Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins's
Stone Age Economics has established itself as a classic of modern
anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological
economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to
study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of
the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to
be the original "affluent society." Sahlins examines notions of
production, distribution and exchange in early communities and examines
the link between economics and cultural and social factors. A radical
study of tribal economies, domestic production for livelihood, and of
the submission of domestic production to the material and political
demands of society at large, Stone Age Economics regards the economy as a
category of culture rather than behaviour, in a class with politics and
religion rather than rationality or prudence.
Sahlins
concludes, controversially, that the experiences of those living in
subsistence economies may actually have been better, healthier and more
fulfilled than the millions enjoying the affluence and luxury afforded
by the economics of modern industrialisation and agriculture. This
Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by David Graeber,
London School of Economics.
Stone Age Economics - Marshall Sahlins
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