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.