Anthropology is a social science that is concerned with understanding culture through participatory observation, or ethnography: cultural immersion in the social worlds being studied.
This might explain why anthropologists often end up in heated debates with economists, who instead understand the world through numeric aggregates and abstract models.
In contrast, anthropology, which involves both deductive and inductive logic, is mostly focused on the latter.
Looking at the emic gives anthropology a superpower: the ability and need to be open to alternative belief systems, challenge its own mental models, take in additional insights, and craft a more nuanced and holistic view of the world as a result.
Anthropologists are not scared of dealing with people’s belief systems because it relativizes them.
Anthropology has a long tradition of writing about the alien “other,” and bitcoin certainly represents a new type of exotic “other” for the majority of the world’s population.
Many anthropologists have come out of the studies inspired by the ethos and beliefs of these communities, as I will explain in more depth in the next section.
In contrast, mainstream economists continue looking at Bitcoin from the comfort of their ivory towers.
Economics as a discipline is locking itself in an echo chamber, siloed from other perspectives and receiving little feedback from the outside.
But the core of economist’s fallacy is epistemological: what is recognized as truth, and where does truth come from? Does it come from the “top” ? Mainstream economics lives off the assumption that money is money by “fiat,” meaning that its value is determined by the state’s ultimate judgment and formal decree.
Anthropology is mostly a descriptive discipline, concerned with making sense of things as they are rather than “messing with things.” In contrast, economics is all about prescribing and “intervening” in the economy: the economy needs to be “stimulated” and then “stabilized,” and employment needs to be “maximized.” As a result, Bitcoin, which cannot be controlled in terms of monetary policy, massively limits the scope of economics to act on the economy.
A study by Kinney demonstrated that Bitcoin adoption by individuals follows a distinct process: first, adopters discover the value of Bitcoin on their own terms. Next, they reflexively overcome challenges to these initial perceptions of its value.
Thus, the Bitcoin community’s value systems and rituals make bitcoin mature and have helped to establish it as money.
So, Bitcoin has the ability to create political bodies.
Anthropologists have criticized the Bitcoin community’s belief that Bitcoin is totally trustless and entirely “run by numbers.” According to anthropologists, this would be impossible because we are social creatures, which means that Bitcoin’s sociocultural layer plays an important role in determining whether it has value, and what that value is.
Anthropologists have noticed that, thanks to Bitcoin, serious questions are being raised about the nature of money, which has important implications about society and humanity at large.
In his book “The Social Life of Money,” Dodd wrote that what is considered money has changed through time, and that we are on track to see it change again.
Like the rest of academia, anthropology has no skin in the game, so not only can it afford to be wrong, but it can continue being wrong and pretending that it is right.
Anthropologists recognize the important role that Bitcoin is playing in leading us to rethink what money is, which in turn has many consequences for social life.
Anthropology may not be the best discipline to understand Bitcoin as a whole, but the same can be said about every other discipline on its own.
The cultural and social aspects of the Bitcoin phenomenon cannot be understated and overlooked, as therein lie answers to many questions .