[1] In Entangled Objects, Nicholas Thomas even has a section called “value: a surplus of theories” (1991:30), though in it, he really cites only three.

[2] Or at least, the more this is the case, the more chance there is that its predictions are accurate.

[3] I might note in passing that this simplified presentation might seem like something of a straw man; most accomplished economists are considerably more subtle. But in fact, anyone who has taken introductory courses in, say, rational choice theory is likely to have found themselves face to face with precisely these sorts of arguments.

[4] Similarly, power is often defined as the ability to influence other people’s actions, which is again, not very similar to private property.

[5] These have often been referred to in anthropological literature as “utilitarian approaches,” a phrase made famous by Marshall Sahlins (1976). I’ve decided to use the term “economistic,” because the meaning is more self-evident, and there’s no danger of confusion with the specific nineteenth century doctrines.

[6] Though it must be admitted that many of the economistically minded will try to take it as far as they can. Even the slightest reflection demonstrates that the mere fact that humans are biologically disposed to want food and sex means little in itself; after all, we can all think of forms of culinary or sexual experience that others crave, the infliction of which we would consider the direst punishment.

[7] This seems to be a very crude popular version of the thought of nineteenthcentury social thinker Herbert Spencer, whose work in scholarly circles is, oddly, considered utterly discredited.

[8] Another way to imagine this would be to say each language begins with the complete color spectrum, and chops it up arbitrarily, assigning a word to each division. This is sometimes referred to as “slicing the pie” of reality.

[9] Most subsequent authors called it “semiotics” instead.

[10] A system that merely indicated that the steak-frites was worth more would, technically, be a ranking system. One that specifies precisely how much more adds an element of “proportionality.”

[11] Hence too politically: in France in the ‘60s, Structualists were famous for their political passivity, or even conservatism (since in practice being ‘apolitical’ usually means being moderately right wing).

[12] Critiques are numerous; I have offered my own alternative model in Graeber 1997.

[13] One might note that he has thus managed to add to a simple Saussurean model an element of ranking (but not one of proportionality).

[14] This is not to say that Dumont is arguing all societies have these spheres exactly; it’s simply an instantly recognizable illustration.

[15] To take a more symbolic example from the Western tradition: while in the secular sphere, it is women who give birth to men (a clear gesture of encompassment), on the higher level of cosmic origins, it was the other way around, with Eve produced from Adam’s rib.

[16] In traditional societies, one cannot really speak of “individuals” at all. There is no clear distinction between subjects and objects; rather, actors themselves are made up of different aspects or elements that have different hierarchical values.

[17] It served this purpose most famously in Edmund Leach’s (otherwise not at all Formalist) Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954). In the Indian case power (artha) is not at all implicit, but a consciously articulated value (see Dumont 1970:152–66), though it still seems to me to stand on a quite different order than “purity.”

[18] In fairness, Dumont himself has argued that it is one of the advantages of his hierarchical, holistic approach that it does not make such clear either/or distinctions (1986:253–56), because hierarchies are inclusive not exclusive, and are defined by their centers and not their edges. But this seems largely a philosophical statement not much reflected in ethnographic practice.

[19] Another factor was the belated publication of Marx’s own “Precapitalist Economic Formations,” which also took a much more flexible approach than later Marxists had imagined.

[20] In the French-speaking and Spanish-speaking world it has remained a much more prominent intellectual trend.

[21] The debate between Marxists and Structuralists, then, was between the legitimacy of a critical perspective, the Structuralists taking up the relativist mantle and coming up with all sorts of arguments that Marxists really were ethnocentric after all. Marilyn Strathern, as we shall see, continues this tradition.

[22] There has certainly been some discussion of Marx’s terms “use value” and “exchange value” (e.g., Godelier 1978, Modjeska 1985, most notably, perhaps: Taussig 1980). I tend to agree with those who argue that “use value” and “exchange value” should best be used to describe the inner workings of a capitalist system, and not outside it.

[23] This conclusion was already implicit in Durkheim’s notion of “organic solidarity,” in which social solidarity emerges from mutual dependence created by the division of labor.

[24] Bourdieu even cites Polanyi on the lack of a “self-regulating market” (1977:183).

[25] Bourdieu is pretty up-front about the fact that he is applying economic techniques of analysis to just about every field of human action—it is not that all fields are ultimately reducible to economics, he argues, but rather that those studying the economic field have done the best job in isolating certain processes and phenomena (competitive strategies, the formation of certain types of capital, etc.) that actually go on in every field, but are elsewhere, disguised.

[26] This can of course be met with the usual objections: if one might as easily be maximizing wealth, or smiles, what’s the point of describing it as “maximizing” at all?

[27] Gnostic in the sense that it is assumed that the world we live in is utterly corrupt and unredeemable, and that the only salvation possible for humans lies in knowing this. It is only fair to note Bourdieu himself has more recently criticized Derrida for arguing that true gifts are by definition impossible, concluding that “the purely speculative and typically scholastic question of whether generosity and disinterestedness are possible should give way to the political question of the means that have to be implemented in order to create universes in which, as in gift economies, people have an interest in disinterestedness and generosity.” (1997:240).

[28] As it turned out, it was individual consumption, which is what prosperous academics were doing with their spare time anyway. Bourdieu, true to form, bucked the trend and immediately began critiquing consumption as reproducing inequality (1994).

[29] As Marilyn Strathern has pointed out, 1992:171, cf. also Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:151.

[30] “In a surprisingly wide range of societies... it is in the interests of those in power to completely freeze the flow of commodities, by creating a closed universe of commodities and a rigid set of regulations about how they are to move” (1985:57). He never mentions any cases in which powerful people try to increase the scope of exchange, or powerless ones, to limit it.

[31] Though some of the essays in the collection do: notably Patrick Geary’s superb discussion of the circulation of medieval relics (1986).

[32] Similarly, where Levi-Strauss (1949) argued that men create society by exchanging their sisters with other men, in marriage, Weiner (1987) emphasizes “sibling intimacy,” the degree to which even after marriage, men refuse to give their sisters up.

[33] It traces back originally, perhaps, to the work of Roy Wagner (1975). It is hard to trace precise genealogies: in what follows, for instance, I emphasize the degree to which Strathern’s theoretical models draw on Gregory’s ideas; but Gregory has pointed out his own work was in large part inspired by Strathern’s early ethnography (1975; see Gregory 1998:10).

[34] Objecting to such a project on principle seems odd. The danger is if one mistakes the model for reality: for instance, taking exception to someone else’s interpretation of a particular Melanesian exchange because “Melanesians” couldn’t possibly think like that—although admittedly it’s a temptation next to no one who develops this kind of model, Strathern included, seems entirely able to resist.

[35] What really seems to really annoy most feminist critics, I think, is that in a work about gender that is 344 pages long, she feels this admission can be postponed until page 325.

[36] It’s not clear which of the two she is arguing; I tend to assume the latter, because there is some fairly strong evidence that even the Melpa-speaking people she takes as her primary example do recognize such a unique creative core (see e.g., A. Strathern 1979).

[37] When reading Strathern, it helps to develop one’s own glossary of Strathernian terms and the words a more conventional scholar would probably use in their place. Mine includes:
to elicit
value
compared to enchainments to coerce
to perceive
meaning (or importance)
distinguished from
obligations
to persuade, or make someone feel obliged to do something

[38] This is inspired in part by a particularly Melpa idiom of “cause” and “origin” (though see also Errington and Gewertz 1987). The donor is the “cause” of the gift being given, while its “source” or “origin” is whatever, in that context, is seen as giving rise to it. These different sources or origins in turn are the reason why pigs that might be identical in size or other physical criteria are seen as different, and therefore of different value.

[39] The Melpa according to Strathern make a distinction between work and exchange: the former is an expression of one’s invisible “mind,” or perhaps “will”; the latter, the manipulation of objects that are intrinsically visible— “on the skin.” As a result exchange can create new relations, while work can only serve to reinforce ones that already exist.

[40] Actually Gregory doesn’t say this; but it’s a minor point, as Strathern could just as easily argue that he should have.

[41] Or even that they have a historical or productive relation.

[42] People do it all the time. But there’s little chance social scientists will be able to understand the precise bases of their decision, any more than one could create a model to predict which heirlooms someone is likely to salvage from a burning house.

[43] Where we in the West tend to see domination as a matter of one party squelching another’s subjectivity, and preventing them from acting, she argues, Melanesians see it as a matter of causing others to act. Hence the rather odd way Strathern often speaks of acts of persuasion—notably, convincing another person to engage in exchange—as “coercion,” as if they were tantamount to violence.

[44] Or “transformational value,” as she sometimes calls it.

[45] As Strathern notes of Hagen pigs: “food fed to a pig by the wife is grown on land of the husband’s clan, cleared by the husband, planted by the wife, and only an exogenous theory of labor extraction would hierarchize these mutual investments” (1988:162–63). One could expand the list of inputs endlessly: why not count the energy spent growing the food that fed the couple or of teaching them how to plant, or some tiny proportion of it?

[46] Those who do tend to dwell on her use of phenomenology rather than her theory of value (e.g., Nicholas Thomas 1991; cf. Weiss 1996, Foster 1990, 1995).

[47] It’s been a bit difficult for modern scholarship to figure out precisely what Heraclitus’ position actually was; his ideas have to be pieced together through fragments or summaries preserved in the work of later authors who disagreed with them. It’s not entirely clear whether Heraclitus ever actually said “you can’t step into the same river twice”—Kirk (1962) suggested he didn’t; Vlastos (1970) and Guthrie (1971:488–92), that he did, and that the phrase “on those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow” does not reflect his original words. However, as Jonathan Barnes observes (1982:65–69, cf. Guthrie 1971:449–50) the debate rather misses the point, since this later gloss is in fact an accurate description of Heraclitus’ position, as it can be reconstructed from comparison other fragments (notably his observation that the “barley drink,” which was made up of wine, barley and honey, “existed only when it was stirred.”). Heraclitus did not deny that objects exist continually over time; he emphasized that all such objects are ultimately patterns of change and transformation. It appears to have been Plato, in his Cratylus, who popularized the former interpretation, suggesting that if Heraclitus were correct, it would be impossible to give things names because the things in question would have no ongoing existence (McKirahan 1994:143).

[48] Heraclitus of course was the intellectual ancestor of Democritus, founder of atomic theory, who argued that all objects can be broken down into indivisible particles that existed in constant motion. Marx, who harked back to this same tradition via Hegel, wrote his doctoral thesis on Democritus.

[49] This “epistemic fallacy,” he argues, underlies most Western approaches to philosophy: Decartes and Hume are two principal culprits.

[50] One reason, perhaps, why Marx’s dialectic, in however bowdlerized a form, proved to have such popular appeal. At any rate, Hegel’s approach was to see models as always relatively “abstract,” and hence “one-sided” and incomplete, compared with the “concrete totalities” of actual reality. All of the dialectical tradition assumes that objects are always more complex than any description we could make of them.

[51] This does not, incidentally, imply that such events cannot be explained ex post facto; Bhaskar also objects to the positivist assumption that explanation and prediction are ultimately, or should ultimately be, the same thing.

[52] Of course, having bought the worker’s capacity to work, what the capitalist actually gets is their “concrete labor”—whatever it is he actually makes his workers do—and this is how he makes his profit, because in the end workers are able to produce much more than the mere cost of reproducing their capacity to work, but for the present point this is inessential.

[53] Note all of this is made possible by the existence of standards of what Marx calls the “socially necessary labor time” required to produce a certain thing: i.e., cultural understandings of what degree of exertion, organization, and so on that can determine what is considered a reasonable amount of time within which to complete a given job. All of this is spelled out very clearly on page 39 of Capital (1967 edition).

[54] This is true even if one tries to work with some notion like “labor” (a culture-bound notion anyway); certainly it’s true if one adopts a more abstract term like “creative energies,” which are intrinsically unquantifiable. One cannot even say that a society has a fixed sum of these, which it then must apportion—in the familiar economic sense of “economizing” scarce resources—since the amount of creative potential floating around is never fully realized; it would be hard even to imagine a society in which everyone was always producing to the limit of their mental and physical capacities; certainly none of us would volunteer to live there.

[55] Actually, either by dint of identity or simply by dint of learning, or otherwise acquiring certain powers through the process of action itself. “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature” (Capital page 177).

[56] Of course, in many forms of everyday action, one is hardly aware even of that. But Turner, like Marx, is concentrating on the sorts of action in which one is most self-conscious, so as to examine their limits.

[57] Of course, Freudian ones as well; one reason, perhaps, they are so often paired as critical tools of unusual power.

[58] Though false insofar as those who have this partial consciousness do not recognize its partiality.

[59] Piaget in fact argues that structuralism in the social sciences made a profound mistake in taking Saussurean linguistics for its model, since language, practically alone among social forms, is based on an utterly arbitrary code that can therefore be seen to stand entirely apart from practice. It is this that allows Saussure’s famous distinction between langue and parole. In almost every other domain of human activity it would be impossible to even talk about a “code” except in terms of practice (Piaget 1970:77–78).

[60] So Sahlins 1976:121n49; Bloch (1989:115–16) is only a tad more generous.

[61] “ ... first in sensory-motor action and then practical and technical intelligence, while advanced forms of thought rediscover this active nature in the constitution of operations which between them form efficacious and objective structures.” (1965 [1995]:282). As with so many such authors, Piaget develops his own unique terminology, which requires no little study to master fully.

[62] This is actually derived a theory of education that assumes that children are always capable of learning tasks and generally operating on a level one step more advanced than they can explain, or in fact, have fully internalized. But one could easily adopt the idea to adult operations as well.

[63] As Turner notes (1979c:32): in our own society, it is common at weddings to acknowledge that individual marriages are created by real-life men and women but assert that the institution of marriage was created by God.

[64] Piaget himself never much elaborated on the similarities between Marx’s ideas and his own (but cf. “Egocentric and Sociocentric Thought,” 1965 [1995:276–86]), but he made it clear that he was working in the same dialectical tradition. That egocentrism tends to involve an inversion of subjects and objects similar to that which Marx thought typical of fetishism is a theme that recurs throughout his work. He makes the interesting observation, for example, that children have a systematic tendency to describe almost every feature of the physical world as if it had been instituted by some benevolent intelligence for their benefit; though of course, from a Marxist perspective, this is not entirely untrue, as it is precisely the means by which everything in our environment has been designed for our convenience in one way or another that becomes disguised by the market, leading to very similar attitudes on the part of many adults.

[65] Actually in this case, technically, “abstract labor” or the worker’s capacity to labor—which is formed in the domestic sphere in ways that are effectively invisible from the sphere of production, just as much as the work that formed the product becomes invisible from the other side (see diagram below).

[66] The one exception are certain elaborate and beautiful masquerades, about which, however, they offer no exegesis, dismissing the whole business simply as “play.” I might remark in passing that as anarchist societies go, they fall about as far as one can go on the collectivist (as opposed to individualist) side of the spectrum.

[67] As for example in the debate in Russian psychology about the minimal units of analysis, starting with Vygotsky, and running through later “Activity Theory” (see Turner and Fajans 1987).

[68] He has been known to refer to it as a “minimal modular unit of articulation,” which admittedly lacks a certain elegance. According to Turner this concern with the minimal unit of structure also helps explain Marx’s approach to Capital, in which the factory fulfills a similar role.

[69] “Beauty” is a quality which the Kayapo attribute to things or actions which are complete, in the sense of fully realizing their essential nature. potential, or intended goal. “Completeness” in this sense thus has the connotations of “perfection,” and also, considered as action, of “finesse.” Ceremonial activity, properly and fully performed, is “beautiful,” but the capacity to perform certain of its most essential and specialized roles, like the distribution of its most prestigious valuables, is not evenly distributed in the society.” (Turner 1987:42).

[70] The term translated “chief ” in fact literally means “those allowed to chant.”

[71] Their new status can be seen as a proportion of the totality of social labor time, as measured by those units, though in this case in an infinitely less complicated sense. This is because the young adults are the products of two consecutive cycles of social production, and the elders, of three.

[72] Incidentally, this does not mean that all systems of value most be socially invidious: it just means a distinction must be made. The comparison could also be made, say, in temporal terms, between a previous state in which one did not have said value, or a future on in which one might not.

[73] As in most societies, it’s not even something that human beings feel they are themselves really responsible for.

[74] A process that, we have seen, tends to have emergent properties not entirely comprehensible to the actors involved. This is actually quite similar to Roy Bhaskar’s “transformational model of social action” (1979:32–41), though the latter is formulated much more broadly.

[75] Strathern does acknowledges this in a sense when she says that the “esthetic” rules according to which some things are recognized as valuable and others not tend to become invisible in a gift economy. In this way, she suggests, it is the opposite of a commodity economy, in which the external forms of the objects are all that are stressed and the human relationships involved disappear. This is to my mind a fascinating suggestion, quite brilliant actually, but it does rather dodge the question of how that esthetic code is produced and reproduced to begin with. Probably this is inevitable considering the British social anthropology tradition in which she is working: it has always insisted on a clear divide between “culture,” seen as a set of expressive meanings, and “society,” seen as a web of interpersonal relations—which in the American cultural anthropology tradition tend to be seen as two aspects of the same thing. Strathern has little use for either “society” or “culture” as explicit concepts; but she ends up reproducing the division between in her distinction between the social relations, which people are consciously trying to reproduce, and the hidden “conventions of reification” that determine which forms (a pig, a shell, a woman’s body) can embody certain types of social relations and which cannot (compare, e.g., Leach 1954).

[76] Or more likely, perhaps, different ones that exist on different social levels.

[77] As the example should make clear, I am talking not merely about the physical properties of the media (though these do indeed make a great deal of difference), but also the ways in which they are used. “Abstraction” is not a physical quality.

[78] Obviously this is a total simplification: I am, in effect, fusing all sorts of social organizations in which people realize themselves personally into the “domestic sphere,” ignoring the fact that formal education is separated from the home, and so on. But such simplifications can sometimes be useful, always provided one does not confuse them with reality.

[79] It does, as Strathern puts it, tend to “eclipse” all the other, less dramatic actions involved.

[80] The Baining, after all, seem to be remarkably nonindividualistic egalitarians; for the Kayapo, egalitarianism does not seem to be all that important a factor.

[81] Indeed, almost by definition, since states are normally defined by the systematic use of force.

[82] Dumont obviously likes hierarchy and feels that modern, individualistic/egalitarian societies are in some sense abnormal or even perverse—though he also seems to feel that it is impossible to get rid of them (see Robbins 1994, especially his amusing conclusion, “what does Dumont want?”).

[83] If one consults the anthropological literature on “relations of avoidance,” and formal relations of deference more generally, one reads over and over about contexts in which one must not gaze directly, or at all, at those in authority or at least not do so until they have first gazed at you. I suspect this principle shows up, in some form, everywhere—despite the fact that there are usually other contexts in which staring at these same figures of authority is what one is expected to do (cf. Graeber 1997a).

[84] Hence, he says, the artistic stereotype of the woman staring in a mirror.

[85] A telling example is to be found in Nancy Munn’s analysis of Gawan notions of “beauty” and its role in kula exchange (1986:101–103). For Gawans, she says, display is held to be intrinsically persuasive: “the beautified person persuades by exhibiting his or her persuasive potency as a visible property of the self” (103). In this case the effect is to make others want to give the beautified person kula valuables—objects of decoration similar to those with which one beautifies oneself. I note this analysis is entirely in keeping with that of aristocratic display developed below.

[86] This at least is the aristocratic ideal. In reality, of course, no king has ever relied exclusively on display to convey his authority. Such techniques work only insofar as they are combined with more active forms of persuasion. I am perfectly well aware that the theoretical dichotomies I am mapping out here, like most theoretical dichotomies, do not anywhere exist in their pure forms—that in reality, the exercise of power will always require an ability both to act on others and to define oneself. But degrees vary. Even more, certain types of people—whether bourgeois males, feudal monarchs, or whatever—will always tend to identify themselves (and be identified) with certain characteristic ways of exercising power more than with others.

[87] As Finley points out, “no money-changer gave a better rate for a fourdrachma Syracusan coin because it was signed by [the famous artist] Euainetos” (1974:167).

[88] Or dominance behind beauty, and so on.

[89] When one looks in a mirror, of course, one is looking at an image of oneself reflected in some other object. So one could say there is an immediate affinity between mirror images and “adornment to the person,” in the sense in which I have been using the term: both have to do with an extension of one’s self or person into some thing outside one’s body, in a form that can only be realized by being seen (on beads and mirrors, see J. and J. L. Comaroff 1992:170–97; Hammel 1983).

[90] Madagascar was exploited as a source of labor for European plantations in Mauritius and Reunion.

[91] Beads were apparently no longer in use as a medium of exchange by this time—that it is, if they had ever been, in Imerina itself.

[92] Called vola tsy vaky. Remember that money was usually used cut up into smaller divisions.

[93] This applies both to its actual history and to the history ascribed to it by those who consider it valuable.

[94] I would not want to suggest that all desire is necessarily fetishistic. In fact, it might ultimately be possible to make a distinction between metaphoric and metonymic desire: only in the first, then, would the desired object become an imaginary representation of the wholeness of the desirer’s self. Allowing for the possibility of the second would also allow for the possibility that one could wish to unite with other persons or things because of their actual differences rather than their imagined similarities. I might note that this would be in accord with Lacan’s own thinking: he always treated the imaginary or “specular” as an inferior, pre-Oedipal level of desire in relation to the more indexical sort that comes with language.

[95] “Mohawk” in fact is from an Algonkian word meaning “cannibal.” “Iroquois” seems to be derived from one for “killer.”

[96] This was the period in which wampum was no longer playing the role of currency among settlers: as of circa 1652–54, it was no longer recognized as legal tender in the English colonies. The Dutch kept using it, but the English then began to dump supplies for fur and Dutch goods to create a severe inflation in the New Netherlands.

[97] Among the Huron, at least, there was one aspect of a person’s “soul” that was said to be reborn when the name was resurrected; another that ascended to an otherworldly village of the dead (Heidenreich 1978:374–75). I have not been able to find any information exactly paralleling this from Iroquois sources.

[98] Later a sixth, the Tuscarora, was added on, but only in a subordinate, nonvoting capacity.

[99] Whether through giving him the victim’s name (as with the Huron) or through the giving of a belt, we are not told.

[100] Eric Wolf makes a great point of this (1982:168–70): in no major conflict in which they were involved did all of the nations of the league even take the same side.

[101] In the absence of wampum, other gifts could be substituted, such as hatchets or beaver pelts (Snyderman 1954:474; Druke 1985). The crucial thing was that some object had to change hands. But all sources agree that wampum was the proper gift; at times, parties to negotiations who did not have any wampum on hand would simply give sticks as a pledge for wampum to be provided later.

[102] The formal speeches may have been inspired to some degree by missionary influence (Fenton, personal communication, 1999), but almost all Iroquois rituals can be seen as thanksgiving rituals in one way or another.

[103] For two recent treatments of the epic, with full background on the various extant versions, see Dennis 1993, chapter 3; Fenton 1998, chapters 5–6.

[104] One purple belt was worth two white ones, since the purple beads were more rare. In exchange with European settlers the logic of supply and demand still held, so white beads were worth less, despite the fact that they were held to convey the highest value in Iroquoian terms. Over time most of the pelts arrived as tribute as well.

[105] Hallowell 1960:52; Elisabeth Tooker (1979b) agrees.

[106] Some dreams implied dangers not just for the dreamer but the community as a whole, or alternately were seen as prophecies: hence, if a man dreamed of being burned to death by enemies, it was often felt necessary to carry out some kind of milder version of this fate, so as to prevent it from happening for real. I note in this case the desire appears to be not the dreamer’s soul but the Creator’s.

[107] Wallace too notes that the “soul,” the inner invisible aspect of the person is identified with intentions and desires, though the terms for this are continuous with those for the talismans given to satisfy them (Hewitt 1885:113).

[108] This is most explicit among the Onondaga (Blau 1962) but appears to be a general principle even in places where dream-guessing is no longer such an important part of the ceremonies (e.g., Fenton 1936:17–18, Speck 1949:122, Shimony 1961:182–83).

[109] It’s much less pronounced in contemporary material; it appears primarily in the antics of the False Face society, whose members were drafted by means of dreams on a cross-moiety basis (e.g., Fenton 1936:17).

[110] For example, a young man’s brothers would probably be scattered across different clans and his father would belong to the opposite moiety.

[111] Though of course women could also be the immediate cause of war, since when someone died, it was usually their female relatives who would demand a mourning war (cf. Dennis 1993:109–10).

[112] The obvious exceptions were name belts and strings; still, the more generic forms, the closest to the raw power to create political realities, seem to have been exchanged almost entirely between men.

[113] Davy had published Foi Jurée, an investigation of the legal basis of the Northwest Coast potlatch, a few years earlier, in 1922. Elsewhere (1921b:388) Mauss claimed that they had been working on the problem “since well before the war.”

[114] Some trace the notion back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “gifts” (1844), which also contains a description of the degree to which someone receiving a gift often feels to have undergone a kind of assault, which can be put right only by returning something of equal value. Mauss in effect fuzed these notions together.

[115] Maurice Godelier (1996 [1999:63–64]) describes Mauss as a “staunch anti-Bolshevist” and social democrat. But Godelier was writing before the republication of Mauss’ political writings in 1997, which show his profound ambivalence about the Russian revolution, and the fact that, in many ways his political vision was closer to that of anarchists like Proudhon than his mentor Jaurès.

[116] Mauss also felt it was tactically disastrous: “Never has force been as badly used as by the Bolsheviks. What above all characterizes their Terror is its stupidity, its folly” (1923).

[117] 18 November 1922, p. 1–2 (Fournier 1997:472–76).

[118] The point should not, perhaps, be overstated. Capital had long been available in French, and members of Durkheim’s circle had at one point created a reading group to discuss it. Mauss himself seems to have become more familiar with Marx’s ideas later in his life, when he became interested in the question of techniques. Some of his pronouncements on the subject seem clearly inspired by Marxian notions of praxis: for instance, “Man creates and at the same time he creates himself; he creates at once a means of livelihood, purely human things, and his thoughts inscribe in these things. Here is elaborated true practical reason” (in Schlanger 1998:199). Still, I am particularly concerned here with Marx’s ideas of alienation, which are developed especially in his earlier work, and with which Mauss does not appear have been very familiar. At least, I have been unable to find any reference to “alienation” in the Marxist sense in Mauss’ published work (1968–69, 1997).

[119] If they were unidirectional, he remarks, they would generally cancel out in the end, so that A takes from B, B from C, C from D, D from A again. The influence on Levi-Strauss’ later conception of “generalized exchange” (1949) is obvious. Another of Mauss’ concepts in his lectures, “alternating reciprocity,” in which one repays what one’s parents has given one by doing the same for one’s children, has not received the same attention.

[120] One might compare Jonathan Parry’s observations on the gift in Hinduism (1986); he see suggests that the emergence of universalistic religions tends to lead to an ideal of unrepayable gifts. On Islam, see Dresch 1998.

[121] For a typical dismissal from a knee-jerk right wing point of view see Mary Douglas (1990).

[122] Schwimmer goes so far as to suggest that these are also two poles of a Maori philosophy. Since everyone descends equally from the gods, the question arises of how differences between species came about; why they have different tikanga or natures; the answer is the universality of strife.

[123] Most of these examples are actually derived from White (1885:197–98), who also provides a long list of factors that might be invoked when a tribe or hapu lays claim to a particular stretch of land: among others, that members ancestors are buried there, or died there, or won or lost battles there, or committed famous deeds there. Actions too, then, could contribute to the process whereby property was assimilated to a person’s unique identity.

[124] Similarly, a troublemaker could curse a local chief by calling someone else’s pigs by that chief ’s name; if the chief heard this had happened, the only way to salvage his honor would be to arrive with military force to take the pig; hence, its owner would usually feel obliged to hand the pig over as soon as the chief was cursed.

[125] What’s more, food rather than heirlooms constituted the principle material of exchange: see Polack 1840 II:159.

[126] Best’s translation, with various changes based on Bruce Biggs’ (in Sahlins 1972:152), and Grant MacCall’s (1982) and others’.

[127] E.g., cooked food was incapable of any further growth or “unfolding of its own nature” (tupu), and could serve only to be incorporated within and hence aid in the growth of something else.

[128] Just as to be tapu means, among other things, “beyond one’s power, inaccessible” (Williams 1844:450).

[129] Actually the word taonga could be used for anything one treasured, not only for heirlooms, for which the more appropriate term seems to have been manatunga (Johansen 1954:100, see Williams 1844:202, 445). Weiner claims Ranpiri felt only taonga had a hau; actually, even return gifts for food were called hau (viz. Mauss: 1965:90–91n31).

[130] Firth notes (1959:93) that one of the chief of a tribal ariki was the guardianship of such tribal heirlooms, along with the oversight of the mauri of forests and fisheries (cf. Johansen 1954:106).

[131] Generally it was said that only aristocrats could make such precious objects, but as we’ve seen this did not really exclude much of the population. For a notable exception, see Stirling 1976:162. In part, the fact that artists are not remembered follows from the nature of Maori exchange. Craftspeople, like priests who provided ritual services, or tattooers, were repaid with gifts that seem to have effected a definitive alienation (Firth 1959:299–304; 413–14; cf. Thomas 1991).

[132] Since, as the proverb has it, he was a stingy man.

[133] Note how after all that he felt he had no choice to refuse a direct request; though in his situation he probably already considered himself heavily in their debt.

[134] My summary follows Kelly 1949:223–227, 275–77; Jones 1995:260–71, 360–61.

[135] I could find no evidence in Te Whata Karaka’s recorded genealogy that he was a descendant of Pakaue, so it was in a sense just given to Waikato, in the person of its chief.

[136] Like so many hunter-gatherers, the Kwakwaka’wakw alternated between scattered settlements in the summer and large concentrated settlements in the winter, which was also the ceremonial season.

[137] Only the first four children, of whatever sex, were said to inherit their parents’ noble status; the fifth was considered a “slave”—though in practice this seems to have meant a commoner.

[138] More likely only the lids would be transferred, and the rest rebuilt for the new owner. Note how similar this is to the transmission of titles: it’s really the name that’s passed on, and new physical entities are created to inherit it, and become in effect new embodiments of the original.

[139] Since family histories and other more detailed accounts invariably provide all sorts of titles not included in those paradigmatic lists, it seems obvious the real number of titles—or at least, potential ones—was far larger.

[140] Helen Codere argued that the overall ranking system emerged only in the end of the nineteenth century, when the Kwakiutl became concentrated around Fort Rupert and began using their newfound access to wealth as a way of competing over status.

[141] Since these were, however, all male names, women could hold them only as a sort of honorary male, or in trust for their children; even during the period of worst demographic collapse, when the number of noble males was far below that of available titles, it was quite unusual for a woman to be allowed to succeed to such a title.

[142] These were, however, still considered separate personalities for potlatch purposes, and would, for instance, receive their share of distributed property separately.

[143] Wolf 1999:77 cites figures suggesting the population fell from perhaps eighty-five hundred in 1835 to roughly a thousand around the turn of the century.

[144] The one notable exception for the Northwest Coast is Kan 1989:49–75.

[145] Such crests were particularly prominent on chiefly houses, thus representing the house itself as a kind of external body of the numaym, in which all members were in a certain sense encompassed in the personality, the form-soul, of its Founder, and his living representative.

[146] Hence, when mythical animals strip off their disguises and become humans, they are only showing another surface, much like the masks within masks.

[147] Neither are women’s titles, which do exist. Each numaym has a number of noble titles reserved for females, but unlike the male titles, these are considered unique and incommensurable.

[148] Potlatches were also held to make up for embarrassing accidents: for example, if a noble child was injured playing, or fell out of his canoe, his parents would normally distribute property by way of compensation.

[149] In part, of course, because rank could not be changed, or not so easily. The relative standing of different tribes and numayma, and hence the rank of their respective titles, could be altered by potlatching but this seems to have been extremely difficult to effect. Of course, as in most such systems, there was no absolute unanimity on exactly how matters stood at any time.

[150] The notion that there are two sorts of copper, one more valuable, and kept within clans (Weiner 1992:164n11,180n1; Godelier 1999:59–60), appears to be based on Mauss’ misreading of some material in Boas (1897:564, 579; Mauss 1991:194n245).

[151] Barnett (1938) suggests this was really derived from the custom of what he calls the “face-saving potlatch,” in which one gives up or destroys wealth to compensate for some slight or indignity, say, falling from a canoe. Similarly, if a guest stumbles on one’s way into a host’s house, he’ll normally give a blanket or two.

[152] Breaking coppers was a particularly effective way for nobles to squash those they considered upstart commoners trying to elbow their way into potlatching; the early twentieth century literature is full of this.

[153] Margaret Weiner refers to this as the excalibur principle: “whosoever bears this sword is henceforth king” (1995:67).

[154] Hence we are even obliged to pretend that hack politicians got where they are mainly because of their personal qualities. (Incidentally, it is my understanding that B. B. King has gone through quite a number of Lucilles over the course of his career. Having such a famous object in a situation like this actually creates enormous pressures to dispose of it: to auction it off for charity, for example, or give it away in a spectacular gesture. Some of this pressure I suspect comes from the need to reestablish that it is indeed inner capacities that are at the root of one’s identity, and not such emblems or historical artifacts.)

[155] See here the literature on Maori feasting: e.g., Firth 1954, chapter 8.

[156] In fact, Mauss sometimes stressed the obligation to repay gifts; at other times, he stressed that there were three important obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to repay. As Alain Testart has noted (1993, 1999), “obligation” has a number of meanings in French and it’s not clear if Mauss meant a feeling that one ought to, or a duty with actual sanctions. In any case, it should be clear even from the material already presented in this chapter that these three obligations are rarely equally weighted: Maori gifts, for instance, usually did not have to be accepted, but they did have to be returned; among Kwakwala speakers one had to give, but usually there was no obligation to repay.

[157] Moieties usually imagine themselves as standing in such a relation, even when, as in the Iroquois, they have not actually done so for a very long time.

[158] Sahlins therefore concludes that most hierarchical relations fall under the rubric of “generalized reciprocity,” though to my mind this is yet another example of the dangerous ambiguities of the term “reciprocity” itself: I would say that in any meaningful sense, most such relations are not reciprocal at all.

[159] In fact, they would become in a rather paradoxical way equivalents again, at least by default.

[160] One might argue that by “more individual” I really mean “differ from others of the same class among more dimensions (that are considered important).” The incommensurability, it might then be argued, comes from the very number of those dimensions, in the way that one cannot say one person is more intelligent than another if intelligence is really made up of hundreds of different sorts of incommensurable scales. But this assumes that those dimensions themselves could, at least hypothetically, be measured, which strikes me as in itself somewhat positivistic.

[161] It can become a bit confusing because even the most unequal relations usually can be represented as somehow reciprocal by the actors involved, when they want to represent their societies as ultimately just. Usually, however, this sort of rhetoric is appealed to only in certain very specific contexts, and even then, one is never sure how seriously the actors themselves take it.

[162] See William Pietz’ famous essays on the “problem of the fetish” (1985, 1987, 1988; MacGaffey 1994).

[163] Like that of the “take-off states” that grew out of them, whenever one local lord managed to begin organizing large-scale public works, usually by having his followers drain swamps and create irrigation works, then parceling out the new land to families that became his immediate retainers.

[164] Hery is the word for simple force, but it is applied especially to things like moving rocks or hitting people on the head; hasina is force that works in less tangible ways.

[165] In practice, to his local representative. The actual amount afforded on such occasions was considerably less than a silver dollar; in fact it was a very modest fee, but it was called hasina nonetheless.

[166] Marx himself did seem to rather approve of magicians, at least in the bedtime stories he told his daughters, as the epigraph to the chapter would indicate.

[167] Tambiah himself eventually moderated his position somewhat in grappling with such cases (esp. 1992).

[168] Even when power is purely violent and repressive, it is still a matter of convincing those who have weapons or are otherwise part of the apparatus of repression.

[169] Lewis Henry Morgan dreamed of a civilization in which private property would no longer be the dominant institution; Alfred Haddon was a socialist; Radcliffe-Brown was known in his undergraduate days as “Anarchy Al.”

[170] Geoghegan (1987:22–34) gives a useful summary of the historical relation of Marx and Engels to utopian thought, one that turns out to be far more ambivalent than is usually represented. For Marx’s reaction to moral critiques, especially that of Proudhon (an important intellectual ancestor of Mauss’ socialism) see Thomas 1980:175–248.

[171] Weiner also makes it clear that her approach is inspired largely by Mauss, certainly more so than Marx. It would probably be unfair to say that Weiner denies that women are in any sense subordinated, since she does not explicitly do so; on the other hand, like Strathern she devotes all her energies to attacking arguments by others that state or imply that they are.

[172] This is in fact a constant dilemma in feminist anthropology—and the only reason it’s so much easier to see it in this case, I suspect, is that feminist anthropology is one of the few areas of anthropology that remain politically engaged.

[173] No doubt the systematic application of such an approach would throw up all sorts of irresolvable paradoxes of its own. It would be naive indeed to imagine that it wouldn’t. But at least there is good reason to believe that these irresolvable paradoxes would be more fruitful ones.

[174] At least a theory about why desire is different from anything else. One could say much the same of Foucault’s theory of power.

[175] Not even the board on which checkers can move around, but even more, the principles that tell us which marks on the board are important and why.

[176] Until, of course, after they’ve been realized. From this perspective might one say that desire is not the fundamental constituent of reality, as in the Nietzschean version, but rather a metaphor for potential, which is.