Economic Anthropology in View of the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

Economic anthropology is the study of how individuals and communities understand and engage with economic life, broadly conceived. This chapter provides an overview of central debates and approaches used in the subdiscipline over the past century. These debates – ranging from the form and substance of the economy, the impact of the cultural turn, and the rise of neoliberal economic policy – are explored amid changing relationships with credit and debt following the global financial crisis (GFC). Positioned between anthropology and economics, the field of economic anthropology has long sought to understand notions of exchange, ownership, consumption, value, reciprocity, production, and labor and considers how these relate to the function and maintenance of distinct cultural worlds. Analyzing central debates in historical perspective, this chapter asks how practitioners continue to engage with key ideas after the GFC. What is more, it decenters key theoretical approaches by examining the experience of the GFC from outside the global centers of finance. Through a case study of the Icelandic banking collapse as part of the GFC, questions of how credit and debt are understood in light of crisis are pursued, particularly after the collective prosperity of Iceland’s “economic miracle” in the early 2000s. It concludes with a discussion of the harms of neoliberalism and economic “virtualism” and charts emerging inquiries in economic anthropology that boast flexibility for examining economy in a changing world.