The Matthew Effect and Symbolic Capital in Anthropology and Beyond

The article approaches the issue of academic knowledge hierarchies from an “empirical” rather than a “theoretical” perspective. It provides three sets of data that merely illustrate existing inequalities in the recognition of a quality of knowledge produced by scholars located in different academic settings. The first case in point is the distribution of Nobel Prizes; the second is the distribution of European Research Council grants; the third is the distribution of prestige in the discipline of anthropology. The conclusion is rather pessimistic. After decades of struggle for the establishment of world anthropologies in which there is a multidirectional flow of knowledge and in which pluriversality reigns, a hierarchical order is being reproduced that privileges certain centres of the production of anthropological wisdom.