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Value, price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers∗ Department of Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Connecticut. An initial version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Mexico City, November 21, 1974. A second version was presented as a colloquium to faculty and students of the Department of Anthropology at SUNY‐Stony Brook in March 1975. A third version was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Anthropological Association in Potsdam, N.Y., April 18, 1975. I wish to express my appreciation to the following persons who have offered comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper: Pedro Carrasco, Bob Stevenson, Jim Faris, Maurice Godelier, Martin Diskin, Ralph Beals, Richard Salisbury, and Ronald Meek. None of these colleagues is to be held responsible for how his comments might be reflected in the end product. View all notes
Abstract
The concepts of ‘commodity’ and of ‘simple commodity production’ in the work of Marx and his interpreters are examined as a necessary departure point for the analysis of value and price in a Mexican peasant‐artisan stoneworking industry. The labour theory of value, which posits a close relationship between market price and average embodied labour cost of commodities in a peasant‐artisan economy, is applied to the stone‐working industry and is shown to have explanatory power in both the qualitative and quantitative sense. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the labour theory is a necessary tool for discerning and approximating the fundamental role of the labour process, as well as the structure of production relations, in determining the nature and conduct of exchange activities in a peasant‐artisan commodity/market economy.
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- Published online: 05 Feb 2008
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