Frannie Berdan and Economic Anthropology

Summary

We all know of Frannie Berdan’s many contributions to historical scholarship, archaeology, art history, and Aztec studies, but my goal in this paper is to assess Frannie’s influence on the growth of economic anthropology during a time when the discipline was just beginning to rethink the anti-market theories of Karl Polanyi. The principal institutional context of change was the Society for Economic Anthropology, of which Frannie was a founding member and a founding board member. In the Society’s early meetings, her presentations on Aztec economy were well argued and rich in detail, leaving substantivists little option but to modify their positions. While the rethinking of economic theory by anthropologists has had a long and complex history, and still is ongoing, my sense is that, having attended those same critical meetings, Frannie can be considered to have a place in any consideration of the history of ideas.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Aztecs and their World: Initerdisciplinary Contributions of Frances Berdan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage