The Social Life of Things, Varna and the emergence of wealth in prehistoric Europe, Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), Colin Renfrew, Author, page 143

Now the notion of value is not an easy one to analyze, even in a society where rates of exchange can be directly observed. I should at once add here that I see some force in the arguments of Binford (1969, 163) that "psychological preferences" in archeology, using explanations based upon assumed states of mind of prehistoric people for which there is no direct evidence, are best avoided. Binford, I rather think, regards a concept like value as belonging to what Pike (as quoted by Harris 1968, 571) would term an "emic" category: something existing primarily in the thoughts and minds of individual members of a given community. But value can also be an "etic" category: something that acts upon the material world in a manner that can be observed and evaluated cross-culturally, for which the modern observer can therefore gather relevant material evidence1,

Cambridge University Press, 1986, Great Briton, 0-521-35726-8