Development Studies

What (if anything) can economic anthropology say to neoliberal development? Toward new anthropologies of capitalism and its alternatives

What (if anything) can economic anthropology say to neoliberal development? Toward new anthropologies of capitalism and its alternatives

This paper attempts to define ways in which the comparative and ethnographically based approach of economic anthropology can provide a powerful tool for the critique of neoliberal development models.

Author

John Clammer, Professor of Sociology, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.

Summary

Critiques of neoliberalism and associated forms of development are now abundant. But few if any draw on the vocabulary or empirical work of economic anthropology.

This paper will attempt to rectify this absence through a number of moves including examining recent work in economic anthropology and noting possible applications to the study of larger systems of development based on this foundation; the paper will attempt to define ways in which the comparative and ethnographically based approach of economic anthropology can provide a powerful tool for the critique of neoliberal development models and will seek to provide an alternative mode of analysis through which this might be done.

Published in: Dialectical Anthropology

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