Economics focuses on a particular institution, and is concerned about the production, consumption, and distribution of economic goods, and with economic development, prices, trade, and finance. In anthropology there is an area of specialisation called economic anthropology. It is a precious fact that an institutionalized kind of economics first appears in anthropology in direct relation to the field research among exotic societies. Anthropology has a substantial overlap with economics, considered as the production and distribution of goods. While not all societies have a fully developed monetary economy, all societies do have scarce goods and some means of exchange.
Social anthropologists are interested in exploring the range of production and distribution systems in human societies and in understanding the particular system in the society being studied at a given time. Most social anthropologists are not scientifically interested in the operation of the economy of one’s own society; the typical non-anthropological economist, on the other, hand is extremely interested in the operation of one’s own economy. He will not ordinarily show much interest in the operation of greatly different economic systems. Social anthropology under the name of “formalist” vs “substantivist” interpretations of the primitive economics, bring with these terms the following option between the ready-made models of western economic science, especially the micro-economics taken as universally valid and therefore applicable to the primitive societies and the necessity – supposing the formalist position unfounded – of developing a new analysis more appropriate to the historical societies in question and to the intellectual history of anthropology.