Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

* Book: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. By David Graeber.

URL =

Summary

Based on the book notes of Michel Bauwens:

Chapter 1

This book, described as "the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value", re-examines a century of anthropological thought on value and exchange.

There are 3 conceptions of value in the social sciences:

   - 1) sociological: what is the ultimate good in human life
   - 2) economic: the degree to which an object is desired, i.e. what people are willing to give up to get it
   - 3) linguisting: meaning difference in a system of language

How are these 3 meanings related ? Theorists who concentrated on only one strand of inquiry usually ran into problems, for example:

Clyde Kluckhohn's value project: The first anthropologist to make it his central theme (1940s, 1950s), redefining the discipline as the comparative study of values. Values were for him "conceptions of the desirable" (in the sense of 'ideals of what people ought to want), and "value orientations", where these ideas plus the assumptions about the nature of the world. But this methodology had trouble to make practical comparisons and was felt to have ended in relative failure. The project had no intellectual successors.

Graeber then shows how ill-equipped the economic theory of the maximizing individual is, to explain the behavior of non-western subjects.

The Formalist-Substantivist debate of the sixties also ended in a deadlock, and is now considered to be 'outdated'.

Details on the Formalism-Substantivism Debate

Formalists look at individuals; Substantivists look at society as a whole.

Both terms are from Polanyi who had shown that the market was definitely the product of the state.

Formalism is the study of the formal laws of behaviour of people in a market. But most historical societies did not have such a market,i.e. had no 'economy', and there a 'substanttive' approach may be needed, one that looks at the actual process a society uses to provide itself with material goods.

Thus were discovered mechanisms such as:

   - redistributive economies
   - ports of trade
   - spheres of exchange
   - spheres of sociability

In conclusion: Formalists look at individuals; Substantivists look at society as a whole.

Graeber next discusses Structuralism as started by the semiology of De Saussure. The latter had said that no meaning or value ould be determined, unless by contrast to the total system of which it was a part (ex: red is not yellow, not brown, ....). The same principle was then applied to objects. It is now thought that if structuralism could account for difference, it could not account for evaluation (and therefore could not be applied to money, which has to take into account 'exact' differences).

Sahlins has done a lot of work to solve this problem, but especially Louis Dumont, whole concept of value derives from his notion of hierarchy. Structuralism discovers binary oppositions, i.e. left vs. right, but fails to notice, one term is always superior to the other, and includes it. For example, giving one's right hand, represents the whole person, including the left hand. Conceptual distinctions contain an element of value, since they are ranked. "All societies were holistic, and thus hierarchical, ranked in a series of more and more inclusive domains. Except the West, because: "each person is being assumed to have a unique individuality, is a value onto themselves, and none can be treated as intrinsically superior". Graeber says that later Dumontian studies tend to see societies as totalities, and thus also in isolation, an apparel which is now rejected, also because it cannot account for change.

Box: What are anthropologists looking for ?

   - For a 19th cy evolutionist: where it stands in a grand historical series, what it tells us about universal history
   - For a functionalist: how a given practice contributes to social stability
   - For a structuralist, to uncover the total system of meaning

All are looking for a logically coherent system, and thus distinct from the economist' focus, on individual action.

Chapter 2

Graeber will now focus on the present theories of value.

After the sixties, i.e. the debates between the Formalists and the Substantivists, the seventies saw the polemics between the Structuralists and Marxism.

Graeber is referring to the first (French) marxist anthropologists, such as Claude Meillasoux, and Maurice Godelier.

They criticized both Formalists and Substantivists, for focusing on distribution and exchange, forgetting production. This 'mode of production' approach, worked well in societies WITH a state. Though 'pure' approaches tended to be on capitalism (including the natives' relation to it), it had broader, though hidden influence. It would also morph into various critical theory approaches.

In the eighties, the attention turned from production (seventies) to consumption. If there is anything that unites post-structuralists, it is their refusal of totalities. Reality consists of different fields with different games which do not form a overall structure. Both societies and individuals are fragments. Bourdieu has gone the furthest to reconcile structuralism and theories of human action. His notion of habitus, i.e. symbolic systems that can be absorbed and reproduced without the awareness of the individual, "is justly famous". Bourdieu re-interpreted the gift economy of Mauss by saying that traditional societies 'are not yet aware' of the economy, and the disguise the fact. They are in bad faith and a gift is in fact an exchange. Symbolic capital is also an economic good.

Why would Bourdieu, a critical theorist, 'economize everything' , to rational self-interest ? To Graeber, by seeing everything as a field of power and domination, the academic left seriously undercut itself and the belief in alternatives!!

Appardurai, in a seminal 1986 essay (Commodities and the Politics of Value, in: The Social Life of Things), followed G. Simmel ("Philosophy of Money") in discussing 'regimes of value', denying commodities were a purely capitalist phenomenom. She denies that value derived from labour, seeing it dependent solely on exchange, i.e. individual desire (what is one willing to give up for something)