This post is part of the Modes of Production feature moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling and Joe Trapido.
From the sixteenth century onward, European trading networks grew ever more extensive. In some places, they displaced or directly subjugated the indigenous population early on. In others, merchants entered trading relationships with locals. In some parts of Asia, these traders interacted with forms of social organization that had affinities with Europe—dense populations with large merchant classes, and states that extracted tribute over large areas (Wolf 1997: 73–101). In other places, power and resources were distributed according to very different rules: in particular, wealth was more directly related to the person. This is not to say that these places lacked markets or currency; they often held large markets and had an amazing diversity of objects for mediating transactions, but these objects are better seen as an element of, or adjunct to, the value of the person. I am calling such societies human modes of production.1 Continue reading →
Ever felt like the best conversation at the party is happening in the next room? When I did my field research in an urban neighborhood in Java some twenty years ago, it was at a time when we were “bringing the state back in” (Evans et al. 1985). I was deeply influenced by Philip Abrams’s “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” ([1977] 1988) Corrigan and Sayer’s The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985), and Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Rural Mexico (Joseph and Nugent 1994) through my supervisor, the late Daniel Nugent. In my own work, I found “everyday forms of state formation” to be more than a great title; it provided a perspective on understanding how relations of production (and crucially reproduction) were entangled with culture, community, and forms of rule. Continue reading →
This article argues that the oil price shocks of the 1970s triggered a wave of global financialization led by Western banks and the US State that disconnected actual production from social reproduction in hundreds of indebted countries after 1982. It draws on a case study of Citibank lending in Mexico, the first country (of dozens) to default on the spate of cross-border loans spurred by new petrodollar (oil/gas debt) recycling strategies. I argue that this turn to fictive production—now ubiquitous as a neoliberal strategy—as well as the accompanying social exclusion that results, calls for rethinking the concept of “mode of production” in efforts to characterize late capitalism. Continue reading →
This contribution elaborates on the relevance of the concept of mode of production in understanding contemporary North American indigenous populations. While examination of Native American peoples played a crucial role in early Marxist thought, Marxist theory has never been popular in examinations of North American Indians and has even been rejected by many indigenous intellectuals as ethnocentric, colonialist, and otherwise irrelevant to the political interests of indigenous peoples. This discussion has two parts: first, I briefly discuss the history of Marxist engagements with Native American anthropology, showing how this engagement played a crucial role in the development of anthropological and Marxist theory. In the second part, I draw from Elizabeth Rata’s (2000) concept of neotribal capitalism to discuss the relevance and advantage of mode of production–based analyses to Native North America.
Organizations such as the World Bank have repeated what has been called the “migration development mantra.” In this, remittances appear as a panacea—or “wonder drug” (Green 2015)—for economic development, while in real world interactions “social remittances” import liberal ideals such as “work ethic,” “financial literacy,” and democracy. Thus, this “mantra” reflects a neoliberal revival of 1960s modernization narratives (Glick Schiller and Faist 2010; Wise and Covarrubias 2009) with which it promotes temporary worker programs in particular, as they facilitate the return of the migrant and remittances and thus (it is assumed) greater economic development in the area of origin. Continue reading →
The mode of production (MoP) was an important term in the Marxist anthropology of the 1970s. Its origins can be traced to the diverse uses of the words by Marx himself, to elaborations on this by Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar (for an excellent overview, see Resch 1992), and to contributions from various French Africanist scholars. It was part of a wider conceptual vocabulary—about “articulation,” “social reproduction,” and “social formations”—that underpinned a number of innovative works in history and anthropology (Anderson 1974; Rey 1971; Wolf 1982). Continue reading →
Capital’s resilience as technologies and cultures change lies in the systematic priority placed on value development and extraction. However, this does not imply that actors in these systems clearly understand their roles in the process. As industries change, equal amounts of optimism comingle with confusion as practitioners experiment with new roles and practices that they had not anticipated. In this article, I explore such changes and adaptations in the music industry following the advent of digital technology and the Internet. Specifically, I look at how musicians have had to rethink where their value lies for listeners and how some have come to believe that it rests in developing and exploring online social communities. Continue reading →
Karnatic music, or South Indian classical music, is understood as “religious” music, deemed to be “divinely inspired,” and performers are seen as embodying the divine. Because of its association with “religion,” Karnatic music is generally considered a shared traditional knowledge that has historically been bequeathed from one generation to another through oral teaching. However, at the same time, Karnatic music also has a complex history with capitalism, having been constructed by bourgeois-nationalist elites in the early twentieth century from traditions that formed an inseparable part of the operation of temples and courts. This history has recently become further complicated. Some contemporary Karnatic musicians, while adhering to the beliefs of the “religious” and “divine” nature of the tradition and indeed the creativity of musicians therein, now raise concerns about protecting individual creativity and performances—specifically against unauthorized recordings of performances in concert halls and the availability of such recordings on the Internet (Paitandy 2011).
There was a strong relationship between music and political-economic power in the precolonial Congo basin. This was because music was an integral part of a ritual nexus that dominated social life. Those who controlled the ritual nexus became rich and powerful, and controlled trade between locals and an expanding capitalism (MacGaffey 2000). Here I will show how music was important to this interface. Continue reading →
In contemplating music and capitalism, we might imagine alternative framings to “art versus commerce.” Art versus commerce understands music as perpetually compromised between musicians’ desire to produce l’art pour l’art in a context in which they must be commodity producers. In this regard, the challenge facing musicians is to register discourses of truth, authenticity, and subjectivity within the structure of commodity production (Frith and Horne 1987). Arguably, the primary theoretical reference for such analysis is presented by Adorno and Horkheimer’s ([1944] 1997) culture industry thesis, which posits a negative dialectic between orders of culture and industrial production. By focusing on the possibility of artistic production autonomy, a shift seems to take place wherein the spirit or aesthetic possibility claimed by the artist becomes emphasized and the music is analyzed with such spirit in mind. Continue reading →