T Veblen’s Anthropology

I love this piece, which enjoys just enough verisimilitude to what contemporary anthropologists actually believe about semi-nomadic and nomadic communities that, in addition social subjective validity of T Veblen’s categories, it also seems to enjoy scientific validity as well. I can find little fault with Veblen’s characterization of the earliest hominid communities—peaceable, collective, non-acquisitive, non-competitive—for all of the reasons that M Sahlins and N Bird-David have identified in their research.

I might even entertain T Veblen’s admittedly fanciful reconstruction of original acquisition and his grounding of this acquisition in the drive to engage in exploits in order to be able to make invidious comparisons with others in one’s own favor.

Behind and underneath Veblen’s account, however, is a secreted Hegelian spirit that lends his account its directional dynamic. For the stages that he adduces appear to unfold naturally and inevitably on their own as if drawn or propelled forward by a secret telos—their end or goal. This implicit teleology, from which Veblen adduces the anticipated taxonomy of primitive/advanced, early/recent/late, etc., makes the earlier, primitive way of life appear less fully human and less rationally advanced than the later stages in which invidious acquisition have been fully elaborated.

Once stripped of this implicit teleology, T Veblen’s account invites the following question: is it our ingrained aptitude for invidious acquisition that gives rise to the contemporary pecuniary practices or is it rather contemporary pecuniary practices that lead us to believe that all humans (as soon as they become truly human) discover the aptitude for invidious acquisition in their breasts? Identifying this causal—as opposed to imposed teleological—relationship would help us to better understand the socio-historical foundations of contemporary social subjectivity and social practice.

The larger question might be: why does T Veblen feel that inferring this teleology is preferable to securely establishing a socio-historical causal basis?

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