The rites and relics of value: Sacrifice and communality in nineteenth-century political economy, anthropology, and fiction.

摘要

This dissertation examines the fictional and non-fictional prose of the nineteenth century, arguing that the tendency among Victorian writers such as John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling to synthesize conceptions of the sacred, sacrifice, and ritual with economic value and exchange reveals a pattern of thought hidden within capitalist theories of value and exchange as well. Political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, and Alfred Marshall theorize value in terms of sacrifice and conceive of the market as the site wherein agents consecrate the social body and its values by engaging in ritualized networks of exchange. In illuminating this pattern, Victorian writers expose the shared disciplinary genealogies of political economy and anthropology. Victorian anthropologists like E. B. Tylor, Henry Maine, James Frazer, and W. R. Smith inherit the social and religious preoccupations that had once been conjoined to theories of value and exchange, examining the gift economies and sacrificial rituals among non-British subjects that political economy embedded in its theories of value and exchange. By revealing this displacement, the dissertation extends discussions on the ethics of economics by demonstrating that notions of communality, equitable distribution, and interdependence are just as crucial to the foundations of capitalism as self-interest and competition.