Newsletter - Winter 2002

Why Haven't They Ever Heard of Economic Anthropology

Richard Wilk
Department of Anthropology
Indiana University

The good news is that many mainstream economists and political scientists have discovered culture, and have decided that culture makes a difference in economic behavior. The bad news is that they are re-inventing the wheel, and employing some very naive and uninformed concepts of culture that anthropology discarded long ago. What can we do to change this situation? Here are a few references to some of this work that you might want to take a look at.

Harrison, L. and S. Huntington,eds. 2001 Culture Matters. Basic Books.
In this book a large group of Harvard economists and political scientists, and a few anthropologists, debate the radical proposition that culture makes a difference in economic development. While its nice to know the foreign policy elite are ready to think about culture as more than 'western civilization,' it turns out that this allows them to blame all poverty on the malformed and defective cultures of underdeveloped countries. It's as if the "culture of poverty" debate never took place. Most anthropologists will grind away several millimeters of tooth enamel while reading this.

Nelson, R., 2001 Economics as Religion. Penn State University Press.
Guess what. Economists themselves have culture! Do you believe it? And modern neoclassical economics actually incorporates a lot of Judeo-Christian morality! This book is an interesting look at the history of neoclassical and Keynesian economics, and the author is to be commended for actually reading some theology. But his ignorance of economic anthropology is profound - and Polanyi appears just once in the index. The idea that religion is as embedded in culture as economics never occurs to him. He reinvents enough wheels for a freight train.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, S. Bowles, C. Camerer, E. Fehr, H. Gintis, and R. McElreath, 2001 "In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies." American Economic Review, 91(2)73-78. This article is summarized and popularized in the January 2002 issue of Scientific American. Experimental economics is producing some really fascinating and important results, but it usually generalizes from a small sample of Americans to human beings in general. In this article some experimental economists make a huge discovery - people in other cultures are not as selfish as economic theory predicts! They have proved it by reinventing cross-cultural methodology. Of course this leads them to reject one untenable reductionism for another - evolutionary psychology. You see, evolution has hard-wired all of us to be generous with each other. No alternative hypotheses occur to them. The lack of any genetic evidence does not seem to bother them, nor does their ignorance of the debates over group selection in evolutionary biology.

I am sure these are just the tip of the iceberg. Clearly, anthropology is being willfully ignored here, which suggests that the SEA needs to step in and assert some leadership here. I would be happy to hear suggestions either by email, or at the business meeting at the SEA meetings in Toronto this spring.