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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how the concept of 'values' developed in relation to varied understandings of capitalist wealth, including the perspective that 'value' is the dominant form that wealth takes within capitalist relations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces how the concept of 'values' developed in relation to varied understandings of capitalist wealth, including the perspective that 'value' is the dominant form that wealth takes within capitalist relations. Rather than seek after a 'unified theory of value/s' as many anthropologists have proposed, this paper examines how and why 'value' and 'values' developed as relatively separate and distinct objects of study. The paper situates the category 'values' within the broader development and spread of 'culture' as a concept.

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Marx's labour theory of value and alienation offers an important perspective from which to record and describe the process of natural resource management policy development utilising Aboriginal knowledge groups and cultural practitioners in Victoria. The paper examines three such policy initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

Governments in south eastern Australia are beginning to use Aboriginal knowledge in their environmental management policies and, in doing so, are re-valuing (or re-evaluating) Aboriginal people as potential assets (or creators of profit though the practice of cultural knowledge). In this moment, governments again have the capacity to exploit Aboriginal labour value in concert with their exploitation of Aboriginal land. This is not unwelcomed in Aboriginal communities as it represents a greater degree of land control than has been possible since the advent of colonisation. Examining three Victorian Government policy initiatives in 2018 which utilised Aboriginal led knowledge groups and cultural practitioners, this paper argues that Marx's theory of labour value and alienation offers an important perspective from which to record and describe this process.

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In this paper I draw from ethnographic fieldwork in southern Venezuela (Gran Sabana) and Chile (Araucanía) to analyse causes and effects of the growth of tourist ventures in indigenous territories.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I draw from ethnographic fieldwork in southern Venezuela (Gran Sabana) and Chile (Araucanía) to analyse causes and effects of the expansion of tourist activities in indigenous territories. I engage classical debates on the labour theory of value to ground this analysis, resorting to Marxian contributions in order to generate new conceptual tools. Engagement with those theoretical contributions is combined with a discussion of the way in which theories of uneven development and rent-capture can facilitate our understanding of why tourism has become a common (and expanding) phenomenon in indigenous territories.

I will approach my ethnographic material through those theoretical prisms, aiming to explain how tourism affects cultural production and social relations in the locations where I have undertaken fieldwork, and how the concept of "cultural labour" might contribute to support such explanation.

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Paper short abstract:

An analysis of labour and its exploitation can provide fertile and useful ground for anthropological analysis of humans and nature in a time of multiple ecological crises.

Paper long abstract:

The current climate crisis has led to significant debates within anthropology and more broadly about how to theorise the relationship between humans and nature with the aim of addressing this crisis. Some have argued that theory and research must take a 'post human' approach, and that Marxism should be rejected for its dualism and for devaluing nature. In contrast, this paper argues that theory and research must include robust analysis and critique of human actions, including human creations such as capitalism and value. Drawing on Andreas Malm's work, the paper reviews of Marx's analysis of human labour and systems of exploitation, and questions assumptions about the supposed dualism of Marxist analysis. The labour theory of value can contribute to analysis of how capitalism excludes nature from its value systems. The paper concludes by arguing that an analysis of labour and its exploitation can provide fertile and useful ground for anthropological analysis of humans and nature in a time of multiple ecological crises.

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This paper draws upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in informal urban settlements in Fiji to analyse how theoretical concepts such as value, labour and commodification at once inform and are articulated through quotidian economic practice.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I trace the human economy of informal urban settlements in Fiji. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the peri-urban edge-lands outside Fiji's largest commercial centres my discussion analyzes the everyday economic strategies squatters employ in order to make a living and survive on the fringe of the market economy. I am particularly interested in how local understandings of key theoretical concepts such as value, labour and commodification at once inform and are articulated through various forms of informal economic activities - from commodity trade, gambling and cash crops to usury, hawking and hustling - in the heterogeneous, rapidly changing, and unstable context of squatter settlements. More broadly I use this particular study to reflect on how research data on the quotidian economic practice of those who are most highly motivated to effect change can be operationalized politically and inform social justice discourses about urban poverty in Fiji and beyond.

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I will challenge conceptualisations of capitalism as abstract dis-embedded realities as humans are oriented to other humans and act in relation to each other within a system which is open rather than closed. I will explore value(s) within a capitalist regime using narratives from Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

My research focuses on Bangladesh and reflects on its distinct linkages with the global process of capitalism. By interweaving theory and evidence throughout the narratives, I will challenge conceptualisations of capitalism in general, as abstract dis-embedded realities. Here, I will elaborate on why an extreme universalistic approach (such as the universal logic that propels capital and capitalism, explaining every social relation in light of class, and understanding objective structures for expanded wealth accumulation) or a vernacular approach (evading global processes) will lead to only a partial understanding of the condition of human existence. The study of capitalism in Bangladesh revealed that unfreedom, exploitation, and social oppression interplay in complex ways, which remain out of focus in debates on industrial transition. Capitalism alone does not reproduce the social that regulates the social conduct of people. Rather, we must consider what humans try to achieve in life through the things they do in social settings - which is open rather than closed or static. For instance, people (in Bangladesh) work to become higher valued persons by the measure of the social values reinforced by Islam, kinship relationality, and patriarchy. These values regulate the relations between family and the larger community as well as help structure the labour process in the factory. Therefore, I will highlight how the human subject, i.e. the worker in the factory, lived in the given place and time (inside and outside the factory) that has been incorporated in the cycle of the global capital accumulation process.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a critical reconsideration of the relationship between value and frameworks of reciprocal exchange. I argue that we need to pull apart the material, social and moral dimensions of exchange if we are to achieve a universalist theory of value as meaningful action.

Paper long abstract:

It is conceptually difficult to talk about value in the absence of reciprocal exchange relations. While the former has been the subject of a great deal of debate and theorising the latter has received comparatively little critical attention. This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork from northeast Arnhem Land to critically consider the relationship between anthropological notions of value and associated frameworks of reciprocal exchange. I employ Sahlins' scheme of reciprocities (1974) and Graeber's slight recasting of this scheme (2001) as a template for classic and current thinking in this regard. As the Yolngu material shows, there are significant limitations to this scheme; there is a clear evaluative mismatch between the alignment of empirically observable material criteria with the moral and political dimensions of exchange. I argue that we need to pull apart the various dimensions of exchange - material, social and moral - if we are to do justice to the way different cultural groups conceive of value as meaningful action. Doing so does a few important things. It allows us to ask if the material dimension is the ultimate determinant of value in each ethnographic case (rather than assuming). It accommodates further potential diversity as regards the alignment of these dimensions of exchange, and, in doing so affords a great deal more ethnographic and theoretical nuance. Among other things it allows us, for example, to more carefully consider the affective dimension of value and exchange.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the future of Big Data in international development, and its place in the informational reorganisation of global capitalism. The "digital revolution in agriculture" portends novel forms of dispossession and immaterial labour that retool capitalist value for the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Big Data seems to hold out Big Promises for the global food system. The term, and the technocratic apparatus it denotes, are increasingly wielded in millenarian style by acolytes of both international development and global agribusiness. In the face of looming environmental crises and a swelling global population, the "digital revolution" is pitched as a technical solution for global hunger, promising greater harvests and greater returns. In this paper, we interrogate some of the implications of these imagined futures, the digitised mode of agricultural production they underwrite, and the reconfigurations of power, value, and immaterial labour that unfold from it. We argue that they articulate the realms of international development and smallholder agriculture in the Global South with an ongoing digital reorganisation of global capitalism, integrating farmers into global markets and informational value chains and profoundly transforming human-environment relations and knowledges in the process. We locate this reorganisation within a long history of crises and spatio-technical fixes for capital accumulation. The rhetoric of Big Data and its applications within global food systems therefore both reproduce earlier logics of primitive accumulation and colonial biopolitics, and extend them into new configurations of digital imperialism and informational or immaterial labour that, we suggest, express mutations in the nature of capitalist value itself as it is retooled for the Anthropocene era. In this way Big Data portends novel forms of dispossession that are at once material and immaterial.

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Dsicussant This panel seeks contributions that engage the labour theory of value from anthropological perspectives and create grounds to discuss the extent to which the study of human behaviour and cultural production can benefit from a such a universalist theory.

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Discussant

This panel seeks contributions from anthropologists who examine and discuss the ways in which capitalism shapes and is shaped by human sociality. Within this general frame of analysis we are particularly interested in papers that engage the labour theory of value from anthropological perspectives. We expect contributions that, from different angles, create grounds to discuss the extent to which the study of human behaviour and cultural production can benefit from a such a universalist theory. We welcome papers backed by ethnographic work, but also presentations with a focus on methodological questions: what does anthropology do with the labour theory of value? What type of ethnography pairs well with the labour theory of value? If theory always informs ethnographic work, what benefit can anthropologists obtain from their knowledge about the labour theory of value and the questions this theory enabled us to explore? In this panel we are also interested in papers oriented towards other forms of theoretical (not necessarily methodological) reflection, and on any form of anthropological intervention tackles ongoing debates around the creation of value in contemporary capitalism.