Centenary workshop – call for papers

The publication in 1922 of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific inaugurated a golden age in social anthropology. Recent revisionist views notwithstanding, it is widely regarded as inaugurating modern ethnographic methods, as well as being a landmark for the sub-field later known as economic anthropology. Malinowski’s analysis of kula and gimwali has been appropriated by authors from Firth, Herskovits, Mauss and Polanyi down to the very latest journal articles and textbooks in the twenty-first century.

Closer inspection reveals significant disagreements and uncertainty as to what the author really meant. Is he a proto-substantivist who would endorse the metaphor of the “embedded economy” popularized later by Thurnwald and Polanyi? Or is he, despite polemics against homo economicus, in reality a proto-formalist, whose individual Trobrianders are motivated by a universal rationality of utility maximization? Does his concept of “tribal economy” betray a latent evolutionism? What exactly does “economy” mean for Malinowski? Can production, exchange and consumption be investigated in the terms applied in modern economies, or should they be approached everywhere through relationships grounded in kinship and politics, and practices of magic and ritual?

Papers are invited that consider these and other implications of Malinowski’s work from the perspective of the sub-field as it flourishes a century later. The opening session will focus on the history of the sub-field, while others will present fresh ethnographic materials and insights into anthropology of economy. For those focusing on the former, participants are encouraged also to engage with earlier and later publications (such as the article on “primitive economics” published in the Economic Journal in 1921, the monograph Coral Gardens and their Magic, with its rich materials on garden work and property, and the posthumous study of a Mexican market system, co-authored with Julio de la Fuente). Attention will also be paid to Malinowski’s early formation in Cracow (notably his doctoral dissertation on the “economy of thought”) and to his time in Leipzig (notably his exposure to the evolutionism of economic historian Karl Bücher).

Send paper proposals/abstracts by 31st January 2022 to the organisers: Deborah James d.a.james@lse.ac.uk and Chris Hann hann@eth.mpg.de