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

352 Pages·2001·1.1 MB·English

by  David Graeber

Toward An Anthropological
z
Theory of Value
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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).
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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.