When anthropologists and other students of culture want to compare different societies in such areas as the organization of land, labor, trade, or barter, they often discover that individual researchers use these concepts inconsistently and from a variety of theoretical approaches, so that data from one society cannot be compared with data from another.

In this book, Rhoda Halperin offers an analytical tool kit for studying economic processes in all societies and at all times. She uniquely organizes the book around key concepts: economy, ecology, equivalencies, householding, storage, and time and the economy. These concepts are designed to facilitate the understanding of similarities, differences, and changes between contemporary and past economies. While this is not only a "how-to" book or handbook, it can be used as such. It will be of great value to scholars and students of archaeology and history, as well as to ethnographers and economists.

Rhoda H. Halperin (1946–2009) was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Montclair State from 2004–2009. She was also Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology, at the University of Cincinnati.

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Methodological Individualism: Structure and Agency in Economic Anthropology
• Two. Marx’s Institutional Paradigm and Polanyi’s Generic Model of the Economy
• Three. Economy and Ecology: Basic Concepts, Their History, and Applications
• Four. Equivalencies in Economic Anthropology
• Five. Householding: Resistance and Livelihood in Rural Economies
• Six. Storage as an Economic Process
• Seven. A Cross-Cultural Treatment of the Informal Economy
• Eight. Time and the Economy: A Substantive Perspective
• Nine. Looking Backward and Forward on Concepts of the Economy: The Discourse of Economic Anthropology in Historical and Comparative Perspective
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index