The Price of Wealth: Scarcity and Abundance in an Unequal World

Danilyn RutherfordYou have probably been in one of those meetings that was supposed to be interdisciplinary.A lone geneticist sits silently to your left, the unwilling representative of a vast epistemological tradition.They smile politely, but they are clearly having trouble finding their way into the discussion.When they present their paper, no one asks any questions: the anthropologists do not know how to read the charts.Or you are the lonely emissary, an anthropologist among art historians.You work on aesthetics; they work on aesthetics.You pick up a few helpful references.But there is little opportunity to explore new approaches: for the purposes of the conversation, you are all worried about the same thing.It is a completely natural reaction when you are exposed to a language you do not understand-you latch on to the words that seem familiar.But by focusing on what you already know, you miss out on learning what you do not.A few years ago, when the Wenner-Gren Foundation was developing a strategic plan, we found ourselves worrying about this problem.What could we do in this program that was not already being done in other venues?Symposia are expensive to host.How could we justify the cost?We decided to experiment with holding meetings that were truly interdisciplinary-meetings that placed anthropologists in dialogue with scholars from a field with which they were not already in conversation.We would include enough of these other scholars to give them equal weight in the conversation.We would focus on issues that mattered deeply to everyone in the room.We would force participants to confront the differences between their disciplines, rather than simply skirting them.And so "The Price of Wealth" was born.