The Formalism/Substantivism Debate
By the 1950s, an acrimonious debate had broken out in anthropology
between "formalist" and "substantivist" approaches.
Raymond Firth
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Formalists like Raymond Firth argued that the tools of neo-classical economics were
applicable, with some minimal modification to all cultures...thus,
neo-classical economics discerned universal patterns of human
behavior.
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Karl Polanyi |
Substantivists, inspired largely by the work of Karl
Polanyi, argued that economics was a "special case" that applied only to
Western market economies. Its rules and formulae were applicable
only to such economies. Anthropologists would have to devise new
forms of economic analysis to understand cultures where capitalist markets
didn't govern behavior (and that included almost all cultures studied by
anthropologists).
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results |