A compelling work on the nature of value as creative potential realised through social action Graeber wanted to title this

book 'The False Coin of Our Own Dreams' but at the publisher's request that became the sub-title under the rather more staid and academic 'Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value'. Graeber's preference is indicative of his hope for an audience beyond anthropologists. It's clearly written (for the most part), not over-long and balances expositions of theory with some personal insight. I'd say he succeeded in making it accessible to the non-specialist. The book proceeds by considering three common approaches to value and then examines how our experience of value is contextualised by scholars (with a focus on post-structuralist work). Then it gives exposition to Graeber's understanding of value as action and gradually explores this understanding by examining how value is experienced and conceptualised in different cultures. Finally he concludes with the idea that value exists in the potential for creative action; 'the ultimate social reality'. The social aspect is key because structures of relation with others come to be internalized into the fabric of our being', and so the potential for creative power - and hence value - cannot be (significantly) realized, other than through coordination with others. In reaching such conclusions about the relation of reality to value, the book deals with some arcane material. For example; it details how the Maori's metaphysical concepts of 'mana' and 'tapu' relate to their exchange, politics and society; it considers the how the ancient quarrel between Heraclitus and Parmenides (are things in flux or are they fixed?) echoes through thought and time; and it pays homage to Marc Shell's seminal discussion of the Ring of Gyges and the problems of visibility and invisiblity as they relate to money and value among the Iroquios. You can

see why the publisher would have insisted on the more academic title. However, ultimately I sympathise with Graeber's wish to call it 'The False Coin of Our Own Dreams'. The phrase is inspired by a passage from Mauss and Hubert's 'Mana and Magic' quoted at the start of Graeber's odyssey. Simply put, Our Own Dreams are our creative potential, and the False Coin is our misattribution of the value of that creative potential onto objects. A version, if you like, of fetishism. But a version that digs deeply into the ontology of value. Philosophical musing from an armchair is all well and good, but what Graeber tries to do is combine this ontology with real world observations from anthropology. He creates a compelling picture of the political, social and economic manifestations of value across time and culture, even if sometimes the link between the ethnography and his ontology of value isn't that easy to pick out.. I very much enjoyed the book. In particular, I found the discussion of the Iroquoian 'Dream Economy' and the Maori's 'mana and tapu' fascinating and thought-provoking. Towards the end, Graeber says that certain objects can act as 'pivots between the imagination and reality' and, maybe for me, this book might be one such object. Although I disagree with Graeber about some quite fundamental issues - the nature of money in particular - reading this book has really made me consider the relation of value to action and pushed me more deeply into the work of philosopher Roy Bhaskar. I thoroughly recommend it.