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Anthropology · Chapter 5

What Is This Worth?

Nothing is worth anything by itself. A thing becomes valuable only inside a register of value — a set of shared rules about what may be exchanged, with whom, and for what. Change the register and the same object changes its worth, sometimes by a factor of a thousand, sometimes from priceless to worthless. Pick an object below, then move it through five registers and watch what happens to it.

Pick an object

Value set by—
Alienable?—
Its past—
Five objects, five registers. The object never changes. Everything else does.

When the walls come down

“The same object, moved into another sphere, is not the same object.”
Working among the Tiv of central Nigeria in the 1950s, Paul Bohannan found goods sorted into three sealed spheres of exchange: ordinary subsistence goods (yams, chickens, tools); prestige goods (brass rods, white cloth, cattle, ritual office); and rights in people, exercised through marriage. Trading inside a sphere was unremarkable. Converting upward was a coup a man boasted about for years. Converting downward was a disgrace.
Then colonial money arrived — a general-purpose currency that could buy across all three spheres at once, and the walls between them fell. Money is never neutral: it carries an argument, and the argument is that everything is comparable.
Value is assigned, not foundchoose an object to begin
The object
The register it is moving in
Before you startAsk of every object in this chapter: who decides what it is worth, and what would have to change for that answer to change? Almost every disagreement about value turns out to be a disagreement about which register applies.

Read the transaction

Scene 1 of 6
Which register is this exchange running in? Tap your answer.
Read correctly0 / 6