Money Wisdom #121

" Values are those invisible chains that link relations between things to relations between people. They are invisible in the sense that they are, first and foremost, forms of human consciousness that describe what is and prescribe what should be. As descriptions they clarify the relations between the reproduction of things and people in specific historical, geographical and social settings; as prescriptions they guide the actions to transform a found chaos into a desired order, or, what amounts to much the same thing, to reform an existing state."

C.A. Gregory   Savage Money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange (1997) p13