Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value : The False Coin of Our Own Dreams

Acknowledgments

The belief of all, faith, is the effect of the need of all, of their unanimous desires. Magical judgment is the object of a social consent, the translation of a social need.... It is because the effect desired by all is witnessed by all that the means are acknowledged as apt to produce the effect. It is because they desired the healing of the feverish patients that sprinklings of cold water and sympathetic contact with a frog seemed to the Hindus who called on the Brahmins of the Atharva-veda sufficient antagonists to third- or fourth-degree fever. In short, it is always society that pays itself in the counterfeit money of its dreams. —from Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Mana and Magic (1904, trans. Loic Wacquant) Acknowledgments... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Few Words by Way of Introduction, A

A Few Words by Way of Introduction When I originally set out to write this book, the goals I had in mind were relatively modest. I was interested, first of all, in making a contribution to anthropological theories of value. Many anthropologists have long felt we really should have a theory of value: that is, one that seeks to move from understanding how different cultures define the world in radically different ways (which anthropologists have always been good at describing) to how, at the same time, they define what is beautiful, or worthwhile, or important about it. To see how meaning, one might say, turns into desire. To be able to do so promises to resolve a lot of notoriously thorny problems not only in anthropology but also in soc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 1 : Three Ways of Talking About Va...

Chapter 1 — Three Ways of Talking about Value If one reads a lot of anthropology, it is hard to escape the impression that theories of value are all the rage of late. One certainly sees references to “value” and “theories of value” all the time—usually thrown out in such a way as to suggest there is a vast and probably very complicated literature lying behind them.[1] If one tries to track this literature down, however, one quickly runs into problems. In fact it is extremely difficult to find a systematic “theory of value” anywhere in the recent literature; and it usually turns out to be very difficult to figure out what body of theory, if any, that any particular author who uses the term ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 2 : Current Directions In Exchange...

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 ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3 : Value as the Importance of Act...

Chapter 3 — Value as the Importance of Actions What if one did try to create a theory of value starting from the assumption that what is ultimately being evaluated are not things, but actions? What might a broader social theory that starts from this assumption look like? In this chapter, I’d like to explore this possibility in greater detail. I ended the last chapter with the work of Nancy Munn, one of the few anthropologists who has taken this direction. Munn is not quite the only one. Another is Terence Turner, who has developed some of the same ideas, not so much in the phenomenological tradition, but with an eye to adopting Marx’s labor theory of value for anthropological use. Turner’s work, however, has fou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4 : Action and Reflection, or Note...

Chapter 4 — Action and Reflection, or Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power Moby Duck and Donald, captured by the Aridians (Arabs), start blowing soap bubbles, with which the natives are enchanted. “Ha ha. They break when you catch them. Hee, hee.” Ali-Ben-Goli, the chief, says “it’s real magic. My people are laughing like children. They cannot imagine how it works.” “It’s only a secret passed from generation to generation,” says Moby, “I will reveal it if you give us our freedom” ... The chief, in amazement, exclaims “Freedom? That’s not all I’ll give you. Gold, jewels. My treasure is yours, if you reveal the secret.” The Arabs consent to th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 5 : Wampum and Social Creativity A...

Chapter 5 — Wampum and Social Creativity among The Iroquois In this chapter, I’d like to say a little bit about wampum, the white and purple shell beads which became a currency of trade in early colonial Northeast North America. Among “primitive valuables”—a category that includes such things as kula necklaces, Kwakiutl coppers, or the iron bars used in bridewealth exchange by the West African Tiv—wampum holds a rather curious place. Simply as an object, it’s by far the most familiar. The average reader is much more likely to know what wampum looks like, or to have actually seen some in a museum, than any of the others. Nonetheless, unlike the others, wampum has never been treated as a classic c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6 : Marcel Mauss Revisited

Chapter 6 — Marcel Mauss Revisited We have here an admirable example of how capitalist property is created. The appropriation of gold, in particular, is by necessity a bloody business. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spaniards massacred the Peruvians and Mexicans; in the 19th century the Indians of California were coldly exterminated; the Australian Aborigines, methodically destroyed. And now this same genre of collective assassination which is war is directed against the Boers. The bourgeoisie no more recoils before blood than it recoils before human exploitation. Thus we see how “private property is founded upon labor”! —Marcel Mauss, from “La guerre du Transvaal” (Le Mouvement Socialiste, Ju... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7 : The False Coin of Our Own Drea...

Chapter 7 — The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, or the Problem of the Fetish, IIIb One man is a king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is the king. —Karl Marx, Capital, 63 Of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle.” It went on for months; it was a whole series of stories... Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffman-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always “hard up.” His shop was full of the most wonderful things—of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as num... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

References Cited

References Cited Ahern, Emily 1979 “The Problem of Efficacy: Strong and Weak Illocutionary Acts.” Man (n.s.) 14 no. 1:1–17. Akins, David and Joel Robbins 1999 “An Introduction to Melanesian Currencies: Agencies, Identity, and Social Reproduction.” In Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia (David Atkins and Joel Robbins, eds.), pp. 1–40. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Albert, Ethel 1956 “The Classification of Values: A Method and Illustration.” American Anthropologist (n.s.) 58:221–248. 1968 “Value Systems,” in The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (David Sills, ed.), vol. 16, 287–91. Anderson, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Notes

[1] In Entangled Objects, Nicholas Thomas even has a section called “value: a surplus of theories” (1991:30), though in it, he really cites only three. [2] Or at least, the more this is the case, the more chance there is that its predictions are accurate. [3] I might note in passing that this simplified presentation might seem like something of a straw man; most accomplished economists are considerably more subtle. But in fact, anyone who has taken introductory courses in, say, rational choice theory is likely to have found themselves face to face with precisely these sorts of arguments. [4] Similarly, power is often defined as the ability to influence other people’s actions, which is again, not very similar to private ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value : The False Coin of Our Own Dreams

By David Graeber

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Author : David Graeber

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