Introduction: commodities and the politics of value

“Becoming institutionalised in a market logic means to consider the effectiveness and profitability of the innovation through assigning economic value and turning it into an object of trade (cf. Appadurai, 1986, 2005) and marketizing it (Eikenberry and Kluver, 2004).”

“The approach draws from social 327 BR A N D S A N D BR A N D IN G lives and histories of commodities (Appadurai 1986), commodity “careers” (Kopytoff 1986:66), and material culture ethnographies (Miller 1998), as well as geographic “biographies” and “lives” (M. Watts 2005:534), “commodity stories”…”

“…of hummus—a dish adopted by Jewish settlers from Palestinians and made a central element of the Israeli “national food” repertoire— raises questions about how the social life (Appadurai 1986) of food items that move across ethnic or national boundaries is shaped by these items’ cultural identity.”

“…the term, ‘discounting procedures’ to point out that calculating national and international remittance flows is made possible by pre-defining the regime of value within which remittances circulate and by not counting certain other transactions associated with remitting (see also Appadurai 1986).”

“…guide the interactions and by those understandings that emerge between the producer and the object, the producer and the primary sellers, and the object and the final consumers (e.g.,Appadurai, 1986; Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Fine, 2003; Goffman, 1961; Smith, 1989; Velthuis, 2003; Wolf, 1983).”

“Whereas the early landscape biographies were inspired by anthropological studies of material culture (Appadurai, 1986 ; Kopytoff, 1986 ), current approaches follow an earlier and influential formulation of the concept by the geographer Marwyn Samuels ( 1979 ).”

“Often cited anthropologists in interpretive consumer research include Wilk (2006), Appadurai (1986; 1996), Arvidsson (2006), Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa (2002), Douglas and Isherwood (1979), Mazzarella (2003), Miller (1987), Moeran (1996; 2006a), and Schor (1998). of consumption as they unfold…”

“This change in subjectivity comes about through the practices of consumption and the interactions between people and their material surroundings (Appadurai 1986, Gottdeiner 2000, Miller et al. 1998).”

“Commodities hold ‘a particular type of social potential’ (Appadurai, 1986, p. 6). The gift economy is one which places emphasis on social motives to move objects rather than economic motives (Jenkins et al., 2013). Social and economic motives are often counterpoised in networked culture, though gift-giving and commodi…”

“The theoretical perspective of this paper draws on work of Arjun Appadurai in which he makes us aware that meanings attached to material objects depend upon the social-cultural context in which we find them (Appadurai 1986, pp. 3–63).”

“…crucial to the constitution and transformation of political orders, determining not only their location along the junction of trade routes, at mountain passes, ports, or rivers, but also forming a key source of power, income and conflict (e.g. Appadurai, 1986; Makki, 2011; Polanyi, 1944: 63ff).”

“Things or objects can be seen to have `social lives' (Appadurai, 1986) and `biographies' (Kopytoff, 1986) through which we can track their candidacy and entry into the status of c̀ommodity', or perhaps their suspension from the circuits of commodity exchange by their attaining the status of…”

“As other scholars have argued, it is not so much the flow of different things, in the form of goods, ideas or cultural meanings, that is significant in itself (Appadurai 1986; Basch et al. 1994; Friedman 1994).”

“…opens for the perspective that demand and advertising contributes to the social construction of a new fetish (Baudrillard, 1981).6 We pursue the argument of Goodman and Dupuis (2002), going beyond the production– consumption dichotomy and following ‘the things themselves’ (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5).”

“There are other stratifying elements that are usually identified with ‘late capitalism’ or even ‘post-capitalism’, where consumption appears to determine status differentiation in and of itself, independently of the ways that people acquire wealth (Weber 1978: 937; Bourdieu 1984; Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Friedman…”

“The technological knowledge required for the production of `primary' commodities (Appadurai 1986:42) such as metals, fuels and grains was more readily accessible to people like miners, smelters and traders than was the knowledge required for producing luxury (or `secondary') commodities.”

“In their ‘‘lives,’’ Appadurai (1986, p. 3) argues, things go through socially and culturally defined phases, one of which is the commodity phase.”

“First, an heirloom, whose “social history” (Appadurai 1986) links it to specific taste regimes, embodies both private family meanings (FM) and public sociocultural connotations (SCC), as illustrated in figure 2.”

““Things” have social meaning, as Ribot and Peluso (2003) explore, and affect social relations (Appadurai 1986).”

“A key premise of material culture as a field of inquiry has been set out in exemplary fashion by Appadurai (1986, 1996).”

“Acknowledging that what is given in exchange is not inert has been informative for the study of objects and for what one might call ‘the materiality turn’ in anthropology (Appadurai 1986b, Miller 1987, Strathern 1992, Foster 1990, Weiner 1992, Keane 1997, Gell 1998).”

“I look, as have many others before me (e.g. Appadurai, 1986), to kula exchange – specifically, for analogies between commodity chains and kula ‘paths’, and between the reputation of brands and the ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ of kula transactors (Mazzarella, 2003).”

“This chapter argues that if cognition is indeed thus distributed, then cognition is also historical and heterogeneous and must also be analysed diachronically and differentially.”

“Like slaves, objects can indeed move in and out of the commodity economy (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986), but even if commodities are given and gifts exchanged, the commodity economy remains a commodity economy and the gift economy a gift economy.”

“A commodity’s “social life” encompasses the situations that mediate its production, exchange and eventual consumption at different locations and times (Appadurai 1986: 13).”

“Particularly, it has suggested a role for objects in generating cultural meanings; in doing social and cultural work through processes of differentiation, objectification and integration (Appadurai, 1986; Baudrillard, 1996[1968]; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979).”

“A number of anthropologists have argued that gifts and commodities co-exist in certain circumstances (Appadurai, 1986; Parry and Bloch, 1989; Carrier, 1991; Godelier, 1999).”

“The literature on the social life or cultural biography of things emphasizes that things take on their own histories apart from their makers or owners (Appadurai 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Hamann 2002; Kopytoff 1986; MacGregor 1999).”

“…methodologies was also emerging in Britain (e.g. Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Gell 1988, 1992, 1996, 1998; Miller 1984a, b, 1987, 1995, 1998a, b, 2001, 2005a, b; see further discussion in Buchli 2002), the US (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986) and France (e.g. Lemonnier 1986, 1992).”

“The fact that consumers can special-order sperm illustrates the workings of postmodern consumer culture in which sperm is a commodity infused with cultural meanings (Appadurai, 1986; Daniels, 2006; Kopytoff, 1986).”

“Likewise, none of the well-known critics of the absolute commodification of nature ever questioned the nature of food as a commodity, least to say proposing its reconsideration as a commons (Marx, 1867; Polanyi, 1944; Appadurai, 1986; Ostrom, 1990; Radin, 2001).”

“Scholars argue that analyses of particular modes of exchange and circulation should not focus exclusively on the presence or absence of one mechanism or another (Appadurai, 1986; Blanton, 1998; Garraty, 2009; Hassig, 1998; Wilk, 1998).”

“…illustrate the centrality of reciprocal household exchange to markets, and the sophistication of small-scale financial transactions among the poor, have blurred the category even further (Wolf, 1966; Friedman, 1980; Shanin, 1988; Appadurai, 1986; Bernstein and Byers, 2001; Collins et al., 2009).”

“While much technological, social and aesthetic knowledge go into a commodity’s production, knowledge is also required to consume it appropriately (Appadurai, 1986: 41–2).”

“Symbolic value may therefore have been not only ascribed, but created in the myriad ‘tournaments of value’ (Appadurai 1986, 21–2) that occurred daily as part of the life of the town.”

“DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00101.x Anthropologists long have focused on material culture’s potential to give rise to boundary-crossing biographical pathways and to polysemic interpretations (Appadurai 1986; Marcus and Myers 1995; Price 2007; Tilley et al. 2006).”

“In this process, consumers perform their social lives and maintain social networks, which are bound up with the social life of the brand (see Appadurai, 1986).”

“Figures 2 and 3 can also be regarded as showing different stages in an object’s biography (Appadurai, 1986), with the object constituted either as a commodity (Figure 2) or as a capital asset (Figure 3).”

“…of the postsocialist world have found an effective theoretical platform in the circulating objects that populate the recent anthropological literature arrayed against dichotomies between gift and commodity economies (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Myers 2001; and see Patico and Caldwell 2002).”

“In contrast, ‘the word “commodity” is used in neoclassical economics only to refer to a special subclass of primary goods and no longer plays a central analytic role’ (Appadurai, 1986a , p.”