Anthropology and Economics: Economism as Culture

Abstract

Today, any observer of social and political reality is aware of the strong tensions that exist between the “world of economists” and the “world of people”. This essay seeks to explore the relationship between economics and culture, a topic of interest to several disciplines, although the analysis will be limited here to the relationship between economic science and anthropology.

This paper raises two basic questions as axes of connection between economics and anthropology. The first concerns anthropology, its position, and the methodological problems it has faced when dealing with the economic question. The second involves a reflection, from the perspective of economics, on culture as a central issue in the behavior of the economic system. Culture has been widely considered by anthropology, but not with the same intensity by economics.

Economics has not limited itself to constituting a scientific discipline whose field of action is confined to the academic world or to economic relations. Rather, it has criteria for observing reality, assumptions regarding human values, and a particular way of reasoning and thinking that extends to all fields of human life, shaping a way of seeing things and a particular perspective on reality. This characteristic defines a culture, which we call “economism”, and which differs from “economicism” insofar as the latter is a monetary reductionism of the former.

Both in the relationship between economics and other disciplines and in other aspects of culture, economism places economics and its “vision” in a central position, comparable to ethnocentrism. Attempts to bring economics closer to other disciplines, abandoning the central position of economics, are presented as efforts to make these relationships horizontal, as cultural relativism seeks to do. In this way, economism is presented as one culture among others, respectful of the rest.

Finally, the paper seeks to show that economism emerges from social relations and forms part of a dominant culture, in which only certain sectors of those groups participated, and that it expanded as relations among economic sectors were transformed. From this legitimist view of economism, the naïve perspective of transdisciplinarity is called into question, as is any consideration of economism as a form of cultural relativism.