On religiosity and commercial life: Toward a critique of cultural economy and posthumanist value theory

8/9/2019 On religiosity and commercial life: Toward a critique of cultural economy and posthumanist value theory

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2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic Teory 4 (3): 45–68

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Chris Gregory.ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.005

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On religiosity andcommercial lifeToward a critique of cultural economyand posthumanist value theory

Chris G, Australian National University/ University of Manchester

Revolutionary developments in the social organization of capitalism give birth torevolutionary developments in ideas about the economy and value. Just as the industrialrevolution in England in the late eighteenth century saw the emergence of political economyand the labor theory of value, and the age of imperialism in the late nineteenth century

saw the emergence of economics and the marginal utility theory of value, so the age ofglobalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has seen the emergenceof cultural economy and a new posthumanist theory of value that attributes agency tothings. What are the assumptions that inform this new posthuman theory of value? Does itdehumanize anthropology, or does it pave the way for an anthropology of the future basedon a radically new ethics of possibility? Whatever, the provocations of cultural economydemand a robust debate.

Keywords: economy, religion, posthumanism, globalization, value

“What is it that makes anthropology possible in the contemporary period?” asksSarah Green. “What might count as an intervention in anthropological terms?”Green’s questions (see introduction, this special section) invite us to ponder theconventional wisdom that rules in anthropological departments today, to examinewhere these ideas have come from, and to debate where they could go in the future.This is a big topic, but I limit myself here to globalization theory, and in particularto that branch of it that has developed a multidisciplinary approach to the analysisof the economy and religion. This new school of thought, called cultural econo-my, challenges our prejudices about mainstream economics. Instead of dismissing


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mainstream economics outright, as many economic anthropologists are apt to do,cultural economy has rehabilitated an interesting dissident tendency within themainstream tradition and cloaked it in the language of culture rather than mathe-matics. Cultural economy conceives of the bond between religiosity and commerciallife in a radically new way, one that is informed by a radically new theory of value.

The new cultural economy school has made some important advances in ourthinking about the global economy today. It calls for a robust debate about theethics and politics of the possibilities that confront us and challenges many of theassumptions that inform classical economic anthropology and political economy.Cultural economy is deliberately and provocatively “posthumanist” in that it allowsfor the agency of things alongside the agency of people. This new theory of valueturns classical humanist theories of value upside down. Indeed, it begins by up-ending Marx’s labor theory of value on the grounds that the new global order thatemerged in the 1980s demands such a move.

I very much welcome this challenge, for it is only by means of robust debate thatour thinking can move ahead. My paper, then, is a response to the provocations ofcultural economy. It is divided into four sections. The first three sections deal withGreen’s first question: I look at the historical background to the emergence of cul-tural economy from its infancy in the 1980s to it full maturity in the 2000s; I thenoutline the fundamental assumptions of cultural economy as revealed in its critiqueof mainstream economics and classical economic anthropology, respectively. In thefinal section I deal with Green’s second question. Here I attempt an evaluation ofthis new paradigm by noting its advances and its limits in the light of a competingtheory; I end with some thoughts about what might count as an intervention in this

debate from a humanist’s perspective.

Historical background to the emergence of cultural economy

The 1960s and early 1970s were revolutionary times in the academy. America wasat war with Vietnam, and the televised acts of aggression of the world’s leadingsuperpower upon a poor nation radicalized students and divided academic staff,with some marching with students on their demonstrations, others insisting thatclasses continue. At Sydney University, for example, division led to the creation of

two departments of economics and two departments of philosophy; the anthropol-ogy department did not divide institutionally but imploded internally amid accu-sations, denied by the accused, that a large research grant a professor received forresearch in Northern Thailand was funded by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organiza-tion (SEATO) (Flanagan 1971). Universities in the United States and Europe facedsimilar problems. These turbulent times stimulated much debate about the natureof US imperialism and led to a rehabilitation of Marxist political economy.

Things began to change after April 30, 1975, when a defeated American statemade a humiliating retreat from Saigon. By this time the economic consequencesof the most expensive war in human history were now being felt. The US govern-

ment paid for the war by printing money. The dollar, which was backed by gold inFort Knox and fixed in price at $35 per ounce, was the basis of the internationalmonetary system; but by the mid-1960s, the dollars circulating in the world market


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began to exceed the gold in Fort Knox. In August 1971, President Nixon had nooption but to end the US dollar gold standard system of fixed exchange rates. Thisturned money into a commodity that could be bought and sold at a profit, a trans-formation that provided the conditions for a new form of financial capitalism toflourish (Gregory 1997). The era of what we now call “globalization” had begun.This political and economic revolution had profound effects on the world at largeand on the academy, where the ruling modes of thought were challenged.

In economics departments, for example, the hegemony of Keynesian economicscame to an end. Keynes, Britain’s foremost economist theorist, argues the need forstate regulation of markets to ensure economic welfare. He was one of the centralfigures in the foundation of the postwar Bretton-Woods system of fixed exchangerates. Milton Friedman of Chicago School fame, a prominent critic of Keynesian,had been long arguing for a system of floating exchange rates. For him, free mar-kets, not state regulation, maximize economic welfare. The rise to dominance ofthe Chicago School provided the theoretical foundations of what is now called“neoliberalism,” the idea that governments should deregulate markets. Such werethe policies implemented by Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Reagan in theUnited States in the 1980s. These policies were adopted by governments in manyother parts of the world around the same time and after. Even the so-called socialistcountries like Vietnam have begun to adopt then. When I was in Vietnam recently(2014), I saw a new English-language school called “The Wall Street School of Eng-lish.” When I suggested to my Vietnamese guide that Ho Chi Minh would be rollingin his grave, he replied, “No sir. It is not like that. We Vietnamese say that withoutHo Chi Minh we cannot live.” He then smiled and jokingly added, “because his face

is on every banknote.” This anecdote could not be a better illustration of the factthat while the United States may have lost the political war in Vietnam, it won theideological battle on the global economic front.

In anthropology departments, to take another example, the rapid rise of interestin 1960s and 1970s neo Marxist approaches to the relationship between imperi-alism and anthropology peaked and slowly declined after the war ended. In the1980s and 1990s and beyond, the new global order stimulated the posing of newquestions centering on the relationship between globalization and the agency ofthings. The fall of Kathleen Gough and the rise of Arjun Appadurai exemplify thistransition. Gough was trained in the British social anthropology tradition and her

early work focused on classic problems such as kinship and marriage. The VietnamWar radicalized her. She was living in the United States at the time with her hus-band David Aberle, but they left the country in 1967 to live in Canada because shebelieved that the proper goals of academic work were undermined by US govern-ment military policies. She and her husband were unwilling to allow the gradesthey gave male students to be used by draft boards as a criterion for conscriptionfor military service in Vietnam. She notes these facts in her classic article “An-thropology and imperialism” (Gough 1968), where she develops her argument thatanthropology is a child of Western imperialism. “What,” she asks, “does an an-thropologist do who is dependent on a counterrevolutionary government, in an

increasingly revolutionary world?” (ibid.: 18). She affirms the answer proposed byother neo-Marxist colleagues: either we choose to confine ourselves to the studyingthe cultures of small-scale, preindustrial societies or we “embark fully on the study


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of modem societies, including modem revolutions. . . . If we take the latter path,which is the one some of us must inevitably follow, we shall have to admit that oursubject matter is increasingly the same as that of political scientists, economists,and sociologists” (ibid.).

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that historical developments inthe 1980s and 1990s compel us to reformulate Gough’s question: What does ananthropologist do who is dependent on a neoliberal government, in an increas-ingly neoliberal economic world characterized by the proliferation of interethnicand sectarian violence? Appadurai does not critique Gough and nor does he posethis question, but his two books Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography ofanger (2006) and he future as a cultural fact: essays on the global condition (2013)can be read as answers to it. He follows Gough’s second path and creates allianceswith political scientists, economists, sociologists, and others to embark on a studyof the new modern global order that emerged after the Vietnam War era. He as-signs ethnography of the pre-1970s era to the “cabinet of curiosities” (2013: 5). His2013 book—a collection of essays from 1986 to 2011—focuses on the global unitycreated by the “spirit” of finance capital, while his 2006 book focuses on the localpolitical division fired by sectarian and ethnic hatred. In this respect he takes upGough’s challenge to anthropology, but his theoretical approach could not be moredifferent. Out go Marx and Lenin and in come Weber and Knight. This brings withit a new conceptual language and a new theory of value. “Globalization” becomesthe key term of the new debate, along with “localization” as its logical complement.“Imperialism” and its logical complements—conqueror/conquered—are rejectedas terms of an old, now transcended, debate. Appadurai develops his new theory

of value by deliberately and consciously turning Marx upside down.

1

He convertsMarx’s famous theory of the fetishism of commodities into a methodological prin-ciple and argues that it is not labor that gives value to things but things that give

value to people. His paradoxical epigram, “the social life of things,” captures theessence of this new theory of value. This theory, first developed in 1986 (Appadurai1986, reprinted in 2013: ch. 1), attributes agency to things. In a recent developmentof this argument we are told that this attribution includes intentionality: “Thingscould usefully be regarded as having not just itineraries, but also intentionalities,projects, and motives independent of their human handlers” (2013: 257, emphasisadded). This is tantamount to the argument that inanimate things are animated

and is, from a Marxist perspective, a classic example of fetishistic thought of ananimistic kind. For Appadurai, on the other hand, it is a fundamental assumptionof his analysis, one that deliberately and consciously inverts Marx. If Marx’s labortheory of value is humanist and anthropocentric, then Appadurai’s theory is post-humanist and thing-centric.

Just as Marx’s labor theory of value is a variation other labor theories found inthe political economy paradigm, such as those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo,so Appadurai’s theory of nonhuman agency is a variation on others in the posthu-manist cultural economy paradigm. Compared to Callon, for example, Appadu-rai’s attribution of intentionality to things represents an extreme position. Callon’s

1. “In a word, exchange is not a by-product of the mutual valuation of objects, but itssource” (Appadurai 1986: 4).


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theory, as we shall see below, proposes a collective hybrid model where agency isdistributed between humans and nonhumans. What he and others in the culturaleconomy paradigm share with Appadurai is a multidisciplinary modification anddevelopment of certain aspects of mainstream economics.

Cultural economy, for its part, is but one branch of posthumanist thought ingeneral. “Posthumanism,” Wolfe (2010: xv–xvi) notes,

names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by itsimbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networksis increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development thatpoints towards the necessity of new theoretical paradigms . . . a newmode of thought that comes after the cultural repression and fantasies,the philosophical protocols and evasion, of humanism as a historicallyspecific phenomenon.

The exact specification of this “historical moment” depends upon whether one

takes an economic criterion such as the floating of the dollar in 1971, or a politicalcriterion such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Whatever the criterion adopted,there is general agreement that by the 1990s a new global order had arrived requir-ing a new mode of thinking about the human condition. It is beyond the scope ofthis essay to consider development in posthumanist thought in general, but a briefmention must be made of Latour because he has done much to set the new agenda.

Latour is a theological thinker who has devoted his life to attacking human-ist thought. In a recent book, On the modern cult of the factish gods, he ensnareshis would-be humanist opponent, the “critical sociologist,” in a double bind: “Noemperor is more exposed in his nakedness than the critical sociologist who sees

himself as the only lucid person in an insane asylum” (Latour 2010: 131, fn. 26).Appadurai’s inversion of Marx also captures the neo-Marxist in a double bind. Isthe commodity a “very trivial thing, and easily understood,” or “is it a very queerthing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”(Marx [1867]1978: 44)? Which proposition belongs to the lucid scholar? If we allow ourselvesto be trapped by this double bind, then critique stops. There is no objective way toidentify the lucid scholar: Is it the “lunatic” in charge of the asylum or the inmate? Ifthe paradigms are incommensurable, then we cannot even begin to answer Green’ssecond question.

Fortunately there are ways out of a double bind. In Zen Buddhism, for example,

the Zen Master sometimes uses the double bind to instruct students. He holds astick over the head of the student and says, “If you say this stick is real, I will strikeyou with it; if you say it is not real, I will strike you with it; if you say nothing, I willstrike you with it.” A student can escape the double bind by reaching up and tak-ing the master’s stick away (Bateson et al. 1956: 254). In like manner, the humanist

victim of Latour’s posthuman stick—the insane asylum metaphor—must reach upand take it away. One does this not by ridiculing an opponent but by respectfuldisagreement. Ultimately, academic debate is about the explanatory adequacy ofcompeting theories. It behoves a critic of the dominant orthodoxy to identify thekey assumptions of a dominant paradigm, to locate these ideas historically, and to

demonstrate the merits of an alternative approach rather than to condemn it onmoral grounds.


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This is what Graeber tries to do in his book oward an anthropological theory ofvalue: he false coin of our dreams (2001). He critically surveys a vast body of litera-ture and develops a novel approach to the theory of value informed by his anarchistpolitical stance, novel because while Marxist-inspired thought is popular withinthe academy, anarchist-inspired thought is extremely rare. Graeber shows respectto his opponents by taking their ideas seriously, by subjecting their theories to aclose reading, and by paying particular attention to their advances. For example,he argues that the real importance of Appadurai’s 1986 essay was the liberating ef-fect it had on other scholars, enabling them to ask new questions about the globalflow of objects. On the other hand, he argues that Appadurai’s theory, and that ofBourdieu, are variations on the theoretical “return of economic man” (ibid.: 26–33)in a neoliberal era.

Graeber’s alternative theory of value, it must be said, has received little criti-cal attention. This has nothing to do with the merits of his new theory—of whichthere are many—but because he was saying things scholars did not want to hear.In the decade that followed the publication of his book, cultural economy took off.It officially came of age in March 2008, when the Journal of Cultural Economy waslaunched. This was the naming ritual for a paradigm whose conception and birthwas decades in the making (Appadurai 1990; du Gay and Pryke 2002). The editor’sintroduction to the first issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy gives us someinsight into this history.

Intriguing ground has opened over recent years as [a] result ofmultidisciplinary efforts to unsettle the partitioning off of the “economy”and the “economic” from those working outside the discipline of

economics. It is now increasingly clear that economists are just one ofa multitude of agents involved in “preparing and repairing” markets aswell as being generally active in many areas associated with economiclife: organisations, markets, economies. These three are not pre-formedobjects: they are given shape and meaning by a host of socio-cultural-technical practices that aid what has been called the “performation” orperformative action of economics. (Bennett, McFall, and Pryke 2008: 1)

The following paragraph gives us insight into the theoretical orientation of thismultidisciplinary team.

Perhaps most important of all have been those developments across actor-

network theory, feminist cyborg theory, assemblage theory, Foucauldianand Deleuzian conceptions of the machinic, and posthumanist theorywhich have disputed the validity of the separations which placed natureon one side of a dividing line and the economy, the social and culture onthe other side as, although different, all equally non-natural. (Bennett,McFall, and Pryke 2008: 2)

Needless to say, this new paradigm is a broad church that contains a great varietyof people (and animated things) with varying points of view. Like any academicparadigm, it is united more by what it opposes than what it proposes, but two keythemes stand out, both inspired by Weber and Knight. The first concerns the roleof nonhuman agency in market calculation in an age of radical uncertainty. One ofthe paradoxes of the mainstream tradition of economic thought, Callon (1998: 1)


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correctly notes, is how little attention it gives to the market, the central institutionthat forms the basis of commercial life. Mainstream economists pay lip service toAdam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” of the market, but few have botheredto investigate its functioning; Callon sets out to do just this. The second themeconcerns the role of religion in the life of the financial trader in the modern post-1971 global era. Wherein lies the “spirit” of contemporary finance capitalism? Thisis Appadurai’s principal question.

Before we critically examine these theories, it is necessary to update Graeber’scritique in the light of developments after his book was published in 2001. Culturaleconomy does involve the “return of economic man” of mainstream economics butin a radically new guise. Mainstream economics has many subdivisions, and recentdevelopments in cultural economy enable us to grasp the finer points of culturaleconomy’s critique of one of these subdivisions.

Cultural economy’s critique of mainstream economics

Cultural economy is founded on the work of Frank H. Knight and his student Ed-ward Chamberlin. From the perspective of classical economic anthropology—bywhich I mean that lineage of thought from Malinowksi via Polanyi to Sahlins deal-ing with the question of gift exchange and reciprocity—this rehabilitation of Knightappears, at first sight, as the rehash of the old formalist/substantivist debate and the“return of economic man.” Knight immortalized himself in the annals of economicanthropology by arguing that the “principles of economy are known intuitively;

it is not possible to discriminate the economic character of behavior by sense ob-servation; and the anthropologist, sociologist, or historian seeking to discover or

validate economic laws by inductive investigation has embarked on a ‘wild goosechase’” (1941: 254). This rather extreme position was the origin of an unproductivedebate about methods, with the substantivists arguing that the homo economicusof mainstream economics was a formalist’s fiction and that economic anthropol-ogy must be grounded empirically in Malinowskian-inspired ethnography andPolanyian-inspired economic history. But if we dig a little deeper, it becomes ap-parent that cultural economy is not a rehash of an old debate about methods buta paradigm shift that proposes a new theory of value. Cultural economy does not

deny the importance of ethnography and economic history and it is not a simple-minded rehabilitation of mainstream economics. It distinguishes the theories ofKnight from those of his most famous student, Milton Friedman, and criticallydevelops the former by rejecting the latter.

Mainstream economics is united in its opposition to the labor theory of valuebut divided when it comes to the finer points of the marginal utility theory of valueit proposes. This theory has its origins in the late nineteenth century, and while ithas undergone significant internal developments over the past hundred years, it isstill the dominant orthodoxy today. In this respect the history of the marginal util-ity theory of value is similar to the history of the labor theory of value. Just as the

theories of Adam Smith (1723–90), David Ricardo (1772–1823), and Karl Marx(1818–83) represent significant turning points in the history of the labor theory of


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value, in like manner the theories of Jevons (1835–82), Knight (1885–1972), Keynes(1883–1946), and Friedman (1912–2006) represent significant turning points inmainstream economics. Approaches to the question of value enable us to definedominant competing paradigms—nineteenth-century classic political economy inthe former case, twentieth-century neoclassical economics in the latter—but leaveopen the question of the nature of differences within a paradigm.

It is relatively easy to identify a new paradigm because, as Pearce and Maynardnote, “conceptual changes show up as changes in language” (1973: x). A labor the-ory of value, by definition, is production-centric, and this perspective informs thelanguage used. Thus terms like commodity , use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value define the terms of debate in the political economy paradigm; a central ques-tion for them was the principles that govern the distribution of income between theproductive classes in the form of wages, profits, and rent. The utility theory of valueis consumption-centric. Thus the marginal utilities of consumption goods definethe terms of a new debate about individual choice. The paradigm shift that Jevons([1871] 1970) and others effected in the 1870s gave birth to this rational economicindividual who maximizes utility subject to income constraints. Strictly speaking,it is incorrect to call this rational individual “economic man” because the theory ab-stracts from gender and postulates a transhistorical and transcultural being. Knightis correct: someone trying to track down this abstract rational individual usingthe methods of anthropology, history, or human geography is embarked on a wildgoose chase. An abstraction, by definition, is not a concrete person situated in timeand place.

Cultural economy represents a paradigm shift because it is market-centric rath-

er than production-centric or consumption-centric. Appadurai, pioneer that hewas, struggled to formulate the new terms of this new debate,2 and his many neolo-gisms—ethnoscapes, financescapes, and the like (1996: 33)—are evidence of this.Callon’s theoretical language, by contrast, is much more rigorous and precise (see,e.g., Callon 1998, 2005). Being a relative latecomer3 to cultural economy, Callon isfully aware of the theoretical implications of the shift from a consumption-centricapproach to a market-centric approach and develops the new conceptual frame-work with close attention to logical and terminological detail. The problem, as heformulates it, is to understand the market calculation done by agents who are cal-culative using goods that are calculable in exchanges that are calculated ; this calcu-

lation is not done by rational individuals but by a network of calculative agencies.These calculative agencies are “posthuman” in the sense that they involve a net-work of human and nonhuman agents.

So whereas Marx’s labor theory of value privileges the perspective of the indus-trial working class, and neoclassical economics privileges the perspective of the ra-tional individual consumer, cultural economy privileges the market perspective ofthe network of human and nonhuman agents. Cultural economy is a constructive

2. This happened with Jevons too as he struggled to formulate the new terms of the debateof mainstream economics in the 1870s (see Milgate 1987).

3. Callon collaborated with Latour on the development of actor network theory beforeturning his attention to cultural economy.


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critique of neoclassical economics in that it transcends the problem of rational in-dividual choice to consider the problem of market calculation in a new global or-der where neoliberal policies have triumphed. It is a negative critique of classicalMarxist political economy in that it turns the labor theory of value upside down.Cultural economy argues that value is created by calculative agents of a human andnonhuman kind, not by industrial workers. It draws attention to the undisputedhistorical fact that nineteenth-century industrial centers like Manchester are nolonger at the center of the world economy, their role having been usurped by finan-cial centers in Wall Street and elsewhere. These new financial centers, as culturaleconomy sees it, create networks of human and nonhuman agents that bind theglobe together in ways never seen before in human history.

Another notable feature of this brave new world that cultural economy cor-rectly identifies is radical uncertainty. The pre-1971 era of fixed exchange ratesintroduced a degree of certainty into an otherwise uncertain world. In those days,market traders knew that the exchange rate of dollars for yen would be the sametomorrow as today. As such they could be certain that whatever profit or loss theymade was due to the vagaries of the market, not to any changes in the value of mon-ey. The post-1971 era of flexible exchange eliminated this certainty and creatednew avenues for risky investments in speculative currency trading as the prices ofnational monies fluctuated.

Radical uncertainty of market outcome is, therefore, a central plank of culturaleconomy, and this is why Knight is so important to it. Knight was a neoclassicaleconomist of the purest marginalist kind, but he differed from other mainstreameconomists in one significant respect. Whereas the marginalist theories of his col-

leagues involved unrealistic assumptions about perfect competition and perfectknowledge of the future, he insisted on realistic assumptions about the latter, al-though he was prepared to make “drastic assumptions” about other matters. Thisschizoid approach can be found in his classic work Risk, uncertainty, and profit(1921). His method of argumentation here is the classic intuitive ahistorical oneof the neoclassical economists that privileges the perspective of the rational indi-

vidual consumer.

Starting with the individual psychology of valuation and adding newfactors step by step, we have now built up a competitive industrialsociety involving valuation and distribution under the highly simplified

conditions necessary to perfect competition. The drastic assumptionsmade were necessary to show the operation of the forces at work freefrom all disturbing influences; and impossible as the presuppositionshave been, the principles involved have not been falsified or changed, butmerely exhibited in purity and isolation. (Knight 1921: III.VII.1)

But at the same time he could argue the following.

Uncertainty is one of the fundamental facts of life. It is as ineradicablefrom business decisions as from those in any other field. The amount ofuncertainty may, however, be reduced in several ways, as we have seen.In the first place, we can increase our knowledge of the future through

scientific research and the accumulation and study of the necessary data.To do this involves cost, the expenditure of resources which must be


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drawn from other uses. Another way is by the clubbing of uncertaintiesthrough large-scale organization of various forms. This operation alsoinvolves costs, and not merely in the sense of expenditure of resources.There is also to be considered the loss of individual freedom involvedin any possible plan of organization, a loss for the great mass of persons

affected, though possibly a gain for a few who may secure wider powersand a larger range of action from the concentration of authority. (Knight1921: III.XII.1)

He draws a sharp distinction between uncertainty and risk.

There is a fundamental distinction between the reward for taking aknown risk and that for assuming a risk whose value itself is not known.It is so fundamental, indeed, that, as we shall see, a known risk will notlead to any reward or special payment at all. (Knight 1921: I.II.38)

This is the basis of his theory of profit.

The only “risk” which leads to a profit is a unique uncertainty resultingfrom an exercise of ultimate responsibility which in its very naturecannot be insured nor capitalized nor salaried. Profit arises out of theinherent, absolute unpredictability of things, out of the sheer brute factthat the results of human activity cannot be anticipated and then only inso far as even a probability calculation in regard to them is impossibleand meaningless. The receipt of profit in a particular case may be arguedto be the result of superior judgment. But it is judgment of judgment,especially one’s own judgment, and in an individual case there is noway of telling good judgment from good luck, and a succession of cases

sufficient to evaluate the judgment or determine its probable valuetransforms the profit into a wage. (Knight 1921: III.X.33)

He contrasts his theory of profit with others, including Marx’s, and, not surpris-ingly, finds them wanting.

A special place in the history of theories of profit should be given to theGerman socialist school, the so-called “scientific” socialists, Rodbertus,Marx, Engels, Lassalle, and their followers. These writers take the Englishclassical treatment of profit in a narrowly literal (one must say whollyuncritical and superficial) sense as including all income accruing tocapital, to which they add land. Combining this with an equally blind

reading of the labor theory of value which was the starting-point of Smithand Ricardo, they derive a simple classification of income in which allthat is not wages is a profit which represents exploitation of the workingclasses. Capital is equivalent to property, which is to be regarded as merepower over the economic activities of others due to the strategic positionof ownership over the implements of labor. It is analogous to a robberbaron’s crag, a toll-gate on a natural highway, or a political franchise toexploit. (Knight 1921: I.II.10)

I have quoted liberally from Knight because it his theories of uncertainty and profitthat cultural economy adopts and develops, not those of Marx or Keynes, for whom

uncertainty was also something to be affirmed rather than denied. Also impor-tant to cultural economy are the ideas of Knight’s student Edward Chamberlin on


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“imperfect competition” (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002: 200). It sufficesto note that what distinguishes Knight and Chamberlin from Friedman and oth-ers in the mainstream tradition is a concern for the realism of the assumptions.Knight and Chamberlin were both happy to make “drastic assumptions” in orderto understand the principles of economics in their purity but not assumptions thatdenied the reality of the brute fact of uncertainty and, in Chamberlin’s case, thereality of “imperfect competition.” Friedman, by contrast, held that the “realismof assumptions is irrelevant to the assessment of a scientific theory” (1953: 3). Theimplication of this extraordinary position meant that economists could developmathematical models of the economy based on perfect knowledge not only of thepast and present, as in Knight’s case, but also of the future. This assumption deniesuncertainty and allows for the development of models premised on the belief thatthe future is predictable and is calculable using probability theory. Assumptionsof this kind are the basis of most mainstream economic theories today; they alsoinform the strategies of many financial traders in the market. Cultural economyhas no truck with mainstream economics of this kind. It develops Knight’s con-cept of uncertainty and rejects totally any idea that the economic future is pre-dictable. Appadurai (2013: 243) not only follows Knight, he goes one step furtherand denounces uncertainty deniers as magicians whose unscientific practices—forexample, predictive economic models based on probability theory—are “in realityno different from the charts of astrologers, psychics, or tarot card operators” (ibid.:244). The vicious “ethics of probability” of these magicians stands opposed to the

virtuous “ethics of possibility” of those informed by Knightian science. Today’s fi-nancial players, Appadurai notes,

are able to take advantage of Knight’s work and use their sense of grace (inregard to uncertainty) to animate their manipulation of derivative marketsand their risk devices. They too rely on being successful beneficiariesof the power of devices they operate to guarantee returns that are quitedisproportionate to the amounts they wage to begin with. . . . What is atstake . . . is the interlinked nature of honor and credit. (2013: 251)

The profit these people earn “actually depends on the capacity to face uncertaintyrather than to manage risk. Profit is the reward for facing uncertainty , not for man-aging risk or even less, as in Weber’s analysis, for methodical business practice”(ibid.: 247, emphasis added). Probability and possibility “have become dangerously

confused,” argues Appadurai,4 “opening the door to myriad schemes, scams, anddistortions” (ibid.: 244). The future of anthropology as a critical discipline, he con-cludes, must be an ethics of possibility grounded in Knightian uncertainty.

4. It is very easy to confuse these two closely related terms. In Australia, shortlisted can-didates for a representative football team are divided into “possibles” and “probables”who play each other prior to final selection; confusion reigns among the shortlisted asto which team is the better one to belong to. Appadurai’s usage associates an ethics of probability with predictability of the future using probability theory . He confirms (email

dated April 15, 2014) that the second last sentence of his book (2013: 300) contains atypographical error: where he refers to “the ethics of probability” he means “the ethicsof possibility,” that is, a world where the future is uncertain.


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The humanist has no quarrel with Appadurai’s argument that theorists whodeny uncertainty are like black magicians whose thoughts and actions in today’sworld are morally questionable. Only a cursory knowledge of the Enron affair orthe collapse of Lehman Brothers is necessary to see the merits of it. The assump-tion of perfect knowledge of the future is a theological one, and people such asFriedman are rightly termed high priests of the free market. But it should be notedthat it is not Friedman’s thoughts on the free market that concerns cultural econ-omy; it is actions of policy makers and traders in the market that are the problem.Those who act on the basis of conceptual models that deny uncertainty are theblack magicians whom Appadurai calls to account. The religious spirit of marketcalculation that Appadurai’s ethics of possibility tries to capture is something elseagain. To understand this it is necessary to consider cultural economy’s critique ofclassical economic anthropology.

Cultural economy’s critique of classical economic anthropology

The history of economic anthropology in the twentieth century can be read as along struggle to bury the homo economicus of mainstream economics (Hann andHart 2011). Paradoxically, cultural economy has succeeded in doing this not byopposing the idea homo economicus but by modifying and developing it. In theprocess it has buried classical economic anthropology under a new posthumantheory of value.

The long struggle to bury homo economicus begins with Malinowski.

Another notion which must be exploded, once and for ever, is that ofthe Primitive Economic Man of some current economic text books. Thisfanciful, dummy creature, who has been very tenacious of existencein popular and semi-popular economic literature, and whose shadowhaunts even the minds of competent anthropologists, blighting theiroutlook with a pre conceived idea, is an imaginary, primitive man, orsavage, prompted in all his actions by a rationalistic conception of self-interest, and achieving his aims directly and with the minimum of effort.Even one well established instance should show how preposterous is thisassumption that man, and especially man on a low level of culture, shouldbe actuated by pure economic motives of enlightened self-interest. The

primitive Trobriander furnishes us with such an instance, contradictingthis fallacious theory. He works prompted by motives of a highly complex,social and traditional nature, and towards aims which are certainlynot directed towards the satisfaction of present wants, or to the directachievement of utilitarian purposes. (Malinowski [1922] 1961: 60)

Different variations of this argument can be found in the work of Polanyi, Sahlins,and others working in what used to be called the “tribal economy” tradition ofeconomic anthropology. The neo-Marxist revolution in the 1960s continued thisline of critique by drawing attention to the coevality of tribal, peasant, and capital-ist economies and posing the question of the articulation of these modes of pro-duction in the new era of capitalist imperialism. Cultural economy, for its part,changed the terms of debate: out went the language of gifts and commodities and


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imperialism, in came the language of calculable goods and the new problem of un-derstanding market calculation in an era of globalization. This involved turning theold fiction of homo economicus into a new reality. Callon led this revolution.

Whether we choose to enhance the economic theory of the agent

or denounce it, in both cases we formulate the same critique: homoeconomicus is pure fiction. This introduction, as well as the entire bookin fact, maintains the contrary. Yes, homo economicus really does exist. Ofcourse, he exists in the form of many species and his lineage is multiple andramified. . . . He is formatted, framed and equipped with prostheses whichhelp him in his calculations and which are, for the most part, produced byeconomics. Suddenly new horizons open up to anthropology. It is not amatter of giving a soul back to a dehumanized agent, nor of rejecting the

very idea of his existence. The objective may be to explore the diversityof calculative agencies forms and distributions, and hence of organizedmarkets. The market is no longer that cold, implacable and impersonal

monster which imposes its laws and procedures while extending themever further. It is a many-sided, diversified, evolving device which thesocial sciences as well as actors themselves contribute to reconfigure.(Callon 1998: 51)

Homo economicus is reborn in the plural with a new name, calculative agencies, in anew theoretical home, cultural economy, where the future is uncertain and globalfinancial markets rule. “Calculative agencies,” we are told elsewhere (Callon andMuniesa 2005: 1236),

are not human individuals but collective hybrids, “centres of calculation.”

. . . These agencies are equipped with instruments; calculation does nottake place only in human minds, but is distributed among humans andnon-humans. . . . Calculative agencies, along with calculable goods andcalculated exchanges, constitute the three elements that define concretemarkets as organized collective devices that calculate compromises onthe values of goods.

Callon’s careful and precise use of the language of “goods” betrays the kinship linksthis theory has with the mainstream economics tradition; but by relocating the

value-creating work of this agent from the sphere of consumption to the market,he transforms homo economicus completely. Three key innovations must be noted:

• the individual economic agent, homo economicus, is replaced by anetwork of posthuman calculative agencies;

• rational choice theory is replaced by market calculation done by agentswho are calculative, with goods that are calculable in exchanges thatare calculated ;

• certainty of market outcome is replaced by radical uncertainty .

Callon’s extensive writings on the theory of calculable goods are a logically rigor-ous reformulation of Appadurai’s (1986: 3) early thesis that it is the social life ofthings in the sphere of exchange that creates value. Things, he notes, referring fa-

vorably to Appadurai’s “apt expression, are goods with a career” (Callon, Méadel,and Rabeharisoa 2002: 199). Callon and his collaborators develop this idea by


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revisiting Chamberlin’s 1946 theory of value, which they find essential to their ar-gument (ibid.: 200). This argument is complex and technical and beyond the scopeof this paper to develop. Of more interest are the theoretical implications of thetheory of calculable goods for understanding cultural economy’s critique of thetheory of gift and the gift/commodity distinction more generally.

The beginning of this critique is found in Appadurai’s 1986 essay where he notesthat the “exaggeration and reification of the contrast between gift and commodityin anthropological writing has many sources” (1986: 11). His critique was explicitlyaddressed to those of us in the neo-Marxist tradition—Taussig and I are namedas examples—who sought to develop the classical tradition of tribal economy bysituating the gift in the historical context of colonialism. His counterargument wasthat “in trying to make sense of what is distinctive about commodity exchange, itdoes not make sense to distinguish it sharply either from barter on the one hand,or from the exchange of gifts on the other” (ibid.: 13).

Callon develops this argument further using the language of calculable goodsand the idea of uncertainty. From this theoretical standpoint a gift presents itself as aform of noncalculative agency and poses the problem of how a theory of calculativeagency can explain its apparent opposite. Callon (1998) answers this paradox by de-

veloping Bourdieu’s ([1972] 1977: 8–15) analysis of gifts and uncertainty. “There isnothing in human nature, there are no sectors or activity, which impose exclusivelyor successively, either disinterested or calculative actions,” declares Callon (1998:14–15). The formatting of relationships between selfishness and altruism, markettransaction or love relationship, “will orientate the agent towards calculativeness ordisinterestedness.” The emergence of calculative agency depends on the time frame:

“The shorter the interval, the more the gift will be experienced as calculative.” “Toput it bluntly,” he adds (ibid.), “there is as much artificiality in the altruistic gift,in the interpersonal relationship (based on trust, for instance) as in the striving tomaximize profits. Both forms of agency imply huge investments, especially mate-rial. Neither of the two is more human or anthropologically correct than the other.”

This critique not only dissolves the distinction between gifts and commodities,it also dissolves the tribe/peasant/capitalism trichotomy of socioeconomic typesthat formed the basis of 1960s and 1970s neo-Marxism. Posthumanists critiquewhat they call “Kapitalism” (with a capital K), the simple-minded and unresearchedimage that anthropologists have of the economy of the West (Callon 2005). Their

counterargument is that the global world of today is an extremely complicated,historically evolving, network of human and nonhuman agents whose social andreligious interactions demand long-term research of an ethnographic, geograph-ical, and historical kind before it can be understood; in short, that fieldwork in“Wall Street” is needed before one can pontificate about it. One word, globaliza-tion, has replaced the old trichotomy of tribe, peasant, and capitalist and with itthe problem of violent imperialist conquest. For the posthumanist, “the market isa process in which calculative agencies oppose one another, without resorting tophysical violence, to reach an acceptable compromise in the form of a contract and/or price” (Callon 1998: 3). This image of a peaceful moral economy of the post-

modern market could not be more different from the image of the vicious moraleconomy of the premodern market of classical Marxism with its “rebellions of thebelly” (Thompson 1971: 77).


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Toward a critique of cultural economy’s theory of value

This brief account of cultural economy is hardly an adequate exposition of a com-plex theoretical development that has been decades in the making, that is stillevolving, and that involves contributions from scholars from many disciplines; but

cultural economy is, to repeat, a broad church united more by what it opposesthat what it proposes. I have tried to identify these unifying themes through myexamination of cultural economy’s critique of mainstream economics and classicaleconomic anthropology. To recapitulate: risk, uncertainty, and nonhuman agencyare the key assumptions that form the basis of a new posthuman theory of value.This is a rehabilitation of the theory of goods of mainstream economics but nota “return to economic man” as the supreme valuer. Cultural economy moves the

valuer from the sphere of consumption to the marketplace and reconceptualizesthe valuer in the plural as a network of human and nonhuman agents. This is not areturn to formalist economics. Cultural economy accepts Knight’s theory of uncer-

tainty but not his ahistorical methods. Herein lies the challenge of posthumanismfor classical economic anthropology: cultural economy proposes a new theory of

value grounded historically in the new global order that emerged after the VietnamWar, one that recognizes the dominance of finance capital in this order. This bringsme to Green’s second question: What might count as an intervention in this debate?Do we work within the paradigm to advance it or do we challenge its fundamentalassumptions and critique it from without? Or, to put it another way, does Appadu-rai’s “ethics of possibility” define the future of anthropology?

Cultural economy’s great achievement is to acknowledge the historical changesin the world economy and polity, and to realize that these changes call for a fun-

damental rethink in our approach to anthropology. The now extensive literatureon the ethnography of finance is a product of these new developments. Scholarsin other disciplines have also made significant contributions to this literature inthe areas of economic history, economic sociology, accounting, and so on. Thismaterial has provided us with fascinating new data on the relationship betweenuncertainty and profit and the role of new financial products in linking the two.I choose just two examples to illustrate this empirical point before getting to themore controversial theoretical issues.

The first is Miyazaki’s (2013) ethnography of Japanese financial market pro-fessionals in Tokyo, which explores, in the classic Malinowskian tradition, the

meaning of “profit” from the “native point of view” of traders. Traders define fourideal trading types, three axes of difference, and one simple strategy. The latter is“buy cheap, sell dear,” and three axes of difference employed are time, place, andknowledge. The Speculator, the first ideal type, hopes to make a profit by exploit-ing temporal differences in prices: when he trades “long,” he buys cheap today andsells dear tomorrow; when he trades “short,” he sells dear today and buys cheaptomorrow. The Hedger, the second ideal type, also exploits temporal differences inprices, but, risk-averse character that he is, minimizes loses by counterbalancinghis trades just like the gambler who has an each-way bet on a horse. The Arbitrager,the third ideal type, exploits geographical differences in prices: he buys cheap here

and sells dear there. This type of trade is virtually riskless, but one has to be quickoff the mark to exploit the profit-making opportunity when it arises. Miyazaki’s


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traders, whose technology lagged behind those in Wall Street, were unsuccessful inrealizing these riskless profits. The final ideal type, the Insider Trader, is based ondifferences in knowledge: near-certain profit can be made by buying cheap fromthe ignorant and selling dear to those who know the real market price of a financialasset. The legality, ethics, and morality of these different types of financial profitmaking have varied across nation and over historical time as regulators react tocrises and political pressure to change existing laws. The rules of the state, then, arethe first reality check on these ideal types. The second complication arises from thefact that the three axes of difference—time, place, and knowledge—are inextricablybound up together. The reality is a synthetic merging of the four ideal types. Forexample, one might buy cheap here and now in the hope of selling dear there andtomorrow by exploiting someone whose knowledge of the market is limited. Thekey word here is “hope,” because the trader is faced with the brute fact of uncer-tainty. Building on the theories and praxis of George Soros, one of the most suc-cessful financial traders of the current era, Miyazaki develops an ethnographicallyinformed theory of the financial trader as a “thinking subject” rather than a “deci-sion maker.” Miyazaki does not refer to Knight’s theory of uncertainty and profit,but the distinction between the profits of the Arbitrager, on the one hand, andthose of the Hedger and the Speculator, on the other, illustrate Knight’s argumentof the significance of the difference between known risks and unknown risks. Theprofits of the Insider Trader are something else again. Legally, they should not bepart of the game, but the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) gives us pause for thoughtabout the morality and significance of such traders: Is insider trading the exceptionor part of business as usual?

A second example is Millo’s (2007) historical geography of the origins of index-based derivatives. If the bride was the “supreme gift” in the tribal economy paradigm,then the derivative is the supreme “calculable good” for the cultural economy para-digm. The derivative is the ultimate abstraction, a financial product that exists only asa mathematical formula in the future. Derivatives have uncertain future prices, andeven those that are otherwise identical will have different future prices, a differencewhich means that profits (and losses) can be made by buying cheap and selling dear.Millo’s short but enlightening article reveals how these radically new financial formsarose in the post-1971 era. These new financial products have a complexity that isquite literally beyond human comprehension; they are created by mathematicians

using supercomputers and the most advanced statistical techniques. If Marx foundthe nineteenth-century industrial commodity to be “a very queer thing, aboundingin metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” ([1867] 1978: 44), then he wouldmarvel at the hyperfetishism of this twenty-first-century financial commodity.

Many other examples could be used to illustrate the important empirical advances that historians and ethnographers in the cultural economy paradigm havemade to our concrete understanding of the present global order, but I now turn tothe new theory of value that defines the cultural economy paradigm. This is a muchmore problematic area, and I restrict myself to a consideration of the work of justtwo key theorists, Callon and Appadurai. The theory of market calculation these

scholars advance is, among other things, a new theory of profit that takes the novelperspective of a posthuman agent. This new theory transcends nineteenth- andtwentieth-century debates about theories of profit and the spirit that animates it.


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For Marx, the industrial wage-laborer was the value producer; profit was a mea-sure of the exploitation of the surplus labor of the working class. Weber, by con-trast, found the “seed-bed of capitalistic economy” to lie within the people of theCalvinistic diaspora ([1930] 2001: 10): it was they who sought profit rationally andsystematically; it was they who had succeeded in eliminating magic as a means tosalvation. The course of twentieth-century debates in mainstream economics havebeen shaped by the debates between the Friedmanites and the Keynesians, the for-mer basing their theories of value on the agency of an individual decision makerand the necessity of his/her freedom, the latter on the necessity of the role of thegovernment regulator to ensure long-term wealth and prosperity.

These early debates, it must be stressed, did not dispute the role of religiosity incommercial life. Marx, Keynes, and Weber, for example, are agreed that religiousthinking plays a role in commercial life, but they find its workings in differentplaces: Weber found it in the Protestant ethics of the entrepreneur; Marx found itin the fetishism of commodities in the sphere of exchange; and Keynes found it inthe gold holdings of central banks.5 Callon and Appadurai transcend these debatesby defining the valuer as a hybrid network of human and nonhuman calculativeagents in a new global era of finance capital. Their perspective is that of a certainclass of posthuman financial trader, the one informed by Knightian uncertainty.Appadurai, following Weber, is concerned to understand the “spirit of calculation”that motivates this posthuman agent. Appadurai perceives a “great divide” betweenCallon and himself. While Callon argues that the best way to understand marketdevices today is “to account for their performativity as devices,” Appadurai is dis-posed “to think that there is something akin to a Gödel-type problem in inducing

the spirit that animates a particular set of mechanisms from within the propertiesof the device itself” (2013: 234). In a global world where religion and commerciallife constitute an indissoluble bond, the debate is about who gets to define God andGood—that is, about fundamental values that inform our thoughts about what isand our actions about what could and should be.

The theories of Callon and Appadurai are two variations on the general themeof posthumanism that has become very popular today. Their focus is the finan-cial market, and the debate between them is internal to the paradigm rather thanexternal to it in the sense that they do not question the fundamental posthumanassumption that informs cultural economy. In other words, they both agree that

things have agency, even though they conceive of this agency in different ways.An external critique begins by questioning this posthumanist assumption. Callon’stheory of the hybrid nonhuman and human valuer can be seen as a reformula-tion of Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” of the market. Callon givesSmith’s version of the labor theory of value a posthumanist twist, but an alternative

5. The rationality of a market system that sent South African miners three miles under-ground to extract gold to be shipped halfway across the world in order to be reburiedin vaults three miles underground in places like Fort Knox made no sense to Keynes.“The magical properties, with which Egyptian anciently imbued the yellow metal,” he

argues (Keynes 1930: 258–9), “it has never altogether lost.” Elsewhere he notes that ifcentral bank holdings of gold “were to fade into air everything else would continue justas it did before—provided we were not told” (ibid.: 219).


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interpretation, consistent with Smith’s humanism, is to argue that the invisiblehand is an artifact of the well-known principle that the whole is greater than thesum of the parts. For example, the behavior of a crowd is greater than the sum ofthe actions of the individuals who make it up. This is the case even when membersof a crowd are empty handed. It is true that when people in a crowd carry devicessuch as cell phones and guns the crowd behavior may vary; but to say that this isdue to the nonhuman agency of the devices is to deny the agency of the people whouse them as instruments. The debate about whole and parts, like the debate aboutguns, can be pushed this way and that, and recent developments in digital technol-ogy have enlivened an old debate. This is an important discussion to have, and it isone on which reasonable people may disagree.

But Appadurai’s position raises the debate to another level when he argues thatwe must attribute intentionality to things. To assume that inanimate objects havea spirit that animates them is quite literally a form of spiritualism. This is an as-sumption that no humanist, whatever his or her colors, can accept. Appadurai isnot alone in making radical posthumanist assumptions of this kind, as suggestedby the title of Holbraad’s recent essay Can the thing speak? It is one thing for animalliberationists to question nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions aboutthe differences between humans and animals, but quite another for posthumaniststo question the distinction between animals and things by attributing animal char-acteristics to things. For the humanist, these assumptions are part of the problemto be explained in the current era of hypercommodity fetishism, not a solution toit. We again find ourselves at an impasse. The humanist is caught once again inLatour’s double bind. Communications stops.

We can open communication by moving the locus of debate from one aboutfundamental assumptions to one about the competitive explanatory adequacyof theories that follow from different assumptions. We have seen, for example,that Appadurai uses Knight’s theory of uncertainty to argue that profit is thereward for facing uncertainty. The adequacy of this theory can only be assessedby examining competing theories. There can be no doubt that financial tradersreceive this reward and that the relative size of any one trader’s reward dependsupon his or her success at outsmarting rivals, as Mizayaki’s (2013) ethnographyreveals. But who pays the ultimate reward? There are many answers to this ques-tion, but I limit myself to a consideration of the one provided by the demonstra-

tors in the Occupy movement, who claim that they are the “99%” who pay thereward to the wolves of Wall Street, the 1%.6 Herein lies a challenge to the theory

6. Evidence to support this assessment can be in the Final report of the National Com-mission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States (FCIC2011). When legislative changes made it profitable for banks to securitize loans, theywere able to extend new-found credit at superprime rates (i.e., relatively high rates) tosubprime borrowers (i.e. those with a problematic credit history). This set off a boomin housing prices. The wealth effect enabled subpr,ime borrowers to refinance theirhouses and further contribute to the boom in housing prices. When the bust came in

2008, subprime borrowers were the victims. Their lives have been devastated and it willtake decades for them to recover. Meanwhile the profits of financial traders have tripledand large bonuses to executives are being paid once again (ibid.: Pt. V).


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of value that informs cultural economy because the ethnographers and theoristsof the Occupy movement propose a new ethics of possibility for the future ofanthropology.

Graeber7 has been a central figure in this movement as activist, ethnographer,and political theorist. His values led him to Wall Street to protest on the streetsrather than to study the traders in their offices. His participant observation of theOccupy movement and other similar movements has resulted in two ethnographicstudies (Graeber 2009, 2013) and an economic history of debt (Graeber 2011). Hisactions, as noted above, are informed by an anarchist political philosophy (Graeber2004). His books, which include an ethnography in the classic tradition (Graeber2007) among others, postdate his oward an anthropological theory of value (2001)and constitute an extraordinary one-man assault on the multidisciplinary para-digm that is cultural economy. The politics and ethics of possibility that Graeberproposes could not be more different from that of cultural economy. The crucialdifference is that of perspective: Graeber takes that of the 99%, but he is not alonein this venture. This new paradigm of which he is part is in the early stage of its de-

velopment and, like cultural economy, contains contributors from many disciplineswith many different theoretical perspectives (Hart, Laville, and Cattani 2010). Theleading theorists of this movement, it seems, tend to find their inspiration in theanarchist rather than Marxist tradition of thought. This, at least, is the case forGraeber and Chomsky. As the latter notes,

The world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat—inthe imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literalnumbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is

and it could continue like this. If it does, the historic reversal that beganin the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. Andthe Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that couldavert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long,hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form thestructures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times andcan win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.(Chomsky 2012: 1)

This radical perspective on the twenty-first-century value question redefinescultural economy’s network of nonhuman and human calculative agents in hu-

man terms as the plutonomy and poses the question of the means by whichincome is redistributed from the precariat to the plutonomy—that is, of how therich use the institutions and devices of financial capitalism to enrich themselveseven further (see, e.g., Standing 2014). Uncertainty and risk loom large in thisparadigm too. Knight correctly notes that uncertainty can be reduced, but at acost. Theorists in this alternative tradition such as Beck note that the plutonomyare able to pay this cost and to reap its benefits. In other words, the profit the

7. Graeber’s analysis builds on a large body of post-1980s ethnographic, historical, and

theoretical work that develops a constructive critique of the classical literature of giftsand commodities. This literature is reviewed in the preface of the second edition of myGifts and commodities (Gregory 2015).


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plutonomy receive is not from being able to face uncertainty but from being ableto reduce it.

The type, pattern and media for the distribution of risks differsystematically from those of the distribution of wealth. That does not

exclude risks from often being distributed in a stratified or class-specificway. In this sense there are broad overlapping areas between class andrisk society. The history of risk distribution shows that, like wealth,risks adhere to the class pattern, only inversely: wealth accumulates atthe top, risks at the bottom. To that extent, risks seem to strengthen, notto abolish, the class society. Poverty attracts an unfortunate abundanceof risks. By contrast, the wealthy (in income, power or education) canpurchase safety and freedom from risk. (Beck 1992: 35)

This approach privileges the social relationship between people rather than theagency of things. Both approaches locate their analyses in the twenty-first-century

financial marketplace, but posthumanists take a different turn when they focus onthe harmonious relationship between human and nonhuman calculative agencyrather than the antagonistic human relationship between the plutonomy and theprecariat.

My intention is not to assess the explanatory adequacy of these competing theo-ries but simply to note that the dominant cultural economy paradigm,8 and theposthumanist theory of value that informs it, has its limits. Humanism is reassert-ing itself in a new guise with a new theory of value. This is, of course, how it shouldbe. Academic thought has been enriched by the twentieth-century debates betweenthe Marxists and the Weberians, on the one hand, and those between the Keynes-

ians and the Friedmanites, on the other. An alternative approach to the theory of value in the twenty-first century that privileges the perspective of the precariat overthe plutonomy is to be welcomed.

By way of conclusion, it should be noted that cultural economy catches usin a double bind of a type for which there is no escape. It has redefined the“ethnographic present” as the new global order, one in which we are all partici-pant observers whether we like it or not. When it comes to understanding theethnographic present of today’s uncertain world, it must be admitted that weare all in the dark. This is another brute fact of reality. We have no option butto cope with this dilemma. This requires a certain humility but also a vigorous

debate about the ethics of different possibilities, because one person’s dream ofthe future may be another person’s nightmare. The posthumanists of the cul-tural economy paradigm have done us a favor in moving the debate ahead inthe post-Vietnam War period, but the ethics and politics of the possible futuresthey imagine must not be allowed to go unchallenged, for the notion of what

8. One sign of this dominance is Appadurai’s citations. He is one of the most cited anthro-pologists in the history of the discipline, as a quick check on Google Scholar can con-firm. A search I did in March 2014 showed 15,579 citations for Appadurai’s Modernity

at large (1996) and 32,353 for Geertz’s he interpretation of cultures (1973). This gives877 per year for Appadurai since his book was published and 788 per year for Geertz.Of course, some of these citations are critical of Appadurai’s position.


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it means to be human is at stake, and no school of thought has a mortgage onthis question.

AcknowledgmentsI am grateful to participants at the Anthropological Knots Symposium for help-ful comments, and in particular to David Graeber, Sarah Green, Keir Martin, JoelRobbins, and Marilyn Strathern. I have also received helpful comments from FredDamon, Jane Guyer, Chris Hann, and Keith Hart. An ESRC-funded project on the“Domestic moral economy: An ethnographic study of the Asia-Pacific region” hasenabled me to think about the value question in new ways with colleagues at Man-chester. Particular mention must be made of Jon Altman, Rodolfo Maggio, FionaMagowan, Russ Odoni, Rachel Smith, and Karen Sykes. I have also benefited fromthe comments of anonymous reviewers.

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De la religiosité et de la vie commerciale: Vers une critique de l’économieculturelle et de la théorie de la valeur post-humaniste

Résumé : Les transformations révolutionnaires de l’organisation sociale du capital-isme donnent naissance à des transformations révolutionnaires des idées portantsur l’économie et la valeur. Tout comme la Révolution Industrielle de la fin du18e siècle en Angleterre, qui donna lieu à l’émergence de l’économie politique et

à la théorie de la valeur-travail, et l’ère impérialiste de la fin du 19e siècle, qui vitl’émergence de l’économie et de la théorie de la valeur marginale, la période demondialisation de la fin du 20e siècle et du début 21e a donné lieu à l’émergencede l’économie culturelle et à une nouvelle théorie post-humaniste de la valeur,qui attribue aux choses une agentivité (agency). Quelles sont les hypothèses quisoutiennent cette théorie de la valeur? Déshumanise-t-elle l’anthropologie, ou pré-pare-t-elle une anthropologie future, fondée sur une éthique du possible radicale-ment nouvelle? Quoi qu’il en soit, les provocations de l’économie culturelle doiventêtre soumises à un débat rigoureux.

Chris G has appointments in anthropology at the Australian National Uni- versity and the University of Manchester. He has conducted fieldwork in India,


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Papua New Guinea, and Fiji. His research has focused on the relationship betweenkinship, economy, and religion. He is the author of Gifts and commodities (1982;second edition, 2015), Observing the economy (with Jon Altman, 1989), Savagemoney (1997), Lachmi Jagar: Gurumai Sukdai’s story of the Bastar rice goddess (withHarihar Vaishnav, 2003), and numerous articles.

Chris Gregory School of Archaeology and Anthropology College of Arts and Sciences Sir Roland Wilson Building Australian National University Canberra AC 2601 Australia [email protected]
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

Documents

On religiosity and commercial life: Toward a critique of cultural economy and posthumanist value theory