David Graeber's Value As "meaning-making"
David Graeber attempts to synthesize the insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss. He sees value as a model for human "meaning-making". Starting with Marxist definitions of consumption and production, he introduces Mauss’s idea of "objects that are not consumed" and posits that the majority of human behavior consists of activities that would not be properly categorized as either consumption or production. To illustrate this principle, one of Graeber’s undergraduate students at Yale, David Corson-Knowles, began a list of things that are neither consumption nor production in 2003, which has since been expanded and expounded upon. This list includes those human activities that are not consumption, in the narrow sense of simply purchasing something, and are not production, in the sense of creating or modifying something intended for sale or exchange, namely:
- cooking a meal
- extinguishing a fire
- dressing and undressing
- applying makeup
- watching television
- playing in a band
- falling in love
- reading
- listening to music
- going to a museum or gallery
- taking a photograph
- gardening
- writing
- conducting a coming of age ceremony
- going window shopping
- exercising
- acting
- turning around in a circle
- teaching
- having an argument
- playing games
- having sex
- attending a religious service
- looking at old photos
- critiquing art
Read more about this topic: Anthropological Theories Of Value
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