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A Common Measure for the Commonwealth in John Ruskin's THE RITES AND RELICS OF VALUE: SACRIFICE AND COMMUNALITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND FICTION Supritha Rajan A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2007 Approved by: John McGowan Jeanne Moskal James Thompson Laurie Langbauer Beverly Taylor © 2007 Supritha Rajan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ii ABSTRACT SUPRITHA RAJAN: The Rites and Relics of Value: Sacrifice and Communality in Nineteenth-Century Political Economy, Anthropology, and Fiction (Under the direction of John McGowan) This dissertation examines the fictional and non-fictional prose of the nineteenth century, arguing that the tendency among Victorian writers such as John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling to synthesize conceptions of the sacred, sacrifice, and ritual with economic value and exchange reveals a pattern of thought hidden within capitalist theories of value and exchange as well. Political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, and Alfred Marshall theorize value in terms of sacrifice and conceive of the market as the site wherein agents consecrate the social body and its values by engaging in ritualized networks of exchange. In illuminating this pattern, Victorian writers expose the shared disciplinary genealogies of political economy and anthropology. Victorian anthropologists like E.B. Tylor, Henry Maine, James Frazer, and W. R. Smith inherit the social and religious preoccupations that had once been conjoined to theories of value and exchange, examining the gift economies and sacrificial rituals among non-British subjects that political economy embedded in its theories of value and exchange. By revealing this displacement, the dissertation extends discussions on the ethics of economics by demonstrating that notions of communality, equitable distribution, and interdependence are just as crucial to the foundations of capitalism as self-interest and competition. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe the completion and quality of this dissertation to the generosity and scrupulous attention of my director, John McGowan. I would also like to thank James Thompson, Jeanne Moskal, Beverly Taylor, and Laurie Langbauer for consistently encouraging my intellectual and professional development over the past five years. I am especially grateful to Eric Scherbenske, my best friend, who by now likely knows far more about nineteenth-century political economy than he ever desired. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………...1 II. “PERSONS THEMSELVES ARE THE WEALTH”: A COMMON MEASURE FOR THE COMMONWEALTH IN JOHN RUSKIN’S POLITICAL ECONOMY………………………..20 The Theory of Value in John Ruskin……………………………..……...22 The Search for an Invariable Standard……………………..…………….45 III. THE VISIBLE HAND: COMMUNALITY AND THE RITES OF EXCHANGE IN RUSKIN, POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND VICTORIAN ANTHROPOLOGY…………………82 Value of Actions, or Acting on Values…………………………………..85 Ruskin, Ritual, and Reciprocity………………………………………...103 Models of Communality………………………………………………..130 IV. ANIMATING HOUSEHOLD GODS: VALUE, THE SACRED, AND KINSHIP IN ELIOT, DICKENS, AND TROLLOPE……………………………………..……………….169 The Problem of Value…………………………………………………..177 The Destruction of Household Gods……………………………………194 Value, Kinship, and the Regeneration of Household Gods…………….218 Mclennan, Kinship, and Totems………………………………………..222 Household Gods, Resacralization, and Kinship………………………...234 v V. ENERGY, SACRIFICE, AND RITUAL IN KIPLING………………..262 Economic Systems and the Regulation of Sacred Forces………………268 Magic, Mechanical Rituals, and Empire’s Long Day of Work………...286 Electric Kim and the Ludic Rituals of Empire………………………….315 VI. CODA…………………………………………………………………..348 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………..355 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Since Marcel Mauss’s publication of The Gift (1925), scholars from various disciplines have debated the commonalities and divisions between archaic gift economies and modern capitalist practices. For Mauss, the gift economy that characterizes Melanesian exchange practices represents but a medium through which Melanesians establish social obligations and norms. The gift embodies not just one type of communal bond, but all structures of reciprocity, exchange, and obligation. This tendency to totalize social phenomena expresses Mauss’s moral and political interest in gift economies as an alternative to British utilitarianism’s reduction of human agency to self-interested drives. Thus, Mauss’s ideological and political interest in the gift cannot be separated from his analysis of the gift as an expression of social bonds—a moral contract in which the receiver of the gift reciprocates the act of gift-giving by rendering a return gift that is both obligatory and, paradoxically, freely given. Mauss’s analysis of exchange practices centers on the thesis that exchange in archaic economies appears “free and disinterested” but is actually “constrained and self-interested” (3). Though the return gift presents itself as voluntary, it is in fact “reciprocated obligatorily” (3). Mauss and Hubert’s earlier analysis of sacrificial ritual, in which they interpreted the logic of gift-sacrifice as the offering of something sacred to the gods so that the gods would be compelled to reciprocate, resurfaces in Mauss’s treatment of reciprocal gift- exchange. In his efforts to explicate the principle that compels the return-gift in Melanesian exchange practices, Mauss questions what it is about the object given that compels a return. Having presented the question along these lines, Mauss explains the logic of reciprocity through the Maori concept of the hau. The hau or spirit that embodies the gift ultimately characterizes the spiritual aspect of the person who gave the gift and must eventually return to the donor, a return initiated through the reciprocal gift. Unlike commodity exchange, Mauss’s interest in the gift and its hau underscores what C.A. Gregory would call its inalienability—objects still retain a magical and spiritual quality that derives from the person who once owned them even after exchange and thus the relationship between persons and things can never be entirely sundered.1 In this context, Mauss’s analysis of reciprocal gift exchange becomes a means of establishing social cohesion and alliances since the things exchanged perpetuate a set of indissoluble links (33). Subsequent theorists on gift exchange have departed from Mauss’s political and spiritual interests in the gift; instead, the paradoxical assertion that the return gift is free yet obligatory has created a schism in gift theory.2 Intent on exposing Mauss’s mystification of exchange, especially the rivalries and contests of prestige inspired by agonistic exchange practices such as the potlatch, theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida focus on the self-interested motives concealed by the disinterested and reciprocal exchange of gifts. Both theorists unveil the bad faith in gift-giving, arguing that agents derive self-satisfaction from their seemingly altruistic behavior—what Derrida terms auto-recognition (“King” 137). Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital 1Gregory claims there are two economies: the commodity exchanges of alienable possessions between independent persons and gift exchange practices where inalienable objects are given and received in a network of dependent relations. See 100-105 and 43-53. 2For a brief summary of this schism, see Osteen and Woodmansee 28-32. 2 resonates with similar grievances: collectively organized misrecognition underlies all gift exchanges and transforms interested relations into the “sincere fiction of a disinterested exchange” (Outline 171). Interested actions are retrospectively understood as generosity but actually establish our prestigious and elevated position within the social hierarchy. Both Derrida and Bourdieu, seizing on the problem of obligation in Mauss’s theorizations of the gift, conclude that so long as exchange binds us to others and obliges us to give, it is not really giving. This impossibility of the purely disinterested gift becomes for Derrida the impossible itself (“King” 124). By contrast, Mary Douglas and others have argued that the notion of the free gift contradicts the purpose of exchange in Mauss because it disentangles individuals from a state of indebtedness rather than reinforcing social obligations (Douglas “Free” vii-xvi).3 Gift theory inevitably arrives at a repeated impasse: either self-interested desires form the basic motive of all exchanges in both archaic and capitalist economies or, following Mauss’s statement in The Gift, gift exchange lies “outside the bounds of the so-called natural economy, that of utilitarianism” (72). These debates on the gift provide the backdrop and, to some extent, the motivations of my argument and interest in the relationship between nineteenth-century political economy and Victorian anthropology. Rather than reducing archaic economies to versions of utilitarian capitalism or opposing the two economies as irreconcilable, I am interested in demonstrating the degree to which the tensions evidenced in debates on gift theory disclose the competing categories that structure capitalism. In this context, I 3Caillé and Godbout argue that gift economies contradict the logic of capitalist equivalence and create a surplus-state
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