Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Value

Money

Felix Stein — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:31:52 +0000

Tulane University

Initially published 27 Mar 2020

Abstract:

Money is a formidable subject — an intimate object in our everyday lives, a claim over resources, and a topic of academic inquiry. Textbooks define money by its various functions, e.g., as a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a unit of account, and a store of value. While anthropologists also reckon with these functions, they are equally concerned with money as a social process, a material object, and a political token, concerns that lead them to emphasise money’s diversity and instability over its universality and coherence. This entry highlights four areas of inquiry in the anthropological literature on money: (1) debates over what counts as money; (2) investigations into money’s role in maintaining and overturning social boundaries; (3) studies of monetary pluralism in light of the failure of state-centric monopoly currencies; and (4) approaches that engage the role of technology in creating new platforms and networks for creating and distributing money. By way of concluding, the essay addresses how anthropologists reflect on the future of money.

Introduction

Most definitions of money begin with its functions. While varying in their elaboration, these functions usually include a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a unit of account, and a store of value. Upon closer inspection, we see how these functions are just starting points that open up additional questions, including how price or value is constructed; who or what authorises money; how people use different units to express hierarchies, solidarities, and identities; and even how money as a store of value or asset is protected. Because anthropologists confront a great diversity of objects that channel value, they are less concerned with identifying a universal conception of money, turning instead to wonder at the ‘breathtakingly ambitious project that [anthropologists] set out, simply by defining Melanesian and African currencies, the greenback and the “Euro” as part of the same domain’ (Guyer 1999: 245). Even archaeologists no longer assume coinage is a familiar medium to be studied in isolation from other contextual evidence—coins described in an archaeological context tell a different story than when any coin find is assumed to represent commercial value or exchange (Haselgrove & Krmnicek 2012). Challenges arise not simply because of the range of money objects or the diversity of their uses but because of how money travels beyond the horizon, along pathways not always visible to its participants (Hart & Ortiz 2014: 475). Given these dilemmas, scholars now argue money may be better understood as a process, ‘inextricably social, inherently dynamic, complex, and contradictory’ (Dodd 2016: 88), and one usefully approached through the material and political systems that create and govern money, whether payment systems (Maurer 2015), central banks (Holmes 2014; Riles 2019), or even mining for bitcoin (Ferry 2016; Zimmer 2017).

This entry considers debates about what counts as money, and then addresses how money mediates social relations and identities. It next examines what happens when people manage multiple currencies, particularly when state-centric monopoly currencies unravel and monetary pluralism is on the rise. Finally, the entry highlights those platforms and infrastructures that channel value, exposing the stubborn materiality of money.

What counts as money?

When we begin with the function of money as a means of exchange in the marketplace, we privilege utilitarian need over other values (Guyer 1999: 242). This starting point is reinforced by the popular view that money emerged out of barter, a resolution to the problem of the ‘double-coincidence of wants’, in which each participant fails to possess what the other wants and so requires a third medium to initiate and complete an exchange (Menger 1892). Anthropologists argue this story is better understood as a myth for several reasons. First, evidence for this claim is built not on the historical record but from examples conjured up by scholars themselves (Graeber 2011: 37). Second, archaeological records suggest that the idea of money preceded the object, a ‘virtual currency’ that encoded information in accounting systems, such as the knotted strings made by the Inca, or Mesopotamian clay tablets. Only later did money circulate as physical objects such as tokens (Graeber 2011: 40), a point made by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, who highlighted the role of the state in creating a unit of account to express value (e.g., a token) over money as a commodity (Hart 2005: 168). Finally, and most importantly, insofar as myths do political work, the claim that money originates in barter reinforces the dominant values of capitalism, including the sanctity of private property over inalienable possessions and the emphasis on exchanging equivalent rather than asymmetrical values (Graeber 2011; Hart 2005: 161; Guyer 2004). It also mystifies the role of the state or political authority in conjuring money. Anthropologists, as we shall see, have different stories to tell about money.

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists promoted empirical fieldwork as a method to avoid researchers’ biases and prejudices. They were concerned with documenting trade relations and other sorts of exchanges, such as ceremonial exchanges and life-cycle rituals. When confronted with the immense range of objects that people used in exchange, from shells to axe blades to cattle, anthropologists questioned whether such objects counted as money. Bronislaw Malinowski (1921: 14) famously declared that axe blades, shell necklaces and arm shells, and pigs—highly valued among the Trobriand Islanders—were not money. Nor were those objects likely to become money because, according to him, the islanders did not need a ‘common measure of value’. Instead, in the Pacific, shell necklaces and arm shells projected the reputation of men, demonstrating how their value was irreducible to a common standard. Elsewhere, however, shells did convey value over long distances. In Africa and Asia, cowrie shells served as a convenient currency—easily recognisable by their colour and shape, difficult though not impossible to counterfeit, and highly transportable (Şaul 2004). Malinowski’s contemporary, Marcel Mauss, cautioned that defining money in terms more relevant for European metropoles than Pacific Islands would only foreclose the possibility of focusing on its social significance in extending and even repairing relations (1990: Note 29, 100-2).

This debate set the stage for how anthropologists conceptualised non-state and non-standard objects that fulfilled some but not all of the functions of money taken for granted today. Such objects came to be called ‘primitive money’, in opposition to ‘modern money’ issued by a single issuing authority like a state bank (Dalton 1965). Other terms came into play, including ‘special-purpose money’ to denote objects restricted to certain kinds of people and types of relationships, in contrast to ‘general-purpose money’. Could, then, any object in circulation serve as ‘primitive’ money? Mary Douglas (1958) posed this question about cloth woven from the raffia palm. Among the Lele, a group in what was then the Belgian Congo, people wore the cloth, and while it quickly wore out, it could not be purchased; instead, people exchanged the material as peace offerings, gifts upon the delivery of a child, and even as a mortuary gift. These conventions ensured that older men received or wove the cloth, while younger men borrowed it, thus remaining indebted to their seniors. Raffia cloth, Douglas argued, had not evolved into a form of money because it circulated but without buying and selling; again, a claim that rested on an a priori definition of money as mediating market transactions, not social payments. Raffia cloth also raises the question of whether the physical stuff of money matters. If money represents exchange value (Menger 1892) or indexes social relationships of credit and debt (Graeber 2011), then the medium is either neutral or a ‘veil’ that conceals those underlying relationships. Yet the patterning of exchange relations, such as bridewealth, point to the specificity of relations and political processes that support money’s materiality. In societies where bridewealth involves paying respect to elders, even money and other goods are displayed so they are ‘seen by all, measured against one another, and displayed to function as memory devices about those prior obligations’ (Maurer 2018: 13).

These so-called ‘primitive currencies’—pigs raised by kin, raffia cloth woven by elderly men—circulated against the backdrop of an ever-widening set of state-issued currencies and expanding markets (Wolf 2010). Anthropologists analysing their difference initially drew on evolutionary paradigms, arguing that ‘primitive currencies’ would evolve into, or be displaced by, ‘modern’ ones. A well-known case is the model of co-existing ‘spheres of exchange’, in which Paul Bohannan (1955) described how members of the Tiv ethnic group in western Nigeria organised their transactions into three hierarchically-ranked spheres, each one defined by the object(s) that circulated as currency. The lowest sphere of exchange was concerned with subsistence. Here people exchanged foodstuffs and everyday utensils. The middle sphere mediated prestige through transactions with cattle and metal bars, and the highest sphere designated rights over dependent women and children. While these spheres were distinct, they were also permeable. People occasionally traded iron rods downward for foodstuffs or upward as social payments for marriage. In the nineteenth century, however, colonial administrators viewed metal rods as money and established a rate of exchange with the new coinage, which then circulated as an ‘all-purpose currency’, eventually collapsing the spheres, and, by extension, the social relations and cultural values held by the Tiv. Frustrated elders cursed money as bride payments increased and foodstuffs were trucked away to larger markets (1955: 69).

This story of money dissolving customary arrangements and social bonds has proven to be remarkably enduring among anthropologists, a myth that opposes culture and money (for a critique, see Maurer 2006). Like barter, Bohannan’s model also has significant limitations. For example, he does not account for how people came to possess metal rods in the first place. These objects did not just circulate in contained spheres; rather, some rods originated in Europe and then moved across Atlantic Africa as people converted them into assets with greater longevity and security than other currencies or objects (Guyer 2004: 30). Consequently, anthropologists now emphasise asymmetrical values, stressing how the value of objects shifts across different social and political landscapes (Appadurai 1986). People seek to realise gains in their conversions, propelled by competition, war, and conquest as much as by trade.

By the mid-twentieth century, as money proper coalesced into a paradigmatic form of state-issued national currencies, so did the story of money’s evolution from commodity-money to coins and paper notes backed by precious metals to state-issued currencies. Today, however, anthropologists recognise how debates over ‘primitive money’ staged other dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the assumed ‘savage’ and self-declared ‘civilized’, allowing standard monetary objects to signal the arrival of the ‘modern’—impersonal, objective, and impervious to the particularities of historical and cultural difference (Nelms & Maurer 2014: 45). Once we accord non-standard variants the status of money, we can address questions such as when something is money, where something is money, and for whom something is money (Agha 2017: 300). What comes into view in asking these question is ‘moneyness’ as a relational property between objects and subjects (Zickgraf 2017). It is not that alternative forms of money express solidarities, hierarchies, and differences, and modern money does not; instead, we may want to conceptualise not just what money is but also when and how things and ideas work as money (Maurer 2006; Nelms & Maurer 2014: 39).

Money at the threshold of persons and relations

Anthropological interest in money has engaged concepts of neoclassical economics as well as those of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century European philosophers, who reflected on money through the provocations of industrialization (Marx 1977 [1867]) and the seduction of urban metropoles (Simmel 1990). For anthropologists, the question was whether money gave rise to a particular worldview, or whether it reflected specific historical and social circumstances. In the book Money and the morality of exchange, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry argued that money had no intrinsic meaning; instead, it was an existing worldview that gave rise to ‘particular ways of representing money’ (Bloch & Parry 1989: 19). They also emphasised broader patterns, noting how across different societies, people evaluated the morality of transactions in relation to different temporal orders. In short-term activities, such as bargaining in the marketplace or spending a windfall from gambling, people tended to express values of competition and acquisitiveness. Over the long-term, however, they evaluated monetary transactions in relation to moral and even cosmological orders. Farmers in Kenya, for example, referred to the gains from the selling of land holdings that did not benefit them in the long-run as ‘bitter money’ (Shipton 1989), while young men in northern Madagascar working in sapphire mines spent their earnings or ‘hot money’ in daring ways, signalling their rejection of their place on the social landscape (Walsh 2003).

Through earning, spending, saving, and even investing, money mediates personhood in multiple ways, as we saw above with young men in Madagascar. In the post-Civil War United States (from the 1870s to 1930s), as household incomes increased and consumer goods became more widely available, the meanings associated with wages for men and women diverged (Zelizer 2017). Men were considered to earn a ‘family wage’, sufficient enough to support spouses and children, whereas women received ‘pin money’, even as wages, intended for incidental expenditures (Zelizer 2017: 27). In Southeast Asia, where scholars long associated women with markets and money, anthropologists found the wives of Malay fishermen and Javanese batik makers handled money, not because they had more power or status than their husbands, but because they were seen to domesticate money by channelling it for household expenses (Brenner 1998; Carsten 1989). Such gendered conceptions of money have spurred microfinance organisations to promote their activities as empowering women. Yet joint-collateral loans made to groups of women, in which all borrowers are equally responsible for repaying the loan, can heighten the vulnerability of female borrowers. Loan collectors in Bangladesh, for example, relied on social codes of honour and shame to recover loans, which has led to some women being ostracised from community life (Karim 2011). In Paraguay, microfinance organisations instrumentalised women’s social ties via group-based loans, whereas men were seen as autonomous subjects and so responsible for only their individual share (Schuster 2014).

The many ways in which money relates to worldviews and personhood shows that how we assign meanings to transactions matters. For example, measurements of the GNP (gross national product) exclude those activities that are said not to produce economic value such as government transfers, charitable donations, family gifts, and bequests, even though they involve money (Gibson-Graham 2006). Yet money is promiscuous, often crossing the interpretive boundaries that people seek to maintain (Akin & Robbins 1999: 7). In capitalist societies, people tend to oppose commodities and gifts for ideological reasons, an opposition that reasserts money’s proper place in the market (Bloch & Parry 1989: 9) and highlights gifts as subjectively constituted (Weiner 1992; Strathern 1988). However, money can be a powerful gift itself, evident in the energy that people expend to disguise the economic nature of transactions (Bourdieu 1977), or invoke the ‘perfect gift’, to resolve the contradiction between commodities in the marketplace and gifts in the family domain (Carrier 1990). For migrants, money now constitutes the ‘internal essence of the transnational family today’ (Gregory 2012: 392), evident in how remittances are intended to secure a place for the migrant, supplementing their absence (Cliggett 2005). This role of money is so powerful that in some countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, the overall economic value of remittances surpasses that of major exports in the home country.

Yet the meaning of money as gift is highly unstable. It may spur recipients to imagine idealised capitalist landscapes (Small 2019) or even to re-arrange social relationships. Young Thai women who migrated from rural farming communities to cities seeking work in factories are a case in point. They have been shown to try to reconcile their family obligations and roles as dutiful daughters who remit their earning to their parents with their desires to spend these earnings on expressing themselves as modern women (Mills 1999). Consumption practices enable them to constitute social selves, but they may bring about new forms of indebtedness. The expansion of shopping malls in Latin America and post-apartheid South Africa, for example, has contributed to growing consumer debt. Salaried individuals now enjoy new possibilities of enrichment as they become eligible for consumer loans that they, in turn, lend to others, creating a ‘money-go-round’ aimed at aspirational consumption (James 2014). In the face of the pleasures associated with the expanding consumer goods market, combined with a volatile banking sector, people come up with new strategies to improve their lives. For example, in Nepal, urban residents participate in dhukuti, whereby a group contributes a specific monthly sum to engage in consumption, much like rotating savings and credit associations yet redirected to allow members to participate in consumer markets (Bajracharya 2018: 94). Thereby, money extends sociality, even though its physical form is neither fixed nor constant (Dodd 2016; Yuran 2014). Its flows erode some relations but expand and extend others, potentially creating a ‘human economy’ (Hart 2017: 5).

Money mediates cosmological worlds as well. In China, people used different replicas of money as offerings to gods, ancestors, and ghosts, their hierarchy secured by specific material objects (Wolf 1974; Feuchtwang 2001: 19). In Vietnam, where a similar relationship to money prevails, people contend with a post-war landscape where they offer replica US hundred dollar bills to both gods and ghosts, materialising the changing relations with the dead in which the hierarchy of gods and ghosts no longer pertains (Kwon 2007). Likewise, in Cuba where political legitimacy rests upon the revolution, practitioners of Ifá, a divination cult, offer money to the orichas, deity-figures presumed to exert divine influence over people’s everyday life (Holbraad 2005). In the lowlands of South America, peasants forced to work on expanding sugar plantations sought to increase their earnings by drawing on the logic of capital—the power of money to beget more money. During baptismal rites conducted by Catholic priests, godparents-to-be would ask that peso notes be baptised instead of the child, a ritual that exposed the metaphysics of capitalism, where making money was elevated above human life (Taussig 1977: 137). In a princely polity of Madagascar, the ritual use of coins served a different purpose—to channel sacred ancestral power (Lambek 2001). The coins placed in the mouth of the deceased were not those issued by the contemporary state but ones that predated colonialism and mercantile trade, notably the slave trade, exposing how royal power ‘is derived ultimately from violence . . . a life for a life’ (Lambek 2001: 754). The use of money for metaphysical ends—appeasing ghosts, blessing coins, and conveying ancestral power—encodes not just cosmologies but also legacies of economic and political upheaval. No wonder, then, that people engage in gambling, an activity that reimagines money by decoupling value from labour, investment, and return (Pickles 2019).

Monetary pluralism

How people and institutions manage money’s various functions is a vital concern, especially in the Global South, where monetary pluralism has long prevailed. Monetary pluralism refers to how people juggle not one but many currencies. In postcolonial settings, state-issued currencies have never entirely displaced indigenous media. In Papua New Guinea, for example, shell valuables are still used in exchange, especially in contexts where young men have more access to cash than older men (Foster 1999: 221). Even the foundation of ‘hard currencies’, so called because they serve as storing and protecting wealth in money, can be unmade and remade. In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the US dollar-gold convertibility, a move that engendered new sources of insecurity and profit (Gregory 1997) and eventually ushered in a new regime of central banking based on inflation targeting and price stability (Holmes 2014).

Why, despite the multiple forms of money, do conceptions of it remain so stubbornly state-centric (Guyer 2012)? One answer may lie in that state currencies reinforce the idea of national markets and the nation as a collective body (Helleiner 2003). That said, national currencies have never been coterminous with the boundaries of modern states, some mediating trans-border exchanges, while others, like the US dollar and the euro, traverse state borders and challenge national sovereignty. In socialist and post-socialist states, the appearance of the US dollar signalled the ascendance of the market (Lemon 1998; Truitt 2013). However, in Haiti, people uphold the fictional ‘Haitian dollar’ (alongside the national currency known as Haitian gourdes) as a placeholder for national sovereignty, especially valued among those people not subject to international humanitarian efforts denominated in US dollars (Neiburg 2016).

Producing a standard measure of value, or unit of account, involves political work (Desan 2010). Just as individual households use strategies of enclosure, taboos, and concealment to protect their assets, states do as well, using central banks to maintaining reserves that bolster their credibility and confidence (Peebles 2008: 236). In Argentina, the 2001-2002 forced conversion of U.S. dollar-based accounts into pesos led residents to look for alternative assets for storing value, exposing the national currency as a failed state project (Muir 2011). If national currencies circulate as instruments of state power and symbols of popular sovereignty, they are also materials through which people assess the authority of the state and the legitimacy of markets. In the former Soviet Union, people attributed the reliability of the US dollar to the material qualities of the currency (Lemon 1998), while in Indonesia, citizens used the national currency in other representational forms such as advertisements and billboards, thus remediating it as a means of political communication (Strassler 2009). In Mongolia, state-issued currency is not standardised but valued within specific transactions; shopkeepers viewed the cash held by small-scale gold miners as ‘polluted’ (High 2013), underscoring how they assigned value through the status of its possessor. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, people likewise rejected the state’s authority to guarantee the value of its currency by relying instead on the material qualities of cash (Walker 2017). In Cuba, the state issued two different currencies: a domestic peso to represent collective labour, and a convertible peso for use by tourists; however, in everyday exchanges, people often handled the domestic Cuban peso in pursuit of profits (Tankha 2018). In such instances, money reveals its performative dimension, seen in how even indices that purported to simply measure money’s fluctuating values are used to adjust actual prices and wages (Neiburg 2006).

Monetary pluralism is a strategy by which people sidestep formal financial institutions, even though they are still ‘saving, loaning, hedging risk, and investing’ (Maurer, Musaraj & Small 2018: 2). These practices of so-called ‘low finance’ can be unexpectedly transnational. Somalis in Kenya draw on informal hawala money-transfer systems for remitting money and financing new businesses as well as meeting basic social needs. Hawala channels value over long distances through a network of brokers, and today it exists alongside formal banking systems, allowing people to remit money often more quickly and without the fees of formal financial institutions. Through this system, Somalis mobilise financial capital through their continued investment in family relationships that stretch from Africa to Europe and North America. It enables people to cultivate social capital that has been at the root of their business success in spite of the collapse of the Somali state (Omeje & Githigaro 2018).

Monetary pluralism challenges normative assumptions of the social foundations of money, namely trust and confidence. While textbooks may insist all monetary systems are equal, alternative voices such as Positive Money in the United Kingdom argue for new models that recognize that how money is created and governed is central to our collective life (Di Muzio & Robbins 2017). In Macedonia, for example, the authoritarian regime tightened its grip on power as vendors accepted in-kind payments—unfinished apartments or cars—that lost value over time (Mattioli 2018). At the same time, Wall Street stockbrokers, driven by a belief in maximising shareholder value, justify business practices that destabilised markets, companies, and jobs (Ho 2009). Anthropologists have consequently turned to investigating the material and political processes that create, regulate, and circulate money.

Networks, platforms and open questions

As people bypass financial institutions and state-issued currencies, they create new forms of money. Airtime, or prepaid cell phone minutes, is one of the most celebrated instances of how people’s strategies of channelling value became formalised as mobile money (Maurer 2012). In Kenya, people purchased airtime cards and sent the verification code to a recipient who would either use the airtime or sell those minutes to a vendor at a discount for cash, effectively bypassing formal financial institutions and their transaction fees. Alternative monetary forms and money-like objects now abound, uncanny descendants of the 'primitive monies' once described by anthropologists.

New money platforms and networks are successful only insofar as they draw on existing behaviours, moral frameworks, and socialities, a point that has been made about bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that first appeared as a critique of the 2008 financial crisis (Nelms & Maurer 2014). Unlike national currency issued by a centralised state, transactions with bitcoin are authenticated by a distributed bookkeeping function known as blockchain. Maintained on a far-flung network of computers, the blockchain logs and verifies transactions. People let the blockchain do this work from their computers because it enables them to receive bitcoin in return (a process known as ‘mining’). The blockchain as a platform provides an alternative to the power traditionally conferred on centralised record-keepers. Users, however, invoke familiar practices and moral discourses, or ‘digital metallism’, by attributing the value of bitcoin to its scarcity, much like gold (Maurer, Nelms & Swartz 2013). They also attribute their trust to the distributed network of the blockchain, thus conflating the object and the system that enabled it, exposing the importance of networks in materialising transactional activity, including the coin itself.

The rise of digital and mobile monies foregrounds the infrastructures through which value flows, especially the ‘currency interface’ or conversion of value across different platforms (Guyer 1994). Such infrastructures include a vast apparatus of objects and recording devices such as payment cards, mobile phones, networks of wire, and electronic point-of-sale terminals. The assemblages of transactional objects and ideas that make the transfer of value possible are often ‘forgotten, ignored, or operate in the background’ (Maurer & Swartz 2017) yet they operate as the ‘rails’ that carry value from one location to another. By noticing these payment systems, we can ask questions such as who owns the rails, who or what authenticates payments, and who bears the cost of supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. Today, for example, data breaches take on a ritual form. Corporations publicise the number, often in the millions, and then pledge greater surveillance of the vast amounts of data that still leave individuals exposed to data breaches.

Despite the growing importance of electronic and digital payments, cash persists as a vital part of monetary ecologies, especially in the Global South. One of the most spectacular examples of how cash operates was the demonetization campaign in India, in which the Reserve Bank withdrew high denomination rupee notes from circulation (Dharia & Trisal 2017). While the campaign was promoted as an effort to eradicate ‘black money’, or untaxed cash transactions, the withdrawal of cash had differential effects across India. Recipients of microloans, for example, could not repay or receive loans unless they participated in digital payments (Kar 2017). The campaign also exposed other inequities: people who hoarded cash hired those who were cash-poor to wait in line to deposit money, exposing how the scheme to reduce illegal practices and tax avoidance relied on the labour of already-marginalised citizens (Dharia 2017). Even while scholars agree that money is a ‘token’, more a concept than a thing, people still handle paper notes as though they were inherently valuable, a dilemma that asks how money as a social object relates to money as a physical object (Vasantkumar 2019: 318) and returns to the preoccupations of anthropologists over defining what counts as money (Maurer 2018).

Anthropologists have long highlighted the political and economic systems in which money circulates, from families that seek to maintain their kinship ties across space and time, to the performances of legitimacy among state actors like central bankers. They are thus well-positioned to investigate future monies, by asking how objects travel, generate prestige, and introduce new forms of inequalities. Anthropologists also continue to examine the role of beliefs that accrue to some monetary objects but not others. If money rests on a social foundation backed by its institutional authority, do the specific material properties bolster people’s confidence in money and its issuing authority? What is the difference between money and valuables or assets? Do asset-classes like houses and securities, for example, have attributes like valued shells when they serve as stores of wealth? By posing questions around the material practices of stockpiling and accounting and the means of channelling value across space and time, anthropologists will continue to ask questions that challenge our received wisdom about money.

Conclusion

Confronted with a range of objects that have money-like features, anthropologists have highlighted the multiple practices and beliefs animating the idea of money. Just describing the meanings people assign, however, is not enough to understand what money is. As the recent financial crisis has made clear, the nature of money is sometimes not even visible to or understood by its users and governing technocrats like central bankers. Today, it is imperative to recognize money’s malleability—its new objects, relations, and even platforms—that expose how it is continually being unmade and remade. If we acknowledge that money is ‘not bestowed upon us by nature or some god, and if it can be shown that the present monetary system is undemocratic, unfair and unstable’ (Di Muzio & Robbins 2017: 39), then what are the possibilities of remaking money? Anthropologists work with designers, engineers, and religious scholars who are also invested in creating alternatives to our present monetary systems (Rudnyckyj 2018). Their efforts to represent money in ever new ways parallel those of the ethnographer (Maurer 2005). The challenge is therefore not just to define what money is, but also to understand how the institutional and collective efforts to make, unmake, and remake money are on-going projects of human sociality.

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Note on contributor

Allison Truitt is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the author of Dreaming of money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Money: ethnographic encounters (Bloomsbury, 2007).

Dr. Allison Truitt, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, 6823 Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70118 US. atruitt@tulane.edu.

Waste

Felix Stein — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 07:49:34 +0000

Patrick O'Hare

University of Manchester

Initially published 14 Aug 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19waste

Abstract:

From plastics in the oceans, to the export of toxic materials, waste is an issue that increasingly attracts public attention as well as demands for political and environmental action. Within the social sciences, writing on waste has clustered around the emergent and growing sub-discipline known as ‘discard studies’. This entry looks at how anthropologists have broached the issue of waste, from a long-standing interest in pollution, to more recent explorations of how humans and waste constitute one another. It is divided into three main anthropological approaches to waste: a symbolic-structuralist approach focused on the relations between order/disorder and the sacred/profane; an economic-materialist approach that is more concerned with waste, value, and the connections and flows between local and global scales; and intersubjective-posthuman approaches that focus on how waste makes people as well as how people make waste. Through fine-grained ethnographies of engagements with waste and theoretical contributions, the anthropology of discards highlights how diverse waste’s materialities and representations really are, and helps to challenge taken-for-granted associations between waste, stigma, and an absence of value.

Introduction^[1]

Just as ever-growing quantities of waste have increasingly attracted the attention of governments, activists and communities, the issue of waste at a global scale has risen rapidly up political and research agendas since the turn of the millennium. Shocking photographs and videos that make visible the harm that wasting causes, such as those of the North Atlantic garbage patch (estimated to measure hundreds of kilometres) and the plastic-filled bird carcasses of photographer Chris Jordan, have captured the public imagination around the topic of plastic waste in the oceans. At the same time, waste has become an issue of international diplomacy and scandal, as a series of countries in the Global South have begun sending contaminated waste back to its sources in the Global North (see the ongoing dispute between the Philippines and Canada, Choi 2019). The initial classification of our current age as the Anthropocene by geologists was based in part on the fact that signs of human activity and wasting – plastics, metals, radionuclides – could be observed deep into the Earth’s crust (Zalasiewicz & Waters 2015). Indeed, global warming, which places human, animal, and plant life as we know it in mortal peril, is caused by a form of waste: the release of carbon emissions as petroleum deposits are consumed.

In tandem with these broader developments, research into waste has escalated both in anthropology, and across the social sciences and humanities more generally, giving rise to the interdisciplinary subfield of ‘discard studies’. Yet do we necessarily know what waste is? As the popular expression ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ hints at, rubbish can very often be in the eye of the beholder. This encyclopaedia entry explores three analytic approaches to waste taken by anthropologists, as set out and discussed by Alexander and O’Hare (2020): symbolic-structuralist; economic-materialist; and intersubjective-posthuman.

In a symbolic-structuralist approach (e.g. Douglas 2002 [1966]; Leach 1989 [1964]), waste can be understood as what emerges through interactions between the sacred and profane, which are structurally bound to one another, a focus that can be traced back to the work of Emile Durkheim (1915), a founding father of social anthropology and sociology. In this perspective, waste is usually considered to be social and relational rather than an objective quality or categorization of phenomena in the world. The second analytical approach, heralded by Michael Thompson’s (1979) Rubbish theory, launched an economic-materialist approach to understanding the circulation of materials between different regimes of value. Within this approach, an increasing number of scholars (e.g. Gille 2007; O’Brien 2008) have focused on the materiality of waste within broader political and economic structures that act to shape how and where it appears. A third approach to the study of waste can be called ‘posthuman-intersubjective’. It has been gathering strength since the 2010s and concentrates on the subjects that waste and various forms of waste-work engender. This includes workers whose identities are tightly bound up with waste – such as waste-pickers (Millar 2018) – as well as the more general encounters with discarded materials that happen as we separate out our recyclables (c.f. Hawkins 2006), or unexpectedly meet with a tangle of trash in the street (c.f. Bennett 2009). Waste in these perspectives is given varying degrees of agency: it is seen as acting and acting upon us in ways that are outside our conscious control.

By emphasising some aspects of human-waste relations while neglecting others, each approach – symbolic-structuralist, economic-materialist, and posthuman-intersubjective – captures a part of but not the whole picture. Thus, anthropological work on waste generally foregrounds the different epistemological consequences that specific representations of waste can have, including the removal of agency from so-called ‘wasted lives’ and value created from territories depicted as ‘waste-lands’. Far from being a load of rubbish, the anthropology of waste also brings cultural perspectives into conversation with questions of power, class, religion, materiality, and economics that are at the heart of contemporary society.

Symbolic-structuralist approaches

The anthropology of waste per se is quite recent. The relatively small societies that anthropologists traditionally studied did not generate levels of waste on the scale of today’s consumer societies, and whilst materials (i.e. food waste) were inevitably discarded, such practices do not appear to have been deemed worthy of serious attention.^[2] A relevant precursor, however, is the study of purity and pollution. Pollution in anthropological discourse has had a specific meaning: a stigma linked to people or substances – generally as a result of a mixing or conflation of things that should be kept pure.

The social anthropologist most associated with the study of purity and pollution is Mary Douglas, known for classifying dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Douglas was an English social anthropologist who conducted fieldwork with the Lele ethnic group who live in the modern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but her social theories were influential beyond African anthropology. In particular, her most well-known book, Purity and danger (1968), shares with structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss the idea that prohibitions, taboos, and attachments have very little to do with the concrete thing that is prohibited, and much more to do with an interplay of symbols that reflect deeper organising principles of society. Douglas argued that the prohibition of pork in Leviticus, for example, could not be explained by the ‘dirtiness’ of the animal but lay instead in the way that pigs confounded the religious classifications of animals (hoofed/ non-hoofed; cud-chewing/ non-cud-chewing, etc.)

For Douglas, the human mind is an ordering mind, and rituals of pollution and purity tend to cluster around the anomalies that confound cultural systems of classification. In other words, cultural classification comes first, and determines ideas of pollution. Those who take for their area of enquiry matters of pollution, dirt, and waste engage with her ideas in part because the ‘matter out of place’ phrasing so succinctly defamiliarises us from the notion that what constitutes waste should be obvious and universally accepted. Rather than waste, however, she was primarily interested in the symbolism of ritual pollution in religious and what she called ‘primitive’ classificatory systems. This, as Martin O’Brien notes, makes Douglas a somewhat awkward fit for discussions of the billions of tons of municipal solid waste that arrive daily at the world’s landfills (2008: 128).

Pollution as a traditional anthropological concept is different from contemporary, everyday understandings of environmental pollution embodied in car exhaust fumes, smoking industrial chimneys, and frothing, chemically-polluted rivers. Its characteristic areas of study include menstruation – since menstruating women are viewed as polluted in many societies and are, therefore, quarantined (c.f. Kristeva 1982) – and death, where those working with or touching the dead are considered polluted and thus to be avoided or approached with ritualised caution (Parry 1994). Nevertheless, looking to some of the early approaches to pollution can help us understand the roots of the first anthropological analyses of waste.

Early anthropologists (e.g. James Frazer) exhibited two tendencies regarding pollution (c.f. Forth 2018). One was to locate pollution in the properties of substances and things as opposed to the relations between people and categories. A second was to differentiate between forms of pollution aversion that exemplified either ‘primitive’ hygiene measures or reflected religious ideas of the sacred and profane. However, these studies tended to centre on polluted people rather than the things that polluted them, whether these were menstruating women, Indian untouchables, or stigmatised gravediggers (Jewkes & Wood 1999). Where there was an interest in things, these were often substances ejected or detached from the body, including menstrual blood, nail clippings, and excrement. This focus on bodily substance was later taken up by Michael Thompson (1986: 1) to argue for the culturally relative nature of waste. That there is nothing intrinsically polluting about blood, hair, or snot indicates that there is no ‘waste in nature’, he argues, explaining that these might be valued, feared, or treated with indifference by different cultures or indeed classes.

This clustering of ideas of pollution and purity around substances emanating from the body has nevertheless given rise to quite different theoretical approaches, including those inclined to a universalist rather than relativist nature. Exemplary of the latter approach is Julia Kristeva’s (1982) psycho-analytical theorisation of abjection, which draws on the work of Douglas. For Kristeva, threats to the preservation of the integral subject inspire pollution beliefs, so that a body that leaks wastes and fluids – externalising what should be inside – violates an important inside/outside boundary and risks the dissolution of the self into the other. One example that she gives is the instinctive, visceral reaction she has to the thin film that forms on milk and that the body repels: once this has entered the mouth, and mixed with saliva, one is essentially expelling a part of oneself.

Within anthropology, Valerio Valeri (2000) draws on Kristeva and fieldwork with a small group of hunter-gatherers in Eastern Indonesia to make broader theoretical claims, ultimately arguing that ‘the embodied subject’s fear of disintegration through the body and by the body is the ultimate basis for the notion of pollution’ (2000: 111). Valeri objects to the way that Douglas treats pollution as a secondary phenomenon resulting from processes of classification. By exploring pollution beliefs around bodies, substances, and animals, he shows that not all things considered polluting are classificatory anomalies, nor all classificatory anomalies regarded as polluting. Douglas’s legacy has persisted over time and extended beyond anthropology. Take the work of a student of Douglas, Laurence Douny, on domestic waste among the Dogon, an ethnic group in Mali numbering roughly half a million people. In Douny’s analysis,

“[Dogon] categories of waste enact a conceptual ordering of daily life that allows them to set up and to maintain their socio-cultural and symbolic boundaries. It appears that through the naming of rubbish, Dogon take control over the fuzzy reality of the matter.” (2007: 313)

For example, the Dogon praise certain forms of dirt – food left on pots, sweat, and smoke – as signs of a lively, busy, and prosperous household, while people who are always clean are thought to be work-shy. Negative forms of dirt include the highly ritually polluting – menstrual blood and body solids – and the simply bothersome, such as daily sweepings and tourist trash. This description of order imposed on an assumedly formless world through the cultural imposition of different categories and classifications resembles a symbolic-structuralist approach. Yet Douny is careful to note a relative fluidity and dynamism in categorisation processes, explaining that “the local classification of refuse is versatile, being a daily practice that constantly redefines and generates new categories of waste with which differing world-views are associated” (2007: 313). Plastic waste brought by outside visitors, for example, might be assimilated into existing waste categories but can also be recovered as a resource that can be fashioned into craftwork sold back to tourists.

Despite its plentiful insights, Douglas’s approach is not the primary framework that guides the contemporary social science of waste. Contributing factors have been its binary nature; her lack of focus on waste per se; and the theoretical consideration of only one side of a ‘primitive’/’civilized’ binary that itself has long been discarded. To theorise the ever-greater flows of waste across the planet it would be necessary to develop approaches that attended to politics, economics, and the material stuff of waste itself.

Economic-materialist approaches

If earlier anthropological engagements with ‘rubbish’ in the religious sphere were concerned with the sacred/profane and pure/polluted dichotomies, economic anthropology brought in another important binary: waste and value. These are critical categories for Thompson’s recently reissued Rubbish theory (2017 [1979]), whose theoretical ambitions, Josh Reno argues, go ‘far beyond anything heretofore attempted by anyone in discard studies’ (Thompson 2017: xi). Against the binaries of symbolic-structuralist models, Thompson introduces a tripartite schema to help understand how objects, from houses to antiques, can undergo radical transformations in value. He starts out with two categories of goods common to economics: transient and durable. A classic example of a transient good is a car, which decreases in value from the moment that it is purchased until it is reduced to scrap, while durables, such as certain antiques, ‘increase in value over time and have (ideally) infinite life-spans’ (2017: 25). Thompson’s initial interest is in how an object can cross over from one category to the other, as they do in the case of ‘vintage’ cars, re-valued pieces of furniture, and works of art. The question precipitates a new third category for goods that are neither decreasing nor increasing in value but are of no value at all: rubbish.

Whilst at first glance Thompson appears to be discussing something that fits with normative ideas of waste, his ‘rubbish’ category is in fact quite specific. Although he explicitly describes the rubbish stage as denoting a value-less state, the examples he uses – which later move into the category of durables – never seem to attain the state of zero value. Stevengraphs^[3], for example, steadily decreased in value throughout the first half of the twentieth century before reaching relatively astronomical prices from the 1960s onwards. Yet even at the Stevengraphs’ point of lowest value, Thompson quotes a source noting that there were still probably ‘a few discerning people quietly collecting them for their decorative charm’ (44). Thompson’s rubbish category is thus restricted to a class of objects that still have owners, have depreciated in value, but have not been disposed of. This constitutes a restricted category of rubbish, excluding what most would think of as waste and the discarding practice that others would regard as the key moment when objects pass into a waste category. Drawing on Douglas’s assertion that ‘dirt is simply matter out of place’, Thompson is not particularly interested in the lowly objects that do not attract attention because they are widely regarded to be in the right place: the dustbin or landfill. His concern lies in radical value transfers as a source of social transformation.

Nevertheless, the aspiration to understand material flows and the creation and destruction of value in British society arguably laid the foundations for more recent social science studies into globalised flows of discards and their connection to domestic waste practices (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020). This scholarship is interested in the question of value but not necessarily as the polar opposite of waste, with attention directed towards the political economy and government of waste, and how these are impacted by contemporary knowledge about waste and its effects. Gille’s concept of ‘waste regimes’, for instance, includes the idea that at particular historical conjunctures, one kind of waste and its treatment can be taken symptomatically or even synecdochally by the state to stand for all generated waste. This is neatly illustrated by the 1950s Hungarian state emphasis on collecting scrap metal, what Gille calls the ‘metallic regime’ of post-war recovery communism. While metal can be easily stored, the stockpiling of toxic chemicals, ignoring their unique chemical composition, meant that often barrels rapidly corroded and leaked, opening the way for subsequent waste regimes that were more centred on questions of safety. Here we see a focus on materiality, the state, cultural representations, and the political economy of waste replacing the idea of unique ‘cultural’ approaches to waste.

Historical works (e.g. Strasser 1999, Zimring 2005, Thorsheim 2015) have shown the long lineage of domestic practices of material recovery and re-use. Recently attention has turned to the global nature of the recycling industry and how this links domestic practices to transnational flows of stuff. Thus, Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno’s collection, Economies of Recycling (2012), mobilised economic anthropology and a focus on how people use, consume, and engage with objects (material culture studies) to destabilise conventional understandings of household and global economies. Contributors analysed the profoundly unequal global flows of waste materials – textiles, ships, electronics, uranium, medical discards – in terms of their location of production and recycling – concerns also taken up by The Waste of the World project and its subsequent publications.^[4] The collection also highlighted how various forms of waste labour and waste processing have been cast as redemptive, drawing on a Protestant-inflected language of salvation. Britt Halvorson’s (2012) ‘No Junk for Jesus’ chapter, for example, examines the flow of medical discards between Lutheran churches in the United States and Madagascar, where the sorting of waste from viable donation constitutes a form of religious service. One of the key benefits of this global approach was to highlight that, for all the focus on consumer and domestic recycling practices, household waste accounts for only a fraction of the waste stream.^[5]

Construction waste, for example, makes up a large percentage of urban waste streams and it has served as a useful lens through which anthropologists have studied wider questions of land speculation, urban development, and dispossession. Gastón Gordillo (2014) analyses how the rubble of different rural development schemes in northern Argentina, from Jesuit agricultural collectives to soy production, can provide clues to changing socio-economic forces. Across the world, Erik Harms’ (2016) study of two housing developments in Saigón is 'more concerned with the conversion of wastelands than with waste material per se’ (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020). Yet a link to Gordillo’s work can be found in Harms’ exploration of the ways in which existing productive uses of land (in his case, smallholder farming) are ignored whilst urban development is championed, through a dominant Vietnamese trope of ‘civilising the southern wasteland’. In both cases, it is not symbols, but the materiality of rubble, bricks, building plans, and maps that tell us something about societies and the utopias that transfigure and disfigure landscapes at distinct moments in time.

For Harms, waste is evoked in order to open up space for economic and political intervention and value creation through the construction of real estate. This is only one of a number of possible relations between waste and value. As Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez (2018: 3) note, waste can be seen as the antithesis of value, lost value, the enabler of value, or simply another word for resource. Their 2018 volume on indeterminacy, waste, and value echoes the work of Thompson in that they introduce a third term – indeterminacy – to trouble the stubborn binary between waste and value. Rather than proceeding from an analytical definition of indeterminacy, they start from ethnographic examples to highlight different modes of indeterminacy for people and materials. They share with Douglas an interest in the people that fall through the cracks of classificatory systems, suggesting that such systems are by their very nature exclusionary and key to creating discarded populations. Simultaneously, their idea of indeterminacy challenges both Thompson’s scheme of distinct value positions (transient, rubbish, durable) and Douglas’ framework of single, unified cultural systems of order (2019: 15).

Materialist scholars have gone so far as to criticise Douglas for ignoring the qualities of dirt and its alleged dangers in the study of pollution, as part of an alleged ‘rubbish idealism’ (O’Brien 2002: 133). For this new generation of anthropologists, with eyes trained on waste’s materiality, its odours, and hazards as well as creative potentials, nothing could be further from their position. Economic-materialist analyses of waste in anthropology have tended to highlight how waste’s materiality influences its nature and appearance even if it does not determine it fully. They have also thought of new ways in which waste may be extracted from its classification and become re-valued.

Intersubjective and post-human

For symbolic-structuralist approaches, a fundamental question is why different things are considered waste in different cultures – and the answer given is their culturally-specific classificatory systems. As Alexander and O’Hare (2020) note, ‘economic-materialists shift the question to how the dynamics of waste flows link domestic and global industrial scales, and answer it by examining… flows in a globalised schema of reproduced inequalities'. A third thematic concern among anthropologists, which also has to do with the how, but often at different scales, is a focus on subjectivity and the kinds of relationships and identities that are created through associations with waste. For scholars such as Gay Hawkins (2006), creating subjectivities by engaging with waste is at once an ethical process and similar to actor-network theory (ANT) it signals that waste itself has agency. Thereby it acts, and is acted upon. Household recycling, for example, is an everyday ethical act that becomes drummed into the body – embodied – through repetition and practice.

The role of waste and dirt in creating and sustaining oft-unequal subjectivities has a long history of study inside and outside anthropology. In colonial public health policies, for example, we find two interlinked processes: colonial subjects are often portrayed as dirty, backward, and thus in need of a civilising mission, whilst at the same time the most oppressed people are often called upon to carry out the jobs seen as ritually and hygienically polluting, such as waste work. Race, waste, and power often come together to mark out such distinctions. In the American Philippines (Anderson 1995), as in British India, Australia (Bashford 2003), and elsewhere, colonial governments used public health measures such as vaccines, quarantine, and segregation to demarcate physical and racial boundaries and govern unruly populations. These are far from purely historical questions: consider the furore in early 2019 over a Fox News host’s comment, echoing similar statements made by Donald Trump, that mass migration made America ‘poorer, dirtier, and more divided’, an assertion he supported with images purporting to depict garbage and trash left behind by migrants at the US-Mexico border. Indeed, representations of the dirty colonised other have arguably been transferred onto the figure of the immigrant other (c.f. Thorleifsson 2017), although proletariat or lumpenproletariat populations have also often been the target of similar discourse and measures of bio-political governance.

‘Waste colonialism’ and its sister term ‘garbage imperialism’ are nowadays primarily used to describe instances or patterns of rich countries dumping their waste on poorer ones. This is to some degree limited by the Basel convention^[6] and a spectrum of injustice can be detected in such practices, which range from the export of recoverable, non-toxic recyclate to the dumping of contaminated materials. As Reno notes, ‘not only waste but also waste regimes have been exported and experimented with abroad through colonial and imperial formations’ (2015: 565). Max Liboiron likewise argues that ‘waste colonialism goes beyond the export of waste from colonial centres to… peripheries’ (2018). Relevant to our discussion of ‘rubbished’ subjects here is her point that dominant interpretative frameworks of hygiene and cleanliness are still imposed on peoples whose landscapes and means of subsistence have already been rubbished or enclosed. Waste-pickers and scavengers, for example, are often cited as exemplary polluted subjects, the discards of modernity, or as indexing global inequality (Reno 2009: 32).

Anthropologists have been able to get behind the headlines and assumptions about waste work through ethnographies of informal waste labour like Rosalind Fredericks (2018) on Dakar, Minh Nguyen (2018) on Vietnam, Kathleen Millar (2018) on Rio de Janeiro, Jamie Furniss (2017) on Cairo, and my own research on Montevideo (O’Hare 2018). In Montevideo, waste-pickers proudly adopt the term ‘classifiers’ to signal the productive and environmentally important nature of their labour and overturn the stigma associated with their previous moniker, ‘rummagers’. Similarly, Furniss (2017) describes how Egyptian Christian minority waste-workers downplay both derogatory titles – such as the Zabaleen – and upper-class attempts to focus on the ‘environment’, emphasising instead their role as cleaners of the city. Nguyen (2018), meanwhile, tracks the complex networks and connections between city and village. In her account, Vietnamese waste traders opt to suffer and even perform stigma in the city in order to amass sufficient capital to build their homes and status in rural villages.

Millar’s longitudinal research with Brazilian catadores at Rio’s Gramacho landfill is a good example of an ethnography that gets close to waste-picker perspectives and seeks to understand their social worlds. She shares with Reno’s (2016) ethnography of an industrial Michigan landfill an attempt to highlight the way that waste work helps to constitute desirable subjectivities, from masculine identities of repair and manual labour to the freedoms of autonomous work outside of waged work. As such, Millar argues that academics should be careful when echoing reactionary commentators by referring to people as surplus or waste even if we simultaneously voice a critique of injustice (cf. Bauman 2003).

While Millar attends to the materiality and plasticity of waste, her focus remains on the human subject. Other approaches, however, also accord agency – and sometimes subjectivity – to waste materials and the non-human animals that co-produce them. Gregson et al. (2010), for example, identify an economically performative aspect of asbestos, as its presence intervenes in ship-breaking work in the EU. Undetected asbestos slows down the work of waste removal and complicates contracts given that these are based on asbestos removal estimates gleaned from initial surveys. Hird (2013) meanwhile, emphasises how the inhuman and nonhuman life forms found within waste (e.g. leachate and bacteria) and their physically, biologically, and chemically determined time-frames 'complicate human technocratic attempts to measure, know, and control waste’ (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020). The engineering time of landfills, for example, is only a hundred years, whereas the thousands of diverse materials assembled there – chemicals, bacteria, organic matter – will continue to interact and have unpredictable effects long beyond this time period.

Reno (2014) has also drawn attention to the ways in which waste can be considered a ‘sign of life’ rather than ‘matter out of place’. Only with great difficulty could we understand scat (animal faeces) through a symbolic interpretative framework or view it as a human problem. Instead, when scat is encountered in the wild, whether by scientists, hunters, or non-human animals, it constitutes a trace of the animal that has left it behind, “not at all a symbolic classification but a sign of life” (9). This approach is post-human in that it relegates the anthropos to just another animal involved in cross-species interactions; indeed, waste more broadly can be thought about bio-semiotically here, as “the outcome of interactions between the many species that both create, and are created by it” (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020).

If forms of ‘scat’ have been around for millions of years, more recent forms of waste material also shape human life rather than being simple reflections of cultures. The continued work of Gay Hawkins (2006, 2015, 2018) has brought some of these instances to light. In her most recent book, she argues that the plastic water bottle was revolutionary in shifting people’s perception of plastic away from ideas of durability towards ideas of disposability and single-use: disposability highlights how things design us. For profitable ‘throw-away’ economies to succeed, people’s habits and customs had to be changed, creating the consumer who only in recent years has begun to rediscover forms of re-use and recycling.

What kinds of subjects might be needed for responsible engagements with waste in the twenty-first century and what can social scientists contribute to this debate? One potential ethical position is that advocated by Jane Bennett (2010), who suggests a re-enchantment with the power of agentive things, waste included. As others have noted, this invitation comes up against the hard reality of certain materials that simply aren’t nice for humans to become enchanted with (from asbestos to nuclear waste). Yet perhaps we can learn from the enchantment and pleasure that waste-pickers and dumpster divers experience both from rummaging in the trash and from carrying out socially responsible acts of recovery and cleaning (c.f. Millar 2018, Barnard 2016). More broadly, what the mutual constitution of subjects and their wastes exemplifies is that in a world of rapidly evolving materials, many of which become waste, human beings change our actions, categories, and indeed ourselves according to our responses to these materials. More circular models of production and consumption are certainly part of this story. Yet in redrawing the line of disposal as a virtuous circle, anthropologists can also bring attention to the ways that subjects who have built positive identities and livelihoods out of waste work might be left out the loop.

Conclusion

Waste does not exist in the singular, and indeed it can be the combining of substances and things in particular spaces that leads to their classification as waste, a point highlighted in the early symbolic-structuralist approaches to waste that has continued relevance today. Purity in waste management is important: muddling materials in composite packaging and baled recyclate makes things very difficult to recycle, leading to landfilling, and accusations of ‘waste colonialism’. The technical dynamics of transnational waste chains might seem far from relativist understandings of what constitutes waste, but cultural understandings of hygiene and cleanliness continue to play an important role. To give just one example, David Evans (2014) has explored how residents’ ideas that food waste caddies are ‘out of place’ on kitchen counters play a role in limiting the recycling of food waste in the UK.

Similarly, there is no single anthropology of waste, and although the different approaches sketched out here imply a chronological arc, residues of earlier orientations can still be found in the present, often in unexpected places. While anthropologists of waste might still be interested in menstrual pollution and taboo, they increasingly deal with global flows of problematic, indeterminate matter that challenge binaries along the sacred-profane or waste-value axes. Categories such as ‘indeterminate’ or ‘rubbish’ indicate some of the mediating roles that waste plays between the creation and destruction of value, as do ethnographies that highlight how people situate themselves pragmatically with regard to ascriptions of waste. Societal stigmas of being associated with waste still matter, but anthropologists have shown how these can be manipulated and disguised, from respected waste traders in Vietnam, to medical discards that are repackaged as benevolent donations as they travel from the United States to Madagascar. By getting its hands dirty, the anthropology of waste contributes to an epistemology of the ever-more complex and voluminous materials that humans and non-humans produce, consume, discard, and digest in our Anthropocenic present.

Note

This article makes some use of material published in Alexander, C. & P. O’Hare (2020). Waste and its disguises: technologies of (un)knowing. Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734

References

Alexander, C. & J. Reno (eds) 2012. Economies of recycling. London: Zed Books.

——— & A. Sanchez 2018. Introduction: the values of indeterminacy. In Indeterminacy: waste, value and the imagination (eds) C. Alexander & A. Sanchez, 1-31. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

——— & P. O’Hare (2020). Waste and its disguises: technologies of (un)knowing. Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734.

Anderson, W. 1995. Excremental colonialism: public health and the poetics of pollution. Critical Inquiry 21(3), 640-69.

Barnard, A.V. 2016. Freegans: diving into the wealth of food waste in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bashford, A. 2004. Imperial hygiene: a critical history of colonialism, nationalism and public health. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Baumann, Z. 2003. Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. London: Wiley.

Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Choi, T. 2019. Ship carrying waste arrives back in Canada from the Philippines (29 Jun 2019). Reuters. Accessed 7 August 2019 (available on-line: https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-canada-waste/ship-carrying-waste-arrives-back-in-canada-from-the-philippines-idUKKCN1TU0TB).

Douglas, M. 2002 [1966]. Purity and danger. London: Routledge.

Douny, L. 2007. The materiality of domestic waste. Journal of Material Culture 12(3), 309-31.

Durkheim, E. 1915. The elementary forms of the religious life: a study in religious sociology. London: G. Allen & Unwin.

Evans, D. 2014. Food waste: home consumption, material culture and everyday life. London: Bloomsbury.

Forth, G. 2018. Purity, pollution, and systems of classification. In The international encyclopedia of anthropology (ed.) H. Callan, 1-12. New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

Gille, Z. 2007. From the cult of waste to the trash heap of history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

— — — 2013. Is there an emancipatory ontology of matter? A response to Mya Hird. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2(4), 1-6.

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Gregson, N., W. Watkins & M. Calestani 2010. Inextinguishable fibres: demolition and the vital materialisms of asbestos. Environment and Planning A 42, 1065-83.

Halvorson, B. 2012. No junk for Jesus: redemptive economies and value conversions in Lutheran medical aid. In Economies of recycling (eds) C. Alexander & J. Reno, 207-34. London: Zed Books.

Hawkins, G. 2006. The ethics of waste. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

———2018. Plastic and presentism: the time of disposability. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5(1), 91-102.

———, E. Potter & K. Race 2015. Plastic water: the social and material life of bottled water. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Jewkes, R. K. & K. Wood 1999. Problematizing pollution: dirty wombs, ritual pollution, and pathological processes. Medical Anthropology 18(2), 163-86.

Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of horror: an essay in abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leach, E. 1989 [1964]. Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse. Anthrozoos 2(3), 151-65.

Liboiron, M. 2016. Municipal versus industrial waste: questioning the 3-97 ratio. Discard Studies online (available on-line: https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-industrial-waste-a-3-97-ratio-or-something-else-entirely/).

——— 2018. Waste colonialism. Discard Studies online (available on-line: https://discardstudies.com/2018/11/01/waste-colonialism/).

Millar, K. 2018. Reclaiming the discarded: life and labor on Rio’s garbage dump. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nguyen, M. 2018. Waste and wealth: labour, value and morality in a Vietnamese migrant recycling economy. New York: Oxford University Press.

O’Brien, M. 2008. A crisis of waste. London: Routledge.

O’Hare, P. 2018. ‘The landfill has always borne fruit’: precarity, formalisation and dispossession among Uruguay’s waste pickers. Dialectical Anthropology 43(1), 31-44.

Parry, J. P.1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: University Press.

Reno, J. 2014. Toward a new theory of waste: from ‘matter out of place’ to signs of life. Theory, Culture & Society 31(6), 3-27.

——— 2015. Waste and waste management. Annual Review of Anthropology 44, 557-72.

——— 2016. Waste away: working and living with a North American landfill. Oakland: University of California Press.

Royte, E. 2007. Garbage land: on the secret trail of trash. Columbus: Back Bay Books.

Strasser, S. 1999. Waste and want. New York: Metropolitan Book.

Thompson, M. 2017 [1979]. Rubbish theory: the creation and destruction of value. London: Pluto Press.

Thorsheim, P. 2015. Waste into weapons: recycling in Britain during the Second World War. Cambridge: University Press.

Zalasiewicz, J & C. Waters 2015. The Anthropocene. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science online. Accessed 18 January 2019 (available on-line: https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-7).

Zimring, C. 2009. Cash for your trash: scrap recycling in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Note on contributor

Patrick O’Hare is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on plastic, waste, recycling, and labour cooperatives in Latin America, where he has conducted ethnographic research in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico.

Patrick O'Hare, Department of Social Anthropology, 71 North Street, St Andrews, KY16 9AJ, Fife, United Kingdom

[1] This entry has been updated on April 15th, 2020. If you would like to have access to the original version, please contact us via email.

[2] As an indication of this, the first review article for waste dates from 2015 (Reno).

[3] Silk woven pictures produced through a method developed by Thomas Stevens in the 19^thcentury.

[4] See https://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/RES-060-23-0007/read/outputs

[5] In the United States, for example, it is estimated that municipal solid waste makes up just 3% of total waste, with the rest composed of industrial waste (see Royte 2007), although this oft-cited figure has recently been called into question (Liboiron 2016).

[6] The Basel Convention, fully the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, is an international treaty signed by 186 states and the European Union and in place since 1992.

Voice

Felix Stein — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 12:38:17 +0000

Marlene Schäfers

University of Ghent

Initially published 27 Oct 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17voice

Abstract:

Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. Anthropologists have sought to denaturalise these associations, showing them to be the product of a particular ideology of voice that is neither universal nor inevitable. At the same time, they have also studied the effects that such associations have on imaginations of subjectivity as well as public and political life.

As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.

Introduction

Voice is a salient category in Euro-American modernity and beyond. Familiar idioms attest to its significance: we speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we ‘give voice’ to our ideas and ‘have a voice’ in matters of our concern; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. In its consideration of voice, anthropology has sought to denaturalise these associations and point to alternative ways of understanding how voice may relate to identity and agency. Instead of accepting voice as a universal category, anthropologists have shown voices – both as sound objects and as metaphors – to be culturally and historically constructed, and hence variable. This recognition has allowed for the interrogation of broader issues, including questions of agency, representation, identity, and power, from the vantage point of actual voices and vocal practices (Weidman 2014a: 38).

Voice has only emerged as an explicit focus of ethnographic research and theoretical concern to anthropologists over approximately the last two decades. Even if not explicitly, however, voice has long featured in a broad range of literatures. From a sonic and linguistic perspective, voices are the focus of studies in (ethno)musicology, linguistic anthropology, and media and technology studies. Ethnomusicological studies, for example, show how vocal variations such as pitch, amplitude, rhythm, and melody constitute culturally specific means of aesthetic expression and social communication (e.g. Feld 1982; Urban 1988), while sociolinguistic frameworks focus on how specific grammatical aspects of speech indicate or engender social relations (e.g. Agha 2007), or how specific formal and stylistic aspects of speech cohere into recognizable types (e.g. Agha 2005; Bakhtin 1981). Fields like postcolonial theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, on the other hand, have studied voice mainly through its associations with subjectivity and representation. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), for example, has cast lasting doubt on the empowering potentials of the endeavour to ‘give voice’ to the marginalised in her famous intervention ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, while psychoanalytically-inspired scholarship has emphasised the uncanny character of voice as both of the self (emerging from one’s own body) and other to it (resonating outside the body’s limits) (Chion 1999; Dolar 2006). Anthropological considerations of voice draw on this wide variety of literature in order to bring insights regarding actual voices and vocal practices to bear on critiques of voice as a representational trope.

This entry aims at outlining what a distinctively anthropological approach to the voice might entail. It traces how anthropologists have brought to bear analyses of voices’ sonic and material aspects onto broader social phenomena. In this way, it explores voice both as ideologically and practically constructed and as constructive of subjects, publics, and ideologies.

Voice in Euro-American modernity

The starting point of much anthropological scholarship on voice has been the attempt to destabilise a number of powerful assumptions about it. These can be summed up under two headings. First stands ‘the idea of voice as guarantor of truth and self-presence, from which springs the familiar idea that the voice expresses self and identity and that agency consists in having a voice’ (Weidman 2014a: 39). Linguistic anthropologist Miyako Inoue (2003: 180) has summarised this idea as ‘I speak, therefore I am'. The idea here is that the voice is a direct expression of a person’s intimate emotions and opinions, which renders the act of speaking an expression of human agency and, in certain contexts, resistance.

Related is a second assumption, which holds that the voice is but a channel in order to transmit a more important message (Weidman 2014a: 39). In this view, the content of the message prevails over the sonic aspects of the voice, or its form. Philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) has demonstrated that this tendency to listen to voices primarily for what they say rather than how they say it can be traced through some of the most influential works of Western philosophy from Plato to this day. This second assumption about the prevalence of signifying content over vocal form directly sustains the first, because it allows for imagining the voice as a transparent channel that gives immediate access to a person’s inner life without having any significance itself.

Linguistic anthropologists Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue that the opposition between signifying speech and a sonic vocality outside of meaning solidified into a hierarchy during the European Enlightenment, with the former clearly valued over the latter. The speech-vocality opposition moreover became mapped onto a number of parallel dichotomies such as male versus female, coloniser versus colonised, urban versus rural, or white versus black, which, as Bauman and Briggs argue, were sustained and legitimised in this way. From this perspective, voice needs to be understood as an ideological construct that has crucially shaped the modern (post)colonial world and has contributed to legitimising relations of domination and abuse (De Certeau 1988; Inoue 2003).

In order to highlight that the way we understand and give meaning to vocal phenomena is historically and culturally constructed, and that such constructs have crucial social and political impacts, anthropologists have coined the term ‘ideology of voice.’ As defined by Amanda Weidman, ‘ideologies of voice’ are

culturally constructed ideas about the voice… [They] set the boundary for what constitutes communication, what separates language from music, and what constitutes the difference between the intelligible and the unintelligible. Ideologies of voice determine how and where we locate subjectivity and agency; they are the conditions that give sung or spoken utterances their power or constrain their potential effects (2014a: 45).

Indeed, we can trace how ideas of voice specific to Euro-American modernity have had a forming impact on knowledge production and science. Take anthropology, our own discipline: its hallmark methodology of ethnographic fieldwork largely relies on soliciting informants’ voices in face-to-face encounters as a means of accessing their lifeworlds. Voice features here as an important index of authenticity and as a standard for judging the originality of anthropological works. Psychoanalysis is another example. Institutionalised since the late nineteenth century, it centrally relies on the notion that a patient’s interior life is accessible through his or her actual voice, elicited by the psychoanalyst in therapeutic sessions. We also encounter similar ideas in contemporary truth and reconciliation commissions that have been set up to uncover past wrongdoings and achieve justice. In such settings, victims’ voices are construed as a relatively unproblematic means that, when elicited, are all it takes in order to gain access to past injuries, hidden truths, and authentic suffering (Slotta 2015). Anchored in the popular conviction that ‘speaking is healing,’ truth commissions participate in a discourse that equates victimhood with silence and proposes ‘giving voice’ as a means to heal, find redemption, and bring about reconciliation (Posel 2008).

These examples highlight two issues: (1) that ideas about language, speech, and voice are not natural or universal, but historically and culturally specific constructions and (2) that such ideas have important repercussions for social and subjective life because they determine how voices are heard and recognised. How, then, are we to study the ideologies that determine how voices are produced and received?

The sonic and material voice

In an article published in 1994, Steven Feld and Aaron A. Fox pointed out the need to develop research perspectives that would link a ‘phenomenological concern with the voice as the embodiment of spoken and sung performance, and a more metaphoric sense of voice as a key representational trope for social position and power’ (1994: 26). Their call makes clear that if we are to understand the role of voice in social life, it is imperative to study not only how voices routinely function as metaphors but also their sonic, embodied, and material dimensions. Concomitantly, the anthropological project of denaturalising voice crucially hinges on studying how voices are produced by discourse, physical bodies, and technologies and how these actual voices sustain, reinforce, or challenge specific figurative understandings of voice.

Linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine’s study of Wolof speech registers is an early study that, even if it does not explicitly conceptualise voice as such, usefully lays out how the study of actual voices can reveal understandings of voice alternative to the assumptions outlined above. Irvine (1990) describes vocal practices that run radically counter to the adroit association between voice and self posited by Euro-American ideologies of voice, and in this way highlights the latter’s cultural particularity. She argues that Wolof speakers in Senegal have at their disposal two different ‘registers’ or styles of speaking that are connected to social status and situation. The speech of noble and upper caste Wolof is typically marked by a lack of affect, translated into linguistic features that include simple or even ‘wrong’ syntax, slow tempo, low volume, and a breathy voice. Lower caste Wolof and griots (bards) employ an opposing register that is marked by heightened affect, expressed through a high-pitched voice, fast and fluent speaking, and the use of complex syntax and morphology. As Irvine highlights, these registers or ‘voices’ are not inherent properties of individual speakers but strategically employed in order to mark relative status difference in a particular context (1990: 131-132). They operate as a resource available to all Wolof speakers in order to define a given situation and relationship. A noble Wolof who employs a restrained register of speech when talking to a griot might, for instance, switch into a more agitated register when asking a noble kinsman for a favour. In addition, griots often act as spokespersons for Wolof speakers of higher standing, using their own voices to express the opinions and emotions of their patrons. Voice is in such instances decoupled from a person’s self and interiority. Instead it becomes a cross-individually available resource for the performance and negotiation of social status and relations.

In classical anthropological fashion, Irvine presents her readers with a cultural framework that links voice and identity very differently from Euro-American models. The more recent work by Nicholas Harkness (2013) on voice and identity in the context of Evangelical Christian South Korea further investigates how specific identities or cultural tropes come to be linked to and eventually indexed by specific vocal qualities. He shows how many Christian Koreans invest enormous efforts in making their voices sound less ‘rough’ and ‘husky’, since these qualities are understood to represent a traditional, ‘unclean’ Korean voice that is associated with a past marked by suffering and backwardness. By listening to Christian sermons, singing in church choirs, and participating in further musical schooling, many Koreans seek instead to acquire a voice with qualities resembling that of European classical singing; what is commonly described as a ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ voice. This requires conscious and sustained work on how singers use their vocal apparatus. The ‘harsh’ or ‘rough’ tones of traditional Korean singing are produced by pushing air through tightened vocal cords, while the ‘clean’ voice of Western classical singing requires an open larynx and vocal cords. These specific ways of using the vocal apparatus become mapped onto specific sound attributes (harsh, rough vs. clean) and bodily experiences (tense, painful vs. healthy, natural) with their attendant ideological connotations, such that strained vocal cords and a tense throat come to index a troubled, pre-Christian, Korean history (Harkness 2013: 92-102).

What Harkness’s study demonstrates is that not only ideas about voice but also voices’ sonic and embodied qualities are malleable and can become the target of conscious transformation. As such, we may understand voices, as Steven Feld and his colleagues have put it, as ‘material embodiments of social ideology and experience’ (Feld et al. 2004: 332). Materiality here refers to a voice’s actual sound as well as the production and reception of this sound through bodily processes (Weidman 2014a: 40). Even if we cannot see or touch it, the sound of a voice is material insofar as it is the result of vibrations that propagate as waves through physical matter, typically air. These vibrations, in turn, are produced by our vocal cords when we speak (or sing, hum, cry, shout, etc.). When described in this way as a strictly physical and mechanical process, it may appear that the voice is simply the outcome of an objective or pre-cultural process of employing one’s vocal cords. Yet, as Harkness’s description begins to indicate, the way in which we employ our vocal cords and receive the sonic waves produced by others is in fact thoroughly encultured. How so? When we hear a voice, we ascribe meaning to it. We may, for instance, find it ‘clean,’ ‘manly’ or typically ‘black.’ Such acts of ascribing meaning to other voices influences the way we modulate our own, as we consciously or unconsciously tune our voices in relation to specific voice types or ideals. Norms, values, and ideologies in this way come to bear on the production of vocal sound (Eidsheim 2011: 149).

Voice and the making of socio-political identity

Both Irvine and Harkness’s studies highlight that the ascription of cultural meaning to voice often occurs when a number of sonic qualities become bundled into voice types, which in turn become associated with sociopolitical identities (such as the Wolof griot or the aspiring Christian Korean) or broader cultural tropes (such as modernity or sincerity) (Agha 2005; Fox 2004; Gray 2016; Keane 2011; Porcello 2002; Samuels 2004; Stokes 2010). Timbre is one category that allows for the exploration of how such processes of association occur. The term refers to the quality or ‘tone colour’ of an instrument or voice and is often described by highly culturally-specific words such as bright, dark, warm, harsh, creaky, husky etc. In her work on African-American opera singers, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim (2008) argues that timbre is a key mechanism that regulates how voices are matched to bodies. Specifically, Eidsheim shows how the common perception that ‘black’ voices have a specific ‘sound’ or timbre works to continuously reinscribe racial difference onto African-American bodies. She describes how, when training as singers, African-Americans are regularly taught to reproduce the timbre or vocal ‘sound’ expected of them, with the effect that each vocal performance further reinscribes the expected association between race and voice. This process obscures how timbre is socially constructed, rendering it a seemingly natural and innate characteristic of specific bodies. Vocal production in this way contributes to naturalising racial difference as inherent and immutable.

What this discussion exemplifies is that voice as a sonic and material entity not only marks existing socio-political categories, but also contributes to their making. This is an important claim for the anthropological project of destabilising the seemingly natural link between voice and self or identity. From this perspective, voice does not just express identities but also constitutes them. In this sense, the voice represents a disciplining force capable of generating social categories and subject positions: ‘Vocal practices, including everyday speech, song, verbal play, ritual speech, oratory, recitation, can be viewed as modes of practice and discipline that, in their repeated enactment, may performatively bring into being classed, gendered, political, ethnic, or religious subjects’ (Weidman 2014a: 44).

This also highlights that the distinction between an actual or sonic voice, on the one hand, and a metaphoric or figurative voice, on the other hand, can be but an analytical one: in social life these two aspects of voice are intricately linked, one sustaining and continuously (re)producing the other. Nicholas Harkness has expressed this idea through the term ‘phonosonic nexus,’ referring to the necessary interdependence of voice as it is phonically produced on the one hand, and sonically received, categorised, and given meaning to on the other hand (2013: 12-21). As a nexus or point of convergence, the voice links specific bodily actions (e.g. a specific way of modulating one’s voice) to specific sonic frameworks (e.g. what is considered to be a ‘clean’ voice) and ultimately to categories of social identity (e.g. a healthy and aspiring Korean Christian).

Miyako Inoue’s (2006) research on ‘Japanese women’s language,’ a feminine speech style associated with the image of urban middle-class women, further illustrates how vocal practices can generate social categories. Inoue demonstrates that such ‘women’s language’ is less a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin, as is commonly assumed, than a cultural construct adroitly linked to Japanese capitalist modernity. Based on historical research, Inoue reconstructs how speech styles that are today understood as distinctively feminine were largely invented at the turn of the twentieth century by male Japanese intellectuals. These intellectuals overheard speech patterns they considered to be vulgar and crude and ascribed them in their writings through quotation and reported speech to young women. Over time, this so-called ‘schoolgirl speech’ became idealised as refined rather than vulgar, and reconceptualised as a speech style befitting ideal middle-class femininity. Inoue’s study thus highlights how speech forms, even if invented, are able to create specific subject positions that people eventually come to inhabit, a process that she calls ‘indexical inversion’ (2006: 51).

The voice as excess

While acknowledging that the voice frequently functions as a disciplinary practice that (re)produces social categories and identities, a more psychoanalytically inspired body of literature has argued that it is impossible to ever fully discipline or capture voice. Because the voice is a sound object that lilts and sways, pitches and cracks, it asserts a presence of its own that cannot be reduced to the referential meaning expressed in speech or cultural associations that link vocal sound to socio-political categories (Nancy 2007; Schlichter 2011). In this sense, the voice may be described as ‘in excess of speech and meaning’ (Dolar 2006: 10). From this perspective, the singing voice is a particularly interesting object of study, because it highlights that voices have effects that go beyond the communication of meaning. In opera, for example, the voice’s impact greatly relies on it surpassing or even disrupting the necessities of meaningful communication (Duncan 2004).

In conceptualising the voice as excess, this body of literature has primarily been concerned with deconstructing Western metaphysical assumptions that accord primacy to signification, rationality, and the mind. From an anthropological point of view, however, this literature at times problematically ascribes a universal, pre-cultural quality to the voice’s disruptive potential. In this context, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s (2014) study of aurality in nineteenth-century Colombia usefully grounds assertions about vocal excess through a meticulous historical study. Ochoa Gautier argues that in nineteenth-century Colombia – a newly independent state keen to craft a national citizenry out of multiple constituencies – the voice was construed as ambiguously standing between nature and culture. This rendered it a central mechanism for determining where the boundary between these two realms ought to be drawn, and consequently also for how the categories of non-human and human, primitive and civilised, were to be distinguished. Various European and Colombian scientists and intellectuals, for instance, repeatedly described the sounds produced by the boat rowers of the Magdalena River, who were of mixed African and Amerindian descent and used rhythmic stamping and call-response vocal patterns to coordinate their labour, as ‘howls’ resembling the sounds of animals. Ochoa Gautier shows that linguistic policies like the standardization of pronunciation and orthography were employed by Colombian elites as a means to tame and hominise such ‘barbaric’ voices in order to forge ‘proper’ citizens for the new state. Yet she insists that such projects to discipline ostensibly untamed voices were never fully successful, since some voices refused or failed to conform to the standards laid out for them. It is in this failure or refusal to conform to disciplinary frameworks that Ochoa Gautier locates vocal excess.

Sound technologies and the mediated voice

So far we have looked at how sonic voices are shaped by and shape in turn the representations through which people make sense of them. What we have not taken into consideration yet is how voices are, in their capacity as sound objects, inherently mediated: at the very minimum, they rely on air as a mediator that transmits sound waves. Many of the voices we encounter in our daily lives are mediated by more complicated technologies, though: radios transmit distant voices into our living rooms, microphones amplify them to reach large audiences, tape recorders render them durable and re-playable, while digital programmes modify them. From an anthropological perspective these technologies are of interest because they highlight a condition that characterises all voices, whether technologically mediated or not: that voices are able to circulate separately from the (human) bodies that produce them. This ability throws up the question of how circulating voices ought to be matched to their origins. Ideologies of voice determine what kinds of answers people will find to that question and where they consequently locate subjectivity and agency. In this sense, studying sound technologies can be a particularly productive entry point for studying reigning ideologies of voice.

Yet while separability as a condition characterises all voices, sound technologies allow voices to circulate independently of their origins in unprecedented ways. As such, they are capable of bringing about novel social formations; an aspect that much anthropological work has focused on. What kinds of anxieties and what kinds of desires does the heightened circulation and amplification of voices engender? How are reigning ideologies of voice able to accommodate such new forms of vocal circulation, and how might they transform in order to give meaning to new technological phenomena? These are some of the questions that anthropologists as well as scholars from neighbouring disciplines have asked (Fisher 2016; Gitelman 1999; Kunreuther 2010; Spitulnik 1998; Stokes 2009; Weheliye 2005; Weidman 2003).

In studying technologically-mediated voices, anthropologists have drawn from insights produced by media and technology studies regarding the capacity of technologies to create new subjects, publics, and forms of authority and discipline. In particular, social and cultural histories of modern sound technologies such as the radio, gramophone, or telephone have proven useful resources for anthropological inquiries (Connor 1997; Erlmann 2004; Frith 1996; Gitelman 1999; Sterne 2003). Particularly influential in how to approach the role of technologies in transforming vocal ideology and practice has been the work of media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990), who argues that the notion of an ‘inner voice’ associated with subjective interiority was the outcome of new pedagogical practices (such as silent reading) connected to changing family organization and reading practices in eighteenth-century Europe.

Amanda Weidman’s (2003, 2006) research on Indian Karnatic music illustrates how a focus on sound technologies and their effects allows for the unearthing of a particular ‘politics of voice’ and its centrality for discourses of modernity, nation, and authenticity. Weidman argues that Karnatic music is not, as is often claimed, an ancient Indian cultural tradition that predated British colonialism. Instead, she shows how its codification as ‘classical’ emerged from the colonial encounter and the ideals of cultural authenticity it produced. Modern sound recording technologies were crucial in shaping these ideals by introducing previously unavailable notions of sound fidelity. Before the introduction of such technologies, Karnatic musical practice had largely relied on face-to-face encounters between musical masters and disciples, performers and listeners. Recording technologies like the gramophone, which were widespread in India by the middle of the twentieth century, profoundly transformed these practices and the social relations they sustained. The gramophone posed a threat to the authority of musical masters, because it took the monopoly of music teaching and performance out of their hands. Disciples and aficionados no longer relied on the personal encounter with masters, because they could now listen to recordings whenever and wherever they wanted. At the same time, recordings became a new standard for judging the fidelity of performers to what could now be conceived of as ‘classical’ musical originals. These new standards regarding musical fidelity, Weidman argues, paved the way for an entirely new social sense of fidelity to tradition and loyalty to one’s roots (2006: 246). Ideas of national heritage and cultural authenticity are, from this perspective, fundamentally intertwined with the history of sound recording technologies.

Another aspect of Weidman’s (2007) research demonstrates how sound technologies can formatively shape ideologies of gender through the politics of voice they sustain. The codification of Karnatic music in the early twentieth-century centrally relied on crafting a class of women performers who would fit ideals of middle-class feminine respectability that became current at the same time. This required, in particular, distinguishing women singers and dancers of ‘classical’ music from devadasis, musicians and dancers who did service at Hindu temples and were sometimes romantically or sexually involved with their male patrons. Simultaneously, with the emergence of the respectable, middle-class ‘family woman,’ lower-class devadasis became stigmatised as prostitutes. In this context, the availability of sound recording opened up a new avenue for high-status Brahmin women to become involved in musical performance. Because gramophone records allowed women to be heard without their bodies being seen, ‘it provided a way to sing for the public without appearing in public and jeopardizing their respectability’ (Weidman 2007: 140). In addition, the technology of the microphone created a new sense of intimacy between singer and listener, which sustained understandings of the voice as a pure and natural expression of interiority, thereby further dissociating it from the performer’s body (Stokes 2009). Sound technologies like the gramophone and the microphone in this way created the conditions that allowed linking a notion of ‘natural’ or ‘pure’ voice with the chaste female body. As such, they contributed to shaping an ideology of the female voice that sustained specific notions of femininity and embodiment.

Public voices and intimate publics

Weidman’s work shows how sound technologies do not ‘just’ amplify, record, or transmit voices, but that in doing so they profoundly influence how voices are able to sustain notions like authenticity and feminine respectability, which in turn powerfully shape social reality. Because they greatly amplify the circulation of voices, sound technologies also crucially shape public spheres. Laura Kunreuther’s (2014) work on the central role that different figures of voice have played in the recent history of Nepal demonstrates this aspect in ethnographic depth. Kunreuther notes that the liberalization of Nepal’s political system and economy since 1990 has introduced a liberal discourse of voice, which associates voice with political participation, consciousness, and agency. This political sense of voice, she argues, relies upon and produces a second figure of voice – ‘intimate voice’ – that is associated with interior feeling, emotional directness, and authentic communication. Yet paradoxically, as Kunreuther shows, this intimate voice is in many ways an effect of publically- and technologically-mediated interactions (see also Porcello 2002).

Kunreuther (2014: 124-214; also Kunreuther 2006, 2010) examines FM radio stations as one crucial site where this happens. FM radio began broadcasting in Nepal six years after the adoption of parliamentary democracy in 1990. In contrast to the state-controlled Radio Nepal broadcasting nation-wide on AM airwaves, FM stations are more local in scope, privately owned and commercially run. Crucially, moreover, they are not allowed to cover political content. Kunreuther nevertheless identifies these radio stations as having political effects, because they contribute to creating the kinds of subjects befitting the newly created liberal political sphere. Locally anchored, they support a high degree of interaction between radio hosts and listeners, and often directly broadcast their listeners’ voices. For listeners, this creates an image of the radio as a transparent and direct form of communication. FM radio broadcasts also employ mainly informal and unrehearsed speech, emphasise personal life-stories, and feature as platforms for the sharing of listeners’ private thoughts and feelings. One radio show, for example, asks listeners to send in letters with their personal stories, some of which the show’s host then presents on air. Kunreuther argues that such shows educate their listeners to present their private lives in a public form, in this way shaping new subjectivities that are marked at once by a sense of interiority and a desire to share such interiority in public. By thus creating ‘intimate publics,’ FM radio stations, even though not explicitly political, are crucial for perpetuating a politics of voice that thrives on notions of immediacy, transparency, and participation and feeds into larger trends of political and economic liberalization.

Daniel Fisher’s (2016) ethnography of Aboriginal radio production in Australia similarly highlights how radio technology is capable of sustaining intimate networks of kinship and relatedness, here in the face of an Aboriginal reality marked by violent colonization, displacement, and assimilationist government. One way in which this happens is through request shows, where listeners call in to request a particular song and dedicate it to kin dispersed across immense distances, often as a result of incarceration or other forms of governmental intervention (Fisher 2016: 43-79). Older ideas of kinship are ‘mediatized’ by these radio programmes in distinctly modern ways as the sound of country music and the voices of callers, radio hosts, and singers conjoin to address a geographically dispersed yet collectively imagined Indigenous public. While these programmes do not feature explicitly ‘Aboriginal’ content – both hosts and callers speak in English and callers generally request American-inflected blues and country music – they nevertheless sustain a distinct Indigenous public sphere by evoking characteristically Aboriginal networks of relation and address.

As both Kunreuther and Fisher explore in detail how the practices of radio broadcasting render the voice an object of technical as much as bureaucratic intervention, their work usefully highlights that the seemingly immediate and transparent radio-broadcast voice is in fact the outcome of complex processes of technological as well as governmental mediation. This draws attention to the fact that the material practices, technologies, and institutions through which voices become audible crucially determine how voices are understood and heard. This insight usefully challenges prevailing notions of orality as more direct, sincere, or transparent than writing; what historian of technology Jonathan Sterne has called ‘the audio-visual litany’ (2003: 15-19). Opposing the ear to the eye, hearing to writing, this ‘litany’ is a powerful Euro-American assumption that posits the oral/aural as more immediate and hence more ‘authentic’ than the visual. As a discipline, anthropology has long seen itself responsible for studying so-called ‘oral societies.’ Showing the immense complexity of cultural and literary production, memorial techniques, and ideologies brought forth by these societies, anthropologists have gone a long way in challenging stereotypes about oral societies being ostensibly simple or primitive (e.g. Barber 2007; Finnegan 2007). The emerging anthropology of voice equally contributes to dispelling engrained stereotypes about the oral. It does so, however, by approaching orality not as opposed to technologies of writing, inscription, and recording, but as fundamentally mediated by and intertwined with these technologies. Such an approach promises to be productive for challenging not only the oral-visual, hearing-writing divide, but a whole series of dichotomies that regularly get mapped onto it, including nature versus culture, body versus mind, primitive versus civilised, female versus male, etc.

Conclusion: The wider relevance of voice

The anthropological record shows that voice is a salient category in many communities and repeatedly functions as a potent metaphor in relation to questions of power, agency, and subjectivity, though in ways that are neither uniform, nor predictable. Given this salience, anthropological studies of voice and vocal practices carry relevance for other subfields of anthropology and the social sciences. What renders such studies particularly productive is the move of considering metaphors of voice in tandem with actually sounding voices. This allows anthropologists to complicate common understandings of voice as a means of empowerment and agency and to ethnographically ground broader concepts in social theory to which voice is central yet remains unexplored.

Attention to vocal practice, for instance, can be a productive starting point for challenging human rights projects that seek to ‘give voice’ to the powerless by exploring the often ambiguous and contradictory effects that such projects produce. An analysis of the relation between material voices and their metaphorical mobilization in political struggle is also important for understanding how social movements are or are not able to make their voices ‘matter’ (Faudree 2013; Minks 2013). Considering the impact of technological mediation on the circulation and uptake of voices, moreover, appears imperative for our grasp of how social media and new technologies shape new subjectivities and practices of social interaction. More broadly, this points to the reframing of voice under conditions of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policy tends to position voice in a framework of choice, creativity, freedom, and transparency (Kunreuther 2010; Weidman 2014b). Anthropological attention to the actual vocal practices that such claims enable and foreclose promises important insights into how neoliberal discourse and practice shape subjects and determine frames of action.

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Note on contributor

Marlene Schäfers is a social anthropologist and FWO [PEGASUS]² Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Ghent University’s Middle East and North Africa Research Group. She holds a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation investigates Kurdish women’s attempts at making their voices heard in intimate, public and political spheres in Turkey, while her new project explores Kurdish politics of loss and mourning.

Dr. Marlene Schäfers, Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Universiteitstraat 8, 9000 Gent, Belgium. marlene.schafers@ugent.be

Ethics / morality

Felix Stein — Fri, 19 May 2017 14:09:20 +0000

James Laidlaw

University of Cambridge

Initially published 19 May 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17ethics

Abstract:

It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new departures – virtue ethics, ordinary language philosophy, the later thought of Michel Foucault, phenomenology, and experimental moral psychology – and outline briefly emerging debates within the field.

Introduction

To understand the anthropology of ethics, and its place in the wider discipline, it helps to know that two apparently contradictory things are both true. It is true that the academic discipline of anthropology has been centrally concerned with morality or ethics (these words will be used here interchangeably) throughout its whole history. It is also true that until the last couple of decades there was nothing that could reasonably be called the anthropology of ethics. Its advent has been felt to be such a discontinuity that we are routinely said to be experiencing an ‘ethical turn’, yet people also feel moved, equally routinely, to point out that anthropologists have been writing about morality all along; and they are indeed correct in saying this. So what exactly is new?

Partial engagements: Durkheimian, Boasian, and Marxist

Influential early anthropologists with otherwise widely different approaches, such as Westermarck (1906-8, 1932) and Marett (1902, 1931), put the study of the evolution and variation of morality in different societies at the centre of their work. But the view that most profoundly influenced anthropology was that of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who proposed the replacement of ‘speculative’ moral philosophy with a positivist science of ‘moral facts’. For Durkheim, the social changes brought about by modernization were so rapid and far-reaching as to produce unprecedented dislocation and the potential for discord and disorder. A science of social life was necessary to inform state policy in order to restore social solidarity. Early in his career, Durkheim thought that the newly complex division of labour might itself be the basis of a new form of social order (1933 [1893]), but he later concluded that modern societies would need, in addition, to incorporate updated, rationally designed versions of the religious institutions that had been the basis of consensus and solidarity in pre-modern societies. His monumental Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995 [1912]) was to provide the basis for the design of a religion for modernity, being an analysis of the religious foundations of social order in what he supposed to be the earliest and most primitive societies. What was required, Durkheim argued, was for the rules of good behaviour, including those variously relevant for people in different walks of life, to be rendered sacred: endowed with a kind of inviolable authority so that people would follow them willingly. For this to happen they must be associated with the ultimate Good, that in virtue of which all human flourishing is possible. In the past, that Good had been misrecognised as a supernatural reality, or God. It is in fact not supernatural, although it is super-organic, being nothing other than society itself. It is in ritual, Durkheim argued, that people enjoy their most direct experience of the reality of society as a thing greater than the sum of its parts, and it is there too that specific values, ideas, and rules are endowed with society’s authority. Under modern conditions, the state would need to institute rituals and design a secular religion so that the rules of conduct necessary to maintain harmony and solidarity come to be widely embraced and voluntarily followed. Sociologists must therefore replace not only philosophers but also priests, and serve the state by ensuring that the institutions of modern societies are matched by the correct values and rules, and that these are inculcated through the education system as well as in its collective civic life (1957 [1937], 1961 [1925]).

As Durkheim himself observed (1953 [1906]), his basic conception of morality in many ways closely paralleled the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s account of the moral law, but it differed not only in being fully secularised, with society (in practice, the state) occupying the role of divine legislator, but also in being naturalised and mechanical. What for Kant was a profound philosophical problem about the relation between the human being as part of the natural world, subject to cause and effect, and that same being as a free and rational subject, is transformed for Durkheim into a crucially different conception of the ‘double existence’ of mankind: the individual, subject to ungovernable and egoistic biologically-driven desires, becomes capable of meaningful and satisfied life only insofar as he or she is incorporated into a well-functioning society. ‘Freedom’ is a matter merely of how willingly people do what society anyway requires.

Thus ‘morality’ was absolutely central to Durkheim’s conception of society, and on his account to describe a society would necessarily involve describing its shared moral rules and values. Indeed, for Durkheim, the social just is the moral (which is to say the sacred) as opposed to the individual and biological. But if this makes morality central, the cost of this particular way of doing so, it could be argued, is a strikingly streamlined and impoverished conception of ethical life. Gone is any philosophical perplexity (as in Kant) about human freedom or about what might be a good life, in light of our nature and limitations or our place in the cosmos. Gone equally (or at best, reduced to mechanical ‘forces’ acting on the individual) are all the paradoxes and tragic conflicts involved in what T. S. Eliot has one of his characters describe as ‘the endless struggle to think well of ourselves’ (1969: 402). It is a conception of ethical life as much without tragedy and conflict as it is without sainthood and striving. Morality is that mechanical process whereby individuals become a functioning ‘part’ of society.

The anthropology influenced by Durkheim’s ideas, which is to say to some degree most anthropology, especially in Europe, through the twentieth century, thus conceived of morality as consisting of the socially-sanctioned rules of conduct that tamed individual desires in the service of society. And the central problem (see, for example, the essays in Fortes 1987), in addition to showing how rule-governed behaviour functioned in an integrated system, was to explain the mechanisms by which people are brought to follow these rules: how do customary rules and roles become compelling for the individual?

In American anthropology, where Durkheim’s influence was less powerful, the Boasian conception of bounded cultures, each with its own distinctive values and modal personalities, resulted in a remarkably similar treatment of morality as the approved ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are taken for granted and habitual in each culture (Benedict 1934). The problem, strictly comparable to Fortes’s though in a less mechanical idiom, was how processes of ‘enculturation’ ensured that individuals came to embody the values of their culture. Here the internal consistency, distinctiveness, and autonomy of individual cultures replace social integration and solidarity as the functional goods that morality serves, but the flattening of ethical life it implies is remarkably similar.

Marxist anthropologists introduced a couple of minor variations in the general approach. For some, since what Durkheimians called social solidarity is always in fact achieved in the interests of a dominant class, the problem was to explain how subordinated groups (such as young men in a gerontocracy) were induced to follow kinship and other ‘moral’ rules that were fundamentally against their interests. How was the dominant ideology inculcated (e.g. Meillassoux 1981; Bloch 1989)? For others, the focus should be on the limits to such ideologies: when exploited groups engage in violent rebellion or quiet everyday resistance, they enact values that are contrary to the dominant ideology. The anthropologist’s task here was to give articulate voice to this popular ‘moral economy’, which not coincidentally tended to coincide with the anthropologist’s own egalitarian and anti-capitalist views (e.g. Scott 1976; Taussig 1980). In both these variants, morality functions as an idiom for the tactical expression of class interest, and thus as in Durkheimian and Boasian approaches, it remains fundamentally a matter of the collective representations and rules that define and enforce group membership, whether of a whole society or of a specific class.

The limitations of these general views of ethical life did not prevent anthropologists from giving rich and insightful descriptions of the morality, as they conceived it, of diverse societies. Studies of kinship explicated the complementary rights and duties of different kinship roles, and how these are reinforced in rituals such as initiations, marriage, and ancestor worship. Studies of economic life showed how cooperation is achieved and how competition is regulated, by shared norms and values. More darkly, accusations of witchcraft, and divination and other methods of identifying malefactors, were shown to enforce moral values and mediate structural conflicts of interest. And all these studies, along with studies of political and religious life, showed how common values as well as structural principles cut across and integrated these never-actually-separate domains of life. In addition, within the terms set by this understanding of morality as collectively shared values, habits, and rules in relation to social structure, anthropologists achieved some notably sophisticated and original insights, including Leach’s ideas about how conflicting complexes of values might be dynamically related (1954), Fortes’s comparison of ideas of Fate and Justice in both scriptural and oral religions (1959), and Gluckman’s suggestion that the social dynamics of moral life can be mapped by describing the processes involved in the allocation of responsibility (1972).

The sense that all this, while valuable in its own terms, simply bypassed much of what is most important about the ethical dimension of human life, was never far from the surface. Might it be possible to broaden the range of what was included under ‘morality’ to include more than the following of obligatory rules? How do we understand what happens when people doubt or question the dominant values of their social milieu? And what about when they face irreconcilable conflicts of values, or aspire to alternative ideals and values, or respond to what they take to be ethical demands than run contrary to accepted rules and values? Can people’s sense of responsibility and freedom in relation to their own character and conduct really be written off, with a causal story about how, generally speaking, they come to do what society (or their culture or their class) requires of them? Could not anthropologists’ knowledge of the diversity of forms of moral life contribute something to debates among philosophers and others about how to understand ethics?

So punctuating the history of anthropology in the twentieth century, we find calls, sometimes by anthropologists, more often by philosophers, and on one memorable occasion by a husband-and-wife team of philosopher and anthropologist, for a more reflective focus on ethics in anthropological thought and, as part of this, a dialogue with moral philosophy (e.g. Westermarck 1932; Firth 1951, 1953; Kluckhohn 1951; Macbeath 1952; Brandt 1954; Read 1955; Ladd 1957; von Fürer-Haimendorf 1967; Vogt & Albert 1967; Edel & Edel 1968; Mayer 1981; Evens 1982; Wolfram 1982; Pocock 1986, 1988; Moody-Adams 1997; Cook 1999). But none of these various initiatives and proposals generated much of a response. No sustained debates developed within anthropology, so there was no conceptual innovation or argument that could attract much attention from other disciplines. It remained the case that when philosophers mentioned anthropology at all, it was merely as the professional exponents of cultural relativism, which meant of course that there was no substantive conversation to be had.

New departures: The anthropology of ethics

Around the turn of the millennium, a newly sustained interest in ethics began to be evident in anthropology: one that was liberated by a broadening of scope well beyond problems of social control and enculturation, and by a loosening of the commitment to cultural relativism that enabled a more rounded and productive engagement with moral philosophy. A few ethnographies and collections of essays indicated a growing interest (e.g. Parish 1994; Laidlaw 1995; Howell 1997, Briggs 1998). Then, three programmatic essays written independently of each other (Lambek 2000; Faubion 2001b; Laidlaw 2002) made overlapping cases for anthropologists to take the problem of understanding ethical life much more seriously, and each surveyed some intellectual resources they suggested might be drawn upon to help with this. For reasons that will surely not be fully understood until we have rather more hindsight (inevitably, the suggestion has already been made that it is a facet of ‘neoliberalism’, but then since scarcely anything has not been explained that way by someone recently, this is hardly significant), these suggestions seem to have struck a chord, or at any rate shortly afterwards workshops and symposia began to be held on the subject (for example, those published as Barker 2007; Corsín Jimenez 2007; Brown & Milgram 2009; Heintz 2009; Sykes 2009; Lambek 2010; Pandian & Ali 2010), what are now classic monographs began to appear (e.g. Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006), as did synoptic accounts and readers aiming to introduce students to the emerging field (Zigon 2008; Faubion 2011; Fassin 2012; Fassin & Lézé 2014; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek et al. 2016).

Surveying all this and the subsequent literature, which has continued to grow at a still gathering pace, it is possible to identify two salient features: first, a range of work that engages systematically with intellectual traditions, many in other disciplines, where there has been a sustained engagement with ethics, in an effort to develop a conceptual vocabulary for anthropology and to advance a general understanding of the nature of ethical life; and second, a series of emerging debates taking place more or less within anthropology, on topics ranging from very general theoretical matters to substantive controversies about ethical change in specific societies, as well as a series of established topics of anthropological research that have been materially enriched by being subject to ‘the ethical turn’.

Under the first of those two headings, the main philosophical orientations or disciplinary sources anthropologists of ethics have explored are: virtue ethics, ordinary language philosophy, and Michel Foucault’s ‘genealogy of ethics’, and, to a lesser extent and more recently, phenomenology and experimental psychology.

Intellectual traditions

a. Virtue ethics

In the middle of the twentieth century, two schools of thought dominated Anglophone moral philosophy: consequentialism (primarily utilitarianism), according to which courses of action are judged by calculating their relative effects (e.g. on aggregate happiness or well-being), and deontology (predominantly Kantian), which is concerned with identifying the duties and obligations necessarily pertaining to a (rational) moral agent. Both these traditions are largely abstract, deductive, normative, and ahistorical, so establishing dialogue between either and anthropology would encounter obvious difficulties. But the most significant development in moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, usually seen as beginning with Anscombe (1958), was a reaction against just these features of those traditions. What became known as ‘virtue ethics’ emphasises the careful description of linguistic categories, especially those describing aspects of character, conduct, and social relations, and therefore contextually sensitive interpretive descriptions of exactly the kind referred to by Clifford Geertz, in his prescription for interpretive anthropology, as ‘thick description’ (1973). For virtue ethicists, the central task is the explication of the virtues and vices that are central to the ability to thrive and flourish within a socially- and historically-located form of ethical life, with the supposed fact-value dichotomy being overcome by the fact that these concepts of good and bad conduct and character are inextricably both descriptive and evaluative. The virtue ethics revival involved a conscious recuperation of a good deal of the form, and not a little of the content, of the moral philosophy of the classical world, with Aristotle being a particularly pervasive influence. And exponents have frequently called for moral philosophy to proceed on an ethnographic or anthropological (or historical or sociological) basis. Unquestionably the philosopher writing in this tradition who has had the widest direct influence on anthropologists has been Alasdair MacIntyre, whose seminal and widely-read After Virtue (1981) directly inspired Talal Asad’s (1986) prescription for an anthropology of Islam, which in turn has been the framework in which Saba Mahmood (2005), Charles Hirschkind (2006), and others have written ethnographies of ethical (or ‘piety’) movements in Islam that have transformed the anthropological study of that religion. Anand Pandian’s ethnography of the Piramilai Kallar caste in south India (2008, 2009), which also takes the form of an explication of virtues and moral reasoning and is in some ways indebted to MacIntyre, makes in addition a persuasive argument for rejecting some of the more crudely normative elements of MacIntyre’s philosophy, accepted by these other authors, in particular the implicitly authoritarian assertion that only a tradition that is internally consistent and coherently integrated, and where orthodoxy is effectively enforced, can provide a sustainable framework for ethical life (on this, see Laidlaw 2014: Chs 2 and 4). Also influenced by MacIntyre, but more extensively drawing directly on Aristotle, Michael Lambek (2002, 2008) and Cheryl Mattingly (2012, 2014) have carefully worked out and exemplified virtue-ethical analytical methods for anthropology. Virtue ethics remains a rich and developing field, and is much more diverse than anthropological engagements have yet fully reckoned with; there has been little engagement with the important work of Martha Nussbaum (1986, 1994), Christine Swanton (2003, 2015), Charles Taylor (1989, 2014), and others. My own work has proceeded in part through an engagement with various works by Bernard Williams (e.g. 1985, 1993), and increasingly virtue ethics is developing in a self-consciously interdisciplinary direction, in which awareness of cultural diversity and the theoretical challenges this represents call directly for productive dialogue with anthropology (e.g. Snow 2015; Annas, Narvaez & Snow 2016).

b. Ordinary language philosophy

Overlapping with the virtue ethics revival is the school of thought known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (both were the work initially of disciples of the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and both derived in part from his later teachings). This philosophical tradition had long been influential in anthropology, both from anthropologists’ readings of Wittgenstein and as mediated especially through the writings of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and others, in the so-called ‘interpretive turn’ in general and specifically in manifold uses of the idea of performativity. Indirectly, through Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983), the influence of Wittgenstein’s later thought has been very wide indeed, even if not all anthropologists have been impressed (see especially Gellner 1959, 1998). Two authors in particular have recently championed the importance of ordinary language philosophy specifically for the anthropology of ethics, and their proposals for ‘ordinary ethics’ have attracted a good deal of interest and comment. For Michael Lambek (2010, 2015b) and for Veena Das (2010, 2012, 2015), following Wittgenstein and Austin and also later interpreters such as Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, it is impossible to separate action from the concepts that structure its intentional content, which means that even apparently unthinking or habitual conduct is subject to criteria and embodies ethical judgement. They conclude accordingly that ethics is immanent in human action as such. Further, Das in particular insists that while the ethical is therefore properly to be located in the ordinary or everyday, we should be intensely suspicious of all claims to represent any extraordinary or transcendent ‘good’, whether made by individuals or religious or state institutions or in the name of formalised, aspirational ethical projects: these are emphatically not where the ethical is to be sought. Many have found these arguments persuasive and ethnographically productive (e.g. Jackson 2013; Stafford 2013; Singh 2015). Debate on the position has focused on two main sets of questions: just what it means to say that the ethical is ‘immanent’ in all human action, and whether this risks once again collapsing ethics into ‘the social’ (on this see Lempert 2013; Lempert 2014; Laidlaw 2014b; Zigon 2014; Lambek 2015a; Lempert 2015); and whether it unhelpfully treats the categories of the ordinary and extraordinary normatively rather than ethnographically, and so forecloses prematurely on what it makes sense to include within the ethical, by assuming it must contain only phenomena of which one approves (Clarke 2014; Venkatesan 2015; Robbins 2016; Laidlaw 2017).

c. Michel Foucault

A third formative source of ideas in the development of the anthropology of ethics has been the later writings of Michel Foucault: the project he referred to as his ‘genealogy of ethics’. This project shows both continuities and discontinuities from his earlier and better-known studies of asylums, clinics, and prisons. In his genealogy of ethics, Foucault continues and extends his influential rethinking of the concept of power, pursued in those earlier studies, but now encompassing an equally radical rethinking of that of freedom, such that these two concepts are not defined negatively as what the other excludes, and such that freedom emerges as a central term in the analysis of how subjects are constituted in diverse historical and social contexts. Power is a pervasive aspect of human relations not in spite of the fact that, but only because, human subjects are free (Foucault 1982). They have the capacity to reflect, to stand back from their own conduct and constitute it as an object of knowledge, and to act so as to change themselves; and this reflective freedom is the basis of ethics.

Substantively, Foucault seeks to trace the genealogy of what he calls ‘the desiring subject’: how did it come to be that in the modern West people think of themselves as defined by their desires, such that the modern concept of ‘sexuality’ seems to reveal one’s inner nature and destiny? To tell this story properly requires beginning from a form of thought and practice constituted altogether differently. The ethical life of classical Athens, Foucault seeks to show, was not yet based as is the modern complex on what he calls ‘a hermeneutics of desire’. Instead, it was ‘an ethics of existence’. What he means by this is that citizens of classical Athens were invited, in the dominant ethical discourses of their time, not to discover who and what they were by uncovering their hidden desires – perhaps with the aid of therapists, priests, or psychiatrists, as we are invited to do – but instead consciously to fashion themselves, and to do so, in particular, with regard to their fitness to exercise both freedom and power in relation to others. In the two last published volumes of his History of Sexuality (1986, 1988), and in a number of essays, interviews, and posthumously published lectures (1980, 1997, 2005, 2010, 2011), Foucault sets out to describe this radically different form of ethical thought and practice, and the millennium-long process whereby it was replaced by the hermeneutics of desire, from which our own taken-for-granted assumptions – including those of Foucault’s Marxist and Freudian contemporaries who fancied themselves radicals – derive.

Of course, Foucault’s diagnosis of the infirmities of our political discourse and the sources of our identity are a challenging provocation for anthropologists, as they overturn many of the accepted understandings widely shared in modern societies. But these writings also provide a more focused impetus to the anthropology of ethics, because in the course of pursuing these arguments, Foucault develops a number of conceptual resources for the ethnographic and comparative analysis of forms of ethical life, including a distinction between forms of moral life dominated by rules and codes, and those organised around more optative projects of ethical self-fashioning, and a formal scheme for making comparisons among the latter.

The conceptual and analytic resources Foucault developed in his genealogy of ethics (for extended commentary see Faubion 2011 and Laidlaw 2014) have been productively used by anthropologists in a range of ethnographic studies (e.g. Laidlaw 1995; Rabinow 1996; Faubion 2001; Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Cook 2010; Dave 2012). Perhaps the most widely shared reservation among anthropologists about Foucault’s analytics of ethics concerns the extent to which it relies on the notion of freedom. Despite the fact that the Foucauldian concept of freedom is necessarily limited, and socially and historically variable, anthropologists are made ‘nervous’ and ‘uneasy’ because it plays such a prominent part in what they tend to call ‘Western common sense’ (for sophisticated expressions of these concerns see Robbins 2007 and Keane 2014) and therefore use of the notion analytically might be ethnocentric. My own view is that the real danger of ethnocentrism here lies not in taking for granted a supposedly Western common sense about freedom, since there is in fact no such agreement, but rather in allowing the fiercely contested place of the idea of freedom in Western political debate to give rise to an intellectual taboo, preventing both the acknowledgement of the ethnographic prevalence of concepts of freedom well beyond the modern West and serious analytical engagement with the question of the place of freedom in ethical life.

d. Phenomenology

Anthropologists have been influenced by philosophers who fall under the designation ‘phenomenological’ for a very long time indeed: Lévi-Strauss’s great book The Savage Mind (1966 [1962]) was dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, after all. The category ‘phenomenology’ covers a wide range of thinkers, who have in common only that they take as their subject matter structures of experience and consciousness. Those who identify themselves as part of this tradition typically qualify the designation in one of a number of overlapping ways (hermeneutic, existentialist, dialectical, or transcendental phenomenology, etc.) and those identified as its major thinkers (variously Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, Sartre, Levinas, Schutz, Arendt, Dilthey, Garfinkel, Derrida – some even include James and Dewey) adopted a wide range of conflicting positions. Nevertheless, there are those who have argued in recent decades that there is enough of common substance in phenomenology to provide the basis for a distinctive project of ‘phenomenological anthropology’ (e.g. Jackson 1996; Desjarlais & Throop 2011). A common objection, of course, is that so much of what phenomenological thinkers say is couched in universal and culture-free terms and is concerned with ostensibly universal dimensions of human experience, and although some proponents of ‘cultural phenomenology’ have attempted to link questions of selfhood and experience to specific social and cultural settings (e.g. Csordas 1999), the increasingly dominant tendency has been to comment on what are seen as existential challenges of human being as such, or in the context of very generally conceived global circumstances (Weiner 2001; Jackson 2005, 2013; Ingold 2011, 2013).

Unsurprisingly, some anthropologists of this persuasion have proposed that phenomenology also provides the basis for a distinctive approach to the anthropology of ethics (Kleinman 2006; Zigon 2009, 2014; Jackson 2013; Throop 2010, 2012, 2016; see also Wentzer 2016). A difficulty here is that these anthropologists owe primary allegiance to different foundational phenomenological thinkers, and therefore divergent intellectual programmes, and these imply rather different trajectories for the anthropological study of ethics. Thus, while Kleinman’s phenomenology is mediated through American pragmatism, and Jackson draws most concertedly on Merleau-Ponty, Zigon by contrast speaks up in particular for ‘those of us who take Heidegger seriously’ (2009) and his ‘theory of moral breakdown’ (2008) is presented as being directly derived from Heidegger. Given these differences, calls for a specifically phenomenological approach to morality perhaps sometimes express a general preference for a certain theoretical vocabulary in anthropology, more than a commitment to specific ideas or concepts in relation to ethics. And given how differently ethics figures in the writings of major phenomenological thinkers – while for some it is a central concern, Heidegger was, as it seems to me, almost as much a stranger to ethics in thought as in his life – some considerable conceptual work would be required to reconcile divergent starting points into a unified research programme, if the prospect of a distinctive, comprehensively phenomenological anthropology of ethics is to be realised. But even if that is not to come to pass, phenomenological ideas and concepts are already being productively deployed, as variously dominant or subsidiary conceptual components, in ethnographies of ethical life of otherwise quite divergent character (e.g. Parish 1994; Lester 2005; Marsden 2005; Prasad 2007; Mattingly 2014; Throop 2010; Simon 2014; Schielke 2015; Keane 2016).

e. Experimental psychology

A different kind of challenge is presented by the burgeoning research carried out by experimental psychologists in recent years on how people in varied situations make moral judgements and decisions, and the role especially of emotions in shaping those decisions (for a thoughtful survey, see Appiah 2008). Many of the methodological assumptions made in that research strike most anthropologists as unrealistic; it also often makes decidedly parochial assumptions about what counts as ‘morality’; and genuinely cross-cultural research is extremely difficult, and therefore rare. But the difficulties are not insuperable, as demonstrated by pioneering research using experimental methods by anthropologists Rita Astuti and Maurice Bloch (2015). For several years, Richard Shweder and others have been developing a synthesis of anthropological and psychological research, which they refer to as ‘cultural psychology’ (1991), and this has included a distinctive approach to the question of cultural variation in moral reasoning. In a challenge to the most influential psychological accounts of moral development (e.g. Kohlberg 1981; Turiel 1983), which focused entirely on the supposedly universal moral principles of justice, emphasising autonomy and protection from harm, Shweder and his colleagues (Shweder et al. 1997) argue that there are three distinct areas of concern in moral reasoning – autonomy (which encompasses justice/harm), community, and divinity – and that these are balanced differently in more individualistic and more collectivist cultures. So far at least, this analysis has seemed to most anthropologists of ethics to be overly schematic, and not much other anthropological research has been guided by it (although see Cassaniti & Hickman 2014 for anthropological attempts to follow Shweder’s lead). However, a modified form has been adopted by one of the most innovative psychologists of moral development writing today (Haidt 2013), and this work is formulated in such a way that it both invites and enables dialogue with anthropology. The intellectual basis for such cooperation has been greatly strengthened by Webb Keane’s recent book, Ethical Life (2016), which achieves a critical synthesis of a wide range of psychological research with anthropological and historical perspectives. Perhaps the most salient and interesting challenge in all of this literature for the anthropology of ethics is the foundational role much of it implies, in ethical thought and practice, of emotions and sentiments. A serious engagement with this literature, and with the broad Smith/Humean tradition in moral philosophy that emphasises moral sentiments, might have the potential to enrich the anthropology of ethics while at the same time breathing new life into the anthropology of emotions.

Emerging debates

With intellectual resources drawn largely from these five broad and diverse sources, what briefly are the concepts, questions, and topics of debate anthropologists of ethics and morality are beginning to explore? Having realised that collective rules do not exhaust the ethical dimension of social life, they are exploring a range of other ways in which ethical thought is organised socially. More or less voluntary projects through which people work to fashion themselves and cultivate ethical qualities have been studied mostly in religious contexts (e.g. Lester 2005; Mahmood 2005; Marsden 2005; Eberhardt 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Cook 2010; Bender & Taves 2012; Fisher 2014; Cassaniti 2015), but also in fields as diverse as parenthood (Paxson 2004; Clarke 2009; Kuan 2015) and activism (Dave 2012; Heywood 2015a, 2015b; Lazar 2016). There is also a renewed interest in the concepts of value and values (Robbins 2012, 2013). And following a pioneering early paper by Caroline Humphrey (1997), there has been interest in the part played in ethical life by modelling one’s conduct on a chosen ‘exemplar’ (who might be a known, historical, or mythical individual), rather than, or in addition to, the following of moral rules (Højer & Bandak 2015; Robbins forthcoming). All of this has also prompted the appropriate corrective: the realization that when the specificity of rules as a mode of organising ethical life is recognised, elaborate attention to rules, when and where it occurs, becomes interesting in its own right (Dresch & Skoda 2012; Pirie & Scheele 2014; Dresch & Scheele 2015, especially Clarke 2015). Anthropologists have long found more rich and subtle resources for thinking about moral life in the writings of Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and sometime collaborator, than in Durkheim himself (see, for example, Carrithers et al. 1985). The stimulus of the new anthropology of ethics has, however, also prompted a creative and careful re-reading of Durkheim, with a view to finding insights in relation to ethical life quite other than those derived by mainstream anthropology through the twentieth century (e.g. Stavrianakis 2016).

Although it is occasionally suggested (in seminars and informal discussion) that the very category of ethics may be inapplicable in this or that part of the world (the usual candidates being Melanesia and Amazonia, and conditions of extreme poverty and exclusion), a sustained exposition of that position has yet to be attempted, and persuasive ethnographic accounts of ethical life in just such places and situations have been published (Robbins 2004; Londoño Sulkin 2012; Roberts 2016; see also Lear 2006, 2015). But if the ethnographic range of the anthropology of ethics is global, there is something of a special case, in terms of density, with China. The idea has gained some currency in popular discourse in China itself that in the wake of the catastrophes of Maoism and the lurching dislocations of the ‘reform’ era, the country might be enduring an especially profound ‘moral crisis’. It is perhaps for this reason that a strikingly rich and varied ethnographic literature on aspects of moral life in China has appeared in the last few years, with emerging debate on what, if anything, a notion of civilizational moral crisis might mean, and in what ways, if any, it might apply (Liu 2002, 2009; Jankowiak 2004; Yan 2009a, 2009b, 2014, 2016; Oxfeld 2010; Zhang, Kleinman & Yu 2011; Kleinman 2011; Steinmüller 2013; Fisher 2014; Xu 2014; Kuan 2015).

So, the development of the anthropology of ethics has not seen the emergence of a new sub-discipline. It has instead constituted both a renewal (and in some cases rediscovery) of concerns with deep roots in the discipline, and a fairly radical re-thinking of the fundamentals of anthropological theory, in which perennial questions of human agency and social causation have been revisited in new ways. For instance, it has been a theme in the anthropology of ethics (see Laidlaw 2016) to pay attention to the specific modes and moods of people’s personal striving, resisting the all-too-common reflex in much recent anthropology of reducing all such phenomena to mere expressions of neoliberalism: some thought-provoking examples, strikingly different from each other, include Kuan (2015), Schielke (2015), Singh (2015), Cook (2016), and Marsden (2016). And of course, renewed interest in ethics in the discipline has profoundly inflected anthropological analysis and critique of the two most newly powerful discourses and sets of institutions and practices through which ‘doing good’ is organised in the contemporary world: human rights and humanitarianism, respectively (see Bornstein 2003, 2012; Englund 2006; Ticktin 2006; Bornstein & Redfield 2011; Elisha 2011; Fassin 2012; Keane 2016: 248-59). Other topics that have proven amenable to new and interesting forms of anthropological analysis, once approached in part as an aspect of the ethical dimension of social life, include happiness (Kavedžua & Walker 2016), the giving and receiving of favours (Henig & Makovicky 2017), and the varied practices and phenomena of detachment (Candea et al. 2015). A further development to note, however, lies outside anthropology itself, in highly encouraging signs of considerably more informed and considered use of anthropological writings than heretofore in discussions of morality in other disciplines, including in psychology (e.g. Haidt 2013), moral philosophy (Lear 2006, 2015; Lillehammer 2014), and theology (Banner 2014). Finally, the rich potential for productive interdisciplinary conversation is illustrated by recently published symposia, on ethical conversations conducted across cultural borders (Mair & Evans 2016) and on the fundamental sources and forms of ethical life (Mattingly et al. 2017).

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Note on contributor

James Laidlaw is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Inner Mongolia, Bhutan, and Taiwan. His most recent book is The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Prof. James Laidlaw, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. jal6@cam.ac.uk

Values

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Joel Robbins Julian Sommerschuh

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16values

Abstract:

The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review the different anthropological approaches that come together under the label of ‘value theory’. At present, these can be sorted into structuralist and action-oriented camps. The former treats values as objective phenomena embedded in cultural structures; the latter conceives of value as something that must be continually produced by human activity. After reviewing classical and more recent statements of these two positions, we discuss a third approach that tries to link both structure and action perspectives.

Introduction

The concept of values occupied a central place in philosophy and the social sciences during the first half of the twentieth century. After having faded out of view for some decades, it has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. An initial definition might state that ‘values’ have to do with the good and the important. But even this would suggest greater agreement about the nature of this concept than has so far been reached among anthropologists. The aim of this entry, therefore, is not to state authoritatively what value ‘is’, but to review the different anthropological approaches that come together under the label of ‘value theory’.

At present, these approaches can be sorted into structuralist or action-oriented camps. The former treats value as an objective phenomenon embedded in cultural structures; the latter conceives of value as something that must be continually produced by human activity. Proponents of both camps agree, however, that an anthropological theory of value should ultimately be able to transcend this division. As one key contemporary value theorist puts it, value is

a term that suggests the possibility of resolving ongoing theoretical dilemmas; particularly of overcoming the difference between what one might call top-down and bottom-up perspectives: between theories that start from a certain notion of social structure, or social order, or some other totalizing notion, and theories that start from individual motivation (Graeber 2001: 20).

Foundations of value theory

The concept of value originated in eighteenth century economics and was taken up in late nineteenth century German philosophy from where it entered the twentieth century social sciences (Schnädelbach 1984: 161-91; Joas 2000: 20; Robbins 2015a). The emergence of a philosophical discourse on value known as axiology needs to be seen in the context of the rise of the modern scientific worldview (Schroeder 2012). Earlier ways of thinking, largely derived from Aristotelian thought, had assumed that how things ought to be could be deduced from the way things are. The scientific worldview, by contrast, advocated a strict separation between facts and what now came to be called ‘values’ (Robbins 2015a). For our purposes, two things are worth noting here. Firstly, in taking the position formerly occupied by the concept of the good, the notion of value assumed its meaning as something people want or should want to attain, as opposed to the right, which refers to those things people feel obliged to carry out (Venkatesan 2015: 442-43). It is this meaning that has remained most closely associated with the term ever since. Secondly, the distinction between facts and values raises the question of whether values are subjective or objective phenomena. On the one hand, it appears that understandings of the good, if not rooted in nature, could only depend on the whim of valuing subjects. On the other, reacting to the relativism implied by this position, early value philosophers, such as the neo-Kantians Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, sought to re-establish an objective basis for value by trying to find ‘in the subjectivity of valuation the conditions for its universal validity’ (Joas 2000: 22). Early phenomenologists such as Max Scheler (1973) likewise argued for the objective existence of values as things in the world. The issue of whether and in what sense values exist independently of subjects has remained a topic of debate to this day and will reappear throughout this entry.

Through the work of Max Weber in particular (1949: 50-112; 1946: 323-61), himself deeply influenced by German philosophical debates, the concept of value entered the North American social sciences, where it gained a prominent place in the decade following World War II. A key protagonist of this movement was the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. According to Kluckhohn's influential definition, a value is a ‘conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action’ (1951: 395). The key term in this definition is ‘desirable’, which indicates that values are not simply desires but desires which people consider justified. It is such conceptions of the desirable, when shared by people, that Kluckhohn thought account for the uniqueness of cultures. Hence, the comparative analysis of cultures – anthropology – had to take the form, above all, of a comparison of values. As a way to investigate empirically the difference values make, Kluckhohn designed the ‘Harvard Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures’. Conducted from 1949 to 1955, this large-scale research project aimed at comparing the values of five cultures – Navaho, Zuni, Spanish-America, Mormons, and Texan – that existed under similar ecological conditions in the Rimrock area of western New Mexico. Although resulting in a number of sophisticated descriptions of each of these cultures' values (see Albert 1956; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck 1961; Vogt & Albert 1966), the project is commonly remembered as a failure because it did not achieve its core aim of finding a way of drawing comparisons between these value systems. Its lack of success in this regard has been laid at the feet of its failure to develop of a notion of the structures that relate values to one another (Graeber 2001: 4-5), or attributed to the difficulty from within the project’s framework of determining how many values might be relevant to the analysis of a given culture or the comparison of two or more of them (D'Andrade 2008: 4). Perhaps as importantly, for various reasons – some of them personal rather than intellectual – the most prominent publication of the project, People of Rimrock (Vogt and Albert 1966), was not published until ten years after the project itself ended, by which time general interest in the topic of values had passed its peak (Powers 2000).

Louis Dumont, who commented on the Harvard project some twenty years later, was one of those scholars who attributed its failure largely to the absence of a notion of structure (1986: 240 ff.). Dumont’s own work (1980, 1986, 1994) directly addressed that absence, and contributed significantly to the anthropological study of values. Dumont's starting point was the observation that whereas classical structuralism considered cultures to be made up of binary oppositions in which each element is as important as the one to which it is opposed, such oppositions in reality mostly take a hierarchical form. That is, not only do cultures draw distinctions of the type male/female, raw/cooked, hot/cold, but they also routinely accord a higher value to one of the poles of each opposition. Furthermore, Dumont suggests that in cases of hierarchal opposition, the higher ranked element can in some contexts ‘encompass’ the lower ranked one, coming to stand for the whole domain to which the two elements refer. Thus, for example, in the English language, the lexeme ‘man’ can in some contexts stand for both ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the idea of ‘mankind’, even as in others it stands for male individuals.

Cultural meaning systems – ‘ideologies’ as Dumont called them (though here he was drawing on a sense of the word that has significant overlap with the English 'culture' and is not tied to Marxist definitions of the term that link it to notions such as class interest or false consciousness) – can be described as orders of such hierarchically arranged values and ideas. The overall hierarchical ordering of the various ‘value-ideas’ of an ideology is, in Dumont's view, an effect of certain overarching or ‘paramount’ values – things or states of affairs considered better and more worthwhile than anything else. All other values in an ideology are attributed a specific rank based on the extent of their contribution to the realization of its paramount value. In the ideology of the Indian caste system, for instance, ‘purity’ figures as the paramount value, and all things and social groups are ranked according to their relative degree of purity, ranging from the highly pure Brahmans to the impure ‘Untouchables’. However, Dumont also emphasised that ideologies do not present one unbroken chain of decreasing value (1980: 239). Rather, on his account, ideologies also contain several ‘levels’^[1], which are themselves ranked in relation to each other by virtue of their own relative contributions to the realization of highly ranked values. In moving between levels, ‘reversals’ occur: a thing highly valued in one context may in another context be subordinate to and differentiated from what it previously encompassed. Thus, in India, the king is overall ranked below the Brahman, for power is less important than purity. But in certain worldly contexts defined as political this relation is reversed and the Brahman is represented as inferior to the king. The concept of reversal is important because it highlights that Dumont's notion of ideological structures of values is less neat and totalising than alleged by his critics (see Appadurai 1988; Dirks 2001). At the same time, it suggests that what appears as contradictory to an outside observer unacquainted with emic distinctions between levels may in reality conform to an overarching logic. All in all, then, Dumont proposes to think of value as embedded in the structure of culture. He thus takes a decidedly objectivist position according to which values exist independently from human subjects, though their existence as part of ideological structures also means that no values are necessarily universal across all cultures.

Parallel to Dumont, a second school of anthropological value theory developed across the Atlantic at the University of Chicago among scholars such as Nancy Munn and Terence Turner. Rather than focus on ideational orders, as Dumont did, the Chicago School directed attention to the role of human practice in the creation of value. For Munn, the impulse for this focus came from her work on Gawa, an island in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea well known to anthropologists as the area in which the Kula ring^[2] is an important institution. Gawans' primary concern, Munn found, was to extend their ‘fame’ in the inter-island world by attaching their name to prestigious kula shells (1986). To do so required a long chain of exchanges (or ‘value transformations’), in the course of which lower level valuables such as garden produce were exchanged against more valuable ones, such as canoes, which in turn could be exchanged against low-level kula shells and so on. If value in Gawa is generated by human acts of value transformation, then ‘value is signified through specific qualities that characterise such components of practice as the body’ or kula-shells (Munn 1986: 16, emphasis added). For example, heaviness and motionlessness are qualities of bodies that signify negative value because they index that a person has consumed food herself rather than using it in exchange for something more valuable. Lightness, by contrast, indexes positive value. Drawing on the philosopher C. S. Peirce, Munn refers to such qualities that signify value as ‘qualisigns’ – a second key concept, along with chains of value transformation, in her theoretical program.

Turner’s (1979; 2003; 2008) theory of value similarly focused on practice or action more than structure, but he took greater pains to phrase his contribution in Marxist terms than did Munn (though she too was influenced by Marx). ‘Value’, in the Marxist tradition, first of all refers to the value of commodities and is understood to result from the labour invested in their production. This labour theory of value differs from the neoclassical view according to which a thing's value is rooted in the utility that it has for someone. On Turner’s (2008: 46) account, contrary to other labour theories of value, such as David Ricardo's (2006 [1817]), the Marxist version of this theory moreover holds that the value of a product is not determined by the absolute amount of labour that went into its making but by the proportion of the total social labour power of a system invested in it. Turner argued that this perspective has its merits even in non-capitalist contexts, where people are primarily concerned not with the production of commodities but with that of social persons. Thus, among the Amazonian Kayapo, with whom Turner did fieldwork, the people into the ‘making’ of whom the greatest fraction of labour had been invested – elders – appeared as imbued with the greatest value. Harkening back to Marx, Turner notes that value usually becomes embodied in and represented through some kind of material “value-form” (2008: 49). In capitalist societies, money is the primary value-form. Among the Kayapo, by contrast, certain types of ritual chanting and oratory take this position. The supreme value of elders is indicated by the fact that they are the only ones to have the right to engage with these forms of oratory and chanting (2003: 3). Turner went much further than this in his application of Marxist theory to non-capitalist societies, arguing that here too processes of fetishization and exploitation occur. For our purposes, however, the basic point to take away is the Marxist notion of value being an effect of human productive activity.

Contemporary developments in value theory

As mentioned earlier, recent years have witnessed renewed anthropological interest in the concept of value (see Otto & Willerslev 2013a, 2013b; Iteanu & Moya 2015; Haynes & Hickel forthcoming). While we do not have the space to discuss the reasons for this development, it is worth noting that it coincides with a more general ‘ethical turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Value theory is potentially well placed to contribute to this broader field of inquiry into the evaluative dimension of social life (see Robbins 2012; 2015b). The ability to do so, however, is likely to depend on resolving internal difficulties first. At this point, the two basic positions outlined in the previous section – the structuralist and the action-oriented - continue to oppose each other. Yet, there have been developments on both sides. We review these here before moving on to discuss a third approach to value that might be able to remedy a gap left unfilled by both the structuralist and the action-oriented approaches.

On the structuralist side, work has continued along Dumontian lines, with Dumont's followers defending his approach against a range of criticisms. The most widespread of these criticisms maintains, in many respects unfairly, that Dumont's notion of ideology relies on assumptions about its bounded, integrated, and unchanging nature that have been widely criticised as features of theoretical notions of culture more generally (for a review of these criticisms, and a discussion of some of the problems that beset them, see Brightman 1995; for examples of pieces that suggest that in fact they do not apply to Dumont, see Kapferer 2010; Ortner [1984] 1994). One promising response to such claims is Rio and Smedal's conceptual pair of ‘totalization’/‘detotalization’, which introduces a procedural perspective that sees totality not as a fait accompli but as an ongoing movement (2008). From this point of view, ‘[h]ierarchy is an ideology in motion that constantly melts down categories and substances, things, ideas and people that come under its totalizing sway and transforms them and gives them value according to its own social universe’ (Rio & Smedal 2008: 237). In other words, value systems here are not conceptualised as existing in a fixed form but instead as being constantly (re)produced through the tendency of core values to attach value to the things around them. As an example of this process, one might consider the way economic values related to market freedom and the maximization of profit often move to influence spheres other than the economic one in social formations currently defined as neo-liberal.

A second way of addressing the criticism directed at Dumont’s model – that it tends to represent value relations as static – is to be found in Joel Robbins' (2007) proposal to incorporate Weber's ideas about value spheres into Dumont’s model. According to Weber, social life is divided into several spheres of activity. Weber himself distinguished six such spheres (political, economic, religious, aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual) (1946: 331), but Robbins notes that the number and shape of value spheres may differ across societies (2007: 298-99). In Weber's account, the different spheres promote different ultimate ends and therefore, like ‘warring gods’, stand in irreconcilable conflict with one another. Hence, where Dumont is often read as proposing that the different levels of an ideology are neatly integrated under one paramount value, Weber allows for the possibility that levels or spheres may also confront each other as equals. Robbins' suggestion is not that one of these views is more adequate than the other. Rather, he suggests that anthropologists should treat the question of whether value systems are ‘monist’ (with various values exhaustively ranked vis-à-vis one another and thus working together harmoniously) or ‘pluralist’ (with values standing in conflict to each other) as the object of empirical inquiry, and should be attentive to the tension between unifying and pluralising movements that often mark cultural process (Robbins 2013).

As important as this work has been in updating Dumont’s approach, it has not addressed one of the basic problems associated with his approach, namely the lack of a theory of motivation. While Dumont’s model excels at analyzing values on the cultural level, his theory does not attend to how values influence people's lives and what motivates actors to pursue them. As long as we do not assume that cultural systems reproduce themselves independently of human subjects, this neglect of the subjective dimension of value makes it difficult to understand cultural reproduction, or, for that matter, change.

Here, a return to the action-oriented camp is necessary, for its main contemporary proponent, David Graeber, explicitly states that theories in this camp ‘start from individual motivation’ (2001: 20). Graeber' approach strongly builds on Munn and Turner. He derives from their work the basic understanding that value ‘is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves’ (2001: 45). The underlying assumption here is that people invest their energies into the things that they consider most important. Hence, if ‘Americans spend 7 percent of their creative energies in a given year producing automobiles, this is the ultimate measure of how important it is to us to have cars’, and ‘if Americans have spent, say, .000000000007 percent or some similarly infinitesimal proportion of their creative energies in a given year on this car, then that represents its value’ (Graeber 2001: 55). Like Turner, Graeber assumes that value inevitably comes to be represented in value-forms, such as money, kula-shells, or chiefly chanting. The crucial point is that such value-forms are not simply representations of value but elicit people's desire and thus actually bring into being the very thing that they represent. This had already been noted by Turner (2008: 51), and is further emphasised by Graeber. Money, for instance, appears as ‘an object of desire, the pursuit of which motivates workers to actually carry out the very creative actions whose value it represents—since, after all, this is the reason one goes to work to begin with: in order to get paid’ (Graeber 2013: 225).

This argument certainly goes some way toward formulating a theory of motivation. Yet it only pushes the problem one step further back, because it does not explain how value-forms become desirable in the first place. This appears as a question particularly worth posing for cases (take contemporary Western societies as an example) where different people pursue different forms of value (e.g. money or academic standing). The traditional answer to this sort of question would point to the influence of social structures in making certain things rather than others appear as desirable to people (see Bourdieu 1984). But this response does not appear possible within Graeber's framework, because he is at pains to reject the notion of structure as something that precedes and guides human action, putting in its place his understanding that structures are ‘really just patterns of action’ that are constantly subject to change (2001: 59). This position makes it as difficult to bridge the gap between structure and motivation from within his theoretical perspective as it is from within the structuralist paradigm.

A third approach to value

So far, we have encountered values as existing as elements of cultural or ideological structures and as products of human action. One might speak, then, of cultural values, construed as collective representations of what is good and important in life, and personal values understood as that which persons feel is worth striving for. The question that has emerged from the preceding sections is how these two levels are linked. As Claudia Strauss once put it,

knowing the dominant ideologies, discourses, and symbols of a society is only the beginning – there remains the hard work of understanding why some of those ideologies, discourses, and symbols become compelling to social actors, while others are only the hollow shell of a morality that may be repeated in official pronouncements but is ignored in private lives. Our key questions thus becomes: How do cultural messages get under people's skin […]? (1992: 1).

Here, a third lineage of value theory deriving from Durkheim (1974) is worth considering. The basic idea of this approach is that a commitment to values arises out of certain types of collective experiences. Values, Durkheim says, arise when people participate in rituals that lead them to feel a kind of heightened state he calls ‘collective effervescence’. This feeling, he says, leads people to the experience of being in the presence of something greater, more important, and we might say more desirable than themselves and the things to which their own individual desires are attached (Durkheim 1974). They come to associate this feeling with the objects, ideas, states of affairs and goals that the ritual promotes, and in this way these things becomes values for them (see Turner 1967). As Robbins, who has recently (2015a) argued along these lines, suggests, it is not only through ritual that values become represented to and lodged in subjects, but also through the influence of exemplary persons (see Humphrey 1997; Scheler 1987; Wolf 1982) or through people’s encounters with myths and other types of value-laden narratives.

With this approach, one gets some sense as to how values that exist on the cultural level become subjectively attractive. To be sure, this perspective raises its own questions. For instance, it does not solve the question of intersubjective variation in values. Why do people of a given social formation, if exposed to the same rituals, narratives, etc. not always value the same things with the same intensity? Robbins (forthcoming) has recently argued that the supposition that values on the subjective and the objective level should look alike depends on a flawed ‘fax-model of socialization’ (cf. Strauss 1992: 9). Because all cultures contain more than one value, people come to internalise several values which can be difficult to pursue all at once. It thus becomes necessary to work out their relation and accommodate them to the requirements of everyday life – a process which leads to the kind of variation in personal values to be observed in many societies.

Clearly further questions pose themselves. For instance, would the Dumontian model not suggest that the more important values get communicated more frequently and/or with greater intensity, so that the cultural value hierarchy becomes reproduced within individuals, rather than different values coming to exist as equals within people? Nonetheless, a focus on the interrelation between objective and subjective forms of value, between value as structure and value as a motive for action, might well proceed along Durkheimian lines and would certainly help to advance contemporary anthropological engagements with the concept of value.

Conclusion

Having built this entry around the cleavages that mark the contemporary debate about value, we would like to close by noting three points of convergence. Firstly, there appears to be agreement that the study of value requires a holist style of analysis. This follows from the nature of value: like meaning, value derives from reference to sets of relations and often to larger wholes and can therefore only be understood with regard to these. Secondly, scholars of value seem to converge in rejecting the ‘flat’ ontologies of the social that have proliferated in recent years in approaches such as actor-network theory. To look at value inevitably brings hierarchy to light: even the most egalitarian social formations contain at their heart a hierarchy of value, namely the subordination of inequality to equality (Robbins 1994). Finally, and most importantly, there is agreement that greater attention to value would return to anthropology a perspective that was foundational to it but has increasingly gone missing over the years: the interest in what really matters to people around the world and in how cultures differ not simply as systems of power, production, or meaning, but as schemes that help to define what is ultimately good and desirable in life.

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Note on contributors

Joel Robbins is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the anthropology of religion, values, ethics, and cultural change. He is the author of Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society.

Dr Joel Robbins, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. jr626@cam.ac.uk

Julian Sommerschuh is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His research explores changes in values associated with the advent of Protestantism in a southwestern Ethiopian community.

Julian Sommerschuh, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. julian.sommerschuh@posteo.de

[1] The notion of level roughly corresponds to such better-known concepts as ‘fields’ or ‘domains’, e.g. the political, the religious, and so on.

[2] An inter-island trading system based on the movement of valuables made from shells first made famous in anthropology by the work of Malinowski (1922).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Value

Money

Introduction

What counts as money?

Money at the threshold of persons and relations

Monetary pluralism

Networks, platforms and open questions

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Waste

Introduction[1]

Symbolic-structuralist approaches

Economic-materialist approaches

Intersubjective and post-human

Conclusion

Note

References

Note on contributor

Voice

Introduction

Voice in Euro-American modernity

The sonic and material voice

Voice and the making of socio-political identity

The voice as excess

Sound technologies and the mediated voice

Public voices and intimate publics

Conclusion: The wider relevance of voice

References

Note on contributor

Ethics / morality

Introduction

Partial engagements: Durkheimian, Boasian, and Marxist

New departures: The anthropology of ethics

Intellectual traditions

Emerging debates

References

Note on contributor

Values

Introduction

Foundations of value theory

Contemporary developments in value theory

A third approach to value

Conclusion

References

Note on contributors

Introduction^[1]