ABSTRACT
Most anthropologists writes on issues have offered a preliminary, simple definition of 'the market' or 'the economy', and then turned to primitive or non-Western societies, where they found the definition inadequate for the processes and relations. Anthropologists accomplish this impressive feat with the use of oppositional models: market vs. non-market societies, Western vs. non-Western, commodity vs. gift exchange and so on. Considerations of freedom, both in the discourse of anarcho-capitalists and in the complex social and ideological load the word bears, or of the state are other areas where anthropologists have important roles to play. To the extent that anthropologists and historians have limited application of this insight to pre-capitalist or non-market situations, they have accepted Market ideology for recognisably market situations at face value. They therefore have no critical intellectual tools with which to argue against the bizarre and frightening fantasies and politics of the anarcho-capitalists or policy-makers who wish to reduce social and political questions to cost-benefit calculus.
