To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field. Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on nationalism, hybridity, diaspora and globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the metropolitan centres. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its field, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

On the face of it, an exploration of the idea of the "native" in anthropological discourse may not appear to have much to do with the genealogy of the idea of hierarchy. But I wish to argue that hierarchy is one of an anthology of images in and through which anthropologists have frozen the contribution of specific cultures to our understanding of the human condition. Such metonymic freezing has its roots in a deeper assumption of anthropological thought regarding the boundedness of cultural units and the confinement of the varieties of human consciousness within these boundaries. The idea of the "native" is the principal expression of this assumption, and thus the genealogy of hierarchy needs to be seen as one local instance of the dynamics of the construction of natives. Although the term native has a respectable antiquity in Western thought and has often been used in positive and self-referential ways, it has gradually become the technical preserve of anthropologists. Although some other words taken from the vocabulary of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators have been expunged from anthropological usage, the term native has retained its currency, serving as a respectable substitute for terms like primitive, about which we now feel some embarrassment. Yet the term native, whether we speak of "native categories," or "native belief-systems" or "native agriculture," conceals certain ambiguities. We sense this ambiguity, for example, in the restricted use of the adjective nativistic, which is typically used not only for one sort of revivalism, but for revivalism among certain kinds of population. Who is a "native" (henceforth without quotation marks) in the anthropological usage? The quick answer to this question is that the native is a person who is born in (and thus belongs to) the place the anthropologist is observing or writing about. This sense of the word native is fairly narrowly, and neutrally, tied to its Latin etymology. But do we use the term native uniformly to refer to people who are born in certain places and, thus, belong to them? We do not. We have tended

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Putting Hierarchy in Its Place

labor which is represented in the value of commodities is a concept which has an important place in Marx's thinking. It must be admitted, however, that it is not an easy concept to comprehend; and for this reason it seems wise to consider the matter in further detail. It may be well to remove at once any misunderstandings of a purely verbal character. To many the expression 'abstract labor' suggests something slightly mysterious, perhaps not a little metaphysical and unreal. As should be clear from the last section, however, nothing of the sort was intended by Marx. Abstract labor is abstract only in the quite straightforward sense that all special characteristics which differentiate one kind of labor from another are ignored. Abstract labor, in short, is, as Marx's own usage clearly attests, equivalent to 'labor in general'; it is what is common to all productive human activity. Marx did not think he was the first to introduce the idea of labor in general into political economy. For example, in speaking of Benjamin Franklin, whom he regarded as 'one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value,' he had the following to say: Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value ?f everything in labor, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labor exchanged, and thus reduces them all to equal human labor. But although ignoran' of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of 'the one labor,' then of 'the other labor,' and finally of 'labor,' without further qualification, as the substance of the value of everything.16 And in another connection, he remarks that 'it was a tremendous advance on the part of Adam Smith to throw aside all limitations which mark wealth-producing activity and to define it as labor in general, neither industrial, nor commercial, nor agricultural, or one as much as the other.' 17 Ricardo, as Marx was well aware. adopted the same point of view and followed it out with ABSTRACT LABOR 31 greater consistency than Smith. In this, as in many other cases, Marx started from a basic idea of the classical school, gave it precise and explicit expression, developed it, and utilized it in the analysis of social relations in his own original and penetrating fashion. It is important to realize that the reduction of all labor to a common denominator, so that units of labor can be compared with and substituted for one another, added and subtracted, and finally totalled up to form a social aggregate, is not an arbitrary abstraction, dictated in some way by the whim of the investigator. It is rather, as Lukacs correctly observes, an abstraction 'which belongs to the essence of capitalism.' 18 Let us examine this more closely. Capitalist society is characterized by a degree of labor mobility much greater than prevailed in any previous form of society. Not only do workers change their jobs relatively frequently, but also the stream of new' workers enterin~ the labor market is quickly diverted from declining to rising occupations. As Marx expressed it, 'We see at a glance that, in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labor is, in accordance with the varying demand, at one time supplied in the form of tailoring, at another in the form of weaving. This change may possibly not take place without friction, but take place it must.' 19 Under these circumstances, the various specific kinds of labor in existence at any given time and the relative quantities of each become matters of secondary importance in any general view of the economic system. Much more significant is the total size of the social labor force and its general level of development. On these depend the productive potentialities of society, whether the latter be manifested in the production of consumer's goods or in the production of implements of war. This is a conclusion which commands universal assent in the modern world; it flows from such common facts of experience that no one would think of denying it. It is important to observe, however, that in arriving at this conclusion we were obliged to abstract from the differences between specific forms of labor, an abstraction which is inevitably implied in the very notion of a total labor force available to society. We are likely to forget or overlook this JZ THE QUALITATIVE-VALUE PROBLEM only because the differences are practically of secondary importance. In the course of a methodological discussion, Marx emphasizes this point in the following terms: . . . This abstraction of labor is but the result of a concrete aggregate of different kinds of labor. The indifference to the par~icul~r ~dpd of labor ~orresponds to a form of society in which md1v1duals pass With ease from one kind of work to another, which makes it immaterial to them what particular kind of work may fall to their share. Labor has become here, not only categor~cally but really, a means of creating wealth in general and IS no longer grown together with the individual into one particular destination. This state of affairs has found its highest development in the most modern of bourgeois societies, the United States. It is only here that the abstraction of the category 'labor,' 'labor in general,' labor sans phrase, the starting ~oint of modern political economy, becomes realized in practice.20 To sum up, we may say that the reduction of all labor to abstract labor enables us to see clearly, behind the special forms 1 which labor may assume at any given time, l}n aggregate social · labor force which is capable of transference from one usc to another in accordance with social need, and on the magnitude and development of which society's wealth-producing capacity in the last resort depends. The adoption of this point of view, moreover, is conditioned by the very nature of capitalist production which promotes a degree of labor mobility never before approached in earlier forms of society. 6. THE RELATION oF THE QuANTITATIVE To THE QuALITATIVE IN

The Theory of Capitalist Development

This paper introduces the notion of “nesting orientalisms” to investigate some of the complexity of the east/west dichotomy which has underlain scholarship on “Orientalism” since the publication of Said's classic polemic, a discourse in which “East,” like “West,” is much more of a project than a place. While geographical boundaries of the “Orient“ shifted throughout history, the concept of “Orient” as “other” has remained more or less unchanged. Moreover, cultures and ideologies tacitly presuppose the valorized dichotomy between east and west, and have incorporated various “essences” into the patterns of representation used to describe them. Implied by this essentialism is that humans and their social or cultural institutions are “governed by determinate natures that inhere in them in the same way that they are supposed to inhere in the entities of the natural world.” Thus, eastern Europe has been commonly associated with “backwardness,” the Balkans with “violence,” India with “idealism” or “mysticism,” while the west has identified itself consistently with the “civilized world.“

J. Sibree

Papers

Philosophy of history

Lectures on the Philosophy of History

The philosophy of right ; The philosophy of history