Objects, identities and cosmological authentication

Extract

Frans Theuws's paper reinforces and extends the developing critique of the early medieval economy as structured around gifts and commodities (for the ‘orthodoxy’, see Hodges 1982 and Hedeager 1993; for the critique, see Moreland 2000a and 2000b; Samson 1991; also Godelier 1999 (1996); and Thomas 1991). In the past, our assumptions about why certain objects were deemed valuable, and why they should have circulated as prestige gifts, have been influenced by notions of inherent worth (gold, silver and so on) or by the unthinking application of the laws of supply and demand (objects from afar are in short supply and must therefore be valuable). The proposition that value derives from the ‘imaginary world’ is one of the most significant in his paper and I will return to consider its implications in some detail.