The "Anti-Market" Mentality Re-Examined: A Further Critique of the Substantive Approach to Economic Anthropology

Abstract

The primary aim of this elaboration of an earlier critique of the substantive approach to economic anthropology is not so much "rejection" of the tenets of that approach as it is "penetration" to a deeper level of analysis. The wider implications of the formal-substantive controversy cannot be appreciated until it is viewed in its proper intellectual context, namely as directly linked to the polemic in economic thought which was initiated in the mid-19th century with the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. More specifically, it is argued (1) that the "anti-economics" of Polanyi and his followers parallels in origin and rationale the views of the immature Engels--views which were subsequently negated in a definitive fashion through the development of the Marxian critique of classical political economy, (2) that Polanyi's is a spurious substantivism because of its failure to recognize and emphasize that the essential "materiality" of the economic process lies in production phenomena, and (3) that on epistemological grounds the method of economic anthropology must incorporate concepts, analytic strategies, and tactics from the widest range of sources which might yield operationally sound and anthropologically relevant results.