Anthropology and political economic : theoretical and Asian perspectives

The concept of political economy has once again begun to emerge as a unifying idea around which to organise hitherto separated themes of economics, development and critical sociology. This is the first book to address this question from a specifically anthropological point of view with the intention of exploring the anthropologist's understanding of the idea of political economy, the uses to which it has and may fruitfully be put and to examine the linkage between an anthropology reformulated in these terms and a range of questions in economics, development and the under standing of non-western societies.

The form of the book is that of a series of linked essays which take up a variety of topics including themes in economic anthropology, the analysis of peasant and lineage societies, the significance of neo Marxist approaches in anthropology, anthropological approaches to development and underdevelopment (including the much-neglected position of cultural analysis), and some suggestions about how anthropologists might set about the exploration of complex societies.

The uniqueness of the book lies in its concentration on the theme of political economy as a focus for some of the issues of leading moral and political significance to contemporary anthropologists, especially 'Third World' ones, and in the specific theoretical and empirical contribution of the case-studies which form a substantial part of the book. Certainly this approach is controversial: it implies a major rethinking of the objectives and methods of con ventional anthropology and its relationship to the world of which it is a part. Certainly it suggests that a more critical, reflexive and development-orientated anthropology equal to the task to the analysis of world systems as well as tribal societies (and of the linkages between the two) is one essential direction in which anthropology must advance.

The book should be of interest to all anthropologists interested in the new directions that their discipline is taking, and in particular to economic anthropologists, students of anthropological theory, scholars in the field of development studies and to both First and Third World sociologists and anthropologists interested in creating a more critical approach to the study of, in particular, contemporary Asian society.