5 - Pause: How can the Impasse be Resolved?

Summary

On the rare occasions when development economists work in the field they usually do so, in the manner of Bliss and Stern, without consulting any anthropological writings before they go there – or indeed when reporting their findings. Nearly all economists have so little time for economic anthropologists that they scarcely acknowledge their existence, as even respectable textbooks show. On the other hand, I think that many anthropologists have a secret reverence for (perhaps combined with a fear of) economists, a reverence which lay behind both the retreat from economics by the substantivists in the Polanyi debate (see p. 22) and the still deeper subsequent withdrawal into the closed world of marxism with its anti-empirical bias. Anthropologists cannot avoid being overawed by a powerful academic discipline which commands financial resources vastly superior to their own, and which continues to exert so much authority in the world despite its inability to solve the problems of inflation and unemployment in industrialized countries. It is perhaps for this reason that their normally severe critical propensities are apt to be suspended when faced with such ‘economic generalizes’ as Boserup, whose work, did she happen to be an anthropologist, would be less highly regarded.

For many reasons the tiny discipline of economic anthropology is rapidly becoming obsolescent, especially in third-world countries themselves, this being in some degree due to its inability to persuade development economists, whether in academia or the international agencies, that its findings can be really useful.