ABSTRACT
This chapter raises some basic questions of cooperation between social anthropologists and economists. What do economists know of the work of anthropologists in the study of peasant economics, and what do they think they really need from anthropologists? In making a model of a subsistence farm economy, an economist needs no anthropological help in drawing his inferences. The chapter discusses that peasants have been initially defined as farmers who sell or exchange only a minor part of their total farm production or, if they sell a major part, still do so at a level which leaves them in the lowest income group of the farmers in their country. Broadly, among the structural features of a peasant society ordinarily apt to affect economic choices are: neighborhood ties; family and household ties; ties of kinship; ties of ritualized friendship and of quasi-kinship such as godparenthood; status and class differences; and relations of patronage and clientship.
