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Paul Kockelman , The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. xi + 190, £61.00, £16.99, pb.
As the title suggests, at face value this book is about chickens and Quetzal birds in the cloud forests of Guatemala. Below, at a deeper level, it provides precisely a discussion of incommensurable ontologies and portable values by investigating emergent ontologies and how value might be stored, transported, recognised, alienated or divided. Thus it is a contribution to fundamental debates in anthropology, philosophy and linguistics, if not also the very science of humans and how humans ‘do’ science. Moreover, though serious it is a very wittily written contribution. It is a joy to read and, as it should, the humour makes the at times difficult going much easier. With its 190 pages it is not a long read, but the text is dense and the four chapters are tightly knit. Each section merits rereading several times in order to grasp – and enjoy – Kockelman's thorough investigation of how scholars have grappled with, for instance, the contrasts between, and the constitution of, use value and exchange value since Aristotle first (to our knowledge) theorised the possible paths between them.
Yet it is also an anthropological monograph centred on the small village of Chicacnab in the province of Alta Verapaz, situated at the edge of one of the remaining cloud forests and...