Production Anthropology Essay

If you’d like to write about production, I want you to consider the role

of production in shaping social organization and daily life. That is,

how the way we materially produce our means of subsistence creates

particular forms of social cohesion. If you choose this one you must

address the specific questions below.

In Video 3 of the Law of Value: Production and Exchange Value at

approximately 3:18, our narrator says “labor is how we create

ourselves.” What does this mean? Think about this question in relation

to our textbook chapter. What does this statement mean for our

capitalist society and what does it mean for the non-capitalist

societies mentioned in the textbook (societies that potlatch, etc.)?

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In Video 1, at about 4:29, our narrator speaks of “the particular

masquerading as the universal” and the “universal type of individual.”

What can the discipline of anthropology as you now understand it

contribute to a critique of this sort of thinking? Why is it

problematic in the first place?

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And lastly but certainly not least—in Video 3, we are told that “there

is a central ideological issue at stake in this distinction between the

general and the particular.” What is this ideological issue? Whatever

else you may write about you must answer this question to get full

credit this week.

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