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‘Structural Substantivism’: A Critical Review of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Scott Cook
Scott Cook
Affiliation:
The University of Connecticut
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Extract

Stone Age Economics is the most important book in the field of economic anthropology produced by an American cultural anthropologist since M. J. Herskovits published The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples in 1940. Its theoretical and analytical superiority to that earlier book should cheer those of us who feel depressed because of the slow and tortuous course of progress in this sub-field of anthropological inquiry. While Sahlins’ book is original and provocative, however, it is not likely to revolutionize thinking in the field as much as the recent work by Godelier (1967). Even though it lacks the theoretical scope and scholarly judiciousness of the latter work, it should nevertheless become a minor classic in the literature dealing with ‘primitive’ (or tribal) economic life.

Type
Review Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , June 1974 , pp. 355 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1974

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