A Few Words by Way of Introduction

When 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 always 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 science 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 assumptions 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 qualities of political tract, or at least, an extended reflection on the relation between disciplines like anthropology and politics.

The standard history—the sort of thing a journalist would take as self-evident 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 everything 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.

But recent events suggest there might be very different ways to tell this story. The last several years have seen the rapid growth of new social movements— particularly, movements against neoliberalism (in the United States referred to as “free market” ideologies)—in just about every corner of the world, including, somewhat belatedly, the United States itself. Yet the so-called academic left in America has played almost no role in this; in fact, many of its presumed members seem only vaguely aware that such movements exist. Perhaps this is not all that surprising: neoliberalism itself remains a subject on which modern critical meta-theory has never had very much to say.

But why is that? It seems to me that in a surprising variety of ways, this critical theory actually anticipated neoliberal arguments. Take, for example, the concept of “postmodernism.” Now, admittedly this is a somewhat tricky one because there were never many scholars willing to actually call themselves “postmodernists.” But in a way, this was precisely what made the term so powerful: “postmodernism” was not something anyone was proposing but a fait accompli that everyone simply had to accept. From the ‘80s on, it has become common to be presented with a series of arguments that might be summarized, in caricature form, as something like this:

1. We now live in a Postmodern Age. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.

2. One result of our postmodern condition is that schemes to change the world or human society through collective political action are no longer viable. Everything is broken up and fragmented; anyway, such schemes will inevitably either prove impossible, or produce totalitarian nightmares.

3. While this might seem to leave little room for human agency in history, one need not despair completely. Legitimate political action can take place, provided it is on a personal level: through the fashioning of subversive identities, forms of creative consumption, and the like. Such action is itself political and potentially liberatory.

This is, as I say, a caricature: the actual arguments made in any particular theoretical tract of the time were usually infinitely more complex. Still, they almost invariably did share some version of these three themes. Compare them, then, to the arguments that began to be promulgated in the ‘90s, in the popular media, about a phenomena referred to as “globalization”:

1. We now live in the age of the Global Market. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as the result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.

2. One result is that schemes aiming to change society through collective political action are no longer viable. Dreams of revolution have been proven impossible or, worse, bound to produce totalitarian nightmares; even any idea of changing society through electoral politics must now be abandoned in the name of “competitiveness.”

3. If this might seem to leave little room for democracy, one need not despair: market behavior, and particularly individual consumption decisions, are democracy; indeed, they are all the democracy we’ll ever really need.

There is, of course, one enormous difference between the two arguments. The central claim of those who celebrated postmodernism is that we have entered a world in which all totalizing systems—science, humanity, nation, truth, and so forth—have all been shattered; in which there are no longer any grand mechanisms for stitching together a world now broken into incommensurable fragments. One can no longer even imagine that there could be a single standard of value by which to measure things. The neoliberals on the other hand are singing the praises of a global market that is, in fact, the single greatest and most monolithic system of measurement ever created, a totalizing system that would subordinate everything—every object, every piece of land, every human capacity or relationship—on the planet to a single standard of value.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that what those who celebrated postmodernism were describing was in large part simply the effects of this universal market system, which, like any totalizing system of value, tends to throw all others into doubt and disarray. The remarkable thing is that they failed to notice this fact. How? And why has it been so difficult for them to come up with a way to criticize a system that would seem to fly directly in the face of everything they are calling for?

Probably the reason is because those who used terms like “postmodernism” did not, in fact, see themselves as calling for anything. They were not writing manifestos for a postmodernist movement. They thought they were simply describing something that was already taking place, inexorably, through the movement of one or another sort of structural force. And in this their attitude was, again, merely an exaggerated version of a much more common one. This, I think, is the best explanation for the current paralyzes. To put it bluntly: now that it has become obvious that “structural forces” alone are not likely to themselves produce something we particularly like, we are left with the prospect of coming up with some actual alternatives. Even aside from the always-daunting fact that this would mean deciding who “we” are, it would require a massive change of theoretical habits. It would mean accepting that people, as part of social movements of one kind or another, might be capable of affecting the course of history in a significant way. That alternatives can indeed be created, and not just come about. That would in turn mean having to give some serious thought to what role intellectuals can legitimately play in this process, and how they might do so without fomenting the kind of stupid sectarian dogmatism we’ve so often ended up fomenting in the past. My own experience over the last year working with the Direct Action Network suggests that on a lot of these questions, the activists are way ahead of us.

Obviously, this book is not itself an attempt to answer these questions. It is, as I say, a book that I wrote largely in order to work out some problems in anthropological theories of value. Still, it strikes me that if one is looking for alternatives to what might be called the philosophy of neoliberalism, its most basic assumptions about the human condition, then a theory of value would not be a bad place to start. If we are not, in fact, calculating individuals trying to accumulate the maximum possible quantities of power, pleasure, and material wealth, then what, precisely, are we? The first three chapters of the book are an effort to survey how social theorists have dealt with such questions in the past, the dead ends that they have tended to run into, and also, how many of most apparently innovative recent theorists have tended to recycle these same old dilemmas—without, for the most part, realizing they were doing so. It ends with a suggestion for one possible way out, starting from what I call the “Heracleitian tradition,” one that sees what seem to us to be fixed objects as patterns of motion, and what seem to be fixed ‘social structures’ as patternings of action. Value, I’ll suggest, can best be seen in this light as the way in which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger, social totality—even if in many cases the totality in question exists primarily in the actor’s imagination. This argument turns on a rather idiosyncratic reading of the ideas of Karl Marx.

The second half of the book focuses more on two themes, exchange, and social creativity. It begins with an essay originally entitled “Beads and Money: Notes Toward a Theory of Wealth and Power” (Graeber 1996), which asks why it is that objects chosen as currencies (beads, shells, gold, silver, etc.,) so often consisted of things that were otherwise used only as objects of adornment; it goes on to explore several detailed ethnographic case studies, ranging from a chapter on wampum in the seventeenth century American northeast, to a return to the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous examples of Trobriand, Maori, and Kwakiutl “gift economies,” and finally, some material drawn from my own work on magic and royal ritual in the Merina kingdom in Madagascar. Over the course of it I try to tease out and further develop some of Mauss’ less well-known ideas, and in particular his belief in the role anthropology could play in the development of revolutionary theory. In many ways, Mauss serves as a perfect complement to Marx: while one dedicated himself to a thorough critique of capitalism, the other was ultimately interested in bringing the fruits of comparative ethnography—the only discipline capable of addressing the full range of human possibilities—to bear on envisioning possible alternatives to it. Each approach has its dangers if taken too far. If one takes up the Maussian project with too much uncritical enthusiasm, one ends up with a naive relativism utterly blind to power. But if one is too rigorous and single-minded about one’s critical project, one can easily slip into a view of social reality so cynical, of a world so utterly creased with power and domination, that it becomes impossible to imagine how anything could really change—and this is, I argue, precisely what began to happen when critical theory was pushed too far in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and opened the way for the neoliberal backlash to be found in so many strains of postmodernism.

I did not write this book just for anthropologists. I like to think that it might be of some interest to social theorists in general, and in particular those currently struggling, like me, with how to relate theory to a sense of political engagement. In the final analysis, it is a plea, as the Zapatistas like to say, “for humanity, and against neoliberalism”: an attempt at least to begin to imagine what a humanistic social science—one that does not, in so doing, abandon everything that is genuinely valuable in the notion of “science”— might actually be like.