The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. They discuss a wide range of goods - from oriental carpets to human relics - to reveal both that the underlying logic of everyday economic life is not so far removed from that which explains the circulation of exotica, and that the distinction between contemporary economies and simpler, more distant ones is less obvious than has been thought. As the editor argues in his introduction, beneath the seeming infinitude of human wants, and the apparent multiplicity of material forms, there in fact lie complex, but specific, social and political mechanisms that regulate taste, trade, and desire.
Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists. archaeologists, and historians of art.
Editor
Arjun Appadurai, New School University, New York
Contributors
Nancy Farriss, Arjun Appadurai, Igor Kopytoff, William H. Davenport, Alfred Gell, Colin Renfrew, Patrick Geary, Brian Spooner, Lee V. Cassanelli, William M. Reddy, C. A. Bayly
Retracting to the Marxian framework of the politics of commodity production and departing from Simmel’s argument that exchange creates value and not the other way around, the edited essays in the Social life of Things shed light on the specific trajectory ...
评分Retracting to the Marxian framework of the politics of commodity production and departing from Simmel’s argument that exchange creates value and not the other way around, the edited essays in the Social life of Things shed light on the specific trajectory ...
评分Retracting to the Marxian framework of the politics of commodity production and departing from Simmel’s argument that exchange creates value and not the other way around, the edited essays in the Social life of Things shed light on the specific trajectory ...
评分Retracting to the Marxian framework of the politics of commodity production and departing from Simmel’s argument that exchange creates value and not the other way around, the edited essays in the Social life of Things shed light on the specific trajectory ...
评分Retracting to the Marxian framework of the politics of commodity production and departing from Simmel’s argument that exchange creates value and not the other way around, the edited essays in the Social life of Things shed light on the specific trajectory ...
intro部分尤其好!可是每次读理论就会对本学科产生深深的identity crisis...
评分intro部分尤其好!可是每次读理论就会对本学科产生深深的identity crisis...
评分真应该早点重视这本书
评分刚开始看没读懂,后来经过Joe点拨似懂非懂,这本书处理的关键问题是价值是如何产生的;与马克思主义认为的劳动创造价值不同,本书作者们告诉我们交换过程也产生了价值。
评分“Following Habermas, we are used to thinking of crises of legitimacy in modern Western society as the product of a breakdown in the discourse regarding duties and obligations linking state and society.” @RUC
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