[Anthropgrad] Reminder: Seminar by Prof. Robert Foster: 'Two or three things that I know about use value'. Friday July 31st, 3pm.

[John White]

Anthropology Friday Seminar Series. Semester 2, 2009. Milgate Room, AD
Hope. Friday, 31st July, 3pm.

 

This Friday will host a seminar by Professor Robert Foster (University
of Rochester). While Robert will be giving a full-length seminar in the
Wednesday series the following week, he has been kind enough to offer to
present an additional paper in our Friday series.

 

Two or three things that I know about use value:

 

What is the place of use value in the anthropology of exchange and, more
specifically, in a contemporary Marxian labor theory of value?  I
address this question by reviewing a few things that I have known as a
fieldworker in Papua New Guinea: clamshell discs; state-issued currency;
and a bottle of Coca-Cola.  Starting from Marcel Mauss's insight into
how persons and things qualify each other through the media of gifts, I
move toward the idea of an "economy of qualities" recently proposed by
Michel Callon and his colleagues.  I argue that in such an economy, the
use value of things that people realize as consumers becomes a source
and site of surplus value extraction.  That is, the premise of Marx's
political economy that only producers (or labor power in use) creates
surplus value invites reconsideration.  My argument converges with
recent critical work by several business school academics that suggests
a new role for consumers in value creation; it diverges from this work,
however,  in emphasizing the fundamentally exploitative aspects of this
new role while at the same time highlighting the possibilities for
political action that inhere in "putting consumers to work."          

 

***

Professor Robert Foster is a Distinguished Visitor to Gender Relations
Centre and Department of Anthropology, RSPAS, under the
Vice-Chancellor's Travel Award SchemeJune 14 to August 7, 2009

 

Robert Foster received his M.A. from Columbia University, his Diploma in
Social
Anthropology from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. from the University
of
Chicago. Before coming to the University of Rochester, he taught in The
College
of the University of Chicago. Prof. Foster is also a core faculty member
in the
Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of
Rochester,
New York state. Prof. Foster has done field research in Papua New Guinea
since
1984. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in
1991-92
and 1995. His current research interests include nationalism,
globalisation,
mass media, material culture and mass consumption. His most recent book
is
titled Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New
Guinea
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).