ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the early history of economic anthropology and economic philosophy. It shows how the formalist-substantivist debate, once the centerpiece of economic anthropology, has now become an obstacle instead of an inspiration. The field needs to move beyond the debate and ask more sophisticated questions. Economists, in the meantime, mostly ignored anthropology and went on with the business of advising politicians on how to run the world economy. The first rumblings of the formalist-substantivist debate can be heard in Bronislaw Malinowski's 1922 critique of Western economics in his studies of the economy of the Trobriand Islands, off the east coast of New Guinea. The fundamental positions within the formalist-substantivist debate were already established, then, by the early 1950s. The strongest formalist proposition was that the economic rationality of the maximizing individual was to be found in all societies, in all kinds of behavior.
