Book Review

Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nicholas Thomas’ book Entangled Objects offers a critique of anthropological theories of value and exchange from the disciplinary vantage point of history. As a scholar who defines himself as both a historian and an anthropologist, Thomas’ methodological approach to objects and exchange and his analytical framework conceptualizes societies and economies - both western and non western- in their mutual entanglement rather than in their mutual exclusion and isolation. Thomas argues that anthropological theories of value looking at objects in circulation are grounded in binaries such as western and non-western, capitalist and non-capitalist, gift and commodity, alienability and inalienbility. For him, anthropological studies inspired by such binaries are redolent of evolutionism and romantic primitivism which from the reference point of the west look at ‘other’ societies and their social formations as less evolved structures in the process of transitioning into capitalist industrial societies. Thus the moment of colonial encounter and the imperialist project are very significant in his project to historicize the ahistorical theoretical formulations of value. Though sceptical of anthropological abstractions and generalizations, Thomas maintains the analytical divisions reflected in the binaries mentioned above to demonstrate the complexity and mutability of the objects circulating among different people and contexts. He does not completely repudiate or abandon the well defined categories of the anthropological literature on value but adds an element of history to destabilize their categorical rigidity. He does not just stop at identifying the complexity of the objects in circulation and exchange but connects it to their political and historical contexts. Critically commenting on the anthropological conceptions of value (from Mauss to Gregory and from Weiner to Strathern), he illustrates how in their enthusiasm to reduce different practices into generalized forms and arrive at general concepts, these scholars miss the fractures evident in those concepts. Acknowledging the necessity of coming up with general concepts in their intellectual efforts, he says that they miss the nuances of history and practice which their ethnographic work provides them in abundance. Instead they reiterate of canonical Maussian theory of value.

He draws on the later theoretical formulations of value from Nancy Munn and Arjun Appadurai which he opines are more ‘liberating’ as they do not take for granted the objectivity and fixity of artefacts in their structure, form and appropriations. He argues that these approaches make visible the cultural constitution of objects and highlight the politics underlying the determination of value of any object by making value contingent upon temporal, cultural and social factors. This for him is a richer understanding of objects than the essentialist and fixed notions of objects advanced by material culture theorists who do not question the ‘objectivity’ of the objects. Drawing on various ethnographic studies, he shows how it is impossible to ‘generally’ speak of either gift or commodity economies or societies, since the elements and characteristic features of both are present in all kinds of societies. Claiming that gift or commodity status of an object is not invariably fixed and frozen in time, his examples make the readers see that alienation and commoditization are not specific to commoditized economies and societies but predate capitalist exploitative relationship between capitalists and labourers and can also be seen in non-western and non-capitalist economies and societies. Much in tandem with Appadurai’s claim that objects have a social life and pass through many social transformations, he shows how an object can potentially have phases of alienability and inalienability, and morph into a commodity or a gift depending on the context, the domain of transaction and finally the nature of the thing itself. To demonstrate this, he adopts a very innovative approach of hypothetical ethnography of a wedding ring and provides a thick description of its various avatars - as a commodity mass produced for sale, as an object that acquires idiosyncratic, sentimental and personal value once it is offered to the beloved person as a gift and later becomes an inalienable heirloom withheld from exchange and passed on to only a worthy descendant within family, and finally as an object (with all the previous values accumulated in it) that is exchanged with a great sense of loss in times of adversity – to show the movement of an object in and out of commodity and gift status. The expression of value of an object as alienable or inalienable is contingent on its phase and not a reflection of some inherent essence or quality. Likewise, he shows the qualities attributed to gift such as reciprocity and gifts cannot be generalized for all instances by giving examples of hierarchized exchange of ranked items among different tribes. The overall effect of such illustrations is that the categories of gift and commodity are destabilized at the definitional level and the classification of societies and economies based on this division is challenged. He alerts all theorists to the ‘trap of making radical alterity’ out of what are just partial and contingent differences between societies and also cautions them to guard themselves from homogenizing tendencies championing the opposite rhetoric of this excess that levels all differences and looks only at similarities. He does not deny the importance of dichotomous categories at an abstract level but only questions their usefulness in the analytical descriptions of totalities.   

While his first two chapters along with the introduction lay out the theoretical universe in which the theories of value are situated, his third and fourth chapters are exercises to view objects in circulation in their wider historical context. Appropriation is the central concept tying both these chapters together. The use of the term immediately brings in the element of power into the study. Appropriation entails extrication of an object from its cultural location and simultaneous attribution of different values which did not exist before the moment of appropriation. This is not to say that Thomas is working with some originary conception of object or its authentic uses in the culture of its origin. The term has a temporal dimension to it as it demands us to think of objects as having ‘a before’ and ‘an after’ to them as they circulate within and outside societies. It is also suggestive of many relations of power that mark the domains of transactions. Also this term is very helpful in escaping the fixity of objects and moving on to think about them as mutable entities which acquire various meanings in different contexts. Thomas’ use of the same term for both indigenous and colonial reception of objects has a very ironic effect as it only makes more conspicuous the differences between two appropriations in terms of consequences on the native side.

Looking at his account of indigenous appropriation of things, it is not an exaggeration to say that Thomas indeed puts forth a very bold proposition when he asks us to extend the exchange relations between colonialist powers and indigenous people beyond the exploitative relations between the two. It is bold precisely because any such proposition runs the risk of not taking into account the inequality between two sides and is dangerously close to sympathizing with the powerful. Thomas is aware of this danger and articulates it himself in the chapter.  For him the initial exchange relations between the colonizers and the indigenous people need not necessarily be motivated and determined by imperialist ambitions of expansion and its attendant processes of exploitation and violence. Such a view denies history to indigenous people and their modes of transaction and exchange in his opinion. Instead he digs from archives the accounts of early modes of transaction between Europeans and the indigenous people to reconstruct those moments of exchange which are uncoloured by victimized accounts of the colonized (culled out from the oral historical narratives). He is not denying the violence of colonialist and imperialist project, nor is he saying that it did not dispossess the indigenous people of their resources but what he is trying to arrive at is that the terms of those initial exchanges and the understandings of value underlying them were very different from what they are now after the indigenous people have been colonized and integrated into the network of capitalist market exchange.  The initial social exchanges (those not involving violence), he argues had to be carried out according to the terms of indigenous people as their cooperation was very vital to the furtherance of the colonialist project. The Europeans and the early settlers from Europe in the colonies knew this very well and also had understood that it is not very easy to subjugate the native population and make them offer their labour in exchange for goods. Thomas persuades us to see how this cooperation with the natives, conducting barter according to the native terms is as important as using force and violence to coerce populations into subjugation. He explains this in detail by taking example of Marquesans’ attitude towards early colonizers and Europeans and their reception of European objects within the boundaries of their value systems. Marquesans’ appropriations of European commodities and attributing Marquesan values to the appropriated commodities often rendering them unique and singular (giving them the status of gift) are evidences that certain European commodities were not only welcome but also desired and highly valued by the indigenous population. The value accorded to the objects exchanged were not the same for the colonizers and the natives. Thomas seems to be saying that it is an anachronism and a historical fallacy to understand such exchange relations in terms of market relations of equivalence; instead they should be understood in their cultural specificities of what those specific objects meant to natives at the time of transactions and how they expressed their value. He says, ‘... precolonial systems could not determine subsequent histories but do reveal that the colonial process was influenced by the structures and events of early contact, just as these in turn were influenced by autonomous, precolonial cultural and social dynamics. Facts that may appear esoteric – the permutations of debt and prehistories of local exchange – are thus implicated in a global narrative of imperial history, which has remained unconscious of the peripheral representations and transactions that later made dispossession and autonomy, development and exploitation, more possible in one colony than the other”. (p 124)

The European version of appropriation of indigenous objects acquires many meanings and uses depending on the various projects Europeans were interested in. For Europeans encountering it for the first time, they just mean objects of curiosity and novelty which fade out as they see more of the same kind or encounter new objects with each journey and conquest. For missionaries interested in converting the native population into Christianity, the material artefacts of the native population, especially their religious idols offered in exchange become symbols of successful conversion and reformation of barbaric, uncivilized natives (who gave up such idols either in exchange or as offers) into civilized Christians. For early settlers the native objects are symbolic of barbaric violence that the natives were capable of and later become objects of personal collections that adorned their living rooms. For the state in defence of its imperialist and colonialist project, the objects acquire monumental value that could be displayed and preserved in its museums. For scientists studying these societies they are symbolic of diversity of humankind, objects that arouse the scientific urge to name, classify and know all objects produced and used by mankind. Science also beomes mask for a few tourists in some instances to satisfy ‘prurient colonial interests’.

By giving us accounts of various forms of appropriation of different kinds of objects by the colonizers and the indigenous population, he builds a theory of entanglement which resists making capitalist world systems determining instances of local societies and economies or considering the latter as autonomous independent entities which exist in complete isolation from the former. And Thomas is not unaware of the ‘asymmetry in the exchange relation’ which these appropriations are characteristic of. While emphasising that it is important to see how values of objects were perceived in the first encounters of natives with the colonizers to get a historical sense of how objects were valued and seen in the absence of an agreed upon value system, he abstains from declaring that the natives were responsible for their own subjugation and exploitation. Instead he seems to place colonial dominance in the unintended and unforeseen consequences of native engagement with the colonizing forces where each side operated with a completely different understanding of values, and colonialism as a practical project worked this difference to its advantage in addition to the more extreme forms of dispossession and violence. 

-Rashmi M. 

link to google drive folder with thomas review

Dear All,

Link below to Google Drive folder with the reviews

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B80EssmI64t4Rnh5dGRxZUI3Ulk&usp=sharing

Regards
Krupa, Savita, Keya

Notes for session on Geography - Social Reproduction

Hart’s essay offers a critique of current methods prevalent in area studies which starts off from the premise that place is a well defined, bounded, static unit available for study. This conception which forms the guiding principle of area studies is similar to the principle informing ethnography as a practice in general (which also begins with the well defined, bounded area called ‘field’). Hart tries to address this central problematic of area studies and conventional ethnography by offering two methodological alternatives: critical ethnography and relational comparison. Drawing on Appadurai and Burawoy, he states that both these methods can be effectively used to conceptualize space not as statsis but as flows. This method immediately breaks down the neat straitjacketed divisions between societies and different kinds of economies (capitalist and non capitalist) and pushes for an approach that makes one see their interconnectedness and their mutual constitutive nature. The process of capitalism hence becomes an ongoing project with constant accumulation through dispossession. He further says that primitive accumulation is an ongoing process which tries to bring in as many non commoditized forces as possible into the domain of capitalist market exchange. This point is the connecting thread between Hart and Roberts (who discusses the commoditization and privatization of water). In an argument similar to that of Hart, Roberts shows how primitive accumulation can be extended to the problematic of water management and distribution. Water and land become fictitious commodities (in the Marxist sense) when capitalist forces privatize and restrict access to it. Commenting on the transition of water from a non-commodity to a commodity, Roberts says that this process directly affects the social relations of reproduction (which are gendered and racialized) and perpetuates the injustice inherent in them. And this process is so naturalized that the injustices underlying the process are overlooked by the state, and state allies with capitalist forces to achieve the neoliberal goals of empowerment and development.

Mitchell et al. question the artificial division between productive labour (waged and by extension the economic base), which is seen as value generative in traditional Marxist theory and socially reproductive labour (unwaged and by extension the political, cultural and social superstructure) and argue that they are not mutually exclusive but co-constitutive. In this context they consider Braudel’s (French Historian) work in emphasizing the role of socio-economic factors in the making and writing of history, a story of mixture and hybridity.  They try to dismantle the ‘categorical binary of production and reproduction’ from a Marxist, feminist, post structural position and argue that in contemporary societies blurring of work and play (i.e. non-work) is not only accepted but also seen as positive in some cases. Ultimately both are work and that’s what makes you a person – gives you value as a modern, rational agent. They call for a return to 1970s feminist perspective – that everyday life is politically and practically important.

The above piece builds on Katz’s essay: that globalization impacts on values and value systems. Is a given. Any effort to counteract these impacts must start with the sphere of social reproduction and not reproduction as the former is being rescaled to privilege the latter. She suggests adopting a research strategy of topographies and counter topographies to help frame a political response to globalisation’s impact. Topography at a very basic level as place based knowledge and counter topographies as the linkages between topographies i.e. contour lines which link places / sites of similar impacts in the sphere of social reproduction across the world. Thus a network of both specific and fluid knowledge base which she says builds on situated knowledge and standpoint theory.

Harvey’s writing can in a way be seen as the precursor to the above pieces. He calls for justice, both social and environmental, in a post modern world. He considers space, place, time and nature as the four material frames of daily life (or social reproduction or life’s work to use Mitchell et al’s term) and argues that these are getting impacted in a capitalist economy, resulting in injustice. 

In this chapter, he builds on Munn and Gurevich to position spatio-temporality as the precondition to value establishment and argues that not only is capitalism “accelerating time” but also “annihilating space”, resulting in an imbalance. He calls for a need to recognize the larger multidimensional aspects of space and time within which the binary or dialectic of place-space, long term (ecological)-short term (capitalistic), objective space and time exist.

Social practices both define and are defined by spatiotemporality (and hence value systems) and societies transform from within and without through the establishment of new systems of spatiotemporality. Conflicts could and do arise due to differences between personal constructions of space-time and dominant public or objective notion of space- time. Harvey discusses class, gender and ecological struggles as outcomes of such differences. Further, building on Marx to argue that in a capitalist society money becomes the relational umbrella to bridge these different spatio-temporal domains and value systems into a singular system. One needs to understood this before one can attempt to address the imbalance – a call for a moral economy?

Rashmi and Krupa

Discussions on session 4 - Moral Economies

The seminar began with discussing E.P. Thompson’s article on the slow breakdown of the prevailing moral economy in England, which led to many bread riots throughout the 18^th century. These riots coincided with the transition of England undergoing an industrial revolution. This transition had freed serfs to become wage labours and who in the process had stopped producing for themselves, thereby depending on state subsidies and regulations to get subsidised crops and bread. With Industrial revolution came the push for a market economy breaking subsistence for the poor. The poor felt they had a claim on subsidised bread and corn, the lack of which forced them to revolt against market defined prices. The poor workers demanded fair price. Their demand was not spasmodic, but more organised in the lines of a class movement - distributing pamphlets, creating awareness, organising themselves and making demands. There was an unspoken idea of a community, and a pre-existing moral economy provided the basis for collective action. A question raised in the class while discussing this piece was if it was not for food (a basic sustenance) could the people have organise themselves in other situations as well? The example of the Luddite movement was given where the workers had similarly organised themselves demanding better wages.  Another point raised during the discussion was can the famines in India be seen as a parallel development where the breakdown of the moral economy led to famines? In India the Jajmani system could also be seen as a moral economy that prevailed in villages where exchange of goods and services between landowning higher castes and landless service castes occurred.

The discussion then proceeded to look closely at the book by Parry and Bloch which deals with Jajmani system and other issues pertaining to the morality behind economic exchanges. The introduction of the book revolved around the specificity of change in societies in which money as a form of exchange was introduced. We reiterated that while a new order of exchange did bring about several significant changes in the way these societies functioned, it was not to money that all such changes could be attributed. Instead, money took on various symbolic meanings which spoke to existing practices. We also noted that in this paper we see that money as something of an "empty signifier", in that it takes on meanings which differ not just across cultures, but also within a particular culture. There was also a discussion on short and long time cycles of exchange, noting that while it always existed it underwent a change in significance with the emergence of capitalism.

Fuller’s chapter on the grain heap was a critique of Dumontian idea that the village functioned within a moral economy whereby the produce of the village was divided and distributed to all the lower castes by the upper landed castes. The grains did not belong to the farmer alone and every service caste got a cut. It was a village moral economy. Jan Breman called this a system of patronage – it was an obligation to provide livelihood to all. Caste system provided this stability for distribution. This system of patronage was similar to what Kaviraj has shown about the emergence of the modern state where resources were channeled through patronage to the village community by the bureaucracy divided into higher and lower level. This system of patronage later paved way to exploitation and we see a breakdown of the system of payment from kind to cash. It was not a uniform process and some part of India where the transition not complete, or partly happened. The state had to then step in to provide for the poor’s subsistence and NREGA can be seen as an example of this. 

The next paper up for discussion was Zelizer’s piece on the insurance companies and how the idea of monetarily quantifying loss after death gained ground in 18^th century USA. In this discussion we spoke about the specific conditions under which commodification of death begins to get legitimized. It was noted that this particular moment must be viewed as a culmination of several factors - urbanization, loss of traditional assets such as land, the dependence on one person in the family for income - along with the marketing techniques employed by insurers. A question was raised as to whether the article explains how the business of insurance emerged within American society which had a particular ethical understanding of death. Were the insurers not embedded in the same ethics? A comparison was made with Weber's Protestant Ethic which speaks specifically of the process and conditions within which an ethic towards capitalism emerged. Such an analysis seemed to lack in Zelizer. However, some participants believed that the author adequately dealt with this question by pointing the readers to practices of care conducted by the church.

Next we discussed the piece by Robbins which argued that it is not just reciprocity but politics of recognition that defines social relationships. Coming from a phenomenological approach, Robbins says that recognition is a meaning making process amongst individual, which we argued has similarities to Bourdieu’s symbolic capital. His research on Urapmin shows that “economic” progress is an expansion of relations of mutual recognition and economic failure is failing to expand this relation of mutual recognition. Robbins quotes Fraser and Honneth to bring out the parallels between recriprocity and recognition. Fraser puts economic sphere as separate from cultural sphere and it is in the latter where the recognition occurs. Honneth goes a step further and explains that we can not see the two as separate spheres and recognition in the economic sphere is not only important but also crucial to social recognition. For Robbins the morally binding motivation in any exchange, noncapitalist or capitalist, is powered by the need for mutual recognition, and through this we can begin to see new potential connections between gift and commodity economies that are usually seen as analytically discrete systems. The question we then raised was is there something still distinctive about modern western capitalism as opposed to non western societies?

The last piece to be discussed was on Islamic finance. The paper focused on the dilemmas facing Islamic bankers between religiously determined values or ethics and those purveyed as rational under the rubric of neoliberalism. Participants noted the use of Foucault by the author to explain how neo-liberal ideas are shaping identities / subjectivities in spaces not traditionally pervaded by these values ("Economy in practice"). This gives rise to multiple subjectivities, which forms a discursive field, in which opposite positions (such as that between the reformer and the liberal) come into strong contestation. These positions are also informed by other global events, such as the financial crisis. A central point in the paper is that the field of contestation also gives rise to a position which inverts the overt distinction between religiosity and rationality, by positing that Islamic banking is inherently rational. This leads the author to ask questions pertaining to the link between economy and society.   

 Sanam and Nafis

Notes for session 4: Moral Economies

The readings for this week are centered around the theme of moral economy. Bloch and Parry problematize the importance given to money in classical literature as the key factor in transforming a “traditional” social order, which is portrayed to be based on such features as strong social bonds and a gift economy to a “modern” one characterized by individualization, atrophy of moral economy and a commodity economy. In doing so, they highlight the dynamics of exchange in pre-monetarist societies and point to the culturally specific meanings that are associated with money in these societies. Similarly, Zelizer highlights how the symbolism associated with money at the time of death, was exploited in order to market life insurance, a commodity in the United States. In doing so, monetary transactions (like the sale of insurance) take on culturally specific meanings. Rudnyckyj takes these ideas forward by highlighting through the case of Islamic finance that, what is considered sacred is itself highly contested within a specific culture. Robbins draws a parallel between Maussian theory of reciprocity as a foundational social form to that of Hegel’s theory of recognition, making recognition a key term in our understanding of the motivations for and moral bases of exchange. Thompson sketches a history of food riots in 18th century England and nuances our understanding of a moral paternalistic model of subsidies, the failure of which led to rioting. Based on these readings, the following questions are given as pointers for discussion:
 
Questions
What sort of cultural dynamics of exchange and circulation existed in pre-monetised societies such as Tiv? How do these dynamics influence the symbolic meanings given to money?

What distinguishes short term economic cycle from the long term cosmic order in economic exchange? How is this distinction further elaborated in Parry’s and Fuller’s chapters?

In the case of life insurance in the United States, what are the conditions and the context within which commodity transactions begin to get sacralised?

How do certain notions of Islamic finance overturn dominant distinctions between rationality and religiosity?

How does Thompson draw a historical distinction between a prevailing moral economy and the new ‘Smithian’ economy that replaced in by the end of 18th century?  

Urapmins consider emotions central to re creating recognition in a relationship. How does is relate to the larger question of recognition in a capitalist society? 

Sanam and Nafis

Session 3: Discussions on Value, Hierarchy and Domination

The theme for last week’s class was centred around the notions of value, hierarchy and domination in anthropology. The discussion started with noting how Munn’s account seems to closely resemble Bourdieu’s ‘practice theory’. Writing during a period following the demise of structural-functionalism, Munn draws from the tradition of symbolic anthropology, and argues for ‘value’ as created through action (that is oriented towards the past and future). She also draws from the interpretive tradition, and like others like Strathern, tries to do away with modern and ‘Western’ categories such as technology, trade, religion and so on. Therefore, her attempt has been to privilege a phenomenological analysis while deriving a generative model.  However, one question that emerged in this context was whether she has been satisfactorily been able to wed the two together, or whether she arrives at a tautological explanation of value – that is values is created through action and it is important to understand actions undertaken by the Gawan people from their own socio-cultural context, since this is what is valuable to them. Value for Munn is also created inter-subjectively, and involves an extension of the self across space and time, and is anticipated towards future returns. We discussed how her theory places every act within an inter-subjective space that is dependent also on other people’s actions, and thus, always has a potential for positive or negative value creation (with examples such as food consumption, hospitality or witchcraft practices), and how value, manifested through fame is created through a careful negotiation between individual choices and community viability. Munn’s model also appears like a self maximization model. Thus, one of the questions that we returned to in this class was about whether ultimately all theories of value privilege an economic rationale or rationale of self interest. In this context, we also discussed whether these works could be analyzed in terms of the final underlying motive they seemed to indicate, or whether we must consider them from the point of the different approaches to questions of value they bring, and how this contributes to an understanding of value. Another point about Munn’s work that we discussed is how she seems to extract a pristine Melanesian culture, without talking of the effects of colonization and the influence of Christianity on the trading practices.

Discussing Graeber’s work, we discussed how Graeber sees value as ‘political’, and his interest lies not in ‘where value is coming from’, as much as what is it doing? Graeber seems to suggest that the term ‘value’ is an empty signifier, and if w can understand how it operates, we can understand what it means. Graeber appears to see value as created through two kinds of actions – acts of exchange, and acts of desiring (which seems to be similar to Munn’s idea of ‘potential’ for value creation). Value is generated through action and reflection. Graeber sees value as created through congealed history which represents past action, as well as through acquisition of different kinds of value through money (which makes ‘value’ ‘invisible’ or allows certain kinds of misrecognition). 

Discussing Bourdieu’s work we looked at how he tries to move away from the structural-functionalist model of Levi Strauss, and tries to privilege agency. Bourdieu tries to examine the strategies behind gift giving and tries to show how ‘gift’ disguises the political and economic motive through ‘misrecognition’. He appears to be arguing that there are other forms of wealth, other than material wealth (such as honour, status, cultural or symbolic capital) that also matter in creating social hierarchies. One question we came to was whether Bourdieu succeeds in escaping the structure-agency dichotomy when he ultimately resorts to unwritten cultural codes and rules as the basis on which shared value is created. Unless you recognise the value of something, can there be value? Related to this was a question about how does shared value emerge? Does it emerge through violence or subjugation or does it emerge through amicable consensus? Or does it all come down to self interest, so that individuals cooperate with each other in the expectation that this will also contribute to individual gain? Do answers to these questions lead us to a structural-functionalist understanding of what accounts for social order, a position from which those doing symbolic anthropology were trying to move away from in the first place? 

Maithreyi and Sanam