ABSTRACT

Perhaps at no time in the history of anthropology as a discipline has the economic demanded such urgent analysis. The scale of recent, ongoing crises around the world, the increasing division between the extremely wealthy and most others on the planet, and the ever-increasing integration of labor markets, production systems, and financial activities across national borders have a profound effect on the human condition and what forms of contemporary human life are emerging. Given that a focus on human beings (or anthropos in Greek) is part of its selfdefinition, anthropology plays a key role in analyzing the forms of human life that are constituted through the deployment of contemporary economic knowledge and practice.