ABSTRACT
The concept of labour has been central to the constitution of persons and property in Western political theory since the earliest days of capitalist modernity. For Locke, labour is the fundamental constituent of property claims in external objects that then enable the bourgeois or possessive individual to constitute himself as an independent person. For radical critics, such as Marx, labour is equally important as the ultimate source of value that is alienated from the labouring class in capitalist society. Anthropologists have often tended to engage with these traditions by minimising their differences and emphasising their points of connection. This conflation enables them to be presented as fundamentally similar emanations of a ‘Western’ cultural value-system based around shared assumptions concerning ‘labour’ as a fundamental individual human property. This ‘Western’ perspective is then rhetorically critiqued from the position of a ‘non-Western’ cultural system. In this essay, I critically explore the validity of this approach. Drawing on material from Papua New Guinea, I argue that a more careful attention to Marx’s critique of liberal individualism opens up the possibility for a critical anthropology of labour that goes beyond the conventional critique from the position of cultural altereity.
