2 thoughts on “Frank Perlin Book Discussion”

1. I have not fully engaged with your book but like the fearless way you address fundamental questions. I have long been perplexed by how the apparently ‘primitive’ Agaria tribe in the Satpura hills of the Narmada valley traded iron plough-shares and axe-heads with cultivators in the plains for centuries, in exchange for salt and grain. To explain this, I liked Marshall Sahlins’ idea of ‘practical reason’ to explain why apparently remote and isolated peoples could interpret other cultures in an effective utilitarian fashion. Having different gods and beliefs never prevented commodity exchange taking place. You seem to be making a similar argument.

2. frank to those concerned with the gender question:

   Tania especially: Is it possible to have a copy of your comments, or even just of the list of notes that you prepared for reading them.
   You have opened a hornets nest in mind: ouch, ouch, one example after another. It is human labour itself that fills this notion of commodification and the rise and fall of value behind all the appearances, just as I described the positive effects of west indian … carribean … culture on English society, acting so effectively behind the social surface of conflict. When I was a boy, black was a mandatory social colour of display: that song I mentioned “brown boots, I asks yer” an ironic marker of that culture of restraint and prurience concerning colour display. Carribean culture in England altered this permanently and entirely, and probably went far more deeply in altering perception and tolerance of difference despite those appearances, often violent. Tell me why the Afroamerican is such a hidden aspect of US society … …
   Where gender is concerned, there first most obviously, in the Indian context, comes to mind bride-price and the rise and fall in value of that price resulting from different kinds and levels of diploma … of the university degree … and that becomes a focus of family capital investment. It is public in a country such as India but surely applicable as a social pressure of status and investment in every complex society. But soon it must be the value of the marital partner in general, first female, but then both genders, for what parent accepts easily the fall in social status of a “bad” choice by the daughter, if she would marry “below” her status. My cardiologist (Indian) had an arranged marriage with a well educated medical student. All lies in such language: status, up and down….. Afterwards one thinks of women as cheap sources of labour, in today’s super markets for example, in cloth making, and the male as the social focus of skilled labour and as focus of investment in expectation of a rise in social status of the family. Not far to let this invade the whole spectrum of labour in economic terms. Prostitution becomes but an aspect of this, but I remember that in post war Japan considerable numbers of very young peasant daughters were subject to demographic control in the peasant family hiving off “surplus” into urban brothels on a massive scale: I encountered many when merchant seaman operating along the coast of Japan at the start of the 60s, talked with many who had learned some English, but such prostitution eventually became a major source of political controversy and conflict. Given the permanent poverty of the Japanese village in Tokugawa Japan one wonders about other controls of family size operated apart from infanticide. The post-war urban market for prostitutes itself was huge, most probably in Europe also, although, again, only evident through supply and presence, and mortality of potential partners during the war. GIs en masse, merchant seamen, later the male city inhabitants of a Japan struggling to gain some economic control of itself. A huge field, subject to the brutality of conquest, and to colonial domination, and transformed into a huge industry of value, But what strikes one is the constantly subordinate position of the woman on all sides of these questions, everywhere one looks, even on the level of the animal traction into which peasant labour itself had been converted, tugging the immense burden of society itself behind it. Surely, it is the major difference in condition and status today, even though slight in its rate of change and advance.
   So I shall have to consider my hornet friends, ouch, ouch, as part of my new book, probably as a constant aspect of this theme, first of labour power, second of the human being as such, become the focus of scales of value. Labour time and work is already the major aspect of class concerning that book. I wonder if prostitution in Japan would not be a fitting focus whereby to consider woman as commodity in the sufficient detail required, owing to it long controversial political status and its rootedness in an impoverished countryside under a virtually colonial (US) occupation. Much depends on the quality of of English , French &c. language sources on the question. But another young woman asked me about marriage. Once more my mind had become emptied. I’d like to send this note to her.
   How I take this all on board of my book, control it, I am as yet unsure. I shall first allow the theme to pervade consciousness whilst writing and then in a new draft think this question more systematically within the scope and purpose of the book. But thank you for making me think of gender at all in this manner … ouch.

   Sincerely,
   Frank