Karl Paul Polanyi, was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
Polanyi, c. 1918
Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is an amalgamation of economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology began with work by the Polish founder of anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski and the French Marcel Mauss on the nature of reciprocity as an alternative to market exchange. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange.
Bronislaw Malinowski, anthropologist at the London School of Economics
A Kula bracelet from the Trobriand Islands.
Three tongkonan noble houses in a Torajan village.
The Sharon Temple, Sharon, Ontario circa 1860.