Notes for Session 3: Value, Hierarchy and Domination

Munn's book, The Fame of Gawa, conceptualises how action is transformed into value through food consumption and hospitality, marriage and witchcraft, among other things. Following Munn, Graeber's book pushes us to think of value created through actions that may or may not be rendered visible. Bourdieu’s account in The Logic of Practice, while mainly, a theoretical exposition on the social order, argues for ‘value’ creation through gift exchange as a dialectical, ‘irreversible’ process characterised by ‘uncertainty’, and consisting of symbolic acts that nevertheless, underscored by a material logic. Based on these readings, the following questions are given as pointers for discussion:

a.      How does one understand the spatio-temporal dimension of value creation? What directions does Munn's inter subjective space-time offer to us to understand value creation and transformation?

b.      Munn draws our attention to the existence of both individual and egalitarian tendencies within Gawans. How is this contradiction resolved/mediated?

c.       How does one uncover hidden value in an object of exchange or circulation? How do ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ (‘misrecognition’, ‘hiding’) come into play in the creation of value?

d.      How does Bourdieu distinguish between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ models of gift exchange?

e.      What is ‘symbolic capital’? How is this related to modes of domination through the process of ‘misrecognition’?

f.        How does Bourdieu differentiate between paying a loan , exchanging objects, and the practice of ‘gift exchange’?

g.      Does Bourdieu’s theory of value as emerging in practice share similarities with Munn’s theory of value as an extension of self over space-time; and Graeber’s account of value as presented through the concepts of ‘action and reflection’? Why do Munn, Graeber and Bourdieu view action as central to value creation?

h.      How successful are each of these scholars in escaping the structure-agency dichotomy, that they each seek to transcend through their different conceptual apparatuses? 

i.        Does Bourdieu imply continuity when he understands reciprocity and gift as processes of ‘institutionalisation’, similar to the institutionalization of exchange in capitalist societies through such procedures as law, policy, markets systems, and so on? Or, does the dichotomy between market societies and non market societies with respect to value creation hold? Do we need to have an integrated understanding of value formation and transformation in different societies?

j.   Are economic motives, or motives of self interest, ultimately privileged, in some of these theories (e.g., Bourdieu’s)?

-Sanam & Maithreyi