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Brief event

The value of getting to value in the era of `globalization'

University of California, San Diego, USA, dpedersen@.ucsd.edu

This article explores the challenge of how to make sense of ethnographic moments, which are saturated with qualities of immediacy, abruptness, and the faltering of subjective expectations. It approaches the problem through the theoretical lens of nominalism versus realism and, drawing on Marx's inquiries into value formation and Peirce's semiotic logic, develops an approach predicated on discerning a three-way recursively embedded relationship among `the potential', `the actual' and `the general'. The article argues that such a modality — a `realist semiotic of value' — illuminates a great deal more than is otherwise visible and does so in a way that has important political and ethical implications for the subjects involved.

Key Words: abstraction • realism • retroduction • semiotic • value

Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1, 57-77 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1463499607087495


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