Description:
- An innovative contribution to the thinking about economic anthropology.
- The ethnographies illiuminate economic and ritual changes in countries emerging from socialism and re-entering market society.
- Pioneering investigations of transformations of the domestic economy in postsocialist conditions
- Reappraisal of the basic meaning of economy as a separate domain of human activity
- Simultaneous reappraisal of the basic meaning of the concept "ritual
Brief description:
Stephen Gudeman, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, has undertaken fieldwork in several countries of Latin America. During 2008-2012 he was co-director of the Economy and Ritual project at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Gudeman has published extensively in journals and written or edited eight books, the most recent of which are Economy's Tension (2008) and Economic Persuasions (2009).
Review Quotes:
"The result of these six ethnographies is a compelling case for attention to the ritual aspects of the economy and the economic aspects of ritual. But this is a revelation that anthropologists are completely prepared to receive, given our basic commitment to holism and cultural integration. The chapters feature useful descriptions of ritual economics and economic rituals, as well as the invention of traditions and non-market forms of production and exchange." - Anthropology Review Database
"This volume links two fields of anthropological inquiry that were central to the development of the discipline, but have rarely been considered together in recent decades: the study of ritual and of economic systems and rationalities . . . It is a welcome and fresh contribution that has no direct equivalents currently in print." - Sonja Luehrmann, Simon Fraser University
"[This book] makes an innovative contribution to the way we think about economic anthropology-rituals, celebrations, feasts, and the partly constructive ways that they are indelibly tied to economic practices." - Russell Zanca, Northeastern Illinois University