Stone Age Economics

“If economics is the dismal science, the study of hunting and gathering economies must be its most advanced branch” (Sahlins 1972: 1). Stone Age Economics is one of the well-known books in the subfield of economic anthropology provided by an American cultural anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins. This book is a slight representation in the literature dealing with ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ economic life. This book consists of a series of chapters that lacks a proper conclusion of Sahlins discoveries. In context it is comprehensive and adherent, manifesting as it does ethnography, social theories, Marxian, Neoclassical and ‘Substantivist’ economics, interpretations, and incisive logic sometimes applied in support of debatable notions. It is a collection of chapters written to provoke as well as to document. Although Sahlins identifies himself with the so-called ‘substantivist’ school of economic anthropology (Cook 1966), his approach is by no means a carbon copy of Polanyi’s transactional substantivism nor of the material substantivism of certain Marxist-oriented scholars (Cook 1966). His approach is distinctive, combining elements of the others, but representing what is considered “structural substantivism,” the view that the economy, as a function of society, provisions society by maintaining social relations or the social structure regardless of the standard to which the material needs of a given population is satisfied. The substantivists view economics as a category of culture as a “sense-making system” that determine human behavior; economics is organized by domestic groups and kinship relations. Economic behavior is a cultural construction. Our bourgeois of economic values are not universal, argues Sahlins; they are a product of culture. “The primitive order is generalized. A clear differentiation of spheres into social and economic does not there appear” (Sahlins 1972: 182). Sahlins was a student of Leslie White and was influenced by Karl Polanyi and