I was reading through some of the comments to Rex’s latest post about Jared Diamond, in which he ultimately argues that David Graeber’s Debt might be seen as the anti-Diamond (in terms of argument).  Debt, Rex argues, is one of the few “big picture” books that have been written by an anthropologist since Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, which was published more than 30 years ago (1982).  Three decades is a pretty long time (and we anthros wonder why so few people seem to know what we do).  Diamond gets a lot of attention from many anthropologists, in part, because he is writing exactly the kinds of books that we really do not produce anymore.

Personally, I think we give him a little too much attention and air-time when we put so much energy into combating his arguments.  If anthropologists disagree with the version of world history that Diamond is putting out there, my answer (as it was when I wrote this) is to write solid books that make our case.  Yes, of course that’s easier said than done–but please tell me one thing that’s truly worthwhile that doesn’t require a ton of work.  Nobody said any of this should be easy.  If we have different–or “better”–ideas, then we need to find ways to get them out there (through books, or blogs, or interviews or smoke signals or whatever).  Going directly after Diamond every time he publishes is kind of a dead end if you ask me.  It continually sets us up for claims that we’re just reacting because of jealousy or sour grapes.  The way around that is to jump in the ring, take part, and produce the kinds of books that mark the way to a different explanatory path.*

Debt, argues Rex, is one of those books.  And I think he’s right.  The book has indeed garnered a lot of attention both inside and beyond anthropology (and academia in general).  This is a good thing, since it can potentially lead to more discussion and debate.  Of course, when a book or author gets more attention, “discussion” can go in some very different directions, some more productive than others (Diamond is actually a pretty good example of this sort of thing).  And while Graeber’s book has received a lot of praise, it also has its critics.  Nothing wrong with that…in fact, this is also a good thing.  But, just as unthinking praise is pretty much a waste of time, so is baseless criticism.  It all depends, and it’s the risk we all take when we step foot into more public arenas.

Anyway, what brought me back to Rex’s post was a comment a couple of days ago by economist Brad DeLong.  Here’s what he wrote:

You do realize that Graeber’s “Debt” is an absolute empirical disaster when it gets to the post-WWII period, and that strikes all of us as the equivalent of the clock that strikes XIII in terms of making us suspicious of the rest of it?

Now, the first part of that statement is fair game, albeit a bit severe.  DeLong argues that the book is supposedly an “empirical disaster,” and then it’s up to him to demonstrate his argument.  I posted a comment asking Mr DeLong to share his assessment of the book (hasn’t happened yet).  But the second part of his charge is a bit suspect.  DeLong’s argument here is this: If there are indeed some errors or factual inaccuracies within any part of Graeber’s book, then this should make readers suspicious of every argument presented in the entire book.  To me, this is specious argumentation, as I doubt DeLong would extend this sort of critical claim to the work of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Joe Stieglitz, or hell, even himself.  This aspect of DeLong’s argument is absolutely bankrupt, meaning that he has literally gone Chapter 11 on Chapter 12 here.**

In a follow up comment, DeLong does indeed expand on what he’s talking about, explaining that he’s always looking for better books than Diamond’s Guns,Germs, and Steel and Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History to recommend to people (kudos to DeLong for valuing Wolf’s book).  He adds that he has considered assigning Graeber’s Debt to his classes because it has some “wonderful” passages.  However, DeLong explains,

The problem is that Debt also contains passages like:

“Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.”

and:

“When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror.”

and:

“One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of war and military power There’s a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him, there’s a man with a gun…. The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours’ notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world military system, organized around the dollar, together.”

that are completely, 100%, totally wrong analyses of important things like employment patterns in Silicon Valley, of the origins of Gulf War II, and of why the dollar is the world’s principle reserve currency and why China holds so much U.S government debt.

And that’s the point where I asked DeLong if he’d be willing to lay out his critiques a bit more.  Thanks to a helpful comment (thanks Pat!) and some time browsing on DeLong’s blog, it became pretty clear that his argument is actually based primarily in two reviews written about Debt a while back: One by Gabriel Rossman and the other by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber.  Both have a lot of good things to say about Graeber’s work: Rossman calls it “very impressive and thought-provoking” and Farrell takes the time to write about the aspects of the book he appreciated.  I recommend reading both of these posts–there was a pretty good discussion on Farrell’s in the comments section that is well worth reading through, since it gets into more depth about some of the arguments and disagreements going on here.  I will say that Farrell’s post does start off with a bit of an intellectual cheap shot when it calls out Graeber at the very start–the post would have been much better without that sort of thing.  In fact, I think the best part of his post is actually the back and forth going on in the comments section.

There are certainly things to debate here–about the role of violence and military force in the global economy, about Graeber’s “tribute” argument, or about just how much conscious intentionality there really is behind the global capitalist system.  Among other things.  Graeber’s book is by no means the end all, be all when it comes to understanding things like debt, money, or the global economics system.  But it does raise some pretty fascinating, insightful, and often provocative discussions about these issues, and it’s worth reading in its entirety (rather than just skimming through a few pages here and there and then jumping on one band wagon or another).  Read it, see what you think.  If you’re looking for a perfect book, well, good luck.  I have read my fair share of books, and I can’t name any that don’t have their shortcomings, flaws, or outright mistakes.  It happens.  Part of the work in reading and assessing books like this is trying to take everything into account without getting lost in some of the details or side arguments.  Or losing touch with the big picture (which is the point, after all).  The best part of reviews and extended discussions of any book, as I see it, is when the ups and downs of an author’s arguments are really explored, taken to task, and critically evaluated.  That’s the whole point, isn’t it?  That’s what the whole “knowledge production” thing is all about, right?

But let’s not let ourselves get sidetracked with what ultimately comes down to cheap shots and superficial argumentation.  That sort of thing is petty at best, and ridiculously pointless at worst.  And it just leads us to the kind of grade-school level debate that ends up going nowhere quite rapidly.  Which is, by the way, a form of “debate” that plagues the internetz.  DeLong’s “well if there’s one thing wrong how can we trust the rest of the book” sort of argumentation is one form of this sort of thing.  The “Apple” example (cited above) being a good case in point.  Ya, Graeber got that one wrong.  So what?–it’s not as if the sentence about the formation of Apple was a major beam in the overall structure of his argument.  Even Gabriel Rossman added a note to his post: “Struck through the bit about Apple because I think people make way too big of a deal about this. It’s an isolated mistake in a very long book, big deal.”

Sometimes, we gotta move on.  Be fair.  Pick our battles.

But yes, by all means, let’s all debate Graeber’s book–and others that try to tackle the complex, interconnected, often highly political issues that he addresses in Debt.  We need more of this, not less.  But we also need to avoid getting sidetracked by superfluous nitpicking, petty personal battles, and the like.  Frankly, I could care less about getting into some academic/personal brawl about who does and does not like who.  So, my point here is this: Cut the crap, get to the substance.  Because, in all honesty, I would much rather read DeLong’s actual critiques of Graeber’s work than see the drive-by, baseless critiques of the “Apple” variety that ended up on Rex’s post.  We can all do better than that…but it’s definitely a two-way street.

I think us anthropologists have engaged in this sort of thing when it comes to critiquing the economists as well (yep, me too).  In fact, I KNOW we have.  So let’s not pretend that we’re the empirically-grounded, ethnographic geniuses sitting outside the fray with little halos around our heads.  The disciplines of anthropology and economics have a long, often tense relationship with one another.  This has led to some pretty interesting debates and discussions, along with less than dignified interactions.  So where to next?

Here’s what I think is most interesting about what’s going on with Debt: there are a lot of people, including anthropologists and economists, reading and debating this text.  All of the major arguments and disagreements aside, this is undoubtedly a success on an important level, since the book is speaking to various audiences that aren’t always in direct contact with one another.  So then, what to do at this crossroads?  Draw disciplinary lines in the sand and defend them at all costs?  Or something else?

Here I think the anthropologists and economists have a pretty nice opportunity, if some of them are willing to take it.  As I read through some of the reactions to Graeber’s book, I noticed that more than one person has expressed the view that they feel unable to assess some aspects of the book because it’s outside their area of knowledge or expertise.  That’s a pretty fair point to make.  For my own part, I’ll go ahead and admit that there are plenty of aspects of macroeconomics that I find perplexing, complex, and sometimes a bit confusing.  I’m not a macroeconomist, so that’s pretty understandable.  What this means is that when I read papers or books that delve into some of the details of economic theory or methods,  I sometimes end up doing a lot of research on the side to try to pick up what’s going on.  Not really a substitute for getting a PhD in econ, but hey, I do what I can.  It’s basically impossible to keep up with everything, especially at a certain level.  This is a long way of saying I can definitely understand the point these folks are saying when they admit they don’t know much about the politics and economics of ancient Mesopotamia.  That’s why we have archaeologists, historians, and historically-minded anthropologists like David Graeber, right?

So here we are.  Anthropologists and economists, together again.  We each have certain strengths we bring to the table, and we each have our shortcomings and weaknesses.  What are we going to do?  Are we going to dig our trenches and get ready for another round of endless disciplinary warfare?  Are we going to sit on the sidelines and be content with lobbing pot shots here and there?  Or are we going to honestly assess our respective strengths and weaknesses, get on with it, and shift the conversation in more a open, meaningful direction?  We could even consider–GASP!!!–some sort of collaboration?!?  Or we can stick to the same old divisions: the economists and their mathematical models on one side of the dance floor, the anthropologists and their tape recorders and notebooks on the other.  Another standoff?

Maybe not.  In the end, it’s up to us whether or not we decide to maintain the sort of relationship that was wrought by our economic and anthropological ancestors.  Because, no matter the distance they truly fall from the tree, there’s really no reason to let any more bad apples get in the way of the potentially meaningful–and necessary–conversations that we have in store.

Yes, this all sounds so kumbaya and polyanna and all that.  But–and this should really draw in you economists out there (joke)–there is indeed some self-interested behavior going on here: I want to know a little more about your methods, your models, and what “seigniorage” is all about, among other things.  So much to learn, so little time to download all of 20th century economic thought onto my Kindle.  But seriously, I have a genuine interest in learning more about how economists do what they do.

All of this, of course, is assuming that we do indeed have something to talk about, us anthros and econs.  It’s probably pretty clear by now that I think we do–but I am sure there are plenty of fine folks out there who disagree.  In fact, if you’d asked me about this several years ago I would have probably answered “An economist?  What could I possibly learn from an economist?”  We all have to reconsider our blind spots and biases, myself included.  So yes, I think that many anthropologists and economists could do well in comparing some notes.  In other cases, however, I think some of the divisions and chasms are quite deep, and extend to a more philosophical or political level.  And no amount of discussion is really going to bridge those kinds of gaps.  But then, those sorts of divisions go far beyond mere academic boundaries.  They have been around for a long time, they will persist, and they will undoubtedly lead to more of the same longstanding sorts of Cold War-esque statemates (about markets, states, capitalism, communism, and all the usual suspects).  Some folks want to keep holding onto the same old stories, no matter where the tracks seem to be heading.

In the mean time, those of us who are willing to open things up, listen to one another, and look in some new directions will do what we can.

What else is there?

*Such an effort might also help combat some of the seriously misinformed understandings of contemporary anthropology that happen to be floating around out there, this being a case in point (although I am not sure how much rational argumentation will help in that case, since Mr Khan seems to be dealing more with preconceived opinions than facts or evidence in his assessment of cultural anthropology).

**Chapter 12 is the primary chapter that DeLong and the other economists authors take issue with, as is explained soon after this paragraph.  Sorry, these things just come to me and I can’t help but allow my bad sense of humor to escape.  It’s like an evil dragon that refuses to remain in chains.  Apologies if my lame attempt at humor has caused you any sort of gastrointestinal distress.

Conferences are of a very limited utility but a utility nonetheless. You should still go but only to select, useful, and economically fair events. Let’s break it down. There are three economic types of conferences:

1) The first is the “extortion conference” illustrated by research society wide events with hundreds or more participants. The fees are high and the locations are the most expensive in the world. Most graduate students and assistant professors cannot afford these conferences. With limited university support they can attend one of these a year, if that. My call is to cease participation in these types of conferences. They are of a very limited use on the CV, for networking, or experience.

2) The second is the “free conference” with no fee, where you can attend and participate but you are required to pay your travel and lodging. With limited university support you can almost pay for all of the travel and lodging. Attend these conferences only if they provide valuable networking and publishing experience. I only go to these if they are small, defined by less than 40 people and/or have a plan for post-conference publication of a book or special journal edition. Then it is useful for you and you don’t have to pay the extortion conference fee. These conference organizers have done their work finding university patronage to pay for space rental and didn’t pass the cost onto you.

3) Thirdly, there is  the “all expenses conference.” Here the conference organizers will pay travel, lodging, and conference fees. These are rare but if you are patient and continue in academia you can find 1-2 of these a year–which is about all the conferences you need a year. They are small and rewarding and free. It may take them a month to pay you back based on receipts and therefore they leave you with £1000 less for a month, which can be difficult, but the money will return.

The extortion conference system is like publishing in the physical sciences–they will publish your personally subsidized work at a profit only after you pay them. In the social sciences, we rarely encounter a journal requiring payment (except see American Ethnologist) but the system is the same. The extortion conference system, like the proprietary closed door publishing system, thrives on personal economic subsidization and relies upon a now-absent university patronage. Both systems negate open sharing of information. Proprietary academic publishing puts our research behind gates and firewalls and extortion conferences make it economically impossible to share our work in their closed and cold hotel basements. Both systems are economically classed: proprietary publishing and extortion conferences both reward those who can pay to play.

We must break the back of this free labor system. Stop paying conference fees.

Starting in the 1960s, Eric Wolf was already asking what Jared Diamond in the 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel called Yali’s Question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Answering that question, as Eric Wolf understood, means accounting specifically for how Europe went from being a land that in A.D. 800 “was of little account in the affairs of the wider world” (1982:71) to those effective polities that could launch overseas adventures. Diamond would have us believe that the answer lies in the shape of the continents, latitude and longitude gradients, and agriculture, particularly large domesticated animals. Although this much older story may account for the fact that many of the most powerful polities have been in Eurasia, it cannot account for the rise of Europe 800-1400 A.D.

Everyone agrees that geography matters. Eric Wolf’s survey of the world in 1400 is full of maps, descriptions of terrain, and accounts of available resources. But serious historians reject Jared Diamond’s rationale for the rise of Europe.

To truly get a grip on Yali’s Question, we have to turn back to Eric Wolf in 1982.

Go back to something written in 1982?  Is Antrosio crazy?  Actually, no, he’s not.  I think he’s onto something.  One question Antrosio asks is why Wolf’s work is not more influential today.  Maybe it was the ironic title?  Maybe it was the Marxian framework?  Was it the organization of the book?  Antrosio brings up one factor that’s pretty interesting:

Not long after Europe and the People Without History, the Writing Culture (1988) volume took a quite different tack from Eric Wolf’s vision. Anthropology seemed to be turning both elsewhere and inward upon itself, as the Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf Reply to Michael Taussig (1989) illustrates.

After the publication of Writing Culture, US anthropology did indeed veer off in another direction.  That book took us down a more reflexive road, one that has legions of detractors and defenders.  Personally, I think plenty of good came from the so-called postmodern turn in anthropology.  But maybe there is good reason to revisit Europe, retrace our steps a bit, and see what Wolf’s vision of anthropology offers us today.  A good idea.  Definitely check out the rest of Antrosio’s post–it’s worth it.

Now onto Keith Hart.  His post about the importance (and some of the shortcomings) of Karl Polanyi’s work is a good read for any of you economically-minded anthropologists out there.  Much of Hart’s post focuses on Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation.  Some might scoff at the idea of putting so much stock in book that was written back in 1944, but Hart makes it clear why his work still matters today.  I remember one of my colleagues in graduate school told me a story about a conference she attended.  During her presentation, a person in the audience was completely dismissive of the fact that she referenced Polanyi’s work.  It was “too old” and outdated, according to this person, to be of any import today.  Wrong.  This is just the kind of “intellectual deforestation” that rankled Eric Wolf.  Hart’s close look at Polanyi is a good reminder of just how important it is to study the ideas of those who came before us.  He introduces his post with this:

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of “market society”.  Theories are good for some things and not for others and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally in what I have learned from Polanyi.

Much of the post breaks down some of the dominant debates about “the market” and whether or not it is the epitome of all evil (as some seem to argue) or humanity’s unfettered force of salvation.  Hart writes:

The last two centuries have seen a strident debate between capitalist and socialist camps insisting that markets are either good or bad for society. The latter draws implicitly on the pre-industrial apologists for landed rule whose line was, broadly speaking, Aristotle’s. Karl Marx himself considered money to be indispensable to any complex economy and was radically opposed to the state in any form. However, many of his followers, when they did not try to outlaw markets and money altogether, preferred to return them to the marginal position they occupied under agrarian civilization and were less hostile to the state, pre-industrial society’s enduring legacy for our world. Polanyi falls within this anti-market camp since he acknowledged Aristotle as his master and considered “the self-regulating market’s” contradictions to have been the principal cause of the twentieth-century’s horrors.

A less apocalyptic version of socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon acknowledges the social damage done by unfettered markets (what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”), but would not wish to do away with the wealth they produce. Indeed the leading capitalist societies at one stage all signed up for the idea that states should try to contain the inequality and ameliorate the social misery generated by markets. The BRICS are entering this stage now. The emphasis has shifted over time between reliance on states and on markets for managing national economy, between social and liberal democracy of various colours. The general economic breakdown of the 1930s turned a large number of American economists away from celebrating the logic of markets towards contemplating their repair. This “institutional economics” persists as the notion that markets need self-conscious social intervention, if they are to serve the public interest. John Maynard Keynes produced the most impressive synthesis of liberalism and social democracy in the last century. Much recent writing on Polanyi would place him within this tendency rather than as a card-carrying anti-marketeer. He did recognize a role for the market and lined up with those who sought institutional means to correct capitalism’s ills.

While Hart draws a great deal from Polanyi’s work, he also takes great pains to remind his readers (here and elsewhere) to keep an open mind about the positive aspects of markets, rather than assuming that the market is some massive, singular blog of capitalistic destruction.  Specifically regarding the work of Polanyi, he writes:

It is odd that Polanyi sometimes reduces the structures of national capitalism to an apolitical “self-regulating market.” For his analysis of money, markets and the liberal state was intensely political, as was his preference for social planning over the market. His wartime polemic, reproducing something of his opponents’ abstractions, was more a critique of liberal economics than a critical account of actually existing capitalism.

That’s something to keep in mind when reading Polanyi’s work–and some of the various responses to that work over the years.  Read the rest.

The most compelling argument made by Manjoo is a reminder that it was Barran’s packet-switching technologies, the capacity to split-up data, attaching routing directions, send the data, and reconstitute it elsewhere, which is the basis of the internet today and was first put into practice in the US federal government’s ARPAnet. Manjoo explained, “In tech, no one does anything on his own. … in the tech industry, it takes a village.”

Manjoo critiqued Crovitz’s conflation of the internet and the world wide web, his ignorance that Vint Cerf was a federal employee as was his co-creator of TCP/IP Robert Kahn an employee of the Defense Department, his misunderstanding that the Ethernet connects computers to a single not a multiple internetwork, and his mistake in not recognizing that packet-switching technology was developed at RAND, a government funded think tank.

He goes onto defend the role of government in technology saying that it wasn’t bureaucrats who stymied the roll-out of the internet but rather AT&T who rejected Paul Barran’s idea of packet-switching technologies running on their phone lines. Manjoo states, “And that’s why the task fell to the federal government—the Defense Department had to create the Internet because private enterprise refused to.” He concludes: “The Internet, the Web, the microprocessor, GPS, batteries, the electric grid—if you’ve built a thriving company that depends on any of these things, you didn’t get there on your own. Or, as the president once said ‘You didn’t build that.’”

Manjoo’s discourse on the origins of the internet can be conceptualized as technoprogressive, aligned as it is with the historical and present US progressive movement, social liberalism, and social Democrats. This view acknowledges the role of the state in funding technology and science while addressing the shared costs and responsibilities of a state-supported networked society. Technoprogress has been theorized by Douglas Rushkoff, Donna Haraway, Mark Dery, James Hughes in the form of “democratic transhumanism,” and Dale Carrico. Hughes and Carrico, for instance, have been affiliated with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, which forms the technoprogressive answer to the Technology Liberation Front’s technolibertarianism. Carrico says that technoprogressivism “assumes that technoscientific developments can be empowering and emancipatory so long as they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities.” Manjoo, and President Obama before him, embodied technoprogressivism by claiming that it was the democratic and regulatory mechanisms, not to mention the US federal funding, that made the internet possible.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]

However, Ethernet connects computers to computers, not computer networks to computer networks like APRAnet. Ethernet was invented at a corporation, Xerox PARC, where Robert Taylor was working after developing APRAnet for the US federal government. Thus, it was not the US federals but private business, namely Xerox PARC with a later incarnation of Taylor, that came up with what became the internet. The government? “Bureaucrats,” according to Crovitz, harassed Xerox PARC’s engineers.

Crovitz positions media corporations as responsible for and the rightful heirs of the internet. This is technolibertarianism, the belief that private individuals with unfettered access to technologies working out their negative liberties and economic self-interest is not only legal and just brings about economic prosperity for the most. Technolibertarianism is most vigorously defended and self-labelled by the Technology Liberation Front (TFL), a blogging think tank with connections to the best funded conservative think tanks: Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, TechFreedom, Mercatus Center and other bastions of neoliberal information policy construction, debate, and propagation. Adam Thierer who at FTL is the primary chronicler of technolibertarian self-referentiality calls Crovitz his “favorite technology policy columnist,” couldn’t come to his mentor’s defence on this experimental revamping of internet history around a privately employed Taylor, Ethernet, and PARC but he has much to say about technolibertarianism.

“Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.” –Adam Thierer

Crovitz is attempting to reengineer the history of the internet in order to have an origin story more in line with the technolibertarianism advanced by Thierer. If the internet is not made by the state then the state has no right to manage it. If it is made by corporations then corporations are the rightful heirs to the internet. In the following posts I will introduce how another depiction of the origin of the internet carries its own ideology despite its historical accuracy.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]

Suddenly in the wake of President Barack Obama’s untimely but ultimately non-fatal but non-optimal grammar, the question of who made what when and how much the government had or had not to do with it was up for debate. Resisting the attacks on all things federal at the tail end of the 2012 US presidential election, President Obama said to a crowd in Roanoke, Virginia on July 13, 2012:

“The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the internet so that all companies could make money off the internet.”

Dishonestly editing this speech into smug accusations that every small business owner isn’t responsible for their creation, the television and internet video dimension of the pro-business Republican party seized on the moment to produce radio, television, and internet video clips exhibiting President Obama as a big-government braggart and apologist. Linked with his phrase that the private sector is “doing fine,” this statement appeared to show the US President as out of touch with the contributions made by private business to the United States.

The question of who built the internet–big government, big business, the “people,” or a lone genius–was quickly picked-up by the internet hagiographers turned political polemicists. The internet, that technology with a shady past of government, business, peer-to-peer production, and singular brilliance was further politicized as its ontogenesis was topically mined for points across the political spectrum. This battle over who made the internet–the US Pentagon at ARPA; Xerox and Apple; the volunteer bevy of open source coders; “founder father” network engineers Barran at Rand visualizing packet-switching, Cerf at ARPA engineering TCP/IP, Berners-Lee at CERN developing HTML, or Andreessen at the U of Illinois and Mosaic–spread across four camps each with their own classically liberal belief system regarding internet freedom, the role of the state, the legitimacy of business, the collective vibrancy of organizing without organizations, the sheer wit of gifted individuals, or the ideal confluence of state/business/citizenry/scientists.

Soon after the ruthless edits hit internet video sites, four arguments emerged about who really made the internet. L. Gordon Crovitz at the Wall Street Journal started the polemic by going against the accepted wisdom and saying that President Obama was wrong, it was Xerox PARC, and therefore corporations which made the internet. Farhad Manjoo of Slate rebutted that the President was correct, Crovitz’s facts were not facts at all, and the state did fund and support what became the internet. Harry McCracken of Time added to the debate by bringing back an old idea that never gets old in technology journalism, that it wasn’t the state nor corporations, but brilliant individuals who should be thanked for the internet. Finally, Steven Johnson writing in the New York Times said it wasn’t states, corporations, nor smart individuals but Us, namely a public of open source coders that should be thanked for building the software with which states, corporations, and individuals access the internet.

Each make impressive claims but my point is to consider these statements as ideologies that reveal as they attempt to conceal political persuasions in historical revisions. These four internet historiographical ideologies can be traced back to classical Western liberalism and its emphasis on freedom of the corporation (technolibertarianism), the state in securing and defending freedom and citizen responsibility (technoprogressivism),the rugged individual unencumbered by tradition (technoindividualism), and the collaborative citizen public (technoidealism). This overview of internet historiographical revisionism illustrates how technology gets enculturated—technologies are already always enculturated–but an extra-palimpsest of ideology is spread across the internet history by these four positions.

In the following five posts I will explore these contentions about the origin of the internet.

Where oh where have the anthropologists gone?

So, thinking in a strategic sense, how can anthropologists become a more engaged part of these kinds of discussions?  Seems to me that we have a lot to offer, and have for decades.  So why are the economists getting all the air time?  Is it because they try harder?  Are they better looking?  Do they have better ideas?  Are they paying people off at CNN, Fox, and the New York Times?  Or are we stuck in the proverbial bull pen of public debate because this sort of engagement with wider audiences isn’t really “our thing”?  Are we being shut out of the conversation? (I highly doubt it.)  Is this kind of thing “too political”?  Or are we too busy “counting yams” (a nod to this recent post at the OAC about the passing of Eric Hobsbawm) to participate in these kinds of larger conversations?  What gives?

I’m looking forward to the day when someone trots out the usual “humans are all self-interested rational actors” line and at least one anthropologist is called on as an expert to offer a slightly different take.  And when I say “slightly” I mean something like this.**  So how do we get there?  How, dare I say, shall we step outside the halls of academia to once again engage in public debate?  I’d say it’s about time we regain the public voice we once had in the long past days of Boas, Mead, and Benedict.

Or are we too busy for that sort of thing these days?

*You can also see my plug for anthropology in the comments of the post.

**David Graeber is one of the anthropologists who has done a great job of expanding the discussion beyond academia, closed conferences, and peer reviewed papers.  And he deserves a kudos for that.  I think we need more of that sort of thing.  But it doesn’t mean this is an either/or issue.  I think we can do solid academic work AND engage in these kinds of wider debates, issues, and discussions.  It might help if this sort of thing, along with teaching, “counted” a bit more in how we evaluate up and coming anthropologists.  Just sayin.

When I started on this exploration of the idea of value, one of my friends told me that if I’m really serious about looking deeper, then I should start with David Graeber’s book on the subject.  I did, and have subsequently read that book–and his book about Debt–and taken tons of notes.  My friend also said that my search for the meaning of value is going to head back to Marx one way or another.  And it did.  But it also led to Adam Smith, Clyde Kluckhohn, David Harvey, Noel Castree, Julia Elyachar, and many others.  This search for value has led me down many different side streets and avenues, and there’s still a lot of ground to cover. The most recent book that I am reading is James Buchan’s book Frozen Desire.  The money/value question, especially as it relates to land, real estate speculation, and development, is what has been keeping me occupied for some time now.  The more I look into value, the more I want to keep looking.  It’s a bit like an endless economic rabbit hole.

Now, I am definitely fascinated with the idea of value, but I am also willing to admit that it’s a massive, if not vague, concept.  Graeber said pretty much the same thing in the beginning of his book.  The word “value” can refer to a range of things: from prices and money values all the way to moral values.  So there’s a bit of fuzziness and abstraction going on, simply because of the wide array of ways in which people use the term.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell when one usage ends and another begins.  There’s a lot of contradiction and overlap going on.  I hate to say it, but the whole idea of value gets complicated–and really, really abstract at times.  Maybe too abstract?

So when I stared my fieldwork I was not sure how well the whole value thing would work out.  I thought, at the outset, that it was far too abstract and that I was in danger of imposing too much theory on everything.  Kind of like casting a bright light upon a scene that completely washes out what’s actually there–that’s the risk of too much theory.  You can end up a completely detached from any grounded reality.  This is always a problem with fieldwork, I suppose, and the hard part is finding some sort of workable balance between theory and reality.  In my fieldwork about the politics of development in Baja California Sur, I started looking into value for a very specific reason: I saw that some of the social conflicts over land were connected, at least in part, to rising real estate values.  But there was something more to it–a lot more.  I chased after the concept of value, but kept reminding myself not to get too attached.  I felt I was in danger of letting everything get a bit too consumed by abstraction.

And then, a few months into fieldwork, I went to a meeting about a local community development effort in the small community where I have been living for the past year.  For now, let’s call this community “Pueblo Chico.”  The meeting was led by an organization that focuses on alternative development models.  The meeting itself was about a new community development plan that was created as a counter to some of the large-scale tourism developments in the region.  The basic idea was that residents of Pueblo Chico needed to think about what kind of place–and what kind of market–they wanted to create and maintain.  There were several speakers who talked about various aspects of the plan, and a lot of the conversations had implicit connections with my investigations of value, economics, place, and meaning.  Then the next speaker started to talk, and I was floored because his words pulled the whole question of value out of the theoretical clouds.

His whole presentation was about the different between “price” and “value” (see this post I wrote a while back as well).  His argument was that the community needed to realize the difference between the two, and that the creation of a tourism market was about more than just charging more money to more people.  It was, he said, about creating valuable experiences for tourists that would last.  It wasn’t just about getting money, wasn’t just about price.  He really wanted to drive the point home–and people were listening.  The ensuing conversation was fascinating…but I remember sitting there, writing notes frantically, pretty amazed that such an explicit conversation about value had seemingly dropped in out of nowhere.

Now, the use of the term value, and even a lecture about price versus value, does not a theoretical framework justify.  In fact, I think there is always going to be a certain amount of slippage between any framework and the kinds of situations we encounter on the ground.  It’s good to have things line up, of course, and it’s important to cross-check theory with reality.  But I also don’t think we should ever expect some kind of perfect convergence.  For me, I like to think of theories as tools or lenses through which to view problems–rather than seeing them in more rigid terms.  If the tool doesn’t work, find another one.  So for me the “anthropological theory of value” is a tool and I am going to see how far it goes.  But, like choosing a particular screen size for sifting through soil in archaeology, every tool has its benefits, limitations, and tendencies.

Interestingly, the term value has continued to come up during my fieldwork…here and there, every now and again.  In one instance, I was reading through a set of meeting notes from the meetings of a local conservation organization.  The notes were about some of the local battles against a very large development project that many felt threatened the ecology and community of Pueblo Chico.  The author of those meeting notes and meeting minutes was deeply involved in these local development issues, and incredibly passionate about saving the place she loved.  In her notes she wrote a question to herself: Is this place worth something more than just money?*  She expressed her desire to save the place she knows and loves, to keep it from becoming just another site for mass tourism.  This tension between place, value, development, and money is incredibly pervasive.

Value keeps coming up.  Sometimes in more subtle ways, as with the above example when it’s scrawled in a small yellow notebook, and other times it’s more blatant.  Last month I went to another local development meeting in a neighboring community.  I’ll call it Pueblo Grande.  This community has many residents who have been in favor of many of the large-scale development projects because, in short, people want the jobs.  This makes sense, as there aren’t exactly a ton of employment opportunities, and the developers of the mega-project have been making a lot of promises about jobs and local benefits.  There is a certain amount of tension between Pueblo Grande (approximately 2500 residents) and Pueblo Chico (about 200 residents).  A lot of the conservation efforts are focused on saving the reef system located on the shores of Pueblo Chico, whose residents are for the most part against any of the large-scale development proposals.**  Basically, there are many residents in Pueblo Grande who feel that any conservation efforts really only benefit folks from Pueblo Chico who live near the reef.  This development meeting, hosted by an organization with ties in both communities, was meant to create social bridges and highlight mutual concerns and benefits.

There were several presentations at the meeting.  They focused mostly on things like reef ecology, conservation biology, and the possibilities for creating new local tourism economies.  There were presentations by two marine biologists from one of the local universities.  They both tried to show the residents of Pueblo Grande that the reef in front of Pueblo Chico has meaning, value, and importance that extends much further than many imagine.  Local fisheries at Pueblo Grande, argued the marine biologists, directly benefit from the conservation of the reef ecosystem and fisheries.  It’s a connected ecology.  But they also employed another strategy that really generates all kinds of debate among social scientists: they literally put a financial value on the reef, even going so far as arguing that each fish in the reef system was worth about 400 bucks.  Now, say what you will about the commodification or neoliberalization of nature, one thing was really clear: this tactic sure made the fishermen from Pueblo Grande take notice.  People definitely reacted.  Some laughed about the number, many made side comments.  I am not sure about the long term effectiveness of that tactic, but it was interesting to see it deployed as part of a larger effort that is geared toward creating support and enthusiasm for particular values (based upon science, ecotourism, and conservation) and directly opposed to others (traditional sun and sand, hotel-marina-golf course development projects).  On at least some levels, framing the issues in terms of money really seemed to drive the message home.  At the end of the meeting several people said they had completely changed their minds and now realized that conservation of the reef was not only important, but could have direct benefits for them as well.

In the end, value is partially theoretical, or “in my head.”  But it’s also out there, on the ground, in various forms.  It is a slippery term…but that’s where some of the interesting things are taking place.  One theorist whose ideas have turned out to be tremendously useful for me so far is Julia Elyachar.  In her book Markets of Dispossession she talks about “the production of value,” and this has been a helpful tool/framework for approaching some of the development politics that I am seeing in Baja California Sur.  In fact, one way to look at the range of conflicts is that they are battles between different forms of value production, ranging from people who are advocating conservation and ecotourism to those who are pushing mega-development all the way to people who are only concerned with their personal property and quality of life.  There are many people taking part in producing, promoting, and trying to foment these various forms of value, which are based upon certain hopes about the future of this place.  Money and markets play a key role, but they aren’t everything–as ubiquitous and powerful as they sometimes seem.  This is something that has become more apparent the longer I have been in the field.  When I first encountered the situation, I felt that the driving force was the expansion of tourism market, and that increasing land values would simply erase all other forms of value- and place-making.  But…this hasn’t really been the case, at least not yet.  If nothing else, the production of value is dynamic, and it’s surely a complex, fluid process.  It’s also messy…but it’s an interesting mess.  And I’m in the middle of it all.  I’ll let you know how things go.

*Paraphrased.

**Although there are some folks who straddle the fence to a certain extent.

Ryan’s recent post on money and its flows and blocks  prompts me to post this, something I wrote a few weeks ago in response to a request from colleagues in Leiden for their  ICA magazine, which is published by study association Itiwana of the department of cultural anthropology and development. After my post on brands and the UK riots they thought I could write something about brands.   Being in Tanzania which is buzzing with money talk,  prompted in part by its new status as  a destination for mining and gas companies in the current  natural resource rush, I wrote instead about how development is being re-branded. 

The 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals is fast approaching. Few  countries in Africa  are expected to meet the targets.  Income poverty, food insecurity, rising inequality and poor health remain problems for the most of the continent.  Despite shifts towards democratic politics in many countries, civil conflict and political instability  are  entrenched  in others as legacies of colonial state  building and post independence power struggles.  Such conflicts, as in Mali and  the Sudans,  are fueled by the rising value of  resources  associated with particular regions within a global market that is revaluing Africa as a potential source of minerals, gas and oil  and as a  high growth location with an expanding  middle class. 

Annual growth rates  for African economies have averaged six or seven percent for much of the decade.  The extent to which growth is a consequence of political stability and sound macroeconomic management is open to question. A more pressing explanation for the recent transformation in Africa’s economic fortune is the global increase in demand for its natural resources enabled by regimes of economic management  which are increasingly open to foreign investment and partnerships.

This   continental push to promote the commercialization of  what can be claimed as `natural’ resources within a context of on-going economic liberalization is legitimating an emerging discourse about the wealth of African nations and the urgent need for investment  as the magic bullet which can liberate this capital and create national prosperity. The regionalization agenda which fosters economic integration is aggressively promoted by governments and donors, along with initiatives aimed at strengthening property rights, enabling foreign direct investment and transforming communications infrastructure. 

China’s  new position as the potential economic savior of a continent   signals  fundamental  shifts in the political ordering of international development. The poverty discourse  central to the MDGs and,  arguably, to the constitution of countries in sub Saharan Africa as  fitting subjects of development  intervention is  increasingly contested, not only  by politicians and media commentators across the continent,  but by  an authoritative cadre of technical experts promoting market led development. Development is being re-imagined not as a consequence of social sector spending but as an effect of marketization.

States across the  continent are  seeking to present themselves as  entrepreneurial and investment friendly. Tanzania is no exception.  Like Uganda, it has practically shifted the orientation of its poverty reduction strategy towards economic growth. The government of President Jakaya Kikwete, now in its second term, is pursuing  a policy of Kilimo Kwanza,  farming first, seeking to marketize agriculture and to promote `a green revolution’ with the support of  major donors including the World Bank.  While  the country continues to rely on donor support for around thirty percent  of its national budget, rationales for intervention are  now situated within  a discursive package that is market led.  Donor funded workshops  buzz with talk of  value chains and market information.

The more conventional investments in the social infrastructure of schools and health facilities financed by the Tanzania Social Action Fund  have been superseded by  what are designed to be income generating investments for farmer groups to enhance their own livelihoods.  Phase Three of this program, shortly to be implemented, is structured around an assumed transformation from indigence to entrepreneurship, enabling self reliance through savings and micro finance as the poorest get, in a phrase equally at home in US discourses of welfare reform, `a hand up not a hand out’.

The aspirations of private sector advocates, within and outside government, increasingly  converge with  the policy positions of development partners as development is re-branded  globally to occupy a new market position.  In Tanzania, as elsewhere, financialization, as means and end,  plays a central role in this convergence.   International accounting firms fight for market share of development implementation within extended contracting chains that  conflate financial  and political accountability. Civil society organizations are brought into being to play specific roles in monitoring public expenditure, along with new organizational forms and participatory practices.   Public expenditure tracking,  known as PETS, has a  set of methods  into which civil society volunteers must be  enrolled through seminars and allowances. Techniques equally at home in the world of market research  comprising score cards  and surveys  come to have political clout as modalities through which dissatisfaction with government can be articulated.

Outside these transient relations held tenuously  in place through development funding streams, a range of private institutions  are seeking to establish the architecture through which the financialization of Tanzanian  social life is possible.  The limited reach of existing banking infrastructure and the Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies creates potential opportunities for  new kinds of  financial  institutions. These include  private financial institutions providing loans  to  formal sector workers,  specialist microfinance lenders such as Pride,  and the money transfer services provided by mobile telephone companies, of which the market leader is Vodacom’s Mpesa.  The proliferation of  formal and informal financial services, and those which straddle  this divide,  is staggering.

Savings and loan groups are rapidly proliferating in both urban and rural areas, notably those organized on the  Village Savings and Loan model  promoted by the NGO Care International. These groups consisting of around  thirty members are a fascinating  organizational form,  using strategies of ritualization and formalization to ensure regularity of savings and financial transparency in a group structure where all transactions  take place at weekly meetings and hence in public. Group members  buy weekly shares up to a limit  of five  intended to  ensure that large profits cannot be made and to  restrict  the exploitative potential of  the better off making money from lending to their poorer neighbors. Savers lend to members of the group at a rate of interest  designed to  increase the value of the savings share.

Groups operate on an annual cycle  after which accumulated interest is divided among members according the  value of their purchased shares.These  `care groups’ as they have come to be  known in some districts are  wildly popular because they allow people to borrow money at limited rates of interest,  particularly useful in helping meet big expenses such as  school fees, funeral contributions and hospital  costs.  They also provide a predictable return on savings, depending on the extent of borrowing  within the group.  An additional  weekly contribution functions as a kind of social insurance for group members who are paid a  sum of money should they fall sick or  lose a close family member.

These kinds of groups are heralded by promoters as  a locally available form of micro financial institution serving the previously excluded, a social institution for the promotion of fiscal responsibility and the discipline of saving not so much as an end in itself but as the precursor to enterprise.  Savings  groups thus conceived may indeed be foundational to a new culture of economic change. They  also enable  a range of distinct practices which support  radically different cultures of economic practice, cultures which  simultaneously promote and obstruct the aspirations of  Tanzania’s economic transformation.

In Ulanga district, Southern Tanzania,  where I have been doing some fieldwork, a  large number of `care groups’ have been established over the past two years,  with the majority now entering their second  savings and loans cycle. Despite the core organizational  template which specifies  numbers of members and the management structure, the  practice of groups varies widely, even within the same geographical area. In addition to variations in the value of shares purchased and the timing and duration of loans,  some groups insist on   compulsory  borrowing as well as saving as a  condition of membership as a means of increasing the value of savings for all the members of the group. Many groups also insist that members purchase  necessities like laundry soap  from the group at a price which is the same as or higher than market prices  in order to increase group profit and hence the value of the shares which are divided at the end of the cycle.

Borrowing is socially construed as an emergency response to hardship   but valued as the means of increasing savings.  In this enactment of savings and loans  the group itself is the enterprise and saving  framed as entrepreneurial activity which generates a return for individual members.  The income generating strategies of group members focus on  gathering  sufficient cash to  make savings, in actuality purchasing  regular shares,  because  this is likely to  accumulate more value than  alternative forms of enterprise, including agricultural investment. Participating in `care groups’, for  people with cash to make regular  contributions,  is fast  becoming a recognized means  of making money   make money. Consequently,  traders and  middle income people  in the villages close to the district capital   are joining multiple groups, allowing them to them to escape the  limitation on share purchase within a single group and to access the kinds of loan amounts which can  yield profitable returns.

That money generates money though such practices does not equate to  the kind of financialization envisaged by the architects of Tanzania’s new development order,  a world premised on depersonalized economic action within a market frame.   `Care groups’ in  performing the social relations through which money begets money, via shares invested by group members and the interest they pay on loans , permit individual profit so long as costs are shared to some extent by members of the group.  Organized around distrust rather than trust groups rely on  the visibility of transactions made in public  and  the simple technology of the specially constructed cash with three separate locks for which  separate keys are distributed among ordinary members.  Such practices  make explicit the social labor required to make money do savings work and the essential embedding of money within  social relations.  It is this embedding which accounts for the success of  mobile money services in much of Africa rather than mobile banking- what people are interested in  is the capacity to transfer money between situated persons not the potential of investing money in abstract institutions. 

Political emphasis on accountability dovetails with cultural preoccupations around relations and money , articulated as concerns with the illicit appropriation and consumption of public resources which are  highly personalized.   The organizational structure of `care groups’ taps into fundamental cultural concerns about groups and individuals, collective responsibility, equity and enrichment in ways that permit adaptation to support  core ideals.  As anthropology consistently demonstrates, values rather than value are foundational to understanding economic practice in any context.  This is not a matter of resistance to global capitalism or neo-liberal economics so much as an assertion of  what   values count.

I have been working in Mexico off and on since around 2007, and during that time I have had a few interesting run-ins with this thing we call money.  Many of these experiences point to one particularly intriguing fact: the value of money is anything but stable.  Of course, we all know that.  Markets shift, currencies rise and fall.  Inflation happens.  The value of money changes all the time, right?  Yes, it does.  But what I am talking about is how money that is supposedly stable at larger levels can change value depending on specific social situations.  So values shift in the macro sense, but also in micro, very quotidian senses as well.  And the reasons for those micro fluctuations of value are many.  In short, when it comes to the actual value of money, social context matters.  A few examples:

1. Size matters: Small change is god in many places.  Not just Mexico, of course, but that was where I learned this lesson.  I got the chance to travel around in Oaxaca City and the surrounding area in 2007-2008.  There was one incident that really drove home the value of small change, right after I arrived in the city.  I took a bus out to visit one of the pueblos on the outskirts of the city with a few other friends.  The fare was cheap, about 10 pesos.  Well, I spent my small change during lunch, and when I went to get on the bus for the ride back to the city, I tried to pay with a 200 peso bill.  The driver looked at me like I was insane.  At that moment and in that situation, the bill was clearly not going to work.

In a truly pragmatic way, that note of exchange was worth almost nothing.  Not for someone who needed a ride.  Luckily, after asking around a bit one of my traveling companions had an extra 10 pesos, and I was once again back in business.  But that moment was key–a big lesson.  Once you figure out that carrying around a large bill can be about the same as having no money at all, you gotta get strategic about finding ways to get change.  There are certain restaurants and stores that deal with enough cash and larger bills that getting change isn’t too bad.  The funny thing is that during many transactions at certain stores, the person at the register would literally grumble, if not outright argue with me for using 200 peso bills (which is less than 20 dollars).  So sometimes I would give in and give up the chance for some change, and other times I had to hold out because I was running low.  But when things were going really well, I had a nice collection of small coins, which was essential to be able to go to the weekly markets and actually buy something.

Anyway, in this case, the point is that there are moments when small change might be considered more valuable (desirable, useful) than technically more valuable bills.

2. It’s all about location: Here’s another really interesting thing about value and money and Mexico: sometimes it matters where you are.  I’ll use the Baja California peninsula in this case, which is where I am working for my dissertation research.  Let me start off by saying that compared to some other parts of Mexico where I have traveled, the US dollar is actually quite readily accepted throughout this peninsula.  That’s because there has been a pretty steady flow of travelers from the US (many by car) for decades.  It’s also because of the power and influence of the US.  But the rate of exchange is a matter of debate and negotiation.  It all depends.

Yes, there are standard exchange rates.  Of course there are, and people know these rates.  In the past four or five years, the exchange rate between the dollar and the peso has hovered between about 11 to 1 and 13.5 to 1 (which is where it’s at now).  In many cases you can get a pretty decent exchange rate if you try to pay with dollars.  Pretty close to whatever the official rate happens to be.  But, in some “out of the way” places, that probably won’t happen.  Of course, that makes some sense at an intuitive level, but there’s also something going on that’s worth looking at, I think.

Using dollars is fine–especially near borders and in tourism zones.  But in other places currency from the US starts to lose its sheen a bit.  So what happens is this: when you find yourself outside of these main centers, the exchange rate gets closer and closer to about 10 to 1.  For several reasons, among them the fact that the math is a lot simpler than trying to figure out the proper change for a 13.5 to 1 exchange rate.  When I drive through some town in the middle of the peninsula and want to stop and buy something cold to drink, the person in the store isn’t necessarily going to be pleased to see a green bill with Abe Lincoln’s head on it…hence the tough exchange rate.  If I hand over 5 bucks, it’s probably going to get treated as 50 pesos.  I lose some value, but that’s the way it is.  Sure the dollar is backed by the US, but that little tienda isn’t in the US and it’s about 97 outside.  It’s a “take it or leave it” kind of situation.

So the official value and exchange rate of a dollar is one thing in theory, and another thing in a small place like Cataviña, to give another example.  If you’re out of gas there and have to stop and refill from the guys who sell from large drums on the side of the road, don’t expect to get the rate you saw back in Tijuana when you crossed the border.  You might get lucky, though.  I usually do not get stuck in that situation, since I get pesos right when I cross the border.  But I hear lots of complaints from folks about these tough exchange rates in the smaller towns along Mexico 1, which traverses the whole peninsula.  The point: sure the dollar is stable…except when it isn’t.

So the point of this example is that even with an agreed upon exchange rate between two nations (in this case the US and Mexico), the actual daily value of money shifts all around depending on where you happen to be.  So geography–social and physical I suppose–matters as well.  Sure, the value of money is backed by state power…but that power has its limits and edges where things get a little fuzzy.

3. Give me some credit: Ok, this is my last example.  This one took place in Baja as well.  During the summer of 2010 I was down here doing some prelim work for my dissertation.  I had to rent a car.  This is not cheap around here, mostly because it’s a tourism zone and prices are inflated.  Well, when I went to actually rent the car, I ran into a problem.  My credit union card from the US did not work for the transaction, since it was technically a debit card (even though many debit cards will work, this one did not.  Oops).  So the rental company would not let me actually rent a vehicle.  And here’s the kicker: I had enough money for the rental in my account.  In fact, I could have gone to an ATM and taken the money out to pay for the whole rental.  But that was not possible.

To rent the car, they needed a credit card–which means that the form of money that I happened to have was wrong for that transaction.  Therefore, in that situation, the little electronic blips of money that I had were suddenly not sufficient for what I needed to do.  It was not a matter of getting MORE money, which was amazing to me.  I will never forget that afternoon–it was an interesting lesson.  Of course, I understood why they wanted credit cards (liability, damages, etc), but what this illustrated to me is how the access or lack of access to particular forms of money can really limit the possibilities of what people can do.

The same thing happened when I tried to rent a hotel room later that day: no credit card, no deals.  So this lack of access to money in the plastic-card-with-proper-logo form effectively kept me blocked from certain kinds of possibilities.  It did not matter if I could actually walk in with the correct amount of cash…the rental agencies and hotels demanded money in very specific forms.  So this is another case in which the actual value of money is quite situational.  So what did I do?  Well, I found a hotel that took cash.  And for the car, well, that took a few days of finagling to work out (I had to get authorization to rent the car with one of my wife’s cards).  Nobody was willing to rent me a car for cash…at least not where I was.

What does this final example show?  Well, it shows that sometimes having the right technical amount of money isn’t enough.  Sometimes, if you don’t have the right amount of money in the right form, you are out of luck.  This is one way in which money can be used to keep some people in…and others out.  When I dealt with this credit card situation, I kept thinking about the vast layer of the tourism economy that was basically closed off from anyone who had not entered into the wonderful world of credit.

I’ll end with a good quote: “Money conveys meanings, and the meaning of money itself tells us a lot about the way human beings make the communities we live in” (Hart, Money in an Unequal World, 256).  What kinds of meanings about community do the above examples convey?  Lots, I’d say.  About the tensions between two neighboring countries, about class, power, geography, and new forms of economic segregation.  If nothing else, money tells us quite a lot about the instabilities and complexities of human relationships.  It’s a medium of exchange, sure, but it’s also a social medium that builds relationships–and creates boundaries.  Think about that the next time you buy a churro from a street vendor in Tijuana while waiting for your chance to slide on through one of the largest international crossings in the world.

*For really good anthropological discussions about money and value and that sort of thing, check out Keith Hart’s Money in and Unequal World and his 1986 article “Heads or Tails?  Two Sides of the Coin.”  Oh, and you might also want to check out Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  Excellent stuff.

The small background images on credit cards are a way in which people can personalize their credit cards and express a small part of their identity (along with everyone else who chooses the same theme, of course).  My Visa has a nice image of a Hawaiian seascape and sunset.  Very tranquil and beautiful.  It’s so I can feel like I’m on vacation from reality while I’m amassing debt, I suppose.

Well, the NPR Planet Money blog has a new piece about the latest version of the Mastercard in Germany: The Karl Marx MasterCard.

From Planet Money:

The German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz recently launched a Karl Marx credit card. The bank let people vote online for 10 different images, and Marx was the “very clear winner,” beating out a palace, a castle and a racetrack, among others. Reuters has more on the story.

The reader’s suggestions for potential taglines for the card are my favorite parts of this.  Here’s one good one:

@planetmoney From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. For everything else, there’s #marxcard

-Peter Sahlstrom

Check out the rest of the readers taglines at Planet Money.  Some are really funny.  I love it when little everyday things are so loaded with meaning.  Granted, Marx is an extremely controversial individual in human history…but it’s pretty ironic that a big bank has decided to finally give him his due credit.

(insert laugh track)

Ok, I’m done, I promise.  If you have any ideas for taglines, post them here and at Planet Money.

The Nation states that the GOP’s 2013 budget or the “Ryan Plan” helps the very wealthy, corporations, Pentagon, and health insurance companies while forcing the poor, elderly, disabled, and middle class to sacrifice (Zornick 2012). President Obama called the budget “social Darwinism.” A great term, curiously investigated by the Washington Post. Back in February, 2011, during the last federal budget battle, the New York Times claimed that the GOP targeted to slash funding for job training, environmental protection, disease control, crime protection, science, technology, education, and public media (Editorial 2011). It is a theory of classical liberalism that as these issues of national importance are proposed and debated it is fundamental to the workings of democracy that citizens have diverse information options. This is the job of journalists, newspapers, television news — “the media” — whose investigate capacities have been gutted by parent companies’ market fundamentalism and whose federal funding, when it barely existed, is under attack. Six bills were proposed in 2011 to eliminate federally funding PBS (Tomasic 2011). In this neoliberal media logic, if it fails the single criteria of increasing capital, it misses the cut.

The same week the draconian 2013 Ryan Plan was revealed saw the elimination of two paternalistic guardians of the “American public sphere” –the Media Access Project (MAP), a public interest law firm and 40-year veteran resisting the deregulation and privatization of public media resources. And, most dramatically, Keith Olbermann was fired from Current, a cable television news network. Like him or hate him, he is one of the few television newscasters willing to bluntly critique such instances of neoliberal governmentality on that most hegemonic if media systems: television. As both private public interest and not-for-profit public interest media institutions falter, and federally funded public media systems are assaulted, how will diversity in the American public sphere survive?

I need to briefly address the following normative notions: neoliberal governmentality and the hegemonic or American public sphere.

MAP and Olbermann focused on diversifying the programming within the hegemonic public sphere. They see themselves, their work, and their information as central to dominant national issues within a single American public sphere. They are not interested in producing the conditions for a subaltern counterpublic as Nancy Fraser (1992) describes. Their interest is in competing on a national-level with the likes of Fox News, MSNBC, and other media giants. MAP and Olbermann sought to contribute diverse voices into a single, national, or American public sphere. Does it exist? No. Fraser is right. There are overlapping fields of public spheres. But the hegemonic public sphere is a type of emic model or frame, non-existent on the level of day-to-day discourse, that these media reform broadcasters draw from. More abstract and less polemical, yet comparable with the concept of the “mainstream media,” the hegemonic public sphere is a goal or target for the progressive cultural interventions of these media reform broadcasters.

Foucault provides a cogent definition of neoliberal governmentality in his exquisitely readable lectures at the College de France in 1978-1979. “What is at issue” said Foucault, “is whether a market economy can in fact serve as the principle, form, and model for a state” (Foucault 2008: 117). The result is market statism, or corporatism, which, in an extreme version, is fascism. This is diametrically opposed to the social liberalism advocated by Olbermann and MAP in which the state is focused on non-market social projects. It isn’t corporate liberalism either where the government in public discourse supports social liberalism but that practice is performed by subsidized corporations (Streeter 1996). An example of corporate liberalism comes from the presumed GOP candidate for the 2012 presidential election. Governor Mitt Romney addressed a crowd at a primary campaign stop in Iowa in November. At this event Romney says he won’t gut the Corporation for Public Broadcasting but he will require it to “have advertisments.” Romney doesn’t want to “Kill Big Bird” he just wants it to be on life-support from American corporations. Rather, the Ryan Plan is neoliberal governmentality where social liberal projects are negated and replaced by market fundamentalism. It is this reduction of government functions to market logic that Olbermann and MAP once raged against.

So with the departure of Olbermann and MAP the monolithic American public sphere is less diverse and less capable of engineering the conditions for access for diverse voices. Nick Couldry’s Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism (2010) directly addresses how neoliberal governmentality dampens voice through looking at US and UK television. He defines voice as referring to the process of individuals or communities using media to build reflexive and historical stories. Voice, for Couldry, is socially grounded, provides for reflexive agency and is an embodied force. Voice can be injured or denied by rationalities that perceive voice as an externality of market logic. Thus “valuing voice means valuing something that neoliberal rationality fails to count; it can therefore contribute to a counter-rationality against neoliberalism” (Couldry 2010: 12-13). Without Olbermann’s voice and MAP protecting the legal and political conditions for voicing, how will the American public sphere survive this assault by the flexible tactics of neoliberal governmentality?

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Now, dear Reader, to reward you making it this far here are some hilarious videos that illustrate my points from the comic geniuses of Mitt Romney, President Obama, Cenk Uygur! Cue the laugh track after each video. 

Yuck it up with Mitt!

Cenk Uygur, a host of the show the Young Turks on Current, a for-profit television network with the mandate to diversify the hegemonic public sphere with progressive voice, responds by describing the fraction of the federal budget spent on NPR, PBS, and the CPB.

President Obama bring the crowd to its knees by calling the 2013 Ryan Plan “social Darwinism:”

Value, ultimately, refers to the ways in which we choose to represent the importance or meaning of a particular idea, object, action, or place.  Something can be valuable because of its relative standing within a massive global financial system, but it can also be valuable in many other senses as well.  Both David Graeber (in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value) and Julia Elyachar (Markets of Dispossession) explored these different forms of valuation, and made it clear that it’s important to see how the relate with one another.

Another issue that I am looking at is how this question of value relates to geographic space.  This sounds all very abstract and all, but it’s not as abstract as it seems.  The allure, prestige, or value of tourism is fundamentally geographic and spatial in many ways.  As Michael Clancy pointed out in his 2001 book “Exporting Paradise,” exclusive resorts are predicated on the idea of allowing some people in and keeping others out.  These separated or segregated spaces are maintained through a variety of measures, some more explicit than others.  Some resorts have massive walls and guarded entrances, while others are surrounded by miles of barbed wire fences.  Others choose more subtle measures.

So these are a couple of issues that I am looking into during my fieldwork.  Although right now I am just in the beginning of all of this, and there are interesting leads in all directions.  Miles and miles of fences.  Disputes over land.  Completely different ideas about what an ideal tourism destination should look like.  For some, a place is more and more valuable as it gets “developed” with hotels, paved roads, golf courses, and so on.  For others, it is the complete opposite–a place loses its intrinsic, unique value as it becomes a part of a wider, commodifiied tourism network.

Anyway, these are just a few of the starting points, and I thought it might be a good idea to share some of where I am coming from, since I will be writing about little bits and pieces of this over the upcoming year.  Here’s a short selection about value from a working paper that I wrote for the Open Anthropology Cooperative (click here to read the whole thing).  Let me know what you think (for all references and footnotes, check out the paper on the OAC page).  Since I am in the early stages of fieldwork, and looking into these issues about tourism, social conflict, value, space, and so on, I know that things will inevitably lead in some pretty unpredictable directions.  That’s what empirical research is all about.  But it’s good to take account of starting points and see where they end up.  Anyway, enough of the small talk.  Here’s the selection that explores some of my readings of the value question:

SOME NOTES ABOUT 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…

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.”  So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power?  Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:

Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology.

M.S. then links to a 2008 profile of Tett by the Guardian’s Laura Barton.  Here’s a key selection that quotes Tett speaking about how she put her anthropology background to work:

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.”

The Economist article ends with a little chiding of our dear Governor Scott, saying that it’s never too late to learn, and that maybe he should take a course or two in anthropology for good measure.  He could, of course, just ask his daughter.  Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.

The broader point here is about liberal arts education, society, and anthropology.  Interestingly, what a lot of this comes down to is a perceived clash between SCIENCE and other perspectives that are, according to some, less worthwhile and meaningful.  If you take a look at the comments section for the article, you’ll see evidence of this version of events (some comments mention the supposed division in anthropology about the whole “science” issue).  The basic argument for folks who make this sharp science vs humanities division is that the former is useful and important to society (because it supposedly produces jobs directly) and the latter is nice, but not really all that necessary.  I think Rex did a pretty good job of explaining why a well rounded liberal arts education does indeed, matter.  And he used Thomas Jefferson’s words to do it.  Nice work, Rex.

So what does Gillian Tett add to the picture?  I think she’s an excellent example because her work illustrates what anthropology can bring to the table when it comes to everyday processes and behaviors that get taken for granted.  Economics is just one area where anthropology has a lot to add to the discussion–the discipline has a deep history of empirical and theoretical research on human economic systems (Malinowski was, after all, questioning arguments about “Economic Man” way back in the 1920s).  Business, finance, and economics are all issues that get a lot of attention, day in and day out, from the general public, politicians, and pundits.  The financial crash of 2008 has made these issues even more important.

But if you look at a lot of business and economics and finance books, theories, and models, there’s a lot missing.  History is one key ingredient, as Jason Antrosio argues.  A recent article called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics” points to other glaring issues in the discipline.  Anthropology is certainly well-placed to contribute to a rethinking of economics…in theory and actual practice.  There are, in fact, lots of economic anthropologists doing just that.  It would be nice to see more of their names in the pages of publications like The Economist, for starters.

But there’s another important point here.  In their 2011 book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists.  Economic anthropology, in dialog with neighboring disciplines, as well as with more flexible economists, could be part of that process of intellectual reconstruction” (2011: 162).  Hart also argues that anthropological critiques and contributions to economics have to move beyond simply bashing on individual economists or the discipline as a whole:

It is convenient to beat up on the economists, but I wouldn’t be an economic anthropologist if I didn’t believe in the historical project of economics which has been debased by the economists, especially in the last half- century. We should not allow our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to lead us to discount the marginalist revolution (Hutchinson 1978) which launched modern economics in its present form. We should remember that economics was the first social discipline to introduce a subjective theory of value. There are all kinds of problems with this particular theory, especially its reliance on prices as a proxy for value. Nevertheless, it provoked and encouraged some of the most progressive social thought that we still rely on today, such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Talcott Parsons and others (Hart 2011: 7).

What this means to me is that increased engagement from anthropologists requires something more than just critique.  It requires actual participation in debates, and well-argued contributions.  For me, this is a crucial point, and it applies across the board.  Anthropologists can and should add to wider, more public debates about issues like economics–and other critical subjects such as race, culture, human nature, and so on.  Jason Antrosio makes this case pretty powerfully in a recent post about how a critically informed and yet morally optimistic anthropology can challenge many contemporary economic assumptions.  Absolutely.

I appreciate Antrosio’s combination of critical anthropology with the morally optimistic arguments of Michel-Rolf Trouillot.  In his 2001 book “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value,” David Graeber makes a similar argument when he balances the relentless criticism of Marx with the moral optimism of Marcel Mauss (Graeber 2001: 255-56).  Unending critique, Graeber argues, can lead to “a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless” (2001: 256).  Hann and Hart focus their argument on the idea of interdisciplinary dialog and–the part that I find most appealing–intellectual reconstruction, rather than critique alone.  Teaching, as Alex Golub and many others point out, is a fundamental part of that reconstructive project.

Politicians such as Governor Scott wave the banners of science and technology in the name of producing jobs.  Scott seems particularly enamored with engineering, technology, and mathematics.  Anthropology, which is uniquely positioned between the so-called hard sciences and the humanities, can illustrate the fact that science does matter.  Engineering matters.  Physics and biology matter.  Mathematics is indeed important.  The larger point here is that it’s not an either/or choice that we need to make.  Science is fundamentally important…but that’s not all we need.  Economists, for example, love to spend their time with numbers, statistics, and complex models. What anthropologists can add to the discussion is not just a critical assessment of how such models play out on the ground, but also what those numbers actually mean in particular social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts.

Anthropologists can add to these discussions through teaching, and through their research.  The main objective is to find ways to share such discussions about both of these aspects of the discipline with wider audiences–and to do this in creative, dynamic, informative, and challenging ways.  The best counter to ill-informed, instrumentalist arguments against liberal arts education, social science, and anthropology is, as the post on The Economist blog illustrates, with concrete evidence.  The proof, the saying goes, is in the anthropological pudding–all the way from Franz Boas to Gillian Tett.

References

Graeber, David.  2001.  Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.  New York: Palgrave.

Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart.  2011.  Economic Anthropology.  Malden: Polity Press.

Hart, Keith.  2011.  Building the human economy: a question of value?  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society.