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From The Social Production Of The Person To Transnational Capitalism: Parsons, Turner, And Globalization, Daniel Reichman

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This paper focuses on influence of Talcott Parsons on the thought of Terence Turner, and explores how Turner's Brazilian ethnography led to a critical rethinking of Parsons' general theory of action. While Turner's adaptation of Marxian theory of value to anthropology is often read as a practice-oriented alternative to structuralism, I argue that it can also be fruitfully understood as a response to general theoretical questions first posed by Parsons. Late in his career, Turner published a series of papers on "globalization" which apply his Marxian analysis of the social production of the person in Amazonia to questions of citizenship …