Why do critics and celebrants of globalization concur that international trade and finance represent an inexorable globe-bestriding force with a single logic? The Known Economy shows that both camps rest on the same ideas about how the world is scaled. Two centuries ago romantic and rationalist theorists concurred that the world was divided into discrete nations, moving at different rates toward a "modernity", split between love and money. Though differing over whether th...

In this exciting new volume from the Society for Economic Anthropology, Cynthia Werner and Duran Bell bring together a group of distinguished anthropologists and economists to discuss the complex ways in which different cultures imbue material objects with symbolic qualities whose value cannot be reduced to material or monetary equivalents. Objects with sacred or symbolic qualities are valued quite differently than mundane objects, and the contributors to this volume set out to unravel how...