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