Newsletter - Winter 2002

Possible New SEA Publication Project

Robert C. Hunt (for the Editorial Board, SEA)
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
MS006
Waltham MA 02454-9110
E-Mail: Hunt@Brandeis.edu

The Editorial Board of the Society for Economic Anthropology, with the encouragement of Rosalie Robertson, Senior Editor at Alta Mira, is looking for ways to expand the publication activities of our Society. One of the possible projects is a series of case studies which would be useful for our teaching.

For some years I have taught a course entitled Economic Anthropology: Production and Distribution. It is designed for juniors, seniors, and graduate students. The prerequisites for undergraduates are to have taken an anthropology course, or an economics course (normally the standard introductions). Enrollments range from 10 to 30. Writing assignments are two short papers where the topic is decided by me, and a longer research paper on a topic of their choice. I assign the Plattner volume (Economic Anthropology) as the recommended text.

I design the course so that students read on 1) concepts (labor, technology, capital, surplus, foraging, savage affluence, property, money, exchange, labor productivity, agriculture, market, price, etc.), 2) ethnographic accounts (case studies), and 3) what happens when one applies a concept to ethnographic accounts.

For the concepts I assign readings from the literature (most are article or chapter length). Given a reasonably decent library this has not been a problem. Crucial to the enterprise, clearly, is case studies to which the concepts can be applied. I have often tried to have students read on a foraging society, on a horticultural one, and on "peasants". I want the case studies to present information on non-economic aspects of the society, such as household organization, gender relations, settlements, political structure, ritual structure, etc. The case studies need to be short enough so that they can be re-read, they need to be cheap enough so that students can afford to buy several of them, and there needs to be a good deal of data included in them. I have used the Tiwi, the Dobe !Ju, and the Trobriand books in the Holt series. They are short, they are reasonably cheap, and they stay in print.

I have had problems finding case studies of "peasants". Tax's Penny Capitalism, for example, has long been out of print. So is Moerman's Thai study.

For my purposes I would love to have choices among case studies. I would like several areas of the world to choose among. I would want them to be between 100 and 150 pages, reasonably well written, and to have data on some aspects of production and/or allocation. They need to be cheap enough so that students can buy them, probably in the neighborhood of $20.00, although less would be an advantage. (I have found that if one uses a book several years running a market in used copies quickly arises.)

The Editorial Board would like to know what your experiences have been in this regard, as part of our project to expand the publications in our field.