The concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘economics’ have traditionally been disassociated from the other. However, economics largely involves cultural issues such as the formation of individual preferences. Institutional economists have long been cognizant of the importance of culture in their investigations of the links between economics, the humanities and the natural sciences. Thus, it is argued that their work has often been in the spirit of cultural materialism, and therefore the cultural materialist approach can provide a sensitive method to economic theorizing.
