Abstract

ABDUCA, Ricardo. Signifier as an economic category: (Toward a linguistic concept of use-value). Cuad. antropol. soc. [online]. 2019, n.49, pp.59-74. ISSN 1850-275X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.34096/cas.i49.5306.

The article examines the use of the term "use value" in various contemporary works of economic anthropology, finding that the expression is used in three different ways. I maintain that these three meanings are but partial approximations to a description concerning the functioning of the values that emerge from use: the material entities from which human society is built. I argue that this triple manifestation corresponds exactly with the discovery that, since 1950, founded structuralism: the autonomy of the symbolic, as a specific register, although linked to the imaginary and the real. The attributes of the use value concept here proposed suggest notorious parallelism with that of signifier: its arbitrariness and indifference, its qualitative character, versatility, and capability to form signifying chains. From this perspective certain obvious contemporary phenomena are outlined, such as the fact that goods we use nowadays actually have an inscription, while in the distant past only the money had inscriptions.

Keywords : Use value; Signifier; Economic Anthropology; Political Economy; Linguistics.

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