Conversations between Anthropologists and
Economists*
Metin M. Cosgel
Economics Dept., University of Connecticut
Email: Cosgel@UConn.Edu
* Paper Presented at the 4th International Rhetoric Culture Conference,
Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, July, 16-20, 2005
Q-Squared Working Paper No. 18
February 2006
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Interdisciplinary citation patterns and other indicators of the flow and sharing of
academic knowledge suggest that economists and anthropologists do not talk to each other.
Previous studies of this puzzling trend have typically attributed the problem to methodological
differences between the two disciplines. Although there are significant differences between
economics and anthropology in behavioral assumptions and modes of inquiry, similar differences
exist between them and other disciplines (some with much heavier volumes of cross-citations
with economics or anthropology), suggesting that the source of the problem lies elsewhere.
This paper considers the problem at a deeper level by examining systematic differences
in the preferences, capabilities, and literary cultures of economists and anthropologists.
Adopting a rhetorical perspective, I consider not the firms, households, or tribes as the principal
objective of analysis in the two disciplines, but the conversations between these units. These
conversations (through non-verbal as well as verbal media) can be grouped into two genres,
based on the type of problem they aim to solve. Those in the first genre aim to solve the problem
of interest--how to align the incentives of the parties involved. Those in the second genre deal
with the problem of knowledge--how to align localized, and dispersed information. Economists
are interested and capable of dealing with primarily, if not exclusively, th