I Don’t ‘Like’ Malinowski, I Cite Malinowski

The use of citation metrics has progressed to a point where a growing number of scholars are contemplating the possibility of using citation practices to enforce necessary changes on the academia - preferential citing practices, citation boycotts, and the like. Yet the academic citation is not an alienable token without consequential characteristics. In this essay, I suggest some lessons from the history of economic anthropology that may help to foreground those characteristics along with some potential implications should we scolars embrace the external assessors' commodity logic which allows one to reduce citations to value tokens.