Economic anthropology suffered a relative decline in the late 20th century, just as economics expanded the scope of its research to cover phenomena previously outside its field of study: e.g., institutions, social norms, cognitive representations of individuals. The general sentiment in economics today is that the discipline analyses the topics of the other social sciences with greater scientific rigour due to its mathematics-based methodological modelling. This article draws on the example of institutions that govern social participation and shows that, in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, institutions are not measurable variables and that an anthropological approach is actually epistemologically superior for fully analysing the economic effects.