In these chapters I have presented an introduction to economic anthropology. As I said at the outset, I have not tried to be comprehensive. Instead, I have selected and organized ideas and examples in order to illustrate the sorts of things that many economic anthropologists do.

I want to close with a general observation about that doing.

One aspect of the doing is producing detailed descriptions of particular sets of people at particular times, such as the Ponam Islanders that Achsah Carrier and I studied over the course of seven years. Ponams are likely to appear exotic to those who have read this book, but the detailed descriptions can be of people who work in Wall Street investment banks or even a single household in north London. Such descriptions are called ethnography, which A. R. Radcliffe-Brown said is one of the legs on which anthropology stands, and they have long been the staple of anthropological writing.

One could, if one wished, approach that writing for the detailed information that it contains. So, if one liked, one could read all the ethnography of, say, the Melpa, to learn about them and their society.

One could, however, approach the ethnography differently, more in terms of what Radcliffe-Brown called comparative sociology. One could see it as presenting a set of examples of what different sets of people do in their social lives and the factors and processes that seem to shape that doing. Read this way, ethnographies provide evidence of a range of social practices, beliefs and the rest.

These are revealed not by reading everything about the Melpa but by reading ethnography of people anywhere, provided that it describes, for example, the relationship between leadership, an aspect of political organization, and circulation, an aspect of economic practice. Doing this would help us to understand how different sorts of that organization are related to different sorts of that practice. I have tried to indicate this approach from time to time by using processes and practices described for people in distant places and times, and showing how they resemble or differ from what people are doing here and now, and so help make sense of things.