tive, both Formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange. To understand a society, they argued, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist—or, as they put it, “reproduces” itself—by endless creative activity. This was quite different from functionalism. Functionalists begin with a notion of “society,” then ask how that society manages to hold itself together. Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action, and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. This has obvious advantages. The problem with the whole “mode of production” approach, though, was that it was developed to analyze societies with a state: that is, in which there is a ruling class that maintains an apparatus of coercion to extract a surplus from the people who do most of the productive work. Most of the real triumphs of the MoP approach—I am thinking, for example, of Perry Anderson’s magisterial “Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism” (1974a) and “Lineages of the Absolutist State” (1974b)—deal with outlining the history of different modes of production, many of which can coexist in a given society; the way in which the dominant one provides the basis for a ruling class whose interests are protected by the state; the way that modes of production contain fundamental contradictions that will, at least in most cases, ultimately drive them to turn into something else. Once one turns to societies without a state, it’s not clear how any of these concepts are to be applied. One thing Marxism did introduce was a series of powerful analytical terms—exploitation, fetishism, appropriation, reproduction... —that everyone agreed Marx himself had used brilliantly in his analysis of Capitalism, but that no one was quite sure how to apply outside it. Different scholars would use these terms in very different ways and then would often end up quar-

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

This paper reviews the use of the notion of “key symbol” in anthropological analysis. It analyzes phenomena which have been or might be accorded the status of key symbol in cultural analyses, categorizing them according to their primary modes of operating on thought and action.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100

On Key Symbols1

The world region most likely to record the greatest numbers of deaths from Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is sub-Saharan Africa where most transmission of the HIV virus is heterosexual. Drawing extensively on the primarily anthropological often scattered literature and on their own research the authors argue that sexual activity in sub-Saharan Africa has not been subject to the same moral and religious constraints as in the West. Sexuality has been treated in a more matter-of-fact way and sexual relations quite distinct from prostitution often involve material transactions. The pervasiveness of this transactional element means that sudden changes in sexual networking will lead to the deterioration of the situation of many socially marginal women and their children. The lesser constraints on acceptable sexual activity have resulted in a high level of heterosexual networking which provides both a considerable risk of HIV transmission and a strong resistance to the control of AIDS through the enforcement of monogamy. The parameters of likely change areunknown because of the inadequacy of social scientific research into the nature and extent of African sexual networks. (authors)

The social context of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

As a response to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s critique of my essay “Fetishes are gods in the process of construction,” this paper enters into critical engagement with anthropological proponents of what has been called the “ontological turn.” Among other engagements, I note that my own reflections on Malagasy fanafody, or medicine, are informed by just the sort of self-conscious reflections my informants make on epistemology, something that anthropologists typically ignore. After making note of the arguments of Roy Bhaskar that most post-Cartesian philosophy rests on an “epistemic fallacy,” I further argue that a realist ontology, combined with broad theoretical relativism, is a more compelling political position than the “ontological anarchy” and theoretical intolerance of ontological turn exponents.

/pdf/radical-alterity-is-just-another-way-of-saying-reality-a-1k58bv1hcn.pdf

Radical alterity is just another way of saying "reality": A reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

There is a prominent villain in Indian education-the ethnocentric teacher who strives to destroy his students' cultural identity in order to propel them into the American mainstream. Confronted with silent, resistive Indian students, he then quotes chapter and verse of cultural deprivation texts to rationalize his own teaching failure. While the characteristics of such ineffective teachers are well

Effective Teachers of Eskimo and Indian Students

People of Rimrock : a study of values in five cultures

ity or uniqueness of various values, the relation between values and behaviors, the meaning or meaninglessness of ethical terms, perhaps even the relation between duty and happiness (the "right" and the "good"). But the less abstract and general problems of adequate description of values continue to demand attention. The immediate objective of this effort is to outline and illustrate a descriptive-analytic method for classifying values as elements of a value system. The whole is regarded as an approximation and working hypothesis which may be useful, directly or suggestively, for the further study of values. The classificatory scheme to be presented was constructed to organize data relevant to the values of five cultures in the American Southwest (Navaho, Zuni, Spanish American, Texan and Mormon), collected over a five-year period by representatives of twelve special disciplines. Both philosophical and behavioral science sources were tapped for methods, concepts and terminology.' There follows a brief discussion of the theory and method of the classification; categories for describing a cultural value system; and, by way of illustrating a heretofore untested scheme, a description of the value system of the Ramah Navaho. A. THEORY AND METHOD OF THE CLASSIFICATION 1. The choice of a definition of "values" is decisive for the principle of classification to be used. The multiplicity of available definitions probably reflects the variety not only of theoretical biases but also of the phenomena to which the term refers. "Value" is a general label for a heterogeneous class of normative factors, not a simple conceptual unit. Simplification can be achieved

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1956.58.2.02a00020

The Classification of Values: A Method and Illustration*

The teaching of anthropology

Women of Burundi: a study of social values

HE NEIGHBORING African kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi are so similar in many respects that they appear, when viewed from afar, to be virtually identical in all but minor details. However, those who know both countries well, recognizing that Ruanda nd Urundi are more like each other than is either like any other culture, report impressions of several kinds and degrees of difference. The differences t nd to be cumulative and to determine a cleavage that is most pronounced in respect to socio-political organization and related behavior. An indication ofthe characteristics of the countries and the peoples will be given as background to description of the traditional political and social organization-of the feudal structures, the kingships, the caste-like social system in relation to political structures, and relevant details of the kinship system. Point by point comparison should reveal the extent of structural similarities and the nature of the differences. An analytic model will then be proposed to account for observed differences of political behavior in response to uniform influences from the Belgian trusteeship government, in terms of the differences noted in traditional socio-political organization.

Ethel M. Albert

Papers

People of Rimrock : a study of values in five cultures

The Classification of Values: A Method and Illustration*

The teaching of anthropology

Women of Burundi: a study of social values

Socio-Political Organization and Receptivity to Change: Some Differences between Ruanda and Urundi