Understanding Economic Process

The papers in this volume were presented to the tenth annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology. The meeting was conceived as a decennial review of some of the central issues explored in recent studies of economic process in market and non-market societies.
Contents: I. Some New and Old Paradigms; Introduction; Nonmarket Transfers and Altuism; The Nature of Economic Relations; II. Power and Economic Transformations: Introduction; Market, Power and Culture as Agencies in the Transformation of Labor Contracts in Agriculture; Natural Resource Extraction and Power Differentials in a Global Economy; A Theoretical Perspective on Elites and the Economic Transformation of Classic Period Maya Households; III. The Household as Economic Actor: Introduction; Imagined Unities: Constructions of "The Household" in Economic Theory; Households and Gender Relations: The Modelling of the Economy; IV. Environment: Victim or Agent: Introduction; Human-land Relations from an Archaeological Perspective: The Case of Ancient Oaxaca; Marxism Confronts the Environment: Labor, Ecology and Environmental Change; Everyone's Concern, Whose Responsibility? and The Problem of the Common.
Contributors: Sutti Ortiz, Oded Stark, Mark Granovetter, S.G. Bunker, Patricia A. McAnany, Gillian Hart, H.L. Moore, Susan Lees, Gary M. Feinman, Linda M. Nicholas, Jane Collins and Bonnie J. McCay.

SUSAN LEES is Acting Dean of the Social Science Division of Hunter College, City University of New York.