The Political Economy of North American Indians.

For the past several decades, political economy has returned to vogue as a theoretical approach. Anthropologists, in particular, have welcomed it as a useful tool that offers another holistic view of their disciplinary issues. Often used with a class-conscious Marxist analysis, it emphasizes broad, even world-wide trends based on economic questions. It shares this focus on class issues with ethnohistorians and New Social historians. Both of those groups utilize race, gender, ethnicity, and class as basic modes of analysis. However, by excluding or minimizing the significance of culture or ideology, the political economists are at odds with scholars in the other two disciplines. …