To say that economic anthropology is the anthropological study of economy is true, but does not help much. One purpose of this introduction is to explain what “the anthropological study of economy” means.

The object of that study is economy, but this does not help much either, as the word has many meanings. For instance, it can mean being thrifty, as when housewives were admonished to practise economy. Equally, it can mean the interrelated activities of a social unit, such as the households in which those housewives existed and worked. When it is preceded by the definite article and becomes “the economy” it commonly means a country's economy. That can be defined in a variety of ways, but usually they revolve around making things intended to be bought and sold. For instance, commonly the health of a country's economy is taken to be its gross domestic product (GDP), effectively the total monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced in order to be sold in a given period.

Seeing the economy in terms of buying and selling may be ubiquitous, but it is fairly recent. The man often taken to be the founder of economics is Adam Smith, and the book that he wrote that laid that foundation is The Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]), not The Economy of Nations. Wealth, prosperity and well-being were what concerned people when Smith wrote. What makes Smith and his fellows in the Scottish Enlightenment the founders of economics late in the eighteenth century is that they were some of the first in Western Europe to urge that activities related to those concerns should be guided by values different from those that guide activities in the rest of life. That is, and using our terms rather than theirs, they said that the economic and social realms of life should be kept separate. Adam Ferguson, another member of the Scottish Enlightenment, said that in the economic realm one is guided by whether activities “empty [or] fill the pocket” (in Silver 1990: 1484); in the social realm, one is guided by what Smith had earlier described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.