ABSTRACT
As an anthropologist and some-time ethical philosopher attending a conference on economics and ethics, the impact of the ensuing discussions has been and only could have been uneven, and to a degree, arbitrary. What registers are the issues I understand or, more properly, think I understand. Probably, I have also absorbed some points that have struck me as interesting from an anthropologist’s perspective. The following comments are framed in this way because I cannot claim to stand astride the field of economics and its reflections on values, ethics and morality. Apart from any other disciplinary matters, there is a hiatus of communication created by different terminologies that testify to different methods in social science. And possibly unbeknown to many economists, their discipline has become something of a bête noire to anthropology. Among the social sciences, economics is seen as the discipline that most enshrines the language of the West in its analysis of other cultures. Understandably, then, I am disposed to make a comment that revolves around anthropology’s central concept. This is the concept of the multiplicity of cultures that specify human sociality; a multiplicity in which the forms of society described as ‘Western’ embody one specific culture, albeit a pervasive one. To see how ‘culture’ comes into my thinking and influences my ideas about value, the market and moral order, let me select a few of the discussions with which I was presented and generate one particular theme.
