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Polanyi, Mauss, and others describe reasons for the growing differentiation of economy from other spheres of life. This article proposes a further reason: the increasing invisibility of economic transactions in everyday life. It traces the declining visibility of economic transactions in England and North America from around 1700 to the present, as public marketplaces were displaced by growing longer‐distance trade and the growing role of intermediaries. It suggests that this declining visibility of the economic networks in which people were enmeshed encouraged the development of economic thought, ultimately including the idea of the economy as a distinct realm, which was intended to explain activities and processes that were no longer visible. That economic thought became increasingly complex and incomprehensible to ordinary people, who had to come to believe things that they did not understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reinterprets core issues in economic anthropology by exploring transfers as a theoretical resource. After describing deliberate usage of the term "transfer" in anthropology and economics, transfers are defined as movements of economic matter, while transactions are the forms arising from their configuration. Transactional categories such as Maussian gift exchange or market exchange become second-order reifications. Examining the politics of creating and sustaining transactional categories by first looking at the elementary transfers out of which they are constructed places "one-way transfers" of wealth on the same conceptual plane as reciprocal and market transactions, instead of being a derivative or a remainder of either or both. Gifts and gambling are considered as examples. Gambling and "pure gifts" are one-way transfers engineered to possess only one component transfer, and Maussian gifts explicitly connect transfers together in a particular politics. Anthropological literature that employs an incipient version of the transfer strategy is detailed, demonstrating its nascent explanatory promise. The article concludes by suggesting renewed engagement with contemporary economics on the basis of transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]