Chapter 4 : Action and Reflection, or Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power -------------------------------------------------------------------- People : ---------------------------------- Author : David Graeber Text : ---------------------------------- Chapter 4 — Action and Reflection, or Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power Moby Duck and Donald, captured by the Aridians (Arabs), start blowing soap bubbles, with which the natives are enchanted. “Ha ha. They break when you catch them. Hee, hee.” Ali-Ben-Goli, the chief, says “it’s real magic. My people are laughing like children. They cannot imagine how it works.” “It’s only a secret passed from generation to generation,” says Moby, “I will reveal it if you give us our freedom” ... The chief, in amazement, exclaims “Freedom? That’s not all I’ll give you. Gold, jewels. My treasure is yours, if you reveal the secret.” The Arabs consent to their own despoliation. “We have jewels, but they are of no use to us. They don’t make us laugh like magic bubbles.” —Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck (1975:51) Dutch settlers, as any American schoolchild can tell you, bought Manhattan Island from the local Indians for twenty-four dollars worth of beads and trinkets. The story could be considered one of the founding myths of the United States; in a nation based on commerce, the very paradigm of a really good deal. The story itself is probably untrue (the Indians probably thought they were receiving a gift of colorful exotica as a token of peaceful intentions and were in exchange granting the Dutch the right to make use of the land, not to “own” it permanently), but the fact that so many of the people European merchants and settlers did encounter around the globe were willing to accept European beads, in exchange for land or anything else, has come to stand, in our popular imagination, as one of the defining features of their “primitiveness”—a childish inability to distinguish worthless baubles from things of genuine value. In reality, European merchants began carrying beads on their journeys to Africa and the Indian Ocean because beads had already been used there as a trade currency for centuries. Elsewhere, they found beads were the one of the few European products they could count on the inhabitants being willing to accept, so that in many places where beads had not been a trade currency before their arrival, they quickly became one afterwards. But why was that? What was it about beads, of all things, that make them so well suited to serve as a medium of exchange—or at least, as a medium of trade between people unfamiliar with each other’s tastes and habits? True, beads do fit most of the standard criteria economists usually attribute to money. They may not be divisible, but they are roughly commensurable, highly portable, and they do not decay. But the same could be said of any number of other objects that have never been used as a means of exchange. What sets beads apart from them seems to be nothing more than the fact that they are, indeed, pleasant to look at; or to be more precise, perhaps, that they suited for use as personal adornment. In this at least they are in much larger company. It is remarkable how many of the things adopted as currency in different parts of the world have been things otherwise used primarily, if not exclusively, as objects of adornment. Gold and silver are only the most obvious examples: one could equally well cite the cowries and spondylus shells of Africa, New Guinea, and the Americas, the feather money of the New Hebrides, or any number of similar “primitive currencies.” For the most part, money consists of things that otherwise exist only to be seen. Tiny copper axes have been known to become the stuff of currency, or very thin ones, but never axes that could actually cut down a tree. What I would like to do in this chapter—and to a certain degree, over the course of the rest of this book—is to explore why this should be, and consider some of the implications. Whenever one examines the processes by which the value of objects is established (and this is true whether one is dealing with objects of exchange or wealth more generally), issues of visibility and invisibility almost invariably seem to crop up. For instance, while it is often difficult to come by systematic information about what people actually did with trade beads after they had been traded, what evidence does exist indicates that when they were not worn as personal adornment, they were quite self-consciously cached away and hidden— often, as we will see, in elaborately ritualized contexts. To understand why, however, one has to return to the ethnographic literature and reexamine a whole series of familiar notions about value, power, exchange and the human person. Let me begin, then, by considering the display of wealth. the display of wealth “Kachins,” wrote Edmund Leach (1954:142), “do not look upon movable property as capital to be invested, they regard it rather as an adornment to the person.” They would hardly be the only ones. Insofar as wealth is an object of display, it is always in some sense adornment to the person. In any number of societies the most treasured forms of wealth consist of objects of adornment in the literal sense: heirloom jewelry, one might say, of one sort or another. Often, as with Marcel Mauss’ famous examples from The Gift— Kwakiutl coppers, Maori cloaks and axes, kula armshells and necklaces—they are not only the most valuable objects recognized by members of the societies that produce them, but their most important objects of exchange as well. From this perspective, what I have just said about money might not seem particularly surprising. If objects of adornment are already so highly valued, what would be more natural than to use them to represent value in the abstract? Perhaps there really isn’t much of a mystery after all. But in fact I think there is. Because the kind of value ascribed to heirloom jewelry in most societies has little if anything in common with the value we usually attribute to money. In fact it often stands diametrically opposed to it. In using the phrase “adornment to the person” Leach was probably making an oblique reference to Marcel Mauss’ famous essay on “the category of the person” (1938). In that essay, Mauss argues that in societies lacking an ideology of individualism (“archaic societies,” as he called them), the person, or public self of its members is often built up out of a collection of symbolic properties: names and titles, ritual paraphernalia, or other sorts of insignia and badges of office. Often the very possession of such badges of office can be said to convey title to the office in question. However, such insignia cannot become objects of exchange in any conventional sense; giving one away would be tantamount to abandoning one’s social identity entirely. A king who gives away his crown is a king no longer. There is, however, an obvious continuity between Mauss’ arguments on the person and his argument in The Gift (1925): that gift-giving can be a powerful a way of creating social bonds because gifts always carry with them something of the giver’s self. It is in this essay that Mauss deals with the sort of “heirloom jewelry” mentioned above. Heirlooms of this sort are, typically, unique objects. Each has its own name and history—and it is the latter that is in larger measure responsible for the value it is seen to have. Since that history is almost always (at least in part) a history of ownership, the social identities of giver and receiver tend to become entangled in that of the object—and therefore always to be, to a certain extent, part of the stakes of any transaction in which it is involved. I have already discussed the way that in many systems of exchange, and particularly in what Mauss called “gift economies,” different sorts of valuable are ranked according to their relative abilities to convey history, as in kula exchange (Munn 1986:55–73, 111–18), in which there is a hierarchy of types of goods, with perishable and generic substances like food at the bottom and unique imperishable valuables at the top. Armshells and necklaces themselves are divided into nameless, generic shells, ranked at the bottom, a more valuable class of rare shells for which there is only a handful examples of any given variety, and finally, at the top, absolutely unique heirlooms with their own names and histories that everyone is supposed to have heard of. But all this serves only to underline how little the value of kula shells and other “heirloom jewelry” resembles that of money. Money does not consist of unique objects at all. At least in principle, it is absolutely generic, any one dollar bill precisely the same as any other. As a result money presents a frictionless surface to history. There is no way to know where a given dollar bill has been. Nor is there any reason one should care, since neither the identity of its former owners nor the nature of transactions in which it has previously been involved in any way affects its value. This is why transactions involving money can be said to be “anonymous”: the social identities of those transacting need not become part of the stakes of any transaction— in fact, they do not have to play any part in the transaction at all. It is an anthropological commonplace that clothing and adornment serve as markers of social identity. Insofar as they are objects of display, they act to define differences between kinds of people. The display of heirloom jewelry, too, could be said to assert the distinctiveness of its owner. And so with wealth in general: in our own society, anyone who has managed to accumulate a very large amount of money will inevitably begin to translate some of it into objects of unique historical value: old mansions, Van Goghs, pedigreed thoroughbreds—all of which may be considered adornment to the owner’s person. (In fact, they would be considered rather odd if they did not.) Clearly, money itself can never become an adornment to the person in the same way. It can mark distinction only in the quantitative sense: some people have more of it, some less. But I would argue—in fact I will be dedicating most of the next two sections to arguing—that money is quite often identified with its owner’s person, if in a somewhat different sense. Rather than serving as a mark of distinctiveness, it tends to be identified with the holder’s generic, hidden capacities for action. action and reflection If one turns to the literature on power rather than that on value, there is no lack of material on issues of visibility and invisibility. Phrases like “panoptics” and “the gaze of power” have been bandied about quite widely in social theory for some time now. Most of these usages of course go back to the work of Michel Foucault, particularly Discipline and Punish (1977:170–94), in which he argues that there was a major shift in the way power was exercised in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the feudal system that had existed until then, he writes, “power was what was seen” (1977:187). It found its place in cathedrals, in palaces, and especially in the “material body of the king,” which was on constant display in royal pageants and spectacles. Under feudalism, only the powerful were individualized, made “material” and “particular.” Their faces were displayed on paintings and coins, their genealogies and deeds became the official history of the state, their private lives the stuff of public policy (1977:191–92). The powerless remained faceless spectators. With the end of the feudal state, however, the terms of power reverse themselves. In the “disciplinary systems” that began to emerge at this time, power is exercised by faceless, invisible bureaucracies that inspect, examine, and evaluate their objects. The logic is one of surveillance, and it is enshrined in such newfound institutions as the factory, the hospital inspection, the school examination, and the military review. Within such institutions, not only do those who wield power become depersonalized abstractions, but it is the objects of surveillance who now become individualized—at least insofar as they each can be inspected, judged, and ranked according to specific formal criteria (1977:189–92). Now, Foucault represents this change as a clean break between two entirely different types of regime, but I think it would be better to treat these as two different modalities of power, ones that coexist in any society. After all, it’s not as if pageantry, spectacle, and the display of power disappeared with the end of feudalism, any more than the display of wealth.[83] But this is not to say that there was not a certain shift of emphasis in European culture around that time. There are plenty of indications that there was—not least of them changes that took place in standards of personal adornment among Europe’s elite in the period in question. J. C. Flugel, an historian of dress, has referred to it as “the great masculine renunciation” (in Silverman 1985). By the eighteenth century, wealthy men had largely abandoned the colorful costumes of the Renaissance—bright ornamental clothing, makeup, jewelry, etc.—all of this came to be regarded as appropriate only for women. By around 1750, one already had a formal male costume much along the lines of what would soon develop into the modern business suit. As Terence Turner has pointed out (1980a:50–56), the new male garb actually developed out of “sporting clothes”—that is, hunting costumes favored by the rural gentry—and the change in attire was part and parcel of a broader ideological shift among the ruling classes; away, that is, from the old aristocratic ethos of consumption and toward an emphasis on bourgeois sobriety and the moral value of productive work. Male costume now implied a capacity for action; since the sphere of consumption came to be seen as an essentially female domain, women’s costume changed less. I might add that differences in dress also came to encode an implicit theory of gender: one in which, as John Berger (1972:45–46) has aptly put it, “a man’s presence is dependent on the promise of power which he embodies,” on his capacity for action—“a power which he exercises on others. A woman’s presence,” by contrast, “expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.” Berger’s insight, I think, has particularly interesting implications for any analysis of the politics of vision. Forced, he says (1972:46), to live her life within the terms set by a male power that holds that what she is what she is seen to be by others, “a woman must continually watch herself. She is almost always accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping.” A woman in this situation cannot act simply for the sake of acting, and her self is constantly doubled into an implicitly male surveyor and female surveyed.[84] It is easy to see how dress codes reinforce this. Formal male dress is designed to hide the body. Its sobriety seems intended to efface not only a man’s physical form but his very individuality, rendering him abstract and, in a certain sense, invisible. Clothing for women, on the other hand, not only reveals more of the body (or at least hints at revealing it): it transforms what is revealed into one of a collection of objects of adornment—body parts becoming equivalent, as such, to clothing, makeup, and jewelry—that together define the wearer as a sight, and by extension, as relatively concrete and material. Now, as a critique of gender relations, this analysis applies only to Western society—and relatively recent Western society at that. But the basic division between a relatively invisible self acting on the outside world and a concrete and visible one relating primarily to itself is, I think, of much wider significance. It may very well be intrinsic to the dynamics of human thought and action themselves. The same dichotomy is implicit, for instance, in Pierre Bourdieu’s emphasis (1977) on how the grace and artistry of the truly competent social actor is largely dependent on that actor’s not being aware of precisely what the principles that inform her actions are. These principles become conscious only when actors are jolted out of their accustomed ways of doing things by suddenly having to confront some clear alternative to it—a process Bourdieu refers to as “objectification.” One becomes self-conscious, in other words, when one does not know precisely what to do. A similar distinction between action and self-consciousness is played out in Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “mirror phase” in children’s development (1977). Infants, he writes, are unaware of the precise boundaries between themselves and the world around them. Little more than disorganized bundles of drives and motivations, they have no coherent sense of self. In part this is because they lack any single object on which to fix one. Hence Lacan’s “mirror phase,” which begins when the child first comes face to face with some external image of her own self, which serves as the imaginary totality around which a sense of that self can be constructed. Nor is this a one-time event. The ego is, for Lacan, always an imaginary construct: in everyday life and everyday experience, one remains a conflicting multiplicity of thoughts, libidinal drives, and unconscious impulses. Acting self and imaginary unity never cease to stand opposed. Both theorists (and I could cite many others) pose action and reflection as different aspects or moments of the self, so that experience becomes a continual swinging back and forth between them. Not only is this, I think, a compelling way to look at the structure of human experience: there is a good deal of evidence that cross-culturally, it is a very common one. It is also one that almost always finds expression in metaphors of vision. Here let me turn from contemporary French theorists to a thoroughly antiquated English one and refer the reader to Edward Tylor’s discussion of the origins of the idea of the soul in Primitive Culture (1874:430–63). Tylor surveys the terminology used to describe the soul in dozens of different languages across the world. Almost all of them, he finds, fall into one of two groups. On the one hand, there is what might be called the “lifesoul,” or vital principle in humans, often figuratively identified with the heart or breath. The connotation is of a hidden force responsible for the animation of the body, and usually for such abstract powers as thought and intentionality as well. The life-soul represents, in short, a person’s inner capacity for action, their inner powers. On the other hand, there is a very different kind of “soul,” typically referred to by some word whose primary meaning is either “shadow” or “reflection.” In either case, the term conjures up a person’s physical appearance, detached from their actual physical being. In almost all of Tylor’s examples, this “image-soul” (if I may call it that) is said to be able to wander free of the body. Almost always, too, it is believed to endure after the body’s death—which the “life-soul” most often is not. Though Tylor claimed these two were ultimately identified, his own evidence makes it clear that most cultures do not identify them at all. They tend to see them as separate, if complementary, aspects of the self. The distinction may not be a universal one (certainly it isn’t universal in the relatively formal terms Tylor used); but it is so remarkably common that it seems reasonable to ask why. Why should mirror images should be so obvious a metaphor for the public self? What is it about powers of action that make them seem invisible? Perhaps the best answer to the second question comes from Thomas Hobbes (1968:659; cf. Pye 1984:93–94), who suggested, in discussing idolatry, that whatever is invisible is “unknown, that is, of an unlimited power.” Total lack of specificity, in other words, implies an infinite potential. What is entirely unknown could be anything—hence, it could do anything as well. What this would imply is that the hiding of the body and effacement of individuality encountered, for instance, in formal male clothing is itself a way of stating that a man is to be defined by his capacity for action—or, as Berger puts it, “the promise of power he embodies.” It would also help to explain why human capacities for action in general—what Tylor called the “life soul”—should so often be defined as something impossible to see. To be visible on the other hand is to be concrete and “specific” (a word derived from the Latin specere, which means “to look at”). It is also to be the object of action rather than one who acts on others: Berger notes that even when gazing into a mirror, a woman’s self can be said to be split between alien, male observer and passive, female observed. In a similar way, the power exercised through the display of wealth or royal splendor is not a power that acts directly on others. It is always, in its essence, a persuasive power, meant to inspire in others acts of compliance, homage or recognition directed towards the person engaging in display.[85] This anyway is one implication of Berger’s analysis of “female presence” (1972:46–48), one of great significance for the study of power in general: Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, a woman must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman’s self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman’s presence regulates what is and is not “permissible” within her presence. Every one of her actions—whatever its direct purpose or motivation— is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. What Berger describes is clearly a kind of power born of subordination. Perhaps it is better treated as a mere residual of power, all that’s left to those who have no access to the more direct variety. But in purely formal terms, there is little to distinguish it from the kind of power exercised through the display of aristocratic wealth or royal splendor. Kings and nobles too could be said to have decorated themselves with wealth in order to “demonstrate to others how their whole selves would like to be treated.” After all, in the final analysis, a king’s status is based on his ability to persuade others to recognize him as such—and to pay him tribute for that reason. By making a show of magnificence, a king is able to define himself in such a way that others are moved to transfer some of their wealth to him. They do so not as part of any implicit exchange, not by virtue of anything they expect the king to do, but simply by virtue of the sort of person they believe him to be.[86] By covering themselves with gold, then, kings persuade others to cover them with gold as well. Max Weber (1978:490–91) once observed that feudal aristocrats tended to justify their status through their way of being, their mode of life in the present, while the lower orders—including the mercantile classes—tended to define themselves by what they did, created, or aspired to. Here, too, the dichotomy lives on, now largely displaced onto ideas about gender. Just as men of high status tend to be defined in bourgeois terms, as active producers, elite women have inherited the old aristocratic role of passive consumers. As the poet has it, “Man Does, Woman Is” (Graves 1964). Weber’s way of framing the issue is particularly useful in bringing out its relationship to time. In a sense, the distinction between my “action” and “reflection” is really only one between actions to be carried out in the future and ones already carried out in the past. “The promise of power” a man embodies is his potential for acting in the future; at the same time, a “woman’s exemplary treatment of herself ” consists of actions she has already undertaken, or at least ones she is still in the process of carrying out. The person could be said to vanish in its orientation to action because action expresses a completion that only can exist in the future. At the same time, one’s visible persona, one’s “being,” is simply the cumulative effects of actions that have been directed towards one in the past—of all those actions that have made one what one is. Being—if it is socially significant—is congealed action, and just as every category is the other side of a set of practices (Turner and Fajans 1988), every unique being is the result of an equally singular history. By engaging in persuasive display, then, all one is really doing is calling on others to imitate actions that are implicitly being said to have already been carried out in the past. money versus coin So far, I’ve been arguing that Mauss’ gifts are caught up in the specific social identity of their givers and receivers (their exterior “image,” one might say); money, identified with a person’s generic and invisible inner powers. I am not the first person to have made this point. In fact, something very similar can be found in the opening chapters of Marx’s Capital, in which he talks about the dynamics of commodity exchange. In Marx’s conception of the capitalist marketplace, money and commodities are continually being redefined in the perceptions of their buyers and sellers, shifting back and forth between what he calls abstract “content” and concrete “form.” The dialectical terminology may seem a bit obscure to modern readers, but the meaning of these terms is not really all that different from my own “action” and “reflection.” Let me begin with one of Marx’s own examples (1967:18–62). Say one man has twenty yards of linen; another has a coat. The two agree to exchange one for the other. By doing so, they are agreeing that the value of the two objects is equivalent. However, each has a very different way of perceiving that equivalence. The first aims to acquire the coat; obviously, then, it is the particular, material qualities of the coat that are important to him. This is not at all true of his attitude toward the linen. The linen is just a means to his end: anything else would have done just as well, provided its value was considered equivalent to that of the coat. As Marx puts it, from his point of view the linen is a mere abstraction; the coat a concrete, specific “form.” Of course, from the other man’s point of view, exactly the opposite is true. Marx held this is true of all transactions, including those involving money. Everything depends on the point of view—and the intentions—of the actors. If I sell a commodity, my object is to acquire money—therefore, it is money that seems a concrete “form” to me; the goods I have to sell seem a formless abstraction. From the point of view of the purchaser, of course, it is the other way around. In other words, it is always the object of action—the object of desire— that is concrete and particular in the eyes of the person who is acting or desiring. The means have no particular features of their own. Instead, they tend to be identified with the user’s own powers of action. In his discussion of hoarding in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1970:125–37) and the Grundrisse (1971:228–34), Marx phrases the distinction between money in its abstract and concrete aspects as a distinction between “money” and “coin.” “Coin,” he says, is the physical object offered in exchange. It only becomes “money” in the strict sense of the term when it is temporarily withdrawn from circulation—that is, when it is not the immediate object of anyone’s action but instead represents a kind of universal potential for action. By holding on to the stuff, the hoarder preserves his power, which is the power to buy anything at all. For the hoarder, money becomes a kind of ascetic religion—Marx likens it to Puritanism—in which the owner tends to develop an intensely personal, even secretive relationship with the source of his powers. The impulse, once one has accumulated a substantial hoard, is always to hide it in the ground where no one else can see it: An outward expression of the desire to withdraw money from the stream of circulation and to save it from the social metabolism is the burying of it, so that social wealth is turned into an imperishable subterranean hoard with an entirely furtive private relationship to the commodity-owner. Doctor Bernier, who spent some time at Aurangzeb’s court at Delhi, relates that merchants, especially the non-Muslim heathens, in whose hands nearly the entire commerce and all money are concentrated—secretly bury their money deep in the ground, “being held in thrall to the belief that the money they hide during their lifetime will serve them in the next world after their death.” (Marx 1970:130; original emphasis) As his example implies, Marx did not see such behavior as deriving from capitalism per se but from the nature of money itself, from its abstract and almost mystical powers. In a similar vein, Engels (in Shell 1978:41) suggested that coined money, when first introduced into the Greek world in the seventh century BC, was not seen as an economic instrument so much as a magical charm: as he puts it, “a talisman that could at will transform itself into any desirable or desired object.” Engels was no doubt getting a bit carried away with himself. But as Marc Shell (1978:62) points out in a brilliant essay called “The Ring of Gyges,” the stories told in ancient Greece about the man who first coined money did focus on a magical charm of sorts. They were about a ring that could make its wearer invisible (1978:62). Gyges, a sixth-century ruler of Lydia, was widely credited in antiquity— as he is today—with having been the first king to coin money. According to Herodotus, Gyges was not a legitimate king at all but a usurper. Originally a mere courtier and friend of King Candaules, his rise to power began when his friend, given to much lavish praise of his wife’s beautiful body, finally convinced him to conceal himself in the queen’s chambers in order to prove that he was not exaggerating. The queen, having discovered what happened, and outraged at this assault on her modesty, demanded that Gyges either kill the king and take his place, or forfeit his own life. Gyges therefore concealed himself once again in the same spot, waited for the king to pay his nightly visit to his wife, and did away with him. In Herodotus, the story is, as Shell emphasizes, intended to parallel another story of usurpation, the story of Deioces the Mede. This is also Herodotus’ myth of the origins of tyranny. Deioces was a Median nobleman who developed a reputation as a judge— so great was his reputation, in fact, that when he tried to step down from his office, the people offered him the kingship in order to retain him. As soon as he had the power, Deoices hid himself behind a golden wall in his capital and established a rule that no one should be allowed to see him; at the same time, he filled his kingdom full of spies. The two stories parallel each other in a number of ways. Gyges was the founder of the ruling dynasty of Lydia, Deioces that of Media; the meeting of their two descendants, Croesus and Cyrus, when Lydia was conquered by the Persian empire, was the culmination of the first half of Herodotus’ history. In certain ways the two are also inversions of one another. Gyges used his invisibility to gain power, but it was a power that he apparently wielded in the traditional, public fashion. Deioces on the other hand managed to convert his fame, his public visibility, into power—but in doing so he transformed the terms in which that power was exercised, making it invisible and private. Gyges became a king, even if he did so through illegitimate means; Deioces became a tyrant. Taken this way the two stories move in opposite directions, and it seems to me that it makes a great deal of sense that they should. Gyges after all was not considered the inventor of money; he was considered the inventor of coinage— and these are not at all the same thing. Shell goes on to present a great deal of evidence that Greeks of Herodotus’ time did tend to talk about money as having a certain kind of invisible power, one politically dangerous for the very reason of its invisibility. Plato first introduces the story of Gyges when one of the participants in his dialogue claims that wealth is a good thing because it can make the owner invisible to the avenging eyes of Hades when he dies (a curious echo of the Hindu merchants cited by Marx); Hades itself means “unseen,” and Plato elsewhere claims that Plutus, the god of Hades, is so named because the word for “wealth” is ploutos, and because gold and silver “come up from below out of the earth” (Shell 1978:21n25). Since it represented private interests rather than those of the state, money was seen to have much in common with tyranny—defined as the exercise of state power in the private interest. Public and private, visible and invisible: these were no mere casual metaphors. The distinction between public and private was central to the way the Greek polis defined itself. Jean-Pierre Vernant (1983) has described the emergence of the polis, over the sixth and seventh centuries BC, as a process of disclosure and unveiling, even desacralization, in which every power that had once been secret or confined to the interiors of aristocratic families was brought into the public domain of the agora where it was visible to all. Debates began to be carried out in public, laws published. “The old sacra, badges of investiture, religious symbols, emblems, wooden images, jealously preserved as talismans of power in the privacy of palaces or the crannies of priestly houses” were gradually “moved to the temple, an open and public place” (1983:54). The furtive power of money was no exception: private hoarding was discouraged by the state. To the extent that money remained hidden, it was seen as something dangerous, subterranean, a threat to the cohesiveness of the political community. The state of course kept its own hoard, its public treasury, but it made a point of keeping it in a form that was visible to all: the Athenian gold reserves, for instance, were used to plate the monumental statue of Athena in the Parthenon. What it did release for private use, the state released stamped with its own impression. Hence I return once again to the distinction between money and coin. I should emphasize that Gyges was not credited with the invention of money. He was credited with the invention of coinage. They are hardly the same thing. If one simply defines money as economists do—as a measure and medium of exchange—then one can certainly say that gold and silver had already existed in the Middle East for several thousand years. It has been used in Lydia and Greece as well. It is just that before Gyges, this money was not stamped out in uniform denominations by the state. People carried it around in nuggets, lumps, and bits, and merchants kept scales with which to weigh the stuff out at each transaction. It might seem an unwieldy way to go about buying and selling, but any system maintained unchanged for thousands of years must have worked well enough from the point of view of the people using it. Why, then, did governments in Lydia and, soon after, Greece begin to change things? What evidence there is suggests the invention of coinage did little to make trade easier. Ancient Greece was divided into hundreds of tiny citystates; every one began issuing their own coinage, each with its own system of denominations; these denominations might be based on any of a variety of entirely different systems of weights and measures. Since the coins circulated widely, the average marketgoer was likely to arrive with a pouch full of completely heterogeneous currencies, which, for all intents and purposes, might as well have a random assortment of lumps of gold and silver. For most important transactions, Greek merchants were still obliged to weigh coins out on scales. As Moses Finley (1974:166–69; Vidal-Naquet and Austin 1978) notes, coinage was not created to improve economic efficiency. It was not so much an economic measure as a political one. To be able to issue one’s own currency was a mark of political independence: every citystate, however small, felt obliged to do so. But I don’t think this is a full explanation: one could still ask why the issuing of coinage became a mark of independence to begin with. What I am suggesting is that if the polis felt the need to stamp money with its own image, it did so because it saw money as a dangerous, furtive power that had to be tamed and domesticated by rendering it visible. The emblem of public authority was to be impressed on it through violence, literally hammered in. The resulting coins were often things of great beauty. Some were renowned as works of art even in their own day. But in the end, the very fact that the state was willing to seek out the finest artists of the day to cast its dies could be considered evidence of how desperate it had become to substitute some other definition of value for one that had a continual capacity to elude it. It was an attempt to transform money into an object of adornment, something visible in the most exemplary of fashions.[87] The legend of Gyges contains no explicit reference to the invention of coinage. Still, one might say that it is itself a model for the process: the transformation of private and invisible powers into legitimate, political ones— ones made limited and particular by the public gaze. various kinds of fetishism Earlier I made a distinction between two sorts of social power: the power to act directly on others, and the power to define oneself in such a way as to convince others how they should act toward you. One tends to be attributed to the hidden capacities of the actor, the other to visible forms of display. By now, it should be easy to see how this same analysis can also be applied to value. If money tends to become an extension of its holder’s capacities to act on the world (thus inspiring, according to Marx, the impulse to hide it), objects whose value is seen to lie in their particular histories or identities have an equally strong tendency to be assimilated to the social identity or persona of their owners, thus generating the impulse to show them off. It is important to emphasize that these terms are never fixed. Few objects are simply one thing or another. In a market system, as Marx reminds us, money and commodities are always two things at once, since buyer and seller conceive them from opposite points of view. And in any system of value there are, at the very least, constant diversions and slippages back and forth, continual struggles over definition. Often—as in the case of the Greek polis—these struggles are quite openly political ones. And insofar as they involve attempts to reconcile such contrasting values as artistic beauty, wealth, and civic authority, one might say that in essence, they are always political. The constant transformation of the visible into the invisible and back again might provide an answer to the question with which I began this chapter: Why beads? Why, in so many societies, should money consist of objects of adornment? Recall that at the time, I contrasted money to the sort of objects of adornment that played so central a role in Mauss’ writings on the gift—as in anthropological exchange theory in general. These, I said, were unique treasures, and as such entirely different from money. But Mauss himself remarks that the rarest and most valuable of them—Maori axes and cloaks, Kwakiutl coppers, and kula armshells and necklaces—were all seen as having a personality, will, and intelligence of their own. It is almost as if the very fact of an object’s having an individual identity—a unique form, a name, a history—implied the presence some sort of hidden life-force or agency behind it, just as, in Tylor, the inner life-soul always lies hidden behind a person’s unique exterior “image.”[88] But why should heirlooms tend to have a capacity for action attributed to them? In part, it is probably an effect of their value. Value, after all, is something that mobilizes the desires of those who recognize it, and moves them to action. Just as royal splendor calls on its audience to do as others have done, so does the perception of value in objects of exchange. “Others have sought to acquire these things,” is the implicit message, “and therefore so should you.” In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object’s current identity—whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some people have been known to go to acquire it, or the fact that it was once used to cut off a mythical giant’s head. Since the value of the actions has already been fixed in the physical being of the object, it is perhaps a short leap to begin attributing the agency behind such actions to the object as well, and speak, as Mauss does, of valuables that transfer themselves from owner to owner or actively influence their owners’ fates. The obvious comparison here is with Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism and of money. According to Marx, the only thing really lying behind the specific, material form of the object one desires to buy is the human energy that went into producing it; even so, the desirer tends to see those powers as intrinsic to the object itself. They seem to give it a will and power of its own. If nothing else, commodities certainly exert a power over anyone who desires them. Marx’s commodities differ from heirlooms largely because in their case, the illusion of agency emerges from the fact that their true history has been forgotten; in the case of heirlooms, the value that makes the illusion of agency possible derives from that very history, real or imagined. In either case, energies that went into creating the particular form of the object and made it desirable are displaced; they come to seem a ghostly agency that guides its present movements. The object of desire becomes an illusory mirror of the desirer’s own manipulated intentions. All this, in turn, would make the various mirror metaphors that have cropped up over the course of this chapter[89] much easier to understand. A person looking into a mirror is split into active and passive, observer and observed. The very perception of one’s own image implies the existence of an unseen agent who is seeing it. Walter Ong (1977:121–44) has even suggested that it is in the nature of vision always to suggest a beyond, something unseen. Eyes take in only the surfaces of things. To tell if a coin is gold or merely gilded, you don’t stare at it: you bite it, weigh it on your palm, or rap it to hear the sound. Looking at a thing, according to Ong, is always looking at a mere fraction of a thing, and the viewer is always at least vaguely aware that there is something further underneath. At any rate, the continuities between action and reflection, the constant movements between visible and invisible forms of value, the fact that valued objects are so often seen as embodying a hidden power all make it easier to see how money might emerge from objects of adornment. These things are always slipping into their opposites. At this point I can finally return to beads. I am not sure if beads have ever, anywhere, been used as money in a fully monetarized economy. Almost always, they have played the role of trade currency—as an anonymous means of exchange between people of different cultural worlds, most often between members of societies in which there is a full-blown commercial economy and others in which there is not. No doubt one reason beads lend themselves so well to this role is that they can be so easily transformed back and forth from unique forms to generic ones: they can be bought in bulk, sewn together into elaborate beadwork or onto other forms of adornment, and then—whenever the need is felt—broken up into individual, mutually indistinguishable items once again. It makes them ideally suited to pass back and forth between radically different domains (or, if you really must, “regimes”) of value. Let me take up one example of how trade beads could be taken up. Madagascar and the slave trade Indian Ocean trade beads were in wide use in Madagascar at least from the twelfth century A.D. (Verin 1986), and probably well before. Red coral, and later red glass beads, seem to have functioned as a trade currency. In the seventeenth century, European merchants stopping for provisions on their way to the East Indies found that these were the only kind the inhabitants would readily accept in exchange for their cattle. During the eighteenth century, however, the importance of beads declined with the rise of the slave trade,[90] which was conducted largely in silver. Spanish dollars gradually took the place red beads once had. Imerina, the part of Madagascar whose later history is best known, is located on the central plateau of the island, far from the major ports of trade. Imerina was, for much of this time, something of a backwater. Politically fragmented, it was a regular target for slave-raiders from the coasts; and its rulers were almost constantly at war with one another, partly to secure captives they could sell to the foreign merchants—most of them apparently Indian Muslims but including the occasional European—who periodically passed through the country. Maurice Bloch (1990:182–85) has described the economic situation that prevailed around 1777, when the first European account of Merina society was written. There were weekly markets throughout Imerina, in which all sorts of goods were available for sale. For money, silver dollars were cut up into a series of smaller denominations—the smallest being 1/720th of a dollar—and weighed out at each transaction.[91] However, as Bloch points out, the supply of silver was unreliable and if too much time went by without slave traders passing through, it would often dry up and the money economy cease to function. As soon as one appeared again, markets revived and rulers were once again able to collect taxes. One reason the money supply could dry up so quickly was the habit of melting down imported coins to produce silver chains and other ornaments. Along with beads, silver ornaments were the most important forms of personal adornment in Imerina at this time. Chains in particular—the largest containing as much as four hundred dollars’ worth of silver—often became important family heirlooms (Edmunds 1897:474–76). It was not every family, however, that was allowed to own them. The sources are frustratingly vague, but apparently there was a fairly elaborate set of sumptuary laws regarding clothes and personal ornaments. Red beads, for example, could be worn only by men or women of noble status; the bulk of the population seem, in theory, not to have been allowed to wear expensive adornment of any kind at all. That at least is the implication of an account of the royal assembly held in 1834, at which the sumptuary laws were abolished. By this time, Imerina was a unified kingdom and its king, Radama I, signatory to a treaty with England abolishing the slave trade; the account is based on that of Radama’s British adviser, James Hastie, as published in William Ellis’ History of Madagascar (1837, 2:302–303). The British government had sent Radama seeds and cuttings for potential cash crops that might substitute for the export of slaves, and at this assembly he distributed them to representatives of his people, urging on them advantages of commercial agriculture. Several representatives, however, objected that most of Radama’s subjects had little motivation to compete over wealth, since sumptuary laws did not allow them to acquire any of the good things one could buy with it. After some discussion, the king agreed to abolish the laws. The result, according to Ellis, was an outpouring of public celebration unmatched since the abolition of the trade itself. Around the same time—perhaps it was at the same assembly—Radama also announced that any debt incurred for the purpose of buying ornaments for the dead would no longer be considered recoverable (Ellis 1837, 2:304). It was necessary to do so, he said, because ... many persons, endeavoring to make a display of respect for deceased relatives, often contracted debts in purchasing valuable clothes and ornaments to throw into the graves of the departed, agreeably to ancient usage; and several instances occurred, where individuals had been reduced to slavery on account of their inability to discharge the debts so created. Thus the dead had been enveloped in rich clothing, covered with ornaments, and surrounded with silver, whilst the nearest living relatives were by these means reduced to the lowest state of degradation. Sumptuary laws presumably did not apply to the dead. Even if they had, there would have been little way of enforce them, since no one would have dared to enter an unrelated person’s tomb. It is hard to avoid the impression that taken together, these measures amounted to an attempt to shift the competition over adornment from the dead to the living—to bring it out into the open, so to speak. If so, it was not a particularly successful one. Although burying expensive ornaments in tombs probably did become less common as time went on, the habit of wearing them never took hold among the common people. Quite the opposite: over the following decades even the rich appear to have abandoned them. By mid-century, descriptions of wealthy people decked out in beads and silver, so common in Radama’s time, disappear from travelers’ accounts (cf. Edmunds). Many of the huge silver chains and other elaborate forms of jewelry must have been melted down or buried. Others were retained as family heirlooms but rarely if ever worn or displayed. The one area in which both beads and silver ornaments did continue to be used after Radama’s time was the one way their current (mostly plastic and tin) descendants are still used today: in the making of ody, or magic charms. ody and sampy The term ody was typically applied to objects that served a single purpose. The purposes could vary enormously—to prevent attacks by crocodiles, to guarantee the success of a journey, to inspire love or to make an opponent’s tongue trip over his words in court—but they were always limited. Ody were also owned by individuals; charms called sampy provided a more general protection for larger social groups. Most descent groups, for instance, seem to have had their own sampy, and there were royal sampy that guarded the kingdom as a whole. The latter would periodically be brought before the king’s subjects, and water in which the sampy had been washed would be sprinkled on the assembled people to protect them from sorcery, disease, and other dangers (Berg 1979). Ody and sampy were not, however, objects of display. The various magical substances that made them up were almost always hidden inside in a horn, box, or small satchel, and the containers were usually kept out of sight as well. Even when one carried or wore them, it was usually underneath one’s clothes. Most ody were kept inside, wrapped in silk cloth, on the domestic altar that was always set up in the northeast corner of the owner’s house. Sampy were even more elaborately preserved in iron pots or chests: even when they were periodically brought out before the public, placed atop long poles in public ceremonies, they were always swathed in silk and thus effectively invisible (cf. Callet 1908:179,190–91). As for the hidden ingredients themselves, they mainly consisted of pieces of the wood, leaves, bark, or roots of rare trees. All of it was “medicine” or fanafody, no formal distinction being drawn between what we would consider herbal remedies (e.g., an infusion of crushed leaves for an upset stomach) and ceremonial magic (e.g., praying to a piece of wood to direct lightning on one’s enemies). Perhaps in early times, and certainly by that of Radama, beads and silver ornaments were incorporated into this pharmacological system; in many cases, popular varieties of bead were named after some kind of magical wood, whose powers that bead was then assumed to share (cf. Bernard-Thierry 1946:84). I should emphasize, however, that these powers were not seen to derive from the nature of the materials themselves. The latter were little more than a conduit. The efficacy of a charm was referred to as its hasina. In nineteenthcentury Imerina, almost all ritual action involved the creation or manipulation of hasina—a term Alain Delivre (1974:144–45) defines as the capacity to affect the world through imperceptible means. Most often, he adds, hasina turned on the relation between an invisible spirit and a material object through which that spirit could come into contact with human beings: ancestors were spirits one encountered mainly though their tombs or relics; Vazimba, spirits one encountered through certain trees, rocks, or springs; and so on. All these objects became conduits of the spirit’s agency, and could thus be referred to as masina—that is, “having hasina.” The same was true of ody, whose power was derived from the relation between the ingredients and a class of spirits called Ranakandriana. To use an ody, one had to first remove it from its wrappings, then call on it to “wake” and address it in prayer. Often one would have to explain in some detail what the charm was being asked to do, and why. Ody, in other words, were treated like conscious beings; they were objects vested with a sort of disembodied intelligence. In prayers they were often invoked in such terms as “you who have no eyes but can still see, no ears but can still hear,” or “you whose name is known but whose face is never seen” (Vig 1969:59–60; Callet 1908:84; cf. Ruud 1969:218). Malagasy sources are always careful to distinguish between this consciousness (and capacity for action), identified with the spirit, and the “wood” or physical ingredients of a charm (Callet 1908:82–85). However, and this is where things get complicated, while a charm’s personality and capacity for action was identified with a disembodied spirit, that spirit had nothing to do with its individual identity. In invocations, one called out to ody by their names; but the name was not that of a spirit. It was simply the name of the most important piece of wood that made them up. What made ody different from one another, then, were their ingredients. All this is part of a much broader Malagasy ritual logic, one already suggested by Delivre. All spiritual forces in the Malagasy cosmos tend to be generic beings. They only take on individual identity through the objects by means of which people come into contact with them. In themselves they are all, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable. In some myths, they are said to be quite literally identical in appearance (Ottino 1978:36); they are always identical in the uniform ambiguity that surrounds them, their complete lack of defining features—which in the case of the Ranakandriana is brought home by the continual emphasis all sources place on how difficult it is to see them. Ranakandriana were said to live in caves or lightless places where their voices were heard but their forms could not be made out. They were said to fly away as soon as one tried to set eyes on them; likewise, in prayers such as those cited above, they were regularly described as invisible or bodiless. The uniform ambiguity of Malagasy spiritual forces has led to endless debates among foreign observers. There have been long discussions, for instance, over whether terms like Zanahary (“creator” or “god”) should be translated in the singular or the plural. From a Christian standpoint this is obviously a very important question. But it does not seem to have been a question anyone else in Madagascar has ever found particularly important. I would suggest that the ambiguity is itself really half the point: in the absence of any sort of defining feature, “spirits” become sheer formless potential. The term zanahary, for example, could apply to any being capable of creation through imperceptible means; rather than ask what such beings were like, or how many of them there were, it makes more sense to see this power of creation as emerging from their very lack of definition. Their generic nature is itself a way of representing power or unlimited possibility. By this logic, it was the fact that the ingredients of charms were hidden from sight that gave them their generic capacity for action. However, ody were not simply generic potential. The ingredients that made them up were specific objects, and it was those ingredients that determined the specific ways in which that capacity could make itself known. Each ingredient, in other words, corresponded to one of an ody’s powers. Lars Vig (1969), a Norwegian missionary, provides some very detailed descriptions of how ody were supposed to work. Consider, for example, his account of a popular ody basy, or “rifle charm,” meant to protect soldiers from enemy bullets (Vig 1969:70–72). The charm contains fifteen elements in all, most of them bits of wood. In the invocation, the name of each is called out and the element called on to act. In each case, the words used to describe the action are derived from that element’s name. The first, a piece of the arify plant (the word arify is from a root meaning “to turn aside”), is called on to turn aside the bullets fired by the enemy. Another sliver of wood called betambana (“many obstacles”) is asked to “stop the enemy from attacking, make some disaster occur that will be an obstacle to their attack” (71), and so on. In almost every case, the action of the charm is directed outward, toward someone other than the person using it—and this too is typical of Malagasy ody. Rifle charms never make their owners impervious to bullets. They make people shooting at them miss. Love magic does not make the user beautiful. It invokes desire directly in someone else. Rather than change the qualities of the bearer, ody always confer on her a certain capacity for action. Like Marx’s hoards of hidden gold, or Engel’s talisman, the hidden elements of charms were, in effect, identified with their owners’ ability to act upon the world. sacrifice and the creation of charms This play of the particular and the generic, the seen and the unseen, recurred on every level of Merina ritual practice. So too did the link between words and objects implied in the prayers cited above. Take rituals of sacrifice. Sorona, the word used for what we would call “sacrifice,” actually had a much broader meaning. It could be applied to any “religious ceremony to obtain a desired benefit from that to which one prays” (Richardson 1885:591). Even more often, the word sorona was used not for the ritual itself, but for objects meant to represent that “desired benefit” and that were intentionally preserved as offerings for that reason. In this sense, sorona were the opposite of faditra—objects representing evils to be avoided—that were intentionally cast away. Most rituals involved such acts of consecration and casting away. Each time the king dispatched a military expedition, we are told (Callet 1908:51–52), the royal astrologers would offer an unbroken silver coin[92] as sorona, praying that the army would remain similarly whole and not be broken into pieces by the enemy. Then they would cast a pinch of ashes from the king’s hearth to the winds as a faditra, praying as they did so that the army should not be destroyed as had the wood now rendered ash. Most often, the dedication of sorona would be accompanied by a vow. One might, say, place a bead or bulrush on the ritual shelf in the northeast corner of one’s house, promising as one did so to sacrifice a sheep or a bullock to the invisible powers if the “desired benefit” was obtained. If it was, sacrificing the animal would itself be called a sorona, and the head and feet of the sacrificed animal would also be preserved (cf. Sibree l880:302–303). Now, sorona often consisted of exactly the same kind of objects that were used as ingredients of ody. Like them, they did not usually represent objects so much as actions (in the example above: being destroyed, holding together). Finally, at least in some cases, sorona could become ody. Here is what Ellis (1837, I:435) has to say about the latter: The sorona operates as a charm to bring the desired favor, and is sometimes an animal sacrifice, of which, when killed, the principal fat is eaten. In some cases it consists in wearing some article specified by the sikidy [divination]; and in such instances it becomes, in course of time, an ody—that is, a charm or amulet—which, though adopted at first for a particular object, is ultimately regarded as possessing some intrinsic virtue, and therefore is still worn after the imagined case for its immediate use has ceased. These sorona sometimes consist of pieces of silver, or of silver chains; and sometimes of beads, more or less valuable. Occasionally strings of beads, of different colors, are made, and worn around the neck and wrists of the offerer. Beads and silver, in other words, would be worn as a sorona to represent the “desired benefit” (in this case wealth) and, as such, displayed on the person of the sacrificer. And while Ellis does not explicitly say this, on becoming ody the ingredients were presumably hidden, as the ingredients of ody always tended to be. That, at any rate, seems to be what happened to sorona dedicated on the ritual shelf of one’s house—the same place that a family’s ody or sampy were normally kept. Once one’s prayers were answered, they could simply be wrapped in silk to join the other ody (Callet 1908:56; Chapus and Ratsimba 1953:91n134). To sum up, then: Sorona were material tokens of request. They represented the desires or intentions of those who offered them, the action they wished the formless and invisible powers to take. They could almost be seen as physical hieroglyphs, reproducing in visible form the words with which one prayed. Once those prayers had been answered, however, the status of the objects changed. They came to be seen as the embodiments or conduits of those same invisible powers, as objects through which human beings could enter into relations with them. As a result they were no longer displayed but hidden as the elements of ody—placed in horns or boxes or sacks, wrapped in red silk, or otherwise put out of sight. Ody could almost be seen as examples of the Maussian gift in reverse: rather than being part of the giver’s person, the gift comes to constitute the person of the receiver. No doubt this was only one way among many of creating ody. But it appears to have been one particularly relevant to beads and money—providing a hint, perhaps, of the mechanisms by which objects of adornment could so suddenly and so generally vanish from sight and become hidden talismans. As sorona, beads and silver chains expressed the wearer’s desire to gain wealth. Wearing them operated in the same way as any display of wealth: it was a persuasive act—even if, in this case, the object of persuasion was an abstract and invisible power. And here, too, the actions one carried out toward oneself were meant to serve as models for the action one wished to inspire others to take. By covering oneself with wealth, one hoped to move others to do the same. Once proven effective, however, it followed from the logic of Malagasy ritual that these same objects—these sorona—should become identified with the powers that had answered the appeal, and so be hidden away. They became ody, with the power to draw wealth to the bearer on a regular basis. And even today, this is precisely the function of beads and silver ornaments. When they appear as ingredients in magic charms, they almost always act, directly or indirectly, to draw wealth to the owner. the political dimension, or taxes as ritual sacrifice I have not yet even touched on the political aspects of the use of money in Imerina, a topic dealt with in some detail by Bloch (1990)—or on the politics of visibility and invisibility in general. While there is no room here to enter into these subjects in any detail, it might be useful to end with an illustration of some of the directions such an analysis might take. I have been describing Merina ritual as a series of techniques for creating and channeling hasina. While there is no word in Malagasy that really corresponds to our “ritual,” one of the words used most often to describe rituals was (and is) manasina: literally, “to endow with hasina” or “to make something masina” (masina being the adjectival form). Under the Merina kingdom, the verb manasina was most commonly used for the act of presenting gifts of money to the sovereign. This was partly because unbroken silver coins, the kind that were given in such ceremonies, were themselves called hasina. Hasina had to be given every time the king made an official appearance, and during public assemblies or the annual Royal Bath ceremony it developed into an elaborate ritual in which representatives of each of the various ranks, orders, and geographical divisions of the kingdom offered tribute in turn. But if one imagines the coins as a kind of sorona, it is easy to see how, in presenting these coins to the king, subjects gave him hasina in the other sense as well. When whole silver coins were used as sorona or elements in charms— which they occasionally were—it is usually said that the coin, being round and unbroken, stood for wholeness and perfection. I have already mentioned one instance in which a silver coin represented the integrity of the national army. More often coins used in royal ritual were said to represent the integrity of the kingdom, the hope that its unity remain intact. The act of giving a coin as a token of loyalty, then, can be seen as itself creating the king—or, at least, creating the power by which he unifies the kingdom: in a word, his hasina. This is stated almost explicitly when, at the high point of the Merina ritual year, the climax of the Royal Bath ceremony, the sovereign displayed himself before representatives of the people, who presented him with hasina. Immediately afterwards, he hid behind a screen to bathe, crying out as he did so, “may I be masina.” After this he emerged to sprinkle his subjects with the water in which he had just bathed, in exactly the same way as sampy keepers, on other occasions, sprinkled the people with water that had been used to bathe the national sampy (cf. Berg 1979; Bloch 1987). Here, compressed into a brief succession of ritual gestures, is the whole pattern of sorona and ody: an object, displayed to represent the desires of the kingdom, becomes an invisible charm regularly capable of bringing those desires to fruition. prospects and conclusions A central claim of this chapter is the existence of a very widespread distinction between the power to act directly on others (a potential that can only be realized in the future) and the power to move others to action by displaying evidence of how one’s self has been treated in the past. Both, I have argued, tend to be expressed through metaphors of vision: the first represented as something hidden, the second realized through forms of visual display. So, too, the distinction between the power of money and the power (or, if you like, value) of what I have been calling “heirloom jewelry.” Money tends to be represented as an invisible potency because of its capacity to turn into many other things. Money is the potential for future specificity even if it is a potential that can be realized only through a future act of exchange. In this it stands opposed to objects whose value is rooted in past actions (whatever these may be). The latter are not only often objects of display in their own right: they have a power to inspire actions in others, a power that clearly has much in common with that of aristocratic display or royal splendor. But if, at its simplest, aristocratic display calls on the viewer to deliver wealth or render homage to the displayer because others have already done so, the most elementary form of exchange value is just the opposite: it inspires one to try to acquire an object simply because others have tried to do so in the past. If this is so, to understand the value attributed to any particular object means that one must understand the meaning of the various acts of creation, consecration, use and appropriation, and so on, that make up its history.[93] One must ask: Which of these actions determine which aspect of its value? Which among them are those that recognize the value being called on to repeat? And then there is the problem of fetishism, a notoriously tricky one. Perhaps the best way to describe the view of fetishism I have been developing here is to say that when one recognizes value in an object, one becomes a sort of bridge across time. That is, one recognizes not only the existence of a history of past desires and intentions that have given shape to the present form of the object, but that history extends itself through one’s own desires, wishes, and intentions, newly mobilized in that very act of recognition. In fetishizing an object, then, one is mistaking the power of a history internalized in one’s own desires, for a power intrinsic to the object itself. Fetish objects become mirrors of the beholder’s own manipulated intentions. And in a way, the very notion of desire—at least, as I have been developing it in this chapter—demands such fetishization. Consider Gyges, making himself invisible so as to gaze on the body of the Lydian queen—or, for that matter, any of those generically dressed bourgeois males gazing at any of those ornamental, particular bourgeois women. Invisibility and abstraction here offer a way of indicating the power to act (and looking is certainly a form of action), but can they not equally well be seen as implying that the man is a creature of desire, to be characterized (at that moment anyway) not by what he is or has but by what he is not, by an absence or a lack? After all, it is just this sense of absence, or incompletion, that moves us to action to begin with. Next, consider Marx’s analysis of exchange, in which the desired object is always concrete and particular. Could one not say that the abstraction, the lack of definition attributed to the desirer and his possessions, is also a way of figuring desire? It is an absence, if one that necessarily implies the recognition of some imaginary totality that would be its resolution. In such situations, I am suggesting, the object of desire plays much the same role as Lacan’s mirror-objects: it represents an imagined wholeness on which desirers can fix their own inchoate sense of self. Or—to return for the moment to Marx’s own dialectical terminology— it makes the desirer seem an abstract content that can be realized only through that particular concrete form.[94] Even at this most individual level, then, action and reflection endlessly imply each other in an infinite variety of conversions and transformations. On grander levels of historical change, similar dynamics are always in the process of transforming—or at least contesting—the very categories by which value is perceived. And if the Malagasy example—with its royal attempts to turn money-stuffs into icons of national unity, and its popular attempts to divert them into hidden sources of power—demonstrates anything, it is that these struggles over value are always, in the end, political—if only because the most important political struggles in any society (and here I return to Turner 1996b) will always be over how value itself is to be defined. From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org Events : ---------------------------------- Chapter 4 -- Added : January 07, 2021 Chapter 4 -- Updated : January 17, 2022 About This Textfile : ---------------------------------- Text file generated from : http://revoltlib.com/