Introduction: Recuperating economic anthropology

Abstract

‘Transforming Economies, Changing States’ were the themes of the annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, held in Canberra at the Australian National University from 30 October to 2 November 2007. We were fortunate that our keynote speaker, Prof. Anna L. Tsing, addressed both conference themes directly in her stimulating address entitled ‘Beyond Economic and Ecological Standardisation’, included in this edition of TAJA and discussed further in the following. The other papers included here were given in a plenary panel of the conference especially intended to develop the first theme, transforming economies, and entitled ‘The Economic in Contemporary Anthropology’. (Or, rather, 20-minute versions were given of the four papers included here.) The aim of the panel was to examine and assess the value of various concepts of ‘economy’ or ‘the economic’ for the work of anthropology. Panellists were invited to position their own work in relation to these concepts. As one might expect from this, the unfolding academic work and sense of the discipline of each author is visible in what she or he has to say. Two of the authors (Gregory and Austin-Broos) describe, in different terms, what they see as having been a retreat from economy by anthropologists over the last several decades. They suggest ways in which new connections between anthropology and the subject matter of economy may develop in relation to changes in world economic activity (Gregory), or in reconceptualisation (Austin-Broos) of what has often been seen as the relationship of the ‘material’ and the ‘symbolic’. Two more authors (Altman and McKay, as well as the keynote by Tsing) challenge notions of ‘standardisation’ of the economy from differing ethnographic and conceptual standpoints. All the papers are instances of repositioning of economy within anthropology, not so much by resuscitation of a subfield of ‘economic anthropology’, as by new framings of the ‘economic’ deriving, in part, from authors’ convictions that conventional narratives of capitalism do not adequately tell contemporary stories of economic diversity and disjuncture. In part, the relations of anthropology with ‘economy’, as this is ordinarily understood, have been oppositional and deconstructive. From its inception in the work of Mauss, Firth, Malinowski and others, much of what counts as ‘economic anthropology’ has emphasised that ‘economy’ cannot be seen as a separate sphere, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2009) 20, 269–284 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2009.00036.x