The essays in this important collection pose the central issues facing the field of economic anthropology today. After the triumph of formalism in the debate with the substantivists, the question became whether any such subfield could continue to exist at all. This collection shows that a theoretically coherent field called economic anthropology is not only possible but vitally necessary and that its revival is underway. What will give this revived discipline coherence and what are some of the issues that it will have to confront? The classical work of Polanyi, shorn of the restrictions placed on it by Dalton (Isaac 2005), offers a point of departure for answering these questions, but many issues remain unresolved.

Taken as a whole, these essays suggest a tentative convergence between aspects of economic anthropology, economic sociology, and the new institutional economics. This synthesis is by no means unproblematic, and indeed several of the papers (Gudeman, in Chapter 2, and Beckert, in Chapter 3) argue that a considerable number of obstacles have to be overcome. In the end, reconciliation may not be possible, given the fundamentally individualistic and rationalist assumptions of the new institutional economics (see Gudeman's critique of Landa above). Notwithstanding these reservations, we may discern the outlines of what such a synthesis might look like. To focus on purely economic structures, mechanisms, and actions is properly the domain of the discipline of economics.