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InfrastructuralismAuthor(s): By Marshall SahlinsSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Spring 2010), pp. 371-385Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653405 .

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Infrastructuralism

Marshall Sahlins

Claude Levi-Strauss

In Memoriam

I have to make a double apology: first for framing my homage to Claude

Levi-Strauss in autobiographical terms; and then for compounding the

impropriety by repeating a reminiscence of his seminar that I have recently

put in print. I come dangerously close to the old quip about the professor

who said, “that’s enough talking about me. Let’s talk about you. How did

you like my last book?” My excuse is the extraordinary value Levi-Strauss’s

work has had for me, and in particular the productive value of the tension

between structuralism and the various species of materialism and econo-

mism prevailing in the late 1960s, when I had the privilege of being asso-

ciated with the Laboratoire.

Recall the seminal passage in La Pensee sauvage where Levi-Strauss dis-

tinguishes the conceptual schemes ethnologists study, for all that such

schemes define and govern practices, from Marx’s concept of praxis—which, he agrees with Sartre, “constitutes the fundamental totality of the

sciences of man.” (It seems that in the ’60s most Parisian intellectuals felt

obliged to define their own conceptual practice in relation to Marxism;

even if you were not a Marxist, you were only “ peu marxiste,” hardly a

Marxist.) The notion of a “mediation between praxis and practices” to

which Levi-Strauss then refers is likewise reminiscent of Sartre’s “media-

tions” of the material universals by the particularities of biography and

history, if in Levi-Strauss’s case the mediator is “the conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any independent

A version of this essay with footnotes appears at criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu

Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010)

© 2010 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/10/3603-0010$10.00. All rights reserved.

371






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existence, are realized as structures, that is as entities which are both em-

pirical and intelligible.” Yet this conceptual mediator is immediately recu-

perated in Marxian categories, that is, as “superstructure,” to which realm

Levi-Strauss would modestly confine his own structuralist theory. In the

event, the infrastructure becomes exogenous to ethnology: the subject

matter, rather, of history and the other human sciences that inform it:

It is to this theory of superstructures, scarcely touched on by Marx

that I hope to make a contribution. The development of the study of

infrastructures is a task which must be left to history—with the aid of

demography, technology, historical geography and ethnography. It is

not principally the ethnologist’s concern, for ethnology is first of all

psychology.There was already an analogous tension—a similar implication that the

practical relations of production were thoroughly ordered by conceptual

schemes—in the way I introduced a paper on Pacific exchange systems at

Levi-Strauss’s famous weekly seminar—I think it was the Spring of 1969. “I

am not a structuralist,” I said. “I am not talking about the exchange of

women or words. I am talking about the infrastructure: about the ex-

change of vital goods and the specializations of production this entails.” Of

course, the tension was that structuralism already supposed some corre-spondence between the exchange of women, words and goods. The reve-

lation (if not the resolution) of the apparent contradiction turned out to be

the denouement of the seminar.

“But you are a structuralist,” Levi-Strauss commented when I had fin-

ished. “These exchanges across a chain of local groups you describe for

Australian Aborigines are quite like marital echange generalise,” he said,

“and the reciprocity between communities on the east coast of New

Guinea parallels echange restraint .” (I should say that I am reportingspeech here in the classical manner of Thucydides: I cannot vouch for the

exact words; but in any case, the occasion demanded the matter should

have been said that way.)

My response to this apparent high compliment—that I was indeed a

structuralist—was not as gracious: “But I thought you said structuralism is

M A R S H A L L S A H L I N S is the Charles F. Gray Distinguished Service Professor

Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is a fellow of the

American Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

and the British Academy. His latest works include Apologies to Thucydides:

Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004) and The Western Illusion

of Human Nature (2008).

372 Marshall Sahlins / Infrastructuralism






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a science of the superstructures,” I said, “and it is clear I was talking about

real practical issues of the infrastructure.”

“True,” Levi-Strauss replied. “But the problem is that I learned my

anthropology at the feet of Boas, Lowie, and Kroeber, and the anthropol-

ogy they were doing was something like an archaeology of the living: talk-

ing to older people about the ways of life in times past on the Great Plains

or the Northwest Coast. The anthropologists in those days were not inter-

ested in the people’s actual existence, the wretched conditions of the In-

dian reservations. But now we should attend to things like that. We have to

extend structuralism to the infrastructures.”

“Well,” I said, “I thought it was a matter of principle that structuralism

was a science of the superstructures. So I have to ask you, what exactly is

structuralism?”“Enfin,” he said, “le structuralisme: c’est la bonne anthropologie.”

Of course, I then had to agree I was a structuralist.

Indeed, I would say an infrastructuralist, as I was finally freed to resolve the

long-standing opposition between praxis and culture by encompassing the

former in the latter. As Levi-Strauss suggested, Marx had already given us that

liberty: in the famous passage of Capital , for example, where he remarked that

the worst ofarchitects was betterthan the best ofbees, since the architect erects

the building in his imagination before he does so in reality. For me, the issuecame down to the symbolic dimensions of the hand axe, in which the cultur-

alist perspectives of Levi-Strauss and Leslie White, for all their differences,

interestingly converged, as I shall discuss in a moment.

But to set the scene, the so-American versions of historical materi-

alism abroad in the 1960s were bent on making the cultural order a

reflex of real-practical activity, itself understood as a direct function of

economic advantage. Cost/benefit analysis was the key to the “cultural

materialism” of Marvin Harris, for example. Or again, the going an-thropological ecology aimed to reduce cultural forms to “species-

specific behaviors,” supposedly no different in kind than the habits of

beavers or tigers and likewise explicable by the principle of selective

advantage. These paradigms only exacerbated the contradictions of

infrastructure and superstructure, material practice and symbolic or-

der, I already knew from the teachings of Leslie White in the 1950s.

On the one hand, White was a radical technological determinist. He

promoted a conception of cultural order that his students privately called

“the cultural layer cake,” with technology at the base of the entire cultureand underlying the social system, since society consisted of the relations

necessary for wielding a given technology, the whole being topped off by

an ideology that at once reflected the prevailing social relations and the

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2010 373






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ways people were technologically articulated with the world—with tran-

scendental religion as it were the icing on the cake. White thought that

once men were able to reach the heavens in rocket ships, they would see for

themselves that there was no God. He was mistaken.

Yet, on the other hand, White argued tirelessly that culture was a

symbolic phenomenon, in that regard a distinctive human capacity and

the means by which both persons and the objects of their existence were

constituted. White was alone among American anthropologists of the

interwar period to cite Saussure on the nature of human symboling.

No ape could appreciate the difference between holy water and dis-

tilled water, he used to say (and I have been too fond of repeating); nor

could a chimpanzee appreciate the difference between Sunday and

Tuesday or honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. So if White was alsofond of citing Marx to the effect that the hand axe creates one kind of

society and the steam mill another, he insisted nevertheless that the

hand axe was “an idea.” Not only were the axes of a given society

fashioned according to a traditional standard; this also implied that

axes were differentially possessed, distributed, and used among men

and women or adults and youth in ways relevant to the order of that

society. An axe becomes a thing of property, but this is no property of

the thing. All of which is to say that axes function according to theirpositional values in the local conceptual schemes “by the operation of

which matter and form, neither with any independent existence, are

realized as structures.”

Indeed, Levi-Strauss had developed just such an argument about

stone axes in his inaugural lecture at the College de France. “A certain

type of stone axe can be a sign,” he said, insofar as it stands in a differ-

ential relation to the implements other societies use for the same pur-

pose. From which followed a general statement of infrastructuralism tothe effect that social anthropology, “in admitting the symbolic nature

of its object,” neither excludes materiality nor assigns it a unique on-

tological status as distinct from spiritual things. Social anthropology

“does not separate material and spiritual culture,” Levi-Strauss ob-

served. “If men communicate by means of symbols and signs, then, for

anthropology, which is a conversation of man with man, everything is

symbol and sign, when it acts as an intermediary between two

subjects.”

Here was a clear injunction to expand structuralism to the infrastruc-ture. Rather than a discontinuity, temporal as well as ontological, wherein

culture appears as the symbolic afterthought of a material practice that has

its own rationality, what is entailed in infrastructuralism is the realization







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of encompassing conceptual schemes in the particular material function of

provisioning the society. Economy, one might even say, is the objectifica-

tion of cosmology.

Alterity and ValueEconomy is the objectification of cosmology. My space being lim-

ited, I will try to make the point rather literally by some notices of the

cosmic values of alterity, at once in regard to foreign subjects as well as

exotic goods, insofar as both function as agents of the order and pros-

perity of local communities of kith and kin. Whether as the subjective

powers of objects such as imported “valuables,” or the objective powers

of subjects such as enemy heads, the community sustains itself by theincorporation of transcendent life-giving values. Often entailed is a

ranked mode of cultural production in which the acquisition of foreign

valuables by men is the prestigious complement, or indeed the neces-

sary condition, of the human-reproductive powers of women. If the

heads taken by the young warriors of the Toradja of Sulawesi are in-

volved in their initiation, hence in the enhancement of their virility, the

enemy trophies they acquire—as is widely true in Southeast Asian hin-

terlands—are enshrined as enduring sources of human and agricul-

tural fertility. (This would hardly be the only instance of a coup d’etat

in the gender politics of reproduction.) As for the goods acquired in

such border-crossing exploits, J. H. Walker writes of the famous bejalai

or journeys of young Iban men to the coastal centers of Sarawak and

beyond:

Many of the goods acquired through bejalai were themselves

sources of potency. Antique jars, for example, were credited with

supernatural powers and healing virtues, and would thereby con-tribute to the potency of the community into which they were

taken. Moreover, the successful accumulation of prestige goods

and other wealth would indicate in itself an increase in spiritual

powers, status and strength.

Just so, in the “tribal societies” (so-called) from Yunnan in southwest

China or the Kachin Hills of Burma to Biak Island off the New Guinea

coast, local authority was achieved through the acquisition and transmis-

sion of a variety of objects—from bronze drums and gongs through steelswords and water buffalo to golden earrings, silver bracelets, and Ming

ceramics—whose foreign provenance was essential to their social efficacy

and material worth.







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Janet Hoskins cites a song of the Kodi of Sumba, referring to ancestral

heirlooms in the terms of foreign fruits:

Brought across the wide seas, carried over the wide oceans

To fall at our feet and be grasped by our hands:The stalk of the foreign banana now sits at our ancestral hearth,

The sweet gourd from overseas is offered to our forefathers.

The cosmogonic traditions of the Tanimbar Archipelago in eastern In-

donesia dwell on the same theme. After an initial reproductive unity of

heaven and earth was shattered by a culture hero of foreign origins, hu-

mans were left in a kind of Hobbesian condition, wandering the land in

small groups, clashing with one another, while the men (and certain

women dressed as men) searched for access to the otherworldly powersthat would allow them to create a fixed existence. In her excellent ethnog-

raphy of Tanimbar, Susan McKinnon relates how they found the objective

means:

Named heirloom valuables, acquired by the ancestors through actions

that transcended the social order, became signs of the powers that lie

before, beyond, outside and even against society, but also signs of the

powers that underlie society and constitute the very basis of its possi-

bility. It was by forays into the heavens, the underworld, and landsbeyond the horizon that these men appropriated objects of other-

worldly power that would enable them to recompose their own

world, the land within the horizon.

Consider that the named heirloom, carrying the history of its ordering

effects, is rather more than a sign of external powers but something of a

subject and agent able to exercise such powers. One is reminded of the

so-called “borrowing cultures” of the Sepik area of New Guinea: the peo-ples who explicitly constitute their polity and prosperity through the ap-

propriation of foreign, culture-making goods, rituals, incantations, and

ancestors. But then again, the mission civilisatrice mediated by the incor-

poration of external agents of transcendent potency evokes a worldwide

phenomenon of the same general description: the youthful stranger-king

of extraordinary capacities who imposes himself on the autochthonous

“owners” of the country, only to be domesticated by them to their own

benefit in cultural order, wealth, and fertility.

J. P. de Josselin de Jong made just this structural segue when he likenedthe initiation rites of Torajda headhunters of Sulawesi to the exploits of the

Minangkabau hero from Sumatra who founded the Negri Sembilan king-

dom of Malaya. In a charter tradition of headhunting, the village of the







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young Toradja warrior is dead during his absence, but revives upon his

triumphal return with an enemy head and the magical daughter of his

victim, whom he marries after the head-feast. In other words, the Toradja

hero returns from his border-transcending exploits with a foreign subject

(the head) and enhanced reproductive virtue (the wife) in order to give life

to (revive) the whole society. Allowance made for the inversions of classic

stranger-king narratives (the local hero who captures foreign power as

opposed to the foreign prince whose power is captured locally) here is a

modality of the same relationships.

The world around, the rulers of a remarkable number of premodern

societies have been foreign to the people and places they rule. By their

dynastic origins and their inherited nature, as rehearsed in ongoing tradi-

tions and enacted in royal rituals, they are strangers. Speaking broadly of West and Central Africa, Luc de Heuseh writes: “Everything happens as if

the structure of a lineage-based society is not capable of engendering dia-

lectical development on the political plane without the intervention of a

new political structure. The sovereignty, the magical source of power, al-

ways comes from elsewhere, from a claimed original place, exterior to

society.” Well-known examples include Alur, Bunyoro, Benin, Shilluk,

Nupe, Mossi, Kongo, Luba, Ruwanda, and so on not to mention the many

lesser kingdoms and chiefdoms whose ruling lineages traced their originsto such greater ones. The major American empires of the Aztecs and Inca

were likewise governed by immigrant royal houses, as were many Mayan

cities such as classic-period Tikal, whose inscriptions famously tell of the

dynasty that began with “the arrival of strangers.” Sovereignties of foreign

origin in Southeast Asia and the Pacific include the Cambodian kingdoms

of Brahmin ancestry, the Siamese dynasty of Ayutthya founded by a Chi-

nese merchant-prince, the Balinese kingdom of Klungkung by a Javanese

prince, the Hawaiian ruling chiefs whose ancestors arrived from the leg-endary Kahiki, Micronesian rulers from the equally legendary and celestial

island of Kachaw, and Malay sultans descended from Arabian sayyids or

Alexander the Great.

Like many legendary dynastic founders among the Indo-European an-

cients, Alexander himself was a stranger-king in Macedonia, allegedly de-

scended from the royal stock of Argos—even as Aeneas was from Troy; the

eponymous Lacedaemon was a Zeus-descended stranger who married the

daughter of the autochthonous ruler, Sparta, and succeeded him; or again

Romulus, fratricidal warrior prince of Alba, founded Rome by subsumingthe indigenous Sabines through conquest and marriage; and the peripa-

tetic Heracles was the ancestor of the Gauls even as their Irish royal cousins

married the indigenous goddesses of their kingdoms. Once, while cam-







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paigning in Asia, Alexander had occasion to remind his Macedonian

troops that his father Phillip had literally civilized them, transforming

them from a weak bunch of nomads dressed in animal skins into properly

clad, well-ordered city dwellers of the Macedonian plain. Just so, when

Alexander effectively became stranger-king and Hellenizer of Egypt and

Western Asia, he established well-ordered cities from Alexandria to Kan-

dahar. Certain of Alexander’s miraculous descendants, who became sul-

tans in Sumatra and Malaya, turned the rice fields to gold and silver when

they first appeared in the ancient rajadom of Srivijaya. As it is said in the

Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) that relate this Alexandrian origin of

Islamic rulers—Alexander being identified with the Koranic hero Dzu’l

Karnain—as it is said in the Annals, “where there is sovereignty, there is

gold.”The stranger-king is a rainmaker, both in the sense that he detains

powers for fertilizing the bearing earth of the original people, and that he is

the source of the society’s riches in the form of its most precious objects.

Whether he guards these valuables as palladia or distributes them as royal

largesse, they are, like the king himself, foreign presences that bring culture

and order as well as wealth to the native people. The hero of an important

stranger-king narrative from western Fiji has the same name as Fiji’s great-

est valuable, the tabua or sperm whale tooth. According to the tradition, by suppressing incest and instituting proper marriage, here between the

daughters of the original people and himself, Tabua enacts the same con-

stitutive social functions that whale teeth perform in Fijian social practice.

Given the doubly abstract nature of the king as stranger and ruler in tra-

ditions of this sort, he is something of an objectified subject, whereas the

palladia of the realm function again as subjectified objects. This must be

what led Robert von Heine-Geldern to argue that the royal regalia were

the true rulers of the Bugis and Makassar realms of Sulawesi; the sultanswere but their agents. Of course, providing foreign valuables and fer-

tilizing the land are analogous royal functions, inasmuch as both sup-

ply a necessary complement of external moveable means for realizing

the fixed, earthly powers of reproduction that are the heritage of the

native “owners.” Then again, the characteristic union of the immigrant

hero with the daughter of the native ruler, giving rise to a dynasty that

synthesizes their complementary virtues, is another evident analogy—and

a transparent representation of the constitution of the society as a cosmic

totality in which alterity is a condition of prosperity.It follows that the material values at issue here are cosmic utilities. My

argument on economic value rests on the general determination of the

foreign as a metaphysical realm inhabited by beings and forces with tran-







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scendent powers of life and death. It comes down to a simple-minded and

positivist sense of human finitude: the thesis, rather like Malinowski’s, that

people must in reality depend for their existence on conditions not of their

own making—hence and whence the spirits. The going anthropological

alternatives suppose rather that divinity is a misrecognition of humanity.

For Durkheim, god is the misplaced apprehension of the coercive force of

society, a force people surely experience but know not wherefrom it comes.

For a certain Marxist anthropology, god is the alienated projection of peo-

ple’s own powers of production and reproduction: an unhappy conscious-

ness that transfers human self-fashioning to the deity. While these theories

may persuasively address the diverse morphologies of divinity, they do not

tell us why society is set in a cosmos of beings invested with powers of

vitality and mortality beyond any that humans themselves know or con-trol. Neither sense of false consciousness takes sufficient account of the

generic predicament of the human condition: this dependence on sui ge-

neris forces of life and death that are no more subject to human intention-

ality than they are created by human science. If people really were in

control of their own existence, they would not die. Or fall ill. Nor do they

govern the natural reproductive processes of their food supplies or them-

selves. They cannot control the weather on which their prosperity de-

pends. And most notably in the present connection, neither do they control other peoples of their ken: peoples whose cultural existence may be

enviable or scandalous to them, but in any case, by their very differences

from themselves, strangers who thus offer proof of a transcendent capacity

for life. As symptoms of life powers, even the dangers of outside presences

may factor into desires for them.

But who exactly is a stranger and where does the outside begin? Struc-

turalism owes something on this score to British structural functionalism,

since segmentary relativity—operating in virtually any society, as EdwardEvans-Pritchard implied—would make “strangers” of certain fellow vil-

lagers and thus conflate the categories of the cosmological with internal

conceptions of authority or even intimate relations of affinity. More than

metaphor, then, this conflation of structural registers is the stipulation of a

segmentary sociology. When a child is born in Tanimbar, the question of

its sex is phrased as “stranger or house master”—the latter referring to a

daughter destined to reproduce another house. Moreover, a pregnant

woman, reports McKinnon, “is often likened to a boat that makes a long-

distance journey and returns to land laden with valuables.” For the wife-takers must compensate the woman’s natal house for the reproductive

powers they acquired by return gifts of foreign heirloom valuables, partic-

ularly those obtained as bride-price for the outmarried woman’s own







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daughter. My argument is that marriage is the archetypal form of life-

from-without, the actual experiential synthesis of intimacy and alterity

that prospers the consanguineous group through the incorporation of ex-

ternal reproductive powers. In this regard, marriage or stranger-kinship

epitomizes stranger-kingship, as conversely the dynasty of the stranger-

king is typically founded by an alliance of cosmic dimensions with a prin-

cess of the autochthonous people. Recall Edmund Leach’s famous

distinction between the we-group of consanguines, defined as relations of

common substance, and relations of alliance that “are viewed as metaphys-

ical influence.” Or Mary Helms’s observation, based on a broad ethno-

graphic survey: “Certain categories of people, especially affines (in-laws)

are associated with the cosmographically-charged outside world, and

therefore convey distinctive supernaturally informed qualities associatedwith the wider cosmos.” Affines are personifications of cosmic powers,

even as foreign goods objectify them, hence their frequent synthesis in

charged exchanges that produce persons of social value.

Perhaps trade is as old as the incest taboo, inasmuch as they have the

same finality. Perhaps the incest taboo itself, whatever its advantageous

effects in expanding the network of kin, likewise originated in the quest for

powers of life at large beyond the communities of the familiar.

With regard to trade, one further sequitur, not so speculative: in thegreat range of human societies, scarcity is largely a function of exchange-

value rather than the other way around. At least for the most valuable

things, their externality is a necessary condition of their desirability—of

which their scarcity is then a consequence. Indeed the local production of

such valuables is typically inconceivable, even were the means available.

This is as true of trade as it is of (so-called) totemism, where in classic

forms (for example, Australian Aboriginal “clans”) the interdependence of

groups is based on an arbitrary division of labor, each totemic community specializing in the ritual increase of a species that only the others may

consume. Likewise it is a truism of Melanesian ethnography that different

communities and/or ethnic groups are involved in regional exchange net-

works of increase rituals and life-giving valuables—sometimes even sig-

nificant foodstuffs—that have no necessary relation to resource

opportunities or technical capacities. It is a trade in powers, the vital pow-

ers of alterity. Just so, Philippe Descola writes of Amazonian hunting dogs

that the Achuar insist on importing from afar, though they are not partic-ularly distinguished from their own animals:

So this circulation of dogs cannot be justified objectively by the qual-

ity of hounds from distant places. Its cause lies in something common







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to all the Jivaro groups: the fantastical value set on certain material or

immaterial things—shamanic powers for example—upon which a

foreign origin is supposed to confer strength and qualities far superior

to those of identical things that are obtainable locally. This willing

dependence upon the external world is bound to encourage bartering,

since the things one posses oneself are necessarily less estimable than

others that are invested with all kinds of merits because they have

moved from one place to another.

That seeming oxymoron that scarcity is a function of value, given the

life-enhancing virtues of the foreign, has an implication as well for pecu-

niary, market exchange insofar as the latter is no less subject to the cultural

construction of desires—which is to say the basic and true realm of value.

The Infrastructuralism of CapitalismI am hardly the first to attempt to recuperate the infrastructure for

cultural schemes. Saussure’s explanation of the value of signs by the value

of francs was already an open invitation to turn the semiotic argument

around—which Lucien Sebag, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Clastres, and Mau-

rice Godelier, in their various ways, have already succeeded in accomplish-

ing. Likewise for the gestures I once made to “the pensee bourgeoisie.” HereI would conclude by returning to that discussion, adding some further

observations on the cultural constitution of capitalist market values.

The problem is, in order to understand the market economy the way

economists do, we have to give up everything we know about the cultural

formation of value. For all its pretensions as an empirical science, aca-

demic economics is essentially a Platonic discipline, based on an ideal

individual subject (Homo economicus) whose ideally rational behavior is

taken as the intellectual object of the discipline. As Karl Polanyi indicateddecades ago, by this allegedly legitimate “abstraction,” the whole social and

cultural order providing the substantive terms of material life is reduced to

a specific form of subjective activity, itself stripped of any meaningful so-

cial content: the rational allocation of scarce means against alternate ends

to acquire the greatest possible returns. On page one of virtually any in-

troductory textbook, the economy of a society is collapsed by definition

into people’s economizing, which is not only an ideal form of utilitarian

practice but also the specific ideal of the marketplace, not the practice of

people when they come home to their families. By defining the economy aseconomizing, however, the economists banish the cultural schemes of per-

sons and things that order use-values, demand and production to the un-

examined limbo of what they call “exogenous” or even “irrational” factors.







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In conventional pecuniary terms, two-thirds of the current American

economy consists of consumer spending. So if there is no disputing peo-

ple’s tastes, then there will be no science of them either.

What effectively organizing material life has no economic science. The

cultural system of values is a given. The division of labor by sex, for exam-

ple, or the social organization of the labor force, the prestige value of filet

mignon, the supposed natural virtues of bottled water from the “primi-

tive” Fiji Islands: these determining conditions of material activity func-

tion in economic analysis as unexamined presuppositions of the actors. Or

else, if they rise to the economists’ consciousness, they are, as they say,

“exogenous” factors. The unexamined life may not be worth living, ac-

cording to Socrates, but it is business as usual in economics. To adapt

Louis Dumont’s phrasing, the whole kingdom of means and ends, personsand goods, constituted by society and history has been usurped by the

individual actors, so that the cultural order may be perceived as a conse-

quence of their doings and the economy as a function of their authority.

Of course that is the way it seems to the bourgeois subject. The mean-

ingful schemes of objects and persons are at best semiconscious, and com-

prehended only as an unreflected habitus. Certain relations between the

anatomy of edible animals and the occasions for eating them, for example,

are understood by North American consumers by the simple formula thatfilet mignon is to hamburger as fine dining is to an ordinary lunch. We are

generally unaware that underlying our apparently rational choices—we do

not buy hamburger for honored dinner guests—is a whole code of cultural

values that has little or nothing to do with nutritional utility, but much

more to do with such distinctions as muscle vs. organs, outer flesh vs.

inner, carved vs. ground, prepared dishes vs. sandwiches, lunch vs. dinner,

and so on. Neither will utility account for the peculiar way that shoppers in

American supermarkets make choices between different meats, poultry, orfish according to the necessity of having something “different than last

night’s dinner,” where difference is determined from a complex typology

of “main dishes” and methods of food preparation (frying, roasting, boil-

ing, and so on). (When I was doing fieldwork in Fiji, people remarked on

how bizarre European dietary habits were that not only required different

foods every day, but different foods three times a day.) Or consider the

meaningful differences in Western clothing. All the monetary rationality

that we may put into buying clothing will not explain the characteristics of

dress that mark the distinctions between men and women, holidays andordinary days, businessmen and policemen, adults and children, people of

different regions and ethnic affiliations—think of all the ways that clothes

signify.







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Perhaps we have been too quick to celebrate the “disenchantment of the

world” ushered in by the retreat of religion and the growth of naturalism

since the seventeenth century. Rather, what actually happened was the

enchantment of Western society by the world, by the imagined cultural

values of the material rather than the spiritual. We live in a world en-

chanted by symbolically constituted, culturally relative “utilities” such as

gold, oil, diamonds, Pinot Noir grapes, Mercedes cars, heirloom tomatoes,

silk clothing, hamburgers from McDonald’s, and purses from Gucci. Here

is a large construction of nature by particular cultural values whose sym-

bolic qualities, however, are understood as purely material qualities,

whose social sources are attributed rather to individual desires, and whose

arbitrary satisfactions are mystified as universally rational choices.

Perhaps the famous distinction drawn by Karl Polanyi between theautonomous, self-regulating market economy and the so-called “embed-

ded” economies of societies without markets was too radical—because the

market itself is culturally embedded. In embedded economies as Polanyi

defined them, the disposition of goods and labor is ordered by preexisting

social relations among the parties concerned. The traditional economic

terms of Fiji islanders, for example, were not what our economic science

would recognize as such. Their economic terms were “chiefs” (the recipi-

ents of tributes and dispensers of largesse), “sister’s son” (a privilegedrelative with divine rights to the goods of his maternal uncle’s people), “be

of good heart, my kinsman” (a near-imperative solicitation of material

aid), “border allies” (contracted and rewarded by gifts), “war god” (subject

to lavish offerings), and the like. These were the relations of production,

distribution, possession, and consumption by means of which nature was

appropriated and the society provisioned.

By contrast, Polanyi argued, the capitalist market economy, working

autonomously through the supply-demand-price mechanism, is thereby separated out from other relations and institutions—distinct thus from

religion, government, kinship, and other such “exogenous” sectors of the

society. But what about the meaningful differences between steak and

hamburger or men’s clothes and women’s? The supply-demand-price sys-

tem is itself embedded in a larger cultural scheme and driven by the values

thereof. Operating through supply and demand, the market is an effective

way of realizing the symbolic values of this cultural totality in material

terms. But from an anthropological point of view, it has been all too effec-

tive in mystifying these meaningful terms as pecuniary values.I end by invoking another reading of Levi-Strauss which may at first

seem “off-topic” but, I submit, is epistemologically critical for revealing

this symbolic system of values, otherwise unconscious, orchestrating the







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pecuniary order of the market. Recall Levi-Strauss’s seemingly mystical

dictum, “myths think themselves in men unbeknownst to them.” There is

more than one suggestion in the master’s work that since anthropologists

are of the same intellectual nature as the peoples they study, they are given

possibilities of knowing the cultures of others that are in important re-

spects more powerful than the way natural scientists know physical ob-

jects. The more I know about the physical composition of, say, the table on

which I am working, the less it is like anything in human experience—

beginning with the fact that nothing simply physical can specify that it is a

“table.” Unlike the way tables will always appear to us, science tells there

are spaces between the molecules, and beyond that, at the level of quantum

mechanics, our knowledge defies all common sense. But if natural science

starts off with the experientially familiar and ends in the humanly remote,anthropology, as Levi-Strauss so often demonstrated, works the other way

around. One might begin with something distant or even obnoxious to us,

say cannibalism in the Fiji Islands, and yet come to the conclusion that it is

“logical” in that cultural context—which is to say, it has come into accord

with our own thinking.

In 1929 the anthropologist A. M. Hocart recounted the formal speech of

a Fijian chief presenting a reward to the master carpenter who had built his

great sailing canoe—a sacred canoe of the kind traditionally used in warand inter-island festivals. The chief apologized that he could not offer the

carpenter a “cooked man” or a “raw woman” in compensation, for Chris-

tianity, he said, “spoils our feasts.” The “cooked man” would be an enemy

cannibal victim, the “raw woman” a virgin daughter offered as wife. The

anthropological question immediately posed is why the virgin woman

would be equivalent in value to the cannibal victim? The brief answer is

that they have the same finality, which is the beneficial reproduction of

society: the woman directly by bearing children, the cannibal victim as asacrifice whose consumption in conjunction with the god procures divine

benefits for the society, including human and agricultural fertility. One

could also now understand why in some parts of Fiji a fine war club is a

required betrothal gift, in effect compensating the family for the future loss

of their daughter by the future gain of an enemy victim. Or why the great

compliment of a Fijian man as a “strong arm” applies equally to feats in

growing crops, siring children, and slaying enemies. Or again why alliances

with warrior groups— border peoples and sea warriors—are accompanied

by royal gifts of chiefly daughters, thus making the allies privileged sister’ssons of the chiefdom. So if Fijian cannibalism is thereby beginning to seem

“logical,” consider that logic is something that goes on within us. Pardon-

ing the pun, a custom that began as strange and remote has been assimi-







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lated and internalized—that is, as our own good sense. Since cultures are

symbolically constituted, and since we too are symbolizing beings, we have

the privilege of knowing others by reproducing the very ways they are

organized in the operations of our own mind. Or, as Levi-Strauss said,

anthropology is a conversation of man with man.

What has this got to do with the unconscious values of our material

lives? The point is that once we enter into a system of values involving the

meaningful relations between canoes, war clubs, chiefly women, crops,

warriors, enemy victims, and indeed much more, we can hardly remain

unconscious of the values by which we are related to our own objects of

existence. We must suspect that something more than pecuniary goes on

in the infrastructure. Epistemologically, anthropology is a two-edged

sword. We too have a culture—of which our economics is one expression.


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