Gregory’s statement that householding was just a phase in history can be applied to Chayanov’s theory of the peasant economy. Generally speaking, the Russian peasant farm exemplifies the kind of autarkic household Gregory contends “has all but disappeared from the scene”. Chayanov’s very thesis is that the peasant household represents an entirely different form of economic behavior than wage-based capitalism: rather than working to increase profits through the investment of capital, the peasant family seeks only to balance the drudgery of their labor input with the necessary output to subsist and survive (labor-consumer balance).To the extent that the peasant family is independent of market forces, it conforms to Gregory’s (Polany-inspired) model; to the extent that “money-making as a principle of economic behavior has conquered the globe,” such an economic system indeed no longer exists outside the pages of history. However, it is important to keep in mind that Gregory accords the term “household” greater elasticity beyond the traditional understanding of it as a strictly non-market phenomenon.[1] Thus encourages sustained attention to household as a form of economic life that is not mutually exclusive with capitalism.
[1][1] “Just as money-making is not limited in its historical significance as a principle
of economic behavior to the era when the self-regulating market was the dominant
institutional pattern, so too “householding” as a general category is not
defined solely by its realization as an autarkic form of peasant proprietorship. My own research on markets, merchants, and kinship in middle India (Gregory
1997) reveals that, contrary to orthodoxy, householding is not always autarkic
and is sometimes embedded in market relations. In other words, “householding”
may be either autarkic or non-autarkic, or both.” (143)
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