ABSTRACT
The focus of this book is on transformations of local socioeconomic practices in most regions of the world. The main contribution of the book is that it explores this concept in a world characterized by globalization. The empirically rich chapters invite us to a discussion of this topic by economic anthropologists and economic sociologists. In this, the book opens up a discussion of a domain hitherto reserved to economics that has been investigated by anthropologists or sociologists for a rather short time period (Van Binsbergen and Geschiere 2005). The strategy of the book is to further the dialogue with economists by proposing an understanding of countries of the North, the South, and the East in which the world is not as commodifi ed as economists often think, but where socioeconomic aspects of life are present in abundance and no longer hidden. Often ancient production systems have been virtually destroyed or revitalized in the process of globalization that has characterized our world (Cook 2006). In this sense, the case studies in this book are not presented as an ethnographic evidence of socioeconomic practices but their value renders possible a rigorous investigation of broad theoretical issues within a specifi ed social context.
