Where is the mystery?

  In this book, the main argument that de Soto made is he found a mystery of why capitalism only can bloom in the West. When capitalism penetrated to every corner of the world, scholars found that capitalism withered in most of place and want to find the answer and cure this problem. Hernando de Soto is one of them. Unlike other scholars, he argues that the main reason that capitalism cannot bloom outside the West is not because people in other places are lazy, or because they are not protestant so they don’t have those kinds of ascetic attitude to face their businesses. It also is not because all non-westerners are lazy or there are some blindness rooted in their cultural tradition that blocks them to be successful in modern capitalized market. He argues that the main question for these countries—including developing countries and former communistic countries—is laid on their legal system of property. According to he and his colleagues’ research around the world, they find that these countries actually have a lot of property which controlled by their poor people. Therefore, if these countries want to improve their economic condition and develop their countries. All they need to do is turning their legal system to be friendly to and more embodied in people’s daily need and their habit.

  Generally speaking, I agree the main argument that the author made in this book, the formal property system is one of the most important things in market-based society in modern sense[1]. Without formalizing property, it would be difficult to count what people have, and that would be hard for people to exchange goods or property by monetary. de Soto clearly points out that the most important feature of capitalism is that everything has its own price, and this price is decided after comparing with other goods. In other words, he follows Marx’s doctrine that use value is not meaningful in market. It is exchange value that promises the blooming of capitalism. Also, exchange value is the reason for de Soto that why developing or former communistic countries need to establish a formal property system which is friendly and easy to included most of property in people’s hand as soon as they can.  

However, there are several problems I want to discuss in this article. First of all, I think there is a problem which de Soto overlook in his premise. When he argues that it is not cultural differences that cause countries outside the West cannot develop capitalism well, I can see that he really want to against ethnic stereotype or some kind of racism arguments. He urgently wants to clarify that the failure in those third world countries is not based on a unique sort, on the contrary, it is because some universal things that they didn’t do very well. In other words, he tries to prove that the differences between third world countries and the West is not a fundamental difference, but a degree one. Just give third world countries some time and they can get better and better.

 The author has a correct observation in this point without doubt. However, this cannot be an evident to support that the failure of capitalism in countries outside the West is not because their culture. Especially when he uses the evident that all merchants or vendors in the third world countries or former communistic countries work as hard as those in the West. He actually excludes any possible cultural differences between those merchants or vendors. Different cultural norm can direct its carries to the same termination. The same result cannot be an evident to support the same cause. In other words, diligent vendors that split around the world cannot be an evident that the capitalism fail in the third world countries or former communistic countries. In other words, an alternative argument can be made and it is still workable when discussing about the failure of capitalism outside of the West, that is all countries has its own cultural reason to block them succeed in develop the capitalism in their own nations.

In other words, I argue that the author is over reducing phenomena around the world. He over simplify the reason why capitalism cannot penetrated and rooted in the third world and former communistic countries. This will undermine his effort to certify the importance of formal property system in any country that in his list. For example, the capitalism couldn’t develop very well in China during the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. However, this didn’t mean that there was no formal property system existed in China. On the contrary, the measurement technics and the recorded method had been developed thousands of years in China. Each dynasty regularly measures and records the land, property in every household. Although we can argue that even under such kind of survey, there must exists extralegal area in China which would be definitely truth, but the extralegal area might not be a big issue for Chinese economic when Chinese encounters capitalism in the beginning.

 In contrast, the reason that block Chinese to develop capitalism probably is laid on their cultural domain. It is their ethnicity ethos that always emphasizes on studying and becomes a successful officer can achieve higher social status than farmer. And a farmer should earn higher status than a merchant. In other words, it is this ranking system of occupation that might block or at least, discourages people to involve in commercial pursuits. de Soto doesn’t discuss this possibility in some countries which have their long term history. Even more, he ignores those countries’ history. Here, we can borrow the same argument which Eric Wolf made in his book to criticize the Western point of view: all people who live outside the West are people without history.

  Again, this cannot be good for an analysis because when treating people who have their own history as none. It is an over simplify mistake that the author made. This situation will also undermine the author’s argument. If the extralegal economic activity is a pan-global phenomenon, then it might have different appearance and cause in different area. That will prevent the author to dig deeper into the ground of real life.

The last thing I would like to argue here is that the author misuses the concept of capital in Marx’s sense. For Marx, capital is totally an abstractive concept. Human creates capital by exploiting nature and producing different types of commodities to satisfy daily need. He argues that all commodities have two different values, one is use value and another is exchange value. The use value is the value that related to a product’s raw material and its physical characteristics, but the use value is not the thing that Marx really concerns, it is the exchange value that is the thing Marx focusing on. In his discussion, the exchange value doesn’t have a physical based because the exchange value is created during the labor process. It is human labor including the labor time and labor quality that creates the exchange value. Since the exchange value is the thing that measures the value of a commodity in market. It is also the source of the capital. To be short, in Marx sense, the accumulation of capital is not necessary related to the physical property because all the exchange value is not created from raw material or natural resource but from human effort.

In this notion, we can see that the author does not share the same capital concept with Marx. For de Soto, he uses the concept of property to replace the concept of capital. As he says:

Property is not the house itself but an economic concept about the house, embodied in a legal representation. This means that a formal property representation is something separate from the asset it represents.  

                                           (de Soto; 2000; P.50)

Property for him is an equal concept as capital for Marx. However, he still uses the capital at the same time and believes that formalize the property representation can help to create capital. In this regard, what he considers about the capital is nothing more than a representative system. Capital only occurs and can be accumulated after everything represented correctly by official record, it is nothing correlated with human labor. It is hard to persuade me that capital is a concept can be only located at the symbolic domain without considering any human labor.

  I’m not arguing that formal legal system is not important when a country which wants to capitalize its economic, but over-emphasizing the symbolic aspect of capital might encourage the author to overlook several crucial factors that cause poverty. For example, it encourages the author that after a country establishes a formal property system which is friendly to most of its people, and then the poverty problem can be diminished automatically. This is not a case that happens in real world.

   To sum up, I generally agree with the author that formal legal system for recoding every detail of property is an important factor in those countries which struggling to record the property on their land. I also agree that there is more mental effort need to be done than the physical one. However, considering that the author ignores some historical factors, cultural differences and over reduction of phenomena. I cannot agree with him that the formal legal system is the main issue that we should concern. And also, the mystery of capital is not only hidden behind history of the West, but is in the fracture of world history.  

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[1] It is worth to mention that, here, I use the market-based in modern sense is comparing to Karl Polanyi’s argument—market appears in human society earlier than capitalism for a long time, therefore, we should separate these two concepts instead to see that market based society is a by-product of capitalism.

Modernity at Large 消失的現代性：讀後心得

這是一本好書、好拗口的書、好難懂得書，這些綜合起來的特質也或者就是構成這本書在近代人類學發展中成為一個重要礎石的原因。Appadurai在這本書中，一方面依舊站在區域研究傳統所能帶有的特質，去對傳統人類學研究單位進行檢視和批判檢討。另一方面則是架構在 B. Anderson的想像共同體的理論上，對於當代的群體發展的狀況作一宏觀的描述。這樣的努力以及書中的內容都提供了讀者不少的想頭，不過也同時因為文字太過於不親和的關係而阻止了人們的理解。

  不過依舊不得不說，這是一本好書，雖然個人以為自己對於印度這個區域缺乏水準以上的理解（全部的理解除了幾部電影以外幾乎只有階序人一書），同時也對於全球化理論近期的發展相對陌生，因此裡面很多論述的方式對於我來說不只是陌生的，甚至可以說是讀來不舒服的，總覺得許多的地方讀來感覺有邏輯斷裂的嫌疑，但往往在這種地方卻是 Appadurai重要的推論之處，例如在論斷愛國主義及其未來的章節時，作者認為愛國主義的終章將在不久的將來之後上演，並以各種更為零碎的認同形式取而代之。對於這樣的論斷我感到懷疑，因為人們可以在零碎的議題上各自有認同的立場，而這並未代表可以藉此崩解人們的愛國情操。

  另外，作者在書中強調想像在未來社會中，不只像 Anderson說得一般重要，伴隨著更強大的想像武器，想像只會更重要，並且，那不在只是一種幻象而會成為一種社會事實而存在。這樣的推論算是合理，畢竟我們處在一個資訊流動遠遠是三十年前不可想像的世界中，而這樣的資訊流動速度對於群體想像所帶來的衝擊是可想而知並且也該被正視和認真處理的， Appadurai在這裡揭示了這個重要性。

  但，我覺得書中最重要的部份，反而座落在他以一個區域研究專家的身份對於人類學研究單位所做的檢討。的確如他所說得，人群、地域和文化這三者之間的關聯性在現在全球化、離散社群的出現之後，原本緊密的聯繫性開始逐漸的被鬆脫（但值得注意的，也許這種緊密的聯繫性打從一開始就根本只是人類學家的夢囈而已)，一切當初本質化的文化論述形式都不在適用於現世，人類學面對的困境可不止是土著消失這樣簡單的問題，而是在整各方法論上都面臨了革新的需求。

  Appadurai在提出了這樣的檢討的同時，講述了他認為可行的解決方式，一方面是把地方脈絡化的過程和生產/再生產脈絡的經驗以民族誌書寫的方式再現出來，另一方面則是將這樣的脈絡嫁接在全球化的潮流中。對於這樣的解決方式，光是用想的就覺得在操作上將會面臨許多的困境。首先，一個全球化的環境除了在書本上勾勒出來的形象是一個總體的，帶有某種特定傾向的模型之外，如果放到日常的地方實踐中，可以想見的將總是以破碎零散的形式出現在日常生活當中，不僅不容易被研究者察覺，即便察覺了要從中勾勒出一個總體的形式，並且將地方脈絡化的過程扣合進去，光用想的就覺得會有無數的問題。

  再者，人類學現在面臨的困境是在方法論的工具箱中，甚至可以說在知識論的立場上，沒有提供任何的方式去討論一個大範圍社會流動，或者退而求其次--大範圍社會結構的工具。在欠缺這樣的知識工具的情況下，我並不認為我們可以順著 Appadurai的說法去延續人類學的命脈。相對的，也許續命之路在於，重新徹底的思考的人類學的方法論，以及在知識論的立場上，有沒有可以脫出小社群研究但卻依舊仍帶有在小社群研究中建立起的優勢（比如Geertz說得更稠密等等）的研究方式，來面對當代這三位不一體的研究單位和研究環境。

Life and death in Mt. Everest

這本書是Ortner近期的民族誌，大部分的材料是整理她從19 60年代開始在尼泊爾的Sherpa人所居住的Solu-Kho mbu地區所做的田野調查而獲得的。

不過，相較於她前幾本主要著重在Sherpa人的宗教和日常生活 的民族誌來說，這本比較重視於討論在喜馬拉雅地區從1920年代 開始逐漸活躍的登山運動對於當地的影響。但是，光講這一個外來運 動對於當地的影響是不足的，同時在她書成的那個年代裡頭，Ori entalism正盛行著，因此為了避免落入一種東方主義式的再 現觀點，Ortner在這本書中側重的是Sherpa人怎麼瞭解 和認識西方人的登山遠征活動。換言之，Ortner在這書中想要 做到的，就是 from Sherpa point of view, to evaluate or represent the mountaineering of Himalayan.

雖然，我們可以在書中看到Ortner很重視也很強調這樣的努力 ，但是必須遺憾的說，或者是因為Ortner本身並不攀山，對於 整個攀山的理解必須從書中、從訪談中去建立，因此對於登山活動的 描述其實相較於在書中她對於宗教方面的描述即顯得膚淺，沒有辦法 給人以一種深入的感覺。隨舉一例：Ortner說，Sherpa 參與遠征、當挑夫，主要的動機就是因為這職業雖然有危險性，但是 獲得的經濟上的報酬卻是非常理想的，所以有很多人願意冒險嘗試。 同時，這也是Sherpa很重要的經濟來源。

試想，如果是一個很重要的經濟來源，那麼Sherpa對於他們的 職業，應該會有更多更豐富的論述才是，但是Ortner在這書中 ，卻只能很單純的宣稱，Sherpa跟西方人所想像的不同，他們 並不是因為愛山所以爬山，而是因為愛錢所以爬山，錢是最重要，也 幾乎是唯一的登山動機。

但是，真的只有這樣嗎？我倒不是說他們一定愛山，而是說，在經濟 動機的背後，應該會有更完整的，更全面的對於山對於這個行業的想 法才是，只是在Ortner的書中卻付之闕如。

當然，或者可以理解為何Ortner如此描繪Sherpa，這可 能跟她本身多少有些仇視攀山運動有些關係，因此想要把這運動描繪 成一個少數西方中產階級為了反現代性，反布爾喬亞主流價值而創造 出來的運動、娛樂，Sherpa並不分享這樣的價值，而對他們來 說，登山只有經濟價值云云。

我想，我當然可以接受不同人攀山有不同的原因與動機，不過，即使 只是一種單純的經濟動機，我依舊還是認為也許可以有更完整的Di scourse才是，"They climb only for money" is too superfluous, that can hard to persuade people.

不過不管怎麼說，Ortner在這本書中用一種真的可以稱為局外 人的角度來描述了登山這行為，以及這種運動和西方社會、思想發展 的關係，並且，因為她流暢的書寫，也讓這本民族誌具有相當棒的可 閱讀性，讀起來相當的引人入勝，所以，我依舊很推薦！

Can the Subaltern Speak?

In her famous essay "Can the Subaltern speak?", Spivak indicates that the representaion of the third-world in Western discourse has several latent principles. And in more radical tone, Spivak announces that some Western intellectual production complicit with Western international economic interests. Therefore, she wants to provide an alternative representative way that different from Western discourse, and try to speak for the subaltern woman. That is her main topic.

Before she open up her main topic. Spivak spends many page to explain that why she choice Marx and Derrida's theory but not Deleuze and Foucault. I am not familiar to French philosophy, so in fact, I can not catch lucidly of her argument. All I know is that she choice Derrida's theory as a base for her own. And also, she doesn't agree to Foucault and Deleuze that these two philosophers claimed that "the oppressed, if given the chance, can speak and know their conditions." In other words, Spivak believes that the oppressed can never has a chance to comprehense the condition they are, because there are something impede them to have chance, which Spivak calls "epistemic violence."

The epistemic violence is a concept that hard to catch if one who are familiar to Foucault and Deleuze. But I think the word means something that can causes a violation results to somepeople, or creates inequity in intellectual level. Therefore, even thought that many disciplines turn their eyes to the third- world, especially those subaltern classes and poverty. Spivak claims that though it is a good phenmomenon, but the latent episteme viloence will cause such disciplines' research cause subaltern woman as mute as ever.

Since, I am weak in current Western philosophy and also poor in my English writing, so let's go straight to her case study-- the self- immolation of widow in someplace India. In this case, Spivak is not "introduce" or "explain" a extoic custom to Western society, but uses this as a case to present that subalter-- the widow women. No matter in the modernity discourse, or the post- colonial discourse can not have their own voice. On the modernity side, the prohibition of the immolation had been represented as "white men save brown women from brwon women", in another side, the post-colonial discourse represents such custom as "The women wanted to die."

Spivak indicates that both rehetoric do not provide any space for those widow. We can not find out their real thought from the document or the discourse. Those widow, deprived of their voice by scholar, become subject of discourse. And can be distorted by these opposing sides.

Spivak beleives that those "untold" are those most important things. And in my viewpoint, Spivak want to find out a kind of voice that is pristine, pure and undistorted by any discourse. The vocie must be straight from subaltern women. In other words, that is a representative problem for her. how to nuturalize intellectual represent of subaltern is her main point, but I just wonder that what is different between what she disdain and whate she do? If we all agree that purily objectivity is a chimera when we need to do any representation?

貧窮文化

「傳統上，人類學家都去到世界偏遠的角落，去探討對我們文明很少有影響的原始、前文字民族作為她們底研究者和代言人。於是，這就造成了一種充滿譏諷意味的現象：拜人類學家努力之賜，我們對於新幾內亞一些孤立文化（總計只有五百人）的瞭解程度遠遠超過對於印度、墨西哥等其他低度開發國家裡成百萬鄉村居民生活方式的瞭解；而印度、墨西哥這些低度開發國家，卻命定要在國際舞台上扮演那麼重要的角色。」
By Oscar Lewis




這本書是Lewis於1959年成書，書中述說著五個不同的墨西哥家庭各自的一日，這五個家庭分別有著不同的成員，座落在不同的村落、雜院或者高級住宅區裡頭，而他們共同的特徵即在於，即使是座落在高級住宅區裡頭的那戶，主人本身也是一位曾經落魄過的窮人，因此，即使成為了暴發戶的那當下，仍然保有許多窮人的習氣。貧窮，是這幾個家庭曾經、現在、未來所擁有的共同經驗，並且在一方面也反應了當時的墨西哥城左近，勞動/低階層的生活狀態。

據說，在這本書成書之後，因為某幾位學者的誤讀和誤用，造成了美國在六零年代時發起了一個名之為「貧窮戰爭」的政府政策，政府宣示由不同的方式著手去解消一個處於美國當中卻不該屬於美國文化特色的「貧窮文化」，這個政策的詳細內容我不是非常清楚，不過如果單從書中所稱呼的狀態來看的話，那大約就是一個希望將所謂的「美國夢」這樣的概念深植於每一個不同的社會階層當中，每個階層的人們都必須接受和憧憬與中產階級的主流價值，而不該有一種低於中產階級獨立存在的貧窮文化的存在。

在這個政策被設立的同時，Lewis也因為成書這本，而遭到了學界以及政界中諸多的責難，據說，是一位一輩子懷才不遇的學者。直到今日，在社會學或者人類學界對於貧窮的討論當中，卻似乎也尚未有給予Lewis正面、中肯的評價。不過，攻訐Lewis的語言倒是相當不少，許多的學者認為Lewis提供了一套讓窮者遁逃於自身養活自身責任以外的語彙，視貧窮這個狀態本身並沒有也不該被價值判斷云云。換言之，是以一種現代性的，中產階級式的觀點去評價Lewis這本書對於整個貧窮狀態將會造成的影響。

不過，據Lewis本人所言，他希望做到的則是藉由這樣的描寫，來展現出外在環境對於貧窮者的選擇/沒有選擇所造成的影響，以及在種種的逆境當中，這些窮者怎麼用堅強的毅力與韌性來維持生存下來的可能，因此，與其說他是一個維護窮者的學者，更好的定位或者是一個對於主流價值漠視著貧窮問題的批判者。

接著，進入這本書以及我對於這本書內文的想法好了！一開始，在我閱讀這本書的時候，我會覺得有一種不習慣的感覺，我猜想這種感覺來自於作者鋪陳資料的方式，過於接近小說的方式而不是一本在那個時代的人類學著作、民族誌所給予人們的印象。整本書裡頭充斥的都是對於每一個家庭生活細節的刻畫與描寫，作者做的事情頂多只有交代一下每個家庭的概況、生活的環境，而任何來自作者觀點的評論與論述是付之闕如的。

作者，從自身的著作中消失，這是很少在人類學著作中出現的。不過這裡所謂的「消失」跟早期人類學者那種上帝式的隱身是很不相同的。在早期的民族誌著作中，人類學者選擇讓自己隱身在筆觸之後，以一種無所不知無所不包的方式，雜敘雜議的講述著異邦人的故事，人類學者雖然不見於自己的著作中，但是在資料的穿插和邏輯推理的論述中間，依舊可以看到人類學者希冀在自己的著作中扮演著某種的存在與角色。可是，在Lewis的這本書中，這樣的狀況卻是完全不存在的，人們幾乎看不到Lewis的，他不是隱身，而是消失了！沒有論證、沒有邏輯推理，更沒有理論的建立。

因此，在閱讀本書之初，這種作者的缺席讓我一度感到很不安，深怕是不是在看完整本書之後卻只是一種閱讀了一本小說的感覺，而對於知識的積累卻沒有太多的幫助。這樣的疑慮在閱讀完整本書之後一掃而空，倒不是說我從中獲得了一海票知識積累的效用，而是說，因為作者的缺席，我從中可以更好、更獨立的獲知關於墨西哥貧戶生活較完整的面貌，而不是往常民族誌中所習慣提供的那種破碎的、經剪裁的資料。

換言之，正是因為作者的缺席，所以我藉由閱讀的過程，接觸到的是在那個當下活生生的人，而不是人類學家經手之後殘存的「資料」，一種生命的節奏瀰漫在字裡行間中，那種感覺好像不是在閱讀，而是在生活，因此，即使在閱讀之後必須要另外花一些時間去思考這本書對於我們的意義和對於學術理論的貢獻為何，但是我想在這種感覺好像是直接接觸這群人的生活狀態的時候，我們可以學到和瞭解的，將會比傳統的民族誌書寫的方式要來的更多。而儘可能的增加對於一群不同於我們的人們的瞭解，正是人類學初始至今一直保有的重要的精神，我想，這本書是成功的做到了。

更令人佩服的是，這本書成於1959年，在那個年代裡頭，人類學界並不認可類似這樣的書寫作法，甚至於說，如果有位人類學者書寫出這樣的民族誌時，或者會被其他學界主流的學者視為這不會是一本認真嚴肅的學術著作，難登大雅之堂云云。在這樣的環境氛圍下，Lewis依舊勇於堅持自己的書寫方式以及研究方法，需要多少的勇氣，也許是在現在的我難以想像的。

我並不是很想在這篇心得當中進入書中的細節裡頭，因為這樣似乎就是切割著書中人物的生活而將枝微末節的片段取出來進行解析，而這並不是這本書給我的感覺告訴我我應該去做的，把它當成一本小說閱讀也許是更好的選擇，即便這不是一本真的小說，而是一個相當真實的狀態，訴說著墨西哥當地在1960年代時，經過了Zapataist革命以及種種動亂和美國介入等等的影響之後，對於當地勞動、底層民眾生活所造成的影響，人們每天都在想著去哪裡搞錢、怎麼讓家維持下去，但是在這同時，卻又可以不失希望的繼續活著，這種種交織著生活、慾望、情緒、失望、沮喪、 希望和信念的描述，我想是存在於每個人身上的，只是，在不同的階層當中有不同的側重與表現而已，而在這種情況下，我覺得Lewis在這本書中，並沒有刻意的美化/醜化了底層階級的人們，而只是忠實的報導出他們的狀態，至於要對這個狀態有什麼看法和判斷，則是有賴於讀者自身的努力和認識了。

因此，如果這是一本很難用特定立場與觀點去評價的書籍，但是卻因為書中人物他們平凡而真實存在的人生使得整本書變得很有學術以及閱讀的價值，再加上翻譯者將書本翻譯的非常流暢，個人是相當推薦有時間的人可以看看這本很精彩的民族誌。