The Institutional Paradigm in Economic Anthropology

Abstract

Karl Polanyi is probably best known in economic anthropology as the founder of the substantivist school. In fact, it was not until Polanyi published his now famous essay ‘The Economy as Instituted Process,’ that the formalist-substantivist controversy established economic anthropology as a subfield worthy of theoretical consideration. By the 1970s, however, the debate had grown old and Marxism dominated discussions of economies across cultures. Formalists and substantivists alike became converted Marxists and in their zeal for the new religion severed their ties with former faiths. While a few acknowledged that there might be a relationship between Marxism and substantivism, Polanyi’s concepts dropped out or were dismissed summarily. This chapter reconnects the links between substantivism and Marxism in the form of the institutional paradigm, and is predicated on several controversial assumptions. The first is that the critical debates for economic anthropology in the 1980s are not between formalists and substantivists, as they were in the 1960s, but between substantivists and Marxists. By critical I mean those debates which are likely to direct the field toward cross-cultural, comparative analysis, that is, toward explaining how and why economies in different societies take particular forms, maintain their basic structures, or change into forms qualitatively different from the previously existing ones.