Yes, Turner’s work is often, even usually, a painful read at the level of rhetoric, clarity, etc. Munn’s is most impressive in the sense of a fully developed model deployed in a thick ethnographic description and analysis. And Graeber’s is the most suggestive, in part because he widens out his historical, comparative and theoretical focus. At the same time, Graeber doesn’t provide an ethnographically rich exemplification of his analytic and theoretical musings like Munn and Turner. Which is a particular trajedy for those thinking about the production and reproduction of value under ‘Buddhist regimes’ since Munn and Turner’s ethnographic work is focused on social worlds that are relatively small in scale, simple in complexity and bounded in sociality compared to the usual horizon of Buddhist studies scholars. No one has, to my knowledge, worked up an ethnographically and historically informed account of value on the scale of pre-modern polity, a modern nation-state or a civilizational imaginary / regime.

As you might have guessed, I tend to find the presumptions behind symbolic anthropology a bit too constraining given many current theoretical and analytical questions. Practice theory and other related approaches to semiotic forms and collective action I find more amenable, especially when thinking about value. It seems to me actually hard to find anthropologists now self-consciously expanding upon the tradition of symbolic anthropology as a coherent, integrated body of work.

Actually, I do think that ‘modernity’ seriously challenges Buddhism and its regimes of values (both importantly plural, in my opinion). Although the concept of modernity is too diffuse to help analytically. Rather, both a capitalist mode of production and a nation-state mode of sociality / governance create quite distinct yet robustly competitive orders of value and value production that do, in my opinion, challenge the established institutional and discursive modes of value / value production under ‘classical’ (Theravada) Buddhism, as that has been canonically understood. The former challenge tends to be highlighted much more currently, but both have been crucial to the reworking of Buddhism in the 20th century as I see it.

By the way, if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out the March 2008 issue of Anthropological Theory. The issue is devoted to value in anthropological theory. In addition to a Turner article on Marxian value theory, there are other articles by Robert Foster, Webb Keane and other anthropologists working on the anthropology of value.

No, no, we’re in total agreement here – hilariously, to me, your last comment sounds like a briefer (and in some ways, better) version of a paper I wrote a few years back, right down to the name dropping of the three thinkers on value I consider most foundational (well, after the earliest sociological ones, like Marx et al.) – Munn, Graeber, and Turner.

I find Turner’s stuff inspiring but extraordinarily difficult to get through, and his focus on media largely irrelevant to my own work, but Graeber’s big book on value remains one of the best current approaches to value thinking in anthropology.

Munn’s work is even better in her focus on the transformations of value, though I find her definition of symbol (paraphrase: a symbol is something that means something) difficult to take too seriously – that doesn’t damage the importance of her work, just betrays my own preference for a certain version of symbolic anthropology.

Value appears to me as something constantly in conflict and contest, always fluctuating. There are, however, institutions (’regimes,’ as you put it) which attempt (not always successfully) to stabilize and control these meanings. Buddhism has been a profoundly successful strategy of value stabilization, for reasons I think revolve around their emphasis on death and the particular manner in which they integrate with sovereign regimes.

“Modernity” needs to be better defined or else tossed out, but I’m disinclined (and don’t take you to be pushing this idea) to agree that the Buddhist regime of values is tossed into distress by modernity. Cheers,

While I agree transactional exchange models are not the only way to analytically and theoretically think about value in a productive fashion, I am predisposed to a general anthropological take on value. And since the mid-80s to 90s and the practice turn, that has more and more tended towards models that attempt to account for the production, reproduction and transformation of value, in either their specific or general sense – Munn, Turner, Graeber, etc.

While I agree substantively with your approach at a descriptive level – i.e. distinct domains of value within a single world (although I’m not sure I would argue that this necessarily implies a single cosmology – that perspective seems to be very much what the dominant discourse of canonical Buddhism would like us all to believe) – I worry that this risks a vision of value as naturally given epistemologically, ontologically and ethically / metaphysically within a particular socio-cultural world. And that this risks, in turn, a more anemic interpretive and analytical examination. One result being that the processual and praxis dimensions of ongoing social life are downplayed, even displaced, by reified representations of dominant ideologies of value that posit it as simply, unequivocaly there in the world, rather than a contingent product of collective social life and actions.

I think in general, Buddhist Studies has suffered from presuming a whole range of values and regimes of value as ‘given’ in mature Buddhist social worlds, and also from presuming these as being more or less coextensive with the canonical, orthodox, textual visions of the Buddhist imaginary. It has neither sought to explain how that regime of value – or better, hierarchical articulation of regimes of value – is a product of collective social action in general, or how the canonical, orthodox, textual Buddhist imaginary achieves – in actual social praxis and history – its dominance as a stable regime of socio-cultural value. Scholars of Buddhist Studies seem to simply presume that this is a natural result of survival of the ideological fittest. That the Buddhist imaginary – displaying greater complexity, comprehensiveness, and ideological subtlety – naturally wins out over other regimes of value. Until “modernization” arrives on the scene, when it is suddenly for some reason thrown into distress.

But again, all these thoughts betray my disciplinary biases and presumptions.

Cheers.

Your notes on Schopen et al. are quite on the mark – most of chapter one of my dissertation is precisely on such issues, though I am compelled to concentrate on Southeast Asian examples. I do feel that the claim to special power over the dead – not merely what I think of as the ‘pastoral care’ of the dead, but also and especially the power to suppress the malign dead – has been the dominant way in which Buddhism has spread through its history, at least thus far.

As for the social uses of the proverb: it is rare, and I never did study it systematically. It was brought up to me on a number of different occasions, and since I did more research with Buddhist laypeople (especially donchee / maechi, and funerary workers) than with monks, the setting was always ripe for a certain amount of ‘transgressive humor.’ When others brought it up to me it was always, uniformly, when there was no ‘Buddhist official’ (monk, aacaarya, &c.) present, and always with a giggle that marked both nervousness and humor. That is to say, while it indicated some rather deep meaning, it was also very much a joke.

When I brought it up on the other hand, to check my understanding, or to see how widespread recognition of the proverb was, the giggle was also present, but the responses varied depending on audience. When there were no Buddhist officials around, there was more relaxed laughter, and occasionally “O! He knows that one!” and ice was progressively broken. When around a Buddhist official, the official would either ignore it and the conversation would move to other topics, or he would give traditional exegesis as discussed earlier.

Cheers,

The parallelism of the first two lines is so strong to me, and the logic in such contrast to the normative ideals with regards to the third line, that I’m not surprised folks giggle, seem unconformtable and unwilling or unable to explain the final line. Nor am I surprised that monks who do offer an interpretation of the third offer conventional exegesis that simply avoids the logical, moral and cognitive tensions produced by the parallelisms. I would expect them to do exactly what you have indicated.

From a historical perspective, it isn’t surprising that the grave is a treasure of the Buddha. As Schopen has argued persuasively, the Buddhist occupation of graveyards and sites of the dead was one of their pre-eminent claims to religious and social power in ancient India (and the logic extends almost universally, as well). Not that i would expect most Buddhist monks to put it in those terms. And from what you say, they don’t.

But isn’t it very odd that you can never get them to talk about the final line. I mean, except for the reference to ‘grave’, there is obviously nothing controversial about calling nirvana a treasure of the Buddha (and his awakening, his teachings, etc). And there is nothing controversial about death and graveyards in Buddhism; they fully thrive on that imaginary. It is the association of nirvana with grave that is clearly transgressive here and produces silence, inexpressibility. So why the silence? And why the conjunction of the two in the proverb – what provoked it; how is it mythically productive?

Some broader anthropological questions no doubt are this: under what conditions and in what contexts do Cambodians use this proverb, either orally or textually? What types of Cambodians are prone to employing this proverb? What are the reactions of those who hear others using it? The actual social uses of this trope would seem to be key to actually determining somethng of its social, cultural and religious meaning.

Absolutely. I neglected to put those details up in any real form, except to note that the proverb elicits a nervous giggle. There are exceptions: usually among assertive, older aacaarya (អាចារ្យ, Thai: ajhaan) – by definition men, will occasionally hear the proverb from my lips and respond forcefully “That’s right!” and then begin a slight exegesis. However – and here’s the thing that’s interesting for me: they have universally focused on the first two lines, and I can never get them to talk in detail about what it means to ‘value the grave.’

I think the structural parallel you point out is somewhat overstated, if I may. In the second line (the gods), it is very clear that these are offerings the faithful give to the gods. But the first line (men), the treasures stated are things men want, or take, or possess – not things that are given, for the most part. And it is very difficult to understand how one might give a grave, or nirvana, to the Buddha. The Buddha has no need of the latter, already having entered his parinirvana. And if we are the metaphorize both objects as ‘death,’ we end up with a very strange, seemingly christian-oriented focus on the ‘gift of death,’ which I don’t think is what’s going on here.

I’m grateful for these thoughts!