Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value
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迈向人类学价值理论

DOI:
10.1057/9780312299064
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发表时间:
2002
期刊:
影响因子:
1.3
通讯作者:
D. Graeber
D. Graeber
中科院分区:
人文科学3区
文献类型:
--
作者:
D. Graeber

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然而,形式主义者和实体主义者都完全没有抓住要点,因为他们所有的辩论都是关于分配和交换的。他们认为,要理解一个社会,首先必须理解它是如何通过无休止的创造性活动继续存在的,或者用他们的话说,是如何自我"复制"的。这与功能主义有很大不同。功能主义者开始的概念"社会",然后问社会如何设法保持自己在一起。马克思主义者首先要问的是,我们所谓的“社会”是如何通过各种生产活动不断被重新创造的,一个社会最基本的剥削和不平等形式是如何植根于人们这样做的社会关系中的。这具有明显的优势。然而,整个"生产方式"方法的问题在于,它是为了分析有国家的社会而发展起来的:也就是说,在国家中,有一个统治阶级,它维持着一个强制性的机器,从从事大部分生产性工作的人那里榨取剩余。大多数MoP方法的真实的胜利--我想到的是,例如,佩里安德森的巨著《从古代到封建主义的通道》(1974 a)和《专制国家的谱系》(1974 b)--涉及概述不同生产方式的历史,其中许多生产方式可以在一个给定的社会中共存;占统治地位的阶级如何为统治阶级提供基础,而统治阶级的利益又受到国家的保护;生产方式包含着基本的矛盾,至少在大多数情况下,这些矛盾最终会驱使它们转变为其他东西。一旦人们转向没有国家的社会,就不清楚这些概念如何应用。马克思主义确实引入了一系列强有力的分析术语--剥削、拜物教、占有、再生产...... - -大家都认为马克思本人在分析资本主义时曾出色地使用过这些术语,但没有人确切知道如何在资本主义之外使用这些术语。不同的学者会以非常不同的方式使用这些术语,最后往往会以四分之一--
tive, both Formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange. To understand a society, they argued, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist—or, as they put it, “reproduces” itself—by endless creative activity. This was quite different from functionalism. Functionalists begin with a notion of “society,” then ask how that society manages to hold itself together. Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action, and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. This has obvious advantages. The problem with the whole “mode of production” approach, though, was that it was developed to analyze societies with a state: that is, in which there is a ruling class that maintains an apparatus of coercion to extract a surplus from the people who do most of the productive work. Most of the real triumphs of the MoP approach—I am thinking, for example, of Perry Anderson’s magisterial “Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism” (1974a) and “Lineages of the Absolutist State” (1974b)—deal with outlining the history of different modes of production, many of which can coexist in a given society; the way in which the dominant one provides the basis for a ruling class whose interests are protected by the state; the way that modes of production contain fundamental contradictions that will, at least in most cases, ultimately drive them to turn into something else. Once one turns to societies without a state, it’s not clear how any of these concepts are to be applied. One thing Marxism did introduce was a series of powerful analytical terms—exploitation, fetishism, appropriation, reproduction... —that everyone agreed Marx himself had used brilliantly in his analysis of Capitalism, but that no one was quite sure how to apply outside it. Different scholars would use these terms in very different ways and then would often end up quar-