Values and Valuables: from the Sacred to the Symbolic

Duran Bell and Cynthia Werner From the earliest days of the field, economic anthropologists have observed that material objects often are imbued with sacred qualities whose values can never be reduced to material necessity or monetary equivalent. In 2002, the Society for Economic Anthropology hosted a conference to reconsider these ideas in the world today. We invited Professor Maurice Godelier of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, known for his path breaking work in anthropological theory and his ethnographic work among the Baruya of New Guinea, to give the keynote address (Chapter 1). Eighteen anthropologists from five different countries also presented the results of new research on the questions of value, the sacred, exchange, and money. Together, this collection presents of wide-ranging overview of the state of this field of study today. Godilier’s latest book, The Enigma of the Gift, was a source of inspiration for a number of participants, especially his concern with things not given, but kept – a phenomenon that Godelier has provocatively associated with the sacred. A number of conference participants interrogated the sacred it is appears in various cultures and examined the general category of symbolic things that are kept, not given. As we shall define it herein, the sacred resides within the imagination and hence is not available for transactions of any kind; but material things that are symbolic of the sacred are also removed from the domain of exchange. Indeed, the powers of the sacred are often inspired by those things that symbolize them, potentially blurring the boundary between the symbolic and the sacred. But the symbolic, as a general category, most often refers to non-sacred things; and we find that these things are also commonly considered to be outside of the domain of exchange.