Chapter 2 : 
Current Directions In Exchange Theory
--------------------------------------------------------------------

People :
----------------------------------

Author : David Graeber

Text :
----------------------------------


Chapter 2 — Current Directions In Exchange Theory

 
So far, I’ve described how the term “value” held out the promise of
resolving some of the outstanding theoretical problems in anthropology,
notably the clash between functionalism and economism, which took

its clearest and most vitriolic form in the arguments between Formalists
and Substantivists in the 1960s. I’ve also suggested that, common wisdom
to the contrary, these issues are not really all that dead. At the same
time that Dumont’s school has been leading an explicit effort to revive
something along the lines of Polanyi’s substantivism, many
post-structuralists—usually much less explicitly—have ended up
reproducing most of the same assumptions about the world as economic
Formalism. A brief survey of the current state of exchange theories should
help make clear how much the same old dilemmas keep spinning endlessly
around.

In this chapter, then, I’m going to take that history up to the present,
and provide at least a brief summary of the main existing theories of
value. I’ll start with a brief account of the rise of Marxism and
critical theory, then consider the return of economizing models (my main
examples will be Pierre Bourdieu and Arjun Appadurai), and, after a glance
at the work of Margaret Weiner, a more detailed consideration of an
alternative approach, which I’ll call Neo-Maussian, which has come to its
most brilliant fruition in the works of Marilyn Strathern, but which in
many ways is simply a revival of the Saussurean approach.

the Marxist moment and its aftermath

 
If in the 1960s the most spectacular arguments were between Formalists and
Substantivists, by the ‘70s, the great debate was between Structuralists
and Marxists. Since both sides introduced some radically different
perspectives into anthropology, it is perhaps not all that surprising that
both sides assumed older debates were simply irrelevant.

For most of this century, there was no such thing as Marxist anthropology.
This was because if one wanted to be an orthodox Marxist, one had to stick
to the evolutionary scheme developed by Morgan and Engels in the middle of
the nineteenth century, which held that all societies must pass through a
fixed series of stages: from primitive matriarchy to patriarchy, slavery,
feudalism, and so on, in strict order of succession. Since it soon became
apparent that this was not true, anthropologists with Marxist sympathies
were left with the choice of either violating the party line, or writing
nonsense. Most avoided introducing Marxist theory into their work at all
(usually a good idea anyway in pre-war Western universities, where Marxists
were often persecuted). The real break only came in the 1960s, when Louis
Althusser, in France, developed—and even more important, managed to
legitimate—a more flexible set of terms, centering on the idea of a
“mode of production,” Marxist anthropology suddenly became
possible.[19] The groundwork was laid by French anthropologists like Claude
Meillaisoux and Maurice Godelier, but their ideas soon spread to England
and America as well. The most important thing Marxist approaches introduced
was a focus on production. From a Marxist perspective, both Formalists and
Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had
been about distribution and exchange. To understand a society, they argued,
one must first of all understand how it continues to exist—or, as they
put it, “reproduces” itself—by endless creative activity.

This was quite different from functionalism. Functionalists begin with a
notion of “society,” then ask how that society manages to hold itself
together. Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is
continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action,
and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are
thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. This has
obvious advantages. The problem with the whole “mode of production”
approach, though, was that it was developed to analyze societies with a
state: that is, in which there is a ruling class that maintains an
apparatus of coercion to extract a surplus from the people who do most of
the productive work. Most of the real triumphs of the MoP approach—I am
thinking, for example, of Perry Anderson’s magisterial “Passages from
Antiquity to Feudalism” (1974a) and “Lineages of the Absolutist
State” (1974b)—deal with outlining the history of different modes of
production, many of which can coexist in a given society; the way in which
the dominant one provides the basis for a ruling class whose interests are
protected by the state; the way that modes of production contain
fundamental contradictions that will, at least in most cases, ultimately
drive them to turn into something else. Once one turns to societies without
a state, it’s not clear how any of these concepts are to be applied.

One thing Marxism did introduce was a series of powerful analytical
terms—exploitation, fetishism, appropriation, reproduction... —that
everyone agreed Marx himself had used brilliantly in his analysis of
Capitalism, but that no one was quite sure how to apply outside it.
Different scholars would use these terms in very different ways and then
would often end up quarreling, quoting canonical texts at each other,
arguing over what Marx had “really meant” in them. This tendency (and
the specialized jargon itself ) quickly gave Marxism a somewhat hermetic
quality that played a large part in limiting its appeal to outsiders. After
a fairly brief spurt of interest in the ‘70s, Marxism in
anthropology—at least in the English-speaking world[20]—soon found its
place mainly as a technique for understanding capitalism itself and the
different ways in which indigenous people have come into relation with it.

All this might make it seem that Marxism has not had an enormous impact on
anthropology. But this is true only in the most superficial, institutional
sense. In a deeper one, its influence was overwhelming. This is because
Marxism in many ways became the inspiration for a whole series of new
approaches—I’ll refer to them, for shorthand purposes, as “critical
theory”— that beginning in the 1960s transformed most
anthropologists’ ideas about what their discipline was ultimately about.
For most of this century, anthropology has been determinedly relativistic.
Since the time of Boas, it had become almost an item of faith that moral
judgments had no place in it: since cultural standards were ultimately
arbitrary, who were we to apply Western standards to people who did not
share them? Marxism was obviously nothing if not critical; but it also took
those very Western cultural standards as the ground of everything it wished
to criticize. It had been developed as a technique for exposing the
workings of a system of inequality and injustice within the analyst’s own
society, so as to contribute to the dissolution of that society, and the
creation of a radically different one. If a Marxist criticized non-Western
social orders, it was not because it was different from his or her own, but
largely to the degree it was similar.[21] So too with the other critical
approaches that emerged at the same time: the most important being
feminism, whose impact on anthropology and on intellectual life in general
is likely to be even more enduring than Marxism itself. So too with other
disciplines like semiotics and cultural studies. All were part of a broad
left turn in academic life that probably peaked in the late ‘70s (just
before politics everywhere started veering to the right), but that
permanently altered the basic terms of intellectual debate, ensuring that
most academics now think of themselves as political radicals, even if as
time has gone on it has reduced many to producing what seem like ever more
fervent position papers for a broader political movement that does not, in
fact, exist. 

 Now, Marx himself did develop a theory of value. In Capital, and
elsewhere, he argued that the value of commodities is derived from the
human labor that went into producing them, but that this fact tends to be
forgotten when the object is bought and sold on the market, so that it
seems that its value somehow arises naturally from the qualities of the
object itself. This is of course a very famous argument that has generated
a vast literature. But there were few explicit attempts to see how it might
be applied to noncapitalist systems, or if indeed it could be.[22]

Common wisdom has it that where ‘60s debates were mainly about exchange
and ‘70s ones about production; in the ‘80s the focus shifted to
consumption. This is not entirely untrue. While the interest in the
cultural meanings of consumption goes back at least to the work of
Baudrillard (1968, 1972, 1976), there has since the ‘80s been a
blossoming of theory that presents consumption as a form of creative
self-expression. Its most insistent advocate is the British anthropologist
Daniel Miller (1987, 1995). Actually, Sahlins’ work on commodities stands
at the beginnings of the same tradition, and insofar as such people deal
with “value” as an issue they do so largely in the same sense of a
Saussurean code. But this same period has also seen the emergence of at
least two approaches to exchange, both, in their own ways, rising in
reaction to Marxism. One—the one that generally accompanies the
“creative consumption” literature—is a kind of curious revival of
economic formalism, though now, with pretensions to science largely
stripped away. The other—which I’ve labeled “Neo-Maussian”—is
perhaps more interesting.

But first things first.

I: the return of economic man

 
This is hardly the place to launch into a history of poststructuralism, but
there are a few points that I should probably have to cover in order to
ensure that what follows makes any sort of sense. It’s actually rather
difficult to pick out any single theme uniting the works of the various
authors (Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard ...)
normally brought together under this rubric. But if there is one, it is the
urge to shatter totalities, whatever these may be, whether “society,”
“symbolic order,” “language,” “the psyche,” or anything else.
Instead, Poststructuralism tends to see reality as a heterogeneous
multiplicity of “fields,” “machines,” “discourses,” “language
games,” or any of a dozen other cross-cutting planes, plateaus, and
what-have-you, which—and this is crucial—do not form any sort of
overarching structure or hierarchy. Rather than contexts encompassing one
another, as in Dumont, one has a mosaic of broken surfaces, and on each
surface, a completely different game played by a different set of rules.
Moreover, poststructuralists usually insist that one cannot even talk about
individuals moving back and forth between these surfaces; rather, the
players (or “subjects”) are constructs of the game itself; effects of
discourse, and our sense that we have a consistent self, largely an
illusion. Ultimately, language speaks us. Where previous debates asked
whether one should begin with society or the individual, here both society
and the individual shatter into fragments. We seem to have left such
debates as Formalism versus Substantivism altogether in the dust. But here
appearances turn out to be a bit deceptive.

Within each plane, or game, or field, the picture usually looks strikingly
familiar. There are a bunch of individual players (or, occasionally,
collective ones) competing with or otherwise attempting to dominate or
impose their will on the others.

There’s no room here to go case by case, but it might be useful to start
with an example from Pierre Bourdieu. This is for two reasons. First,
because Bourdieu is the theorist considered to have gone the furthest in
actually reconciling structuralism and theories of human action. His notion
of habitus, of symbolic systems that can be absorbed and endlessly
reproduced without the actor ever being aware she is doing so, is justly
famous. Second, because his approach to economic action is so explicitly
formalist.

Consider his reinterpretation of Mauss’ essay on the gift. On the first
page of this essay, Mauss defines gifts as “prestations which are in
theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory
and interested” (1927:1). Just as in our own society, there is often a
pretense of pure generosity when one first gives a gift, though in reality
the receiver is expected to return something of equal or greater value
later on. Hence a gift can often be a challenge, and the recipient,
profoundly humiliated if he cannot produce a suitably generous response.
Nonetheless, Mauss’ ultimate point is that the “interest” involved
need have nothing to do with making a profit—or even scoring a moral
victory—at anyone’s expense. Gifts act as a way of creating social
relations. They create alliances and obligations between individuals or
groups who might otherwise have nothing to do with one another.
Functionalist theorists (Polanyi himself, among others) immediately swept
up this notion because it corresponded so perfectly to their assumptions.
Exchange was first and foremost a way of achieving social integration. For
some, it became the very glue that held society together.[23] If anything,
this held even more for Structuralists: Claude Levi-Strauss (1949) extended
the argument further by suggesting that the institution of marriage, in any
society, should be considered the exchange of women between groups of men,
which again functioned to create a network of alliances.

Bourdieu, in his ethnographic study of the Kabyle of Algeria (1977),
manages to take a radically different turn on the gift by returning to the
pretense of generosity. Often, he notes, all that makes gift exchange
different from simple barter is the lapse of time between gift and
counter-gift. It’s this delay that makes it possible to pretend each is
simply an act of generosity, of denying any element of self-interested
calculation. This sort of subterfuge, he suggests, is typical of
traditional societies, which unlike ours do not recognize an explicit field
of economic activity.

A rational contract would telescope into an instant a transaction which
gift exchange disguises, by stretching it out in time; and because of this,
gift exchange is, if not the only mode of commodity circulation practiced,
at least the only mode to be fully recognized, in societies which, because
they deny ‘the true soil of their own life,’ as Lukacs puts it, have an
economy in itself and not for itself. Everything takes place as if the
essence of the “archaic” economy lay in the fact that economic activity
cannot explicitly acknowledge the economic ends in relation to which it is
objectively oriented: the “idolatry of nature” which makes it
impossible to think of nature as a raw material or, consequently, to see
human activity as labor, i.e., as man’s struggle against nature, tends,
together with the systematic emphasis on the symbolic aspect of the
activities and relations of production, to prevent the economy from being
grasped as an economy, i.e., as a system governed by the laws of interested
calculation, competition, or exploitation (Bourdieu 1977:171–72).

Notice what is happening here. Bourdieu starts with an argument reminiscent
of Karl Polanyi. In traditional societies like the Kabyle, the economy is
not a sphere unto itself; rather, it is embedded in social relations.[24]
But where Polanyi’s “economy” was just a society’s way of providing
itself with food and other necessities, Bourdieu’s definition is strictly
Formalist: it is a matter of self-interested calculation, making rational
decisions about the allocation of scarce resources with the aim of getting
as much as possible for oneself. In real, “objective” terms, he argues,
economizing—or something very much like it—is always going on. It’s
just that where there is no market, everyone goes to enormous lengths to
disguise this fact. This endless labor of camouflage is such a
burden—often it takes up as much time as that invested in economic
activity itself—that it tends to dissolve away immediately as soon as a
market economy is introduced, whereon the hidden reality of calculated
self-interest is openly revealed.

What one has, then, in a traditional society, is one that is dominated by
an overt morality which can never really be put into practice: people are
aware of the existence of self-interested calculation, they uniformly
disapprove of it in principle, yet it is nonetheless the basis of
everything they do. The result is a sort of across-the-board principle of
Sartrean bad faith.[25]

Bourdieu ends up rehearsing all the usual economizing arguments. When
people act in ways that seem economically irrational, this is only because
the values they are maximizing are not material. “Practice never ceases
to conform to economic calculation even when it gives every appearance of
disinterestedness by departing from the logic of interested calculation (in
the narrow sense) and playing for stakes that are non-material and not
easily quantified” (1977:177) Therefore we must

extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic,
without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being
sought after in a particular social formation—which may be ‘fair
words’ or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, complements or attention,
challenges or insults, honor or honors, powers or pleasures, gossip or
scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc. (1977:178).[26]

In Kabyle society, though, these ultimately boil down to two forms of
“capital,” as Bourdieu calls it: economic capital (land, domestic
animals ...) and “symbolic capital” (family honor and prestige). In a
society without a selfregulating market, it’s the latter that’s more
generally useful, because one can use honor to get wealth much more easily
than the other way around.

On some level, what Bourdieu is saying is undeniably true. There is no area
of human life, anywhere, where one cannot find self-interested calculation.
But neither is there anywhere one cannot find kindness or adherence to
idealistic principles: the point is why one, and not the other, is posed as
“objective” reality. This is where Bourdieu is at his most
poststructuralist. Every field of human endeavor, he argues, is defined by
a set of competitive strategies. If it is customary to give gifts, then
gift-giving will be part of those strategies. Therefore, the motives of the
giver are unimportant. You might be a kind and decent person motivated only
by the desire to help a friend, but objectively that doesn’t matter,
because in the overall structure of the situation, gifts are always part of
a game of dominance, an attempt to accumulate symbolic capital and gain an
advantage over the other party; this is how everyone else will perceive
your actions, and this will be their real meaning. (To suggest otherwise
would be to fall into the trap of “subjectivism.”) Note how closely
this position echoes that of economics. There, too, the assumption is that
“objective” or “scientific” analysis means trying to cut through to
the level on which you can say people are being selfish, and that when one
has discovered this, one’s job is done.

Now, it’s one thing to find this attitude among conservative economists;
quite another to find it at the heart of critical theory. Even more in
Pierre Bourdieu, a social theorist who has, more than any I can think of,
dedicated himself to exposing structures of privilege and exploitation even
within the academic world (at no little personal cost). No one could doubt
his own integrity and good intentions. Why, then, his insistence on
discounting the importance of integrity and good intentions in human
affairs?

I suspect it emerges from a flaw in the very project of critical theory.
When Marxism, semiotics and the rest burst on the academic scene in the
1960s and ‘70s, they were seen above all as ways to probe beneath the
surface of reality. The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of
power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and
ordinary aspects of daily life. Certainly such things are there to be
found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a
rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading
through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the almost
Gnostic feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is
threaded with violence and domination.[27] Critical theory thus ended up
sabotaging his own best intentions, making power and domination so
fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible
to imagine a world without it. Because if one can’t, then criticism
rather loses its point. Before long, one had figures like Foucault or
Baudrillard arguing that resistance is futile (or at least, that organized
political resistance is futile), that power is simply the basic constituent
of everything, and often enough, that there is no way out of a totalizing
system, and that we should just learn to accept it with a certain ironic
detachment. And if everything is equally corrupt, then pretty much anything
could be open for redemption.[28] Why not, say, those creative and slightly
offbeat forms of mass consumption favored by upper-middle class academics?

Of course, I am describing intellectual trends now as if they existed in a
vacuum. In reality, the story is probably more one of the dissolution of
the vast social movements in the ‘60s (except for feminism), the
political rout of the left beginning in the early ‘80s, and the global
rise of neoliberal ideologies. Not that this existed in isolation from
intellectual trends either—one might well argue that the rise of
neoliberalism (essentially, the exact thing Polanyi was arguing against
fifty years ago) has been made possible by the failure of the left to come
up with plausible alternatives—but this would take the argument way
beyond the scope of this book. For now, suffice it to say that
post-structuralism opened up yet another space into which the maximizing
individual could crawl.

Finally, now, we can return to value.

Appadurai’s “politics of value”

 
If there is one essay that has the most influence on the way
anthropologists nowadays talk about value, it is certainly Arjun
Appadurai’s “Commodities and the Politics of Value” (1986), the
introduction to a volume called The Social Life of Things. Phrases from
this essay—“regimes of value,” “tournaments of value,” “the
politics of value” itself—have been cited and repeated endlessly ever
since. This makes it all the more important to ask exactly what sort of
value Appadurai was talking about. The essay is well worth a second look.

Appadurai begins by talking about the term “commodity,” which Marx,
among others, applied to objects produced in order to be sold on a
commercial market. This emphasis on production, he notes, arises from
Marx’s belief that value arises from human labor; the problem with this
formulation, though, is that it makes commodities essentially a capitalist
phenomena, typical of some societies and not others. Anthropologists would
do better, he suggests, to forget Marx’s approach entirely and look
instead to those developed by Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money
(1907).

Value, according to Simmel, is not rooted in human labor, nor does its
existence depend on any larger social system. It arises from exchange.
Hence, it is purely an effect of individual desire. The value of an object
is the degree to which a buyer wants it. It is measured by how much that
person is willing to give up in order to get it.

Like Marx, Simmel was thinking mainly of how things work in a market
economy. But Appadurai insists that, unlike Marx’s, his model can be
easily be applied even where formal markets don’t exist. In every
society, there is at least some form of exchange. Therefore there’s no
reason to think of “commoditization” as a purely capitalist phenomena.
Any object becomes a commodity when one thinks of it primarily as something
one could acquire in exchange for something else, or that one would be
willing to give up in order to get something one desires more.

This means looking at the commodity potential of all things rather than
searching fruitlessly for the magic distinction between commodities and
other sorts of things. It also means breaking significantly with the
production-dominated Marxian view of the commodity and focusing on the
total trajectory from production, through exchange/distribution, to
consumption (1986:13).

Now, it must be admitted that this approach does have its advantages. These
are the usual advantages of a formalist approach. It allows the analyst to
skip past the problem of social totalities, structures of meaning, and the
like and focus on individual actors and their motivations. Alternatively,
as Appadurai suggested, we could look at the history of an individual
object: to follow its “life history” as it moves back and forth between
different “regimes of value” (1986:5, 14–15). This latter was one of
the most bold and exciting proposals in the essay, and it has been
endlessly cited ever since, as has the phrase “regimes of value”
itself. The latter is certainly evocative. But given Appadurai’s
endorsement of Simmel, it is hard to see what he could actually mean by it.

What does it mean to say an object passes back and forth between “regimes
of value?” Could we be talking about the way the same object—say, a
rocking chair—might be sold as merchandise in a retail outlet, then
gradually acquire sentimental value as a family heirloom, and then, after
many years, end up for sale once again? Apparently not. If “value” is
simply the measure of someone else’s desire to acquire the chair,
“sentimental value” is ruled out. It’s true that, in a companion
essay, Igor Kopytoff (1986, cf. Bloch and Parry 1989:12–16) does argue
that there are two sorts of value: objects can be valued either as
commodities, which can be compared to other objects, or as “unique”
objects that cannot. This would seem to include unique heirlooms, but
it’s hard to see how a “regime” of value could arise out of a system
that does not allow comparison of any kind. What, then? Perhaps one might
be talking about different kinds of exchange: say, the chair might be at
one point given as a gift, at another, sold at auction? No again, because
Appadurai argues it is wrong to make any strict distinction between gifts
and other sorts of commodity. Here, he refers to Bourdieu’s analysis,
noting that what anthropologists have referred to as “gift exchange” is
not simply generosity but, like commodity exchange, a matter of
self-interested calculation (1986:12; c.f. also Carrier 1990, 1991).

Actually, Appadurai takes the argument much further than Bourdieu ever did.
The classic distinction between commodities and gifts is that while
commodity exchange is concerned with establishing equivalencies between the
value of objects, “gifts” are primarily about relations between people.
Bourdieu, despite one reference to gift-giving as a “mode of commodity
circulation,” never really contradicts this. When he writes about the
exchange of gifts between Algerian peasants, he treats it not primarily as
a way of acquiring things but as a way of accumulating “symbolic
capital”: of establishing one’s honor, or generosity, or of putting a
rival to shame. Appadurai, on the other hand, ends up writing as if all
exchanges are simply about things and have nothing to do with making,
maintaining, or severing social relationships.[29] Insofar as goods affect
relations between people—insofar as society and culture come in at
all—he is left only with the domain of consumption: and indeed much of
the essay is concerned with how consuming of goods involves sending and
receiving social messages. Hence, Appadurai’s “politics of value”
largely comes down to the story of how various elites try to control and
limit exchange and consumption, while others (almost always popular forces)
try to expand it, and with the social struggles that result. “Regimes of
value,” in turn, are the outcome of such struggles: the degree to which
these elites have succeeded in channeling the free flow of exchange, or,
alternately, to which existing cultural standards limit the possibilities
of what can be exchanged for what.

The rejection of Marx, the emphasis on self-interested strategies, the
glorification of consumption as creative self-expression—all this was
entirely in keeping with the intellectual trends of the mid ‘80s. But it
also serves as an object lesson about why, when one catches a wave, one
might do well to think about where it is ultimately heading. Because the
end result is anthropology as it might have been written by Milton
Friedman. As James Ferguson (1988) has pointed out, there is a reason why
Simmel is the darling of modern-day free market Neoliberals. Appadurai
leaves one with an image of commerce (self-interested, acquisitive
calculation) as a universal human urge, almost a libidinal, democratic
force, always trying to subvert the powers of the state, aristocratic
hierarchies, or cultural elites whose role always seems to be to try to
inhibit, channel, or control it.[30] It all rather makes one wish one still
had Karl Polanyi (1944) around to remind us how much state power has
created the very terms of what is now considered normal commercial life.

One could, of course, argue that all this is beside the point. The real
importance of Appadurai’s essay was the liberating effect it had on other
scholars (Thomas 1991:28): providing a charter, as it were, to examine how
objects can move back and forth between different cultural worlds and thus
to ask a whole new series of questions about colonialism, tourism,
collecting, trade, and so on. There is certainly something to this.
Many—perhaps most—of the anthropologists who have borrowed
Appadurai’s terminology drop the blatantly economistic elements anyway:
when someone like Brad Weiss (1996) refers to “regimes of value,” he
obviously means something very different than Appadurai himself. In this
way, Appadurai clearly has done us all a service. But theory does make a
difference. Let me take one example. Both Appadurai’s essay and Kopytoff
’s emphasize the possibility of writing the “social biography of a
thing”; but both also define their terms in such a way that it becomes
impossible to consider that an object’s biography could itself contribute
to its value.[31] The result is a purely methodological suggestion, and
while there’s undoubtedly a certain charm to the fantasy that one could
reconstruct, say, the entire history of a well-traveled cassette or handgun
or pair of tweezers, it would be a little like producing a list of everyone
who’s ever sat on a certain park bench: in the end, you have to wonder
what was supposed to be the point.

This is worth considering, because the other major new approach to value of
material objects that came out around the same time—Annette Weiner’s
writings on “inalienable possessions” (1985, 1992, 1994)—takes
exactly the opposite direction.

parenthetical note: Annette Weiner on inalienable objects

 
The term “inalienable” is derived from Mauss’ essay on the gift: in
it, Mauss suggested that gifts are in a certain sense “inalienable”
(immeuble), because even after they have been given away, they are still
felt in some sense to belong to the giver. If nothing else, they continue
to carry with them something of his or her personality. What, Weiner asks,
would a theory of value look like if it were to take this phenomenon as its
starting point?

It would certainly look very different from the one found in Appadurai and
Kopytoff. Heirlooms, for instance, would not be valuable just because (as
Kopytoff would have it) they are “unique,” but rather, because of their
specific histories. Recognizing this in turn could help resolve some of the
more confusing aspects of Kopytoff ’s essay: for example, the way he
suggests that in many traditional societies, varieties of goods are ranked
by their “degree of singularity,” rather as if some objects could be
more unique than others. Really, what one is talking is the object’s
capacity to accumulate a history: hence, in our society at least, there are
artifacts that are truly unique (the Hope diamond, Monet’s water lilies,
the Brooklyn Bridge), and then, just below them in value, a class of
“collector’s items” (ancient Greek coins, Miro prints, first-edition
Silver Surfer comic books). These are not quite unique, but they have a
rarity that derives from their historical origins; what’s more, when they
circulate, they almost invariably accumulate a further history in the form
of a pedigree of former owners—which then in turn tends to further
enhance their value. In any society, one should probably be able to map out
at least a rough continuum of types of objects, ranked according their
capacity to accumulate history: from the crown jewels at the top, to, at
the bottom, such things as a gallon of motor oil, or two eggs over easy.

Weiner notes that in many of the societies discussed by Mauss (the Maori,
the Kwakiutl, the Trobriand Islanders), the most famous heirlooms do indeed
have their own names and “biographies,” which includes their origins,
past owners, people who had tried or succeeded to win or recover them. It
would seem, then, that circulation can actually enhance an object’s
value. But by fixing on the notion of “inalienability” Weiner ends up
pulling things in exactly the opposite direction. If an object’s identity
is permanently attached to that of one, original owner, circulation cannot
do this (see Weiner 1976:180–83).

Hence, the main thrust of Inalienable Possessions is to propose the
existence of something Weiner calls “transcendent” or “absolute”
value. Weiner is thinking most of all of ancient treasures, here, which are
often also badges of office that not only establish a holder’s name and
position but ground it in the doings of gods or ancestors from the
beginnings of the world. The objects that most embody transcendent
value—say, Australian tjuringas, the crown jewels of England—no one
would ever give away. Still, they can be lost, stolen, forgotten, or
destroyed. Preserving them is thus an achievement, the maintenance of an
image of eternity (1992:8–12). Their value, then, is measured in the fear
of loss. In many societies, there is a complex game of strategies going on
in which others are constantly trying to get hold of the heirlooms that
ultimately guarantee another’s historical identity and thus the
authentication of their claims to status and authority. In other words,
everyone is actually trying to ensure their most valuable heirlooms do not
circulate. This might seem about as far as one can go from Simmel’s
position, that value is a product of exchange. But in many ways, we are
simply dealing with a mirror image. Rather than value being the measure of
how much one would like to acquire something one does not possess, in
Weiner, it becomes the measure of how little one would wish to give up the
things one does. Objects of transcendent value are simply the very last
things one would be willing to part with.[32]

So far, then, it’s hard to see how we have made a whole lot of progress
since the ‘60s. Weiner’s work points in all sorts of interesting
directions, but she often seems trapped between creating a mere
mirror-image of economism, or alternately (as in her notion of
“reproduction”: Weiner 1978, 1980, 1982) swinging towards something
much more like Dumont’s position. Between formalism and substantivism,
then, there still does not seem to be much middle ground.

II: Strathern’s neo-Maussian approach

 
There is one major theoretical alternative, if one so far largely limited
to Melanesia. I’ll call it “Neo-Maussian,” since its genealogy can be
traced from Mauss through the work of Christopher Gregory (1980, 1982) to
that of Marilyn Strathern (1981, 1984a, 1984b, 1987, 1988, 1992).
Strathern’s work is also considered the theoretical culmination of what
is often referred to as the “New Melanesian Ethnography.”[33] No one
could possibly deny its brilliance. Some of her key notions, like that of
the “partible person,” have already had a great deal of influence even
outside Melanesia, in fact, even outside anthropology. Perhaps the main
thing that has limited her work’s appeal is that most of it is written in
an incredibly difficult language, largely of her own invention—one which
seems to have an endless capacity to slip away almost as soon as a reader
thinks she’s grasped it. It can be very frustrating to read.

I’ll begin with Mauss. The main question asked in his “Essay on the
Gift” is: what is it about giving a gift that makes the recipient feel
compelled to return a countergift of roughly equal value? His
answer—which actually harks back to Emerson (1844)—is that a gift is
always seen to contain something of the giver. Hence, Mauss notes, objects
given as gifts often take on human qualities. Actually, his descriptions of
“gift economies” like those of the Northwest Coast emphasize the way in
which everything—not only as gifts but houses, canoes, masks and serving
dishes—was treated as if it had its own personality, likes and dislikes,
intentions and desires. In a book called Gifts and Commodities (1982),
Christopher Gregory—an economic anthropologist working in Papua New
Guinea—suggests this is a general tendency. Gift economies tend to
personify objects. Commodity economies, like our own, do the opposite: they
tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like
objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we
talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something
analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as
cheese, or tire-irons.

Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are
meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they
take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even
the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.
Commodity exchange, on the other hand, is meant to establish a
“quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally
be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even
the human beings involved like things. Giving someone a gift usually puts
that person in your debt; hence, success in gift exchange becomes a matter
of giving away as much wealth as possible, so as to gain a social
advantage. In a commodity system, it’s the things that are important;
therefore, people try to accumulate as much wealth as they can.

Obviously, a system as tidy as this has got to be a bit of an abstraction.
No pure gift, or pure commodity, economy actually exists. Actually, Gregory
himself was suggesting nothing of the sort: as he has noted recently (1998)
he created the distinction in order to understand how contemporary Papuans
move back and forth between one and the other. Nonetheless, such
abstractions can be useful. Most of all, they can be used as the basis of
making further generalizations. If the logic of a ‘gift economy’ really
is so different from our own, for instance, might it not also imply a
different conception of the very nature of human beings or social
relations? This is the direction Strathern takes Gregory’s ideas,
combining them with observations culled from her own experience among the
Melpa-speaking inhabitants of Mount Hagen, in Papua New Guinea. The result
is a kind of grand comparison of “Melanesian” and “Western” social
theories.

Strathern has come into a great deal of criticism for “essentializing”
difference. I don’t think such criticisms are entirely fair, because
Strathern never claims that all Melanesians think one way, or all
Westerners another. Rather, it seems to me her work is meant as a kind of
thought experiment. Western social theory is founded on certain everyday
common sense, one that assumes that the most important thing about people
is that they are all unique individuals. Theory therefore also tends to
start with individuals and tries to understand how they form relations with
one another (thus producing something we call “society”). People in
Mount Hagen did not share these assumptions. With no concept of either
“society” or unique individuals, they assumed the relationships came
first. What, then, would a social theory be like that was founded on Melpa
common sense? It’s at this point she brings in Gregory’s distinction
between gift economies and commodity economies, and the other ethnographers
elsewhere in Melanesia who might be said to have contributed to the
groundwork of such a theory.[34]

Marxian critique, Maussian rejoinder

 
What Strathern is probably most famous for, however, is her ongoing
dialogue with critical—and especially feminist—theory. Her best known
book, The Gender of the Gift (1988), consists largely of a series of
rejoinders to feminist, or feminist-inspired, analyzes of one or another
aspect of Melanesian society. Now, considering this is a part of the world
notorious for extreme inequality of the sexes, this makes reading the book
a rather surrealistic experience: Strathern is an avowed feminist, but she
spends the book systematically knocking down almost every argument ever
made that might justify the notion that Melanesian women are oppressed. It
is not, actually, that Strathern means to deny that Melanesian men dominate
women (she does in fact, acknowledge they do).[35] Rather, she wants to
expose the cultural assumptions underlying the ways most such arguments are
framed. Consider, for example, her reply to Lizette Josephides’ analysis
of Melanesian exchange systems (Strathern 1988:144–59).

Josephides provides what has actually become the classic Marxist critique
of the Maussian tradition (1982, see also 1983, 1985, Bloch 1991:172). It
runs like this: by focusing on “the gift,” the moment when objects
change hands, one is looking only at the moment the society itself places
under its spotlight: the moment when two important men (it almost always
seems to be men) confront one another in dramatic public acts of generosity
or display. But spotlights do not only draw attention to some things, by
doing so, they also draw attention away from others. Should one not also
ask what is being left in the shadows here? Most obviously, someone must
have made these things; there is a whole cycle of production and assembly
of goods that has to go on before the exchange takes place (and usually
another cycle afterwards.) Rather than be seduced by the spotlight, we
should investigate its operation.

Josephides (1985) takes the example of Melpa pigs. Melpa political and
ceremonial life centers on dramatic rituals, called moka, in which clans
assemble to give gifts to one another. There are lavish feasts, dances,
speeches, and gorgeous costumes. Huge heaps of food are piled up and
presented to repay previous gifts of food. Important men give each other
pigs, which are the most important gift of all. Hageners raise pigs
especially to be exchanged; at any moment, a family will probably have a
number in their yard, most of them considered as the product of one or
another of these exchanges. But who does the gardening, and who actually
raises these pigs? Mainly women. Married couples cooperate to raise pigs;
the wife contributes the largest share of labor; nonetheless, only the
husbands can exchange them in public, thus acquiring a “name.” Only men
can translate pigs into fame and political reputation. The whole process,
Josephides suggests, can be thought of as a kind of fetishization, because
it ends up making it seem as if the pigs are produced by acts of exchange
rather than by the human labor that went into tending them, fattening them,
and growing crops with which to do so—just as someone like Simmel would
say that the value of commodities comes from the fact that someone is
willing to buy them rather than from the thought and energy that went into
producing something a buyer would desire to buy.

Strathern objects. To make such an argument one is already assuming that a
person has some kind of rights in whatever they produce. We assume that,
but does everyone? If you examine talk of “rights” in our own society,
she observes, you quickly discover a whole series of assumptions about
private property. We assume that society is made up of individuals, and
most of our conceptions of human rights are based on the idea that
individuals own themselves. Hence, they have the right to prevent others
from intruding on their bodies, their houses, or their minds (cf.
MacPherson 1962). Marxists simply go further by arguing that this includes
their powers of creativity, and therefore, that individuals have a right to
the products of “their” labor. Now, this argument might be useful,
Strathern admits, as an outside perspective, as grounds to declare Hagen
society fundamentally unjust: but certainly we cannot go on to say that
exchange serves as a way of disguising this reality unless we have some
reason to believe Hageners would have reason to see it in the first place.

Thus far the argument is straightforward enough. Strathern continues:
 

 
A vocabulary, which turns on the deprivation of ‘rights’, must entail
premises about a specific form of property. To assert rights against others
implies a type of legal ownership. Does the right to determine the value of
one’s product belong naturally to the producer? (1988:142, emphasis
mine)
 

 
The first two sentences are remarkable enough—apparently, there are no
rights that do not go back to property. But the third is crucial. We’re
not just talking about the right of ownership—the right to determine who
has access to one’s product. We are also talking about the right to
determine its meaning or importance. And of course, the moment an
anthropologist uses a term like “natural,” we all know where the
argument is heading. It is we who assume the producer should always have
this right. We are wrong to believe that this is universal.

The Marxist notion of alienation, she writes, assumes that work has a value
in the first instance for the self... It is the person’s own
appropriation of his or her activity that gives it value, in so far as the
person is a microcosm of the ‘social’ process by which exogenous
appropriation by others, by ‘the system,’ also gives it value
(1988:142–43).

This is a difficult passage, and it turns on a rather particular use of the
term “appropriation.” But it is decipherable. Ordinary Western common
sense takes it for granted that objects—like individuals—already exist
in nature (that the ultimate constituents of the world, as Gilbert Ryle
used to put it, are “blokes and things.”) Human action is therefore
thought to consist mainly of taking those objects and “appropriating”
them socially—that is, ascribing meaning to them by placing them within
some larger system of categories. By “the system,” Strathern seems to
have in mind some sort of Saussurean code, or alternately, a system of
private property, which similarly divides things up. It is this meaning
that Strathern seems to be referring to when she speaks of value.
“Value,” then, is the meaning or importance society ascribes to an
object. Marxists imply that individuals who produce objects should have the
right to determine their meaning. In Mount Hagen, she objects, people do
not see things in this way, since they do not see objects as having been
produced by individuals. They see them as the outcome of relationships.

Here we come to the core of Strathern’s argument. Like Dumont, she views
Western ideology as defined above all by its individualism. We assume every
individual has a kind of central, unique core that makes them who they are.
Call it a self, a soul, a personality—whatever you call it, the
assumption is always that no two are exactly the same, and this is what is
really important about a person. It’s thus we can talk about creativity
as “self-expression,” of “finding oneself,” or of contexts in which
one is more “oneself ” than others. It follows that other people’s
perceptions of us are likely to be superficial and limited. Most people do
not know who we really are. But what if one did not make this set of
assumptions? Melanesians, according to Strathern, either do not recognize
such a unique core, or if they do, do not attach much importance to it.[36]
Therefore they assume that we are, before we are anything else, what we are
perceived to be by others. One might object that this would mean we are
many different things, since different people are likely to have very
different impressions of us, or see us differently in different contexts.
But that is precisely what Strathern is arguing. Her most famous concept,
in fact, is the “partible” or “multiple” person. People have all
sorts of potential identities, which most of the time exist only as a set
of hidden possibilities. What happens in any given social situation is that
another person fixes on one of these and thus “makes it visible.” One
looks at a man, say, as a representative of his clan, or as one’s
sister’s husband, or as the owner of a pig. Other possibilities, for the
moment, remain invisible.

It is at this point that a theory of value comes in: because Strathern uses
the phrase “making visible” and “giving value” more or less
interchangeably.[37]

So here too, value is simply meaning: giving value to something is a matter
of defining it by placing in some broader set of conceptual categories. The
difference is that it would never occur to a Melanesian that anyone would
have the right to define herself, or the products of her own labor— value
always exists in the eyes of someone else. But there’s slightly more to
it than that. Value actually has two components. Because when someone fixes
on one of those “hidden possibilities” in someone else, thus making
them visible, what they are bringing out is always itself seen as the
product of some social relationship that existed in the past. Given the
starting assumption (that persons are brought into being only through
social relations) it only makes sense that this should be so. Hence a man
might be seen as the product of the sexual relationship between his father
and mother, or, perhaps, the exchange relation (i.e., bridewealth payments)
between their mother and father’s clan. Or, if he is identified as the
owner of a pig, that pig is seen as being derived from the marriage
relation between the man and his wife, who raised it, or else the exchange
relation between that man and some other man, who gave it to him. Thus
people and objects are all seen to have “multiple authors,” or, in the
Melpa idiom, “sources” or “origins.”

At this point one can finally understand Melpa concepts of exchange. Mauss
of course had insisted that in giving a gift one is giving a portion of
one’s self. Quite so here: the pig can indeed embody one aspect of its
owner’s identity. However, we are also used to thinking of the giver as
the active party. Hageners—and indeed, Melanesians in general, Strathern
argues—do not see it that way. Instead, they see exchange largely as a
matter of extraction. Actually this is perfectly consistent with what
already been set out: that one’s possessions take on value (i.e.,
meaning) only in another person’s eyes. In exchange, that other person
defines the object not only as the product of past social relations, but
also as something “detachable” from them. Again, take the example of a
pig. If I convince the pig’s owner to give that pig to me, its value is
(a) that of its “origin,” the social relations that brought it into
being, and (b) the fact that I can “detach” it from that person, which
means that pig will now embody a new social relation, between that owner
and myself.[38] If I manage to convince the owner to give me his pig, I
thus displace the value of one relationship onto the other. And the object
now comes to embody my own ability to do this, my power to create new
relationships.

If all this is true, we are in a very different world than that assumed by
Marxist ideas of alienation. For a Marxist, labor is, or should be, a
matter of self-expression: the ideal is that of a fine craftsman, or even
more, an artist, whose work is both an expression of her inner being, and a
contribution to society as a whole. Melanesians see work as an expression
of one’s commitment to a specific relationship. Wives, like husbands,
help raise pigs to show their commitment to their marriage.[39] The pig is
an embodiment of that relation until it leaves the domestic sphere and
enters the public sphere of male ceremonial exchange, where its value
shifts, and it comes to embody the importance of relations between men.
Actually, since the ultimate effect is so similar (and since Strathern
admits that the notion of the exploitation of female labor might be
legitimate as an outside perspective) one might well wonder what all the
fuss was supposed to be about. The Marxist could simply say, “All right,
so the mystification runs even deeper than I thought,” and the Maussian
would then have to either concede the point, or argue that no Melanesian
could ever, under any circumstances, imagine a world in which they would be
able to choose freely who or what they worked for.

toward a synthesis?

 
Our main interest here, however, is clearly with Strathern’s notion of
value. I’ve already said that it seems, in essence, Saussurean: the value
of an object, or a person, is the meaning they take on by being assigned a
place in some larger system of categories.

It’s interesting that this is one of the few points where Strathern
decisively breaks with Gregory. Gregory (1982:47–51) preferred to limit
the term “value” to “exchange value,” in the sense used by
economists. Therefore, he concluded, in a gift economy one cannot talk
about value at all. Objects of gift exchange are, instead, ranked. Among
the Mae-Enga for example (Meggit 1971), there are six different ranks of
objects. The most exalted category includes only two sorts of things: live
pigs and cassowary birds. One can exchange a pig for a cassowary, or two
pigs, or two cassowaries for each other; but one cannot exchange a pig or
cassowary for objects of any other category. The next category includes
pearl-shell pendants, plume headdresses, and stone axes, which again can
only be exchanged for each other, and not for anything higher or
lower—and so on, down to the lowest sphere, which consists of ordinary
foodstuffs. Thus, while one could perhaps say in the abstract that pigs are
worth more than axes, this is all one can say. To speak of value, one would
have to be able to say how much more: to establish just how many axes it
would take to reach the value of one pig; and in the absence of exchange,
such comparisons simply do not take place.

Now, this clearly has a bearing on some of the issues discussed earlier in
the chapter: particularly the way that objects can be arranged along a
continuum from relatively durable, particular items to relative perishable
and generic ones, and therefore, by their capacity to retain a history. The
kind of rank order Gregory is talking about is clearly a similar principle:
indeed, one can normally expect that at the very least, whatever unique
heirlooms a society has will be exchanged (if at all) in the most exalted
sphere and that the most ephemeral products like staple foods will be at
the bottom. And this is almost always what does seem to happen. But there
is an intrinsic problem here. There is a difference between the capacity to
convey history (which can at least be roughly assessed), and the actual
history being conveyed. The latter does indeed tend to be unique, and
therefore cannot be the basis for creating a system of value. Actually,
this is why Gregory avoids using the term “value” at all when speaking
of gift economies: “strictly speaking, like for like exchanges are
impossible because, for example, a particular pig will be one day older and
hence a different pig” (1982:50). Marilyn Strathern’s notion of value
seems intended to bring just such historical particulars back on
board—she specifically points out that even when women in a New Guinea
market are bartering lumps of fish for taro, two apparently identical
batches of fish will not be considered the same because of their different
origins (Strathern 1992a; Gewertz 1983). But in order to do so she has to
redefine radically what she means by “value.”

Where Gregory takes the most restricted definition of the term possible,
Strathern does the opposite:
 

 
An initial definition is in order. As Gregory (1982) notes, the economic
concept of value implies a comparison of entities, either as a ratio (the
one expressed as a proportion of the other) or in terms of rank
equivalence.[40] Both like and unlike terms may be so compared. In
addition, however, this part of the world (the Southwestern Pacific) is
dominated by a third relation of comparison: between an entity and its
source of origin. Value is thus constructed in the identity of a thing or
person with various sets of social relations in which it is embedded, and
its simultaneous detachability from them. Here lies much of the
significance of gift exchange (1987:286).
 

 
Let me take the argument step by step. Value implies comparison. One can
compare the value of two commodities in terms of their worth in money;
here, one can establish proportions: i.e., five loaves of bread are worth
the same as one steak-frites. Or, one can compare two valuables in
Gregory’s gift economies in terms of their rank. But Gregory’s formula
does not really explain the workings of gift economies. At least in
Melanesia, she says, the critical comparison is “between an entity and
its source of origin.” Now, I do believe one should be as generous as
possible in reading another scholar’s work, but the closer one examines
this passage, the less sense it makes. The first two sorts of
“comparison” are not just meant to establish that two entities are
“like or unlike” in some way. They involve evaluation. That is, they
are meant to establish whether one entity is better, or more important, or
more desirable, than the other. Clearly, comparing “an entity and its
source of origin” does not do this. One is not saying an entity is better
than or preferable to its source of origin. One is simply observing that
the two are similar in some ways and different in others.[41]

As I have already observed, Strathern’s definition of value is
Saussurean: value is simply meaningful difference, a matter of placing
something in a set of categories. In fact, the passage above bears a
remarkable resemblance to Sahlins’ invocation of Saussure cited in
chapter 1. It also suffers from all the same problems: if one defines value
simply as “difference,” then the concept loses most of the explanatory
power that has made it attractive to begin with. It is one thing to say
that women at a market in Papua New Guinea are likely to see two lumps of
apparently identical fish as different. It’s quite another to say why, as
a result, a given woman will want one and not the other. In order to
understand that, one would have to realize that actors are not just
“comparing” entities with their origins but comparing the origins of
different entities to each other. And it is this process of comparing
unique histories on which, as I have said, it is extremely difficult to get
a theoretical handle.[42]

All of this is not meant to discount Strathern’s contribution. Mainly it
is meant to illustrate why it can be so frustrating to try to apply it
outside the rather specific (usually polemical) contexts for which it was
developed. When reading her description of gift relations, for example,
it’s hard to resist looking for parallels in our own society. But hers is
explicitly not meant to be the basis of a general theory of gifts. It’s
not even meant to be a general theory of gift economies, since Strathern
never makes clear how we would disentangle one from the specifically
Melanesian—or even specifically Melpa—elements in her account. An
obvious example: her insistence that gift-exchange be seen as a process of
extraction would hardly make sense in the Mediterranean tradition of
“agonistic exchange” which Tom Beidelman (1988) examined in ancient
Greece, or Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary Algeria.[43] There the point of
giving gifts is often to crush and humiliate a political adversary with an
act of generosity so lavish and so magnificent that it could never be
reciprocated. Does this mean one would need a completely different theory
for Mediterranean “gift economies”? What would it be like? It is
precisely this sort of question which Strathern seems to resist, leaving it
to others to determine her work’s broader implications.

Munn: the value of actions

 
So far, then, it’s hard to say whether exchange theory has advanced much
or not since the 1960s. Or to be more precise, there have clearly been
advances in many areas; but it’s specifically around the question of
value that the same conundrums show up again and again. It is still,
basically, a choice between the kind of value proposed by economists and a
Saussurean notion of meaningful difference.

Other approaches, however, have been proposed. It might be useful to
compare Strathern’s perspective with that of another anthropologist of
Melanesia: Nancy Munn (1977, 1983, 1986). Munn’s work concerns the island
of Gawa, in the Massim region off the southeastern coast of New Guinea,
which, like the Trobriands (to which it is closely culturally related) is
part of the famous kula chain. The chain itself is defined by the exchange
of immensely valuable armshells and necklaces, forms of adornment that are
rarely worn, but rather, exchanged as gifts between kula partners. Much of
the drama of Trobriand life revolve around kula expeditions; important men
and their followers descend on distant villages in other islands to woo
choice heirlooms from their kula partners. Since an armshell can be
exchanged only for a necklace, and vice versa, these heirlooms are
constantly moving against each other, the armshells circling the islands in
a clockwise direction, the necklaces counterclockwise.

In Gawa or the Trobriands, there is very clearly a rank hierarchy of types
of goods, and it does indeed correspond to an item’s capacity to retain
history: perishable and generic substances like food are at the bottom, and
unique imperishable valuables at the top. Even among kula shells, there is
an elaborate ranking system, with everyone trying to get their hands, at
least temporarily, on the very most famous heirlooms, whose names are
recognized by everyone in the kula ring. Previous analysts have tended to
look at such phenomena in terms of “spheres of exchange,” in which
different sorts of valuable can circulate only among others of the same
sort. This, however, implies one is looking for value primarily in objects.
Munn instead refers to what others might label “spheres” as “levels
of value,” since for those who attain them, they mean ever greater
degrees of control over, and ability to extend their influence in time and
space, or, as she puts it, “intersubjective spacetime.”

The basic Gawan value template is the act of giving food (1986:11–12,
49–73). If you eat too much, Gawans say, all you do is lie down and
sleep; it means inaction and hence the contraction of one’s control over
space and time. Giving the same food to someone else, on the other hand,
creates alliances and obligations. It thus implies extension of one’s
control over space and time. If that someone else hails from overseas,
giving food creates alliances that one can then activate so as to act on
increasingly higher levels of exchange, enabling one to exchange more
durable valuables like shell ornaments or canoes, and by doing so
exercising even greater control of intersubjective spacetime. The ultimate
achievement is to attach one’s name to a famous heirloom kula shell (the
most famous, remember, have their own unique names and histories) by
passing it along the inter-island kula circle; the continual passing of
which thus creates the most exalted level of all. Note that all this is not
a matter of “entering into” higher spheres or even levels of exchange
that already exist. It is these actions—of hospitality, travel, and
exchange—that create the levels in the first place. And at their most
basic this is all “levels”—indeed, all such abstract
“structures”—are. They consist of human actions.

Where Strathern starts her analysis from a web of social relationships,
then, Munn starts from a notion of activity. Value[44] emerges in action;
it is the process by which a person’s invisible “potency”—their
capacity to act— is transformed into concrete, perceptible forms. If one
gives another person food and receives a shell in return, it is not the
value of the food that returns to one in the form of the shell, but rather
the value of the act of giving it. The food is simply the medium. Value,
then, is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to
themselves—though Munn also notes that it we are not talking about
something that could occur in isolation: in kula exchange, at least (and by
extension, in any social form of value), it can only happen through that
importance being recognized by someone else. The highest level of control
over space and time is concretized simply as “fame,” that is, the fact
that others, even others one has never met, consider one’s name
important, one’s actions significant.

Munn’s approach knits together a lot of the themes that have cropped up
in this chapter, but it also introduces something radically new. Certainly,
it breaks the gift/commodity dichotomy wide open. Rather than having to
choose between the desirability of objects and the importance of human
relations, one can now see both as refractions of the same thing.
Commodities have to be produced (and yes, they also have to be moved
around, exchanged, consumed ...), social relations have to be created and
maintained; all of this requires an investment of human time and energy,
intelligence, concern. If one sees value as a matter of the relative
distribution of that, then one has a common denominator. One invests
one’s energies in those things one considers most important, or most
meaningful. One could even rework Annette Weiner’s argument along the
same lines: the value of objects of “transcendent value” would simply
be an effect of all the efforts people have made to maintain, protect, and
preserve them. Even if, from the point of view of the actors, the sequence
seems as if it’s precisely the other way around.

Framing things this way of course evokes the specter of Marx—the very one
that most of the other authors covered in this chapter preferred to banish.
We are clearly dealing with something along the lines of a labor theory of
value. But only if we define “labor” much more broadly than almost
anyone working in the Marxist tradition ever has. By limiting themselves to
talk of “work” or “labor”—notions that are by no means cultural
universals— most Marxists do lay themselves open to the sort of critique
Strathern levels against them. But certainly, creative action exists
everywhere, and one would be justified in being highly suspicious of anyone
who claims that a given society completely fails to recognize this fact.
The problem is that if you define action this broadly, there’s clearly no
way to make any exact count of how much of it has been invested in any
given object or relation.[45] Even the outside analyst can at best make an
extremely rough estimate. Within the society in question, there are of
course all sorts of ways of estimating value, but the one thing one can be
sure of is that most of this history—sometimes all of it—will be
effaced in people’s eyes.

conclusions (why so little action?)

 
Munn’s work, and particularly her theory of value, has been little taken
up by other scholars;[46] understandably, perhaps, considering it points in
such a radically different direction than does most existing scholarship.

I have been arguing over the course of this chapter that theories of value
have (at least since the ‘60s) been swinging back between two equally
unsatisfactory poles: on the one hand, a warmed-over economism that makes
“value” simply the measure of individual desire; on the other, some
variant of Saussurean “meaningful difference.” Comparing them to
Munn’s approach makes it easier to see one feature both approaches have
in common. In either case, what’s being evaluated is essentially static.
Economism tends to reify everything in sight, reducing complex social
relations between people—understandings about property rights, honor or
social standing—into objects that individual actors can then seek to
acquire. To turn something into a thing is, normally, to stop it in motion;
not surprising, then, that such approaches usually have little place for
creativity or even, unless forced, production. Saussurean Structuralism on
the other hand ascribes value not to things but to abstract
categories—these categories together make up a larger code of meaning.
But Saussure himself insisted quite explicitly that this code had to be
treated as if it existed outside of action, change, and time. Linguistics,
he argued, draws its material from particular acts of speech, but its
actual object of study is not speech but language, the rules of grammar,
codes of meaning, and so on that make speech comprehensible. While speech
(parole) exists in time and is always changing, language (langue)— “the
code”—has to be treated as “synchronic,” as if it existed in a kind
of transcendent moment outside it. Both approaches, then, end up having a
difficult time accounting for ongoing processes of change and
transformation. Economism tends to reduce all action to exchange;
Saussureans have trouble dealing with action of any sort.

Starting from hidden, generative powers of action creates an entirely
different problematic. Value becomes, as I’ve said, the way people
represent the importance of their own actions to themselves: normally, as
reflected in one or another socially recognized form. But it is not the
forms themselves that are the source of value.

Compare, again, Strathern. Because of her Saussurean starting point, she
sees value as a matter of “making visible”: social relations take on
value in the process of being recognized by someone else. According to
Munn’s approach, the value in question is ultimately the power to create
social relations; the “making visible” is simply an act of recognition
of a value that already exists in potentia. Hence where Strathern stresses
visibility, Munn’s language is all about “potencies,”
“transformative potential,” human capacities that are ultimately
generic and invisible. Rather than value being the process of public
recognition itself, already suspended in social relations, it is the way
people who could do almost anything (including, in the right circumstances,
creating entirely new sorts of social relation) assess the importance of
what they do, in fact, do, as they are doing it. This is necessarily a
social process; but it is always rooted in generic human capacities. This
leads in an entirely different direction than that assumed by almost any of
the theories that we’ve considered up to now.




     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

Events :
----------------------------------

     Chapter 2 -- Added : January 07, 2021

     Chapter 2 -- Updated : January 17, 2022

About This Textfile :
----------------------------------

     Text file generated from : 
http://revoltlib.com/