ABSTRACT
Our culture is itself split in a way that has kept us from understanding the cultural elements of the economy. It is in the humanities where scholars have cultivated the understanding of culture, but economics has wanted to see itself as siding with the “sciences” side of the two cultures. Economics has, over the years, learned important things about how the economy works, what is involved in business decision-making, and what underlies economic development, but what it knows remains in a very abstract language and seems to come rarely into ethnographic contact with culture, with the empirical reality of the meanings of everyday life. Long-standing ideological divisions between left and right reinforce the distance between economists and cultural studies scholars.
