If your were to take an economics class, you would focus on three areas: production, distribution, and consumption. Most, if not all of your discussion would focus on industrial societies. In Anthropology, we are more concerned with looking at production, distribution, and consumption across many different kinds of societies. Commonly, economic theory is predicated on the assumption that the value of a particular commodity will increase as it becomes scarcer (what we might think of as "supply and demand") or on the assumption that when exchanging goods and services, people naturally strive to maximize their material well-being and their profits. Within Anthropology, we can find exceptions to these assumptions we in our own world accept without questioning them. Within an egalitarian society, for example, we might find that people do not consider material well-being as important and therefore this will impact the way in which they produce, obtain or distribute, and consume commodities.

Anthropologists tend to focus on three major areas of study in regards to economics:

• the regulation of resources - how land, water, and natural resources are controlled and allocated
• production - how material resources are converted into usable commodities
• exchange - how the commodities, once produced, are distributed among the people of a society or across different societies

Every society has access to certain natural resources within the environment that it exploits - its territory. These could include animals, water, minerals, plants, and land itself. Even though the nature and amount of these resources may vary widely from one group to another, every society has developed a set of rules setting out the allocation of these resources and how they can be used. Hunter-gatherers determine who can hunt and who can gather. Pastoralists determine the access to pasture lands. Agriculturalists determine who owns land and how this land is passed on to future generations.

We might look at how some people in the Andean world consider that they do not own land - their ancestors do. They only can use the land as long as they care for their ancestral relationships. Why do this? It is a rather simple answer. Society values ancestors and, therefore, to ensure that people will continue to pay high respect to their dead ancestors society has created a means by which to place value on those ancestors. What happens to you if you do not pay homage to your ancestors as society expects? You lose rights to the land and in a way are an outcast and will not survive. For Hopi, men own neither land or a home. Their wives do because Hopi society is matrilineal and matrilocal. Descent is passed from mother to daughters and sons. You are a member of your mother's family. To ensure that this is maintained, Hopi culture gives the land and all property to women.

Some key terms that you should explore are: craft specialization, reciprocity, redistribution, tribute, and markets.