How old brain functions constrain modern features of economies

– And how to see this

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde
Institut Jean-Nicod

© 2012 Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

Abstract

Approaches by neuroscience to the production and handling of material artifacts has recently found support for a ‘cultural cortical recycling’ hypothesis (Stout et al. 2008). This hypothesis had already been robustly established for symbolic artifacts such as letters and numbers (Dehaene and Cohen 2007). In both cases, specific cortical maps dedicated to basic perceptual and/or motor functions appear to have been re-used at a relatively recent point in human history (on temporal scales too brief for any anatomical evolution of the brain to take place), allowing new cultural capacities to develop. Such functional recycling both facilitates and constrains the processing of these artifacts. It also presumably plays a role in their emergence and morphogenesis. I present theoretical arguments and preliminary behavioral and neurobiological findings in support of the speculation that the historical emergence and typical neural processing of coins – as both material and symbolic artifacts – might be explained by a similar hypothesis.

My goal here, however, is to provide the empirical and theoretical background to testing this hypothesis from the perspective of behavioral economic anthropology. This might lead to collaboration with anthropologists in designing and making operational future experiments that could be performed easily online or in the field.

Keywords: cultural cortical recycling; coins; money emergence; categorization tasks; response times; field experiments.

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde is a philosopher and an experimental economist. He is interested in understanding the emergence of modern economic environments and artifacts. His main question is about the biological, and especially neurobiological, resources that have been put to use by humans to shape and adapt to their economic environments. He is running several experiments to try to understand these adaptive processes and the constraints on lay economic cognition and behaviour. He has published empirical, philosophical and formal work to make sense of some typical cognitive biases and behavioral anomalies within that perspective. He is currently professor of philosophy at Aix-Marseille University, a member of Aix-Marseille School of Economics and an associate researcher at the Institut Jean-Nicod, École Normale Supérieure.

1. Introduction

Neural plasticity probably allowed humanity to adapt and even to generate modern post-Neolithic cultural environments, but these changes could not be accompanied by genetic and anatomical modifications in so short a time. These modern environments were, however, enhanced by brain plasticity in that typically adaptive genetic and neurobiological features selected on a long-run evolutionary basis were not eliminated. On the contrary, these could well have been re-used, or recycled, in order to process emerging artifacts stimulated by cultural practice. I present an argument here for use in the field of economic anthropology similar to the hypothesis Dehaene and Cohen (2007) developed about reading and arithmetic in cognitive neuroscience.

There is only limited evidence in support of this hypothesis in economic anthropology and that is open to various interpretations. So far, studies in neuroeconomics have not been designed explicitly to test it. Neuroeconomics has been defined as the study of neurobiological mechanisms underpinning decision-making in situations involving – taken separately and together — uncertainty, variable temporal horizons and other-regarding strategies (Sanfey et al. 2006). I would add that neuroeconomics might use a new ‘archeological’ tool (based on the whole set of brain-imaging techniques) to unravel the older (from an evolutionary point of view) neural pathways that continue to underpin our decision processes. This would illuminate how the brain had to adapt to new social contexts by recycling these ancient neural pathways and putting them to novel use. As a result of these neural adaptive processes, for some recent cultural artifacts (like numbers and maybe monetary instruments) and situations (like exchanges in modern economic settings like markets for goods and labor), their ‘cortical niches’ might be constrained by genetic factors. Plasticity is realized within certain limits and new cultural acquisitions are made possible within those limits. The emergence of a given cultural artifact or behavioral pattern is then both facilitated and constrained by its alleged cortical niche.

2. The hypothesis of cultural cortical recycling

The hypothesis of cultural recycling of cortical maps was put forward to make sense of a seeming paradox in neurobiology. As Dehaene and Cohen (2007) put it: “Part of the human cortex is specialized for cultural domains such as reading and arithmetic, whose invention is too recent to have influenced the evolution of our species. (…) To explain this paradoxical cerebral invariance of cultural maps, we propose a neuronal recycling hypothesis, according to which cultural inventions invade evolutionarily older brain circuits and inherit many of their structural constraints”. In what does the recycling consist and what sort of inherited constraints may affect the neural processing of cultural inventions?

The concept of a cortical map is central to Dehaene and Cohen’s hypothesis. Maps are invariant brain structures which encode cultural items and supervene on basic neuronal layouts. Seen working at various scales, these cortical maps reflect the representational structure of a targeted cultural item in an isomorphic way. Structures of encoded items and corresponding cortical mappings may be of different topological types. With regard to reading, for example, we intuitively understand what this isomorphism amounts to in the case of letters. Strings of letters belong to a continuous two-dimensional metric space and their structure is reproduced on the surface of the cortex. Retinotopy, more generally, refers to the spatial organization of the cortex in response to visual stimuli, which has been observed to form a map of the visual field (Tanaka 2003). Here the topology is simple and the isomorphism may be implemented at different neuronal scales. The topology may also be more complex, but isomorphism may still be uncovered (Tanaka 2003, Dehaene 2005).

Neuronal layouts are shaped by evolution and are genetically constrained. Epigenetic factors in the early phase of an individual’s development will finalize the cortical structures, which then react to external stimuli in an invariant way. There occurs a compromise between genetic constraints, cortical relative plasticity and the frequency and tractable structure of encountered stimuli. Dehaene and Cohen (2007) list the potential constraints that might underlie the organization of visual cortical maps in reaction to orthographic stimuli. Those constraints determine the way a given stimulus is processed, as well as potential biases in processing the relevant information. The two determining components of cultural cortical recycling are the presence of a specific mapping process supervening on a pre-structured cortical map and observation of inherited constraints in the processing of a novel cultural item.

Evidence of recycling may be interpreted as the convergence of neural activations on specific patterns in a preexisting and functionally dedicated cortical map. Dehaene and Cohen (2007) report such evidence of converging neural responses in the acquisition of reading skills. At early stages of learning, the neural activities associated with reading are not scattered in an orderly fashion over the ventral visual system. They progressively find an optimal location in the so-called “visual word form area” after reading has become a routine skill. In the process, cells of that area are recycled in order to decode automatically the precise stimuli of a given writing system. Where a cultural cortical map fits both is determined by the structure of the stimuli to be treated and determines some features of that treatment. Biases in neural processing of novel cultural items, when they are attributable to the constraints of a cortical niche that already exists, may give reliable signs that some sort of cultural ‘exaptation’ of that cortical structure has actually taken place. In the case of reading, inherited biases point in two directions: constraints might be transposed into typical behavior (eye movements, limits to the simultaneous processing of several individual stimuli or anomalies like dyslexia etc.) and into a co-adaptive evolution of the stimuli, given their potentially optimal processing by the brain. In spite of cross-cultural variations, writing systems present a limited number of internal organizational forms — a high degree of sameness in terms of the invariant shape, position and size of letters – showing perhaps processing constraints and the forms of cultural stimuli have converged. This cultural cortical recycling hypothesis’ double provisional conclusion seems to be not only that the brain ‘exapted’ some of its evolutionary older neural pathways in order to process novel cultural items; but also that the latter might have evolved to be optimally apprehensible by the brain.

Cultural artifacts may have acquired typical shapes and other material features not only because those shapes and features were apt realizations of some general functions they were destined to fulfill, but because this material organization was optimally tractable by a plastic, but functionally constrained, cortical map. Moreover, we may speculate that the success of a few cultural items, seen through their dissemination and stabilization across places and cultures, as well as their durability, may have been fostered by the existence of such recycled cortical maps, which would be the general anthropological conclusion to draw. I will now be more specific and consider whether it is plausible to extend this hypothesis to the emergence
of money considered as a medium of exchange, referring at this juncture at our co-authored study on the neural basis of categorizing coins (Tallon-Baudry et al. 2011), which points towards a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of monetary artifacts.

3. Neural anchoring of material culture

Recent cultural neuroscience (Chiao and Ambady 2007) seeks to identify the neural structures that are shaped by cultural environments. It generally deals with only one aspect of the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis, namely the influence of repeated cultural exposure to typical stimuli on the early development of corresponding cortical maps (when these can be identified). In this respect, however, it is crucial to connect cultural environments – and especially their material or artificial aspects – with brain structures. Cultural neuroscience, understood in this way as how material and cultural contexts more generally shape the brain, differs from the opposite approach that would investigate how some cultural invariants might be identified and ultimately related to neuronal constraints. If such a reduction could be granted, it would put us in a position to use the methods and data of neuroscience to understand the emergence and history of human artifacts and cultural institutions. I do not aspire to such “ideal” mapping of human social creations onto brain structures. My contention is that some experimental facts, when adeptly acquired, shed light on how the brain’s functional architecture and its genetically limited plasticity have constrained structural aspects of artifacts and institutions. This approach has been advocated by Renfrew, Frith, and Malafouris (2008) when they state that the use of neuroscience techniques and results may improve archaeologists’ analysis of past material cultures. They adapt the concept of “extended cognition” to such an analysis, adding the notion that artificial environments are cognitive prostheses which individual brains jointly shape and wherein they fit.

The stabilization and success of a given material culture, undertaken by a close group of human brains perhaps over a few generations, may be strongly correlated to the same neurobiological processes (such as the convergence of cortical maps toward optimal recycling neuronal sites). Determining the speed and ease of cultural learning may then have archaeological consequences. The study of past material cultures from a neurobiological point of view may offer a more precise, direct and challenging way of uncovering possible correlations between archeological typologies (Gosden 2008). It could reveal slow changes in artifacts over many human generations and, in early developmental stages of the brain, the speed of convergence toward a relevant cortical area that will eventually be selected to deal with a given artifact. Think of lithic cultures and of coinage, the time and resistance it took to introduce alternative monetary means, coins still remaining the prototypical material form of money (Snelders et al. 1992). Is there a possible correlation between the pace and type of historical evolution of stone tools and the neurobiological mechanisms that could support a cultural recycling process in this case?

Stout et al. (2008) have shed some light on the neural and evolutionary foundations of human primitive tool-making skills. They carried out a PET study involving inexperienced subjects who were progressively trained in carving stone tools. Evidence that would point to a likely cultural recycling hypothesis in this case would consist of inter-individual convergence toward a neuronal “niche”. That neuronal niche would superimpose on a preexisting cortical map that it would make sense to “parasitize” when routinizing that task. Finally, inherited structural constraints in processing the intended artifact might be observed. These results, however, only partially support the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of tool-handling.
Having acquired the stone tool-making ability, subjects showed varied neural activities in several parieto-frontal perceptual-motor systems. Among these activities of the neural motor system, one was specific to humans and specialized in the perception and recognition of three-dimensional shapes in motion. As no other specific human neural activities associated with planning and strategy were observed, the authors concluded that low-level fine-tuned processes, rather than higher cognitive ones, would suffice for the neural processing of ‘affordance perception’ and tool-use. This low-level process, rather than more cognitively demanding processes of abstract conceptualization, could well be crucial for the launching of a cultural innovation. Even though the latter carries a lot of very abstract and conventional connotations in other respects, I expect that the very emergence and success of a cultural innovation depends on its fit with a preferentially low-level neural structure.

Another criterion of recent cortical recycling is that, particular proto-historic cultural innovations (such as reading, writing, numbers, money, modern tools and symbols, etc.) could not have influenced the anatomy of the brain in the short evolutionary time since their inception. They may simply be an upshot of specific brain extensions, in contrast with a former anthropological stage or by comparison with primate brains. But if invariant cortical maps and specific neurobiological niches are observed with respect to the processing of these novel cultural items, given that the latter cannot have influenced brain anatomy, this is likely to be explained by a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis. But in that case, they would in turn likely be morphologically constrained by the functional specificities of the re-used older brain circuits they are parasitic on. But this is where the hypothesis of specific cortical maps being recycled in connection with the processing of cultural items becomes tricky. Interpreting systematic observations that seemingly support such an hypothesis may be ambiguous; and one needs first to determine whether evidence points to specific human brain extensions or to the functional reshuffling of evolutionarily older neural pathways.

As an instance of such interpretive indeterminacy, Orban et al. (2006) reviewed comparative fMRI studies of the intra-parietal sulcus (IPS). They confirmed that the human IPS, which has its anatomical counterpart in monkeys, contains functional regions specific to humans. In particular, it includes a region uniquely sensitive to the perception of three-dimensional shapes in motion, as also noted by Stout and his colleagues (2008). At this stage, human brain extension is expected to be correlated with functional specification. Despite the link to monkeys, this may have developed in a specific way in humans: and then re-used or recycled in the context of cultural innovation. The first anatomical and functional extension made possible apprehension of moving objects which was the optimal cortical niche to parasite for a technological ‘affordance ability’ to emerge.

Figure 1: basic plausible functional shift in tool use; underlined in red: the intra-parietal sulcus

Technology is a dual system in the sense that it encompasses both low-level motor procedures – some of them requiring highly specific neutrally-wired functions – and more abstract, cognitively demanding aspects, such as planning, teleological thought and maybe symbolism. Crucially, tool-handling primarily taps into the low-level procedures and, to the extent that there is a pre-established optimally relevant cortical map locally available, a functional shift may be hypothesized with respect to tools. We might ask whether similar conditions may be hypothesized in relation to other cultural artifacts, in particular those relevant to economic environments in which I am primarily interested. Not, of course, that there were not any economic environments before the advent of money, but money defines what we could call a “modern economic environment”, in that it is one where omnipresent face-to-face bargaining relationships are mediated by inert symbolic proxies. In the same way as tools, money encompasses a very material level (if we consider, precisely, money’s materializations) and a highly abstract and conventional one (it is interesting to note that money presides over the increased abstraction of human relationships by means of a material artifact). An analogy with cultural cortical recycling in tool-processing would mean that low-level neural mechanisms are preferentially triggered when dealing with money, in contrast with the immediate involvement of neural circuits that would correspond to the treatment of its more abstract features, and that these low-level mechanisms are grafted onto optimally relevant older neural pathways. Even though there is little direct neurobiological evidence supporting cultural cortical recycling of money-processing, economic and anthropological models of the emergence of money, as well as behavioral anomalies with respect to money and their neural bases, may point towards such a hypothesis.

4. Issues in money emergence

Theoretical economics does not assign any role to an intrinsically useless object such as fiat money. For example, the general equilibrium economy of Arrow-Debreu is completely devoid of any medium of exchange. In real-world economies, however, money not only exists but expectations of inter-temporal variations in the value of money are an important part of monetary transmission mechanisms. Kiyotaki and Wright’s (1989) model (henceforth KW) provides an understanding of money’s role in an economy and incidentally of the mechanisms that may have presided over its emergence. In a KW economy, there is a mismatch between the goods an agent produces and those she wishes to consume. This discrepancy requires the agent to accept a mediator to acquire her own consumption goods (see Figure 2). If trade occurs, it yields a positive payoff, otherwise an agent has to wait and bear the storage costs of his produced good. Agents aim at inter-temporal maximization of the gains from trade and minimization of storage costs. To see how agents’ behavior evolves
in a KW economic environment, this model has been applied in a number of laboratory settings. These experiments show that the marketability of an object plays an important role in its acceptance as a medium of exchange; and in some situations agents could not discern these aspects and thus chose sub-optimally (Duffy and Ochs 1999, Duffy 2001). It has also been observed that an intrinsically worthless piece of fiat money may circulate as a medium of exchange as long as one of its feature is the lowest storage cost; if it is not the least costly to store goods, then its circulation as a medium of exchange less than that predicted by the theory (Duffy and Ochs 2002).

Some recent work in the psychology of money has distinguished between instrumental and hedonistic attitudes and behavior towards money (Lea & Webley 2006). It seems that money as a tool – taken essentially as a medium of exchange for purchasing desired goods – is conceptually primitive; hedonistic qualities of the purported good being derived from acquisition and consumption. But it has been noticed that money per se possesses hedonistic qualities that may sometimes outweigh an instrumental perspective (Vohs et al. 2006). An important question with regard to the study of money emergence is whether money was (and still is) primarily processed by brain structures that connect it to the value of what it is exchanged for, or whether it tends to be valued for itself independently of these intended items. If such an independent valuation phenomenon may be observed, we might wonder why and specifically whether money takes advantage of functionally relevant prewired circuits. If we adopt the purely instrumental view of money as being devoid of intrinsic value, the question becomes to understand how worthless tokens could be adopted as a universal means of exchange.

In the KW theoretical model of money emergence, perceptions of value are mediated by expectations concerning other agents’ behavior. The fact that a good of no intrinsic value is adopted indicates that it acquires value through rational expectations, i.e. through strategic considerations that presumably tap into the most evolved parts of the frontal lobes associated with planning and control, but also into brain areas associated with coordinating behavior, joint intention and action, and mental abilities (Coricelli & Nagel 2009). If, on the contrary, behavioral and neural data with respect to money may be understood as those high-level processes being short-circuited by lower processes, it would alter our view of money emergence in terms of the KW model, or at least lead to a closer focus on the respective contribution of value perception and strategic input to the emergence of a medium of exchange in an experimental environment.

A conceptual shift away from the determination of value by exchange to its derivation (even of an intrinsically worthless object) from the conventions governing monetary exchange is clearly a heterodox move in economics. It has been adopted by Aglietta and Orléan (2002) in a seminal work relying on several anthropological sources. Archaeological data may also provide hints to answering this question about the relationship between valuation and social coordination, especially since the material remnants of money use present features that are likely shaped and were shaped by the neural systems most systematically and primitively involved in money-use. In that respect, the case of electrum coinage is interesting, since its introduction generated a tension between value-perception and social convention (Wallace 1987). Coins in 600BC Lydia were exclusively minted from electrum, a natural alloy of a variable proportion of gold and silver. But given the inconsistent and indeterminable gold content of electrum coins, its intrinsic value for users was uncertain.

Electrum coinage may be viewed more precisely as showing that intrinsic value is not what grants money its market value, at least not since its inception as coinage. Electrum coins were of carefully standardized weight, implying that, regardless of its metallic content, each coin was assigned a particular value by monetary authorities warranting its redemption. Interestingly, coins were still made from an allegedly precious metal, perhaps not so much because their intrinsic value determined the use of these coins, but because it enhanced their perception as valuable items, as if the prevailing social convention could not guarantee it by itself. We may hypothesize, after this brief review of the heavily discussed topic of early coinage, that, on the one hand, the use of something bearing value may certainly take advantage of having the trappings of intrinsic value but the latter is not essential for its adoption as a valued means of exchange; on the other hand, its value, whether this is intrinsically or extrinsically grounded, is the most easily and perceptually processed feature of monetary artifacts.

5. Low-level money functional processing

If this hypothesis is correct, there should be observable conflicts between value-processing and conventional understandings of money, pointing towards the possible prevalence of low-level processing of monetary stimuli. Recent neural data on the money illusion may point into that direction. ‘The money illusion’ means that an increase in income is valued positively, even when prices go up by the same amount, leaving real purchasing power unchanged. The nominal value of money is not connected to its real value or, rather, there is a bias in the assessment of real economic transactions induced by an undue consideration of their nominal evaluation. This means that some features of the real economic structure in which an agent trades may remain unperceived by them in spite of their willingness to trade. This stands in contradiction, first, to the prediction of economic theory that an individual judges the value of money by its purchasing power rather than by its nominal value and, second, to the experimental economics norm of expecting behavioral anomalies to be eliminated through experience of market interactions.

Until recently, little was known about the mechanisms that make people tend to use a suboptimal heuristic and fall prey of the money illusion. Shafir, Tversky and Diamond (1997), in a behavioral study, tried to understand why individuals do indeed use nominal values as a heuristic to infer real values of transactions, thereby failing, in contexts where the real incentive structure has been modified in an inflationary or deflationary direction, to optimize their monetary utility. In the past few years, Weber et al. (2009) have used fMRI to investigate whether the brain shows this money illusion. Subjects were submitted to two distinct experiments that were identical in their real economic structure, but variable in nominal terms. Participants earned low or high amounts of money that could be used to buy items from two catalogues respectively offering low and high prices for identical items. In the absence of a money illusion, no region of the brain typically associated with the processing of value should be sensitive to this purely nominal variation. On the contrary, the experimenters found that a crucial area of the brain-reward circuitry (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC) associated with the valuation and anticipation of goods, exhibited a money illusion. Its level of activity was significantly greater under high-price conditions as opposed to low prices, despite the unchanging real incentive structure. The following picture and graph show how the vmPFC was correlated with the degree of money illusion revealed by participants’ evaluation of simple economic transactions.

Figure 2

This study’s findings show that money was processed at the lower level of reward-related brain activity in the vmPFC. This suggests that the money illusion is deeply anchored at a biological infra-individual level and that its neural treatment favors hedonistic features of value rather than an instrumental and more abstract conventional approach to the use of money.

Although money seems to be primarily treated as a reward and secondarily as a tool, thereby indicating the prevalence of low-level neural processes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the neural processes have taken advantage of old neural pathways that could optimally extend their functions to that specific processing end. Moreover, money is not just any reward; it is a reward – and is primarily treated as such – to the extent that it acquires some value through conventional institutions. We would need to figure out what behavioral and neural evidence could point to a neural mechanism reflecting this characteristically arbitrary feature of money, namely how the features of money are processed outside of contexts of conventional reward and trade.

In Tallon-Baudry, Meyniel, and Bourgeois-Gironde (2011), we demonstrate the existence of symbolic activities in the fusiform gyrus associated with visual categorization of particular monetary stimuli.

We were interested in how money is identified by the brain outside of contexts of reward. What kind of object is it? It is difficult to dissociate money from reward, as we saw, and its perception outside such contexts may well be strongly influenced by the use we usually make of it to obtain reward or in regarding money itself as the primary reward. In spite of this, we decided to investigate the way the brain identifies money in non-rewarding situations. Moreover, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts, and our starting point was to ask how monetary stimuli are identified in the first place. We translated this question into another that makes it answerable through the use of magneto-encephalography (MEG) recordings of cortical activities: how and when does the brain identify a valid currency, rather than “where”, since we were not concerned at the outset with investigating localization.

By “valid currency” or “valid coin”, we meant, in our experiment, a coin that is (or was in 2010) endowed with current purchasing power. We took advantage of the formation of the Eurozone in 2002 to compare neural responses to valid coins (we used Euros and Australian $ for this) and invalid coins (French Francs and Finnish Marks, which were put out of circulation in 2002). The other factor built into this choice of types of stimuli is familiarity with these coins (minimally previous acquaintance) or lack of it. We made sure that the subjects were familiar with Euros and Francs (and were old enough in 2002 to have traded with the former French currency) and had never been in visual or economic contact with Australian $ and Finnish Marks. The experiment we invited our participants to perform was a one-back re-identification task. Namely, coins were successively presented on the computer screen and participants had to click on the mouse when they saw the same coin twice in a row. We did not directly test the factors we built in our choice of stimuli or the hypotheses we had in mind. The indirectness of our paradigm is an important methodological asset, in that if significant effects are shown with respect to our parameters and hypotheses, the conclusions we draw thereby escapes any criticism that we would have forced those effects on the participants.

Before running this experiment, we had expectations that are important to spell out briefly, given that they involve psychological and neural abilities lying at the core of observations and the associated methodology that we intend subsequently to transpose to other relevant contexts, where anthropological knowledge would be vital. We were aware that coins are both material and symbolic objects, endowed with economic properties by tacit, or most often explicit, social agreement. What we defined as coin-validity bears some analogy with the relation between a word and its meaning. Symbolic categories such as coins and words are therefore different from ecological categories, like faces, food, animals, which are based on visual similarities rather than being conventional carvings of reality. Given the partially symbolic properties of our monetary stimuli, we expected that these properties would be decoded by certain brain structures with a minimal 300ms delay. Categorizing a letter string as forming a valid lexical instance of one’s natural language takes at least this time. On the other hand, categorizing natural objects such as faces occurs in the human ventral visual pathway within about 150ms. We expected money to be categorized at a speed more like words than faces.

What we observed was dramatically different from what we expected. As we report in detail in Tallon-Baudry et al. (2011), both familiar and unfamiliar coins were readily recognized and differentiated in the ventral human pathway. This suggests that there preexists a neural representation of money in subjects sufficiently generic and abstract to accommodate new instances of this category. Our main result then was that familiarity with certain categorical instances of valid or invalid coins is not a requirement for money categorization along this abstract dimension. Our second, quite unexpected, result was that in our experiment stimuli are categorized as valid or invalid money within a time window located between 150-175ms. Such processing speed is usually found in the case of natural categories defined, as I said, by visual properties, not social agreement. This result suggest that the human ventral visual system is well able to deal with symbolic environments, or at least certain objects such as coins, on the basis of general knowledge rather than long reinforced experiential channels.

From a neural point of view, our findings may show that the ventral visual pathway, a system previously thought to analyze visual features such as shape or color and to be influenced by daily experience, was also able to use conceptual attributes such as monetary validity to categorize familiar as well as unfamiliar visual objects by tapping into the same neural mechanisms and just as automatically. The symbolic abilities of the posterior fusiform region could therefore constitute an efficient neural substrate to deal with culturally defined symbols, independently of experience, which probably fostered money’s cultural emergence and success in the first place. Natural candidates that come to mind are items such as faces, food or, again, tools. As with tools themselves, and the prior emergence of a motor module associated with three-dimensional moving affordances, we simply conclude that a special neural cortical map located in the ventral stream may have been selected through long-run evolution in order to detect whether faces or foods, or anything contributing to the individual’s survival in her environment, are of a “valid” or an “invalid” sort. This primitive cortical map may have been re-used in the processing of money-stimuli and supported their emergence and the shapes they historically initially took. This neural nesting of money would then help to explain behavioral anomalies that have been often recognized for this culturally central human artifact.

6. Conclusion

A series of experiments in various cultural contexts and using different coins would be needed to validate this interpretation of our findings. Our initial study, still speculatively pointing towards the plausibility of a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of monetary artifacts, must be extended in new directions. Among such questions I would mention the following:

• Is money the only conceptual category that can receive a fast, automatic, reinforcement-free treatment by the visual system? At least another conceptual (or semi-conceptual) category (alive/not alive) shows a neuronal organization independent of learning. It is most unlikely that the neural pattern we observed stems from a module functionally dedicated to money. It is a far too recent invention (about 3000 years) to have influenced brain evolution. If any cortical process has taken place in the case of money, it probably encompasses a more general or more variegated symbolic category than monetary validity only.

• More generally, our results suggest that, on a par with other cultural inventions, cultural capacities do not necessarily develop on the basis of higher-level, flexible, distributed neural mechanisms, but may consist in automatic routines taking place in dedicated neural territories originally associated with other more directly ecological goals. This point, yet to be confirmed, needs more systematic investigation (not necessarily involving brain-imaging) of the acquisition of behavioral measures in categorization patters and response times, referring to tasks in contrasting cultural vs. ecological contexts, more precisely, in contexts requiring anthropological expertise.

• Whichever primitive mechanism money processing is rooted in, the fact that an object conventionally defined as social is treated so automatically, fluidly and within circuits and mechanisms evolutionarily dedicated to ecological items such as faces or food, must have contributed to its cultural emergence and success. Of course, there is a gap between this preliminary result and the more general hypothesis that cultural success in human history (artifacts, institutions, abilities, behaviors?) must be rooted in similar neurobiological recycling processes.

[In order to start to address these open questions we plan to propose online and easy to perform on field experiments that could help to corroborate (or disconfirm), by means of acquisition of basic behavioral measures (items classification, categorization and response times in those tasks), the plausibility of a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of money as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. It means that the three classical functions of money should be systematically explored, separately. Tasks, schematically, will involve pictures (if online) and maybe actual items (if in the field) of monetary artifacts (familiar or unfamiliar, valid or invalid), food, faces (familiar or exotic, friendly, edible, hostile, rotten, etc.) that we will ask the subject to categorize. We measure response times in those tasks by means of precise chronometric devices. The main prediction that short response times point toward automatic cognitive processes in categorization or associative (putting two objects together according to some criterion) tasks, which will be interested to observe whether they are the case in visual settings involving cultural vs. ecological artifacts.]

References

Aglietta, M. and Orléan, A. (2002). La monnaie entre violence et confiance, Paris : Éditions Odile Jacob.

Chiao, J. Y., and Ambady, N. (2007). Cultural neuroscience: Parsing universality and diversity across levels of analysis. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

Coricelli G, and Nagel R. (2009). Neural correlates of depth of strategic reasoning in medial prefrontal cortex. PNAS, 106:9163-68

Dehaene, S. (2005). Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic: The ”neuronal recycling” hypothesis. In From Monkey Brain to Human Brain, S. Dehaene, J.R. Duhamel, M. Hauser, and G. Rizzolatti, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 133-157.

Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron, 56, 384-398.

Duffy, J. (2001), Learning to Speculate: Experiments with Artificial and Real Agents, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 25, 295-319.

Duffy, J. and Ochs, J. (1999), Emergence of Fiat Money as a Medium of Exchange: An Experimental Study, American Economic Review, 89, 847-877

Duffy, J. and Ochs, J. (2002), Intrinsically Worthless Objects as Media of Exchange: Experimental Evidence, International Economic Review, 43, 637-673

Gosden C. (2008) Social ontologies. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 363, 2003-2010.

Kiyotaki, N. and R. Wright (1989), “On Money as a Medium of Exchange,” Journal of Political Economy, 97, 927-954.

Lea, S. and Webley, P. (2006). Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 161-209.

Orban, G.A., Claeys, K., Nelissen, K., Smans, R., Sunaert, S., Todd, J.T., Wardak, C., Durand, J.B., and Vanduffel, W. (2006). Mapping the parietal cortex of human and non-human primates, Neuropsychologia, 44, 2647-2667.

Renfrew C, Frith C. and Malafouris L. (2008), Introduction. The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 363, 1935-8.

Sanfey, A. G., Loewenstein, G., McClure, S. M. and Cohen, J. D. (2006) Neuroeconomics: Cross-currents in research on decision-making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, 108-16.

Shafir, E., Diamond, P., and Tversky, A. (1997). “Money Illusion.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 341-74.

Snelders, H., Hussein, G., Lea, S.., and Webley, P. (1992). The polymorphous concept of money. Journal of Economic Psychology, 13, 71-92.

Stout, D., Toth, N., Schick, K. and Chaminade, T. (2008). Neural correlates of Early Stone Age tool-making: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 363, 1939-1949.

Tallon-Baudry C., Meyniel F., and Bourgeois-Gironde S. (2011). Fast and Automatic Activation of an Abstract Representation of Money in the Human Ventral Visual Pathway. PLoS ONE 6(11)

Tanaka, K. (2003). Columns for complex visual object features in the inferotemporal cortex: clustering of cells with similar but slightly different stimulus selectivities. Cereb. Cortex, 13, 90-99.

Vohs, K.D., Mead, N.L., and Goode, M.R. (2006). Psychological consequences of money. Science, 314, 1154-1156.

Wallace, R. (1987) The origin of electrum coinage, American Journal of Archeology, 91, pp. 385-397.

Weber et al. (2009) The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion, PNAS, 106, 5025-5028.

Friendship, Anthropology

Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
University of St. Andrews

© 2011 Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

Spanish translation: PDF.

The reflexive turn that made anthropologists protagonists of their texts did not alter the role of informants: they remain objects rather than creators of anthropological knowledge. Through their concepts, analytical frameworks, and debates, ethnographers talk to each other, not to their informants. As interlocutors, informants belong firmly in the field, not in the academy. It is as if informants were what happened to ethnographers before they started writing. And so, although ethnographies deal with the lives of informants, informants are kept out of the conversation of ethnography.

Here we collaborate, acknowledging that ethnographic knowledge is made by ethnographers and informants, and should be owned by both. We write together, an informant and an anthropologist, a Gitana (Spanish Gypsy) and a Paya (non-Gypsy), a street seller and an academic, two women born in the same city, in the same year, two mothers, two friends. We write about our worlds and about us: this text is ethnographic and biographical. We talk about being women, mothers, wives, lovers, and workers in a world shaped by inequalities to do with gender, class, ethnicity and wealth. And we talk about anthropology: not just as writing, although that too, but as a powerful presence in our lives.

By reflecting together on our lives and on how we have influenced each other through the years, we try to challenge divisions that have been fundamental to anthropology since its beginnings. These are the divisions between field and academia, between the ones who write and the ones who are written about, those who do the knowing and those who are known. We also consider other divisions: between men and women, Gitanos and Payos, people for whom everyday survival in twenty-first century Spain is easier and people for whom it is harder. These are the divisions that have moulded our lives and that underlie our friendship.

We first met in 1992, when Paloma was doing her fieldwork in a government-built Gitano ghetto in the south of Madrid where Liria had some close relatives. The two of us were twenty-three at the time, since we were born in Madrid towards the end of the Francoist dictatorship. Our lives, however, had developed in very different directions. Liria, a Gitana, had grown up in the expanding suburbs where the cheapest council housing mixed with shanty-towns. Until leaving to start university in Britain aged eighteen, Paloma, a middle-class Paya, had lived in a large apartment in an affluent district of the city. When we met, Liria was a young mother of two sharing a council flat with her husband and children near the ghetto, in an inner-city estate where Gitano families mixed with low-income working-class Payos. Paloma was working towards her anthropology PhD for Cambridge University in the UK, and was looking for a Gitano family with whom to stay. Liria and her husband, Ramón, offered their home. Quickly, we two became close friends.

Nineteen years later, Liria no longer lives with Ramón and their children. In 2008, she met a young Moroccan immigrant, Younes, fell in love, and had to lose her whole family in order to start a new life with him. She is shunned by other Gitanos and lives instead amongst North African and Latin American immigrants. Paloma is now an academic, a wife, and a mother of two working in Scotland. On the cusp of middle-age, we are still close friends. Until recently, we have remained fixed in our roles as informant and anthropologist. Now we have decided to challenge these roles: we have things to say, and we believe we can say them best together. In this project, Liria is not the provider of raw material, of ‘ethnographic data’ for Paloma to analyse and argue about. We each talk, about ourselves and about each other, from our own particular standpoints, with our histories, our own interests, fears and desires as a foundationincluding a deep involvement with anthropology. In these pages both of us speak, sometimes apart, sometimes together, sometimes with each other. The strength of what follows lies not only in the story we tell but also in the way we tell it. We mix voices and styles because we want to foreground our complicity and also the tensions, negotiations, agreements and disagreements involved in doing and writing anthropology.

How we work together

In order to write this article, we started by discussing what we wanted to write, and how we would do it. Since we were apart for the majority of the time, Liria in Madrid and Paloma in St Andrews, we talked on the phone and emailed each other with the kind assistance of Younes Bziz, Liria’s partner. Liria wrote in Spanish, by hand, the sections where she speaks in the first person, and Paloma typed them, added punctuation and translated them into English. On her laptop Paloma wrote in English the sections where she speaks in the first person and translated them into Spanish for Liria to read and suggest changes. Paloma also wrote in English first drafts of the sections were we speak together, using the plural ‘we’. She translated these drafts into Spanish, and Liria made changes and additions, sometimes very substantial, which were then incorporated into the English text. We had Paloma’s fieldnotes, and her letters from the field to her PhD supervisor in Cambridge, Stephen Hugh-Jones, but only Liria’s letters to Paloma since Liria had left Paloma’s letters behind when she eloped. We also had many hours of taped conversations in which we talked about our lives, past and present, and our friendship. Because Liria is unfamiliar with anthropological literature, we have not quoted other authors. We have only made a short explicit reference to anthropological debates in the introduction, and Paloma is responsible for this interpretation. We hope that readers will be able to make their own connections with other anthropological texts.

In order to make our joint and separate voices clear to readers, we use three different fonts. We use Arial when we speak together, Cambria for Liria’s sections, and Calibri for Paloma’s.

Beginnings

I would like it if, with what I am going to write, people could understand how wonderful and important it was to meet my friend Paloma. No matter how much I write, it will never be enough to express so much gratitude towards just one friend. Because everything started with just a fieldtrip. We never thought this would reach so far into both our lives. We had barely started to live, we were both twenty, she was single and I was married with two children, Nena and Angel. We have had so much in common although we grew up in very different settings because I was Gitana and she Paya, and because we belonged to different ethnicities (etnias). That never pulled us apart, the very opposite. I even believe this was the interesting thing about our friendship, the desire to get to know new worlds and different people from what we were used to living with.

For this reason I remember very well the day I met Paloma. My elder sister Carmen had already talked to me about her. She had told me that she had met a Paya girl who came to the Villaverde church and who was doing a study about the Evengelical Gitanos and about all our surroundings and anything related to the Gitanos of the neighbourhood. Back then Paloma lived in Tío Basilio’s house, the most respected Gitano in the area of Madrid and some provinces. He was also my father’s uncle, although we have been brought up very differently in our two families, in particular we in my father’s house. And so when my sister told me that a young Paya girl was staying at Tío Basilio’s, I was surprised, not because they are bad people but because, as Gitanos, they still lived by rather old customs. When my sister introduced her to me, I thought she appeared ignorant and shy, but I recognise now that we were the ignorant ones, and she was also very brave to be in a neighbourhood full of Gitanos, most of them poor and with little schooling. For this reason I recognise that she was doing a very difficult job because she had started with the hardest part, and she still had a long way to go.

My first impression was that she was intelligent and a little serious. After introducing us my sister had told me that Paloma needed to live with a family in the neighbourhood but nobody was offering their house and all her studies hung on her living with a family. I hardly knew Paloma, only from seeing her in church, I had never talked to her, but my sister had said very good things about her and she told me that they couldn’t have her in their house because her husband was an Evangelical pastor. They could be given a church to lead at any time, and they would have to go outside Madrid, so they wouldn’t be able to pay the necessary attention to Paloma to help her do her work. But I also know they were influenced by gossip because they were a young couple, and people’s tongues and their enviousness are very bad. I too was advised not to take a Paya girl into my house because she would bring problems to my marriage. But my marriage could not go to waste more than it already had, even though back then he was not so bad with me. So I felt very sorry for this girl who had so much interest in our lives and our way of life, that we would not give her the chance to realise her project and her future. It was then that my parents supported my decision to have Paloma in my house. They have always been very liberal, in particular my mother, who had friends of all ethnicities (etnias), not minding about race, or colour, or circumstance. She put that in our hearts, and without a doubt this helped me a lot in my decision to open my house to Paloma and to show myself the way I was. And also I acknowledge that I too was interested in knowing more about her world, because the first friends I had as a girl were Payas who went to school with me and I liked very much their way of being, so simple. For Payos live more independently in their lives, without thinking about others’ opinions or gossip. And it has always bothered me, having to do things so that people will let you be and not be criticised for no matter what. For this reason I wanted to have a Payo friendship in my life, because since I married all my friends were Gitanas. I had a good group of friends, and got along with everybody, but I also wanted to make new friends, different from what I was used to.

And so, listening to my heart and my instinct, I said yes, she could come to my house to live with us and finish her research. Although in some ways I also researched her, because I was fascinated by her world and her way of life, even though I did not know what Paloma’s family thought about us, the Gitanos. I admit that I have never been bothered by what her family or my family think, although I have to say that my parents behaved rather well with Paloma, and they were never negative about her work and our friendship. The truth is that Paloma earned their trust through her behaviour. She adapted very well to the Gitano world, and she knew how to get in, through the elders and then through the church, and coming to live with me was the icing on the cake.

It was an experience for both of us. In our free time we used to go to the university behind Ramón’s back, because Gitanos, and in particular the men think that a woman goes to places like that because she wants to meet boys and do bad things. They do not think that two people can just be friends, without going any further. And in that they were wrong, because I met friends of Paloma, and nothing bad ever happened.

Paloma’s fieldnotes, March 1993

Liria and I talked today about what it has meant for her to have me in her house, and about what other people have been asking and telling her. She told me that people have been amazed that she has a young Paya in her house, in particular because her husband is very young. Young men are easily tempted, she said, and any tiny event would make people gossip: ‘you know what people’s tongues are like…’ For example, she said that if it was hot and Ramón took his shirt off, and I happened to be in the same room then, people would say ‘Ramón is having it off with the Paya’, and specially ‘how stupid Liria is, they are doing it in her own house’. Even people who have known me well for a full year were, according to Liria, shocked to learn that I was living in her house. The two pastor’s wives, Carmen and Emilia, who are always friendly and open with me, refused to take me in on the grounds that ‘people would talk, and it would damage very much out testimony, our standing’. Today I began to understand the implications that having me in her house has for Liria, since even those who seem to accept me best and talk freely with me would not have me. According to Liria, even these people ask her if I pay her money, and if I help her in the house, and she said she feels compelled to say that I do, because it is a kind of justification. I said to Liria that, in my opinion, for them it is a question of finding out who is fooling who, who is being tricked, and who is doing the tricking, a very Gitano thing: Gitanos won’t accept that ours could be a relationship on equal terms. So when her grandmother ‘innocently’ asked me where I was staying (she already knew) Liria told her, ‘poor wee Palomi, she is very good, poor thing, she helps me a lot in the house and with the children.’ Although I see that Liria could have done little else, I was rather offended at this, being made to look like a dimwit. But I didn’t say anything.

Informant and anthropologist

Our friendship started with her kindness, taking me into her house although she barely knew me and even though I was bad news. I was a Paya, young, unattached, not really managing to gain acceptance in a strongly marginalised community where the dominant Payos were distrusted and despised, and where Payas were considered uniformly immoral and sexually promiscuous. It was only because Liria looked beyond the stereotypes and the conventions that dominated interactions between Payos and Gitanos, because she questioned what most around her took for granted, that we became friends. Her generosity, her compassion, and her curiosity were the foundation of our friendship. From the first time we met and throughout twenty years, she has loved, helped and supported me.

We were fascinated by each other, perhaps because we were both dissatisfied with our lives and because we embodied for the other the deep unfulfilled desire to belong somewhere else. I had had an average childhood in an upper-middle class, conservative family. I had learnt languages and travelled abroad relatively often, but had also been immersed in a world of rigid conventions regarding such things as class, upbringing, occupation, dress and accent. I looked to anthropology as an escape into imagined, alternative worlds, but all I did was exchange the inward-looking, suffocating atmosphere of the Madrid middle-class for the inward-looking, suffocating atmosphere of a Cambridge college, and I felt at ease in neither. Among the Gitanos of Villaverde I was even more out of place: by the time I met Liria I had been doing fieldwork for nine months and was increasingly frustrated and convinced that I would never ‘get in’.

To start with, Liria seemed to me certain of her place and of her path in life. She was a well-respected young matron, a good street seller and money-maker, strict in her adherence to the highly elaborated Gitano code of conduct for women, always dressing modestly in long skirts, not smoking, drinking, or interacting with unrelated men. Her parents were well off by comparison with other Gitano families nearby, and they were very well liked, her father’s patrilineage was large and powerful and controlled much of Gitano life in the ghetto. At fifteen, her mother had arranged her betrothal to an older relative, Ramón, and she had married well, at a wedding ceremony where her virginity was tested and displayed, rather than much less prestigiously by elopement like some of her cousins and friends. She fitted in, and yet I soon learnt that she was discontented, with her marriage to a man she did not love and who could not love her, with the routine of wifely everyday life, and with the restrictions that being a ‘decent Gitana’ imposed on her. Above all, she was desperately curious to know what things were like among the Payos, the Others who surrounded her but were beyond her reach. She had a deep intuitive understanding of what anthropology was about and embraced the informant role with enthusiasm.

Liria wanted to learn, about the Payos and so about me and what she called ‘your world’. Together we took what seemed like huge risks, lying to Ramón and going for secret outings into Madrid so that she could see what my life was like. We dressed Payo-style, discarding our long skirts and putting on trousers, which the Gitanas never wore, and we visited museums, parks, middle-class restaurants, and the home where I grew up. Since she had opened up her house and her life to me, and she was so curious about mine, I felt I had to reciprocate and took Liria to my mother’s flat, where she met not only my family but the housekeepers who worked for us, and to the university where we had lunch with my childhood friends, well-off boys and girls who studied business, law or economics. Just like fieldwork amongst the Gitanos for me, these trips into middle-class Madrid were a great adventure for Liria. Having spent all her life on the periphery of the city, she literally discovered a new Madrid. And, at the university, she talked freely with unrelated men of her own age for the first time in her life.

Our outings were interludesfrom the strain of fieldwork for me, from the monotony of everyday life for herand they made us accomplices. Aged 22, we were excited, by life itself and by our friendship. We talked endlessly, while selling in the streets, cooking, taking care of the children, and at night while Ramón watched TV. We talked about men and about sex, about our pasts and futures, about being Gitana and Paya, and about anthropology. We argued about whether, as a Paya, I really had more freedom than her, and of what kinds. I read to Liria from San Román’s classic Gitano ethnography, and we discussed together the rights and wrongs of the anthropologist’s account of Gitano patrilineages. I also read to her from my fieldnotes, and we laughed about things we had said only days or weeks before. Liria’s friendship was a wonderful gift.

Looking back, I see that we were not preoccupied by the material inequalities between us, which now seem so blatantly important and which worry me so much. I was very aware of the large-scale hierarchies and inequalities that framed Gitano marginality, and of our relative positions within these, but in our everyday life in the ghetto I was out, wanting in. Yes, my parents were better off and I had reaped the benefits, having a comfortable life and going to study abroad. But Liria came from a Gitano family which was highly respected in Villaverde and she was secure in her role within the Gitano community, where the hierarchies and inequalities that mattered were among Gitanos, and where Payos were despised outsiders. In Villaverde Liria belonged and had status where I had none. Similarly, it did not occur to me that opening my life to Liria might be unethical. Later on, talking about our friendship to anthropological audiences in the UK, I have been criticised for not considering the impact that allowing Liria to meet my family might have on her, for not envisaging that it might make her dissatisfied with her lot as a poor Gitano woman. Back then, both of us knew that that I could not ask to be let into Liria’s life whilst keeping mine out of her reach.

Friends

Paloma and I, after spending so many moments together from when she came to my house to do fieldwork until now, we have lived so many experiences together that I would not have notebooks enough to tell all the good things and the bad ones. Today I can say with all my heart that between myself and Paloma there is a relationship as if we were sisters, because friends are not just for when things go well, but for when things go badly. And throughout many years I think that both of us have realised that our relationship as friends has been very firm and sincere. Even when we were separated by a large distance because she had to work in England, nothing prevented us from staying in contact, by letters or by phone, and whenever she came to see her mother in the holidays she kept some days exclusively to share with me. Nothing has stopped our union as great friends. Even though one was Gitana and the other Paya, and even though we had such different customs, we knew very well how to share our ideas and our tastes. My whole world revolved around the Gitano environment (entorno), and when Paloma was living with me just seeing her was an eye-opener. I saw that a woman is not just good for marrying and having children and cleaning, even though within the Gitano world I used to go out with my sisters, to the beach in the summer, and in winter to the malls and shopping. But with Paloma I did other things, like visiting museums, or going to the university, and many more things that I loved. And above all she made me see my qualities as a woman. She always used to tell me that I was intelligent and a very good person, but in my family I was always treated as a something of a moron, and I used to be taken for a ride. One of the people who helped me see my good qualities and my worth was Paloma. In particular with Ramón, he knew how to have me all mixed up, psychologically, with the idea that I wasn’t sufficiently clever, or pretty, and he told me so often that I came to believe it. Until one day a great friend turned up to tell me that this was not true, and through the years I have had other Paya friends, I had the pleasure of working with them when I was president of the parents’ association in my daughter’s school and they also encouraged me.

From the first time I met Paloma I opened my heart to her, as sincerely as possible, because as time went by I realised that I could tell her any secret since I knew she would keep it, and she knew she could also tell me anything, because with me it would be safe. The truth is that in this life you never know when you are going to need your friends. I think that in life, if you do good, the future can return it to you, although I never helped Paloma out of any kind of interest, and she knew it. Because when I helped Paloma I never thought that later on she would return the help to me with increase. When I decided to leave my Gitano environment (entorno) to find my happiness in a completely different world with a Moroccan partner (he was prepared to fight for our love against the Gitano people, Younes Bziz is his name), that is when I received all the support and the unconditional love, something never seen before, from my great friend Paloma. This is why we decided to write together. We both know we have many experiences to tell, together and apart, but our lives are always intertwined, the lives of two people, a Paya anthropologist with a great heart, and a sincere Gitana.

The middle years

Between 1993 and 2008 we wrote to each other, back and forth. We also talked on the telephone often and met whenever Paloma was in Madrid, at least once a year. As time went by, we continued to share our preoccupations — with pregnancies, children, schools, husbands, work, and our families. Liria and Ramón continued to earn their living by selling textiles at open air markets. They were resettled by the local government to a different flat, even closer to the ghetto where Paloma had carried out her fieldwork. Earning a livelihood became increasingly difficult as they became indebted and lost first one and then another permit to sell at weekly markets. Villaverde changed around them as immigration into Spain grew and more and more North Africans and Latin Americans came to the southern periphery of the city. Meanwhile, Paloma and her husband obtained tenured academic positions, moved to Scotland and bought a house. They settled into a typically British middle-class life.

All along Paloma wrote about Liria and her relatives and neighbours, a book and articles: we were friends, but we were also anthropologist and informant. Liria helped Paloma with her anthropology because she was a friend. She had a sense of what Paloma’s anthropological interests were but did not fully know what Paloma did with what she learnt, how she communicated her knowledge and to whom, and who benefitted or how. Paloma felt that she could only explain to Liria in very basic terms what her work was about, or how academic anthropology is produced. The jargon and theories through which Liria’s life could be made anthropologically meaningful seemed to Paloma almost impossible to convey to her. The fact that Paloma wrote in English meant that Liria could not even read what Paloma produced.

Throughout these years our friendship continued whilst our personal lives changed. Liria’s marriage deteriorated and she left Ramón several times. She took her children to her father’s house, but was always persuaded by her family to return. But as her difficulties inside the home increased, Liria found satisfying rewards outside it. In 2008 she became president of the parents’ association at her daughter’s school. She found herself at the helm at a time of serious crisis, when the local government decided to transfer the children (mostly Gitano) to a smaller building of poorer quality, to make way for the children of a neighbouring school (mostly Payo). Liria became a key player in the campaign against the plans, making several appearances on national radio and television. Although the fight was lost, Liria discovered in herself new capacities and needs, the desire to become something else than a Gitana wife and mother. In the meantime Paloma too found herself moving in new directions. She become a mother by birth and adoption in her thirties, engaged in political activism, and let her career take second or even third place in her life. For both of us our horizons opened up throughout the 2000s: for Paloma to the world beyond anthropology and academia, for Liria beyond her family and the Gitano Evangelical Church. And then Liria met Younes, by chance, and our lives were brought closer than ever before.

Lives transformed

One morning like so many the unexpected happened. There was a young man working with some friends of mine at a stall nearby, we were separated only by some fruit sellers. I don’t know how one morning I came to the stall of my friends to say hello, and to see the clothes they were selling, because often they had very pretty things and I liked to buy from them. The truth is that I had already seen that boy before, but shame and fear to fall in love, especially because he was younger than me, those things did not allow me to pay attention to him or to anybody else. But I don’t know how something made me look at him that morning, and his eyes were fixed deep into mine. I felt that he talked with me through his eyes. I had never felt like that before.

One morning like so many the unexpected happened. Liria’s sisters phoned me from Madrid. She had disappeared the day before, and they were desperate. They had found a small piece of paper with a man’s name and a telephone number in one of Liria’s handbags, and they suspected that she had eloped with him. I was to ring them immediately if she got in touch. I tried and tried Liria’s phone, and texted her, ‘Where are you? Everybody is worried. Is everything ok? Please get in touch, I’m dying of anguish here.’ That evening she rang. She had left with Younes, her sisters had realised she was having an affair and she felt she had no option but to elope, straight away. She had tried living with Ramón for twenty years, and Younes loved her. She hadn’t been able to take her young daughter along: according to Gitano customary law, which is often violently enforced, in cases of adultery children must remain with the blameless spouse. And so her family were looking for her, to bring her back and perhaps punish Liria, and Younes too. She was terrified. I was to pretend she had not been in touch, keep her secret, help her be safe.

I had no alternative but to return, because my sisters and their husbands found me, and my family threatened to kill Younes, and so I had no other option. Today I realise I allowed myself to be intimidated, and that my fear did not let me think straight. Now I see they could easily have harmed him before coming up to fetch me from the flat where I was hiding, because they were with him downstairs quite a while, but they did not. The thing is they convinced me, with threats and with kindness, they did all they could because they were desperate at that time. For me it was very painful, in two ways. First there was Younes, and being forced to leave him. I didn’t know how to explain to him that my family feared that he had tricked me, or pressured me somehow to be with him, because I had never done anything like this before. And then there were my children, and when I returned my heart broke to see how much they had missed me. ‘How am I going to recover my family, and my children?’, that is what I was thinking back then. But it was too late, nobody trusted me, they kept me under watch all the time. They tried to make me see I was deluded, that it was all an illusion because I had never had happiness with Ramón. And so they thought I was very confused, and a little bit mad.

She had no alternative but to return and, when three weeks later I went to Madrid, all her family wanted to make sure I understood why she had done wrong. ‘This is how we Gitanos do things, you know us, you understand us, you know how terrible this is for us, we are not like you Payos, this is beyond the pale, there is nothing worse than this.’ I had to talk to her, they said, convince her not to elope again, help to keep her in the house, under their control. Ramón, Carmen and Liria’s other sisters, her children, her daughter-in-law… they were the voice of Gitano reason. They knew how close Liria and I were, and were desperate for me to take sides. These were ‘the Gitanos’ of whom I had written for so many years, and what they said fitted all I had learnt about them: women’s virtue and subservience to men were central to how they saw their place in the world. And yet she asked for my help, and she was Liria, my friend, a woman whose fears and desires I knew, who had shared with me her wishes and disappointments, who loved me and whom I loved. So I did not say ‘leave’ or ‘stay’, but I helped her meet Younes clandestinely, taking our young children along as cover, knowing that the family would never think we would try something like that. When she decided she would leave for good, I helped again, sorting out plans, listening to Liria’s fears, anxieties, and hopes, and gving some of the money they needed to try to start again. After she and Younes went into hiding, I became the point of contact between Liria and her family, relaying her children’s heart-wrenching pleas, receiving and forwarding Ramón’s desperate letters.

My heart is broken in two.
Every day that passes I feel worse, for my daughter. Whenever I see girls of her age in the street I die inside, it is true.
Something is killing me inside.
I try not to tell Younes and I go into the bathroom to cry.
I tell myself, ‘Be happy’. How can I be happy knowing that my daughter needs me?
Then I say, ‘What if I return, and I die of longing for Younes?’
I can’t think of anything else, I only think about her.

Her heart is broken in two. Liria spent six months of living with Younes, in flats shared with African and Latin American immigrants, working as a domestic, hiding her Gitano identity from her middle-class employers, people very similar to my own family. We talked almost every day, and I visited her in Madrid every few weeks. I could see how much she and Younes loved each other, how much fun and freedom she had in her new life, but also how deeply cutting her pain was. I saw her cry with my daughter in her arms. I raged at Ramón and her sisters, who were unwavering: so long as she stayed away, she would not see her child. And if she took the child, they told me, they would kill both her and Younes. I understood well the cultural logic that underlay their actions, and knew I could not expect them to behave in a different way, yet I did. I began to ask myself about the force of compassion and of hatred too: could Ramón and Liria’s sisters not take pity on her, just because they were Gitanos? Were they so firm because they were Gitanos, or because they hurt? Liria asked for my help and from Scotland I rang women’s NGOs in Madrid, government agencies, social workers, solicitors, but nobody seemed to be able or willing to give any help. They were all puzzled by the complexities of the Gitano world, unable to understand why Liria would not simply apply for a divorce, request access to her child through the usual legal routes, why she was frightened, why there were threats. We could not see a way forward and so she went back once again.

When for the second time I had to return it was much worse. I thought that after so many conversations with my sisters and my children’s father, the situation was going to be better. But it was much worse. I could feel a tremendous hatred from Ramón. Earlier on, even when I was an honest and stupid woman our marriage did not go well, so imagine the situation after living six months away from home, with another man, and Ramón swallowing his pride of Gitano man, fooled by a woman who was inferior to him. So the last night I spent with my daughter I made her a promise, and I told her, ‘Darling, whatever happens I want you to know I love you very much’, and told her that if one day we had to be apart from each other for whatever reason, I would fight for her, until we could be together again. She looked into my eyes and said, ‘Mama, you are going to leave again’. And with pain in my soul, and so as not to worry her, I said no, but that if that happened I would go back to get her. And I looked at her straight and said, ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ So the first thing I did when I returned with Younes was find a solicitor to get custody of my child, and my divorce from Ramón. I got on with it, ready to face the world for the sake of my daughter.

When for the second time she had to return it was much worse. Ramón knew I had helped Liria with money and emotional support during her time away: although he allowed us to talk on his mobile phone, he was always nearby, listening closely to our conversations. Younes was heartbroken, thinking that she had left him for good, and would not sleep or eat. We talked often, but there was little I could do for him. Liria had managed to hide a mobile phone, and she would go into the bathroom at three of four in the morning, to ring Younes and me. In whispers, she told me about her life: she had no freedom, Ramón was in touch with a solicitor to get sole custody of her child, he wanted to have sex in spite of her reluctance, and she missed Younes desperately. When her sisters brought a Gitano Pentecostal priest to exorcise her, she thought it was the last straw, and decided to leave knowing that this time there would be no turning back.

Sharing our lives

When Liria left her home for the very first time, but also later, she and Younes were in dire need of money. Since they had to hide from Liria’s family, they also lost their livelihoods. Liria could no longer sell with Ramón and Younes could no longer work for Gitano street-market sellers loading and unloading stock. As the economic crisis deepened and Spain’s unemployment reached 20%, finding work became almost impossible. Without papers the only jobs Younes could find were sporadic and very badly paid. They could not afford to lose Liria’s small disability pension, so she worked without contracts for two or three euros per hour, cooking in bars, as an office cleaner or as a domestic servant.

Knowing it would be difficult to provide substantial economic help on a long-term basis, Paloma applied first to her Department and then for a small grant to pay Liria for writing down her life. What began as a way to find money became a project that came to fascinate us both. We started to tape long conversations, about Liria’s elopement, our earlier lives, and our families and friendship. Liria wrote, and Paloma wrote too. Liria went to
Scotland, visiting Paloma abroad for the first time ever. She talked to Paloma’s colleagues and students, and we gave a talk about our relationship. As Liria’s and Younes’ life unfolded, and as Paloma shared in it, we thought together about what it meant. Since Paloma was not just an observer, but a player in the story, it became clear that what we wrote had to include her too.

In March 2011, two years after she first eloped, Liria went to court to claim visiting rights to her child. She was the first Gitano woman to turn to the Payo courts to challenge Gitano traditional law and custom. Paloma went with her, and we came face to face with Liria’s sisters, their husbands, and Ramón. In spite of repeated requests, we had not managed to be allocated police protection, and we were frightened that Ramón or Liria’s brothers-in-law would manage to hurt one or both of us. All in Liria’s family thought Paloma had betrayed them and had shown her true nature as a Paya, helping Liria in her transgression. They were wrong in thinking that Paloma had encouraged Liria to leave, but right in identifying the strength of our bond.

Paloma’s Spanish family too have seen our friendship, and are disturbed by it. One of Paloma’s sisters suggested a solicitor and a social worker who might help. Another opened her home to Liria and Younes when they needed a place to stay for a couple of nights. But their middle class, comfortable lives have very little in common with Liria’s and Younes’s, and they are keen to keep their distance. They have a highly developed sense of class and ethnic distinctiveness, like many other well-off, culturally conservative Madrileños. They believe firmly in their economic and moral superiority. Paloma’s family see Gitanos like Liria and immigrants like Younes as unfortunate parts of Spanish society, to be blamed for their ‘situation’, victims of their inability to join in or ‘integrate’. They perceive Younes, like other Moroccan immigrants, as one of the lowest of the low, a member of an abject tide that threatens to engulf Spain. They call him, pejoratively, ‘el moro’ (‘the Moor’), and have been adamant that he must under no circumstance visit their homes, where Paloma stays during her visitsto Madrid. The majority of Paloma’s Spanish relatives are not unlike Liria’s Gitano family in the effort they make to keep themselves distinct, and in their conviction that they, and only they, live righteous and beautiful lives. But while Liria’s family were the amongst the first Gitanos to open their lives and their homes to Paloma, most of Paloma’s family want to have as little as possible to do with Liria or Younes. For them, Paloma’s friendship with Liria is a sign of her unfortunate eccentricity. The fact that Paloma spends more time with Liria than with her own sisters or her mother, demonstrates that Paloma has failed in her responsibilities to her family.

Writing together

I learnt what anthropology was when Paloma came to live in my house. I had a vague idea of what anthropology was, but it was living together day by day, seeing Paloma’s fieldwork, that I learnt its meaning. I think it is a very beautiful work that opens frontiers onto new worlds. Because it is not just writing about other people, but getting to know their lives, their customs, religions, and their ways of being. I find it fascinating, writing not only about my life, but about Paloma’s life. Because I have always been the informant, but now we are breaking the mould. We know that telling our lives, together and united, is going to be something never done before. Two women, a Paya and a Gitana, but very close from youth, breaking the barriers between two different levels and ways of life, although that distance never pulled us apart. Since I started writing about anthropology I have found it wonderful to have the opportunity to express my feelings towards other people, and to understand them. As I write about Paloma, I also learn to see things in a different way, especially because we two have been brought up so differently, in our customs. I know for sure that what I am doing right now is that I would like to do for the rest of my life, because getting to know people, their customs, their experiences,
their sadness and their joys, and especially having another person opening their heart to you, is wonderful.

I want people to know what the world of a Gitana is like, told by herself, and also how my life has changed so that through circumstances I find myself in the Payo world. I want to tell how I see everything, and also how my life changed, and also how things changed for Paloma and those who surround us, like Younes, and Paloma’s husband and her children… All of us have come much closer together. Being able to become united while you work, that is the beauty of anthropology. For me anthropology is about complicity and union, so that we all of us can build a better world, a world with more love.

I have learnt what anthropology is alongside Liria, and my understanding has changed as we have become older and our lives have been transformed. For many years after I first did fieldwork among the Gitanos I thought that my task was to extract information, make knowledge, weave patterns with words. I wrote and I looked away from those parts of experience I could not make sense of easily, from what did not fit into the moulds I had built. And so much of Liria’s life, and of the lives of her relatives and neighbours, was invisible to me. Over the last few years I have been drawn into Liria’s life much deeper than ever before, and she into mine. Sharing our happiness and our difficulties, I have had to confront the nitty-gritty of experience, as a person and as an anthropologist.

The bedrock of anthropology is fieldwork, because fieldwork is what brings us into deep contact with people, with their daily miseries and joys, their fears and their hopes. And it is during fieldwork that we anthropologists open ourselves up to others. But then those others, our informants, are left behind, they do not continue the journey with us. Imagine the possibilities if the deep mutual commitment that is so often seeded in fieldwork were allowed to grow, to spread into other areas of life. I do not know how successful our experiment has been. But I know that, if I want to learn and write about Liria, I have to let her learn and write about me. We share our lives, this is why we write together.

We meet in the spaces between worlds: between Gitanos and Payos, between immigrants and middle-class Spaniards, between informants and anthropologists. These worlds touch and interpenetrate, but they are also sealed away from each other, in many senses far apart. Anthropology is what has enabled us to come together, yet anthropology also erects barriers between us: until now Paloma has watched, investigated, looked for, written; Liria has been in a way in the dark. Our relation has been unequal, not because of Paloma’s greater wealth, but because Liria was a friend above all while Paloma was always a friend and an anthropologist. For anthropology to reach its potential to change the world, barriers like these need to be not just acknowledged, but undermined. By writing together, about our lives, our friendship, and our worlds, we hope to have contributed, in a small way, towards this project.

Landscapes of Wealth & Desire:
Histories of Value in Baja California Sur, Mexico

Ryan Anderson ¹
University of Kentucky

© 2011 Ryan Anderson

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

Summary

This paper explores the historical background to a proposed study of political disputes over the value of large-scale tourism development in Baja California Sur. The paper starts with a review of anthropological discussions of value — focusing on the work of Kluckhohn, Graeber, Elyachar and Appadurai. The aim is to use an anthropological approach to value to place current conflicts over land and resources arising from recent developments within a historical perspective.  The paper then investigates how actors in different time periods have contributed to collective and often contradictory constructions of the area as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure and conflict.  It is not a report on the contemporary situation, but rather it examines some of the key moments and events that have in the past created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur as a place of value, meaning, and importance. These episodes start with the Spanish contact period and focus primarily on the southern portion of the peninsula. [Value, tourism, development, Baja California Sur, Mexico]

INTRODUCTION: A BACKWATER NO LONGER

On May 3, 1535, famed explorer Hernán Cortés landed on the shores of present-day La Paz in Baja California Sur (see Figure 1) with high hopes that he had finally found a legendary island full of gold (Leonard 1992; Alvarez, jr 1987; Crosby 1994). The following year, after spending vast amounts of capital and resources on the venture, the last remnants of Cortés’ expedition set sail for Acapulco on mainland Mexico, abandoning the settlement as a complete failure. While Cortés had hoped to find an island full of wealth, he only found a few pearls and a hot, dry, desolate landscape with few native inhabitants (Crosby 1994: 4). It was, by many accounts, a place of little worth, especially for a conquistador who had sacked the capital city of the Aztecs fifteen years prior.

Cortés was, of course, several centuries too early to cash in on the popularity of international tourism and development that turned the desert landscape of Baja California Sur into a high-end tourism destination that includes everything from ATV tours and Costco to exclusive hotels, expansive golf courses, and even a Hard Rock Café. For more than four centuries after 1536, the landscapes of Baja California Sur remained difficult, perplexing, and challenging places for explorers and entrepreneurs who hoped to extract some measure of value from its territories (whether gold or souls). From pearl diving and missionary work to silver mining, relatively few were able to achieve long-term economic or political success. Baja California Sur remained economically marginal—at least from the perspective of outsiders—until the late 20^th century. And then something changed.

So what happened? How did this supposed “backwater” of Mexico suddenly rise to such prominence and economic importance? As urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch argue in their landmark text Urban Fortunes, “A place is defined as much by its position in a particular organizational web—political, economic, and cultural—as by its physical makeup and topographical configuration” (43-44). The landscapes and territories of Baja California Sur, especially those located near the coast, clearly underwent a radical repositioning within a particular political and economic network. With the onset of mass travel in the 1960s, improvements in transportation technology, and specifically the rising popularity of international coastal tourism, the same arid, seemingly worthless environment of Baja California Sur became the locus for the creation of Mexico’s most prized tourism destination: Los Cabos² (Berger and Wood 2010).

The contemporary socio-economic importance of the coastal territories of Baja California Sur was only made possible by a shift in how various actors—from global tourists to Mexican State officials—re-imagined and re-shaped the formerly “desolate” environment into a desirable destination for travel, leisure, investment, and even permanent residence. From particular perspectives (e.g. the Mexican State, investors, and developers), increased tourism development, along with sharply rising land values, are clear indicators of considerable success and economic “progress”. Los Cabos is, in many ways, a powerful symbol of prosperity in Mexico. But this is only part of the story. To quote the late Vine Deloria, “Into each life, it is said, a little rain must fall” (1985: 78).

Figure 1. Location of Baja California Sur.

In this case, the “rain” is the social and economic inequality that has been generated by Los Cabos. The urban colonias that ring the high-end tourism zone present a radically different picture of the “success” of tourism development in Los Cabos. Poverty, uneven development, unemployment, socio-economic segregation, and lack of access to critical resources such as water and land plague these settlements (Lopez et al 2006; Torres and Momsen 2005; Wilson 2008). This pattern of economic growth and consequent social inequality is a common theme for many tourism developments throughout Mexico, most notably Cancún (Hiernaux 1999, Castellanos 2010). The economic benefits of tourism development “successes” in Mexico are unevenly distributed, both spatially and socially. But this aspect of international and domestic tourism does not get that much attention.

The social, economic, and political restructuring of place in Los Cabos, and throughout the peninsula, is anything but uncontested, however. Sometimes it seems that powerful, larger discourses—such as those that originate with state systems or international media—define these places, spaces, and territories. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 2010), for example, claims that international tourism development is a “key driver” of socio-economic “progress” around the world. But what gets lost in such grand statements? According to this view, the Los Cabos tourism corridor, which has witnessed considerable tourism development, would stand as a major success and site of progress—and for some that is the case. But for others, this re-valuation, development, and transformation of place hasn’t resulted in prosperity. Despite the existence of prominent narratives and discourses that construct Baja California Sur as a place of successful, even “sustainable” development, there are other voices, other experiences, and other values that people attach to places, and they speak to some very different social and political realities.

These contested values and competing interpretations of place in Baja California Sur are by no means recent. By taking a historic look at how different people have engaged with Baja California Sur over time, this paper explores present conflicts over resources and ideas of place in light of the past. The current conflicts over the definition and control of the region are not new—they are just the latest acts of a long-running play. Here I investigate the various ways in which a multiplicity of actors—at various scales—have contributed to the collective and often contradictory construction of Baja California Sur as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure, conflict—and ultimately value. These investigations are preliminary and suggestive, rather than definitive. Starting with the Spanish contact period, and focusing primarily on the southern tip of the peninsula (known as the cape region), the argument covers some of the key moments and events that have created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur over time as a place of value, meaning, and importance.

SOME NOTES ON VALUE

Before going any further, it makes sense to establish a few foundations. My analysis focuses on the concept of value as it relates to the construction of meaning and place in Baja California Sur. I draw from the work of anthropologists, urban sociologists, and geographers in exploring what is admittedly an unwieldy concept. Theoretical discussions about value—the attribution of import or meaning to ideas, ways of life, goods, and/or actions—have a deep history in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology (see Kluckhohn 1958; Appadurai 1986; Eiss and Pedersen 2002; Graeber 2001, 2011; West 2005; Hart 2011; Elyachar 2005). The term “value” is tremendously loaded and complex. It sounds fairly simple to talk about the value of a place or an idea…but the more you dig into the concept the more difficult things become. That is because, as Graeber argues, while there are plenty of discussions about value, there is no clear theory of value per se. Part of the reason for this is that the term itself refers to a wide array of different—yet interrelated—understandings of what “value” is all about.

As Graeber (2001:1-2) explains, theories of value tend to fall into three overlapping categories: 1) values in the sociological sense (i.e. what is good or desirable for society); 2) the economic sense (how objects/goods are desired and measured according to a particular system of accounting, such as money); and 3) the linguistic sense (which Graeber glosses as “meaningful difference” within a larger structured system). Value in these various, interrelated senses is ultimately about how and why people rank, order, and organize their social worlds according to particular ideals, whether moral, cultural, or political. A truly exhaustive account of value should, as some argue, probably extend at least as far back as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and especially Karl Marx (Hart 2011), whose theories of value focused heavily on the critical importance of labor. Such a project, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. For the sake of conceptual clarity, I am going to limit my use of value to a few lines of thought derived mostly from relatively recent anthropological theories of value (although Marx does play a key role for many of these theorists). I draw primarily on Kluckhohn (1958), Graeber (2001), Elyachar (2005), and Appadurai (1986). Kluckhohn’s comparative project on value is a good place to start.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Clyde Kluckhohn launched an ambitious initiative aiming to make the scientific study of values the key concern of anthropology (Graeber 2001:2). Kluckhohn’s work focused mostly on a sociological sense of value, and attempted to analyze how and why different societies came to develop particular value orientations (Kluckhohn 1958). As Graeber explains, this early effort to analyze and cogently theorize value “ran most definitely aground” (2001:5). But it was not without merit. Foremost was Kluckhohn’s drive to find a way to push anthropology toward a study of social life that paid close attention to moral desires—or what individuals “ought to want” out of their lives (Kluckhohn 1958: 469; Graeber 2001:3). Kluckhohn advocated a study of values that sought to move beyond mechanistic assumptions about human choices and behavior:

We want to live in particular ways and toward selected ends. When the gap between actuality and aspiration is too great, individuals and indeed whole groups choose death rather than survival. For we human beings are not just pushed by our biological needs and psychological drives; we are also pulled by conceptions of the right, the good, the desirable (1958:469).

He argued that since there are patterned “habits of thinking which individuals consciously learn and unconsciously absorb in their daily social experience” (1958:469), an empirically grounded and systematic study of values was possible. He was in search of the “codes which unite individuals in adherence to shared goals that transcend immediate and egocentric interest” (1958:470). Values for Kluckhohn “are cultural and psychological facts of a certain type which can be described as objectively as other types of cultural and psychological facts” (1958: 472). The only problem was that Kluckhohn’s value project was never able to actually achieve these ambitious goals, despite much effort from Kluckhohn and his research team. The key issue, as Graeber (2001:4) points out, was the difficulty of finding a way to relate this comparative project to specific choices, behaviors, and actions within a coherent framework. What was ultimately missing was “an adequate theory of structure” (Graeber 2001:5).

Although Kluckhohn’s project hit a dead end, and has had no intellectual legacy, maybe something worthwhile may be salvaged from his efforts. As Graeber explains, Kluckhohn’s key idea was that cultures differ not simply in what they believe about the world, but also in “what they feel one can justifiably demand from it” (2001:5). This is at heart a moral project. Kluckhohn tried to move beyond studies of belief and perception toward a comparative analysis of morally-based ideals and desires. While most anthropologists may consider Kluckhohn’s project passé or irrelevant today, maybe he was onto something after all. In Graeber’s words: “However primitive the models Kluckhohn actually produced, he did at least open up the possibility of looking at cultures as not just different ways of perceiving the world, but as different ways of imagining what life ought to be like—as moral projects, one might say” (2001:22). This takes us further than many of the approaches to value that followed his.

Kluckhohn provides the first key component, then, of how I want to approach value. Value is not just about market forces, and it is not intrinsically embedded in commodities, places, or other material things. Kluckhohn’s value project went beyond questions of supply, demand, and taste to embrace what people feel is socially and morally just. As one foundation for thinking about value, this requires us to think about how such conceptions are linked to actions and to larger cultural contexts.

David Graeber’s book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, offers perhaps the most thorough anthropological investigation of value to date. I want to highlight two key components from Graeber’s discussions of value here. The first is a focus on action. The second is an emphasis on how these actions translate into wider systems of meaning. Graeber seeks to construct a theory of value that moves away from Saussurean structuralism on the one hand and from what he calls “economism” on the other. The problem with the former is that value is reduced to little more than “meaningful difference” (2001:46). With the latter, value is framed as a factor of individual choice and little more. Both frameworks are also hopelessly static; Graeber, following the lead of Nancy Munn, moves toward an understanding of value that is dramatically more dynamic (2001:46).

Munn argues that value emerges in action or through the process of creation itself. Value is not just an intrinsic property of objects, goods, services, or places. It has to be produced—within the context of surrounding cultural systems. This argument, which emphasizes both process and action, comes full circle back to Marx’s theoretical discussions of value (which were, after all, very much about measuring value based upon human action—labor). Money, Graeber explains, is key to Marx’s theory of value: “What money measures and mediates…is ultimately the importance of certain forms of human action (Graeber 2001:66-67). Money, which is an abstract yet ubiquitous representation of value, comes to signify the meaning and importance of human labor or what Graeber sometimes calls “creative energies” (ibid). While Marxists tend to focus on a fairly restricted understanding of human labor, Graeber argues that it might be fruitful to broaden our thinking and consider some other possibilities when it comes to labor and human action.

He writes, “One invests one’s energies in those things one considers most important or most meaningful” (2001:45). Value, he argues, “is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves” (2001:45). This takes certain socially recognizable forms, whether kula valuables, currency, or credit cards. The important point is that these forms are not the actual source of value—they are just the medium through which value is created and passed around. Human actions produce value….and these actions take on meaning when they are understood within larger social and cultural systems. This brings us to the second point: these human actions and creative energies attain meaning when they are placed within expanded symbolic and social systems.

Graeber argues that value may be understood as how “actions become meaningful” within a larger social system, “real or imagined” (2001:254; see also Elyachar 2006:8)³. In order to understand the importance or meaning of a particular action, there has to be some reference to a surrounding totality. There must be some sort of comparison going on: “Parts take on meaning in relation to each other, and that process always involved references to some sort of whole: whether it be a matter of words in a language, episodes in a story, or ‘goods and services’ on the market” (Graeber 2001:86-87). The “real or imagined” aspect of all this is also important here. Graeber says that the process of creating value requires comparison, which necessitates some kind of audience. This audience may be real (e.g. direct social relationships) or imagined. “Society” is basically an imagined, totalized audience that people use to assess tastes, choices, desires, and values. This is akin to the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson (2006) wrote about, which are connected through shared ideals, ideologies, and meanings.

So we have to take account of action in value creation, and we need to pay attention to how those actions are linked to surrounding social, cultural, and political systems of meaning. This is where politics and power come into the equation. Graeber writes, “In any real social situation, there are likely to be any number of such imaginary totalities at play, organized around different conceptions of value” (2001:88). There is not just one system of meaning that people engage with or contest—there are multiple interwoven, contested, overlapping systems. The confluence of these systems leads to what might be called a “politics of value” (Graeber 2001:88; Appadurai 1986). For Graeber, competing or conflicting claims about value are always inherently political in nature (2001:115). Terry Turner, according to him, claims that the struggle to define value is “the ultimate stakes of politics” (2001:88). It would be ideal if value (i.e. what matters, or what is important and how that importance is represented) were determined through democratic, fair, and just decision-making processes. But Graeber and others argue that this is not the case (see also Elyachar 2005). The playing field is not level. This leads to the question of power.

Julia Elyachar writes, “The anthropology of value, which has a strong focus on symbolic meaning, can have politics at its center as well” (2005:7). Elyachar’s monograph, Markets of Dispossession, is a deeply ethnographic work exploring the politics of value through an extended, detailed investigation of workshops in Cairo. She draws from both Munn and Graeber to analyze how workshop masters create what she calls “relational value,” which “expresses the positive value attached to the creation, production, and extension of relationships in communities of Cairo” (2005:7). The power struggles in this case consist of conflicts between these workshop masters, the Egyptian state, international organizations, and NGOs, among others.

Her ethnography outlines a conflict between the intrusion of neoliberal market reforms and ideologies, on the one hand, and the morally-grounded economies of the workshop masters in Cairo on the other. What is being “dispossessed,” she argues, is “the power to decide what matters or, in other words, what is value” (2005:8). Through a focus on neoliberal market reforms, Elyachar shows that “Markets are social and political worlds with their own cosmologies. Each is a cosmos of its own, an intricately functioning field of power” (2005:214). She challenges the utopian notion of neo-classical economists that markets are benign instruments which, if properly unleashed, will serve the interests of “society” at large⁴ (Elyachar 2005:214). Instead, Elyachar argues forcefully that markets are highly political projects that have real—and often dramatically disparate—material effects. What all of this means is that economic expansion and development is anything but a value-neutral or objective process…no matter what many economists and development experts assert. Elyachar makes a solid case for the need to pay close attention to power relations, and more specifically to how different forms of power work, interact, and clash, in the ongoing politics of value.

Arjun Appadurai has explored the politics of value as well, but in a very different way. His approach, which draws a lot on the work of Georg Simmel, is far more economic in its focus. While Graeber seeks to shift the emphasis from a focus on things to an emphasis on actions, Appadurai explores the question of value by paying close attention to the “lives” of commodities. This is because he sees exchange as they key issue in value creation. What matters, ultimately, is how much someone is willing to give up in order to obtain certain goods and services. For Appadurai, value is ultimately based on individual desire (this is a different conception of desire than Kluckhohn sought to address). His analysis of the politics of value focuses on the struggles to control “flows of commodities” themselves, which is a decidedly market-based approach. Appadurai seeks to trace these commodity flows as they pass through different “regimes of value in space and time” (1986:4). He writes, “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, and their trajectories” (1986:5). Although some aspects of Appadurai’s approach are problematic, I find the idea of “regimes of value in space and time” to be particularly intriguing and useful.

This framework, with commodities passing through different systems of meaning and their value related to this overall process, is yet another foundation for my current work on value creation in Baja California Sur. But it needs reworking a bit, mostly because the commodity in question is not a linen coat or a can of Coke—it’s a place. Land, as Polanyi once argued, is a commodity of a special kind. Logan and Molotch, following him, insist that land is 1) immobile, and 2) not originally produced for sale in a market (1987:23). This means that an analysis of how value is created in particular landscapes or places requires different considerations. Yes, there is an argument to be made that places such as Cabo San Lucas or La Paz are most definitely “produced,” but this is not the same as the production of traditional commodities like coats—or iPods for that matter. The “regimes of value” in this case are the ideas, beliefs, and predilections of people, past and present—and these work to shape and define the meaning and value of particular geographic places. These systems of meaning overlap, clash, coalesce, and break apart. In what follows, I seek to trace the historical trajectories of value embedded in specific places.

AMAZONS & PEARLS: 1533-1697

Before a single European even set foot on the territories of present day Baja California Sur, the imagined possibilities of the place had already been influenced by a powerful source: literature. In 1510, Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo first published Sergas de Esplandian (the exploits of Esplandian), a sequel to his previous successful series called Amadis de Gaula. All of these books were written in a genre that was widely popular in 16^th century Spain: the “romances of chivalry,” which were

usually long accounts of the impossible exploits of knightly heroes in strange and enchanted lands inhabited by monsters and extraordinary creatures, and they presented a highly imaginative, idealized concept of life in which strength, virtue, and passion were all of a transcendent and unnatural character (Leonard 1992: 13).

Throughout the century, upwards of ten editions of the Sergas were published (Leonard 1992: 17; Martinez 1960: 90). The main story of Sergas recounts the adventures of Esplandian, the son of Amadis, who eventually falls in love with Calafia, the formidable Queen of Amazon women who inhabit a rocky, gold-laden island named “California” (Leonard 1992: 38; Martinez 1960: 90; Alvarez jr. 1987: 12-13). One of the crucial aspects of this literature is that it often incorporated narrative components of contemporary historical accounts, leaving audiences convinced that such tales were literally true. Leonard argues that there was widespread belief in tales such as Sergas de Esplandian and that they influenced the ideas and actions of Spanish conquistadors, from Columbus to Cortés (Leonard 1992: 13-14). In fact, belief in the actual existence of Amazons was so pervasive that the “contractual agreements between conquistadors and their financial backers…frequently included clauses requiring a search for these mythical women” (Leonard 1992: 36).

The legend of an island full of warrior women dates to ancient Greece, and similar stories were passed around throughout the Middle Ages by famous travelers such as Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Pedro Tarfur (Leonard 1992: 37). These Amazon women have been reported everywhere from Asia Minor to West Africa, but the exact location of their island home always remained (conveniently) vague (ibid). While several explorers repeated similar narratives about these famed female warriors in their letters and publications, Leonard (1992: 38) argues that the popular myths of Sergas de Esplandian may have been the main source for the dramatic prevalence of these themes in the minds of 16^th century conquistadors. Leonard even suggests that the author, Montalvo, may have in heard of Columbus’ reports of seeing Amazon-like women in the Caribbean and added those details to his story about Espandian to capitalize on the popularity of the legend (Leonard 1992: 39). One passage of the Sergas about women who “dwelled in well-formed caves” echoes Columbus’s earlier report (ibid).

One key passage from Montalvo’s romantic novel may have played a critical role in the motivation to explore the lands that were later called California. In Chapter 157 we read:

Now I wish you to learn of one of the strangest matters that has ever been found in writing or in the memory of mankind…Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to the Earthly Paradise, and inhabited by black women without a single man among them, for they live almost in the manner of Amazons. They are robust in body with stout, passionate hearts and great strength. The island itself is the most rugged with craggy rocks in the world. Their weapons are all of gold as well as the trappings of wild beasts which they ride after taming, for there is no other metal on the whole island [in Leonard 1992: 39-40].

Editions of these books were widespread in key Spanish cities, including Toledo, Salamanca, Burgos, and Seville—the last being a primary place from which conquistadors embarked for the New World (Leonard 1992: 41). Editions of the Sergas were published in 1521, 1525, and 1526—all around the time that Cortés and his legions were conquering New Spain (ibid). In 1524, Cortés repeated rumors about this mystical island and its inhabitants in his reports to the Spanish emperor, Charles V (Miller 1974: 6; Leonard 1992: 41). He explicitly expressed his intent to “discover the truth” about the famed island (Miller 1974: 6).

By 1530, Cortés received authorization to explore the western ports of New Spain. This authorization also granted him the power to govern any new territories he discovered. In 1533 he sent two ships into the gulf, but they were separated, and one quickly returned to port in Acapulco. The other, the Concepción, headed west and anchored in the bay of what the crew thought was an island (Miller 1974: 7). This was, in fact, the bay of La Paz (see Figure 2). Its captain “received no welcome and from the outset the peninsula became known as inhospitable country” (ibid). The captain and most of his crew were killed by the inhabitants of the new land (most likely the Guaycara), but one survivor managed to get back to the mainland and informed Cortés about the discovery, which was supposedly an island laden with gold and pearls (ibid).

Figure 2. Map of key cities mentioned in the text. Note: Los Cabos includes the cities of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas.

Cortés set sail late in the year of 1534 for what became “California,” in the hope of exploiting its resources (Crosby 1994: 4) and finding the legendary island of the Amazons. Ultimately, he found neither. The La Paz colony struggled from the start, and by 1536, Cortés returned to New Spain to “defend his rights of conquest and acquisition” (Alvarez Jr., 1987: 14). He never went back to the peninsula, which remained “unsettled” or, perhaps more accurately, unconquered, for the next century. Still, it held strategic importance for Spain, as one of the resting stops for Spanish ships traveling the Manila Galleon route (Ibid: 15). Cabo San Lucas, at the very tip of the peninsula, was a convenient waypoint for ships traveling in and out of New Spain.

For the remainder of the 16th century, the Spanish had little success with their attempts to establish settlements and harbors in Baja California. In the context of Spain’s overall colonial project on the mainland of New Spain, the peninsula held a marginal position (Alvarez, Jr., 1987: 16). The presence of English and Dutch pirates made the region even more inhospitable (ibid). Between 1533 and 1680, each attempt at settlement ended in failure. According to Alvarez, Jr., “Baja California provided no riches, no great cities, and no great populations to evangelize. Furthermore, colonists saw Baja as a barren wasteland in which the European could not live” (1987: 16). Some, however, did manage to find value on the peninsula.

Upon landing in La Paz in 1535, Cortés wrote to Cristobal de Oñate saying that he had discovered a land rich in pearls (Gerhard 1956: 239). While this news was certain to arouse interest, there are no records to indicate that any substantial attempts at pearl exploitation took place for the next fifty years. This may have been due in part to the perceived difficulty of such a venture after Cortés’ failure (Gerhard 1956: 240). The viceroy of New Spain granted three men the exclusive right to the pearl fisheries from the present-day state of Jalisco to the coasts of California. This virtual monopoly was broken in 1593 when Sebastian Vizcaino filed a legal suit and gained his own license to exploit the region’s pearls. From around 1600 onward, various licensed and unlicensed individuals took part in this resource extraction. According to Gerhard, “There is reason to believe that pearl hunting in Lower California became a well-established industry after about 1625, with frequent expeditions setting out from Chacala, Matanchel, Chametla, and other ports on the west coast of New Spain” (1956: 242). By 1685 profits from pearling were already dropping and, upon the arrival of missionaries in 1697, life became even more difficult for the pearlers. The coming of the missionaries meant the loss of a primary labor pool (the California Indians) and also increased government oversight (Gerhard 1956: 244-245). The pearling industry continued well into the missionary period, but “serious depletion” of the resources was already apparent by the early part of the 18^th century.

It is not difficult to accept that the discursive literary tales of writers such as Montalvo had significant effects on the imaginations of Spanish captains, generals, soldiers, sailors, investors, and others who engaged in the conquest and exploitation of the Americas. “There can be little doubt,” writes Leonard, “that a factor in creating the fantastic illusion of the Conquest in the minds of so many participants was the multitude of fables, myths, and legends that so completely possessed their imaginations” (Leonard 1992: 314). Much like TV and internet media of today, these popular discourses had their own material effects, even if they are, ultimately, difficult to measure directly.

Clearly, however, these legends and narratives helped to fill this western edge of the Spanish empire with intrigue—and ultimately high social and political value, at least for a while. The myths of Amazons and islands full of gold and pearls swept across the New World, always located just out of reach, on the horizon, were also undoubtedly spurred by inaccuracies and blunders born out of poor language translation and fevered expectations of wealth and success (Leonard 1992: 45). These discourses, mixed with political, economic, and strategic motivations from the sovereign down, encouraged people to traverse incredible distances and explore unknown places—all without any realistic idea of what to expect at the end of the journey. The search for value, then, is also about what Graeber calls “creative action”; the potential value of those territories depended on marshalling political and financial support from key individuals, as much as it was about literally sailing to the peninsula and attempting to extract resources or secure a territory. Baja California Sur was shaped, from the start, by a constellation of ideas and desires, which led to the interlinked fates of native populations and these Spanish argonauts. The actualities, once the boots hit the sand, were another matter. Regardless, the process continued, as previous discourses, ideas, stories, and narratives led to even more interest in the peninsula. One map always seems to lead to another. It is just a matter of time. For the early conquistadors, the Baja peninsula was desirable and valuable because of its potential material wealth. For a wave of new explorers who came more than a century later, value was measured in terms of human souls.

JESUITS: 1678-1767

In 1678 the Spanish made a second serious attempt at colonizing the peninsula of California. The Jesuit priest, Eusebio Francisco Kino, who became one of the driving forces behind the settlement of Baja, arrived in 1683 as part of a “government-backed effort to colonize the California peninsula” (Crosby 1994: 8). Kino was enlisted in the expedition as a geographer, mapmaker, and missionary (Crosby 1994: 8). They established a settlement at San Bruno, located about 20 km north of present day Loreto. The endeavor was a financial disaster, and Admiral Isidro de Atondo y Antillón, leader of the expedition, blamed the failure on the “sterility” of the new land. This “helped to create a perception of California that dealt a severe blow not only to the continuation of his own venture, but also to the prospects of anyone who might later try to raise money for an occupation of the peninsula” (Crosby 1994: 10). The project was abandoned, as was the colonization of the peninsula of California. Father Kino, however, was determined to establish a mission in California, and spent years working toward his goal. Contrary to conquistadors, pirates, pearlers, colonists, and common soldiers, Kino envisioned the wealth of California not in terms of economic resources, but souls. He remained steadfast in his desire to Christianize the native people of the distant peninsula that had repelled his earlier efforts (Martinez 1960: 118).

Kino, with fellow Jesuit Juan Maria Salvatierra, began working toward finding a way to implement his missionary plans. Both Kino and Salvatierra agreed that the primary reason for the failure of the first attempt at colonization was conflicting agendas between the parties involved. The missionaries, soldiers, and colonists all had different motives, expectations, and desires—and this was exactly what Kino and Salvatierra needed to control (Crosby 1994: 12-13). By 1696, Salvatierra and Kino were able to convince Spanish religious and political authorities to develop missions in California (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 19). Due to an insurrection in Sonora, however, Kino was unable join the 1697 expedition to California. His religious superiors ordered him to remain in the tempestuous region where he held considerable influence; they felt he was far too valuable to be sent to some distant frontier (Crosby 1994: 23). Salvatierra continued on, with the help of the newly enlisted father Francisco Maria Piccolo. Along with Captain Luis de Torres y Tortolero, three mainland Indians, and five soldiers, Salvatierra set sail for the peninsula. They landed at the site of the present day city of Loreto, which is located on the lower third of the peninsula. Eventually, “This small group formed the basis for a successful settlement and for the establishment of a permanent mestizo/criollo populace in the Californias” (Alvarez Jr., 1987: 19). Within two years of landing, Salvatierra and his compatriots forged a settlement that included about seventy colonists.

Over the next three decades, four missions were built on the cape in the pueblos of La Paz (1720), Santiago (1724), Todos Santos (1733), and San Jose del Cabo (1730). Disease and social conflict, however, threatened these sites almost immediately. “Pestilences,” writes Crosby, “had ravaged every band of the cape’s people” (1994: 111). In addition, the missionaries zealously undermined the cultural and social ways of life of the native populations. One particular campaign against polygamy took place in 1733; this effort generated heavy resistance and enmity from the local Pericú people, and fueled aversion to life in the mission system (Crosby 1994: 111). The missionaries argued that the Pericú were the unwitting victims of devious leaders who immorally took multiple wives (ibid). Syphilis swept across the population, killing females disproportionately, and sending shockwaves through the Pericú social order. Polygamy was a common practice among Pericú leaders, and the missionaries struck at the heart of this custom by actively trying to recruit young women into the mission order (Crosby 1994: 111).

Political leaders and shamans fought back with a vengeance and resentment between the Spanish and native populations grew. At this point, half of the cape region’s population was already dead from epidemics. Rumors of insurrection spread throughout the three southern missions. By October of 1734, two Jesuit padres, two servants, and one guard were killed in the missions at San Jose del Cabo, La Paz, and Santiago (Crosby 1994: 115). All four of the missions were destroyed in the uprising, leaving the Jesuits in a precarious position on the cape. The Jesuits appealed to help from the rest of New Spain, and this brought about a radical shift in the power dynamic of the population. Kino and Salvatierra’s original plan for a mission system controlled by a predominantly theocratic agenda fell apart (Crosby 1994: 129). Ultimately, while the rebellion temporarily freed the native populations in the cape region from missionary control, their situation dramatically degraded shortly thereafter. Plagues continued to decimate the population. More importantly, the power of the Jesuits slowly began to crumble, opening up the region to external populations—many from the northern part of the peninsula—who sought new economic opportunities in the south.

Despite numerous conflicts, the decimation of native populations, and decades of adversity, by 1767 the Jesuits still managed to establish fourteen mission sites throughout Lower California. That was also the same year they were expelled from the New World, in part due to competition from other religious orders and the widespread perception that the Jesuits possessed too much political power. In 1772 the two Californias (which included the present day state of California in the U.S. and the two states of Mexico now known as Baja California and Baja California Sur) were divided into different administrative units due to conflicts between the Dominican and Franciscan orders, who took over control of the missions throughout the Californias. The Franciscans took control of the upper territory of California, leaving the lower part of California under Dominican jurisdiction. This division was formalized in 1804, when the territories were officially split into Alta and Baja California (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). Spain concentrated its efforts on the exploitation of Alta California, while Baja served as a launching point for those efforts. Baja California was not, by any means, a focal point of colonial interest or exploitation for the Spanish (and this continued under the new Mexican state in the 19^th century). This relative lack of attention paved the way for the incursion of foreign interests in the 19th century.

Before moving on, however, we should take note of how the Jesuits inscribed value on the Baja peninsula. The place was clearly located outside the primary interests of the Spanish Empire, yet a few key individuals were driven by their desire to spread their ideologies to new lands, to save new people. In this way, these territories became valuable in a very different way: primarily because they were terra incognita, located outside the civilized, Christianized world. Kino and Salvatierra sought a kind of value that was bound within deep ideological and cultural systems of meaning…but the realization of those values also depended on the actions (as Graeber argues) and work (as Marx tells us) that were required to build the missionary structures and networks. Unlike the earlier Spanish colonists, the Jesuits were not interested primarily in economic or political gain—at least not explicitly. The value of Baja California, for them, rested on a worldview framed in terms of faith, fate, and a zealous sense of duty. It was yet another form of value that arose, coalesced for a short time, and then slowly crumbled—like Cortés’s dreams before—and gave way, eventually, to new values, desires, and hopes in the centuries to come.

THE OTHER CALIFORNIA

In the early 1800s, American, English, and Russian hunters and traders, attracted by the rich sea otter colonies in Baja California, began to establish trade networks along the peninsula. American traders made a base in the San Quintin area (in the northern part of the peninsula), and commerce increased in spite of Spanish efforts to quell the operations (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). After the Mexican Revolution, the newly formed nation of Mexico revived interest in mining as one means of developing its economy and of creating much needed post-war capital. This included willingness to allow foreign investment in mining industries within Mexico (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). Interest and investment in mining on the mainland—primarily by the British—waned by the 1840s. At the same time, however, the otter trade and whaling in Baja California was on the rise, drawing in both American and British whaling fleets. The Mexican-American War, which took place between 1846 and 1848, interrupted this period of increased foreign exploitation of Mexico’s—and Baja California’s—resources.

US President James Polk was intent on expanding the nation’s territorial bounds, and the western territories of California and New Mexico were among his prime targets (McPherson 1988: 49). Polk originally attempted to buy the territories from Mexico, but when the latter refused, he opted to use military force. What Polk and his compatriots really wanted was Upper California, which would not only expand the geographic territory of the US, but also assure control of critical coastal ports, such as San Diego, San Francisco, and Monterey. Lower California was a secondary interest. With the aid of internal insurrection and naval occupation of key ports, the conquest of Upper California was relatively swift. By the end of July 1845, in fact, Polk believed that he had undisputed control of the entirety of the Californias, despite the US military not having stepped foot on the lower peninsula (Chamberlain 1963: 50). The war did finally arrive in Baja California in 1846, when Commander S.F. Dupont sailed into the harbor at La Paz in order to blockade the west coast of Mexico (Chamberlain 1963: 50). There was no resistance from the population at La Paz, which was declared “neutral” by the territorial governor, Colonel Francisco Palacios de Miranda. Undoubtedly, the governor gambled on having picked the winning side (he was later reviled in the histories of Baja California as a cowardly traitor; see Martinez 1960). Dupont then continued on to Loreto, Mulege, and then San Jose del Cabo before heading back to the port of Monterey in Upper California. In 1846, Polk announced to the US congress that the conquest of the Californias was complete (Chamberlain 1963: 51).

The only problem was that US control of certain parts of California—especially Lower California—was tenuous at best. The US secretaries of War and the Navy, along with Commodore Robert F. Stockton, acknowledged this situation (Chamberlain 1963: 51). In February of 1846, Stockton ordered Commander John B. Montgomery to establish a more forceful US presence at the coastal towns of San Jose del Cabo, La Paz, and Cabo San Lucas (ibid). By April 14, all of these ports were “pacified,” along with the pueblo of Loreto. In each of these pueblos, there was little resistance to the US forces. The US flag replaced the Mexican flag in both Loreto and La Paz, and Montgomery granted “all peaceably inclined persons” the rights of US citizens (ibid). Having underestimated resistance, the US left many of these towns with little military protection. This incited repeated complaints from the citizens of San Jose del Cabo, for instance, who appealed for a garrison to protect them from “the rancheros and Mexican troops inland”⁵ (Chamberlain 1963: 51). Open fighting between the US and Mexico erupted with the Battle of Mulege in 1847. By the time of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February of 1848, the territorial conflict over Baja California between the US and Mexico was a draw, at best (Chamberlain 1963: 57). While the US repelled Mexican troops from La Paz, Mulege, and San Jose del Cabo, they held only superficial control of the peninsula, whose inhabitants put up fierce resistance (especially when compared to Upper California).

Baja California remained a part of Mexico, ultimately, because Polk never actually demanded the territory during the formal treaty process. He sent Nicholas Trist to Mexico City to negotiate with General Santa Anna’s government, with the explicit command to secure Upper California and New Mexico, but not Lower California (Chamberlain 1963). If Polk had made Baja California a part of the treaty, is it very likely that it would have become a part of US territory, despite the disputes on the ground. While Trist was in Mexico working on the final treaty terms, the Polk administration actually changed its demands and decided that they did in fact want the peninsula. After realizing the high costs of the war, Polk felt that the US deserved more territory than the original treaty demanded. By the time this change of heart reached Trist in Mexico, however, the original terms had already been agreed upon. While the Mexican government initially put off negotiations with Trist, once they received news of a possible change of terms, they probably did all they could to agree to the original terms (Chamberlain 1963). Thus, a measure of diplomatic blundering and carefully timed obfuscation on the part of the Mexican government probably saved the peninsula for Mexico.

With the onset of the California Gold Rush in 1849, Baja California received considerable domestic and international attention, as many new prospectors, migrants, and travelers arrived in the hope of cashing in on the mineral wealth of the Californias (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 28). In 1857 president Benito Juarez enacted measures that once again loosened restrictions on foreign investment and development in an effort to stabilize the nation’s shaky economy (Meyer el al 2003: 385). The Porfiriato, which lasted from 1877 to 1911, resulted in an even stronger push toward development through foreign capital investment. The trend extended to Baja California as well, and foreign investment was dominated by businesses from the United States. Mining once again gained prominence throughout Mexico, spurred by technological advances (Alvarez, Jr. 1987:31). While mining operations in Baja California increased in number, the peninsula remained in a relatively marginalized position in the larger Mexican economy (Taylor 2001: 464). According to Alvarez, Jr., “As in the colonial and missionary periods, Baja’s main barrier to settlement and development continued to be physical geography” (1987: 32). This daunting geography continued to play a key role in shaping discourses and attitudes about the peninsula for decades to come. However, there were some early hints of a perceptual shift, foreshadowing a dramatic change in how people imagined and valued the landscapes of Baja California Sur. The very same rugged landscape that forestalled “development” and conquest for generations became the attraction for outsiders in search of new experiences in exotic, “natural” places.

UN PAISAJE DEL TURSIMO (A TOURISM LANDSCAPE)

In 1897, Swedish-born Gustav Eisen published a short paper about his explorations of the cape region of Baja California Sur. According to Jane Radcliffe, “Eisen’s interests were numerous and he has been described as a horticulturalist, a biologist, a zoologist, an artist and illustrator, an archaeologist, a viticulturalist, anologist, arborist, microbiologist, cartographer, explorer, and would be considered today to be a pioneer conservationist” (Radcliffe nd). His paper reads, in some senses, as a scientific account, since he describes the temperature, climate, rainfall patterns, watersheds, mountains, geology, and “botanical and zoological features” (Eisen 1897: 278) of the region. It also reads, however, as a tourist travelogue:

No one seemed to know that the southern part of the peninsula of Baja California, the country from La Paz southwards, possessed entirely different features from those of the country northward. And, indeed, when I first arrived there it was a surprise to see that, instead of landing on a barren waste, I had before me a tropical country, with luxuriant vegetation, and with many other attractions, at variance with what I had surmised from the few and scanty descriptions that had been published [Eisen 1897:271].

Eisen traveled to the cape region four times in all; three of those were “under the auspices of the California Academy of Sciences” to explore the landscape and collect faunal specimens (Eisen 1897: 272). He recounts tales of scaling unnamed peaks⁶, notes how suited the clear skies are for astronomical observation, and points out “the finest spring” he has ever seen in San Bartolo.

Eisen laments the lack of “taste for athletic exercise” in Mexico, noting that there is no sierra club, no mountaineering club, and “no desire to enjoy the sublime scenery of the high mountains” (Eisen 1897: 277). He goes on to explain that there was a dismal lack of record of ascents for the highest peaks in the region, and writes this off due to the fact that “the natives are satisfied to look at the mountains from below or to engage in deer-hunts in the more accessible places” (ibid). By the end of his article, the once foreboding natural environment of the southernmost part of Baja California Sur sounds like a paradisiacal natural wonderland. This seems to be an early salvo in a complete revaluation of these once feared and spurned landscapes. About a century later, the Mexican government, along with a cadre of hoteliers and developers, caught onto the economic potential of turning the landscape itself into a lucrative commodity.

In the late 1960s, inspired by the success of coastal tourism destinations such as Acapulco, a team of Mexican bankers, planners, economists, and developers crafted a plan to create five regional coastal tourism destinations. The chosen sites were Cancún, Loreto, Huatulco, Ixtapa, and San Jose del Cabo in the cape region of Baja California Sur (Clancy 2001: 50). These marginal places were suddenly seen as potential sources of tremendous value, precisely because of the shifts in the global economy that were taking place. Middle-class American tourists were the prime target market for this development plan; Mexico sought to create destinations that could compete with the popularity of Caribbean tourist sites (Clancy 2001: 53). San Jose del Cabo was likely chosen, in part, because it was already a favored destination for US expatriate sport fishermen, surfers, and other adventurous travelers who were willing to brave the long, dusty drive down the peninsula in Steinbeck-esque campers, trucks, and Jeeps. These populations, like Eisen before them, contributed to a reconstruction of the cape region as a desirable, valuable destination and romantic frontier for travel and leisure. By literally paving the way for future travelers, tourists, pleasure seekers, investors, and developers, these early migrants mapped new economic social values onto the cape region. This re-mapping or re-imagination of place had powerful economic and material consequences.

These histories lead back to my earlier discussion of the shifting nature of value. If value is, as Graeber argues, the way that society measures the importance of its actions, what do the histories of Baja California Sur tell us? The historical examples I have presented clearly illustrate how the same place may embody very different political, economic, and cultural values and meanings, depending on how it is situated within wider social networks. As the interlinked histories of the humans and landscapes of Baja California Sur show, there is no single way of a place to embody value, meaning, and importance. The social, political, economic, and even metaphysical meanings and values of the cape have all shifted dramatically over time—depending on the perceptions, desires, and expectations that various actors brought with them and the material effects of their actions once they arrived. Value, then, is not just the product of ideology or actions. It is instead a complex, dynamic combination of the two. As Marx suggests, value is the result of dialectical, not dichotomous processes that are ongoing. The importance or value of Baja California Sur has risen—and imploded—because of an ever-changing, unpredictable amalgamation of subjective understandings and very concrete actions.

Today, tourism and development media promote the landscapes and marine environments of Baja California Sur’s cape region as luxurious, high-end destinations for adventure, travel, romance, relaxation, and exploration. These discourses emphasize the natural environment, focusing on everything from the azure waters to isolated beaches and the austere beauty of the desert environment. But the value of these places for mass tourism was only made possible by a change in global travel from the 1960s, along with the rise of middle classes (many of them from the US) who had the time and resources to travel for pleasure (Gmelch 2004: 7). Combined with the earlier actions and experiences of expatriates who literally laid the groundwork for future development in places like Los Cabos, these re-imaginations and reconstructions of place coalesced with concrete actions to turn a once barren, isolated, seemingly treacherous territory into an appealing product, ready for consumption.

Yet, like the historical discourses and ever-shifting imaginaries of the cape region, these conceptualizations of place are not without conflict and contestation. The “progress” of tourism development is not shared by everyone, as the urban colonias just outside of the international airport in San Jose del Cabo so forcefully attest (Lopez et al 2006; Wilson 2008). While many international organizations, individuals, investors, and other stakeholders—including the Mexican government—continue to hedge their bets on this newest imaginary of the peninsula, it remains to be seen whether the benefits are truly “sustainable,” or if this is yet another elusive, romantic vision laden with false dreams and Quixotic values.

REFERENCES

Alvarez Jr., Robert R. 1987. Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California 1800-1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Anderson, Benedict. 2006[1983] Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things. Arjun Appaduira, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berger, Dina and Andrew Grant Wood. 2010. Holiday in Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press.

Castellanos, M. Bianet. 2010. A Return to Servitude. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chamberlin, Keith. 1963. Nicholas Trist and Baja California. The Pacific Historical Review 32(1): 49-63.

Clancy, Michael. 2001. Exporting Paradise. New York: Pergamon.

Crosby, Harry W. 1994. Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Deloria, Vine. 1985. Custer Died For Your Sins. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Del Río, Ignacio and María Eugenia Altable Fernández. 2000. Breve historia de Baja California Sur. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.

Eisen, Gustav. 1897. Explorations in the Cape Region of Baja California. Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 29(3): 271-280.

Eiss, Paul K., and David Pederson. 2002. Introduction: Values of Value. Cultural Anthropology 17(3): 283-290.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gerhard, Peter. 1956. Pearl Diving in Lower California. 1533-1830. The Pacific Historical Review 25(3): 239-249.

Gmelch, Sharon Bohn. 2004. Tourists and Tourism: A Reader. Long Grove: Waveland Press.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Hart, Keith. 2011. Building a human economy: a question of value? Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36(2): 5-17.

Hiernaux, Daniel Nicolas. 1999. “Cancún Bliss,” In The Tourist City. Denise R. Judd and Susan F. Fainstein, eds. Pp. 124-142. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1958. The Scientific Study of Values and Contemporary Civilization. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102(5): 469-476.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. 1986. The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

López-López, Álvaro, Judith Cukier, and Álvaro Sánchez Crispín. 2006. “Segration of Tourist Space in Los Cabos, Mexico.” Tourism Geographies Vol. 8(4): 359-379.

Martinez, Pablo L. 1960. A History of Lower California. Translated by Ethel Duffy Turner. In: Editorial Baja California, México, D.F.

McPherson, James M. 1988. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Ballantine Books.

Miller, Ryal. 1974. Cortés and the First Attempt to Colonize California. California Historical Quarterly 53(1): 4-16.

Leonard, Irving Albert. 1992. Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-century New World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Radcliffe, Jane. 2010. Biographic Sketch of Gustav Eisen (1847-1947). California Academy of Sciences,  researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/library/special/bios/Eisen.pdf, accessed December 6, 2010.

United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). 2010. Annual Report for the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

West, Paige. 2005. Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology. American Anthropologist 107(4): 632-642.

Wilson, Tamar Diana. 2008. “Economic and Social Impacts of Tourism in Mexico.” Latin American Perspectives. Issue 160, Vol. 35(3): 37-52.

NOTES

1 Ryan Anderson is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Kentucky.  His research focuses on the politics of development and tourism in Baja California Sur, Mexico. He is the editor of a collaborative online project anthropologies and blogs at ethnografix, as well as being a contributor to the collective anthropology blog, Savage Minds (For examples related to this paper, see this link, and this one). Ryan first encountered Baja California Sur in 2005 and is currently seeking funds to carry out his doctoral research there.

2 This includes the present day cities and surrounding tourism zones of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo.

3 Compare this with Logan and Molotch’s discussion about the definition of a place within particular political, economic, and cultural systems (1987:43-44).

4 Notice how the abstract notion of “society” plays a key role in the value system of neo-classical economic thought. It is, as Graeber argues, an imagined totality that serves a comparative purpose within a particular system of meaning and politics.

5 Considering the fact that the present day population of Los Cabos has many expatriate migrants from the United States, the allegiance of the town of San Jose del Cabo during the Mexican-American War is of particular interest.

6 These peaks, of course, had to be named: “With the right of every explorer, we have named some of the mountain peaks ascended by us, and which previously had no name. Thus in the El Taste region we named Mt. Troyer and Mt. Molera after members of the California Academy of Sciences” (Eisen 1897: 277).

APPENDIX: A Few Photographs & Notes from Baja California Sur, 2005-2010

Broken metate eroding out of the sand in the very southern portion of the peninsula. There are many archaeological sites throughout the region, which speak to the deep histories of these landscapes. 2009.

Landscape scene taken while driving down Highway One in Baja California Sur. This is the same landscape that repelled conquistadors, missionaries, and many others for centuries. This paved highway, which now runs the length of the peninsula, makes the journey quite a bit easier. 2006.

Guard tower and no trespassing sign, located in the far southern portion of the peninsula. With rising land values and ensuing conflicts over title and tenure, scenes like this have become more and more common. Property owners often hire private security guards to protect their lands against squatters and other possible intruders. 2009.

This is a coastal development site in the southern portion of the peninsula. The sign on the right provides some information about the development. Developers buy lots, and then seek investors by advertising the plans for the project. The most expensive properties on this site were listed at around 600,000 USD, just for the land. Similar properties sold for around 10,000 USD in the 1980s. 2009.

This is one of the main beaches in the Los Cabos tourism zone. Tourists, umbrellas, and hotels fill the landscape. Notice the ropes in front of the umbrellas, which are meant to help separate the tourists from local vendors who seek to sell their wares (hats, watches, jewelry, etc). The spatial segregation like this is very common in the tourism zone. 2009.

A long stretch of beach in a part of the peninsula that is relatively undeveloped at present. This is a perfect example of the type of desert landscape that was considered desolate and of little value by many outsiders for centuries. Today, such austere places attract the imaginations (and money) of a multitude of travelers. A few decades ago, the beaches of Los Cabos looked a little more like this. 2009.

This is a small coastal community at the tip of the peninsula. It is composed of citiziens from both the US and Mexico. Communities like this are increasingly common throughout the peninsula. This portion of the peninsula, which remains relatively undeveloped at present, has some of the most high demand real estate in the region.

This image shows some of the remnants of Baja California Sur’s mining past. This was taken in the inland pueblo of El Triunfo, where mining operations peaked in the late 19th century. 2009.

Fishing has a long history on the peninsula. Archaeological sites clearly illustrate the fac that early inhabitants depended heavily on marine resources. This continues up to the present day, but in some very different ways. Baja California Sur’s oceans host everything from large-scale commercial fishermen and international sport fishermen all the way to small fishing camps like this one, located on the Pacific coast. 2006.

As the traffic up and down the peninsular highway has increased over the years, so have the accidents—many of them fatal. The highway has many roadside shrines and grave markers. This particular shrine is located a short way south of the city of La Paz. 2009.

I mentioned in the main text that many travelers make their way down the peninsula in “Steinbeck-esque” vehicles (many of them from the US). There is a long history of tourists and other travelers making their way down the coast in campers, vans, and off-road trucks in search of everything from waves to marlin. There is, in fact, an interesting sub-culture that has developed around these trips to “Baja.” The above image is one recent example of a long-running phenomenon. 2010.

Malinowski had his tent, and I have mine. The bad part about working in a region that has an increasing amount of high-end tourism is that it is can be pretty expensive to find a place to stay. The good thing, however, is that it’s usually warm enough to set up a tent and camp. 2010.

Banking Nature?
The financialisation of environmental conservation¹

Sian Sullivan²
Birkbeck College, London

© 2011 Sian Sullivan

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

In addressing the challenge of achieving global sustainability, we must apply the basic principles of business. This means running “Earth Incorporated” with a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account.

Statement by Maurice Strong, Secretary General at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in a 1996 lecture to the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, Seoul.³ Currently reproduced on the website for EKO Asset Management Partners (www.ekoamp.com), a ‘merchant bank’ for environmental markets.⁴

A recent special issue of the journal Antipode on capitalism and conservation,⁵ introduced and edited by Daniel Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy, traces how what they call a capitalist ‘conservationist mode of production’ is emerging through consolidated alliances between business and environmental conservation. Alongside other key texts,⁶ they emphasise the sustained effort on the part of conservation organisations to recruit business to the environmental cause. Coupled with this is a systemic revisioning of environmental sustainability as a new frontier for capital expansion and revenue growth,⁷ and of markets as the realm through which environmental damage can best be mediated, mitigated and governed. As such, the current combination of environmental and financial meltdowns are being constructed explicitly as creating business and investment opportunities in ‘sustainability’.

Brockington and Duffy assert additionally, however, that ‘[c]onservation has hardly been involved in the production of value through financialisation’.⁸ Financialisation is the process whereby finance comes to dominate other activities in the economy. In post-manufacturing economies, financialisation has come to be the primary engine of economic growth and expansion, generating accumulation through financialisation, even as other economic areas are stagnating.⁹

My perception differs from Brockington and Duffy in that I think the contexts briefly described above actually are ushering in an intense financialisation of environmental governance for conservation, combined in part with the financialisation of environmental risk.¹⁰ And interestingly, in recent months several academic opportunities have appeared seeking to research precisely this.¹¹

I think of the financialisation of environmental conservation as taking two key forms. First, is the turning of banks and financiers to environmental parameters as a locus for expansion and investment. Second, is the modelling of both conservation practice and understandings of non-human natures in terms of banking and financial concepts. These are taking place in the context of two paradoxes. First, while it would seem that recent financial crisis should signal that finance markets had reached some sort of expansionary limit, subsequent bailouts with public money suggest instead that finance has been substantially reinforced, both in resources and in the power to command legitimising strategies by national governments¹² Second, while apparent environmental crisis might be interpreted as signalling a developmental crisis of capitalism – aka James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ whereby capitalism putatively undermines its own possibilities for accumulation by depleting its required material and metabolic base¹³ – it is instead becoming an accumulation frontier for capitalism, precisely through relationships with finance and capital investment. Both financial and environmental crises thus are entwined in ways that strengthen, rather than reduce, the power of finance capital.

As Jason Moore writes, the consequent emerging ‘financialisation’ of environmental crisis and protection extends ‘the penetration of finance into everyday life, and above all into the reproduction of extra-human nature’ as a key feature of capitalism in its current guise as neoliberalism.¹⁴ As such, financialisation has critical structuring effects in all realms of life, composing new and resistant socionatures¹⁵ It is thus ripe for anthropological study. New layers of financialisation pose challenges for the sustenance of local ecological knowledges and ‘biocultural diversities’. They rationalise human and non-human natures to conform with a particular economic system that privileges price over other values, and profit-oriented market exchanges over the distributive and sustainable logics of other economic systems.¹⁶ And by assuming people to be individual utility-maximisers and private property to be the norm, they are simplifying cultural diversity and arguably are contributing to critical transformations of biological, linguistic, cultural and epistemological diversities globally.¹⁷

This paper is an attempt to both delineate and theorise some of these effects in the arena of environmental conservation. It is structured into four remaining sections. First, I draw attention to the ways that environmental crisis and conservation are being created as a spectacular frontier for capital investment. I follow Anna Tsing¹⁸ who observes that ‘the self-conscious making of a spectacle is a necessary aid to gathering investment funds’ and ‘a regular feature of the search for finance capital’, and I detail several ways that finance capital, in collaboration with conservation agendas, is constructing such a spectacular frontier in environmental conservation. In the next section I offer a brief survey of the emerging financialisation of environmental conservation. I focus on four aspects of this process: the production of nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives. My third section constitutes a theorisation of these entwined phenomena. I apply current thinking regarding the continuous nature of primitive accumulation as delineated by Marx, to explain the impetus towards investment in the new frontier of environmental conservation and to consider its likely effects. I follow this with a Foucaultian framing of the current financialisation of environmental conservation as extending the technical and biopolitical entraining of environmental governance to the controlling tenets of neoliberal capitalism. I close with a brief conclusion.

Creating the spectacular new frontier of environmental conservation

Source: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/cms_documents/2008_StateofVoluntaryCarbonMarket.4.pdf

For finance to ‘operationalise’ the accumulation opportunity of environmental crisis and conservation, products and commodities connecting these domains need to be created that permit new investment, trade and speculation. As Martin O’Connor writes in the 1990s, nature needs to be ‘capitalised’ and ‘capital ecologized’ in new ways.¹⁹

Or, to paraphrase Morgan Robertson’s recent work²⁰ capital needs to create new natures that it can see. This requires that the earth-in-crisis is rethought and reworded such that it is brought further into alignment, conceptually, semiotically, and materially, with capital.

The attraction of financial investment to the creation of both new products and new markets for the profitable exchange of these products, requires the spectacular creation of an investment frontier. Tsing notes that new investment frontiers are made through the productive use of spectacle, requiring combinations of dramatic performance, as well as of conjuring tricks in the opening up of unforeseen possibilities. As she states, ‘the more spectacular the conjuring, the more possible an investment frenzy’.²¹ Speculators conjure potential to create commodity bubbles attractive to investors, which although often based on multiple layers of product abstraction can have significant social and material effects. The spectacular frontier of environmental conservation is no different and I want to highlight three mutually reinforcing mechanisms of its creation.

First, are the repetitive utterances of the spectacular financial returns deemed possible through the exchange of new environmental conservation products. Since ecological economist Robert Costanza and colleagues famously estimated the annual ‘value’ globally of ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ to be $16-54 trillion, affirmations of nature’s dollar value have proliferated.²² Costanza et al. were attempting to draw attention to ways that exclusion of environmental factors as externalities in conventional economic analyses misrepresented the cost of environmental impacts of development activities. This has been rapidly transformed, however, into an optimistic embrace of the returns that might be captured if this ‘value’ of environmental externalities can be priced and traded. Statements now abound of the spectacular promise of new markets in products intending to signify environmental degradation and conservation, in terms of returns to both investors/traders and to ‘the environment’. The environmental consultancy firm Advanced Conservation Strategies states on its website, for example, that ‘[b]y 2030, Carbon will be the largest commodity market in the world: $1.6-2.4 trillion, about the same as the current oil market’,²³ and it is easy to find many such assertions of the potential dollar value of emerging commodities that are based on some appeal to environmental conservation.

The promise of this new equation of nature with money is marked by the proliferation of powerful images conveying nature as money. As shown below, for example, a 2007-8 UNEP and IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) document on payments for ecosystem services (PES) features an image of verdant green foliage amongst which various currency notes appear as ‘leaves’.²⁴ This is echoed in the 2009 logo of the United Nation’s Environment Programme’s (UNEP) current New Green Deal initiative, which depicts a delicate young green plant, shooting up from a pile of Euro coins.²⁵ Bombardment by text and images displaying a unitary discourse that nature’s value can be captured adequately through application of money’s signs, is a powerfully manipulative means of marketing, and thereby composing, this ‘reality’.

Sources: http://www.unep.ch/etb/areas/ pdf/IPES_IUCNbrochure.pdf; http://www.unep.org/greeneconomy

This constitutes the opening of a new investment frontier. For this fledgeling frontier to grow, i.e. to attract more interest and investment, it needs to become pregnant with promise. In the financialised world of environmental conservation, this second aspect of frontier creation is constituted by the conjuring of a spectacularly proliferating range of new products and trading possibilities. These are based on unforeseen abstractions of non-human nature and the consequent opening up of new niches for investment. Key to this is the infinite substitutability posited by the notion of a global environment as a sort of abstract ‘global ledger’ that can be essentialised into new definable and exchangeable parts, permitting offsetting trades in newly commoditised measures of environmental health and degradation.

This is made possible through two key interconnected routes. First, is the creation of increasingly derived tradable products through the addition of layers of abstraction to commoditised signifiers of nature health and degradation. Second, is the constructing of tradable equivalence between previously non-exchangeable entities and distant localities. This conceptual mechanism releases any brakes on the creation of environmental conservation commodities that can be traded between localities.

Until recently, for example, the possibility of an emerging global trade in carbon emissions, would have seemed strange and surreal. This is now entrenched and familiar. The market trade in carbon manifests in various ways, significant ones being: 1. trade in the ‘free gift’²⁶ to industrial emitters of government allocated emissions quotas (i.e. ‘carbon credits’) (e.g. under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (UE ETS)); and 2. purchase of standing biomass (normally in the global south), which, under expansionary carbon accounting practices such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, www.un-redd.org), increasingly is becoming conceived as carbon ‘sinks’ for the voluntary ‘offsetting’, or dumping, of carbon emitted elsewhere.²⁷

Within the international policy frame that opens the possibility of this trade (the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)), work to create and stake claims to carbon has been conducted by ‘[b]rokers, consultants, carbon procurement funds, hedge fund managers and other buyers’, who have ‘scoured the globe for opportunities to buy credits associated with projects that reduce emissions in developing countries’.²⁸ Conservation and Policy²⁹ and current heat over REDD, is indicative of policy and business excitement over the potentially lucrative linkage of carbon offsets with the carbon stored in standing biomass. An accompanying array of derivative products increases possibilities for greater financial returns on this trade, extending its reach into the complex and intractable realm of ‘mad money’³⁰ associated with derivatives trading, hedge funds and futures markets. Stock exchanges existing only to service trade in carbon products now exist in London (www.ecx.eu) and Chicago (www.chicagoclimatex.com), and are emerging in Montreal (www.mcex.ca), China (www.chinatcx.com.cn), and Australia (www.envex.com.au). The organisation running these exchanges, Climate Exchange Plc (www.climateexchangeplc.com), is itself a company whose shares are listed and traded on the London Stock Exchange, recently purchased for US$ 395 million by the US-based energy and futures trader InterContinental Exchange (ICE).³¹

This proliferating trade in carbon products naturalises an idea critical for enhancing investment and trading possibilities at the conservation frontier. This is of the equivalence and substitutability of very different ‘things’ and ‘environments’, via essentialising reductions to a defined environmental measure, in this case the element of carbon. The carbon offset trade conceptually enables carbon production as one thing (e.g. industrial emissions) in one location, to be ‘offset’ against its storage in another qualitatively different thing (e.g. tropical forests) in another location. Through this the earth becomes conjured as a carbon matrix in which all production and activity is reduced to the concentration and exchange of the element of carbon. This innovation permits unintuitive conflations, as well as having profound implications for local socio-ecologies.

The possibility of using market exchanges to offset environmental damage in one location through investment in some measure of environmental conservation or restoration in another location, now is a feature of global environmental governance. Equivalent and accompanying offset trades are emerging in additional measures of biodiversity and habitat health. These are being pursued in collaborations between corporations, major environmental organisations and government regulators, to facilitate emergence of an array of new environmental offset commodities and exchanges (outlined further below). The mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, for example, is working with Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in Madagascar to create biodiversity offset schemes whereby the impacts of mining in one location will be ‘paid for’ by investing in biodiversity conservation in a different location.³² As such, biodiversity offsets bring what has been termed ‘the ultimate anti-commodity’, i.e. biodiversity, into the mitigation banking market³³ such that ‘clearing of native vegetation may be allowed if offsets are established elsewhere in the landscape’.³⁴

Ecologically then, these are designed to enable habitat loss through extractive industry. Geographically, they constitute a radical discounting of cultural and biophysical place-based specificities. What they do permit is a bringing forth of proliferating layers of possible finance accumulation through the bundling together of different environmental products that, as they are distinguished and capitalised, can begin to be banked, offset and traded in combination with each other. Bekessy and Wintle³⁵ make plain this opportunity in suggesting that carbon offsetters (i.e. investors in carbon sequestration landscapes), also might accrue biodiversity credits ‘when the biodiversity benefits of a carbon-sequestration project can be demonstrated’.

Accompaniment by spectacularly dramatic performances and mediated presentations of environmental crisis, of the nature treasures that require conservation, and of conservation performance constitutes a third impetus in creating the frontier of environmental conservation investment. These combine to compose an environmental and conservation spectacle that both sets the scene for investment in environmental conservation, and acts to engender particular human and non-human natures as well as relationships between them.³⁶ The lucrative and proliferating investment frontier of trade in environmental conservation products thus is set against, and justified through, spectacular marketing of nature loss and value, and of conservation endeavour and conservationists.³⁷

The recently released film Hotspots, made by the mega-ENGO Conservation International under the direction of celebrity conservation biologist Russell Mittermeir, brilliantly illustrates this production of conservation as spectacle.³⁸ The trailer spectacularly dramatises conservation work, using tropes of treasure, rarity and the exotic in signifying global localities of high biodiversity, and of crisis and threat in specifying the urgency of conservation work. This sets the scene for entrance of the story’s leading actors: the heroic, predominantly white and male, conservation biologists, whose work is a military-style operation featuring long lensed cameras, helicopters, camouflage fatigues, a racy soundtrack and machismo. The cinematic experience thereby generated is similar to that of Hollywood portrayals of contemporary US military engagement in ‘Third World’ frontiers, echoing, for example, Apocalypse now (Vietnam) and Black hawk down (Somalia). The trailer closes with a deep male voice-over describing the protection of hotspots as ‘the mother of all wars’. But alongside fighting to protect nature’s treasures, CI is systematising its productive collaborations with corporate and financial worlds. It is run by a board of directors consisting largely of CEOs and other representatives from businesses such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks.³⁹ It works with business and finance⁴⁰ to seek offsetting solutions for industrial impacts in particular locations, as well as to realise conservation capital through monetising lands owned or purchased by corporations that exhibit newly priced ‘ecosystems services’.⁴¹ The dramatisation of natural history, environmental crisis and capitalist conservation endeavour, is further performed and orchestrated through spectacular events such as at the four-yearly IUCN World Conservation Congress⁴² and the biannual Wildscreen natural history film festival in the UK.⁴³ At these meetings, corporate-conservation networks and empowered understandings of conservation issues and interventions are produced and reinforced.

As with any frontier of capital expansion, this created frontier of environmental conservation is making possible the penetration of finance into the ensuing new spaces for investment. It accompanies and is accompanied by a modelling and conceptualisation of nature using banking categories to produce a proliferating range of new nature products that can be easily aligned with finance. I outline these entwined components of nature’s financialisation in the following section, focusing on the categories of nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives.

Banking nature

Nature Finance

The movement of financial investment into the world of environmental conservation and governance is the most direct means of conservation financialisation. Several tendencies are indicative of this movement and I outline a few of these here.

First, is a notable presence of new investment funds offering products and services linked with discourses and indices of environmental conservation and sustainability. The investment fund EKO Asset Management Partners, for example, is

… a specialized investment firm focused on discovering and monetizing unrealized or unrecognized environmental assets… in short, a “merchant bank” for the world of environmental markets.⁴⁴

EKO’s investors hail from the world of haute finance and include James Wolfensohn, 9th president of the World Bank Group, as well as Lord Jacob Rothschild and Alexander and Ben Goldsmith of the Rothschild and Goldsmiths banking dynasties.⁴⁵ Elsewhere on their website they state that EKO’s approach is to:

stimulate the development of environmental markets’ through aligning ‘smart capital with people, projects, and companies that are poised to profit from emerging markets for ecosystem services, whether they be markets for carbon, for water quality, or for biodiversity.⁴⁶

Investments are oriented towards, for example, towards:

land with undeveloped or unrecognized environmental assets with a view to developing these assets and profiting from their sale in emerging environmental markets’.⁴⁷

Source: http://www.ekoamp.com/

The investment fund ‘Inflection Point Capital Management’, has a slightly different focus but environmental sustainability is emphasised as key for investment choices. The fund’s website describes it as ‘the world’s first multi-strategy asset management boutique offering exclusively sustainability-enhanced investment products across a broad range of asset classes’.⁴⁸ The fund-managers identify ‘recent market meltdown as a multi-trillion dollar “advertorial” for sustainability-enhanced approaches’,⁴⁹ and aim to increase the ‘sustainability alpha premium’⁵⁰ of company performance through incorporating proxy measures of ‘sustainability performance’ into investment practices, based on the proprietary database developed by associated company Innovest.

Source: http://www.inflectionpointcm.com/

This fund is headed by Matthew Kiernan, acclaimed author of Investing in a Sustainable World: Why Green is the New Colour of Money on Wall Street⁵¹ former President of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and regular speaker at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. The cover of Kiernan’s book displays a blue-green earth, half of which is subsumed by gleaming American quarter-dollar coins; an image echoing painted representations of the globe used in the 1500s and 1600s to depict the new commodity trades then bolstering an emerging European mercantile class.

Through work for JPMorgan via his previous company Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Kiernan has been associated with the creation of index-linked corporate bonds, ‘designed to enable credit investors to make return-driven investment decisions that systematically take into account the risks and opportunities created by global warming’.⁵² Thus, ‘[u]sing Innovest’s proprietary database and applying an exacting methodology, [the] JENI [carbon-beta index] overweights the securities of issuers judged to have relatively lower risk due to climate change, and underweights issuers with relatively higher risks’.⁵³ Risk here is related to a firm’s ‘carbon intensity’ (its vulnerability in the context of climate change and carbon regulation), with the index intending to signal firms preferable for investment in relation to carbon reductions, as well as those vulnerable to climate-change associated risks.

It is being proposed that index-linked carbon bonds might also be issued by governments, such that ‘interest payments [from government to investors] are linked to the actual greenhouse gas emissions of the issuing country against published targets’.⁵⁴ This would enable investors to hedge against the risk of a government not meeting its carbon commitments, such that investors would receive ‘an excess return if the issuing country’s emissions are above the government’s published target’, and vice versa.⁵⁵ The rationale is that the issuing government then has an additional incentive to make sure national emissions targets are met, because this will enable them to pay lower interest rates to bonds issued to investors. Investors in turn would provide governments with cheaper debt as long as governments meet their emissions targets. The important point is the implication that private sector ‘green financiers’ would then be governing, or at least disciplining, governments on their carbon/climate policies, via the incentives built into the bond structure. This structurally shifts the locus of responsibility for global environmental outcomes into the incentivising domain of investment finance, and further entangles possibilities for emissions reductions with other competing domains of investment.⁵⁶

Conventional banks also are turning their investment practices towards substantially integrating environmental ‘assets’ into lending. The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility of the World Bank is supporting forest-rich countries of the global south to enter the global offsetting trade in carbon.⁵⁷ The European Investment Bank is working with the University of Stirling’s Management School to ‘design markets for ecosystem service delivery’ (or ‘eco-delivery’ as they call it).⁵⁸ Multilateral development banks, themselves increasingly making private sector investments that go towards financial intermediaries and private equity funds,⁵⁹ are being encouraged to ‘partner countries to sustain their natural capital’, through integrating mapped and monetised ‘ecosystem services’ in all bank ‘strategic direction-setting, investment, and advisory services’.⁶⁰ An interpretation of these moves, consistent with the thesis that financialisation currently is driving accumulation, is that large bank lenders are financialising their own investment practices (through lending to private sector finance), at the same time as encouraging the increasing financialisation of environmental management and conservation.

This moves us into the next layer I want to draw attention to, which is the creation of nature as a ‘service-provider’ and the production of billable ‘nature work’.

Nature Work

Source: http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/home04.html

A significant conceptual move enabling the financialisation of conserved non-human nature, is the construction of nature as a ‘service-provider’. Conservation biologists have been using the language of ecosystem services since the 1970s.⁶¹ The 2005 publication of the influential United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), which highlights human-generated change of the biosphere, overwhelmingly uses this language in speaking of the non-human world.⁶² More recently, the Deputy Head of the Species Programme of the IUCN has stated that ‘[i]t’s time to recognize that nature is the largest company on Earth working for the benefit of 100 percent of humankind – and it’s doing it for free’.⁶³

In combination, this language creates non-human nature as a company that needs to be acknowledged for the service work that it does. Of course, any ensuing payments do not actually go to nature, but to the people who are able to capture them. What becomes significant then are questions of what nature work is able to become billable, and of who, via enforceable property rights signalling ownership, becomes able to capture the revenue arising from payments for this billable work.

The growing discourse on payments for ecosystem services (PES) both creates, and attempts to resolve, precisely these questions. The key idea here is that those wanting and/or requiring the ‘service’ of environmental health should pay those dwelling in the landscapes in which these ‘services’ are located. These flows and ‘cascades’ of services and payments⁶⁴ can be seen most clearly in the case of downstream water users paying upstream users to maintain water flow and/or quality.⁶⁵

Given both the location of valued ecosystems in the ‘global south’, accompanied by need for their services in the industrialised ‘global north’, payments from north to south for service maintenance by the south for the north increasingly are being posited as a means of producing win-win sustainability (i.e. conservation and economic development) scenarios.⁶⁶ The result has been an urgent requirement to measure, assess, standardise and disaggregate nature into new ‘goods and service categories’, combined with measures of their health and/or degradation and the assigning of monetary prices to these measures⁶⁷

This is being done via rapid ecological assessment and economic valuation techniques. The latter rely heavily on contingent valuation or estimates of ‘willingness to pay’, the validity of which has received intense criticism within economics.⁶⁸ Ecosystem service valuation projected from unit values (dollar estimates of economic value on a per-unit basis) derived from particular use and non-use values measured at specific sites, also is often arrived at via the practice of ‘benefit transfer’. This parallels the conceptual convenience, as noted above, of the substitutability or correspondence between different locations, by permitting the transfer of ‘economic value estimates from one location to a similar site in another location’, an assumption and practice that again can produce a number of transfer errors.⁶⁹

Through investment combined with regulatory and legislative support, these valuation techniques are permitting creation of an array of new markets in the environmental service products represented by the measurements they generate. They are ushering in an enormous systematic and competitive effort to measure, catalogue, dissect and ‘value’, i.e. price, nature’s ‘goods and services’, via an emerging ‘ecoinformatics’ that entrains mapping, measuring and monetisation techniques to produce combined ecosystems services catalogues, applicable from local to global scales. The table below provides examples of four such current and massive ecosystem services valuation initiatives.

Details of four current major global ‘eco-informatics’ initiatives to map and price ecosystem services.

All this effort constitutes a systematic ushering in of a new large-scale economic-environmental science so as to bring into focus a world of measured and ‘valued’ ecosystem services or ‘nature work’. The collaborative (and competitive) investment in complex ‘ecoinformatics’ approaches is connecting and entraining ecological and economics data so as to create ‘value’ at various ecosystem scales. It parallels capital investment in bioinformatics at the scale of molecular biology, or ‘accumulation by molecularisation’ as Nally puts it.⁷⁴ In combination these moves into both large and small scales of nature are working to permit consolidation of claims to domains (and inventions) of life, and as such to ‘expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation via so-called “extra-economic” means’.⁷⁵

PES thus capitalises landscapes such that they can be brought into global markets in various new ways. The creation of billable nature work also is radically reframing inhabitants of service-producing landscapes as service-maintainers for consumers elsewhere in the global ledger of environmental services. The implications for those dwelling in landscapes newly priced for their ecosystem service functions are profound. This can be seen in proposals that local people might mortgage the environmental values newly associated with local landscapes so as to provide income for local development. The suggestion here is that communities in low income nations finance poverty alleviation and economic development through offering newly monetised ‘environmental assets’ as collateral for ‘environmental mortgages’. These would be loans offered by international environmental investors that are linked to measures of the state of an ‘environmental asset’.⁷⁶ They would contribute ‘debt-based investment’, i.e. that ‘capitalizes environmental assets locally and makes that capital available to local communities through collateralized lending, microfinance approaches, and access to affordable financial services’, thereby ‘providing access to affordable financial services in exchange for environmental stewardship’.⁷⁷ In these proposals, then, sustained ecosystem services as newly priced nature values are to be used as collateral for loans so that people of the ‘south’ – or the ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ as the business community likes to frame them⁷⁸ – can be brought further into the global monetary economy. Complex questions arise of who then possesses or has governing powers over the collateral (particularly in the case of default), and of how the pricing of local ecologies intersects with other socially embedded culture:nature values.

Nature Banking

Accompanying creation of nature as billable service-provider, is an increasingly hegemonic conceptualisation of the health and degradation of nature’s services as dependent on the underlying stock of nature as ‘natural capital’. Nature itself is becoming conceived as a bank account, as noted in the statement opening this paper, that ‘Earth Incorporated’ will only be sustainable if run as ‘a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account’.⁷⁹ This has been taken seriously by the UN/EU project on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), headed by Pavan Sukdhev – a career banker from Deutsche Bank. The latest TEEB initiative is establishment of a website called The Bank of Natural Capital. This represents environmental issues in a rather standard current bank account format with pages for ‘Current Account’, ‘Natural Capital’, ‘Ecosystem Services’, ‘Stocks and Investment’, and ‘Advice and Guidance’.

Source: http://bankofnaturalcapital.com/ Accessed 5 March 2011.

Unsurprisingly then, ‘nature banks’, managed by nature bankers, are emerging as key management structures in environmental governance for conservation.⁸⁰ By creating the nature that capital can see,⁸¹ in part through capitalising the service work that it is deemed to do, and in tandem with formalised property rights, landowners (private or collective) can thereby become nature entrepreneurs: they can capitalise on the new nature prices attaching to the ‘nature assets’ associated with the monetised and thus billable service work accruing to defined land areas. Forms of ‘nature banking’ now are prominent in the US and Australia, and this approach is gaining traction elsewhere. An array of ‘wetland mitigation banks’, for example, exists in the US. These enable landowners to realise ‘value’ through maintaining wetland ecosystems by entering into financial exchanges with developers intending to degrade wetlands elsewhere, and accompanied by permitting and regulating legislation.⁸² ‘Species banking’ has proliferated in recent years, particularly in the US (e.g. see www.speciesbanking.com),⁸³ allowing trade in species credits to mitigate development impacts on protected species. Biodiversity banking (or ‘biobanking’) now is advocated such that ‘[a]ccrued investment [by landowners in biodiversity] could be sold to a party wishing to liquidate an equivalent amount and quality of vegetation elsewhere in the landscape’.⁸⁴ And the UK now is entering the environmental mitigation banking arena, with recent announcement of its first conservation credit scheme to be facilitated by The Environment Bank Ltd. (www.environmentbank.com)⁸⁵ within a conservative policy discourse that considers a future biobanking industry to be worth billions.⁸⁶ The nature banking and offset market approach has been advocated particularly strongly by the Katoomba Group, ‘an international network of individuals working to promote, and improve capacity related to, markets and payments for ecosystem services (PES)’,⁸⁷ and whose online ‘Ecosystem Marketplace’ (www.ecosystemmarketplace.com) provides market information to facilitate transactions.

Private investment is promoted as the source of funds to facilitate the creation and structuring of nature banks and the ensuing mitigation banking market. The Ecosystem Marketplace’s former Director and co-founder in fact is now a partner and co-founder of EKO Asset Management Partners, the merchant bank mentioned above established precisely to invest in – i.e. to capitalise – new markets in new environmental products.⁸⁸ The consequent attaching of prices to nature’s ‘services’ permits the banking of these new nature values by those who own land and whose ownership is protected by property law. The mission of the US Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets thus is to ‘focus on scientifically rigorous and economically sound methods for quantifying carbon, air and water quality, wetlands, and endangered species benefits in an effort to facilitate the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in emerging ecosystem markets’.⁸⁹ In combination, then, the process serves to add and bank more monetary value to that which already is able to enter a market exchange; i.e. to that which already is formally owned (discussed further below).

Nature Derivatives

I have noted above the proliferation of increasingly derived carbon products as a constitutive aspect of the expanding frontier of conservation commodity markets. The creation of similarly derived environmental-financial products, or ‘nature derivatives’, in additional environmental domains is a burgeoning feature of financialisation of environmental conservation for lucrative management of environmental risk and scarcity.

A recent paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, for example, proposes the creation of ‘biodiversity derivatives’.⁹⁰ A derivative contract ‘is a bet as to whether the value of the underlying security, which might be a stock, bond, or financial index, will increase or decrease by a specified date’.⁹¹ These contracts permit businesses to ‘hedge against the occurrence of unpredictable adverse events’.⁹² As such, they are associated with the construction of risk as a tradable commodity,⁹³ at the same time as also permitting speculative returns based on the chances of the derivatives contract itself.⁹⁴ In recent years, derivative creation has extended into the turbulent realms associated with unpredictable atmospheric, oceanic and biospheric dynamics, permitting the direct hedging and trading of environmental contingencies in capital markets, as superbly described and theorised by Melinda Cooper.⁹⁵ For biodiversity derivatives, the suggestion is that the market be used to reduce the costs of conservation, by applying derivatives to the risk of species extinction. The proposal is that ‘governments issue modified derivatives contracts to sell species’ extinction risk to market investors and stakeholders’, as a means of providing incentive structures that take ‘full advantage of the market to reduce costs in conservation’.⁹⁶ This, it is argued, will align the interests of conservationists, governments and landowners, by making species presence more valuable to landowners than modifying habitat through development. Contracts would be priced on current interest rates and the probability of a payout or default due to species decline below an agreed threshold. If triggered through species decline, the principal paid by investors would be made available for remediation and recovery of the species in advance of being placed on an endangered species list.⁹⁷ Biodiversity derivatives based on risk of species extinction would be akin to insurance derivatives, ‘issued with modifications to allow responsible action to decrease the likelihood of the insured event’ (i.e. extinction of a species) so as to encourage ‘social change that is incentivized through market forces’.⁹⁸

This transferring of derivatives logic to the domain of species survival seems strange. Futures exchanges might help stabilise prices for storable commodities by balancing sellers’ hopes for rising prices with buyers’ desire for the opposite. But it seems perverse to transform the value of species survival into prices whose rise or fall is entangled with bets on the likelihood of their being susceptible to their irreversible loss, underscored by a situation whereby species value rises with rarity, i.e. with greater risk of extinction. Susan Strange notes that gambling on prices creates ‘heightened volatility’. Is this what is wanted for species presence?⁹⁹ Mandel et al. argue, however, that through issuing a derivative whose value is based on species decline, and ‘[i]f the trading of species derivatives were responsibly permitted’, then ‘those who do not currently incorporate a conservation ethic into their economic decisions would stand to profit from a change in behaviour towards environmental stewardship’.¹⁰⁰ This, of course, is a classic neoliberal suggestion to design, invest in, and legislate for market-based incentives to manipulate behaviours through appealing to the economic self-interest of those with protected land tenure.

Proposals such as this act to enhance the ways in which environmental change, itself indelibly and inequitably entwined with human activity, can become ‘a speculative opportunity like any other in a market hungry for critical events’.¹⁰¹ They are rationalising nature dynamics to fit the dynamics of human constructed financial markets, permitting the assigning of tradable prices to the unstorable commodities of essentially unknowable futures.¹⁰² So whilst the production of nature work and nature banking, as described above, is rendering nature into a new ‘mass of standardized, qualitatively indifferent exchange values’,¹⁰³ financialisation here is extending possibilities for nature’s speculative release into the realm of circulating money in its new universal form of derivatives. This derivative realm ‘challenge[s] the idea that the circulation of money must be anchored in some fundamental, underlying value’,¹⁰⁴ whilst at the same time binding nature’s dynamics, and associated wealth-making possibilities, to the influence of financial investment in other commodities. The innovative conceptual alignment of nature change with derivative finance products acts to materially enhance the fortunes of investors and their associated impacts, whilst shifting the locus of decision-making power regarding environmental governance to the realm of finance and the speculative expectations governing futures markets. It is capturing a nature of unpredictable flows and dynamism such that these are able to circulate as money – as a nature ‘on the move’ as Bram Büscher calls it¹⁰⁵ – the power and material effects of which are concealed through the abstract and seemingly virtual milieu of its movement.

The environmentality of ‘earth incorporated’? Theoretical gestures

The above documents the transformation of conserved nature into discrete ‘billable hours’ and bankable assets, whose release onto markets in varied forms and at different scales is constituting an expanding investment frontier. The novel and frequently opaque ecology of associated and intersecting terms and concepts on which this frontier feeds, constitute an emergent and systemic wave of semiotic¹⁰⁶ and material enclosure of ‘the global environment’. It is creating a new ‘product range’ of complex, virtual and mobile nature products, to produce a ‘derivative nature’¹⁰⁷, which while increasingly abstract nonetheless has significant material effects. In what remains I theorise these phenomena through two key and complementary theoretical lenses: that of Marxian primitive accumulation, and of the consolidation of Foucaultian bio-political governmentality in the realm of socio-environmental management.

On contemporary primitive accumulation

Primitive accumulation is the drive of capital and its protagonists to both create and capture the forms of capitalist value that underscore all subsequent relations of production and exchange. For Marx, the two critical enclosures are of land as property, and human activity as labour, the creation of which required the historical separation of each from the other, or the disembedding of people from land-entwined social relations, as Polanyi puts it.¹⁰⁸ Other scholars have highlighted additional historical primitive accumulations as integral to capitalist strategy, together with the ideational changes required and effected in bending nature in situ, as well as human life and bodies, into the commodity form.¹⁰⁹

The accumulations of productive forces that are not a priori manufactured for sale, all require, and are mirrored by, significant and frequently radical, i.e. onto-epistemologically unintuitive, conceptual transformations. New commodity fictions need to be imagined for them to manifest; and the commodity fantasies that become discursively and materially prominent are those privileged by empowered socio-political structures, which in modernity are associated with imperial and patriarchal adventure. In relation to non-human natures, the radical application of a notion of absolute private property to land areas, and a rejection of prior values, access or use rights by those dwelling there, underscores all subsequent commodity creation. Land itself becomes capital that can be owned absolutely: the monetary value of which can rise and fall in relation to other commodities, and the exchange of which can occur at a distance with money as symbolic medium and measure of value. In combination, land and human activity are transformed from subject to object, thereby permitting their reification as tradable commodities.¹¹⁰ Viewed through the onto-epistemological lens of non-capitalist cultures, whether historic or contemporary, such conceptualisations can be a nonsense. Instead it might make more common sense to think that land ‘owns’ people,¹¹¹ or at least is animated by myriad other practices of relationship, value and ethical requirements.¹¹²

Marx states additionally that ‘[a]s soon as capitalist production is on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation [of labour from the means of capitalist production], but reproduces it on a continually extending scale‘.¹¹³ Massimo de Angelis refers to this as the ontological, as opposed to historical, condition of capitalist production, to describe the continuous creation, capture and enforced possession of new commodities that permit capital’s recursive accumulation.¹¹⁴ Many other authors have stressed this continuous nature of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, from Rosa Luxemburg writing in 1913, to David Harvey writing in 2010. Recent analyses of primitive accumulation that see its historical shape as present in contemporary circumstances globally, thus frame the process as ‘continuous’,¹¹⁶ ‘permanent’,¹¹⁷ and ‘contemporary’.¹¹⁸ As Silvia Federici, maintains, ‘primitive accumulation has been a universal process in every phase of capitalist development’, re-launching ‘similar strategies in the face of every major capitalist crisis’.¹¹⁹

Historically and today, rises in capital ‘values’ for land increase the possibility for enhanced money rents, and strengthen desires by land-owners to expropriate land-dwellers, thus ‘releasing’ their availability as labour.¹²⁰ The current proliferation of new nature values and tradable commodities for environmental conservation, as outlined above, can be understood as a similar and significant wave of primitive accumulation in these terms. They are structuring nature into the reified and exchangeable commodity form in previously unthought ways,¹²¹ at the same time as creating additional ways of bringing diverse peoples into the global market in service to these new commodity forms. As such, they are consistent with maintaining a political economic (and cultural) system in which ‘only production-for-market… [is] defined as a value-creating activity’,¹²² a movement which seems likely to discount and displace other value practices and and diversities.¹²³

The environmentality of ‘Earth Incorporated’

Whilst not discounting the hybrid ‘uses’ and manifestations of neoliberal policies in environmental domains,¹²⁴ the myriad policies and practices described above arguably become clearer given their consistency with the globally hegemonic governmentality, or even ‘culture complex’,¹²⁵ of neoliberalism. Here I draw inspiration from Foucault in two ways: to highlight the practices delineating and thereby composing the natures that can be managed and traded as ‘Earth Incorporated’; and to emphasise the ‘bootstrapping’ biopolitical gestalt of the empowered ‘truth regime’ of the market, in both shaping and being reinforced by these natures.

Foucault emphasised that new regimes of governance are structured and bolstered by new social sciences, which iteratively also enable new techniques of management and administration that concord with the episteme of modernity. At the time of the rise of the bourgeois class and the Age of Reason in Europe, for example, he makes much of the accompanying presence of a novel bourgeois spirit that partitions, makes distinctions, classifies, codifies and calculates.¹²⁶ He is talking here about the body; and about the new social sciences that helped to construct, subject, manage and accumulate the body as a utility-maximising ‘body-machine’, as well as to rationalise and administrate bodies as populations.

In the contemporary arena of primitive accumulation in association with neoliberal environmental governance, my suggestion is that we are bearing witness to an intense extension of these tendencies into socio-ecological domains. Through ecosystem service science, nature, like the body, is being made conceptually docile. It is becoming ‘caught in a [new] system of subjection’, whereby its productive characteristics are further ‘calculated, organized, technically thought’ and ‘invested with power relations’.¹²⁷ As with the new sciences of demography, nutrition etc. that make possible the administrations of the modern era and which involved the application of accounting to social relations, currently we are witnessing the similar and apparently depoliticised application of accounting to socio-environmental relations. Like the human body, and the body-politic of populations, nature as service-provider and store of capital is ‘entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’, thus bending and releasing its immanent forces towards economic utility.¹²⁸ In these new ecological accounting practices for environmental conservation, the very necessity of conceptualising ecosystems in terms that lend themselves to the disaggregation of measures amenable to monetisation contracts ecological understanding and may hamper conservation outcomes.¹²⁹ In further transforming and accumulating ‘Nature’s’ exceeding immanence into ‘work powers’, the animated, embodied and sentient world that may be experienced by non-capitalist rationalities is of necessity erased.¹³⁰ Nature’s operations are made ‘intelligible and controllable’, ‘void of any intrinsic teleology’¹³¹ or agency.¹³² As such, human nature is rendered deaf but in apparent authority over a mirroring mute and intractably distinct non-human nature.

Alvehus and Spicer¹³³ note that an increasing experience of work as financialised ‘billable hours’ is a classic strategy of workplace control. Similarly, the ‘micro-physics of power’ operating in the multiplicitous moments and institutional apparatuses of ecosystem service science is strategically training socio-environment relations into those of Earth Incorporated,¹³⁴ creating nature as both usefully productive and utterly subdued in the process. Disaggregation of environmental turbulence into financial products that capture environmental unpredictability into the circulating and derivative commodity form, similarly flattens nature’s life and dynamism through ‘writing’ these as finance.¹³⁵

Foucault’s more recently published work, particularly his lectures of 1978-79 on biopolitics, published in English in 2008, is critically illuminating in this respect.¹³⁶ In this, he draws to the fore the socio-political fact of the ‘truth regime’ of the market under liberalism; and the corresponding necessity of working to create the governing incentivising and regulatory structures that allow for the ‘free market’s’ need for ‘frugal government’. As Martin O’Connor has also noted, ‘[t]he logic of the marketplace states plainly that all capitals will realize their “full value” only by insertion within the sphere of exchange value. Under the doctrine of utility maximisation, their best use will be signaled by price: they should always go to the highest bidder’.¹³⁷ Muradian, Corbera, Pascual, Kosoy and May describe how this naturalisation of capitalist ‘free markets’ also is rationalised by a Coasean institutional economics that assumes the emergence of social and environmental optima through the incentivised bargaining of those with private property allocations.¹³⁸

These conspire to produce a ‘governmentality’ that ironically requires intense government and public engagement to facilitate the construction and regulation of the incentive structures that discipline individual and corporate behaviour, to conform with the logic of the ‘free market’. This, as Noel Castree notes, is ‘the paradoxical need for “free” markets to be managed’.¹³⁹ In understanding neoliberalism to take hold as governmentality, i.e. to be both reinforced and hybridised through multiplicitous yet patterned acts and practices of governance, participation and resistance, it becomes possible to notice how similar practices are unfolding as the ‘truths’ of contemporary environmental governance. Robert Fletcher, in a recent article in Conservation and Society, thus extends the notion of governmentality to highlight the governing incentive structures associated with environmental governance for environmental conservation under neoliberal logics, as well as the different environmentalities associated with other governing logics.¹⁴⁰ In embracing the truth regime of the market, the art of government in relation to ‘environmental conservation’ of necessity will be the environmentality of Earth Incorporated: the accepted participation of all environmental concerns in the logic the market, such that they become framed, traded, banked and circulated as capital.

The nature of the beast?

Current rationalisations and monetisations of nature in terms of the disaggregated, commodified and banked services that ‘it’ provides, constitute a new mechanisation of nature management to satisfy discourses of efficiency in the realm of environmental conservation;¹⁴¹ whilst maintaining accumulation as ‘the engine which powers growth under the capitalist [conservationist] mode of production’.¹⁴² The enhanced separation of human from non-human worlds that this permits makes possible further transformations of nature from subject into object, constituting a significant new layer in the reification of nature as an object consisting of many objects. Nature’s agency is foundationally discounted,¹⁴³ and human:non-human relationships become further disciplined into master-slave or doctor-patient configurations.¹⁴⁴ Nature is reconstituted as ‘service-provider’ for humanity, and people dwelling in landscapes now valued for their ecosystem services are transformed into the labour needed to maintain these services (or are displaced). To paraphrase Sassen, vast regions of the world are being repositioned and territorialised as sites for capitalised global ecosystem services conservation and supply.¹⁴⁵

All these market-based innovations are being effected to accord with the desirable objective of promoting nature’s conservation. But surely there is a fallacy at the heart of these conceptual and technical strategies to incentivise environmentally ethical behaviour via the design of commodity markets and associated financialised trading activity? This is that ‘the market’ does not in and of itself embody or produce virtuous behaviour. The market does not care. And given a political economic system based on the ‘permanently revolutionary force’ of capital accumulation,¹⁴⁶ it seems problematic to assume that it is only the correct design of markets, e.g. through pricing mechanisms, that will prevent the manifestation of nature losses. What is being promoted here is a valuing of nature as money, not of nature’s immanence or sentience, or as a communicative community of which we as humans are one of many companions. And since the ‘free-market’ is an emergent property of the competitive dance of multiple commodity prices, exchanges and other asymmetries and influencing factors, there is nothing intrinsic to this system to uphold the prices of environmental health relative to unpredictably shifting prices of other commodities.

It is pertinent to remember Polanyi’s description of the transformation of land into the commodity form as ‘perhaps the wierdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors’.¹⁴⁷ Currently we are in the midst of an equivalently revolutionary shift in empowered ideas regarding a global geography of non-human natures and associated cultural diversities. While these build on extant understandings of land as commodity and of private property, they extend these in radical ways to release new nature ‘values’ that can be traded, invested in and speculated on via conversion into the commodity form. To paraphrase Marx,¹⁴⁸ once again, a ‘new social soul’ is popping into the body of nature; as the non-human world becomes enclosed, conceptually, economically and legally, into new nature products, and as human and non-natures become reoriented around the emerging environmentality of Earth Incorporated. It seems to me that perhaps the composing of humane, healthy, equitable and diverse socio-ecological relationships instead requires moving in an entirely different direction: towards conceptualising and embodying socio-environmental realities that connect human and non-human ecologies without the always mediating and structuring sign of money. Opening up such possibilities is a task that anthropologist are particularly well-placed to embrace.

NOTES

Can the Thing Speak?

Martin Holbraad
University College London

© 2011 Martin Holbraad

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

It may appear that the last thing that the study of ‘things’ needs right now is another manifesto, as the echo of Spivak’s 1980s subaltern radicalism (1998) in my title may suggest. As archaeologist Severin Fowles has recently observed (2008, 2010), the rise of ‘the thing’ in social theory at the turn of our century has emancipatory tonalities that echo the emancipation of ‘the native’ (or the ‘subaltern’) a generation earlier. If for too long things, under the guise of ‘material culture’, had ‘hibernat[ed] in the basements of museology’, as Tim Ingold puts it (2007: 5), their study in recent years has been all about achieving their visibility: making the thing manifest or, in Peter Pels’ phrase, allowing it to ‘speak back’ (Pels 1998: x).

To see why these are more than echoes of expression, consider the analogy of purpose. Notwithstanding their variety, late 20^th century arguments tagged as ‘post-colonial’ and valorised as ‘de-colonizing’ can also be characterised as emancipatory (sensu Argyrou 2002). This insofar as they typically take the form of what I will call ‘widening the circle of the human’. The move turns on a basic diagnosis of the colonial condition as, in one way or other, a deficient attribution of humanity to the colonial subject (the native, the subaltern): a denial of its history, its agency, its subjectivity, its rationality, in short, its human dignity. The response, then, takes the form of a more equitable distribution of these attributes, a move to globalise the sense of justice which they express, in a kind of extension of the global-political dominion of the categorical imperative. The colonised subject is elevated, its subjectivity recognised, its voice heard. The conceptual mould of the agenda, if not its historical precedent, is perhaps the emancipation of slaves, from relative object-commodities to (relative…) subject-persons (cf. Guyer 1993).

An analogous agenda, argues Fowles, is pursued in the more recent literature on the rise of the thing (material culture studies, thing-theory, ANT, speculative realism, post-phenomenology etc.). Here too polemical writing has been motivated in large part by a diagnosis of a deficit of humanity – an obvious one when it comes to things, of course, though all the more powerful for it. And the remedy too has been various species of widening the circle of the human. ‘Agency’ has been the most vocal term, perhaps due to its relative neutrality, though its corollaries of personhood, history, voice, freedom and responsibility, and other dignities of the kind are never far off in the emancipatory agenda. Indeed, the political tenor of the move is certainly evident in these writings, as is its post-colonial aesthetic. Fowles cites, among others, Bruno Latour, who calls for a ‘democracy extended to things’ (including a ‘parliament’ of them); Danny Miller, who renounces the ‘tyranny of the subject’ and ‘the corpse of our imperial majesty: society’ in favour of a ‘dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction and respect for their mutual origin and mutual dependency’; and fellow archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen, who calls his colleagues to ‘unite in a defence of things, a defence of those subaltern members of the collective that have been silenced and “othered” by the imperialist social and humanist discourses.’ (Latour 1993: 12, Miller 2005: 45, 37, Olsen 2003: 100, all cited in Fowles 2008).

Now, the faint sarcasm of calling all this an agenda for ‘emancipation’ is really more of an irony, since I have subscribed to this agenda myself, along lines that are not dissimilar to the ones Fowles describes – particularly in the volume Thinking Through Things, which I co-edited and co-introduced with Ami Salmond (nee Henare) and Sari Wastell (2007), as well as in a couple of single-authored publications related to it (Holbraad 2005 and more explicitly 2009). In the latter part of the present paper I revisit those arguments in some detail, in an effort to clarify what I have since come to see as the somewhat confused way in which they bundle together the two parallel agendas of Fowles’s analogy. As I shall argue, however, this is worth doing, not in order to recoil from the agenda of emancipating the thing, but to move it forward. In a nutshell, I want to show that while the approach set out in Thinking Through Things (henceforth ‘TTT’) is offered partly as a way of emancipating things as such, the weight of its argument ends up subsuming this task to that of emancipating the people for whom they are important.¹ If things speak in TTT, they do so mainly by ethnographic association with the voice of ‘the native’ – a kind of anthropological ventriloquism.

Hence the question: might there nevertheless be a sense in which things could speak for themselves? And what might their voices sound like? Suitably reconsidered and improved, I argue, the approach of TTT is indeed able to articulate answers to these questions, complementing the anthropological concern with native voices with what in the Conclusion I shall call a ‘pragmatological’ (cf. Witmore forthcoming) engagement with the voices of things – voices which, to anticipate my core suggestion, stem from the contingent material characteristics that make things most obviously thing-like. In order to prepare the ground for this argument, we may begin by fleshing out, with reference to the recent literature on things, the guiding distinction between emancipating things ‘by association’ with persons as opposed to emancipating them ‘as such’ – a pretty tricky distinction, as we shall see, and subject to all sorts of caveats.

Emancipation as the entanglement of persons and things

In line with Fowles’s analogy with writings in post-colonialism, the past twenty years’ or so literature on the rise of the thing could be plotted as a trajectory of increasingly (self-consciously) ‘radical’ attempts to dislodge or even erase the line that divides things from people. Consider, just as an illustration, the shift from proposing that things acquire ‘biographies’ and a ‘social life’ of their own through their complex involvement in the lives of the people who engage with them (Appadurai 1986), to saying that the very distinction between people and things (or humans and non-humans) should be eliminated from the way we think about such engagements (Latour 1993, cf. Pinney 2005). Or the difference between suggesting that people and things emerge out of each other dialectically (Miller 1987, 2005) and claiming that in certain contexts they are best conceived as being identical (Strathern 1988, 1990). Such differences may be said to correspond to two broad stages on the axis of radicalism, which, following Haraway (1991, cf. Webmoor & Witmore 2009), I shall tag as ‘humanist’ and ‘posthumanist’ respectively. The distinction turns on contrasting stances to the ontological division between humans and things. Humanist, then, would be approaches that seek to emancipate the thing in terms of this division, while posthumanist would be ones that do so by going beyond it. The move from one towards the other, I argue, can also be understood as a move from emancipating things by association, i.e. by letting some of the light of what it is to be human shine on them too, to emancipating them as such, i.e. showing that they can radiate light for themselves – though in a way that, as we shall see, is not altogether satisfactory. Let us explore this with reference to some of the most influential contributions to the literature.

Danny Miller’s introduction to his edited volume Materiality (2005, cf. Miller 1987) presents a transparent example of what I’m calling a humanist approach, as well as of the emancipation of things ‘by association’, with reference to the role in the lives of humans, that such approaches tend to imply. Miller is fully cognizant of the importance to anthropological discussions of materiality of ‘philosophical resolution[s] to the problematic dualism between people and things’ (Miller 2005: 41), and includes as an example his own preference for theorizing the relationship between people and things in terms of the forms that emerge out of a Hegelian dialectical processes of objectification, rather than through the ‘mutual constitution of prior forms, such as subjects and objects’ (2005: 9). The job of the anthropologist, he argues however, cannot be simply (or complexly) to reinvent such philosophical wheels, not least because the people he or she studies ethnographically so often have a much more ‘commonsense’ understanding of things, including all sorts of ways of distinguishing them from people, spirits and so on. Ultimately, Miller is saying, the role of an anthropology that is seriously committed to reflecting ethnographically on the world in which we live, and to theorising what it is to be human, must recognise and ‘respect’ (2005: 38) material objects and the implicit as well as explicit ways in which they give form to people’s lives. Its aim, through strategic combinations of dualism-busting philosophical models and ethnographic sensitivity and empathy, must be to show the myriad ways in which ‘the things people make, make people’ (ibid).²

It is perhaps not entirely clear how Miller squares the circle (not to say wheel) of the contrasting demands of a philosophical impulse to overcome dualism and an anthropological one to dwell on the myriad forms in which it may play itself out ethnographically.³ Still, what he makes abundantly clear is that his heart lies with the messiness of the ethnography, and the ‘vulgar’ study of ‘the way the specific character of people emerges from their interaction with the material world through practice’ (Miller 2007: 26), as he and his students at UCL have been doing for some time. If he is interested in emancipating the thing from the ‘tyranny of the subject’, that is because doing so gives us a more profound understanding of what it is to be human. Material culture studies may displace an anthropology obsessed with the imperium of the social, but only to replace it with a better anthropology humble enough to recognise the ways in which things also so pervasively contribute to our humanity. Which is exactly the kind of stance I have in mind when talking of humanism and its emancipation of things by association.

Alfred Gell’s argument in Art and Agency (1998) provides another example of this approach, though a less straightforward one. Certainly, the idea for which Gell’s landmark book most often gets cited, namely that things can be understood as possessing agency in the same sense as humans do, may well appear as an attempt to emancipate things ‘as such’. In contrast to, say, Miller, the flag of emancipation (if such it is) is here pinned not on things’ role in making human beings what they are (although this is a central concern for Gell too), but rather on the extent to which things may themselves be more like humans than we might assume. Insofar as things (e.g. cars, bombs, effigies) can be construed as indices of a prior intention, as they so often are (e.g. an intention to make us late for work, Pol Pot’s desire to kill, the blessing of a benign deity), they themselves become something akin to humans, and thus could be said to be emancipated as such rather than by association.

Nevertheless, as a number of discussions of Gell’s argument have tended to show, there is some ambiguity as to how far agency really attaches to things themselves in his scheme. Indeed, in reading the book, one is never quite sure how seriously Gell wants us to take the, after all, rather scandalous notion that things can be ascribed with intentions. Part of the problem is that in his analysis Gell tends to treat as equivalent ascriptions of agency that, ethnographically speaking, vary rather vastly in the degree to which they are taken seriously by those who engage in them. Broadly put, if swearing at one’s car for failing to start is meant to be a phenomenon of the same order as praying to an effigy, then one wants to know whether the latter ascription of agency is supposed to be taken as lightly as the former surely should be (which makes Gell look rather dismissive of devotees who take their prayers and effigies very seriously indeed), or whether the agency of the car should be imagined as being as weighty as that of the effigy (in which case Gell would look like a bit of a New Age mystic). Indeed, when it comes down to it, it does seem that Gell’s scheme is slanted towards the former option. As James Leach has argued, a close reading of Gell reveals that agency for him is only ever an indirect attribute of things, its origins lying ultimately with a human agent, whose intention the thing in question only indexes – hence, for example, the significant distinction Gell makes between the ‘secondary’ agency of indices and the ‘primary’ agency of the intentions they are abductively surmised to index (Leach 2007, cf. Gell 1998: 17-21). Things, for Gell, cannot really be agents, if by that we mean anything more than the kind of attribution of agency involved in swearing at a car for making us late. As Miller puts it in his own critique, ‘Gell’s is a theory of natural anthropomorphism, where our primary reference point is to people and their intentionality behind the world of artefacts’ (Miller 2005: 13). Indeed, Gell’s emancipation of things by conferring them with agency turns out to be more similar to Miller’s than may at first appear. Where Miller raises the profile of things by making them operative in the making of human beings, Gell does so by making them operative in acts of human agency.

So, in sum: humanist approaches, which leave the ontological distinction between things and people unmodified, cannot but emancipate things by association. The whole point about the common sense distinction between people and things is that the former are endowed with all the marks of dignity, while the latter are not. So if you want to emancipate the thing while leaving the ontology untouched, then all you can do is find ways to associate it more intimately with the person.

Post-human approaches, by contrast, can be seen as taking up just that challenge: they propose a different ontology of people and things and thus precipitate a re-definition of their properties (i.e. rather than merely a re-distribution of them across the person/thing divide). This tack does indeed raise the hope of an emancipation of the thing ‘as such’, although one immediately has to add the proviso that ‘the thing’, following its ontological re-constitution, is no longer the thing as we ordinarily know it.

Think, for example, of Latour’s denial of human/ non-human purification in favour of the flat ontology of the Actor Network. All the ‘entities’ that modernist purification takes as ‘people’ and ‘things’ are refashioned analytically ‘hybrid’ knots of mutually transformative relations. Each element of which these relations are composed (itself a relation – hence the network’s fractal structure, à la Strathern 2004 [1991]) is an ‘actant’ inasmuch as it has a transformative effect on the assemblage (i.e. the contingent and analytically localised aspect or moment of the Network.)

So agency for Latour is not the effectuation of a human intention (e.g. as it is for Gell). It is a property of networks of relationships (hybrid ones, involving all the elements that a modernist ontology would want to distinguish from one another) that emerges as and when the elements they involve make a difference to each other. The classic and much cited example being Latour’s discussion of the gun debate in the USA (e.g. see 1999: 180). The responsible agents are neither the guns themselves (as the anti-gun campaigners argue) nor the people who use them (as the gun-lobby would have it – ‘guns don’t kill, people do’). It is the hybrid assemblage, or ‘collective’, which gun users and guns form together: the ‘person-with-gun’.

There can be no doubt that, thus ontologically revised or redefined, things are indeed emancipated ‘as such’. The new kind of analytical entity that Latour proposes, the hybrid assemblage of humans and non-humans in mutual transformation, is an agent in as serious a sense one might wish to take that term: its very constitution is defined by its ability to act as such. Indeed, the bold political philosophy that Latour has been building on the back of his move to networks of things-and-people in recent years is testimony to this: ‘political representation of nonhumans seems not only plausible now but necessary, when the notion would have seemed ludicrous or indecent not long ago’, he writes, and raises the prospect of a ‘parliament of things’ (Latour 1999: 198).

Yet, in terms of the framework of the present argument, there is also a significant irony involved in Latour’s tack of emancipation. In order for him to avoid emancipating things ‘by association’ to humans, as per Miller or Gell, Latour ends up defining them, in a revisionist move, as associations (assemblages, collectives, networks), thus binding them to humans by ontological fiat. This, however, begs a question: to what extent and, if at all, how does the dignity conferred on the actants of a Latourian network rub off on the things a pre-Latourian metaphysic would call ‘things’? Does the Latourian revision of the constituents of the world get us any closer to answering our question of whether the thing can speak? Of course, from a Latourian point of view, these questions are either meaningless or foolish. There is no ‘thing’, other than in the modernist chimera. To raise the very question – Can the thing speak? – is to engage in an act of purification. One should rather bite oneself and ask, Can the thing – I mean the actor network! – speak? (Answer: yes.)

Yet, I want to suggest that something important is lost in this act of analytical (because ontological) censorship. Far be it from me to propose any kind of return to modernist ontology – not even for the sake of an anthropological commitment to vulgar common sense à la Miller. Indeed, I am not even sure at this stage of thinking about the matter whether the sense of dissatisfaction I express here points to a principled flaw in Latour’s analytic or an accidental feature of the way Latourian analyses tend to get done. Still, so often when reading such analyses one gets the impression that all the qualities that seem peculiar to ‘things’ as one ordinarily conceives of them – I mean the aspects of things we would ordinarily tag is their ‘material’ qualities, such as those studied by material scientists – somehow get muted, lost in the Latourian translation. I am not saying they don’t get a mention, or that they do not play a significant role in Latour’s often highly sophisticated empirical analyses, as well as those of his followers. For example, Latour’s refutation of the technological determinism of saying that guns kill people does not stop him from emphasising the particular forms of agency that a gun’s technological characteristics – the mechanics of detonation, velocity, accuracy and so on – contribute to the man-with-a-gun assemblage. What I am saying is that the net effect of Latour’s ontological amalgamation of such characteristics with the people they act to transform renders them (or at least tends to render them) corollaries of projects and concerns that a lay non-Latourian account would interpret as irreducibly human: what is important about Boyle’s air-pump is its contribution to modernity (1993a), the significant thing about sleeping policemen is that their concrete curvature participates in the patrolling of traffic (Latour 1993b), what the elements that make for a gun’s firing power do is they engender the potential to kill (1999).

All this may indeed be a contingent function of the particular questions on which Latourian analyses have been put to work.⁴ Nevertheless, one can make the principled point that Latour’s prime ontological revision, namely the ‘symmetry’ of treating the entities that a modernist metaphysics purifies as persons ‘or’ things as hybrid relations of persons ‘and’ things (see also Viveiros de Castro 2002), renders any interest in those aspects of things one would ordinarily view as distinctively thing-like considerably harder to pursue. Qualities one would call ‘material’ are, as such, always in deep ontological entanglement with the (also) human projects that they help constitute, so one wonders whether in practice, let alone in principle, a Latourian take on things could at all let one disentangle them and allow them to be explored as such. One suspects that with the metaphysical bathwater of ‘materiality’ (as opposed, that is, to ‘humanity’) goes also the baby of ‘materials’ as a legitimate analytical concern.

This way of putting it shows how close this worry comes to one expressed recently by Tim Ingold (2007). Fed up with what he sees as perversely abstract and intractably abstruse debates about ‘materiality’ in recent years, Ingold urges anthropologists to ‘take a step back, from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials [... –] a tangled web of meandrine complexity, in which – among myriad other things – oaken wasp galls get caught up with old iron, acacia sap, goose feathers and calf-skins, and the residue from heated limestone mixes with emissions from pigs, cattle, hens and bears’ (Ingold 2007: 9). Ingold, we may note, makes no secret of the fact that his manifesto for a renewed focus on materials is itself metaphysically motivated, and bound up with a particular way of viewing the relationship between humans and things. Inspired by Gibson as well as phenomenology, Ingold sees humans and things as submerged on an equal ontological footing in ‘an ocean of materials’ (2007: 7). He writes:

Once we acknowledge our immersion, what this ocean reveals to us is […] a flux in which materials of the most diverse kinds – through processes of admixture and distillation, of coagulation and dispersal, and of evaporation and precipitation – undergo continual generation and transformation. The forms of things, far from having been imposed from without upon an inert substrate, arise and are borne along – as indeed we are too – within this current of materials. (ibid.)

One might say that Ingold’s tactic for emancipating the thing involves a kind of inverse humanism (for this is not materialism as we know it), in which, rather than raising things to the power of the human, humans and things alike are factorised down to their primordial material denominator: Life on Earth (ibid). Nevertheless, my point here is that Ingold’s plea for materials can be taken independently of the theoretical agenda from which it may flow, and heeded as a powerful reminder of a whole terrain of investigation that any attempt to take things seriously – even to emancipate them in the terms developed here – cannot afford to ignore.

Indeed, it is with Ingold’s plea for materials that I want to cut to the chase of what asking for things that speak could mean. The problem is one of, if you like, wanting to have one’s cake and eat it. Eating the cake, in this case, is taking fully on board the post-human (e.g. Latourian) point that a proper emancipation of the thing must eschew any principled distinction between it and humans as a starting-point. Having the cake is finding a way nevertheless to credit the Ingoldian intuition that a full-hog emancipation of the thing must place those characteristics that are most think-like or ‘thingy’ (the designation is purely heuristic, with no metaphysical prejudice!) at the top of its agenda. Asking whether the thing can speak, then, is to ask for it to speak on its own terms – in its own language, if you like. Any interesting answer to this question, I suggest, would have to start form the rather blatant observation that it would be a shame if such a language – call it ‘thingese’? – turned out to have no sonorities of what we take to be the most obvious distinguishing feature of so-called things, namely their material characteristics. It is in answer to this question that a critique of the argument of TTT may be useful.

Rethinking through things

Plotted onto the trajectory of increasingly radical attempts to erase the human/thing divide, TTT should probably be placed at the far posthumanist extreme. Indeed, were one permitted to compound this already horrible term, the argument of TTT is post-posthumanist, in that it takes on board the Latourian suggestion that the distinction between people and things is ontologically arbitrary, but adds (contra Latour among others) that, this being so, the solution for emancipating the thing must not be to bind it to an alternative ontological order (e.g. that of the Actor Network), but rather to free it from any ontological determination whatsoever. TTT, in other words, operates within the economy of the literature announcing and articulating the rise of the thing, and its self-conscious polemic purports to offer a corrective even to the most extreme proponents of this (otherwise) common emancipatory goal. Let me indicate briefly how our attempt to emancipate the thing was supposed to work

As put forward in the Introduction of TTT, the argument involved two key claims – one critical and one positive. The critical move, which took off directly from Strathern (see above), went as follows. If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered, somehow, also as non-things (e.g. an artefact that, ethnographically speaking, is a human being, as per Melanesian gifts, or a river that is a spirit), then the notion of a ‘thing’, anthropologically speaking, can only have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. So attempts to analyse the things we call objects, artefacts, substances, or materials in terms of their objectivity, substantiality or, as has become most popular, their ‘materiality’, are locked in a kind of ethnographic prejudice – they are, to use the dirty word, ethnocentric. And this goes also for attempts theoretically to emancipate things by attributing them with all sorts of qualities earlier shacklers would take to belong only to humans, such as sociality, spirituality, and again, most popularly, agency. In other words, if what a thing may be is itself an ethnographic variable, then the initial analytical task must not be to ‘add’ to that term’s theoretical purchase by proposing new ways to think of it – e.g. as a site of human beings’ objectification (Miller), an index of agency (Gell), an on-going event of assemblage (Latour), or what have you. Rather it must be effectively to de-theorise the thing, by emptying it out of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a purely ethnographic ‘form’ ready to be filled out contingently according only to its own ethnographic exigencies. Treating the thing as a heuristic (i.e. just as a tag for identifying it as an object of study) was indeed, then, a way for us to allow it to speak in its own terms – which in ethnographic principle may be as varied as there are things to listen to – from behind the clamour of social theoretical attempts to theorise such a thing as the thing as such. Things do speak, ran the thought, but the problem is how to hear them past all the things we say about them.

If half of the way towards addressing this problem is to empty out the notion of ‘thing’ of its contingently a priori metaphysical contents – thing-as-heuristic –, the other half is to formulate a way of allowing it to be filled by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethnographic instance. This can be seen as the second and positive emancipatory move of the TTT argument, which is captured by a complementary methodological injunction: ‘concepts = things’. The move is complementary in that it follows directly from the issue that motivates the heuristic approach in the first place, namely the possibility – and in so many instances the fact – that the things we call ‘things’ might not ethnographically speaking be things at all, or not in the way we might initially assume them to be. For note that the things-as-concepts injunction is determinedly not proposed as some new theory of the thing. The idea is emphatically not to propose some kind of revisionary metaphysic, to the effect that, where people have so often assumed things and concepts to belong to opposite ontological camps, we should all from now on recognise them as belonging to the same one (viz. the kind of approach Latour and Ingold advance in different ways, as we have seen). To the contrary, the ‘things = concepts’ formula is offered as a further methodological clause for side-stepping just such theoretical prescriptions. In particular, it is supposed to foreclose a very real danger when it comes to thinking anthropologically about the different ways in which things may feature ethnographically, namely that of parsing them as different ways in which people may think about (represent, imagine, socially construct) them. This is to parse ethnographic alternatives to our metaphysic of things in terms of it – in fact, in terms of what nigh all-thing emancipators consider its crassest version, namely the idea of inert and mute things invested with varied meanings only by human fiats of representation. It is, in effect, to raise the erasure of things to the power of a necessity for thinking of them.

So the ‘concepts = things’ clause is meant to placate just this danger. Put very simply: instead of treating all the things that your informants say of and do to or with things as modes of representing the things in question, treat them as modes of defining them. The immediate advantage of this way of parsing the issue is that it renders wide open precisely the kinds of questions that lie at the heart of the emancipatory agenda, namely questions about what kinds of things ‘things’ might be. Instead of merely offering sundry ways of confirming the base metaphysic of mute things invested with varied meanings by humans, the things-as-concepts tack holds up that very ethnographic variety as a promise of so many ways of arriving at alternative metaphysical positions – whatever they might be. If every instance anthropologists would deem a different representation of a thing is conceived as a potentially different way of defining what such a thing might be, then all the metaphysical questions about its character qua ‘thing’, what materiality might be, objectification, agency – all that is now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency and the analytical work it forces upon us.

As we did in the Introduction to TTT itself, let me illustrate the approach with reference to my own chapter in the book, in which I elaborate an analysis of aché. Aché is a mana-type term that Afro-Cuban diviners use to talk both about their power to make deities appear during divination, and about a particular kind of consecrated powder that they consider as a necessary ingredient for achieving this. The terminological coincidence, I argued, corresponds to an ontological one: a diviner’s power is also his powder and the powder (qua consecrated) is also his power. Now, this is obviously a counter-intuitive suggestion, of the order of ‘twins are birds’ (Evans-Pritchard 1956, cf. Holbraad 2010). If we know what powder is at all, we know that it is not also power in any meaningful sense (it’s just powder!), and much less can we accept that power (a concept with proportions as grand as Nietzsche or Foucault) might also be just powder (of all things!). Hence the classical anthropological type of question: why might Cuban diviners ‘believe’ such a crazy idea? For as long as our analysis of aché remains within the terms of an axiomatic distinction between things and concepts, we cannot but ask the question in these terms. We know that powder is just that dusty thing there on the diviner’s tray (see below). So the question is why Cubans might ‘think’ that it is also a form of power. How do we explain it? How do we interpret it?

Alternatively, we could treat the distinction between concepts and things merely as a heuristic device, as per TTT’s first move. This would allow us to ask questions about that powder that we would intuitively identify as a ‘thing’, without prejudicing the question of what it might be, including questions of what it being a ‘thing’ might even mean. Answers to such questions, then, would be culled from the ethnography of all the data we would ordinarily be tempted to call people’s ‘beliefs’ about this powder, including the notion that it is also power. As per the second move of the TTT method (concept = thing), we would treat such data as elements of a conceptual definition of the thing in question. So: Cuban diviners do not ‘believe’ that powder is power, but rather define it as power. Note, crucially, how this way of setting up the problem raises the metaphysical stakes. Since our own default assumption is that powder is not to be defined as power (it’s just a dusty thing, we assume), the challenge now must be to reconceptualise those very notions and their many ethnographic and analytical corollaries (powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in a way that would render the ethnographically-given definition of powder as power reasonable, rather than absurd. It is just this kind of analytical work I attempted to carry out in my chapter in TTT (I shall cover more of that ground later).

At the time we presented this mode of analysis in TTT, I for one imagined it as having cracked the problem of the thing’s emancipation as I have been outlining it here. Taken together, I thought, our argument’s two key moves effectively opened up the space for things themselves, as one encounters them heuristically in any given ethnographic instance, to dictate their own metaphysics – to dictate, if you like, the terms of their own analytical engagement. Just what I have in mind when asking for an approach that allows things to speak for themselves, in their own language! Yet, to see why I may have been wrong, one needs only to contemplate how the prospect of things speaking in the ‘own’ language in this TTT-sense measures up to the Ingoldian caveat, namely that a proper emancipation of things ‘as such’, whatever that may mean or involve, should place their material characteristics centre stage – that things should speak in thingese, and that thingese should somehow be an expression of things’ peculiarly material qualities. In the sometimes flamboyantly programmatic pronouncements of the TTT Introduction, nothing is in fact made of such qualities, and certainly their role in ‘thinking through things’ is left largely unspecified.

In fact, it is indicative that this first dawned on me (at any rate) when faced with a searching question by an archaeologist in a conference at which my co-editors and I presented our argument (see also Holbraad 2009). Being himself consigned to working with things without the benefit of rich ethnographic information about them, he admitted, he found himself at a loss as to how archaeologists might deploy our approach to any effect. Notwithstanding our claim to have found a way to let things speak for themselves, our argument seemed at most a method for allowing the ethnography of things to speak on their behalf – to set, indeed, the terms of their analytical engagement. If what motivates the whole approach is, as explained above, the fact that in varied instances people speak of or act with things in ways that contradict our assumptions about what a thing might be; and if, furthermore, it is just those ways of speaking and acting around things that are supposed to provide the ‘content’ of their potentially alternative metaphysics; then how might archaeologists, for whom, what people might have said or done around the things archaeologists call ‘finds’ is so often the primary question? If anyone ever needed a way of letting things speak for themselves that is the archaeologist, for whom things are so often all he has to go on. Our unproblematised reliance on, and unabashed love for, ethnography in our way of ‘thinking through things’ is of no huge help. The clue is in the book’s subtitle: ‘theorising artefacts ethnographically’.

These misgivings go to the heart of the problem I wish to tackle here, and are tellingly connected to another worry that as a social anthropologist I have had myself (privately!) about the TTT argument, namely the fact that the analytical experimentations it seeks to promote seem in one way or other to be wound around ethnographic phenomena one might broadly call ‘magical’ or even ‘animist’ in one sense or other. Cigarettes that make Port Morsby inmates’ thoughts fly out of prison, Maori and Swazi legal paraphernalia that have metaphysical efficacy, shamanic costumes that transport Mongols to legions of skies, and family chests and photographs that contain their life force, divinatory powder that is the power to reveal deities: these are the things contributors to our volume thought through, along with the people who ‘informed’ them ethnographically about them. In line with the archaeologist’s comment, I suspect that this ‘magical realist’ tenor of the chapters is not accidental. The leverage for thinking out of the metaphysical box that so entranced us as editors was owed, at least to a large extent and at the first instance, to the chapters’ ethnographic magic, to coin a phrase, rather than the specifically ‘thing-like’ character of their subject-matter.

It emerges, then, that TTT’s claim to offer an emancipation of the thing along the lines I have been discussing is open to a critique that is analogous to the one advanced earlier in relation to Latour. Latour, we saw, emancipates the thing by entangling it ontologically with persons – subsuming both under the terms of his revisionary ontology of networks comprising people-and-things. TTT does something similar, though now at the level of analytical methodology. It emancipates the thing by entangling it heuristically with all that the people concerned with it say and do around it, subsuming things and their ethnographic accounts under the terms of our revisionary methodology. Indeed, just as a Latourian might object that to demand an emancipation of the thing ‘as such’ is flatly to deny the significance of Latour’s ontology of networks, so we might want to contend that that same demand merely contradicts our methodological injunction of concept = thing. As far as TTT is concerned, things as such just are what our ethnographic descriptions of them define them to be. Still, if this is emancipation by ethnographic ‘association’, the Ingoldian bugbear remains: what of materials and their properties?

Yet, I want to argue that the force of this line of critique pertains more to the rhetoric of the TTT argument than to its substance. Suitably reconsidered, the methodological approach of TTT is indeed able to give ‘voice’ to material characteristics, making analytical virtue of them as such. The fact that this prospect remained mute in the way we pitched the argument when we wrote it relates directly to the guiding homology with which I began this paper, between the postcolonial agenda of emancipating the native and the thing-theoretical one of emancipating the thing. With particular reference to Viveiros de Castro’s ongoing project of de-colonizing anthropological thinking by using ethnography to subvert its most domineering (because ontological) presuppositions (see Henare et al 2007: 8-9, cf. Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2002), ours was pitched above all as an attempt to put the ethnography of things at the centre of such an endeavour. If for Viveiros de Castro the emancipation of the native in anthropology is a matter of opening up space for her ‘conceptual self-determination’ (2002) within it, then the TTT argument amounted mainly to the addendum that the ethnography of (people’s engagement with) things is a prime site for pursuing this goal. In other words, whatever emancipation TTT might offer to things was rhetorically subsumed under the older (but surely no less pressing) political agenda of emancipating the native. Indeed, TTT’s two-step methodology reflected this directly. The ‘thing-as-heuristic’ move opened up ‘things’ as a locus of ontological self-determination, while the ‘concept = thing’ clause allowed the ethnography of what natives do and say around them to provide it with ontologically variable contents.

What, then, of the substance of this argument? Might it, albeit inadvertently, provide a way for things to speak, not as proxies for ethnographic natives, but for themselves? In a longer, fully written up version of this paper I plan to use three examples of anthropological and archaeological analyses of things in order to explore the question concretely.⁵ Here I limit myself to making the argument from first principles, and illustrating it briefly with reference to my Cuban powder-is-power case.

It all depends, of course, on what one takes ‘things that may speak’ to mean – what counts as a thing that speaks for itself? It is on this point that I think the homology with Spivak’s question about the subaltern is most instructive. We have already seen that attempts to transpose the humanist agenda of postcolonial emancipation onto things by including them in ‘the circle of the human’ provide only half-hogged emancipations, ‘by association’. But we have seen also that there is an alternative to humanism in the struggle to de-colonise anthropology – not least in the rhetoric of TTT itself, as well as in the work of Viveiros de Castro. Captured by Viveiros’s slogan of ‘conceptual self-determination’, this is the project of constructing an anthropology that opens spaces for natives to set the terms of our anthropological engagements with them, positing them as producers of concepts rather than, say, consumers of ours. Rather than worrying about how far natives might (or should) be considered as humans, agents, subjects and so on, we should be asking what concepts of humanity, agency, subjectivity and more our anthropological engagement with them might yield, and be fully prepared to be surprised by what we find (sensu Strathern 2005). It is this notion of emancipation, then, that I propose to transpose onto things: things can speak insofar as they can set the terms of their anthropological engagement by acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our anthropological conceptualisations. Things can speak if they can yield their own concepts.

This way of putting the matter already gets us much closer to seeing why TTT might after all be suited to stage such a move. Bracketing for this purpose the underlying postcolonialist concerns to which it was put to use, the ‘concept = thing’ formula speaks directly to the problem at hand. All one needs to do is read the formula backwards (in school we called this ‘symmetry of equality’): ‘thing = concept’. Indeed, the thought is in a pertinent sense the reverse (though not the opposite) of the one advocated explicitly in TTT. If there the formula ‘concept = thing’ designated the possibility of treating what people say and do around things as manners of defining what those things are, here its symmetrical rendition ‘thing = concept’ raises the prospect of treating the thing as a manner of defining what we (analysts now, rather than natives) are able to say and do around it. At issue, to coin another phrase, are a thing’s conceptual affordances.

Indeed, thinking of the present argument as a symmetrical reversal of the one made in TTT also allows us to flesh the thought out in Ingold’s direction, towards the question of materials and their properties. As I noted when outlining the TTT position, the promise of conceptual experimentation that it holds up is grounded in ethnographic contingency. Having emptied the notion of ‘the thing’ of any conceptual presuppositions of what may count as one, we fill it back up with alternative conceptualisations drawn from the contingent ethnographic data we find around it. One way of describing the procedure, it strikes me, would be as a form of ‘empirical ontology’, where ‘empirical’ denotes its ethnographic grounding. So we may ask: what is the equivalently empirical grounding of the reverse procedure that I seek to articulate here for things? Following through on the symmetry of our reversal-strategy, the answer can be found only in the material characteristics of the thing itself. What was empirical about (ethnographically driven) concepts that defined things must now be so about (let’s say, ‘pragmatographically’ driven) things that now define concepts. With what other ‘stuff’ can things feed their conceptualizations than the very stuff that makes them what they are, as heuristically marked ‘things’? The data that make a (conceptual) difference, in this case, are no longer what we hear and see people say and do around things, but rather what we hear, see, smell, taste and touch of the thing as we find it (heuristically) as such.

The difference from Ingold, however, is that, in line with his phenomenologically inclined vitalism, he is content to revel at this material and sensuous level of things, to explore their mutual ‘enmeshment’ with people and other organisms, as well as their ‘affordances’ for them in the broader ecology of living. By contrast, in raising the question of the conceptual affordances of materials and their properties, my interest is not in the ecology of their material alterations but rather in the economy of their conceptual transformations: how their material characteristics can dictate particular forms for their conceptualization. At issue, if you like, is not the horizontal traffic of materials’ enmeshment in forms of life, but rather what one might imagine as a vertical axis of materials’ transformation into forms of thought – mainly for fun, I’d call this the ‘intensional vertizon’ of things (to mark its orthogonal relationship to phenomenological notions of things’ ‘intentional horizon’ in, say, Husserl). Simply put, this vertizonal movement would be what ‘abstraction’ would look like were it to be divorced from the ontological distinction between concrete (things) and abstract (concepts). Indeed, this is just what the ‘thing = concept’ clause of our analytical method would suggest. Where the ontology of things versus concepts would posit abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend a particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuristic continuity of ‘thing = concept’ casts this as a movement internal to ‘the thing itself’ (to echo Husserl again): the thing differentiates itself, no longer as an instantiation ‘of’ a concept, but a self-transformation as a concept.

I am of course aware that this way of thinking takes us into deep philosophical waters which I am incompetent to chart (although one may note with pleasure that this is exactly as it should be: one would hardly hope for the scandalous idea of things that speak to have tamer philosophical implications). Indeed, in my amateur understanding, there is a line in Western philosophy, which runs from Heraclitus through Leibniz and up to Deleuze, that deals with many of the relevant problems. Still, adopting a distinctively anthropological slant with reference to Marilyn Strathern’s notion of ‘partial connections’ (1991), Morten Pedersen and I have elsewhere tried to articulate in some detail the analytical implications of things’ capacity for vertizonal transformation – we called this form of self-motion ‘abstension’, to indicate the intensive (as opposed to extensive) character that abstractions acquire when they are thought as self-differentiating transformations of things-into-concepts (see Holbraad & Pedersen 2009). Rather than cover this ground again for present purposes, however, I close by showing what this kind of analytical movement looks like with reference to the example of aché which I began to discuss earlier. (Indeed, in retrospect, it seems remarkable that this line of argument was pasted over, not only in the Introduction to TTT, where the notion of a powder that is power is used as an illustration as we saw, but even in my own chapter in the book, where the actual analysis of this material is carried out.)

If, as I have argued, the problem with TTT is that it emancipates the thing only by associating it in ethnography with an ontologically emancipated native, then my analysis of aché in my TTT chapter is certainly an instance of this. We have already seen, for example, that the very problem that article was devoted to solving – what might a powder that is also power be? – was ethnographically driven: it was not powder that told me it is power, it was my diviner informants. And certainly, a host of ethnographic data serve to frame and develop the problem itself, as well as parts of its analytical solution. Crucially, for example, since what powder might be in this instance depends on the notion of power, part of my attempt to articulate the question involves developing its various dimensions ethnographically. In a nutshell, I provide an account of Afro-Cuban divinatory cosmology based on informants’ responses, to show that for diviners power consists in the ability to render otherwise absent divinities present during the divinatory ceremony, and that this power manifested in divination as the ‘signs’ the diviners mark with their fingers on the powder that is spread in the surface of their divining board, which are called ‘oddu’, and said to ‘be’ divinities in their own right. On the basis of this ethnographic information, I go on to show that the notion of a powder that ‘is’ power emerges as a solution to an age-old theological conundrum, familiar in the anthropology of religion (e.g. Keane 2007): apparently transcendent deities are rendered immanent on the surface of the divining board, allowing those present in the divination to relate to them directly. Conceptualising powder as power, then, requires us to understand analytically how Afro-Cuban divination effectively solves this ‘problem of presence’, to recall Matthew Engelke’s book on a related conundrum (2007). And it is to this question that powder, finally, speaks:

Powder gives us the answer […]. As we saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, powder provides the backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, ‘come out’. In this most crucial of senses, then, powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, ie the capacity to make [deities] ‘come out’ and ‘speak’ […]. Considered prosaically, powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles – its pure multiplicity, so to speak. In marking the oddu on the board, the babalawo’s fingers are able to draw the configuration just to the extent that the ‘intensive’ capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is registered. [In this way] powder renders the motile premise of the oddu’s revelation explicit, there for all to see by means of a simple figure-ground reversal: oddu figures are revealed as a temporary displacement of their ground, the powder. […] This suggests a logical reversal that goes to the heart of the problem of transcendence. If we take seriously babalawos’ contention that the oddu just are the marks they make on aché-powder […], then the constitution of deities as displacements of powder tells us something pretty important about the premises of Ifá cosmology: that these deities are to be thought of [not as] entities, but rather as motions. […] If the oddu […] just are motions […], then the apparent antinomy of giving logical priority to transcendence over relation or vice versa is resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primitive, what looks like transcendence becomes distance and what looks like relation becomes proximity. [So, qua motions, the deities have inherent within themselves the capacity to relate to humans, through the potential of directed movement that] aché-powder guarantees, as a solution to the genuine problem of the distance deities must traverse in order to be rendered present in divination. (Holbraad 2007: 208-9)

It in not an accident that the content of this analysis (i.e. the relationship between transcendence and immanence) is recursively related to its form (i.e. the relationship between analytical concepts and ethnographic things) – in the article itself I made much of this. Here, however, I want only to focus on the latter question, to draw attention to the work powder does for the analysis, by virtue specifically of its material characteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analytical problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder that provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities are conceptualised as motions to solve the problem of presence, after all, that is only because their material manifestations are just that, motions. And those motions, in turn, only emerge as analytically significant because of the material constitution of the powder upon which they are physically marked: its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles, amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of water, in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviner’s fingers, and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres in powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that they can engender vertizonal effects, setting the conceptual parameters for the anthropological analysis that they ‘afford’ the argument. As an irreducible element of the analysis of aché, it is powder that brings the pivotal concepts of perviousness, multiplicity, motion, direction, potential and so on into the fray of analysis, as conceptual transformations of itself, as per the ‘thing = concept’ clause. In that sense, I submit, it speaks for itself – louder, in fact, than any other element of the analysis presented.

Conclusion: anthropology and/or pragmatology

By way of conclusion, it may be worth clarifying a little how I see the dividends, as it were, of the kind of amplification of things’ voices in anthropological analysis that I have sought to articulate. In particular, it is important at this point to be rather precise about the degree and manner in which this way of sourcing anthropological conceptualizations in things counts as a way of emancipating them ‘as such’. Indeed: one might be tempted to object that, whatever the merits of the case I have sought to make for things speaking ‘as such’ in our analyses, their emancipation in this way nevertheless remains unavoidably circumscribed by the human-oriented agendas to which these analyses – anthropological after all – are directed. Sure (the objection would go): powder may be operative in the analysis of my Cuban example, providing the material source for my conceptual abstensions, as I called them, of such analytical ingredients as perviousness, multiplicity, intensive motion, and so on. Still, these ingredients are part of a longer recipe, so to speak, which includes not only things like powder, but also divinities, diviners, their clients and so on. And what this analytical recipe is meant to cook is an argument about Cuban practitioners of divination – that is people, my informants – and how we may best conceive of their notion that powder, in a divinatory context, is a form of divine power. While part of our answers to such questions, in other words, might be driven by things ‘as such’ in the manner I have indicated, their anthropological significance is nevertheless a function of their association, in the economy of anthropological analysis, with people and the ethnographic conundrums they pose to us. So the aforementioned archaeologist’s bemused complaint, it seems, remains after all: could things really speak without their association to human (in this case ethnographically talkative) subjects?

The correct response, I would suggest, is to bite the bullet. Anthropological examples such as the one on Afro-Cuban powder indeed do not demonstrate that things can speak of their own accord, and seem bound to continue to render them subservient to the analysis of the human projects into which they enter. Arguably, however, this line of scepticism is contingent squarely on the anthropological – by which I mean also human-centric – character of the example. Indeed, while admittedly staying within the economy of undeniably anthropological analyses, what I have ventured to argue is that such analyses may involve an irreducibly thing-driven component or phase – one we might call ‘pragmatological’, borrowing somewhat subversively a term coined, tellingly, by the archaeologist Christopher Witmore (forthcoming). Indeed, while the analytical difference things can make pragmatologically might in this instance be gauged with reference to the anthropological mileage they give, the very notion that things might make such a difference of their own accord, ‘as such’, does, it seems to me, ultimately raise the prospect of pragmatology as a sui generis field of inquiry.

Allow me, then, to indulge in a final and absurdly programmatic speculation. Might one imagine a thing-centric discipline called pragmatology in which things’ material properties would form the basis of conceptual experimentations that would be unmediated by, and run unchecked from, any human projects whatsoever? I have to admit that my own conception of what such a discipline might look like is hazy to say the least… Certainly, notwithstanding my earlier comments, I don’t think archaeology would be enough to provide a model, if only because archaeology shares the anthropo-centric slant of social anthropology, its problem being mainly that its otherwise thing-oriented methodology suffers from a deficit of human conformation. Theoretical physics may come considerably closer, since so much of it apparently takes the form, precisely, of radical conceptual experimentations in the service of understanding the material forms of the universe. Still, this also has problems, partly due to physicists’ still encompassing demand for causal explanation (a demand that is certainly distinct, and possibly incompatible, with our pragmatological concern with conceptualization). At any rate, there is no reason to limit our putative pragmatology to physicists’ takes on matter, to the exclusion of those of, say, chemists, biologists, engineers, or, indeed, artists, sculptors or musicians. In fact, I suspect the closest one might get to the kind of inquiry pragmatology could involve would be an inverse form of conceptual art – construed, of course, very broadly indeed. If the labour of the conceptual artist is supposed to issue in an object that congeals in concrete form a set of conceptual possibilities, the work of the pragmatologist would be one that issues concepts that abstend in abstract form a set of concrete realities. Pragmatology, then, as art backwards.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Versions of this paper has been presented at departmental seminars in Aberdeen, SOAS and UCL, as well as at the Things and Spirits conference in Lisbon (September 2010) and the TAG 2010 conference at Bristol. I thank James Leach, Ed Simpson, Victor Buchli, Ricardo Roque and Joao Vasconcelos and Dan Hicks for their respective invitations, and to the participants in each of them for their valuable comments. I am also grateful to Lise Philipsen for illuminating conversations during writing.

REFERENCES

Appadurai, Arjun, 1986. ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’. In: The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, A. Appadurai (ed.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 3-63

Argyrou, Vassos, 2002. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: a Postcolonial critique. London: Pluto Press

Engelke, Matthew, 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press

E.E Evans-Pritchard, 1956. Nuer Religion. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press

Fowles, Severin, 2008. ‘The perfect subject: Postcolonial object studies’. Paper at Annual Conference of Theoretical Archaeology Group, May 24, Columbia University, New York.

———, 2010. ‘People without things’. In: An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, M. Bille et al (eds.). New York: Springer, 23-41

Gell, Alfred, 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Guyer, Jane, 1993. ‘Wealth in people and self-realisation in equatorial Africa’. Man N.S. 28(2): 243-265

Haraway, Donna. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books: London.

Harman, Graham, 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Re.press

Henare, A., M. Holbraad & S. Wastell, 2007. ‘Introduction’. In Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, Wenare et al (eds.). London: Routledge, 1-31.

Holbraad, Martin, 2005. Expending multiplicity: money in Cuban Ifá cults. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 11(2): 231-54

——–, 2007. The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or mana again). In A. Henare et al (eds.) Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, London: Routledge, 189-225

——–, 2009. ‘Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography

of things’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19(3): 431-441

———, 2010. Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion. Debate & Discussion (from GDAT 2008, S. Venkatesan (ed.)). Critique of Anthropology 30(2): 179-185

Holbraad, Martin & Morten A. Pedersen, 2009. ‘Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern’. Anthropological Theory 9(4): 371-94

Ingold, Tim, 2007. ‘Materials against materiality’. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1-16

Keane, Webb, 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press

Latour, Bruno, 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. London: Prentice Hall.

———-, 1993b. ‘On technical mediation: philosophy, sociology, genealogy’. Common Knowledge 2: 29–64

———–, 1999. Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Leach, James, 2007. ‘Differentiation and encompassment: a critique of Alfred Gell’s theory of the abduction of creativity’. In: Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, Wenare et al (eds.). London: Routledge

Miller, Daniel, 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

———–, 2005. ‘Materiality: an introduction’. In Materiality, D. Miller (ed.). Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1-50

———–, 2007. ‘Stone age or plastic age?’. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 23-7

Olsen, B. 2003. ‘Material culture after text: re-membering things’. Norwegian Archaeological Review 36(3):87–104

Pedersen, Morten A., 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Pels, Peter,1998. ‘The spirit of matter: On fetish, rarity, fact and fancy’. In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places, Patricia Spyer (ed.), New York: Routledge, 91-121.

Pinney, Chris, 2005. ‘Things happen: or, from which moment does that object come?’. In: Materiality, D. Miller (ed.). Durham & London: Duke University Press, 256-72

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998. ” Can the Subaltern Speak?” in /Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture/. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-313

Strathern, Marilyn, 1990. ‘Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images’. In Culture and History in the Pacific, J. Siikala (ed.). Helsinki: Transactions of the Finish Anthropological Society, 25-44

———–, 2004 [first published 1991]. Partial Connections (Updated edition). Walnut Creek: Altamira Press

———–, 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: CUP

Tilley, Christopher, 2007. ‘Materiality in materials’. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 16-20

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 1998. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Lecture series delivered at Dept. of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridg, 17 February – 10 March

———–, 2002. And. Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology.

Webmoor, Tim & Christopher Witmore, 2008. ‘Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology’. Norwegian Archaeology Review, 41(1), 53-70

Witmore, Christopher, Forthcoming 2011. “The realities of the past: Archaeology, object-orientations, pragmatology.” In B.R. Fortenberry and L. McAtackney (eds) Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference 2009. Oxford: Archaeopress.

NOTES

1While my comments here speak to the argument as presented by all three of its authors, I do not claim that Salmond and Wastell would agree with the retrospective critique I develop here (although they may well do so, at least in part).

2 Chris Tilley (whose own dualism-busting efforts draw mainly on phenomenology), puts it most simply, in defence of the notion of ‘materiality’: ‘The concept of materiality is required because it tries to consider and embrace subject-object relations going beyond the brute materiality of [things] and considering why certain [things] and their properties become important to people.’ (Tilley 2007: 17)

3On this point Miller, for one, resorts to a rather elaborate metaphor about philosophical wheels and the anthropological vehicles they help along which does not, to my mind, express very clearly the relationship between the two analytical demands (see Miller 2005: 43-46).

4There may exist out there a Latourian analysis of an assemblage of actants consisting only of the things we’d call things, though the prospect seems more speculative at present – see Harman 2009.

5 My favourite candidates are Pedersen’s forthcoming analysis of shamanic costumes in Mongolia (Pedersen 2011), in which he claims that these artefacts ‘provide an analysis of themselves’, Strathern’s commentary on Battaglia’s analysis of Sabarl pick-axes (Strathern 1991), in which she argues that these artefacts ‘contain their own contexts’, and the archaeological debate about skeuomorphism, where, I want to argue, materials analyse each other through translating prior forms into novel contents (material analysis as concretions of abstractions).

On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations
A Maussian Approach

David Graeber
Goldsmiths

© 2010 David Graeber

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

For all the vast literature on “the gift,” the concept is surprisingly under-theorized. This is because everyone assumes that there is something called “the gift”, that all transactions not involving payment or the promise of payment are the same thing. Whether seen as a matter of generosity, lack of calculation, creating social relations or a refusal to distinguish between generosity and self-interest, the possibility that “gifts” operate according to different transactional logics is often overlooked.

In challenging the assumption of the gift’s conceptual unity, I follow Marcel Mauss whose great contribution to social theory was to recognize not only the diversity of “economic transactions” across human societies, but also that all important economic and moral possibilities are present in any human society. Even if we like to contrast “gift economies” with “market economies,” as if each represents a total conceptual universe, Mauss did not see things this way. True, he did write, for instance, at the end of his “essay on the gift”:

The word “interest” can be traced back to the Latin interest written on account books opposite rents to be recovered…The victory of rationalism and mercantilism was required before the notions of profit and the individual were given currency and raised to the level of principles… It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal (1990 [1924]: 73-74)

When making such statements, Mauss was referring to how, in a given social order, people seize on certain practices and use them to generalize about human nature. Our conception of man as an “economic animal” is made possible by certain specific technologies (money, ledger sheets, mathematical calculations of interest) which we then generalize to reveal the hidden truth behind everything—but the existence of such technologies proves nothing. Neither is Mauss really saying that such calculation is anything new.

In fact, Mauss often goes much further. In his lectures on ethnography, he insisted that money, in the broadest sense of the term, existed in virtually all known human societies (2009 [1947]:103, 107)—and that markets appeared in most (with some exceptions such as the Celtic world). He said the same was also true of communism (Ibid:102, 104-105). In his “essay on the gift”, there is a profound tension. On the one hand, he allows that even institutions like the calculation of interest payments do not just go back to the Romans or even Mesopotamians, but can exist in “archaic” societies like the Kwakiutl—societies which did not even practice agriculture. Yet at other times, he makes an evolutionary argument: that societies have moved from “total prestations” to the aristocratic “potlatch” to modern commercial markets. In the essay, when he speaks of stages—except for the most primitive peoples—he’s talking about dominant institutions. We might think of ourselves abstractly as “calculating machines”, but most of us only act that way in specific situations. Ordinarily, “pure irrational expenditure” is the rule among both the rich and poor, and it would be hard to argue that means-end utilitarianism is really the rule even for the middle classes, (Mauss1990 [1924]:74).

This notion was taken up by Georges Bataille (1991-1993) and we are used to reading Mauss retrospectively through his work. Bataille’s elaboration of the idea of expenditure was largely a notion of freedom as consumption (and consumption, as ritualized destruction), which is more about unveiling the hidden logic of capitalism, with its rationalized productive and expressive consumptive spheres, than a great truth about humanity. Mauss was making a more subtle argument, not unlike Antonio Gramsci’s around the same time. True, the bourgeoisie projects certain aspects of its own reality as a theory of human nature and society—life is a marketplace, we are all isolated individuals entering contractual relations —but this view is never stable, since it is constantly contradicted by our own daily experience, even by bourgeois experience. Socialist ideas once made intuitive sense, because we have all had the experience of communism.

The Manual of Ethnography makes clear that Mauss felt this was always the case. In any relatively large and complex system of human relations—as he puts it, “almost everywhere”— all major social possibilities are already present, simultaneously—at least in embryonic form. There will always be individualism and communism too; something like money and the calculation it makes possible, but also every sort of gift. The question then is which dominant institutions shape our basic perceptions of humanity. Thus aristocratic societies, like the Kwakiutl or the ancient Celts, are dominated by the heroic gift, with endless games of munificence, liberality and one-upmanship. Such games were limited to the elite, while ordinary people went about their daily affairs differently. But they represented a certain ideal, even a cosmological function: they became models of what human beings are basically about, their aims and aspirations, the means and stakes of human existence. The market plays the same role in capitalism. Mauss notes that such aristocratic values maintained their dominance in the ancient world, despite the development of commerce. But just as the latter made it possible to imagine human life in very different terms, so does the continued existence of communism and gift relations today allow us to reconfigure what human life is all about. It would take a political revolution, which was Mauss’ aim: as a revolutionary cooperativist, he wanted to encourage the development of new institutions based on these alternative economic practices to the point where they could displace capitalism (see Fournier 2006; Graeber 2001).

Fundamental categories of economic transaction

Mauss’ core insight was extraordinarily important. The idea of society as an often confused amalgam of often contradictory principles, each implying different conceptions of the meaning of life, not only provides a useful corrective to the totalizing tendencies of Marxism and Structuralism, but it is essential for imagining a way out of capitalism—as has been recognized by feminist thinkers like J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) and Italian post-Workerists like Massimo de Angelis (2007). We need to maintain the insight without falling into anachronism—as Mauss undeniably sometimes did. I wish to propose three fundamentally different moral logics lying behind phenomena that we class together as “the gift”. These exist everywhere in different forms and articulations, so that in any given situation there are several kinds of moral reasoning actors could apply. Unlike Levi-Strauss (1950), I claim that only one of these is based on the principle of reciprocity. I will call these logics communism, exchange, and hierarchy.

I: COMMUNISM

I define communism as any human relationship that operates on the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” I could have used a more neutral term like “solidarity,” “mutual aid,” “conviviality”, or even, “help” instead (Graeber 2010).

Prompted by Mauss, I suggest that we jettison the old-fashioned assumption that “communism” is basically about property relations, reflecting a time long ago when all things were held in common and the messianic possibility of restoring the community of property—what might be called “mythic communism”—but instead see it simply as a principle immanent in everyday life. Whenever action proceeds “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—even if it is between two people—we are in the presence of “everyday communism”. Almost everyone behaves this way when collaborating on a common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says “hand me the wrench”, their co-worker will not usually say “and what do I get for it?”, even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King or Royal Bank of Scotland. The reason is efficiency (ironic, given the conventional wisdom that “communism just doesn’t work”): if you want to get something done, allocating tasks by ability, and giving people what they need to do the job, is the most effective way to go about it. It’s one of the scandals of capitalism that most firms, internally, operate in a communistic way. True, they don’t operate democratically. Most often they are organized by military-style chains of command. But top-down chains of command are not very efficient (they tend to promote stupidity among those on top, resentment among those on the bottom.) When cooperation depends on improvisation, the more democratic it tends to become. Inventors have always known this, start-up capitalists also, and computer engineers have recently rediscovered the principle: not only with freeware, but even in the organization of their businesses.

This is why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, a revolution or economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a kind of rough-and-ready communism. Hierarchies, markets and the like become luxuries that no one can really afford them. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to the way strangers become sisters and brothers, and human society itself seems to be reborn. We are not just talking about cooperation. Communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It makes society possible. Anyone who is not an enemy can be expected to respect the principle of “from each according to their abilities…” at least to some extent: for example, if you need to figure out how to get somewhere, and they can give you directions, they will. We take this so much for granted that the exceptions are themselves revealing. Evans-Pritchard reports his discomfiture when someone gave him intentionally wrong directions:

On one occasion I asked the way to a certain place and was deliberately deceived. I returned in chagrin to camp and asked the people why they had told me the wrong way. One of them replied, ‘You are a foreigner, why should we tell you the right way? Even if a Nuer who was a stranger asked us the way we would say to him, “You continue straight along that path”, but we would not tell him that the path forked. Why should we tell him? But you are now a member of our camp and you are kind to our children, so we will tell you the right way in future’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940:182).

The Nuer are constantly engaged in feuds; any stranger might be an enemy scouting out a good place for an ambush: it would be unwise to give him useful information. Evans-Pritchard’s own situation was obviously relevant. The inhabitants of the first place he settled in followed a prophet recently killed by the British government who sent the RAF to strafe and bomb their camps. Their treatment of him seems quite generous.

Conversation is particularly suited to communism. Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of verbal aggression are important, but these somewhat exceptional. It is surely significant that, when we wish to break off amicable relations with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely. The same goes for small courtesies like asking for a light, or even a cigarette, or opening doors for strangers. It seems more legitimate to ask a stranger for a cigarette than for an equivalent amount in cash; in fact, it’s difficult to refuse a fellow-smoker such a request. The costs of compliance are considered minimal. The same is true if another person’s need—even a stranger’s—is spectacular and extreme: if they are drowning, for example. If a child has fallen onto the tracks, we assume that anyone who can help them up will do so.

I call this “baseline communism”: apart from enemies, when the need is great enough or the cost reasonable enough, the principle will be applied. Of course, communities have different standards for what is reasonable. In large impersonal communities, it may go no further than asking for a light or directions. This might not be much, but it contains the possibility of larger social relations. In smaller, less impersonal communities–particularly, when not divided into social classes—the same logic usually extends much further: for example, it is often difficult to refuse a request not just for tobacco, but for food—sometimes, even from a stranger; certainly, from anyone considered to belong to the same community. Evans-Pritchard also notes that these same Nuer find it impossible, when dealing with someone they have accepted as a member of their camp, to refuse a request for an item of common consumption, so that anyone known to have extra in the way of grain, tobacco, or for that matter agricultural implements, will see their stockpiles disappear almost immediately (ibid:183). But this baseline of open-handed sharing and generosity never extends to everything. Things freely shared are treated as unimportant. Cows are really important for the Nuer. No one would freely share their cattle; young men learn to defend cattle with their lives; and, for that reason, they were not bought or sold.

The obligation to share food and other basic necessities is intrinsic to everyday morality in egalitarian societies (those not divided into fundamentally different sorts of being). Audrey Richards described how Bemba mothers, “such lax disciplinarians in everything else,” scold their children harshly for not offering to share an orange or some other treat with their friends (1939: 197). But sharing is also a major source of life’s pleasures. The need to share is acute in the best and worst of times: during famines, but also in moments of plenty. Early accounts of native North Americans always include accounts of generosity, even to strangers, in times of famine.

The more elaborate a feast, the more likely one is to see free sharing of some things (like food and drink) and careful distribution of others: say, prize meat, whether from game or sacrifice, which is often parceled out according to elaborate protocols or by gift exchange. These often take on a game-like quality, along with the actual contests, pageants and performances that mark a popular festival. This shared conviviality could be seen as a kind of communistic base, on which everything else is built. Sharing is not just about morality—it’s also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but the most pleasurable activities usually involve sharing something: music, food, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.

In communistic relations taking accounts is considered morally offensive or just bizarre. Such relations are assumed to be eternal—or treated as such. Society will always exist. Most of us act as if our mothers will always exist (even if we know they won’t); hence the absurdity of calculating reciprocity in relations with them. Beyond baseline communism, certain people and institutions are always marked out as places of solidarity and mutual aid more than others: links with mothers, wives and husbands, lovers, one’s closest friends. These are the people with whom we share everything, or at least, to whom we know we can turn in need, the definition of a true friend everywhere. Such friendships may be formalized by ritual as “bond-friends” or “blood-brothers” who cannot refuse each other anything. Any community is criss-crossed with relations of “individualistic communism”, personal one-to-one relations that operate, to varying degree, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Graeber 2001; Mauss 2009 [1947]: 104-105)

This logic can be extended within groups, and not only cooperative work groups. Any in-group defines itself by creating its own sort of baseline communism, above and beyond what applies to others. One shares certain things or makes them freely available within the group: help repairing one’s nets in an association of fishermen, stationary supplies in an office, certain sorts of information among commodity traders, and so forth. Some categories of people we can always call on in certain situations, such as harvesting, moving house, building or repairing seafaring vessels. Finally, there is an infinite variety of “commons”, the collective administration of common resources (“the commons”). The sociology of everyday communism is an enormous field, but our ideological blinkers have led us not to see it at all.

Communism as a principle of morality, rather than as a property arrangement, comes into play in any transaction—even commerce. If one is on sociable terms with someone, it’s hard to ignore their situation. This is why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are rarely of the same ethnic group as their customers. The opposite is true as well. An anthropologist in rural Java tried to improve her bargaining skills at the local bazaar. It frustrated her that she could never get prices as low as local people. A Javanese friend explained, “They charge rich Javanese people more too.”

Unless the needs (dire poverty) or the abilities (wealth beyond imagination) are sufficiently dramatic or sociality is completely absent, communistic morality will always enter into how people take accounts. A medieval Turkish folktale about the Sufi mystic Nasruddin Hodja makes the point:

One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local tea-house, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast. “Do you have quail eggs?” asked the king. “I’m sure I can find some,” answered Nasruddin. The king ordered an omelet of a dozen quail eggs, and Nasruddin ran out to fetch them. After the king and his party had eaten, he charged them a hundred gold pieces. The king was puzzled. “Are quail eggs really that rare in this part of the country?” “It’s not so much quail eggs that are rare around here,” Nasruddin replied. “It’s visits from kings.”

II: EXCHANGE

Exchange is based on a fundamentally different sort of moral logic. It is all about equivalence. Each of two sides gives as good as it gets; people exchange words (in argument), blows, even gunfire. What is at stake is not an exact equivalence—even if there were some way to measure it—but a back-and-forth process tending towards equivalence. Each side tries to outdo the other, but it’s easier to break the thing off when both consider the outcome more or less even. A similar tension exists with the exchange of material goods. Often there is an element of competition; but both sides keep accounts, and, unlike communism with its notion of eternity, either party call an end to it and the whole thing is canceled out.

With barter or commercial exchange, where both parties to the transaction are only interested in the goods, they may well—as economists insist—try to get as much as they can out of the deal. But, as anthropologists have long pointed out, when we are dealing with the exchange of gifts, that is, exchanges where the objects passing back and forth reflect on and rearrange relations between people, competition is likely to work the other way around, as a contest of generosity, of people showing off who can give more away.

Commercial exchange is “impersonal” and the seller or buyer should be irrelevant. We are simply comparing the value of two objects; but there has to be minimal trust to carry out a transaction at all; and, unless one is dealing with a vending machine, that usually requires some outward display of sociality. Even in the most impersonal shopping mall or supermarket, clerks are expected at least to simulate personal warmth, patience and other reassuring qualities; in a Middle-Eastern bazaar, an elaborate ritual establishing sociality through a sort of baseline communism –sharing tea, food or tobacco—precedes elaborate haggling in a mock battle over prices. Buyer and seller are, for that moment, friends (and so entitled to feel indignant at the other’s unreasonable demands), but it’s just a piece of theater. Once the object changes hands, the two parties need never have anything to do with each other again.

Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. If communism could be imagined as a kind of permanent mutual debt, exchange gives us a way to call it even, hence, to end the relationship. With vendors, one is often just pretending to have a relationship at all. With neighbors, one might for this very reason prefer not to pay one’s debts. Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a rural Nigerian community; people immediately came bearing small gifts: “two ears of corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful of peanuts” (Bohannan 1964: 47) She thanked them and wrote down their names and what they had brought in a notebook. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that such gifts did have to be returned. It would be inappropriate to accept three eggs from a neighbor without bringing something back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money at a discrete interval, provided it was not the exact cost of the eggs. To bring back nothing at all was to be an exploiter or parasite. An exact equivalent would suggest that one wishes to end the relationship. Tiv women might walk miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change. By keeping up this constant excuse for visiting one another, a larger society is created. A trace of communism is involved here—neighbors on good terms could also be trusted to help each other in emergencies—but unlike communistic relations, which are assumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to be constantly created and maintained because a link can be broken off at any time.

There are endless variations on this tit-for-tat gift exchange. The most familiar is the exchange of presents: I buy someone a beer; they buy me the next one. Equivalence implies equality. If I take a friend out to a fancy restaurant for dinner, after a discrete interval, they do the same. The very existence of such customs—the feeling that one really ought to return the favor—can’t be explained by the principle of getting more for less in standard economic theory. But the feeling is real enough and can cause genuine strain for those of limited means trying to keep up appearances. So why, if I took a free-market economic theorist out for an expensive dinner, would he feel somewhat diminished—uncomfortably in my debt—until he could return the favor? Why might he even be inclined to take me to some place more expensive?

Recall the feasts and festivals above: here too there is shared conviviality and an element of (sometimes playful) competition. Everyone’s pleasure is enhanced—who would want to eat a superb meal in a French restaurant all by themselves? Yet things can easily slip into games of one-upmanship—and hence obsession, rage, humiliation– or worse. In some societies, these games are formalized, but they only develop between people or groups who perceive themselves to be equal in status. To return to our imaginary economist, if Bill Gates or George Soros took him out to dinner, he would likely conclude he had, indeed, received something for nothing, and leave it at that. If a junior colleague or eager graduate student tried to impress him by offering to take him out somewhere, he’d think he was doing them a favor just by accepting the invitation.

In exchange, then, the objects being exchanged are to some extent equivalent. By implication, so are the people, at least when gift is met with counter-gift or money changes hands and there is no further debt or obligation—each party is free to walk away. This implies autonomy and it sits uncomfortably with monarchs, who generally dislike any sort of exchange. But within that prospect of potential cancellation, of ultimate equivalence, we find endless variations of games we can play. One can demand something from another person, knowing full well that they have the right to demand something equivalent back. Sometimes, praising another’s possessions might be interpreted as a demand of this sort. In 18^th century New Zealand, English settlers soon learned that it was not a good idea to admire a beautiful jade pendant worn around the neck of a Maori warrior; the latter would insist on their taking it, not taking no for an answer, then, after a discrete interval, return to praise the settler’s coat or gun. The only way to head this off would be to give him a gift before he could ask for one. Sometimes gifts are offered to enable making such a demand: to accept the present is to tacitly agree to allow the giver to claim whatever he deems equivalent.

All this can shade into something like barter, directly swapping one thing for another. Actually, a fair amount of barter does go on, even within commercial economies; but in the absence of a formal market and the presence of what Mauss famously called “gift exchange”, people do not generally swap one thing directly for another unless they are dealing with strangers, with whom they have no interest in maintaining social relations. Within communities, there is usually a reluctance, as the Tiv example showed, to allow things to cancel out—hence, if money is in common usage, people often either refuse to use it with friends or relatives (which in a village society means pretty much everyone) or they use it in radically different ways.

III: HIERARCHY

Relations of explicit hierarchy—that is, between parties where one is socially superior—do not operate through reciprocity at all. They are often justified by an appeal to reciprocity (“the peasants provide the food, the lords provide protection…”), but they don’t in fact operate that way. Hierarchy works rather by a logic of precedent, which if anything is the opposite of reciprocity.

Imagine a continuum of one-sided social relations, ranging from the most exploitative to the most benevolent. At one extreme is theft or plunder; at the other, selfless charity. Material interactions between people who otherwise have no social relationship occur at these extremes. Only a lunatic would mug his next-door neighbor. Similarly, religious traditions often insist that the only true charity is anonymous, in other words, not meant to place the recipient in one’s debt. An example of this is to give gifts by stealth, in a kind of reverse burglary: to literally sneak into the recipient’s house at night and plant one’s present so they can never know for sure who left it.

Observe what happens between these extremes. In Belarus, gangs prey so systematically on travelers that they have the habit of giving their victims tokens, to confirm that they have already been robbed. One popular theory of the origin of states runs along similar lines. Certainly there have been times and places when conquest, untrammeled force, becomes systematized and framed not as a predatory but as a moral relation. Perhaps the justification is that the lords provide protection and the villagers provide their sustenance. But even if all parties assume they are operating by a shared moral code, where lords or even kings must operate within limits and peasants can argue about how much of the harvest the lord’s retainers are entitled to carry off, they are unlikely to calculate the quality or quantity of protection said lord has recently provided. More likely they will argue in terms of custom and precedent: how much we paid last year, how much our ancestors had to pay. The same is true on the other side. If charitable donations are the basis for some sort of minimal social relation, it will not be based on reciprocity. If you give some coins to a panhandler and he recognizes you later, it will not be to return an equivalent—he is more likely to expect a similar donation. Certainly this is true if one donates money to a charitable organization. Such acts of one-sided generosity are treated as a precedent for what one might expect in future. It’s the same if one gives candy to a child.

The logic of hierarchy, then, is the opposite of reciprocity. Whenever the lines of superiority and inferiority are clearly drawn and accepted by all parties and relations involve more than arbitrary force, they will be regulated by a web of habit or custom. Sometimes the situation originated in a founding act of conquest. Or it might be seen as an ancestral custom for which there is no need of explanation. Xenophon claims that in the early days of the Persian Empire each province vied to send the Great King gifts of unique and valuable products of their country. This became the basis of a tribute system, since they were soon expected to provide the same “gifts” every year (Xenophon Cyropedia VIII.6; see Briant 2006:193-194, 394-404). In other words, any gift to a feudal superior was likely to be treated as a precedent, added to the web of custom and as such expected to be repeated each year in perpetuity. While it is unusual for matters to become quite so formalized, any unequal social relation may begin to operate on an analogous logic—if only because, once relations are based on “custom”, the only way to demonstrate a duty or obligation to do something is to show that it has been done before.

The formula goes: an action, repeated, becomes customary; it then comes to define the actor’s identity, their essential nature. It might reflect how others have acted in the past. An aristocrat insists on being treated as one, as in the past. The art of being such a person consists in treating oneself as you expect others to treat you: a kings covers himself with gold so that others will do likewise. At the other end of the scale, this is how abuse becomes self-legitimating. In the US, if a middle-class 13-year-old girl is kidnapped, raped, and killed, this is considered a major national news story, a moral crisis for everyone with a television set. A girl of lower class who gets the same treatment is considered unremarkable, no more than one might expect.

When the parties belong to different classes, different, incommensurable sorts of things are given on either side. An apparent exception is hierarchical redistribution. One can often judge how egalitarian a society is by whether those in positions of authority are just conduits for redistribution or they can accumulate riches in their own right, as happens in aristocratic societies based on war and plunder. Anyone who comes into a very large amount of wealth will end up giving a portion of it away—often in quite grandiose and spectacular ways and to large numbers of people. The more one’s wealth is obtained by plunder or extortion, the more spectacular and self-aggrandizing the forms in which it’s given away. And what applies to warrior aristocracies is all the more true of ancient states, where rulers invariably represented themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of widows and orphans, and champions of the poor. The genealogy of the modern redistributive state—with its notorious proclivity for identity politics—can be traced back not to “primitive communism”, but ultimately to violence and war.

IV: SHIFTING MODALITIES AND THE HEROIC GIFT

These principles always coexist. It is hard to imagine a society where people were not communists with their closest friends and feudal lords when dealing with small children. If we ordinarily move back and forth between different modes of moral accounting, why have we failed to notice this? Perhaps it is because when we think of “society” in the abstract, and particularly when we try to justify social institutions, we ultimately fall back on a rhetoric of reciprocity. Medieval society might have operated through different, largely hierarchical principles, but when clerics spoke of it in the abstract, they would reduce its ranks and orders to one simple tripartite formula for each contributing equally to all the others. “Some pray, some fight, still others work.” Anthropologists likewise duly report that “this is how we repay our mothers for the pain of having raised us” or puzzle over conceptual diagrams of kinship that never correspond to what real people actually do. When trying to imagine a just society, it’s hard not to evoke images of balance and symmetry, of elegant geometries where everything cancels out. “The market” is, ultimately, a similar animal: a purely imaginary, abstract totality where all accounts ultimately balance out.

In practice, the principles slip into each other. Hierarchical relations often include limited communistic elements (think of patronage); likewise, when “abilities” and “needs” prove disproportionate, communistic relations can easily slip into relations of inequality. Genuinely egalitarian societies invariably develop safeguards against anyone—say, good hunters in a hunting society—rising too far above themselves; just as they are suspicious of anything that might make one member a serious debtor to another. Those who draw attention to their own accomplishments are the object of mockery. Often the polite thing to do is to make fun of oneself. Peter Freuchen, who lived with Inuit in Greenland, described how the quality of a delicacy offered to guests was indicated by how much they belittled it. When a successful hunter gave him a large quantity of walrus meat, he found that you should never thank someone for food:

Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs (Freuchen 1961: 154).

Gift here is not something given freely, as any human would do for another, when someone has food and another needs it. Rather, to thank someone suggests they might not have acted that way, thereby conferring an obligation, a sense of debt—and hence, superiority. Egalitarian collectives or political organizations in America have to come up with their own safeguards against creeping hierarchy when faced with similar dilemmas. Communism does not slip inevitably into hierarchy —the Inuit have managed to fend it off for thousands of years. But one must always guard against it.

In contrast, it’s notoriously difficult to shift relations based on communistic sharing to relations of equal exchange. We observe this all the time with friends: if someone takes advantage of your generosity, it’s often easier to break off relations than to demand they pay you back. This too is a common dilemma. The Maori tell of a notorious glutton who irritated fishermen along the coast by always asking for the best portions of their catch. Since to refuse a direct request for food was impossible, they would hand it over; until one day enough was enough, people formed a war party, ambushed and killed him (Firth 1959 [1929]:411-412).

Creating a ground of sociability among former strangers—what I’ve called baseline communism—can often require testing the others’ limits. In Madagascar, when two merchants who form a pact of blood brotherhood, both parties swear they will never refuse any request from the other. In practice people are circumspect with their requests. But at first, they like to test it out. One may demand the other’s house, the shirt off his back, or (everyone’s favorite example) the right to spend the night with their new partner’s wife. The only limit is that demands should be reciprocal. This is just a phase leading to the establishment of trust.

The heroic gift, in contrast, occurs when relations of exchange threaten to break down into hierarchy, as when two parties act like equals, trading gifts or blows or commodities, but someone does something that completely flips the scale. Such “fighting with property” is typical of aristocratic warrior societies and is marked by ritualized boasting and vainglory (these heroes talk themselves up just as much as hunters talk themselves down), and one must not take such statements literally as Mauss (1990 [1924]:42) did, when he concluded that the losers in a Kwakiutl potlatch might really be reduced to slaves). The consequences could be real enough. Mauss (1925) cites Posidonius’ account of Celtic festivals where nobles unable to return a magnificent gift committed suicide, and William Miller (1993:15-16) provides another from the Eddas, where a Viking, not wishing to compose a poem celebrating a friend’s generosity after he left him an incomparable treasure, tried to track his friend down and kill him.

The very complexity in gifts—which so often form the nexus where different moral orders intersect, shade into one another, and shift back and forth— has allowed them to become such an endlessly rich subject for philosophical reflection; yet to insist on treating gifts as a unitary category has stood in the way of understanding what these moral principles actually are.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges

1991-1993 The Accursed Share Volumes I-III. New York: Zone Books.

Bohannan, Laura

1964 Return to Laughter, An Anthropological Novel. (As “Elenore Bowen Smith”). New York: Praeger.

Briant, Paul

2006 From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. New York: Eisenbrauns.

De Angelis, Massimo

2007 The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward

1940 The Nuer. London: Oxford University Press.

Firth, Raymond

1959 [1929] Economics of the New Zealand Maori. Wellington, New Zealand: R. E. Owen.

Fournier, Marcel

2006 [1994] Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Freuchen, Peter

1961 Book of the Eskimo. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co.

Gibson-Graham, J. K.

1996 The End of Capitalism (as we knew it). Oxford: Blackwell

2006 A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Graeber, David

2001 Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2010 “Communism” in K. Hart, J-L. Laville and A. Cattani editors The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity, pp.199-210.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

1950 “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Mauss.” In Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. i-iii.

Mauss, Marcel

1990 [1924] The Gift: Form and reason of exchange in archaic societies. New York: Routledge.

1925 “Commentaires sur un texte de Posidonius. Le suicide, contre-prestation supreme.” Revue celtique 42: 324-9.

2009 [1947] Manual of Ethnography (N. Allen editor). Oxford: Berghahn.

Miller, William

1993 Humiliation: And other essays on honor, social discomfort, and violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Richards, Audrey

1939 Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia. London: Oxford University Press.

This paper was published in French in Revue du MAUSS Semestrielle No 36 (October 2010), ‘Mauss vivant — The Living Mauss’, 51-70. An online version of this issue containing 42 articles (a number of them in English) originally produced for a 2009 conference at Cerisy-la-Salle, may be purchased for 29 euros.

Reader in Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Debt: The first 5,000 years (Melville House, New York, 2011).

An Extreme Reading of Facebook

Daniel Miller
University College London

© 2010 Daniel Miller

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

I welcome the development of internet forums such as the Open Anthropology Cooperative and Medianth. One question they raise is what we might use such public sites for as opposed to more conventional publications. I guess one answer I have seen is draft papers. Another, which I will explore here, is for taking arguments beyond those likely to be accepted for publication in more conventional media. In this instance I am going to take an actual publication and extract three of its component arguments. I will then take them a bit beyond the form they are given in that publication, simply because I didn’t think more extreme readings would be acceptable, and also because, despite being a self-proclaimed extremist I am not at all sure if I even agree with them. But like any academic I see an intellectual merit in pursuing such logics, and I would hope that they also suit these public forums as a means for provoking debate.

The publication these excerpts are taken from is called Tales from Facebook (Polity April 2011). As it happens, it is a rather unconventional publication in its own right. It consists of twelve portraits of individual Trindidadians written in a similar style to a previous book of mine The Comfort of Things, and uses these to consider the impact of Facebook on these individuals, although each also thereby also seeks to make some academic point. These are followed by three short essays. One takes the question of how Trinidadian Facebook is; the second looks at 15 tentative theses about Facebook more generally; and the third, which is summarised in this paper, develops an extended analogy between Kula and Facebook in order to construct an anthropological theory of the latter.

The three propositions I propose to push to more extreme lengths here are as follows:

1) That Facebook radically transforms the premise and direction of social science.

2) That Facebook is a medium for developing a relationship to god.

3) That Facebook, like Kula, is an ideal foundation for a theory of culture mainly because Facebook and Kula are practically the same thing.

I am optimistic that academics will find grounds for disagreement with these three assertions.

Proposition one – Facebook radically transforms the premise and direction of social science.

SNS (Social Network Sites) are already a major global phenomenon. While some of the initial sites such as Cyworld in South Korea have largely remained regional, Facebook is approaching 500 million users spread right across the world. Where Facebook is banned in China, QQ is used on an average day by 111 million people. Other major populations such as Brazil are dominated by alternative social networking sites such as Orkut, though shifts can be rapid as, for example, currently in South East Asia with the migration in the last year from Friendster to Facebook. Other sites with different functionality such as Twitter and Foursquare are also emerging as potentially highly significant.

The starting point for this proposition is that such developments fly in the face of the central tenets of social science. Foundational to Western social science has been the belief that human societies exhibit a slow but constant trajectory away from what are taken to be an earlier state in which people lived in communities, based around close kinship ties and devotion to immediate social relationships. Whether starting from the writings of Tonnies, Durkheim or Simmel, social scientists have assumed that under such conditions we do not study people just as individuals, but rather each person can be understood as a site of social networking. This became the premise for the development of anthropology. With its emphasis on kinship, any given person was seen primarily through their place in such a network, for example the category of being someone else’s `mother’s brother’. So, long before Facebook, networking acted as a kind of shorthand for the way social science understood small-scale and traditional societies.

In contrast to anthropology, sociology was principally concerned with the consequences of an assumed decline from this condition as a result of industrialisation, capitalism and urbanism. Still today many of the most influential books in sociology such as Putnam’s Bowling Alone or Sennett’s Fall of Public Man, along with works by Giddens, Beck and Bauman remain clearly within this dominant trajectory. In all such work there is an assumption that older forms of tight social networking colloquially characterised by words such as community or neighbourhood are increasingly replaced by the dominance of individuals and individualism. My own recent book The Comfort of Things based on a single street in London gave strong confirmation to such arguments, since households proved to be largely detached from those who lived nearby and often from all other forms of community or wider social groupings.

How then should social science respond to an extraordinary phenomenon that has arisen within the last decade and most especially during the six years when Facebook has been in existence? When the internet first developed similar claims were made about its revolutionary impact on social science theory. Research by myself and Don Slater was among the first to show that that while the internet may be hugely important in other ways the evidence for this `reversal’ in macro social change towards individualism was very limited. At that time we were keen to pour cold water on any such speculation that the internet somehow flew in the face of conventional social science. We pointed out that just because one could find extensive material on the internet that claimed to represent some sort of community was no evidence in itself. In fact many people ended up putting such materials on the internet precisely because these had been dismissed by all other media and no one took them seriously. A place on the internet could be evidence for how insignificant something was rather than the reverse. Others such as John Postill provide many good reasons for being careful with regard to any glib use of the term community in this regard and Steve Woolgar devoted a whole research project to a sceptical perspective on these early claims.

However in 2009-10 I carried out research in Trinidad which revealed a very different situation. This is the first work to document what happens when social networking matures into a facility increasingly popular with older people and in countries other than the US. The initial literature on social networking sites (from Boyd & Ellison 2007 through to Kirkpatrick 2010) was based on a period when these seemed to be the plaything of college students (especially in the US), for whom Facebook was invented.

My Trinidad research represents a more mature phase in the development of Facebook. It is based on more than a year participating with many Trinidadians on Facebook itself, supplemented by two months there discussing Facebook face-to-face with those same participants, including over fifty more formal interviews, most of them carried out with Mirca Madianou, since they overlapped with another research project we are conducting jointly on the impact of new media on transnational communication, with case studies of Filipino domestic workers as well as Trinidadians.

The research in Trinidad demonstrates that there really is a case for saying that SNS reverse certain key trends presumed by most of social science. What had become regarded as the natural attrition of relationships is reversed. Previously we tended to lose touch with groups we once knew well who become replaced by new sets of friends. But almost inevitably the first action in using Facebook seems to be the resurrection of all lost relationships, for example, with ex-school friends or relatives who have migrated. Many of the participants in our study used these networks for several hours a day in order to resurrect what might be seen as a more traditional devotion to close social relationships that do come close to classical ideas of community.

Once this issue arose from the fieldwork, I decided deliberately to target research on people who still live in small villages and hamlets and who are well aware of the nature and character of such communities. It seemed right to let such people comment on the degree to which Facebook was or was not analogous to their own experience of living in a community and in other social networks such as kinship ties.

So let me summarise a portrait of someone who exemplifies this aspect of the research in the book:-

Alana is a college student who lives in a kind of settlement that has become quite rare in contemporary Trinidad. Modern Trinidad is a pretty mobile place and one meets relatively few people of any age who live where they were born. Her hamlet, Santa Ana, is quite small. There are around twenty-five houses straddling a ridge in the foothills of the mountains that form a spine pointing north. These houses, with only two exceptions, represent the descendants of the same three or four core families. So by now pretty much everyone in the village is related to everyone else. When it comes to any kind of significant event, such as a wedding or a wake, any remaining lack of relationship is ignored. For all intents and purposes this village is a family writ large. It also has those other hallmarks of community, for example Alana’s family have a running feud with their neighbour that has gone on for years. Every time a pause arises that might lead to a rapprochement, it gets extended by disputes about where children shouldn’t be playing or when dogs shouldn’t be barking.

Alana has two main times when she is involved in Facebook. She was originally persuaded to go on Facebook by a score of younger cousins who like to play the game FarmVille. She admits that this can add up to something like two hours a day of online labour. But the consequence is a thriving online cousinhood that is effective in developing her extended family relations. In order to detach from the family she goes to sleep around 8 pm. She then gets up at midnight and from then to 3 am she is on Facebook with most of her college class. Almost all of them have adopted the same diurnal rhythm. Alana reckons that only about 20% of the subsequent conversation is purely discussion of homework and joint projects.

Amongst my various conversations with Alana, one centres on this question of an analogy with community. What was it like growing up in and continuing to live in Santa Ana? As a student at university she is used to thinking abstractly about such comparisons and concepts. Nor does she have the slightest difficulty appreciating the meaning of community. In her mind there is a clear analogy but in various respects Facebook is not a patch on the real thing. However much one blames Facebook for malicious or ill-informed gossip, Alana feels it doesn’t even begin to approach what happens routinely in a small place like Santa Ana. She tells of how, in a community like this, people would look at or the youths in the village, at how their friend’s children are growing up,. They wouldn’t take time to get to know them, they would just sit and talk about whether a child is neglected or a youth is into drugs. She says `Yeh, it’s much much worse. I think people still have some level of respect on Facebook, well at least the people that I socialize with. They wouldn’t blatantly put something very offensive. We recently had a stranger that came in. I think he dating a girl out the road and she girl, she pretty young. And she and a guy in the village always had an exchange of words. Like throw talk for one another and stuff like that. So he was passing and something she said and her boyfriend get up and try swing a blade at him. And he hold it and pull it away from his hand. All his ligaments and everything gone. He came out of the hospital about three days ago. His right hand, he can’t do anything right now. He have strings and stuff on his hand trying to get it back… yeah terrible’.

The point can also work in the other direction. People congregate online and help each other with homework. But that doesn’t represent the kind of commitment people make to each other in the village. Santa Ana is a place where you can spend the whole day cooking something up for a neighbour who is hosting some communal occasion. There had just recently been a wake that is celebrated on the first year’s anniversary of a death, with food cooked by many neighbours and the community playing cards into the night. In a village such as this, whatever the internal quarrels, there is still the foundation for deep and sustained solidarity in relation to an external threat. When someone is ill or in crisis, you know instinctively what being in a community means, the responsibilities it gives you and the hold it has on you.

When judging the nature of Facebook as a community Alana is clear that it can only be assessed relative to offline community. She regards her situation, living in Santa Ana, as exceptional in contemporary Trinidad. When you are living in a place like that, the community is incredibly intense and her use of Facebook, however sociable, is a means to give herself some sort of break from that intensity. If people in Santa Ana turn to Facebook as a kind of milder version of community, it is to achieve some sort of distance, because the reality of living within such a close-knit community is simply too intense and invasive.

She contrasts her experience with that of a friend who lives in a much more typical settlement within Trinidad, near Tunapuna: ‘it’s more of a small town and you don’t really see people going by each other. But she will keep in contact via Facebook’. For her friend there simply isn’t enough actual community. She is frustrated at how little she knows or interacts with the people who live close to her. So her experience of Facebook does the opposite. It helps create a bit more social intensity in a situation where people have an insufficiency of direct communication and contact with each other. So Alana concludes that Facebook is used to balance out the degree of offline community.

Facebook has all the contradictions found in a community. You simply can’t have both closeness and privacy. You can’t have support without claustrophobia. You can’t have such a degree of friendship without the risk of explosive quarrelling. Either everything is more socially intense or none of it is. This is one of the ironies of the huge emphasis on the loss of privacy that we find in journalist’s accounts. It’s the same public discourse that goes on and on about how we have lost neighbourhood and community and everyone is so individualistic and lonely. Well if you really do want to have more community and less isolated individualism then that means trading privacy. But popular discourse wants it both ways, they want a community that is totally private and anthropologists should be pointing out this kind of contradiction.

So the most important thing Facebook provides is a means to complement the offline version of community and to live with those same contradictions.

I found Alana’s account the most plausible I have come across and the one that accords best with the findings of my research. I don’t have the space here to examine in as much detail the relationship of Facebook to other aspects of close social relations such as kinship, but my conclusions there are similar. What this means is that the best way to understand Facebook is in relation to anthropological studies of close-knit and intense society, not as part of sociology’s encounter with contemporary individualism and the kind of networking envisaged by Castells. Facebook seems like the end of what previously was the natural attrition of social networks. It brings all those who were once disregarded back into the frame of current regard, such as lost kin and school friends. Equally important is the ability of Facebook to bring back Diaspora populations and ameliorate the effect of their residence in different countries.

Facebook is six years old, but if it continues on its currently trajectory and a billion people use it for several hours a day mainly for actual social networking, with the resultant intensification of those social networks, then we will see a kind of shift from sociology to anthropology that we never dared expect. This is perhaps the most profound challenge to the basic presuppositions of social science for a century.

Proposition two – Facebook is a medium for developing a relationship to god

I have always been fascinated by the Akheda, the section in the bible where Abraham offers to sacrifice his son Isaac to god. This is when a covenant is established and we see thereby the effective institutionalisation of that monotheism that develops unto Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For theologians such as Levinas, the key moment within the Akheda is when Abraham says the word ‘Here I Am’. By standing before god, he establishes humanity in the moral gaze of the divine. From a secular perspective one could turn this around and argue that this is equally the moment which establishes the divine as the projected vantage from which humanity sees itself as being seen. It is culmination of a journey a `going forth’ (lek lek’ha) that Abraham makes from the first mythic portion of the bible which has much in common with Sumerian myths such as Noah and the Flood to the main `historical’ narrative which leads to this monotheistic trajectory.

If this is viewed, however, only as a movement from myth to history it raises the question of whether Abraham should be regarded as some kind of freakish or unique episode based on the specific latent propensity of this individual patriarch to search out such a relationship to the divine as witness and thus moral encompassment of humanity, which leads in turn to the religious conceptualisations of these three monotheistic religions and eventually to further ethical and political orders of a secular kind. Or should the story of Abraham be seen as neither myth nor history, but rather as a pointed to some broader latent propensity towards a vision of moral humanity with analogies that make it a characteristic of being human? In which case this same `going forth’ or journey towards the conditions of the Akheda is something we might expect of people generally, including those who may be polytheistic of atheist in their beleifs, in which case it could be equally prevalent in the secular conditions of the contemporary world?

When investigating Facebook, the first step is to take it at `face-value’ simply an effective means of communication to multiple audiences, that helps people keep in touch, post photos and everything else that makes up a simple description of what Facebook appears to be and do. But after a while it becomes clear that there is a sort of surplus communicative economy to Facebook, in that people seem to do all sorts of things with it, and think of it in various ways that are hard to reduce either to some kind of communicative instrumentalism or indeed to any other kind of instrumentalism.

When I first started to try and understand this surplus communicative economy, I came up with the question of whether Facebook should be considered some kind of meta-friend. What if, instead of seeing Facebook as a means to facilitate friendships between people, many of us use friendships between people in order to facilitate a relationship to Facebook itself? I had this fantasy that what most people should really be typing under the title of relationship status was: Married to Facebook lol? A common trope in modern discourse is that we feel we live in an era of materialism or fetishism, such that proper relationships between people are being replaced by relationships to things instead. This is a rather simplistic rendition of our world. As I have argued many times with regard to Mauss’s The Gift, an anthropological sensibility is surely very different from a colloquial one. We have never regarded culture as a medium constructed to facilitate friendships between persons. On the contrary, relationships and exchange between persons, for example kin relations, are usually seen as a means to grow culture, for example through exchange. So for anthropologists, a relationship to Facebook as a thing is not axiomatically morally inferior to a relationship with a person. We do not resort to such simple judgments; we try to understand these cultural processes.

Given that Facebook is a social network, perhaps the simplest idiom for conceiving of this relationship to Facebook itself is to think of it as a sort of meta-best-friend. In the popular culture of TV, on programmes such as Sex and the City, a best friend is the person we can turn to when we are feeling lonely, depressed or bored, when life seems to have less purpose than usual. Our best friend is the one who is least likely to mind being disturbed when having a meal, or wanting to go to sleep, because they sense our deep need to engage in long gossipy discussions about ourselves or others, just to make us feel better. One advantage of Facebook is that it is a totally reliable best friend. Even at 3 a.m., when not even our best best-friend wants to be disturbed, we can turn to Facebook and feel connected with all those other lives, and come out of it less lonely and bored. Though, of course, we may also end up being more depressed or jealous because of the revelations about all those very active other people who don’t seem lonely and bored. But this can happen after face-to-face chats with actual best friends also. There are people who see themselves as irredeemably unattractive and shunned by those who, in public, don’t want to be associated with them. Fieldwork suggested to me that this was not uncommon, especially for school-age children. Such people often find Facebook a lot more forgiving and benign. You can’t say that the photos on someone else’s Facebook site were posted specifically for you to see, but also you can’t say they weren’t. Once there, they are part of your social life.

Journalism is already full of extreme stories about Facebook’s negative impacts. It is held responsible for people becoming jealous and murdering their lover, or for paedophilic grooming. To a lesser extent there are also positive stories about how Facebook stopped someone from committing suicide and helps those who are depressed. With 500 million users, we can be pretty sure that most stories and anecdotes about what Facebook might be capable of doing are true, however extreme. But that is a good reason to replace journalism and anecdote with more systematic research, which can demonstrate that such instances may be so exceptional as to be largely inconsequential, except for the people directly involved in those cases. It is not necessary to suggest that Facebook as a meta-best-friend necessarily cures depression or prevents suicide. We can still recognise that it is plausible, for a number of people, that it does act to complement offline friendships and to become significant as a friend in its own right.

Facebook is somewhere we can talk as much as we like, with or without responses from others. It is a site that genuinely addresses the perennial problem of boredom, especially teenage boredom, without necessarily imposing on the time of others. It has its limits; it doesn’t get drunk when we do. It doesn’t always comment back when we want it to. You can only ‘sort of’ have sex with it. But at a meta-level it may serve a purpose. Some of the most poignant examples we found were of a person who posted constantly about a baby that was born prematurely and another who posted about a parent afflicted with a terminal illness. We observed that these individuals seemed not too concerned whether or not the responses they received were from people they knew well. Facebook allowed the public sharing of suffering. It was a ‘witness’ to suffering that might be cathartic in its own right. The fact that Facebook is made up of actual people may give it unprecedented power and plausibility to act like a meta-person in this way. The downside to this relationship would be its potential to become so extreme that it does become appropriate to talk of fetishism or indeed pathology. One of the stories in Tales from Facebook is about a man who feels his partner’s addiction to Facebook has become pretty much on a par with heroin addiction; at least it became fatal to their relationship. There was no evidence that this sort of thing was common, but I believe that some sort of best-friend like relationship with Facebook is.

This is a work of anthropology rather than psychology, but it is worth at least speculating about Facebook’s role in facilitating the fantasy worlds of individuals. Imagine a novel in which two work colleagues have barely exchanged more than a few sentences, an occasional comment on what the other is wearing, but little more. Yet one of them dissects each word actually spoken, each glance, in copious detail. The man thereby convinces himself that he is now completely in love and in thrall to this work colleague and would surely leave his wife for her if only he didn’t have children. He knows exactly which Greek island will be the site of their passionate tryst. A little molehill of conversation becomes the mountain that moves Tristan and Isolde. My evidence for the impact of Facebook in this regard is very limited. But it seems likely that people’s increased ability to observe and follow another person passively gives even more licence to their internal fantasy world, where they can imagine whatever they might choose to happen between them. It is therefore possible that one of the most significant impacts of Facebook will be on internal worlds of fantasy and imagination, where many people spend much of their time.

One of the first discussions of the internet’s impact that looked more deeply into its possible consequences was The Second Self by Sherry Turkle. But much of her discussion concerned the implications of being anonymous and how people could appear to be someone quite different from their offline selves when online. Although she doesn’t make explicit use of his work, her discussion leads back to Erving Goffman, the author of the most rewarding of all social science writings about the self. Yet Facebook points us in the opposite direction to this concern with anonymity, indicating rather an end to anonymity. This alone should give pause for thought to anyone who thinks such digital technologies lay down a consistent path in any given direction. In either case, such debates release us from any simple or colloquial assumption that there is evidently a more true or less true self, or that these correspond to the distinction between online and offline selves. What Goffman and Turkle reveal is that all versions of the self are to some degree performative and based on frames of expectation. We play a variety of roles in life with degrees of attachment and distance.

To determine whether or how far Facebook itself makes a difference to the nature of the self or self-consciousness is extremely difficult. For example, one could argue that the sheer number of photographs a person posts online must create a new self-consciousness about their appearance. As someone commented, ‘I think for teenagers Facebook is just dangerous, and seeing everybody’s photos makes you so superficial. It’s like constantly looking in a mirror and seeing yourself reflected. But through other people’s eyes. So you have everybody’s opinions coming down on you, because everyone will comment on your photos. “And, oh I love your top” or this and that and you never know, it’s just constant. So I don’t think it’s healthy for teenagers at all or anybody who has insecurities’. There were many versions of this idea that Facebook makes us more concerned with appearances and thus more superficial. But often such arguments work by contrasting the concrete present with a mythical, more authentic past. I was conducting fieldwork in Trinidad long before the invention of the internet, and at times I would spend hours with young women who were getting changed to go out for an evening. They would try on seven different outfits to get the right image. It’s hard to imagine they could be any more self-conscious about their public appearance now than they were then. At that time I argued that, in an egalitarian society such as Trinidad, the concept of the self depended less on some interior being or institutionalized position or role. The self is a more transient creation, largely formed from other people’s responses to your appearance, which alone tells you who you are. So if the truth of who you are exists largely in other peoples responses to how you look, it is not that unreasonable to be obsessed about your public appearance.

Lets move this from an issue of psychology to one of anthropology. The idea that making visible relationships is far more than just a representation of those relationships has become widely accepted in anthropology largely through the writings of Marilyn Strathern. In her work a person is constituted by a network of relationships which are not just made manifest, but come to exist through becoming apparent. So in The Gender of The Gift the birth of a child was significant in particular because it objectified the relationships that are made evident through the existence of that child. Obviously having a child is what makes people related as parents.

Scroll on a few years and it looks as though Strathern was not merely a theorist but a rather prescient prophet. Since today, when so many of us regularly use social networking sites, it seems almost common sense to see an individual on our computer screen as constituted by their network of relationships and to regard social networks as a medium of objectification that makes these not only visible, but also constitutive. A student increasingly discovers who they are by going online and checking to see in what regard they are held by how many people and how they have engaged with them and each other. Social networks also seem to generate their own compulsion to visibility. Just as people don’t feel they were not actually on holiday unless they can see photographs of themselves enjoying that holiday, so today some people don’t feel they have experienced an event unless they have broadcast it through Facebook or Twitter. It is as though we have all read Strathern and want to transform our lives to accord better with her understanding of the nature of social networks.

This idea that making a relationship visible also creates that relationship can extend to the self. Facebook is a place where you discover who you are by seeing a visible objectification of yourself. Central to Trinidadian cosmology, as found in Carnival, is the belief that a mask or outward appearance is not a disguise. As something you have crafted or chosen and not merely been born with, the mask is a better indication of the actual person than your unmasked face. This is why one of my informants states that the true person is the one you meet on Facebook, not the person you meet face-to-face. It follows that the truth about yourself is revealed to you by what you post on Facebook. On Facebook you find out who you are.

I believe, however, that there is a final stage in accounting for this surplus economy of communication that is Facebook. What becomes clear from studying Facebook after a while is that, whatever the reason why we first friended them, most people are well aware that there are two main layers to their network. There is the active layer they respond to and who respond to them and the inactive layer of hundreds of others who have come to represent a generic other consisting of the anyone or everyone. We may not actively engage with them, but we are well aware that they are there and the question remains what their role is in relation to our personal postings.

The idea of witnessing comes in dozens of different philosophical and theological guises. In the next section I turn to Nancy Munn on Kula; she makes considerable use of just such a concept of witnessing which she derives from Jean-Paul Sartre. There are powerful religious undercurrents to the idea that everything we do is seen, or should be seen, by another, perhaps divine force. A common trope in the various forms of Christianity found in Trinidad is the idea of an all-witnessing God from whom nothing is or should be hidden. An increasing proportion of Trinidadians follow various kinds of Pentecostal and Apostolic churches where concepts of witnessing are central. But even without any religious beliefs, there are plenty of secular equivalents. Consider, for example, Freud’s concept of the superego, the introjected image of one’s own parents, who see everything and again become the foundation for our moral evaluations.

This is what leads me back to my starting point when considering the Akheda and to Levinas’ proposition that we are constituted as moral agents only in relation to this third observing other, which corresponds to the divine before whom Abraham can proclaim `Here I am’. It is manifested as the belief that there is a witness out there that is often the driving force behind moral action.

In Trinidad it is clear that people are increasingly aware that Facebook postings are also a form by which one sets oneself up for moral adjudication. It may be intentional presentations of ones best face or the fact that one inevitably ends up being posted while drunk and disorderly and often with the wrong partner, all of which shows why Facebook corresponds readily with a Trinidadian concept of truth. So here perhaps we reach the logical end of the search for an explanation of the surplus economy of Facebook.

These reflections imply a sort of necessity that people may feel with regard to ensuring there is a higher and wider scrutiny of their personal exchanges and self-presentations. That is, people may want an assurance that there is some higher moral evaluation and they use Facebook to ensure that it exists. In which case, what Facebook provides is not only some particular friends who may comment on you nor even just a meta-best-friend. We have reached the point where Facebook may be regarded as providing a crucial medium of visibility and public witnessing. It gives us a moral encompassment within which we have a sense not only of who we are but of who we ought to be. Facebook is normative not just in the sense of a consensual netiquette, but also as a force for witnessing the moral order of the self. Not for all people and not necessarily. But without some kind of explanation of this ilk, it is hard to account for what often appears as a compulsion to place things under a generic public gaze rather than to post them to any particular person. Such an argument would render Facebook anything but superficial. It may be, for some, their equivalent to the presence of the divine as witness in their lives. In which case perhaps the Akheda really is a story about the latent propensity of humanity with regard to something we have in the past generally regarded as divine.

Proposition three:- Facebook, like Kula is an ideal foundation for a theory of culture, mainly because Facebook and Kula are practically the same thing.

As I have made clear in several previous publications, my all-time favourite ethnography is The Fame of Gawa by Nancy Munn, a book that seems to me the culmination of Malinowski’s project. Social scientists are not natural scientists, but I want to suggest that, if we imagine The Fame of Gawa as a theorem, than Facebook would be its proof. Kula has become the ur-example of culture for anthropology. We might spend the day like animals obtaining and consuming food, mate, protect our young till they are old enough to survive for themselves and then die. By contrast, human societies such as the people of Gawa create vast arrays of custom and expectation, rituals based on spirits of good and evil, arts and artefacts, etiquettes of behaviour, all of which make for a vastly more elaborate world. This wealth of culture rests on fundamental values by which people are expected to live and are judged. In turn these values create goals in life that make it rich and complex. Not only that, thanks to the Kula ring, the cultural universe of Gawa in turn gives rise to the excitement and challenge of Malinowski’s Argonauts within a still more expansive universe, where those who negotiate transactions with other islands make even wider possibilities and accomplishments beyond the shores of Gawa itself. The Fame of Gawa is so called because it rests on a series of sanctions and exhortations designed to create, maintain and increase these values. If there were not a great world out there in which we can do deeds and become known for them, there would be no possibility of fame and much less to live our lives for. Culture provides the platform that allows every person to become a player. Kula activity finally comes back as Fame; and the people who exchange the valuables become the ‘celebrities’ of the Kula ring. To use modern parlance, culture is what ensures that the people of Gawa ‘get a life’.

Munn reasons that this activity represents an expansion of what she calls inter-subjective spacetime: the scale of the world within which people can live and gain Fame. Positive transformations expand this spacetime and negative transformations shrink it. The first chapters of The Fame of Gawa are mainly concerned with the establishment of positive transformations, the complex systems of exchanges based on principles of reciprocity and mutual obligation and expectation that grow spacetime: first exchanges within Gawa and then through Kula with other islands. The final chapters are more concerned with witchcraft, an aspect of these same activities that can destroy and shrink our social relationships and the field within which we can gain Fame. So culture itself can grow or shrink.

If Facebook may be regarded as a kind of social ‘big bang’ leading to an expanding social universe, then an analogy seems warranted with Munn’s argument about culture. For this analogy to be useful, we would have to see in Facebook something equivalent to both the positive expansion and negative shrinking of spacetime. To start with expansion, in Gawa a contrast is drawn between just eating the food you grow yourself and sending it out into ever expanding networks of exchange. Similarly, in Trinidad, a person might use some experience or reflection in dyadic exchanges with someone close to them, reporting it in a personal conversation with another person. I tell you about something that happened to me and that’s as far as it goes. But, with Facebook, they can harvest those same observations from the garden of their experiences and post them onto a site, where not just one other person will be able to consume them, but hundreds. Even if no direct messages are sent to and from individuals, they are made aware of aspects of others lives through textual and visual posts. As spacetime, it allows this information to carry across continents and diasporas, allowing news and information to travel vast distances with extraordinary effect. There is an unprecedented simultaneity, but also a digital inscription that lasts. As such, Facebook is a positive transformation and expansion of spacetime through social media.

Trinis are, in general, just as keen as the people of Gawa that their individual reputations should lead to enhanced respect for the island of Trinidad itself. Thanks to Facebook, the achievements of Trinidadians abroad, the degrees they pass, the children they have, are re-internalised within the local networks of Trinidad, ready for discussion and assessment. By the same token, Facebook internationalises events in Trinidad, initially to the Diaspora and then, if they are of sufficient interest, to others. Similarly, there is a consensual desire to export interest in particular aspects of Trinidadian culture, such as Steelband or Carnival. In the book, I also show how Facebook rests on reciprocal exchanges analogous to Munn;s reliance on Mauss and indeed Mauss’s on Malinowski. Munn, as noted above, also uses Sartre’s concept of wider witnessing ‘In Gawan images of kula fame, the virtual third party is the distant other who hears about, rather than directly observes the transaction……As iconic and reflexive code, fame is the virtual form of influence. Without fame a man’s influence would, as it were, go nowhere: successful acts would in effect remain locked within themselves in given times and places of their occurrence or be limited to immediate transactors’ (pp. 116-117). My last proposition rests on the idea that Facebook represents a realisation of this ideal as a virtual component in the construction of Fame. Again in my book I demonstrate the application of Munn’s theory of the ‘qualisign’ to the analysis of Facebook.

The last chapters of The Fame of Gawa are devoted to negative transformations of spacetime. This implies that any cultural form that creates expansion has to have within itself the opposite quality which would destroy and shrink spacetime. I argue that the Trinidadian concept of Bacchanal corresponds to the Gawan concept of witchcraft because it derives from gossip and the exchange of news, which is part and parcel of what makes Facebook work. But it is equally the aspect that destroys its ability to expand spacetime positively. The very first portrait I introduce is one where viewing turns into stalking, stalking into jealousy and jealousy destroys a marriage.

There were many other stories circulating in Trinidad about inadvertent or sometimes deliberate exposure of sexual material, ranging from school girls to people’s own relatives. Such as when a photographer has recorded something and tagged the photograph or, as is common with teenagers, the mere hint that one person’s boyfriend was observed with another girl. These can cause an explosion of recrimination publically aired on Facebook itself. When such bacchanal occurs it often has the effect of either demolishing specific relationships or of making people in general frightened of the consequences of beinf exposed through participation in their online community. Bacchanal thereby directly contributes to the negative transformations of spacetime made possible by Facebook as. It shrinks social worlds.

The other significant impact of bacchanal is that, like witchcraft in The Fame of Gawa, it also operates as an important sanction which secures normative and moral use of Facebook. In Gawa, witchcraft provides a sanction against those who would rather not bother to take part in these complex exchanges. We could call them the ‘couch yams’ of Gawa who just can’t be bothered to help build a canoe or participate in a ritual, but come to fear witchcraft. In Trinidad, defining culture itself as bacchanal creates a fierce and continual debate about netiquette: how to determine what is proper and improper behaviour in the use of Facebook. Conversations about the immaturity of teenagers who fail to see the consequences of their desire to look more sexy than the girl next door or about how much they will regret losing their temper when they vent their spleen against a parent or best friend on Facebook are typical. Equally, many negative comments appear about people who photograph private quarrels or tag too many photos or otherwise behave inappropriately. This negative potential, the bacchanal inherent in Facebook that could destroy community, is one of the main factors that help people build consensus as to how they should behave there. At least if they want to stave off destructive acts of witchcraft.

The extended analogy can be found in the book, where it is used to demonstrate my claim that, if Munn’s book were a theorem about culture, then Facebook would be its proof. The true significance of her arguments only really becomes evident when they are applied, not only to Gawa, but to an entirely different context. Her theory can work not just for a few hundred people on an island in Melanesia but helps us to comprehend the vast network that is Facebook. By the same token, this act of theorisation makes another point that is central to my decision to study Facebook from an anthropological perspective. It follows from this essay that, if Kula exemplifies what anthropologists mean by the word culture, then so does Facebook.

I would prefer to offer the evidence of the book rather than these short examples, in order to make such extreme points more plausible; but the world of publishers seems inexorably slow and the book will not be out until April. Meanwhile, I hope there is enough here at least to show why I think anthropology has the potential to appreciate aspects of Facebook that might not emerge from discussion by other disciplines. That we have have a responsibility to at least push things well beyond the incredibly superficial idea promulgated by films such as The Social Network that Facebook is best understood by an investigation of its invention by Mark Zukerberg. I confess that I have pushed things to extremes, partly because I get intellectual pleasure from doing so. I am sure that some of you out there will see this self-indulgence as detrimental to the larger goals of our discipline, so by all means attack.

Professor of Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology, University College London and the author of many books of which Stuff (Polity, 2010) is reviewed elsewhere on the OAC press site.

Stuff : 1-11

Polity, 2008.

Putnam, R. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, 2001; Sennett, R. The Fall of Public Man. Knopf, 1977.

Miller, D. and Slater, D. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Berg, 2000.

Postill, J. Localising the internet beyond communities and networks, New Media and Society 10 (3), 2008, 413-431; Woolgar, S. Virtual Society? Technology, Cyperbole, Reality. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Boyd, D. and Ellison, N. Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 11, October 2007; Kirkpatrick, D. The Facebook Effect. Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.

Mauss, M. The Gift. Routledge, 1990 (1925).

Turkle, S. The Second Self. MIT Press, 1984.

Goffman. E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956. Frame Analysis. Harper and Row, 1974.

Strathern, M. The Gender of the Gift. University of California Press, 1986.

Levinas, E. Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen. Duquesne University Press, 1985.

Munn, N. The Fame of Gawa. Duke University Press, 1986; Malinowski, B. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Dutton, 1961 (1922).

Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan
Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation

Philip Swift

© 2010 Philip Swift

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

Tiger and Bond stood in the shade of the avenue of giant cryptomerias and observed the pilgrims, slung with cameras, who were visiting the famous Outer Shrine of Ise, the greatest temple to the creed of Shintoism. Tiger said, ‘All right. You have observed these people and their actions. They have been saying prayers to the sun goddess. Go and say a prayer without drawing attention to yourself.’

Bond walked over the raked path and through the great wooden archway and joined the throng in front of the shrine. Two priests, bizarre in their red kimonos and black helmets, were watching. Bond bowed towards the shrine, tossed a coin on to the wire-netting designed to catch the offerings, clapped his hands loudly, bent his head in an attitude of prayer, clapped his hands again, bowed and walked out.

‘You did well,’ said Tiger. ‘One of the priests barely glanced at you. The public paid no attention. You should perhaps have clapped your hands more loudly. It is to draw the attention of the goddess and your ancestors to your presence at the shrine. Then they will pay more attention to your prayer. What prayer did you in fact make?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t make any, Tiger. I was concentrating on remembering the right sequence of motions.’

‘The goddess will have noticed that, Bondo-san. She will help you to concentrate still more in the future. Now we will go back to the car and proceed to witness another interesting ceremony in which you will take part.’

—Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice (1965) p.90-91

A superficial citation, to be sure, but deployed with a more significant (I do not say deeper) end in mind: to pay attention, in this essay, to the significance of superficiality in Japan. By this, I mean the well-documented tendency of Japanese sociality to invest a serious amount of energy in the creation of surfaces. For the moment, though, let us stick with this trivial epigraph, for it is instructive. In You Only Live Twice, James Bond – on a mission in Japan – is instructed in becoming Japanese by Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service. As described by Fleming, James Bond’s Japan is a kind of technicolor theatre state, parcelled up in ritual. A country of pure exteriority that Fleming invents by papering it with clichés (so often italicised): samurai, sake, Suntory whisky, ninja and nightingale floorboards. How then to go undercover in a world of surfaces? Not so difficult, when identity too is just a façade. In a doubly dubious moment of mimesis, Double-O Seven play-acts at being Japanese by the easy expedient of cosmetics: black hair dye and skin-tanning lotion. Later on, Bond gives up his Japanese disguise in favour of something even more implausible. He pretends to be an anthropologist! (Fleming 1965: 121)

Ironies aside, however, consider the scenario quoted above; the prayer exercise at Ise Shrine. Suppose, for a moment, that an anthropologist were present at the scene, loitering perhaps behind a giant cryptomeria; spying on the spy. Observing Bond perform a sequence of actions and overhearing the subsequent bit of dialogue – You did well…What prayer did you in fact make? – I’m afraid I didn’t make any – our eavesdropping anthropologist might well be led to ask herself the following question: Did James Bond pray or not? After all, he got the actions right, but then he says that actually he didn’t pray; yet Tanaka, his mentor, seems to think that he did. Which is it then? Our anthropologist is fazed, both shaken and stirred. For while she is able to accept that, on the surface, Bond seems to pray, what she most wants to know is what’s really happening deep down. Perhaps she remembers reading Geertz and his Rylean doctrine of thick description. The job of ethnography, she recalls, is to codify occurrences according to their particular significations, to sort out ‘real winks from mimicked ones’ (Geertz 1993: 16). Well then, how to tell the difference between someone making a prayer and someone faking one?

If I indulge in these fictional speculations, it is in order to create a conceptual space for the staging of analysis. Fleming’s account is a fabrication – obviously – but it is, I suggest, effective nonetheless in terms of delimiting certain aspects of the ethnographic problem of prayer in Japan. In fact, more than that – to deploy this ersatz example as a means of enacting my general thesis: it is effective to the extent that it is fabricated.

To see how this passage of Fleming might turn out to be ethnographically useful – in spite of its evident exoticism, its double-O orientalism – consider the following description offered by Thomas Kasulis (2004: 27-8). He reports on the sort of typical exchange he would have with the businessmen he would often see praying at a certain shrine in Tokyo.

‘“Why did you stop at the shrine?”’ asks Kasulis.

Says the businessman: ‘“I almost always stop on the way to work.”’

Kasulis presses him further. ‘“Yes, but why? Was it to give thanks, to ask a favor [sic], to repent, to pay homage, to avoid something bad from happening? What was your purpose?”

“I don’t really know. It was nothing in particular.”

“Well then, when you stood in front of the shrine with your palms together, what did you say, either aloud or silently to yourself?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Did you call on the name of the kami [divinity] to whom the shrine is dedicated?’

“I’m not really sure which kami it is.”

So there you have it. Everything happens as if the invocation is simulated, seemingly going no further than the curve and contact of surfaces – clapping, bowing, and the pressing of palms together. Roland Barthes possibly gestures at this image