CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Institutions and Collective Action
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fhumd.2025.1585721
This article is part of the Research TopicMarketplace Exchange across History: Transcending Theoretical DividesView all 5 articles
Europe and the People Without Market History
Provisionally accepted
- 1The PAST Foundation, Columbus, United States
- 2The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States
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Wolf's Europe and the People Without History has significantly influenced anthropology and social science, marking a crucial point in the discipline's engagement with historical perspectives. However, the conceptual frame employed by Wolf excluded an important aspect of human life from consideration among native peoples of North America -market exchange. My goal in this essay is to reexamine the role of market exchange in Native North America. But rather than rehash the critiques of the substantivist-Marxist-Polanyian frame, I propose the use of an alternative approach drawn from the New Institutional Economics. My goal is to explore the diverse ways in which social institutions (or rules) governed the social construction of private goods, especially the creative ways humans generate institutions to facilitate exchange in the absence of reciprocity, which builds trust by embedded exchange in social relationships. I present ethnohistoric and archaeological data from Alaska (Iñupiaq), Arizona (Hohokam), and Illinois (Cahokia) to demonstrate that native peoples engaged in commodity exchange, including market exchange, prior to European contact. Evidence includes detached specialization, patterned diversity/distributional approach (an archaeological marker of market exchange), and strategies used to build trust and overcome cooperation problems generated by anti-market behaviors.
Keywords: Native North America, Private goods, cooperation, Iñupiaq, Hohokam, Cahokia, Market exchange
Received: 01 Mar 2025; Accepted: 22 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Fargher-Navarro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lane F. Fargher-Navarro, The PAST Foundation, Columbus, United States
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