Economic Anthropology

Offering a new and comprehensive overview of important topics and orientations in the anthropological study of economic life, this invigorating third edition of A Handbook of Economic Anthropology addresses key changes in the decade since the previous edition in people’s economic lives and environments, as well as in intellectual interest among scholars.

The Handbook contains diverse reflections on the economic turmoil of 2008 and the austerity that followed. Containing 35 newly commissioned chapters from important scholars in the field, it covers the nature of work and the changing ways people think about it, as stable jobs give way to short term work and the platform economy, as well as the expansion of the financial sector and efforts to control it. Chapters further explore social reproduction, the maintenance and regeneration of households and social relations over time, as well as the increasing concern with value, morality and ethics, both as things that motivate people and as policy orientations.

This will be a critical read for academic anthropologists looking for a state-of-the-art and thorough reference work for this key area of the discipline. Economic sociologists and geographers, as well as heterodox economists will also benefit from the broad range of empirical work and theoretical standpoints explored.