Search

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that religious practice and the ritual expenditure on spectacular performances of sacrifice and destruction are not activities usually associated with rapid regional economic development. He asserts that the paper did not unfold stories of religious squandering, general sacrifice, indulgent consumption and tomb building into the dominant narrative of global capitalist penetration. What Yang aimed to confront in her search for new conceptual vocabularies is the lingering influence of economic determinism.

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that Yang's paper has unsettled the dominant productivity stance which considered to be one of the major orthodoxies of economic anthropology. He asserts that Yang has offered a sobering reflection about the nature of global capitalism and on the current fascination in management-school circles with the phenomenon of the so-called Confucian capitalism.

The authors comment on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." They present queries about the models presented focusing on the Yang's sources of theoretical inspiration and not her use of them. They question whether Bataille's vision of capitalism is not itself caught in capitalism's self-mythologization as a desacralized and productivist space and worry about the slippage between the linguistic and the biological notion of hybridity.

Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugar- plantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community's evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that Yang aims to unmask and undermine the larger economy's hegemonic principles subscribed as a mix of state socialism and market economy. He asserts that it is right to seek an alternative to privatized consumption and what is preferable in the ritual economy is that it enhances leisure and social generosity. He believes that ritual extravagance is local despite the fact that it is ancient and a fulfillment of a primordial need.

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that Yang reveals the wizened features of the economy of ritual blowing apart the double repression of party and paradigm. He asserts that it is through Bataille that people came to know of a general economy which points to a human curse of wanton expenditure, taking people beyond rational calculation and into the realm of never-ending and destructive cycles of production and consumption.