Contribution short abstract:

A cooperation between anthropology and behavioural economics, an experiment in a resettlement village in Laos, questioned some implicit assumptions of both disciplines by involving an emergent and diverse set of people on the ground that made visible local politics.

Contribution long abstract:

Anthropologists and economists are often seen to operate at opposed ends of the study of society, both in terms of method and of basic assumptions regarding human sociality. These issues merge in claims of the universal comparability of the quantitative data collected by economic methods such as experimental games, mostly conducted in university settings. However, mutual learning is possible, as the present case study argues. It addresses two levels of analysis, one regarding interdisciplinarity and method, the other commoning and the public good. Its setting is a large resettlement village in Laos where the authors conducted an experiment in which participants distributed tokens to various levels of relationships (household, “old” and “new” village). This public goods game was tailored to this place and gave insights in how a large number of people common their assets in a situation of restructuring and uncertainty. At the same time, the interdisciplinary collaboration highlighted a productive tension between scholarly epistemologies, that of experiment and of participant observation. Participant observation rendered visible the stark contrast between the usual university settings of such games and the involvement of local conditions and values in a socialist state in the present case. The experiment itself was a phase of extraordinary social activity that required on-the-spot learning of new skills and drew people from various strands of life together. The study thus argues for learning through methodological difference. (Paper presented by Guido Sprenger)