Re: Filipino Theory of Value

My good friend Out in Four had an interesting thesis in his blog. I wrote this as a comment, but it got too long so I'll just it post here.
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It is always interesting when anthro and econ meet. A few comments:

1. Material conditions and language do not work in a single direction (i.e., material conditions affecting language); it's more of a two-way interaction. Material conditions do affect the language (e.g., our many words for rice-- palay, bigas, sinaing, bahaw), but the language also affects the way we perceive the world (e.g., our word for sickness is sakit, which is also pain, so mental health is often neglected or trivialised). And this is most true for abstract concepts. Therefore, even if you find significant correlations, it will be difficult to establish causality. Did the language develop because they traded, or did trading develop because the people were open to it?

2. Note that most of pre-Hispanic trade was barter rather than in money, so "expensive" might be a very different concept for the early Filipinos (it would be more akin to marginal rates of substitution rather than actually being "expensive").

3. In any study of culture you will always find exceptions, so explaining them within the theory would be very difficult. And unlike other statistical anomalies, it wouldn't be possible to explain them away as outliers-- how does one consider a language or culture as an "outlier"? Could we disregard an entire Weltanschauung because it isn't like any in the rest of the world?

4. Filipino (i.e., Tagalog) is part of the Austronesian family of languages, so a lot of our words would be the same with, say, Bahasa; however, trading circumstances would be vastly different across groups. In many cases, there is more diversity between languages within the Philippines than between other countries (e.g., compare Ivatan and Panggalatok vs. Tagalog and Bahasa). So the results will be driven by how the sample is selected. The results will be different if we compare the different Austronesian languages or if we include, say, Indo-Eurpoean languages into the mix. Not to mention that a lot of our words came from Chinese and Indian (including mahal), so the lines get even more blurred. Cross-section analysis can't be done on data where the supposedly random samples are talking to and influencing each other.

5. Also consider the case of the Maranaos and the Maguindanaos-- almost identical languages, religions, social structures, etc., but the former are prolific traders and the latter are not.

Bottomline, your thesis is interesting, but very difficult to test. Obviously, I'm very much into the study of econ and anthro (the two extremes of the social sciences, actually) and have given this some thought-- studying both makes one aware of the limitations of each. The way I see it, Economics has a long way to go before it is crowned Queen of the Social Sciences.