City Intelligible A Philosophical And Historical Anthropology Of Global Commoditisation Before Industrialisation Frank Perlin by Frank Perlin 9789004414914, 9789004414921, 9004414916, 9004414924, 2019046041, 2019046042 instant download after payment.

City Intelligible seeks to integrate a transcendental philosophical anthropology of commodification before industrialisation with a social and cultural, thus empirical anthropology of commodity production and the global range and intercultural character of a marketisation indifferent to frontier. It treats commodification as a singular privileged evidence of the universal status of human reasoning, grounding the entirely translational character of such intercultural commodity exchange throughout the early centuries AD, yet simultaneously grounding ubiquitous cultural differentiation. This book thus constitutes a veritable “explanation of difference”, and a refutation of the predominant tendency in the humanities to represent cultural difference as inhibiting the very possibility of effective communicational translation. It thus constitutes a systematic critique of method and of the role played by a-priori assumption in the historical and anthropological disciplines, focussing upon cloth manufacture and marketing in Europe and Asia to propose a profound alteration in method. Mainstream economic factors are treated as forms of cultural expression within a continuum of exchange communications that are global from the beginnings of complex, agriculturally-based society. It utilises Kantian principles to investigate two questions: 1) how intercultural exchange, and thus translation of the commodity, is even possible; by answering 2) “what is a commodity?”.