Introduction

Anthropology and economics have very different approaches to the question of value. While economists look for methods of evaluation in transactions on the basis of what is being exchanged, anthropologists have always given attention to the way agents think about value in the whole range of transactions they are involved in, but at another level they look for the value of underlying structures for society. Exchanges are basic to society but anthropology has shown that there are other mechanisms also at work – descent, affinity, memorialization, among others – in organizing collective life. Psychoanalytic, structuralist, semiological, and anthropological interpretive theories have shown how elusive and mysterious questions of value are in different societies. The notion of value in terms of underlying structures of societies is far from the simplistic rendering of this notion as narrow moral rules in current political discussions. It is also much broader than the notion of value as equivalence in economizing exchanges.

It is quite significant that in the contemporary world in which markets have become the dominant organizing principle in liberalized economies, there has been simultaneously the emergence of a multiplicity of cultural movements. In many cases, such movements become visible through resignified rituals or the invention of new ones. What is the value of such rituals for people? Why are Mexican migrants now revitalizing the ritual of the Day of the Dead, which they celebrated back in their villages in Mexico, in their neighborhoods in Chicago; why have highly mobile Caribbean migrants created a new musical culture, Rastafarianism, steeped in Ethiopian history and culture?