Drawing upon their joint fieldwork, the authors cast this book as a conversation involving themselves, a Colombian rural people, and the writings of past economists. In their view, the material practices of the rural folk constitute a house model of the economy, and the Colombian voices provide a window on prior European fold conversations about the house. The house and the corporation have been the principal modes of material organization in Western life: the former is older, but the latter now predominates. The authors suggest, through use of the Colombian conversations, that textualists of...