Cultural Economies Past and Present (Texas Press Sourcebooks in Anthropology, No. 18)

Rating:
Summary: Not quite that bad, I'd say
Review: I have read the book in its entirety and did not find it difficult to follow in the least. However, I had the advantage of having recently read some of Polanyi's best known books.

While I acknowledge that Halperin's book did draw quite heavily on Polanyi's work, it would be most unfair to state that Polanyi's ideas have died and that Halperin's work along these lines is useless.

Most scholars acknowledge that the formalist/substantivist debate Polanyi initiated was less than fruitful and historians have poked some holes in his economic history. Some errors are to be expected in multidisciplinary work - especially when written at a time when it was politically unacceptable for Polanyi to acknowledge some of his source of inspiration.

Though Polanyi's history was flawed, his arguments could have been instantiated by ethnographic work, which was a key source of inspiration for his approach.

Halperin extracts a valuable conceptual approach from Polanyi's work. I emphasize VALUABLE because Polanyi's concept of embeddedness has been modernized and extended by Mark Granovetter, who in turn has been very influential not only within economic sociology and anthropology but also within new institutional economics.

While many economic anthropologists cast irrelevant or impotent critiques at the easily misunderstood giant which is economic science, Polanyi's critiques called attention to a weakness in neoclassical economic theory that nobel prize winner Ronald Coase was to write about just 3 years later in The Theory of Social Costs.

Polanyi's notion of embeddedness - that economic transactions are not independent of their social and institutional millieu - is sweeping through economics like wildfire and even encouraging a few bold economists to read classic ethnography in search of better insights and justification for their analysis.

It is ironic that the substantivist/formalist debate be labelled as unfruitful precisely when economists are so fervently striving to close the social gap first identified by Karl Polanyi and subsequently by Ronald Coase between "Blackboard economics" and economic reality.

It may be the case that anthropologists become bored of novel ideas and theories before working out their enormous implications for interdisciplinary research and reformulation of existing theory.

I would submit that few ideas within economic anthropology have had as large an effect on mainstream economics as those of Karl Polanyi. As such, distilling and revisiting his core concepts may be more fruitful than expected.

For researchers wishing to participate in these exciting new interdisciplinary developments within academia or policy, accessible, modernized, expanded, and refined versions of Polanyi's arguments may be highly relevant.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, hard to follow, an ode to Polanyi
Review: Its hard to tell what the author's goal is in this book. It purports to be about economic anthropology, but does not cover any of the important work in that field over the last 20 years. The author sometimes claims this is a work that ties together cultural anthropology and archaeology, but again there is almost no reference to other relevant work in either field.

The book reinvents not just one wheel, but enough to support a tractor-trailer. But in most cases the wheels are old, cracked, and flat. This is because the author's single inspiration seems to be the work of a long-dead historical economist, Karl Polanyi. The book is basically a long ode to how brilliant Polanyi was, how he figured out everything important, and answered every question.

This is not an easy book to read. There never seems to be any clear line of thought, progression , or narrative. The examples are thrown together with no coherent order - they are a mish-mash taken at random from ethnography and archaeology.

I cannot see how this book would be of any use to a student starting out in economic anthropology, unless you wanted to confuse them and put them to sleep. Professionals in the field are not likely to get much out of it either. Most anthropologists already know what Polanyi said, and dont need an endless exegesis of ideas which have largely not withstood the test of time. The author appears to be massively uninformed about what has gone on in social theory since Polanyi died.

I don't get it. University of Texas Press usually does careful peer review, and most of their books are excellent. Why do they keep publishing Halperin's lame stuff?