Forms of production in practice: Fresh approaches to simple commodity production

Jaques M. Chevalier, Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin and Cult in Eastern Peru, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. In an important new book, Jacques Chevalier advances the concept ‘form of production’ by giving it explicit theoretical treatment. In doing so he reveals a number of significant differences in the way various scholars have used the concept, especially on the central question — the relationship between capitalist and non‐capitalist forms of production in peripheral social formations. This is an old problem, but one that refuses quietly to die. It thus deserves continued discussion. What makes Chevalier's book worthy of extended discussion, however, is that it provides an anthropological treatment of the cultural elements involved in creating and sustaining distinctive forms of production. It does so by elaborating some of Pierre Bourdieu's notions about social practice in creating cultural as well as material life. The two sets of issues are not as far apart as one might think, since both consider actual social practice within particular material and cultural contexts, giving agency to both economic practice and to the environment containing it in determining the resulting social dynamic. In this way the scholars working on these two traditions hope to avoid many of the deterministic assumptions embedded in most analysis of production ‐ a problem that has long bedevilled marxists (as well as anthropologists). In this review essay I reflect on both sets of issues and the advantages to be gained by considering them as interrelated.