Discourse on anthropological political economy provides several overlapping genealogies (Roseberry 1988; Vincent 1990; Moore 1993). All agree, however, that the juxtaposition of ‘political’ with ‘economy’ came with the invention of the concept of capitalism by eighteenth-century ideologues such as James Steuart: what ‘economy’ was in a family, political economy was in a state. Nation-states became actors in a worldwide drama. Thus political economists considered as a single project, for example, the colonization of India, the rise of the textile industry in Britain, and the status of Egypt within what they called the cosmopolitical economy.
Bifurcation set in early in the development of political economy as scholars began to question whether the state ought to act as paterfamilias. Increasingly the moral and governmental aspects of political economy were set aside and a separate discipline, economics, came into existence. In opposition to the classical focus on the market and consumption, popular political economists developed theories of property and labour. Based on experience with expanding industrial capitalism, they argued that capitalism did not simply adjust to, but positively required, crisis. The term political economy was thus revitalized and transformed into a rallying point for those critical of rampant capitalism.
Several features of classical and popular political economy have been assimilated into anthropology. When, in Ancient Society (1877), Lewis Henry Morgan deplored what he called the property career of mankind, Engels suggested that Morgan’s ethnology validated Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. The idea that what was thought of as ‘natural’ — the family, the difference between men and women, women’s work, for example — was interlinked and connected with the political economy of the society and the existence of the state, did not gain wide circulation until the 1970s when feminism began to contribute critically to anthropological political economy.
Nineteenth-century German economists and historians developed a substantive critique of British political economy, questioning its focus on homo oeconomicus. Arguing the inapplicability of the British model of capitalism to agrarian Germany, they focused instead on cultural otherness. This, too, entered anthropology when political economists within the discipline began to question even more broadly whether neoclassical economics could be applied to non-Western, non-capitalist societies. This was taken up initially as a formalist—substantivist debate between economic historians and anthropologists and was later revived in connection with modernization theory and the analysis of capitalism’s impact on the non-Western world.
Anthropological political economy enters the mainstream
Anthropological political economy entered the academic mainstream in the 1970s. At that time two paradigms prevailed in the social sciences: the development and underdevelopment paradigm that emerged to challenge modernization theory, particularly in its focus on newly independent Third World nations; and the modern world-system model of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Anthropological political economy defined itself in contradistinction to both.
It would be unrealistic not to relate the emergence of these paradigms to the historical events of these years. Politically, in the Third World, this was an age of advocacy of armed revolution: Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Regis Debray, Che Guevara, Fanon. Peasant revolutions were clearly the order of the day rather than social science analyses of nation states. The work that most influenced anthropology was that of Samir Amin, Arrighi and Rodney in Africa; and Andre Gunder Frank and Cardoso in Latin America. Eric Wolfs Peasant Wars appeared in 1969.
The term ‘political economy’ became widely used in anthropology during the Vietnam War (1965—73). Teach-in movements in the universities, radical political economic and history journals and a campus movement, Students for a Democratic Society, spearheaded the emergence in the United States of a New Left. The critical thrust of these radical movements was applied to society at home, to the university system, and to anthropology itself in the United States, Britain and France. Critiques of structural anthropology’s representation of African societies, with its emphasis on kinship and its neglect of political economy, appeared in re-evaluations by Kathleen Gough, Peter Worsley and Talal Asad of classic ethnographies. These seminal studies stimulated more explicit discussion of the theories of political economy and their application in Third World countries, by Joel Migdon in Indonesia, for example, and Keith Hart in Africa. An entire cadre of French Marxist anthropologists and Africanists — among them "Godelier, "Meillassoux, Terray and Coquery-Vidrovitch — became prominent exponents of economic anthropology worldwide. With the emergence of a new group of radical left scholars within the American academy, Marxism became academically respectable.Africanists, for example, drew on Lenin’s thesis of the uneven development of the capitalist economy in agrarian societies and emergent rural differentiation, documenting the increasing pauperization of the mass of the people in Africa’s so-called ‘development decade’. Marxist theories of petty commodity production were criticized by anthropologists, stimulating valuable historical ethnographies of petty commodity production in, for example, Minangkabau in Southeast Asia (Kahn 1980) and the Peruvian Andes in Highland South .America (Smith 1989).
An intellectual connection with Marxism has, at different times and in different places, both strengthened and undermined anthropological political economy. Yet, when political economy came of age in academic anthropology in 1978 in a special issue of American Ethnologist, it was apparent that there was no one unifying vision or discourse among its self-proclaimed practitioners. Thus when Wolf published a subaltern alternative to prevailing paradigms of expanding Western capitalism, Europe and the People without History (1982), his topic was subjected to keen debate among anthropological political economists, historians and social scientists. Criticisms of the paradigm it offered both consolidated anthropological political economy and moved it forward.
Anthropological political economy and its critics
In the tradition of both classical and popular political economy (of which Marxism is a variant) internal critiques have shaped and reshaped the metanarratives of anthropological political economy. By the end of the 1980s, it could no longer be said that anthropological political economy was no more than a simple-minded representation of Enlightenment thinking and that it was not political enough. Always attentive to history, anthropological political economy had achieved much of its coherence through analyses of colonial capitalism and economic imperialism, initially in a critique of ethnographic representation of non-Western societies and cultures, but subsequently as a genre in its own right. It is currently taking up the challenge of feminist and post-colonial theory with a somewhat belated recognition that historically specific determinations of gender, race, and class come into conflict with one another. Anthropological political economists studying colonial and post-colonial capitalism in Africa, Latin America and Oceania have thus begun to delineate numerous capitalisms.
That political economy did not analyse the structures and history of non-Western communities penetrated by capitalism and that it appeared unwilling to incorporate culture into its analyses were more problematic matters. At issue is the historical tension between ethnographic particularism (local knowledge) and universalizing social theory. Jane Schneider’s many essays on complex European ‘cultural codes’ exemplify political economy’s resolution at its best. With their enigmatic titles — ‘Peacocks and Penguins’, ‘Trousseau as Treasure’, ‘Rum-pelstiltskin’s Bargain’ — they consistently blend culture, ideology, symbolism and folklore with historical materialism. They interpret and explain at the same time: why peasant women wore black clothes; why embroidery was valued in peasant Europe and what has taken its place today; why weaving cloth was viewed with suspicion. Status emulation, class formation, demographic change, female purity, the seclusion of women and dowry systems as liquid wealth in regional spheres of exchange are all linked in her analysis of the changing social topography of Central and Southern Europe.
The peripheral situation
The end of modernism in anthropology brought no resolution to the problem of employing universalistic analytic categories. What it did bring was a more explicit application of Marxism.
The question in anthropological political economy remained one of the relationship between capitalism and those societies conceptually located on its periphery. Was capitalism to be understood as a single world-system or as a heterogeneous assemblage of subsystems which Western capitalism had penetrated to varying degrees?
For such peripheral situations, "Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980) and Jacques Chevalier’s Civilization and the Stolen Gift (1982) provided key texts for a clear formulation of the issues involved. Both provided ethnographies of communities in highland South America. Chevalier found non-capitalist modes of production to be subsumed within the dominant framework of capitalism. Taussig described a cultural system that had internalized the contradictions of capitalism in several different ways but most notably through beliefs in ‘the devil’ as an indigenous critique of commodity forms of exchange and wage relations.
In a critical review of the two books Terence Turner urged appreciation not simply of the possible integration of two systems of economic production but of the qualitative differences that might be attached to defining and articulating production itself. With absorption into capitalism, indigenous peoples lost the ability to define themselves in their own way. Turner thus argued for moving beyond the analysis of economic production to social reproduction. This raised the question of whether on the periphery subsistence might not simply be an alternative mode of production to capitalism but a form of resistance to it.
Analyses of such relations in the historically earlier peripheries of northeast Scotland and colonial Africa had suggested that developing industrial capitalism required a peasant subsistence sector so that the costs of reproduction might be borne by the agrarian sector as both food resources and labour power. The South American peripheral situations suggested the very real need in anthropology to distinguish more precisely between "mercantile, industrial and finance capitalism.
Discussion of the peripheral situation opened up space beyond the debate between those who saw capitalism as largely determinate of local social systems and those asserting the relative autonomy of local peoples and their cultures.
Appreciating that the periphery of capitalism is but the furthest extension of the core (Nugent 1988) is not unrelated to the growing corpus of political economic research carried out in modern Western cities and within the apparatus of the modern state. Thus anthropological political economy provides ethnographies of race in the inner cities, educational discrimination, poverty and the underclass. It has sometimes questioned the validity of sociological paradigms and, indeed, the very way in which phenomena have been defined as problems within complex societies. The current challenge of anthropological political economy is to interrogate its own intellectual equipment.
Conclusion
Anthropology’s engagement with political economy reflects its somewhat ambivalent role within the social sciences. Anthropologists tend to put forward alternative and even oppositional analyses to those offered by the other social science disciplines. The endurance of political economy owes much to its emergence within capitalism as a discourse on crisis. New theoretical movements in anthropology tend to define themselves in contradistinction to political economy’s long intellectual career. Thus "interpretive anthropology attempts to set the logic of political economy against the autonomy of culture just as post-modernism attempts to decentre political economy by labelling it modern (in its attention to capitalism and class) and canonical (by virtue of its historically situated intellectual origins). Ironically, that which appears most characteristic of post-modernism — fragmentation and the diffusion of power — is to the political economist a further indication of capitalism’s success in masking its hegemonic powers.
