Re: [jox] A response to Michel and Jakob
- From: jmp <m.pedersen lancaster.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:49:47 +0000
Hi,
On 16/03/12 17:37, Jakob Rigi wrote:
Hi Stefan and Michel,
I have read Graber`s book and taught it in a course, I called from
Gift to Spectacle. The trouble with Graber`s book is that it takes
the word value as a generic concept and find many different
instances.
Why is that a problem?
And finally decends into a type of post/modernist cultural
relativism, which is indeed typical of contemporary anthropolgy.
Could you be more specific? I have not read the entire book, only
pieces, but my general understanding of Graeber's book, work and
person is situated in a very different corner of the intellectual
field. And certainly he has seriously attempted to make that clear
himself:
“Consider for example the doctrine of moral relativism. By this I
mean the doctrine that, starting from the (entirely reasonable)
premise that one cannot fully understand any action except in the
context of the actor’s cultural universe, concludes that as a
consequence, no one has the right to stand in judgment over any action
committed by someone with a fundamentally different world view…this is
a doctrine that could only really emerge as a product of imperialism.
It could only have been produced by members of an elite population
whose dominance over the world was so complete and so reliable that
they could live their lives in full confidence that no one with a
fundamentally different world view would ever be in a position of
power over them…Pretenses to some kind of moral superiority, based on
their unwillingness to morally condemn ‘the Other’, it seems to me,
are often entirely underpinned by tacit support for real walls to shut
real other people out…what basis would we have to criticize the
structures of power in the world, unless we at least admit that
everyone in the world shares certain things in common?”
-David Graeber’s ‘Anti-Relativist Diatribe’, 2007 (Lost People.
Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Pg 386-7)
Actually in all ecomomies upon to p2p there have been regimes of
value. The precapitalist regimes were concerned with two things:
the distribution of labour and means of production on the one hand
and distribution of use values on the other.
All of "them"? Can you lump them all in like that?
best,
martin
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