Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value PDF
Preview Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value
Toward An Anthropological z Theory of Value This page intentionally left blank Toward An Anthropological z Theory of Value The False Coin of Our Own Dreams David Graeber TOWARDANANTHROPOLOGICALTHEORYOFVALUE Copyright © David Graeber, 2001. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per- mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd. (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0-312-24044-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-312-24045-7 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graeber, David Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-240449 – ISBN 0-312-24045-7 (alk. paper) 1. Values. 2. Anthropology—Philosophy. 3. Social values. 4. Ceremonial exchange. I. Title. GN469.5.G73 2001 303.3’72—dc21 200121794 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: December 2001 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Contents Acknowledgments vii A Few Words by Way of Introduction ix Chapter 1 Three Ways of Talking about Value 1 Chapter 2 Current Directions in Exchange Theory 23 Chapter 3 Value as the Importance of Actions 49 Chapter 4 Action and Reflection, or Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power 91 Chapter 5 Wampum and Social Creativity among the Iroquois 117 Chapter 6 Marcel Mauss Revisited 151 Chapter 7 The False Coin of our own Dreams, or the Problem of the Fetish, IIIB 229 Notes 263 References Cited 281 Index 317 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 be- cause they desired the healing of the feverish patients that sprinklings of cold water and sympathetic contact with a frog seemed to the Hindus who called on the Brahmins of the Atharva-veda sufficient antagonists to third- or fourth-degree fever. In short, it is always society that pays itself in the counterfeit money of its dreams. —from Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Mana and Magic (1904, trans. Loic Wacquant) Acknowledgments It feels a little silly writing acknowledgements for a book like this, an in- tellectual 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 intellec- tual 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). This page intentionally left blank A Few Words by Way of Introduction W 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 al- ways 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 sci- ence 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 as- sumptions 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 quali- ties of political tract, or at least, an extended reflection on the relation be- tween disciplines like anthropology and politics. The standard history—the sort of thing a journalist would take as self-ev- ident 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 every- thing 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.
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