Harold K. Schneider - Formalist Vs Substantivist Debate

Formalist Vs Substantivist Debate

Schneider focused on East Africa in his field work, and was especially influenced by his study of the Turu in Tanzania. His mentor, Melville Herskovits, had also focused on East African pastoral peoples, and in this, as well as in Schneider's continued interest in morality and aesthetics, the pupil followed the teacher.

Active in creating the nascent field of economic anthropology, he was the first president of the Society for Economic Anthropology, serving from 1980 until 1982. His focus on economic anthropology is first evident in his dissertation, on the ways in which cattle were used by a pastoral people in East Africa. His early contribution was as an articulate advocate for the formalist perspective in economic anthropology. Schneider thought it useful to view human behavior as optimizing behavior, in the tradition of neoclassical economics, and thought that this optimizing behavior manifested itself even among peoples without money or markets. Schneider was compelled to argue forcefully against the prevailing substantivist perspective, which held that optimizing behavior was characteristic only of societies with markets. The debate took place in academic journals and conferences, and "peaked with the publication of Marshall Sahlins' Stone Age Economics (1972) and Schneider's Economic Man (1974)". The debate was fundamentally about the relationship between academic economics and academic anthropology, with formalists eager to use the methods of economics and substantivists equally determined to keep economics out of anthropology. By the late 1970s the debate had died down.