Economy's Tension The Dialectics of Community and Market [Paperback]

Why are we obsessed with calculating our selections? The author argues that competitive trade nurtures calculative reason, which provides the ground for most discourses on economy. But market descriptions of economy are incomplete. Drawing on a range of materials from small ethnographic contexts to global financial markets, the author shows that economy is dialectically made up of two value realms, termed mutuality and impersonal trade. One or the other may be dominant; however, market reason usually cascades into and debases the mutuality on which it depends. Using this cross-cultural model, the author explores mystifications of economic life, and explains how capital and derivatives can control an economy. The book offers a different conception of economic welfare, development, and freedom; it presents an approach for dealing with environmental devastation, and explains the growing inequalities of wealth within and between nations.

Stephen Gudemanreceived his PhD in Anthropology from Cambridge University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and has carried out fieldwork in Panama, Colombia, Guatemala and Cuba. He works at the intersection of anthropology and economics. His books includeThe Anthropology of Economy(Blackwell),Conversations in Colombia, with Alberto Rivera (Cambridge UP),Economics as Culture(Routledge), andThe Demise of a Rural Economy(Routledge).

[The author] does not shy away from this controversial aspect of his book; to the contrary, he asserts his stand in a forceful manner, but in a language that is marked by its remarkable clarity and absence of polemic. For the open-minded reader concerned with fundamental questions about notions of economy and value, this book contains many thought-provoking ideas.? ??New Political Economy

Gudemans model is thought provoking and his elaboralS°