Economic Anthropology: Lectures at the College de France, 1992 - 1993

Has the revolution that led from the economy of the gift, characteristic of most precapitalist societies, to the economy of modern societies been accomplished in all spheres of life, as tacitly assumed by those who claim to apply the model of the profit optimizing agent to every practice - to art, to education and even to marriage, seen as an exchange of economic services of production and reproduction? And is it totally accomplished even at the heart of the sphere most directly concerned with economic activity - the world of business? These and many other questions are absent from the dominant economic theories, which fail to take account of the economic and social conditions under which economic agents and their universe arise. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1987-89, Pierre Bourdieu laid bare the assumptions of the imaginary anthropology that underlies economics in its dominant form and put forward an alternative view. He replaced the notion of a pure and perfect market