Thursday, 5 February 2015

A nice Geertz quote

The locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighbor­hoods . . . ) ; they study in villages. You can study different things in different places, and some things - for example, what colonial domina­tion does to established frames of moral expectation - you can best study in confined localities. But that doesn't make the place what it is you are studying.

For anthropologist substitute experimental economist, for villages substitute laboratories.

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