Contents

Hunter Gatherers and the Crisis of Civilization

Stone Age Economics initiated a lively debate about the quality of hunter-gatherer life that has now lasted fifty years. Since...

The Original Affluent Society and the Culture of Scarcity

Marshall Sahlins’s “The Original Affluent Society” challenged the assumption that all of human history has witnessed a struggle between needs...

Sahlins and a Kind of Anthropology

This considers Stone Age Economics in terms of anthropological research carried out in Melanesia and in terms of the kind...

Reconciling Spirit and Contract? Marshall Sahlins and the “Essai sur le don”

This article revisits Sahlins’s discussion of Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, with a focus on its contribution to research on...

From the Continuum of Reciprocities to the Multiplicity of Perspectives. Problematising Sahlins’ Triad into Animist Ontologies

Sahlins proposed a tripartite classification of reciprocities mostly sustained with ethnographic data of hunter-gatherer societies but non-human persons, vital agents...

The Housewife and the Home: Stone Age Economics and Insights For US (and Global North) Economies

Theorizing from the Global South is often understood to provide key insights into alternative perspectives and cosmologies excluded and effaced...

Conjectural History and Empirical Data. A Deep History of the Human Condition

Like Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don, Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics is perhaps “his own gift to the ages”....

Has Money Transformed Our Brains? A Glimpse into Stone-Age Neuroeconomics

Monetary exchanges supported by coins appeared less than 3000 years ago in Lydia. They don’t resort to an evolutionary temporal...

The Surplus Approach, the Polanyian Tradition, and Institutions in Economic Anthropology and Archaeology

This paper was inspired long ago by Jared Diamond (1997), and in particular by his extensive use of the concept...