ABSTRACT
There is a paradox in Malinowski's contribution to economic anthropology. At an early stage of his work he wrote, ‘There is no other aspect of primitive life where our knowledge is more scanty and our understanding more superficial than in Economics’ (1922a, p. 84). If this view (which he stated on a number of occasions) is less true now, most of the credit for leading the way to a better appreciation of the subject is due to Malinowski himself. Yet his knowledge of formal economics was always very limited; his approach to economic analysis began largely on a descriptive, commonsense level and for the most part continued to be unsophisticated. To what then can we attribute the value of his own work and the stimulus which he gave to the work of others in this field?
