I was looking at this image of the old wall around the Sultan’s citadel in Zinder. This was a big wall that went right round the old “birni” at least where it didnt rely on a natural granite outcropping for protection. This wall, which sadly has almost melted back into the land more than 115 years after the conquest of Zinder by the French in 1899, was built entirely by hand. And it was certainly not entirely through slave labor. But of course, if slave labor was involved this was not the chattel slavery of the Americas but the Islamic variety with rights, responsibilities and gradations..
And I was thinking about the problem of value. Use value, exchange value, symbolic value, sign value, Marx, Mauss, Malinowski, Gell, Strathern, Weiner, Graeber, Baudrillard and so on. I was also thinking about Jane Guyer’s book on among many other things nominal value, Marginal Gains, Monetary Transaction in Atlantic Africa. And of course, I was thinking about “Against the Implicit Politics of Service-Dominant Logic,” from Marketing Theory by Hietanen and Bradshaw.
All this made me think about the distinction made in Hausa between arzikin kud’i and arzikin mutane. As best as I can understand the former, money wealth, was not embedded in the MCM logic but more in the CMC logic even if there were and are renowned merchants who amassed significant fortunes in both M and C. But the second, is of interest; because it is both twinned with and separated from the former. Arzikin mutane means wealth in persons in severality. But what it really means is the ability to mobilize a constituency, a web of variously obliged persons. The forms of this obligation were quite many in pre-colonial Hausaland. And these obligations were in fact animated by flows of both M and C.
So when I was writing about value a couple of years ago for Marketing Theory, I wrote, “value is neither in a thing nor in perceptions of a thing. Instead we can think of value to consumers – as distinct from other kinds of human subjects–as consisting in meaningful differences following Baudrillard, and more broadly as meaningful distinctions that refine identities and ‘count’ as significant achievements following Bourdieu. This value emerges from what people do; that is to say, the social pursuit of those meaningful distinctions typically through the exchange of resources between actors” (2014), Rudiments of a value praxeology, Marketing Theory, 13 (4, November), 129–133.DOI: 10.1177/1470593113500384.
I had in mind the contemporary context, and I could be taken to ask for neglecting the capitalist CMC context in which these kinds of value producing practices are embedded per the Hietanen and Bradshaw paper. But I wonder whether in the new digital environments is there not something else: According to some of the prophets like Henry Jenkins and Rob Kozinets there is enormous scope for value creation as we have later demonstrated, e:g:;
2009, How Brand Communities Create Value, Journal of Marketing, 73 (September), 30-51, with Hope Jensen Schau and Albert Muniz, Jr.
2015 Practice Consumption and Value Creation: Advancing the Practice Theoretical Ontology of Consumption Community, Psychology and Marketing, 32(3, March): 319–340, Benjamin Hartmann, Caroline Wiertz and Eric Arnould, DOI: 10.1002/mar.20782.
Can we see in platforms, hubs, gameified environments, social media feeds, the nugget of post-capitalist modes of value creation. After all, capitalism arose out of precapitalist economic formations. Cant post capitalist economic formations arise out iof capitalism?
mktganthropology 