ABSTRACT
This chapter examines accounts of market trading that have highlighted its historical and cultural specificity. It presents a common theme: arguments dwelling on spatial and temporal variation; arguments that look towards social and cultural influences on trade and arguments that see markets as reflecting material production. A single core model goes against the grain of the cultural and evolutionary thinking that has traditionally dominated anthropology. Subtleties can be brought out by culturally sensitive anthropological work unhampered by a single model of market trade. ‘Culturalist’ critics of substantivism have taken the relativist case one step further. Economic anthropology has been divided among formalist, substantivist and culturalist approaches. Within the economics discipline, the case for a social and cultural approach to markets has been made by American institutionalism, which reacted against neoclassical methods. In the new cultural climate, trade came to be an activity in its own right.
