Capitalism eludes its definitions. It has been called free enterprise and defined as production for a global market in which goods, services and labour are priced. Ownership is private and alienable and that which is owned can easily change hands in a monetary transaction. Profits are sought in market exchanges and are made available for further investment. Such definitions tend to create a rupture in history between advanced market economies and earlier periods of time or precolonial societies geographically remote from the West. Although economic anthropologists study capitalist phenomena, other branches of anthropology study them as well by examining such features as the cultural dimensions of the commodity or emergent lifestyles in relation to popular music in distant areas of the world.
The causes and origins of large-scale capital formation have been debated by economic historians; the rise of capitalism has been located in Western Europe and particularly England. Fernand Braudel (1977) considered the longdistance, seaborne trade that opened the Atlantic and Pacific Basins to high-volume markets as a vitally important source of stimulation. Both the London Company of Merchants Trading to the East Indies, chartered by the Crown in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company served to move the state formation of companies to new levels of organization, to pool investment funds, to self-insure against disaster by spreading liability, to create new domestic and international markets, and to sponsor long-distance trade. It has been shown that the national institutions evolving during the early moments of capital development were significant for the rise of colonalism and also the Industrial Revolution.
The study of capitalism by anthropologists was stimulated after World War II by fieldwork conducted among peasants who had been radicalized by Marxist ideals and also by the student protests of the late 1960s. In conjunction with Marxist anthropologists in France, British social anthropologists began to ask if the structure of inequality had preceded capitalist economic development and if capitalist modes of production were substantially different from those that did not make profits. In the US cultural materialists argued that profit-making constructed anew every aspect of society in all parts of the world. Scholarly meetings, provocative formulations, and the inauguration of studies brought a focus to the workings of capitalism; the neo-Weberians breathed new life into Weber’s definitions and studies of the rise of the market and the Protestant ethic. In addition to Marx and Weber, Mauss’s The Gift has been rethought, and changes in exchange as people move from a face-to-face economy to a market system have been explored.
The study of capitalist processes, whether foregrounded or backgrounded, has served to shift the field of anthropological inquiry away from predominant concern with non-Western societies and to place the Western and non-Western on a more equal footing. Neither Marx, Weber nor Mauss provide the sole focus for the wide range of study conducted. Issues of money, the commodity, religious resistance and identity formation through the construction of mass markets break out of the easy definitions of capitalism, and anthropologists’ case studies reveal the diversity of the phenomena while at the same time pointing to certain regularities that obtain.
Inquiries into contemporary capitalism include a large array of issues and geographical areas. Gender studies have been prominent due in part to the massive restructuring of the family induced by the formation of international markets, the introduction of wage-earning and the displacement of local roles. In Africa, substantial research has informed understanding of the course of economic development through examination of incomes generated outside the official system, prominently a domain of women (MacGaffey et al. 1991). Bribery, corruption, smuggling and trade in illegal substances is not only occurring globally, but serves in countries without a highly developed public and legitimized market economy to foster economic growth. Surprisingly, it also fosters an increasing search by the newly affluent for legitimation and the building of legal institutions. In Kathmandu, research has shown that new media audiences among the young create new consumer spheres through the introduction of media assemblages; for example, magazine advertisements tied into clothing and musical styles simultaneously. Possession ceremonies by troupes of Hauka performers among the Songhay in Niger mime the colonial and post-colonial presence while redirecting its power. The effect on local peoples of growth (stimulated by national governments and international lending institutions) in regional economies of Third World countries on local peoples has been closely documented. There has been a surge of interest in European ethnography; concern with the entangled growth of nationalism and the anthropological enterprise; close observation of resistance and rebellion, and inter-ethnic conflicts; studies of commodification and commodities such as coffee and sugar; studies of women’s roles in traditional and new markets and the conflicts generated from such transitions. Anthropologists’ research interest has expanded into the debates over intellectual property, the legal ownership of such things as brand names, chemical formulae, the ‘look and feel’ of images produced by software, logos, cartoon figures, songs, poems, and images and texts of all sorts including their electronic storage, retrieval and transmission.
In capitalism, the extended corporate form, traced to its beginnings in the Cluniac order after AD 910, has dominated the recent course of world societies. Contemporary capitalism stimulates three modes of corporate organization: those organized for profit, as in the private firm; those which govern and are public and governmental; and the non-profitmaking, such as the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that lobby in the halls of the United Nations and represent among other things the interests of native peoples worldwide. Studies of dynastic families (Marcus 1992), non-profitmaking cultural institutions, and old elites who have willingly married family members with industrial fortunes have also been studied in Europe, the USA and Asia.
Whatever else they do, capitalist enterprises produce a plethora of new, often dangerous material substances, many of them rich with their own abilities to act. Some studies focus on the human relationships with materials transformed — in corporate laboratories through science, manufacturing and marketing — into consumer items that form great networks of objects, scientific claims, political responses and consumer anxieties, preferences and identities (e.g. Appadurai 1986). At the same time critical attention has been paid to the linguistic formations, both pragmatic and rhetorical, that exemplify discourses of the marketplace (Rose 1991; Herman 1999). It is clearly the case that native languages are being transformed from within, not just by new words but by new forms of pragmatic dealings tied to market exchanges. Finally, more recent ethnographic work has depicted capitalism as having undergone significant transformations in the late twentieth century, characterized variously as neoliberalism,globalization, postmodernity or the ‘New Economy’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Downey and Fisher 2006).
