Inter-tribal commodity barter and reproductive gift-exchange in old Melanesia

Gell, Alfred

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511607677.006

Cited by 93 publications

(56 citation statements)

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“…Even in Melanesia people exchanged with strangers in commoditylike barter goods such as salt, feathers and shells in entirely alienable conditions with no sense of continued property rights or gift-like aspects. Indeed Gell (1992) argued that they did so precisely because they enjoyed the freedoms that such abstracted commodity-like exchange allowed them. So the idea that only the market produces such conditions is an illusion.…”

Section: Daniel Miller: Turning Callon the Right Way Up 219mentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning Callon the right way up

Miller¹

2002

Economy and Society

258

151

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This paper argues that, contrary to his own claims, Callon's work amounts to a defence of the economists' model of a framed and abstracted market against empirical evidence that contemporary exchange rarely if ever works according to the laws of the market. I start with an example from an Indian village, which shows how other societies also try to frame particular genres of exchange to protect themselves from other varieties of exchange. But both there and within capitalism the frame is precisely a moral system of how exchange ought to be carried out. I then use the example of car purchasing to suggest the highly entangled world of actual exchange within capitalism both between the exchange partners and also between consumers and commerce more generally. Indeed, the actual case studies in Callon's The Laws of the Markets seem to support this conclusion rather than the model put forward in his own introduction and conclusion. These studies, as others cited here, suggest the centrality of entanglements also for higher-level exchanges, such as stock markets and corporate take-overs, and not just for shoppers or other individual actors. As an alternative to Callon I brie y summarize an argument published elsewhere, called 'virtualism', in which I examine the increasing ability of economists and other agents of abstract models such as audit and consultancy to transform the world into closer approximations of their theories and models. I suggest this provides a more fruitful way of understanding the growth and power of abstraction in the contemporary economy.

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Section: Daniel Miller: Turning Callon the Right Way Up 219mentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning Callon the right way up

Miller¹

2002

Economy and Society

258

151

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Similar to Appadurai (1986) and others (Gell, 1992;Myers, 2001), Monaghan observes that the strategic dimension of the gift reveals broad continuities between gift and other kinds of exchange. This allows him to view goods "not as 'gifts' or 'commodities' in an absolute sense but as moving through phases, with overlapping social features, such as exchangeability and alienability, emphasized or de-emphasized at different times" (Monaghan, 1996, p. 501).…”

Section: Cultural Contexts Of Circulationmentioning

confidence: 55%

Recent Trends in Theorizing Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies

Wells

2006

J Archaeol Res

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Theoretical frames for modeling prehispanic Mesoamerican economies have been informed mostly by political economy or agency approaches. Political economy models examine the ways in which power is constructed and exercised through the manipulation of material transfers, mainly production and distribution. Research along these lines emphasizes regional redistribution, wealth and staple finance, debt and reciprocity, and regional integration through core/periphery relations. Agency models, on the other hand, explore the social aspects of manufacture, circulation, and consumption to infer the processes by which power is negotiated and contested. Work using this framework focuses on the manner by which meaning and value are assigned to, and become fixed in, social valuables, as well as the moral and emotional dimensions of allocation and consumption. Political economy and agency approaches are converging in Mesoamerican research to forge a new, hybrid theoretical construct, "ritual economy," which strikes a balance between formalist and substantivist views by considering the ways that belief systems articulate with economic systems in the management of meanings and the shaping of interpretations.

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“…If a regional-systemic perspective is adopted, it appears that the character of internal exchange is dependent on external articulations (cf. Gell 1992); this appears to be true, at least in a gross sense, where a wide range of cases rather than only the societies of the eastern and western highlands are considered. But my interest is not in proposing that it would be ultimately useful or informative to trace precise correlations on this point.…”

Section: Evolutionary and Non-evolutionary Modelsmentioning

confidence: 94%

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox, and Darrell Tyron. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1995. viii, 359 pp. A$35.OO (paper).

Collins

1997

J of Asian Stud

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Inter-tribal commodity barter and reproductive gift-exchange in old Melanesia

Cited by 93 publications

References 0 publications

Turning Callon the right way up

Turning Callon the right way up

Recent Trends in Theorizing Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies

The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox, and Darrell Tyron. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1995. viii, 359 pp. A$35.OO (paper).

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