The structure of world history: From modes of production to modes of exchange

Abstract

We are living in an age of Big Ideas. Not so long ago, a book like The Structure of World History would have seemed impossible. Every word in its titleeven, perhaps, the article and the prepositionwould have aroused instant suspicion. Grand narrative of modernity, we would have said. Necessarily exclusionary in its effort to capture everything. Insensitive to difference. Totalizing. Potentially totalitarian. Now, things appear very different. Universalism is backalthough, this time, it has a slightly different valence, and a slightly different relationship with that other concept that was until recently more or less forbidden, namely truth. In the English-speaking world, Kojin Karatani appeared on the scene in 2003 with the translation of his Transcritique: On Kant and Marxa work in which he argued that a number of the apparent contradictions in Marx's thought (particularly between a deterministic account of history and an activist account of politics) must be conceived of as 'antinomies' in the Kantian sense, and that they can be understood alongside one another, not dialectically or oriented towards an eventual synthesis, but via what Karatani called a 'parallax view' (this being where Žižek derived the title of his book of the same name). If Transcritique was a decidedly philosophical work, The Structure of World History, as the title indicates, is decidedly historical. More accurately, here Karatani seeks to contribute to a Marxist tradition of anthropological historiography, and especially to what Wallerstein calls 'world systems theory'. While, as I will try to suggest in a moment, the details get rather sophisticated and surprising, the overall argument of The Structure of World History can be stated quite directly. To understand human history, Karatani suggests, we must think, not in terms of what Marx called 'modes of production', but in terms of what he calls 'modes of exchange'. Here the word 'exchange' has an expansive meaning, including everything from economic exchange to symbolic exchange in the widest possible sense. Once we make this shift, Karatani proposes, we are no longer stuck with Marx's base/superstructure model. Now things like politics and culture are no longer seen as instruments or epiphenomena of economics. Rather, we can think all

Sacred natural sites classification framework based on ecosystem services and implications for conservation

“…In early human societies and traditional communities, most essential resources were produced and obtained locally through a subsistence livelihood. With the development and expansion of commercial activity, essential resources could be shipped from region to region, enabling livelihoods to be more flexible, and making it possible for people to rely less on their locally produced resources (Barbour, 2017). At the same time, people's needs for spiritual services from SNSs changed with changing local belief systems (Liljeblad & Verschuuren, 2019).…”