees
and new forms of forced displacement (Klein 2014). Such changes imply that
new models of development are urgently needed and that among the immediate
and major issues is that of ‘‘transition’’—of not only conceiving of an
alternative and sustainable future, but of how to get there from here (Clammer
2016b, pp. 155–177), and what can be learnt from previous social transitions,
even if of lesser scale. The academic study of ‘‘social change’’ suddenly takes
on a whole new urgency and significance.

It is interesting that among new social and economic movements concerned with
the present state of the world is one basing itself on the ideas of one of the founding
fathers of economic anthropology—notably Marcel Mauss. This movement, based
on a book by Caille (2000) and with its key ideas enshrined in a ‘‘Convivialist
Manifesto’’ (2014), draws on some key ideas inspired by Mauss’s seminal work The
Gift. These include a critical approach to growth economics, the need to define new
ways of conceiving of wealth and the good life, the idea of a society of ‘‘frugal
abundance,’’ ‘‘de-growth’’ as associated with the work of Serge Latouche and linked
to ideas of reduction in working time, consumption and consumer desires, and the
creation of a journal and movement to support these ideas, known indeed as
MAUSS—the ‘‘Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales’’ and which
revives the notion of the gift and Mauss’s concern with ‘‘solidarity as a form of
mutual recognition secured by the exchange of gifts and founded on social ties and
mutual indebtedness’’ (Adloff in the introduction to the 2014, p. 11). Sharing many
features with Solidarity Economy, mutual aid systems and cooperatives, and many
other associative projects scattered through civil society, the convivialist movement

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also recognizes that unlike conventional socialism, change cannot come through the
state alone: it must be rooted in new forms of social self-organization, building in
many cases on older and tested examples of these principles. While it is not clear
that convivialism in itself can provide the basis for a systematic critique of and
transcending of capitalism, the movement does indicate the vitality that still exists
in economic anthropology and that in forming a new social movement to combat the
destructive qualities of existing neoliberal capitalism, such anthropology speaks
clearly to and with such movements. In that direction may lay its renewal and
relevance for the coming crisis-loaded years and decades.

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