Rationality or Reasoning? Comment on Heath Pearson's “Homo Economicus Goes Native, 1859-1945”

Abstract

Heath Pearson's claimthat a growing indifference developed between and anthropology after the mid-century is a provocative one, since it predates by about ten years the rise of the subdiscipline that defines itself as economic anthropology and that produced a great wave of new studies of old topics such as the Kula ring and of new topics such as peasants, markets, and the course of economic change. This new eco- nomic anthropology has indeed related to economics, albeit on certain restricted issues: household economics, collective property regimes, and economic development, among others. Yet I do not disagree with Pear- son's claim that primitive economics and lost relevance for each other with respect to basic issues. In a paper published in a pre- dominantly collection (Guyer 1997), I noted that most of the relevant anthropological literature on the topic I was addressing—the