Economics as A Cultural System
One of the themes given expression below is the idea that people cannot tolerate the uncanny; that the stranger things in our environment are potentially unsettling and that people are unable to leave the unclarified simply unclarified. In what follows I discuss what must be to many, especially institutional economists, a very strange phenomenon in the landscape about us. Specifically, how it is that a scientific theory that purports to be a description of reality continues to be espoused when in fact so many are unable to bring themselves to honestly and truly believe in it as a description of reality, and for those who can, as has been noted, it is for about as long as it takes to write an examination).1 Undoubtedly John Kenneth Galbraith's comments have a great deal of validity, but somehow they are not satisfying; he suggests that economics must be more than an ideological mask directing attention away from inconvenient fact and that academic economists must have something to teach when the students arrive.2 Galbraith's own works are available but they are not espoused and if introduced at all it is only briefly and more often than not they are quickly dismissed. There must be more than meets the eye. This paper is, then, an attempt to think about economic theory. The vehicle for thinking about it will be anthropology's concept of culture; the end result will be to suggest that economics is a cultural system, more specifically, that economics is a sacred cultural system. In order to give expression to this view it will be necessary to first sketch the concept of