text:
Principal Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams
Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams
This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory that have become critical at a time of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, who represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical process, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making that far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.
Categories: Biology\\Anthropology
Editora: Palgrave
mauss283
maori183
anthropological theory173
toward an anthropological167
iroquois153
kwakiutl146
wampum143
anthropology124
marx105
anthropologists68
hau68
beads64
potlatch64
heirlooms63
creativity62
reciprocity61
strathern60
kula60
marcel mauss55
hasina55
kayapo52
tapu49
kinship43
marxist42
iroquoian42
commodities42
generic41
essay41
mauss revisited40
marcel mauss revisited40
ody40
weiner37
malagasy37
boas36
treasures36
symbolic36
sphere36
ceremonial36
madagascar36
valuables35
passim35
coppers34
appropriation34
adornment34
belts33
sahlins31
merina31
fetishism31
heirloom31
insofar31
histories31
economies30
obligation30
Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature
Mary Bryden
Design of Structural Masonry
W.M.C. McKenzie
Toward An Anthropological
Theory of Value z
The False Coin of Our Own Dreams
TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY OF VALUE
Copyright © David Graeber, 2001. All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
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Graeber, David
Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own
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1. Values. 2. Anthropology—Philosophy. 3. Social values.
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A Few Words by Way of Introduction
Three Ways of Talking about Value
Current Directions in Exchange Theory
Value as the Importance of Actions
Action and Reflection, or Notes
toward a Theory of Wealth and Power
Wampum and Social Creativity among the Iroquois
Marcel Mauss Revisited
The False Coin of our own Dreams,
or the Problem of the Fetish, IIIB
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)
t feels a little silly writing acknowledgements for a book like this, an intellectual project at least fifteen years in the making. The logical thing
would perhaps be to thank everyone I've ever known, because you never
know where your ideas really came from. There are two names though that
I really ought to mention: my oldest friend, Stuart Rockefeller, an intellectual companion since high school, and Nhu Thi Le, whose mind for the last
six has touched everything mine has. Any idea you read in here might very
well actually have been invented by one of them; in many cases, perhaps
most, they are really joint projects that all three of us, and probably others,
are equally responsible for. (Except for the parts that are just dumb: I had
nothing to do with those!)
Aside from that I must acknowledge the professors and staff and students
of the anthropology department of the University of Chicago when I was
there, who produced an environment that actually encouraged people to
think for themselves and experiment with ideas, something surprisingly rare
in academia; my fellow workers at Crerar; my colleagues and students at
Haverford, NYU, and Yale; and my comrades in the direct action movement
here and abroad who give me hope for humanity, and with whom I have
spent so many pleasant hours tearing down walls. Oh, and my parents, who
made me who I am.
And my brother Eric. And Kristi Long, the best editor who ever lived,
and everyone at Palgrave (except whoever it was who made me switch
around the title).
A Few Words by Way
of Introduction
hen 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 social science more generally. I wanted to see if I could map out at least the outlines
of such a theory and also, to relate them to certain ideas about wealth and
power and the nature of money that I had first set out in an essay several
years before (Graeber 1996).
In the course of writing, however, something started happening. The
more I wrote, the more I was forced to confront the fact that my own assumptions and priorities were in many ways diametrically opposed to much
of what now stands as common wisdom in the social sciences—or at least
those disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, etc.) that
see themselves as most politically engaged. As I found myself increasingly
obliged to clarify points of difference, I realized the book was turning into
something much more ambitious: in some ways, it was acquiring the qualities of political tract, or at least, an extended reflection on the relation between disciplines like anthropology and politics.
The standard history—the sort of thing a journalist would take as self-evident fact—is that the last decades of the twentieth century were a time when
the American left largely retreated to universities and graduate departments,
spinning out increasingly arcane radical meta-theory, deconstructing everything in sight, as all around them, the rest of the world became increasingly
conservative. As a broad caricature, I suppose this is not entirely inaccurate.
But recent events suggest there might be very different ways to tell this story.
The last several years have seen the rapid growth of new social movements—
particularly, movements against neoliberalism (in the United States referred
to as "free market" ideologies)—in just about every corner of the world, including, somewhat belatedly, the United States itself. Yet the so-called academic left in America has played almost no role in this; in fact, many of its
presumed members seem only vaguely aware that such movements exist. Perhaps this is not all that surprising: neoliberalism itself remains a subject on
which modern critical meta-theory has never had very much to say.
But why is that? It seems to me that in a surprising variety of ways, this
critical theory actually anticipated neoliberal arguments. Take, for example,
the concept of "postmodernism." Now, admittedly this is a somewhat tricky
one because there were never many scholars willing to actually call themselves "postmodernists." But in a way, this was precisely what made the term
so powerful: "postmodernism" was not something anyone was proposing but
a fait accompli that everyone simply had to accept. From the '80s on, it has
become common to be presented with a series of arguments that might be
summarized, in caricature form, as something like this:
1. We now live in a Postmodern Age. The world has changed; no one is
responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes;
neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.
2. One result of our postmodern condition is that schemes to change
the world or human society through collective political action are no
longer viable. Everything is broken up and fragmented; anyway, such
schemes will inevitably either prove impossible, or produce totalitarian nightmares.
3. While this might seem to leave little room for human agency in history, one need not despair completely. Legitimate political action can
take place, provided it is on a personal level: through the fashioning
of subversive identities, forms of creative consumption, and the like.
Such action is itself political and potentially liberatory.
This is, as I say, a caricature: the actual arguments made in any particular
theoretical tract of the time were usually infinitely more complex. Still, they
almost invariably did share some version of these three themes. Compare
them, then, to the arguments that began to be promulgated in the '90s, in
the popular media, about a phenomena referred to as "globalization":
1. We now live in the age of the Global Market. The world has changed;
no one is responsible, it simply happened as the result of inexorable
processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply
adopt ourselves to new conditions.
2. One result is that schemes aiming to change society through collective political action are no longer viable. Dreams of revolution have
been proven impossible or, worse, bound to produce totalitarian
nightmares; even any idea of changing society through electoral politics must now be abandoned in the name of "competitiveness."
3. If this might seem to leave little room for democracy, one need not
despair: market behavior, and particularly individual consumption
decisions, are democracy; indeed, they are all the democracy we'll ever
really need.
There is, of course, one enormous difference between the two arguments.
The central claim of those who celebrated postmodernism is that we have
entered a world in which all totalizing systems—science, humanity, nation,
truth, and so forth—have all been shattered; in which there are no longer
any grand mechanisms for stitching together a world now broken into incommensurable fragments. One can no longer even imagine that there could
be a single standard of value by which to measure things. The neoliberals on
the other hand are singing the praises of a global market that is, in fact, the
single greatest and most monolithic system of measurement ever created, a
totalizing system that would subordinate everything—every object, every
piece of land, every human capacity or relationship—on the planet to a
single standard of value.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that what those who celebrated postmodernism were describing was in large part simply the effects of this universal market system, which, like any totalizing system of value, tends to
throw all others into doubt and disarray. The remarkable thing is that they
failed to notice this fact. How? And why has it been so difficult for them to
come up with a way to criticize a system that would seem to fly directly in
the face of everything they are calling for?
Probably the reason is because those who used terms like "postmodernism" did not, in fact, see themselves as calling for anything. They were
not writing manifestos for a postmodernist movement. They thought they
were simply describing something that was already taking place, inexorably,
through the movement of one or another sort of structural force. And in this
their attitude was, again, merely an exaggerated version of a much more
common one. This, I think, is the best explanation for the current paralysis.
To put it bluntly: now that it has become obvious that "structural forces"
alone are not likely to themselves produce something we particularly like, we
are left with the prospect of coming up with some actual alternatives. Even
aside from the always-daunting fact that this would mean deciding who
"we" are, it would require a massive change of theoretical habits. It would
mean accepting that people, as part of social movements of one kind or another, might be capable of affecting the course of history in a significant way.
That alternatives can indeed be created, and not just come about. That
would in turn mean having to give some serious thought to what role intellectuals can legitimately play in this process, and how they might do so without fomenting the kind of stupid sectarian dogmatism we've so often ended
up fomenting in the past. My own experience over the last year working
with the Direct Action Network suggests that on a lot of these questions, the
activists are way ahead of us.
Obviously, this book is not itself an attempt to answer these questions. It
is, as I say, a book that I wrote largely in order to work out some problems
in anthropological theories of value. Still, it strikes me that if one is looking
for alternatives to what might be called the philosophy of neoliberalism, its
most basic assumptions about the human condition, then a theory of value
would not be a bad place to start. If we are not, in fact, calculating individuals trying to accumulate the maximum possible quantities of power, pleasure, and material wealth, then what, precisely, are we? The first three
chapters of the book are an effort to survey how social theorists have dealt
with such questions in the past, the dead ends that they have tended to run
into, and also, how many of most apparently innovative recent theorists have
tended to recycle these same old dilemmas—without, for the most part, realizing they were doing so. It ends with a suggestion for one possible way
out, starting from what I call the "Heracleitian tradition," one that sees what
seem to us to be fixed objects as patterns of motion, and what seem to be
fixed 'social structures' as patternings of action. Value, I'll suggest, can best
be seen in this light as the way in which actions become meaningful to the
actor by being incorporated in some larger, social totality—even if in many
cases the totality in question exists primarily in the actor's imagination. This
argument turns on a rather idiosyncratic reading of the ideas of Karl Marx.
The second half of the book focuses more on two themes, exchange, and
social creativity. It begins with an essay originally entitled "Beads and
Money: Notes Toward a Theory of Wealth and Power" (Graeber 1996),
which asks why it is that objects chosen as currencies (beads, shells, gold, silver, etc.,) so often consisted of things that were otherwise used only as objects of adornment; it goes on to explore several detailed ethnographic case
studies, ranging from a chapter on wampum in the seventeenth century
American northeast, to a return to the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss'
famous examples of Trobriand, Maori, and Kwakiutl "gift economies," and
finally, some material drawn from my own work on magic and royal ritual
in the Merina kingdom in Madagascar. Over the course of it I try to tease
out and further develop some of Mauss' less well-known ideas, and in par-
ticular his belief in the role anthropology could play in the development of
revolutionary theory. In many ways, Mauss serves as a perfect complement
to Marx: while one dedicated himself to a thorough critique of capitalism,
the other was ultimately interested in bringing the fruits of comparative
ethnography—the only discipline capable of addressing the full range of
human possibilities—to bear on envisioning possible alternatives to it. Each
approach has its dangers if taken too far. If one takes up the Maussian project with too much uncritical enthusiasm, one ends up with a naive relativism
utterly blind to power. But if one is too rigorous and single-minded about
one's critical project, one can easily slip into a view of social reality so cynical, of a world so utterly creased with power and domination, that it becomes impossible to imagine how anything could really change—and this is,
I argue, precisely what began to happen when critical theory was pushed too
far in the '70s and '80s, and opened the way for the neoliberal backlash to
be found in so many strains of postmodernism.
I did not write this book just for anthropologists. I like to think that it
might be of some interest to social theorists in general, and in particular
those currently struggling, like me, with how to relate theory to a sense of
political engagement. In the final analysis, it is a plea, as the Zapatistas like
to say, "for humanity, and against neoliberalism": an attempt at least to begin
to imagine what a humanistic social science—one that does not, in so doing,
abandon everything that is genuinely valuable in the notion of "science"—
might actually be like.
Chapter 1 z
f 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 "value" is drawing on. Sometimes, one
suspects it is this very ambiguity that makes the term so attractive.
What I'd like to do in this chapter is offer some suggestions as to how this
situation came about. I think it has something to do with the fact that anthropology has been caught in a kind of theoretical limbo. The great theoretical dilemmas of twenty years ago or so have never really been resolved;
it's more like they were shrugged off. There is a general feeling that a theory
of value would have been just the thing to resolve most of those dilemmas,
but such a theory never really materialized; hence, perhaps, the habit of so
many scholars acting as if one actually did exist.
It will become easier to see why a theory of value should have seemed to
hold such promise if one looks at the way the word "value" has been used in
social theory in the past. There are, one might say, three large streams of
thought that converge in the present term. These are:
1. "values" in the sociological sense: conceptions of what is ultimately
good, proper, or desirable in human life
2. "value" in the economic sense: the degree to which objects are desired,
particularly, as measured by how much others are willing to give up
to get them
3. "value" in the linguistic sense, which goes back to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), and might be most simply
glossed as "meaningful difference"
When anthropologists nowadays speak of "value"—particularly, when they
refer to "value" in the singular when one writing twenty years ago would have
spoken of "values" in the plural—they are at the very least implying that the
fact that all these things should be called by the same word is no coincidence.
That ultimately, these are all refractions of the same thing. But if one reflects
on it at all, this is a very challenging notion. It would mean, for instance, that
when we talk about the "meaning" of a word, and when we talk about the
"meaning of life," we are not talking about utterly different things. And that
both have something in common with the sale-price of a refrigerator. Now,
putting things this way raises obvious objections. A skeptic might reply: it
may well be that all these concepts do have something in common, but if so,
that "something" would have to be so utterly abstract and vague that pointing it out is simply meaningless. In which case the ambiguity really is the
point. But I don't think this is so. In fact, if one looks back over the history
of anthropological thought on each of the three sorts of value mentioned
above one finds that in almost every case, scholars trying to come up with a
coherent theory of any one of them have ended up falling into terrible problems for lack of sufficient consideration of the other ones.
Let me give a brief sketch of these histories, one at a time:
I: Clyde Kluckhohn's value project
The theoretical analysis of "values" or "systems of values" is largely confined
to philosophy (where it is called "axiology") and sociology (where it is what
one is free from when one is "value-free.") It is not as if anthropologists
haven't always used the term. One can pick up a work of anthropology from
almost any period and, if one flips through long enough, be almost certain
to find at least one or two casual references to "values." But anthropologists
rarely made much of an effort to define it, let alone to make the analysis of
values a part of anthropological theory. The one great exception was during
the late 1940s and early '50s, when Clyde Kluckhohn and a team of allied
scholars at Harvard embarked on a major effort to place the issue of values
at the center of anthropology. Kluckhohn's project, in fact, was to redefine
anthropology itself as the comparative study of values.
Nowadays, the project is mainly remembered because it managed to find
its way into Talcott Parson's General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils
1951), meant as a kind of entente cordiale between sociology, anthropology,
and psychology, which divided up the study of human behavior between
them. Psychologists were to investigate the structure of the individual personality, sociologists studied social relations, and anthropologists were to deal
with the way both were mediated by culture, which comes down largely to
how values become esconced in symbols and meanings. Kluckhohn's main
anthropological work had been among the Navaho, but he conceived the notion of doing a comparative study of values that focused on the county of
Rimrock, New Mexico (1951b, 1956; Vogt and Albert 1966), which was divided between five different communities: Navaho, Zuñi, Mormon, Texan,
and Mexican-American. Its existence, Kluckhohn thought, provided as close
as one could get in anthropology to a controlled experiment: a chance to see
how five groups of people with profoundly different systems of value adapted
to the same environment. He sent off five students, one to study each (and
in fact quite a number of the next generation of American anthropologists
were involved in the Rimrock study at one time or another), while he remained behind at Harvard, leading a seminar on values and working out a
succession of working papers that aimed to define the terms of analysis.
So what, precisely, are values? Kluckhohn kept refining his definitions.
The central assumption though was that values are "conceptions of the desirable"—conceptions which play some sort of role in influencing the
choices people make between different possible courses of action
(1951a:395). The key term here is "desirable." The desirable refers not simply to what people actually want—in practice, people want all sorts of
things. Values are ideas about what they ought to want. They are the criteria
by which people judge which desires they consider legitimate and worthwhile and which they do not. Values, then, are ideas if not necessarily about
the meaning of life, then at least about what one could justifiably want from
it. The problem though comes with the second half of the definition: Kluckhohn also insisted that these were not just abstract philosophies of life but
ideas that had direct effects on people's actual behavior. The problem was to
determine how.
Of course when one speaks of values in the traditional sense, this is not
so difficult. By this I mean, in the sense in which one might say that the
Navaho community in Rimrock places a high value on something it calls
"harmony," or the Texan, on something it calls "success." Normally "value
analysis," such as it is, consists of identifying such terms and interpreting
them, figuring out precisely what "harmony" or "success" means to the people in question, and placing these definitions in a larger cultural context.
The problem though is that such terms tend to be highly idiosyncratic.
Kluckhohn was interested in the systematic comparison of values.
In order to compare such concepts, Kluckhohn and his disciples ended up
having to create a second, less abstract level of what he called "value orientations." These were "assumptions about the ends and purposes of human
existence," the nature of knowledge, "what human beings have a right to expect from each other and the gods, about what constitutes fulfillment and
frustration" (Kluckhohn 1949:358–59). In other words, value orientations
mixed ideas of the desirable with assumptions about the nature of the world
in which one had to act. The next step was to establish a basic list of existential questions, that presumably every culture had to answer in some way: are
human beings good or evil? Should their relations with nature be based on
harmony, mastery, or subjugation? Should one's ultimate loyalties be to oneself, to a larger group, or to other individuals? Kluckhohn did come up with
such a list; but he and his students found it very difficult to move from this
super-refined level to the more mundane details of why people prefer to grow
potatoes rather than rice or prefer to marry their cross-cousins—the sort of
everyday matters with which anthropologists normally concern themselves.
At this point the story takes on something of the color of tragedy. Almost
everyone involved felt that the Rimrock study was a failure; in writing up
their conclusions, the fieldworkers found it almost impossible to develop
common terms. Even while Kluckhohn's disciples—notably philosopher
Edith Albert—were continuing to pour out essays gushing with scientific
confidence in the late '50s and early '60s, Kluckhohn himself seems to have
spent the last years of his life plagued by a sense of frustration, an inability
to find the breakthrough that would make a real, systematic comparative
study of values possible—or anyway, to relate it properly to action (Albert
1956, 1968, Kluckhohn 1951a, 1961, F. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck 1961).
It was all the more frustrating because Kluckhohn saw his project in many
ways a last-ditch effort to rescue American anthropology from what almost
everyone perceived as the theoretical doldrums. Where British anthropologists had always conceived their discipline as a branch of sociology, the
North American school founded by Franz Boas had drawn on German culture theory to compare societies not primarily as ways of organizing relations
between people but equally, as structures of thought and feeling. The assumption was always that there was, at the core of a culture, certain key patterns or symbols or themes that held everything together and that couldn't
be reduced to pure individual psychology; the problem, to define precisely
what this was and how one could get at it. One is left with a strange, rather
contradictory picture, since this was also the time when Boasian anthropology was at the height of its popular influence and academic authority, flush
with Cold War money, at a time when their books were often read by ordinary Americans, but at the same time, was burdened with a growing feeling
of intellectual bankruptcy. Kluckhohn's effort to reframe anthropology as
the study of values could be seen as a last-ditch effort to salvage the Boasian
project; it is nowadays seen as yet another dead end. The consensus of those
who even bother to talk about the episode (Edmonson 1973, Dumont
1982), though, is that there was nothing inherently wrong with the project
itself: rather, it failed for the lack of an adequate theory of structure. Kluckhohn wanted to compare systems of ideas, but he had no theoretical model
of how ideas fitted together as systems. In his last few years he became increasingly interested in the idea of borrowing models from linguistics, but
the tools then available were simply not up to the challenge. His critics seem
to imply that if he or his project had lasted a few more years, until structuralist models burst on the scene in the late '60s, everything might have
been different.
Be this as it may, the project had no intellectual successors. This is not to
say, of course, that anthropologists no longer talk about "values." Some regional subdisciplines are veritably obsessed with particular values (especially
those dealing with regions without too much elaborate social structure, such
as clans or lineage systems): most notoriously the anthropology of the
Mediterranean, which has been for most of its history focused on "honor."
But there has been next to nothing on "values" in general. This is true even
of scholars working in Kluckhohn's own intellectual tradition. Some of the
most influential American cultural theorists of the '60s and '70s—I am
thinking here especially of Clifford Geertz and David Schneider—were in
many ways continuing in it, but they moved in very different directions.
In a way this is rather too bad. For all its sterility in practice, there is
something appealing about Kluckhohn's key idea: that what makes cultures
different is not simply what they believe the world to like, but what they feel
one can justifiably demand from it. That anthropology, in other words,
should be the comparative study of practical philosophies of life. Actually
the closest parallel to it in the social sciences was probably Max Weber's
comparative study of world religions, which also was concerned with delineating a limited number of possible ways for thinking about the meaning of
human existence and then trying to understand the implications for social
action of each. It's possible that his work may even be due for something of
a revival: there have been some recent efforts, for example by Charles Nuckolls (1999), to integrate such value analysis with psychological approaches in
anthropology. But for present purposes, the important thing is that the first
great effort to come up with an anthropological theory of values ran most
definitively aground; and that anthropological concerns with such issues
started developing, in the '60s, in two opposite directions: one that looked
to economics, the other, to linguistics.
II: the maximizing individual
Practically from the beginnings of modern anthropology, there have been
efforts to apply the tools of microeconomics to the study of non-Western
societies. There are several reasons it seemed an obvious thing to do. First,
because (apart from linguistics) economics has always been the social science that could make the most plausible claim that what it was doing was
anything like a natural science; it has long had the additional advantage of
being seen as the very model of "hard" science by the sort of people who
distribute grants (people who themselves usually have some economic
training). It also has the advantage of joining an extremely simple model of
human nature with extremely complicated mathematical formulae that
non-specialists can rarely understand, much less criticize. Its premises are
straightforward enough. Society is made up of individuals. Any individual
is assumed to have a fairly clear idea what he or she wants out of life, and
to be trying to get as much of it as possible for the least amount of sacrifice
and effort. (This is called the "mini/max" approach. People want to minimize their output and maximize their yields.) What we call "society"—at
least, if one controls for a little cultural "interference"—is simply the outcome of all this self-interested activity.
Bronislaw Malinowski was already complaining about this sort of thing
in 1922, in what is arguably the first book-length work of economic anthropology: Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Such a theory would do nothing, he said, to explain economic behavior in the Trobriand Islands:
Another notion which must be exploded, once and for ever, is that of the
Primitive Economic Man of some current economic textbooks . . . prompted
in all his actions by a rationalistic conception of self-interest, and achieving
his aims directly and with the minimum of effort. Even one well established
instance should show how preposterous is this assumption. The primitive
Trobriander furnishes us with such an instance, contradicting this fallacious
theory. In the first place, as we have seen, work is not carried out on the principle of the least effort. On the contrary, much time and energy is spent on
wholly unnecessary effort, that is, from a utilitarian point of view. (Malinowski 1922:60)
Malinowski takes up the example of the attitude Trobriand men have toward
their yam gardens: the endless energies they pour into vying to make their
garden the most tidy and attractive (effort that is in strictly "economic"
terms entirely useless). The whole point of gardening was to show off how
much effort a man could sink into it; as a result, half the yields ended up
rotting for lack of anyone to eat them. What's more, those that were eaten
were not eaten by the gardener himself:
The most important point about this is, however, that all, or almost all the
fruits of his work, and certainly any surplus which he can achieve by extra effort, goes not to the man himself, but to his relatives-in-law. Without enter-
ing into details . . . it may be said that about three quarters of a man's crops
go partly as tribute to the chief, partly as his due to his sister's (or mother's)
husband and family (Malinowski 1922:60–61).
In other words, rather than "economizing" their efforts, Trobriand men are
actively trying to perform unnecessary labor; then they give the products
away to their sister's families. There's not even any direct reciprocity involved, since the man's own family is fed not by his sister's family but the
brothers of his own wife.
Such examples could be multiplied endlessly, and, in the early days of anthropology, they were. It didn't make much difference. Every decade or so
has seen at least one new attempt to put the maximizing individual back into
anthropological theory, even if economic theory itself usually ends up having to bend itself into ribbons in order to do so.
In fact, the effort to reconcile the two disciplines is in many ways inherently contradictory. This is because economics and anthropology were
created with almost entirely opposite purposes in mind. Economics is all
about prediction. It came into existence and continues to be maintained
with all sorts of lavish funding, because people with money want to know
what other people with money are likely to do. As a result, it is also a discipline that, more than any other, tends to participate in the world it describes. That is to say, economic science is mainly concerned with the
behavior of people who have some familiarity with economics—either ones
who have studied it or at the very least are acting within institutions that
have been entirely shaped by it. Economics, as a discipline, has almost always played a role in defining the situations it describes.2 Nor do economists have a problem with this; they seem to feel it is quite as it should be.
Anthropology was from the beginning entirely different. It has always been
most interested in the action of those people who are least influenced by the
practical or theoretical world in which the analyst moves and operates. This
was especially true in the days when anthropologists saw themselves as
studying savages; but to this day anthropologists have remained most interested in the people whose understanding of the world, and whose interests and ambitions, are most different than their own. As a result, it is
generally carried out completely without a thought to furthering those interests and ambitions. When Malinowski was trying to figure out what Trobriand gardeners were trying to accomplish in acting as they did, it almost
certainly never even occurred to him that whatever that was, reading his
book might make them better able to accomplish it. In fact, when an anthropologist discovers that anyone is using anthropological texts in this
way—say, as a guide for how to perform their own rituals—they are usually quite disturbed.
Economics, then, is about predicting individual behavior; anthropology,
about understanding collective differences.
As a result, efforts to bring maximizing models into anthropology always
end up stumbling into the same sort of incredibly complicated dead ends.
The classic case studies of economic anthropology, for instance—Franz
Boas' reports on the Kwakiutl potlatch (1897, etc.) or Malinowski's on Trobriand kula exchange (1922)—concerned systems of exchange that seemed
to work on principles utterly different from the observers' own: ones in
which the most important figures seemed to be not so much trying to accumulate wealth as vying to see who could give the most away. In 1925, Marcel Mauss coined the phrase "gift economies" to describe them.
Actually, the existence of gifts—even in Western societies—has always
been something of a problem for economists. Trying to account for them always leads to some variation of the same, rather silly, circular arguments.
Q: If people only act to maximize their gains in some way or another, then
how do you explain people who give things away for nothing?
A: They are trying to maximize their social standing, or the honor, or prestige that accrues to them by doing so.
Q: Then what about people who give anonymous gifts?
A: Well, they're trying to maximize the sense of self-worth, or the good
feeling they get from doing it.
And so on. If you are sufficiently determined, you can always identify
something that people are trying to maximize. But if all maximizing models
are really arguing is that "people will always seek to maximize something,"
then they obviously can't predict anything, which means employing them
can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add
to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption,
most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for
oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It's called "cynicism." Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it "science."3
Still, all these dead ends did produce one interesting side effect. In order
to carry out such an economic analysis, one almost always ends up having to
map out a series of "values" of something like the traditional sociological
sense—power, prestige, moral purity, etc.,—and to define them as being on
some level fundamentally similar to economic ones. This means that economic anthropologists do have to talk about values. But it also means they
have to talk about them in a rather peculiar way. When one says that a person is choosing between having more money, more possessions, or more pres-
tige, what one is really doing is taking an abstraction ("prestige") and reifying
it, treating it as an object not fundamentally different in kind from jars of
spaghetti sauce or ingots of pig iron. This is a peculiar operation, because in
fact prestige is not an object that one can dispose of as one will, or even, really,
consume; it is rather an attitude that exists in the minds of other people.4 It
can exist only within a web of social relations. Of course, one might argue
that property is a social relation as well, reified in exactly the same way: when
one buys a car one is not really purchasing the right to use it so much as the
right to prevent others from using it—or, to be even more precise, one is purchasing their recognition that one has a right to do so. But since it is so diffuse a social relation—a contract, in effect, between the owner and everyone
else in the entire world—it is easy to think of it as a thing. In other words,
the way economists talk about "goods and services" already involves reducing
what are really social relations to objects; an economistic5 approach to values
extends the same process even further, to just about everything.
But on what basis? In reality, the only thing spaghetti sauce and prestige
have in common is the fact that some people want them. What economic
theory ultimately tries to do is to explain all human behavior—all human
behavior it considers worth explaining, anyway—on the basis of a certain
notion of desire, which then in turn is premised on a certain notion of pleasure. People try to obtain things because those things will make them happy
or gratify them in some way (or at least because they think they will).
Chocolate cheesecake promises pleasure, but so does the knowledge that
others do not consider you obese; rational actors regularly weigh one against
the other. It is this promise of pleasure economists call "value."
In the end, most economic theory relies on trying to make anything that
smacks of "society" disappear. But even if one does manage to reduce every
social relation to thing, so that one is left with the empiricist's dream, a word
consisting of nothing but individuals and objects, one is still left to puzzle
over why individuals feel some objects will afford them more pleasure than
others. There is only so far one can go by appealing to physiological needs.6
In the end, faced with explaining why in some parts of the world most people are indifferent to the pleasures of chocolate cheesecake but excited by
those of salted prune drinks, or why in others obesity is considered attractive, economists, however begrudgingly, usually admit they do have to bring
some notion like society or culture back in.
It was just these kind of issues that lay behind the Formalist-Substantivist
debate that preoccupied economic anthropology in the 1960s (Polanyi 1957,
1959, 1968; Dalton 1961, Burling 1962, Cook 1966, etc.). Nowadays, most
consider this debate to have been rather pointless—and indeed, the theoretical basis of both positions has been largely discredited—but the basic issues
have never, really, been resolved. Let me provide a rapid summary.
The terms "formalism" and "substantivism" were actually both invented
by Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi. Polanyi's most famous work, The
Great Transformation, was an account of the historical origins, in eighteenth
and nineteenth century England, of what we now refer to as "the market."
In this century, the market has come to be seen as practically a natural phenomenon—a direct emanation of what Adam Smith once called "man's natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another."
Actually, this attitude follows logically from the same (cynical) theory of
human nature that lies behind economic theory. The basic reasoning—
rarely explicitly stated—runs something like this. Human beings are driven
by desires; these desires are unlimited. Human beings are also rational, insofar as they will always tend to calculate the most efficient way of getting what
they want. Hence, if they are left to their own devices, something like a "free
market" will inevitably develop. Of course, for 99% of human history, none
ever did, but that's just because of the interference of one or another state or
feudal elite. Feudal relations, which are based on force, are basically inimical
to market relations, which are based on freedom; therefore, once feudalism
began to dissolve, the market inevitably emerged to take its place.7
The beauty of Polanyi's book is that it demonstrates just how completely
wrong that common wisdom is. In fact, the state and its coercive powers
had everything to do with the creation of what we now know as "the market"—based as it is on institutions such as private property, national currencies, legal contracts, credit markets. All had to be created and
maintained by government policy. The market was a creation of government and has always remained so. If one really reflects on the assumptions
economists make about human behavior, it only makes sense that it should
be so: the principle of maximization after all assumes that people will normally try to extract as much as possible from whoever they are dealing with,
taking no consideration whatever of that other person's interests—but at
the same time that they will never under any circumstances resort to any of
the most obvious ways of extracting wealth from those towards whose fate
one is indifferent, such as taking it by force. "Market behavior" would be
impossible without police.
Polanyi goes on to describe how, almost as soon as these institutions were
created, men like Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo appeared, all drawing analogies from nature to argue that these new forms of behavior followed inevitable, universal laws. It is the study of these laws that Polanyi refers to as
economic "formalism." Polanyi is perfectly willing to admit that formal
methods are appropriate for understanding how people will behave within
such a market. But in most societies, such institutions did not exist; one simply cannot talk about an "economy" at all, in the sense of an autonomous
sphere of behavior that operates according to its own internal logic. Rather,
one has to take what he calls a "substantive" approach and examine the actual process through which the society provides itself with food, shelter, and
other material goods, bearing in mind that this process is entirely embedded
in society and not a sphere of activity that can be distinguished from, say,
politics, kinship, or religion.
The Substantivist school of economic anthropology (its chief exponent
was Polanyi's student, George Dalton) was thus basically empirical. One
takes a given society, looks at how things are distributed, and tries to understand the principles. The main result was a list of new forms of exchange and
distribution, all of which did not seem to operate on principles of economic
maximization, to add to the gift economies with which anthropologists were
already familiar. These included the notion of redistributive economies, the
phenomena of ports of trade (neutral enclaves in which merchants of different countries could do business according to pre-established exchange rates:
[Polanyi, Arensberg and Pearson 1957]), the notion of spheres of exchange
(Firth 1959, Bohannon 1955, 1959; Bohannon and Bohannon 1968), and
Marshall Sahlins' spheres of sociability (Sahlins 1972).
All this was a definite contribution to human knowledge. The problem
was the overall theoretical armature. It is one thing to say "societies" have different ways of distributing goods. It is another to explain what particular
members of the society in question think they're doing when they give gifts,
or demand bridewealth, or exchange saffron for ivory in a port of trade. This
is precisely what their opponents were quick to point out. Because almost immediately, the Substantivist challenge was met by a counter-offensive by selfproclaimed Formalists (for example, Burling 1962, Cook 1966). Formalists
claimed that Polanyi had misunderstood what economics was actually about.
It did not depend on the presence or absence of something called "the economy." Economics was concerned with a certain type of human behavior
called "economizing." People economize when they make choices between
different uses for scarce resources in an attempt to minimize their outputs and
maximize rewards. (Yes, they said, this did involve some a priori assumptions
about human nature, but everyone has to work from some assumptions: the
ultimate test is whether the resulting theories produce results.) The point of
social science is not comparing different forms of social system but understanding what motivates human beings to act the way they do.
Here they did have a point. For the most part, Substantivists didn't try to
explain anything; they just created taxonomies. Insofar as they did invoke a
larger theory, it was generally some variant on Durkheimian functionalism.
Where economists saw the shape of society largely as the outcome of individual decisions, Functionalists represented society as an active force in its
own right—even, as something close to a conscious, purposive agent,
though its only purpose seems to be a sort of animalistic self-preservation.
For a Durkheimian, economic institutions can be seen as a means of social
integration—one of the ways society creates a network of moral ties between
what would otherwise be a chaotic mass of individuals—or, if not that, then
at least the means by which "society" allocates resources. The obvious question is how "society" motivates people to do this. Without some theory of
motivation, one is left with a picture of automatons mindlessly following
whatever rules society lays down for them, which at the very least makes it
difficult to understand how society could ever change.
Of course, the Formalists, as I have already noted, could not do much
better. They were working with tools originally designed to predict individual behavior in a market setting; by twisting them around, they could sometimes predict the behavior of individuals in other cultures but not the values
that motivated them, or, for that matter, the shape of society as a whole. At
their most ambitious, a Formalist might try to demonstrate how, if one starts
with a collection of people living in, say, Baluchistan, and a scattershot collection of "values" (food, sex, prestige, not being tortured in hell for all eternity, etc.,) one could then show how the existing shape of Baluchi society
emerged as the result of the strategies people adopted to secure them. This
is pretty much what Frederick Barth proposed anthropologists should do,
calling his approach Transactionalism (1966; cf. Kapferer 1976). Transactionalism was probably the most ambitious attempt to apply the principles
of formal economics to anthropology, and it caused something of a stir in
the late 1960s. The obvious question though, was—even if it was possible to
create a model that would thus generate the entire Baluchi lineage system or
the structure of a West African kingdom from the right collection of values—what would be the point? What would one then know that one had
not known before one started? The result would not even be an historical reconstruction, but a purely logical model that need have nothing to do with
the actual historical origins of the societies in question.
Most anthropologists nowadays would wonder what the point is in even
going into all this; the Substantivist-Formalist debate is considered definitively passé. But there is a point. It seems to me that these basic issues have
never been resolved. Those who start by looking at society as a whole are left,
like the Substantivists, trying to explain how people are motivated to reproduce society; those who start by looking at individual desires end up, like the
Formalists, unable to explain why people chose to maximize some things
and not others (or otherwise to account for qestions of meaning). In fact,
though scholars have drifted off to other concerns, the same problems keep
re-emerging. As we shall see, a lot of what passes for the newest and most refreshing poststructural theory nowadays is largely warmed-over Transactionalism, minus the fancy economic formulae, with some even fancier linguistic
formulae pasted on instead.
III: Structuralism and linguistic value
Linguists have long been in the habit of speaking of the meaning of a word
as its "value." From quite early in the history of anthropology, there have
been efforts connect this usage to other sorts of value. One of the most interesting can be found in Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer (1940:135–38): a
discussion of the "value" of the word cieng, or "home." For a Nuer, EvansPritchard notes, the "value" of this word varies with context; a speaker can
use it to refer to one's house, one's village, one's territory, even (when
speaking to a foreigner) Nuerland as a whole. But it is more than a word;
the notion of "home," on any of these levels, also carries a certain emotional load. It implies a sense of loyalty, and that can translate into political action. Home is the place one defends against outsiders. So we are
talking about value in the sociological, "values" sense as well. "Values,"
Evans-Pritchard says, "are embodied in words through which they influence behavior" (135). Or, alternatively, the notion of "home," when it
serves to determine who one considers a friend, and who an enemy, in the
case of potential blood-feuds, "becomes a political value" as well. Note
here how "value" slips back and from "meaning" to something more like
"importance": one's home is essential to one's sense of oneself, one's allegiances, what one cares about most in life.
This was a fascinating start, but it never really went anywhere. When a
contemporary anthropologist speaks of the value of words, instead, they are
almost invariably referring back to the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure,
founder of modern, structural linguistics.
In his Course of General Linguistics (1916 [1966]), Saussure argued that
one could indeed speak of any word as having a value, but that this value
was essentially "negative." By this he meant that words take on meaning
only by contrast with other words in the same language. Take for example
the word "red." One cannot define its meaning, or "value," in any given
language, without knowing all the other color terms in the same language;
that is, without knowing all the colors that it is not. We might translate a
word in some African language as "red," but its meaning (or value) would
not be the same as the English "red" if, say, that other language does not
have a word for "brown." People in that language might then be in the
habit of referring to trees as red. The most precise definition of the English
"red," then, would be: the color that is not blue, not yellow, not brown, etc.
It follows then that in order to understand the "value" of any one color term
one must also know those of all the others in that language: the meaning of
a term is its place in the total system.8 Saussure's arguments of course had an
enormous impact on anthropology, and were the most important influence
on the rise of Structuralism—which took off from Saussure's suggestion that
all systems of meaning are organized on the same principles as a language,
so that technically, linguistics should be considered just one sub-field of an
(as yet non-existent) master discipline that he dubbed semiology, the science of meaning.9
As these examples suggest, Saussure's approach was more about vocabulary than grammar, more about nouns and adjectives than verbs. It was concerned with the objects of human action more than with the actions
themselves. Not surprising, then, that those who tried to follow Saussure's
lead and actually create this non-existent science tended to be most successful when exploring the meaning of physical objects (Barthes 1967; Baudrillard 1968; Sahlins 1976). Objects are defined by the meaningful
distinctions one can make between them. To understand the meaning
(value) of an object, then, one must understand its place in a larger system.
Just as the value of "red" is determined negatively, by all the other colors it
is not, if one were to analyze the meaning of, say, a turtleneck worn underneath one's jacket, one must examine the full set of other things one person
might be wearing: that is, wearing a turtleneck means that one is not wearing a shirt and tie beneath one's jacket, but that neither is one wearing a Tshirt, or nothing at all. Again, the meaning of one element makes sense only
in terms of its contrast with other possible elements within the same system.
This is a crucial consideration, because it means nothing can be analyzed in
isolation. In order to understand any one object, one must first identify
some kind of total system. This became the trademark of Structuralism: the
point of analysis was always to discover the hidden code, or symbolic system,
which (language-like) tied everything together.
Almost inevitably, though, the question became how to connect this sort
of value to value in either of the other two senses. In the early days, when
Structuralism was a new idea that seemed to offer resolutions for almost any
outstanding problem in social theory, it seemed self-evident that it should be
possible to do so. Hence Marshall Sahlins (former Substantivist, newfound
Structuralist) concluded his famous analysis of the Western clothing system
in Culture and Practical Reason (1976) by suggesting that one could only understand economic value, too, as the product of meaningful distinctions. To
understand why people want to buy things, he said, we have to understand
the place that thing has in a larger code of meaning.
Production for gain is the production of a symbolically significant difference;
in the case of the consumer market, it is the production of an appropriate social distinction by way of concrete contrast in the object. The point is implicit
in the apparent ambiguity of the term "value," which may refer to the price
of something or the meaning of something (as the differential concept of a
word), or in general to that which people hold "dear," either morally or mon-
etarily. Anthropologists, incidentally, are quite familiar with this ambiguity, if
not always entirely conscious of it, since many adopt it to illustrate the universality of rational economic behavior—even where market exchange is
specifically absent. The people are nevertheless economizing their resources:
it's just that they are interested in "values" other than the material—brotherhood for example (1976:213–14).
So, value in each sense is ultimately the same, just as the Formalists were
often forced to admit. Things are meaningful because they are important.
Things are important because they are meaningful.
Sahlins goes on to observe that Saussure himself made a similar analogy,
and suggests the passage in which he does so should be the basis for any future economic anthropology. To understand the value of a five-franc piece,
Saussure had written, one must be able to understand (a) something different with which it can be "exchanged," i.e., a loaf of bread, and (b) something
similar to which it can be "compared," i.e., a one franc piece, or other denominations of money.
In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea;
besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word.
Its value is therefore not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be "exchanged" for a given concept, i.e., that it has this or that signification: one
must also compare it to similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it (Saussure in Sahlins 1976: 214–215).
Perhaps the best one can say about this passage is that in the flush of enthusiasm that often follows the discovery of powerful new techniques for understanding reality—such as Structuralism was in the '60s and '70s—there
is good reason to put common sense on hold and see how far these techniques can take you. Still, this seems to be the point at which they reached
their limits. I mean, really: what does it mean to say that when you use a
word, you are "exchanging" it for a concept? In what way does this really resemble paying a shopkeeper for a loaf of bread? Most of all, what sort of
"comparison" are we really talking about here? After all, when one observes
that a loaf of bread costs five francs, and a steak-frites costs twenty, one is
not simply observing that the bread and steak-frites are different. One is
more likely to be emphasizing the fact that one is worth more. This is why
one can say an element of evaluation is involved. This is also precisely what
makes money unique—that it can indicate exactly how much more one is
worth than the other10—and precisely what Saussurean models cannot account for. The latter provides a way to understand how the world is divided
up, how objects are grouped into categories based on their differences with
other sorts of object—and Sahlins is of course right when he says that in a
consumer society, marketing is often a matter of creating symbolic distinctions between products that are otherwise virtually identical, like two different brands of corn flake or detergent—but this in itself does not explain why
people are willing to spend money on them. People do not buy things simply because they recognize them as being different than other things in some
way. Even if they did, this would do nothing to explain why they are willing
to spend more on certain things than others.
On Structuralism, the results are by now more or less in. The general
consensus is that its greatest weak point is evaluation. Many have pointed
out for example that Structuralist literary critics have often provided brilliant
analyses of the formal principles underlying a novel or a poem, discovering
all sorts of hidden patterns of meaning, but that they provided no insight at
all into whether the novel or poem in question was any good. Similarly,
Structuralist approaches in anthropology—as exemplified in the works of
Claude Levi-Strauss (1949, 1958, 1962, 1966)—tend to focus on how
members of different cultures understand the nature of the universe, and for
this they can be remarkably revealing; but the moment one tries to understand how, say, one thing is seen as better—preferable, more desirable, more
valuable—than another, problems immediately emerge. As a result, the great
dilemma of Structuralism has been how to move on from understanding
people's passive contemplation of the world (Geertz's "cerebral savage"), to
their active participation in it.11
Actually, no one has done more than Marshall Sahlins toward thinking a
way out of this box, often with spectacular results (Sahlins 1981, 1985,
1988, 1991). So perhaps I am not being especially fair to him in singling out
this one, very early, text. But it's also true that since, he has tended to abandon talk of value entirely. The only author who has made a consistent effort
to develop a theory of value along Structuralist lines is Louis Dumont (1966,
1971, 1982, 1986). His work thus deserves more detailed consideration.
Dumont is of course best known for having been almost single-handedly
responsible for popularizing the concept of "hierarchy" in the social sciences.
His notion of value, in fact, emerges directly out of his concept of hierarchy.
Classical Structuralism, according to Dumont, was developed as a technique meant to analyze the formal organization of ideas, not values. Carrying out a structural analysis means, first, identifying certain key conceptual
oppositions—raw/cooked, pure/impure, masculine/feminine, consanguinity/affinity, etc.—and then mapping out how these relate to one another,
say, within in a series of myths or rituals, or perhaps an entire social system.
What most Structuralists fail to realize, Dumont adds, is that these ideas are
also "values." This is because with any such pair of terms, one will be considered superior. This superior term always "encompasses" the inferior one.
The notion of encompassment is in turn the key to Dumont's notion of hi-
erarchy. One of his favorite illustrations is the opposition of right and left.
Anthropologists having long noted a tendency, which apparently occurs in
the vast majority of the world's cultures, for the right hand to be treated as
somehow morally superior to the left (Hertz 1907, Needham 1973). In offering a handshake, Dumont notes, one must normally extend one hand or
the other. The right hand put forward thus, in effect, represents one's person
as a whole—including the left hand that is not extended (Dumont 1983, see
Tcherkezoff 1983.) Hence, at least in that context, the right hand "encompasses" or "includes" the left, which is also its opposite. (This is what he calls
"encompassing the contrary.") This principle of hierarchy, he argues, applies
to all significant binary oppositions—in fact Dumont rejects the idea that
two such terms could ever be considered equal, or that there might be any
other principle of ranking, which as one might suspect has created a certain
amount of controversy, since it pretty obviously isn't true.12
So: meaning arises from making conceptual distinctions. Conceptual distinctions always contain an element of value, since they are ranked.13 Even
more important, the social contexts in which these distinctions are put into
practice are also ranked. Societies are divided into a series of domains or levels, and higher ones encompass lower ones—they are more universal and thus
have more value. In any society, for instance, domestic affairs, which relate to
the interests of a small group of people, will be considered subordinate to political affairs, which represent the concerns of a larger, more inclusive community; and likely as not that political sphere will itself be considered
subordinate to the religious or cosmological one, where priests or their equivalents represent the concerns of humanity as a whole before the powers that
control the universe.14 Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Dumont's theory is the way that the relations between different conceptual terms can be inverted on different levels. Since Dumont developed his model in an analysis
of the Indian caste system, this might make a good illustration. On the religious level, where Brahmans represent humanity as a whole before the gods,
the operative principle is purity. All castes are ranked according to their purity, and by this standard Brahmans outrank even kings. In the subordinate,
political sphere in which humans relate only to other humans, power is the
dominant value, and in that context, kings are superior to Brahmans, who
must do as they say. Nonetheless Brahmans are ultimately superior, because
the sphere in which they are superior is the most encompassing.15
None of this, of course, applies to contemporary Western society, but according to Dumont, the last three hundred years or so of European history
have been something of an aberration. Other societies ("one is almost
tempted to say, 'normal ones'") are "holistic," holistic societies are always hierarchical, ranked in a series of more and more inclusive domains. Our society is the great exception because for us, the supreme value is the
individual: each person being assumed to have a unique individuality, which
goes back to the notion of an immortal soul, which are by definition incomparable. Each individual is a value unto themselves, and none can be
treated as intrinsically superior to any other. In most of his more recent work
in fact (Dumont 1971, 1977, 1986) Dumont has been effectively expanding on Polanyi's arguments in The Great Transformation, arguing that it was
precisely this principle of individualism that made possible the emergence of
"the economy."
One could go further. In France, there is by now a Dumontian school of
anthropology, largely made up of his devoted students, and its approach to
traditional, non-Western societies (normal, hierarchical ones that is) is in
many aspects a new form of Substantivism. If anything, it is more radical
than the original in its uncompromising rejection of anything that smacks
of methodological individualism.16 The main difference is that it has tossed
out the functionalist assumption that economic institutions act to integrate
society, and put in its place the Saussurean notion that you have understand
a total system of meaning in order for any particular part of it to make sense.
Either way, it means that the first step in analysis is to identify some totality. The Dumontians call their project one of "comparing wholes," by which
they mean not so much symbolic systems as societies taken as totalities structured around certain key values. (Or, as Dumont puts it, "ideas-values.")
Note how even in Dumont's original analysis of India, the use of the term
value covers quite a range. Purity, for example, is clearly a value of the "cultural values" variety with which Kluckhohn concerned himself, a conception
of what people should want to be like; power, on the other hand, seems
more like one of the values Formalists came up with when trying to account
for what people actually seem to want, even if they don't necessarily admit
to it.17 The claim is that both are ultimately "ideas-values" that can be analyzed in Saussurean terms, as part of an overall system of meaning.
The best illustration of how all this works itself out in practice can be
found in a book called Of Relations and the Dead (1994), co-written by four
of Dumont's students: Daniel de Coppet, who worked among the 'Aru'Aru
in the Solomon Islands (1969, 1970, 1982, 1985, 1992), Cecile Barraud in
the Moluccan village of Tanebar-Evav (1979), Andre Iteanu among the
Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea (1983a, 1983b, 1990), and Robert Jamous
among the Berbers of the Moroccan Rif. The idea of the book is to compare
each society as a total system.
In every case, the societies turn out to be structured around two or three
key values. The highest is the one that defines its members' place in the cosmos as a whole. So among Jamous' Berbers, while important men spend
much of their time defending and increasing their honor through various
forms of aggressive exchange, ranging from dramatic gift-giving to the ex-
change of violence in blood-feuds, honor is not the highest value. The highest is baraka, which can roughly be translated divine grace and is immanent
in the holy men who resolve feuds and generally mediate human relations
with God. In Barraud's Moluccan village, life is taken up in a series of marital exchanges, but this takes place on what is ultimately a lower level of
value called haratut—roughly, island society in relation to its own divine ancestors—while the most important level is that of lor, or "law," in which the
society of both living and dead is bound to other societies. The two Melanesian cases are even more complicated, since the values are not named—the
authors make the interesting (and profoundly structuralist) suggestion that
key values receive names only when a society is aware that other societies
with different values exist. When it does not, members of that society will
not distinguish the nature of their social order from the nature of the cosmos as a whole, and the values are seen as inhering in the very fabric of reality. Among the 'Aru'Aru, for example, the three key values are embodied
in three basic constituents of every human being: body, breath, and ancestral "image" (the last is the only element to survive a person's death). These
in turn correspond to the three most important objects of exchange: taro,
pork, and shell money. According to De Coppet, 'Aru'Aru ritual life is
largely made up of an intricate web of exchanges, in which taro, pork, and
shell money change hands as a way of building up and breaking down
human personae, creating new ones with marriages or dissolving them in funerals, and, on the highest level, reproducing the relations between human
beings and their ancestors.
In societies such as these, the authors argue, it is utterly absurd to talk
about individuals maximizing goods. There are no individuals. Any person
is himself made up of the very stuff he exchanges, which are in turn the basic
constituents of the universe.
They also admit that all four societies have their "great men"—Melanesian
"big men," Bedouin "men of honor," important lineage heads in the Moluccas—and that these are always, those who have achieved mastery of that society's most important form of exchange. But the values they are trying to
maximize are never the ultimate values of that society. Always, there are two
levels, so that while on the lower one, the "values" involved may resemble the
sort a Transactionalist might come up with—"honor," "power," wealth,
etc.—on the most important level they are more values in Kluckhohn's sense,
ideas about what is ultimately important in life. So, they note, from the point
of view of society, great men only exist in order to sponsor certain forms of
cosmological ritual—ritual that in turn serves to reproduce society as a whole,
along with its key values. While this somewhat contradicts Dumont's own
statements that the value he is dealing with has nothing whatever in common
with the economic sort (economists look at preferences; hierarchical values
are about intrinsic superiority), it means that this model does embrace all
three of the main ways of talking about value; though strictly subordinating
one to a synthesis between the two others. As for why great men perform
these rituals: well, this is not for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, but simply because they believe it is the right thing to do.
More than any other approach, the Dumontians provide the promise of a
grand synthesis of theories of value—in their case, through a sort of supercharged Substantivism. The question: at what cost? In order to do so, they
have had to make a strict division between "modern" societies, in which people are individuals and seek economic values, and "holistic" ones, in which
they do not. Hence there is a fundamental break between the sort of society
in which most anthropologists live and the sort they study. Second, they reintroduce all the notorious problems of functionalism. For example, to speak of
societies as "wholes" does seem to imply there are clear borders between them,
and they exist in relative isolation.18 Examining history shows this is very
rarely the case. Even more, it becomes almost impossible to see how these societies can ever change. In fact, one of Dumont's most notorious arguments
is that the Indian caste system cannot, by definition, change. Its structure is
fixed; therefore, it can either continue, or it can collapse and be replaced by
an entirely different system: like a chair eaten away by termites, it will maintain the same form until it falls apart (1970:219). These are the main reasons
why anthropologists rejected functionalism to begin with.
At this point, the reader should at least have some idea of the history the
term "value" evokes. It is a term that suggests the possibility of resolving ongoing theoretical dilemmas; particularly of overcoming the difference between what one might call top-down and bottom-up perspectives: between
theories that start from a certain notion of social structure, or social order,
or some other totalizing notion, and theories that start from individual motivation. Reconciling the two has been a perennial problem for social theory.
Of course, there are those who would question whether there's much of
a point in grand theory to begin with. Some scoff at the very notion, arguing that all anthropology really has to offer to the world is ethnography, the
description of other societies and other ways of life. There is no doubt that
this is a very important part of what we do: keeping a record, one might say,
of cultural and social differences, a compendium of what being human has
meant, in different times and places (and hence, perhaps of human possibilities). It is hard to deny that if anyone is reading our books, say, two hundred years from now, this is what they're most likely to be looking for. The
conventional reply is that every ethnography always implies a theory. Since
even the most apparently bland and factual descriptions turn out to be based
on all sorts of a priori assumptions about what is important and relevant,
and these, on what human beings, or human society, are fundamentally
about, the real choice then is between thinking about such questions explicitly, or leaving them implicit—in which case, one will inevitably end up
drawing on one's own culture's unstated folk beliefs. The usual result is one
or another sort of economism. And the more one deals with human motivations, the more of a problem this becomes. A more recent variant of this
attitude, that it's the "grand" part of "grand theory" that's objectionable,
has—as we'll see in the next chapter—resulted in much the same problems.
Economics, of course, has a very clear notion of what it is trying to do,
and of what constitutes a successful analysis (does it or does it not predict
what happens?). One way to look at the history of anthropological theory is
to ask the same question. What is it anthropologists in any given period were
trying to figure out? The discipline has clearly gone through stages in this regard. At all stages one gathered data. But for a nineteenth century evolutionist, for instance, the point of gathering the data about a particular society was
to determine where it stands in a grand historical series, and to discover how
its existence might reveal something about the universal history of mankind.
For a functionalist, it was a matter of showing how a given practice or institution contributed to social stability (which did carry with it the tacit but
rarely stated assumption that without such institutions society would collapse
into some kind of Hobbesian chaos). For a structuralist, the point of analysis
was to show how social forms were made up of symbolic elements that hang
together as a total system of meaning. For all, however, the ultimate point was
the same: to delineate some kind of logically coherent system, which meant
moving away from individual action—and, in doing so, left the empty space
into which economistic theories were always trying to crawl.
By the early '80s, there was a general consensus that this was the great
problem of the day: how to come up with a "dynamic" theory of structuralism, one that could account for the vagaries of human action, creativity, and
change. The way it was usually phrased was as a matter of moving from
langue to parole, from language ("the code" of meaning, however conceived)
to speech. It was at this point that value really came to the forefront of intellectual debate. For reasons that should be obvious by now, a theory of
value seemed to be just what was needed to bridge the gap: to bring together
society and human purposes, to move from meaning to desire.
It is interesting that in these arguments, virtually no one mentioned the
legacy of Kluckhohn. His work was considered definitively outdated. If anything, this shows the extent to which structuralism really has come to set the
terms of debate. However primitive the models Kluckhohn actually produced, he did at least open up the possibility of looking at cultures as not
just different ways of perceiving the world, but as different ways of imagining what life ought to be like—as moral projects, one might say. This was so
far from the approaches most theorists were starting from that it seemed utterly irrelevant.
Anyway, all this perhaps provides an explanation for both the continued
popularity of the term "value," and the lack of a concrete theory behind it.
Anthropology didn't really resolve the dilemmas of the early '80s. For the
most part, it just skipped over them. The discipline moved on to other issues: concerning the politics of ethnographic fieldwork, memory, the body,
transnationalism, and so forth. Structuralism faded out of prominence, then
gradually came to seem ridiculous; theories that concentrated on power
(Foucault) or practice (Bourdieu) largely replaced it; there was (and is) a
general feeling that the debate was over. Hence, the tendency to act as if such
a theory does, in fact, exist.
As we will see in the next chapter, though, most of the new theories that
seem to have made the old arguments irrelevant are, at least in many of
their aspects, little more than retooled versions of the same old thing. Nor
do I think that ignoring the problem is necessarily the best way to make it
Current Directions
In Exchange Theory
o 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.1 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, ulti-
mately 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 world2—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.3 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.4
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, post-
structuralists 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.5 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 labour, 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.6 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.7
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 con-
form 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, honour or
honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or
distinctions, etc. (1977:178).8
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.9 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 powe