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it is understandable that economic anthropologists would have some hope that their view of the world, the world implied in their view of economic life, might stimulate those who think not just about the wealth of nations, but also about their health. Indeed, in the past few years there has been a minor boom in works by economic anthropologists that, explicitly or implicitly, challenge not just specific elements of conventional economic thought, but also the fundamental ways that it construes economic life and social life more generally. Thus it is that this handbook is timely. Saying this does not mean that dissent strides across each page, parading itself in capital letters.the purpose of this work, which is one of reference rather than advocacy.it is a set of chapters that cover economic-anthropological work on specific topics and in specific regions of the world. At the same time, however, these chapters all revolve around economic anthropology. At the most basic, economic anthropology is the description and analysis of economic life, using an anthropological perspective.it best to consider economic anthropology as a collaborative, and combative, field, no one scholar need exhibit all the characteristics that present.The anthropological perspective approaches and locates aspects of people’s individual and collective lives, which is to say their lives and societies, in terms of how these aspects relate to one another in an interconnected, though not necessarily bounded or very orderly, whole. The aspects at issue can be different elements or fields of people’s lives, such as religious belief,consumption, household organisation, productive activities or the like. So, for example, an anthropologist might want to study how household organisation among a particular set of people is related to, say, religious belief, and vice versa (in an ideal world that anthropologist would want to know how all the elements of people’s lives and societies are related to one another). As this suggests, anthropologists tend to want to see people’s lives in the round. A different set of aspects of people’s lives and societies is important as well, one that cuts across the sort of aspects I pointed to in the preceding paragraph. Anthropologists tend to want to know about the relationship between what people think and say on the one hand, and on the other what they do. These two aspects can have different labels as disciplinary interest and fashion change, but they can be cast as culture on the one hand and practice on the other. These can be approached to see the extent to which practices shape culture (and vice versa) and how they do so. This can be part of an effort to understand how, say, exchange practices affect people’s understandings of the kin groups involved in exchange (and vice versa), or how, say, practices in brokerage firms affect people’s understandings of stock exchanges (and, once more, vice versa) This handbook is devided into 6 parts, which is Orientations, Elements, circulation, Integrations, Issues, and Regions