Pranab Bardhan at his Substack:
Reading the work of economists and anthropologists at least three differences in their general methodological approach strike one:
Individual Autonomy versus Social Embeddedness
Much of Economics starts with the assumption of an autonomous individual with a given set of stable preferences and explains social phenomena in terms of individual choices and motives. Such individuals and explanatory devices are, however, quite alien to the anthropologist. To the latter, individuals are deeply embedded/situated in social and political relationships governed by norms and moral commitments, and so not all social phenomena are reducible simply to individual characteristics. Preferences often reflect the inner workings of culture and power in society. Autonomy in a social vacuum is not meaningful, as individuals are taken as relational creatures with multiple allegiances and overlapping identities.
In the context of the public use of common environmental resources, for the economist free riding in the form of littering or polluting or degrading is quite understandable, even ‘normal’, when the individual calculates the cost and benefits of a given individual action. But, as my friend the sociologist Erik Olin Wright pointed out in his contribution to our book, to the sociologist/anthropologist such action is ‘pathological’ -–sociologists in such contexts use a term, coined by Émile Durkheim, ‘anomie’ meaning normlessness– as it violates the basic social understanding that some norms are part of the shared collective commitment and are not subject to individual cost-benefit calculation.
More here.
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