Introduction: commodities and the politics of value

“A widely held view in the West is that authentic objects are those that have been made by the people they represent (Appadurai 1986: 45), and it is this view that informs many critiques of current promotional practices.”

“The meanings of these categories lie not only in variable form and use, but also in the trajectories the objects have taken (Appadurai, 1986: 6), and in what Pels (1998: 94) has called the ‘spirit of matter’ – the ability of material objects to ‘speak’ and ‘act’ on their own (as well as through a…”

“Concerns about the touristic consumption of ICH also became prominent, with the potential commodification of local customs such as rituals and feasts and folk and ethnic arts, beginning to enter the scholarly discourse (Appadurai, 1986).”

“See, for example, Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Appadurai (1986), Gudeman (1986), Kopytoff (1986), Amariglio et al. (1988), Callari (1988), Lefort (1988), Ruccio (1991), Amariglio and Callari (1993), Butler (1993), Dallmayr (1993), Amariglio and Ruccio (1994), Zelizer (1994), Buttigieg (1995), Gramsci…”

“2 In recent work on material culture, some stress discourses of the object’s or “fetish’s” agency (Gell 1998; Pels 1998; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1999); while others (Appadurai 1986; Myers 2001a; and, to a lesser extent, Keane 1997) stress the human regimes of value to which objects are subordinated.”

“It makes it possible for them to organize their value propositions according to what Appadurai (1986) calls a politics of value.”

“However, it is inadequate for an explanation of rising consumer demand, which is neither a mechanical response to production levels nor ‘a bottomless natural appetite’ but rather a complex social mechanism (Appadurai 1986: 40–41).”

“…a number of authors: Appadurai argues that commodities can be said to have ‘social lives’ such is the relationship between commodities and consumers (Appadurai 1986, p. 3), while Ruvio describes how consumers use objects to demonstrate that they are ‘unique like everybody else’ (Ruvio 2008, p.…”

“Integrating anthropological debates around the need to dissolve the gift/commodity binary (Appadurai, 1986; Gunnorson & Svenaeus, 2012; Mauss, 1968; Pande, 2011; Scheper‐Hughes, 2007; Shaw, 2008; Titmuss, 1997 [1970]; Waldby et al., 2013) into geography, Parry's (2008) work shows how reproductive…”

“‘Pacifying’ goods may require a lot of effort and the construction of particular socio-technical arrangements that help objects to enter into what Appadurai (1986) calls a ‘commodity phase.’”

“Drawing on Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986), others have explored the biographical character of commodities.”

“Since a single item can have different functions, acquire different meanings, and often change status during its “life” (Appadurai 1986; Kopitoff 1986), new approaches to socially valued objects should focus on the processes by which these objects encoded different social or economic messages…”

“The analysis we present here incorporates recent propositions on the biographical approach of things (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986), focusing on the exchange relations and the forms of incorporation of Western objects and practices into Native cultures in the Orinoco region.”

“Impact relating to an object’s genealogy depends on differential knowledge of this heritage and its associations by producers, users and viewers (Appadurai 1986: 41–56).”

“…roles in shaping the value of the goods they are producing, has often lain just outside the scope of inquiry in the growing literature on consumption (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1995, 2005; Myers 2001), the production of symbolic and material value may be key to understanding the relationship between…”

“Later, it can be removed to the markets and offered again the status of a commodity (Kopytoff, 1986: 65; see also Appadurai, 1986).”

“Although nobles in this part of Lombok prefer pyramid-shaped roofs, their ability to defend their ‘sumptuary exclusivity’ (Appadurai 1986) has been eroded.”

“Arjun Appadurai (1986) and Igor Kopytoff (1986) usefully introduced the idea of things having social lives and thus life histories.”

“Yet trust is extraordinarily difficult in many ‘‘situations of exchange’’ (Appadurai, 1986) and here I argue that relationships that appear to operate on trust—that is, on the assumption that the parties involved will treat each other as honestly and fairly as they would themselves want to be…”

“…with Marx that human creative activity is foundational to value; with Simmel that commodity constitute and are constituted in regimes of value (Appadurai, 1986), as are kinds of the subjects who participate in such regimes; and with Saussure and early Baudrillard (1996) that what constitutes…”

“Following objects within the larger frame of exchange allows these authors to bring into question what can constitute a commodity, how the permanence and value attached to this label are enacted, and the importance of considering the ‘social lives’ of objects (Appadurai, 1986: 3).”

“…difference and give rise to questions about alterity, ontology and translation (Henare et al. 2007), often in the broader context of commodification (Appadurai 1986; Strathern 1988; Thomas 1991).6 Our focus on materialisation as a process facilitates passage between domains of social experience…”

“For social science scholars an exploration of these issues starts to demonstrate how aspects of culture and polity link together to provide the ground rules for capital accumulation and structuring the 'situations of exchange' (Appadurai, 1986) in the retail sector.”

“This broadening of the meaning of consumption follows trends in anthropology (e.g., Appadurai, 1986; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979).”

“During the processes of globalization, shifts in what Appadurai (1986, 1996) has called the “technoscape” are inevitable.”

“Object biographies offer a complementary perspective on how tools and other crafts accrue value and impinge upon social structures throughout the course of their “social lives” (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Stahl 2010).”

“…in a shoe, qualities that take on different meaning as the things in which they inhere pass from one handler and country to the next—from miner to patron in Madagascar, trader to processor in Thailand, and jeweler to consumer in Canada—through different “regimes of value” (Appadurai 1986:4).”

“Scholars have illustrated how objects themselves can be crucial to understanding consumption (Appadurai, 1986; Douglas and Isherwood, 1996; Miller, 1995), yet the discursive dimensions of this process remain underexamined.”

“…of replicas of archaeological material are generally an under-valued and under-used resource but, like anything, they can come back to life when someone invests an interest in them, and when they become things we also understand as being ‘in motion’ (see Appadurai, 1986: 4; Byrne et al., 2011: 18).”

“An object acquires economic value through exchanges, and its status as a commodity is therefore not fixed but contingent and contextual; the object may shift from commodity to non-commodity status and back again (Appadurai 1986).”

“As we shall see, for contemporary Maya ritual practitioners an object’s social meaning and ritual status sometimes is acquired through actions it undergoes during the last phase of its life history, when “things-in-motion” ( Appadurai, 1986, p. 5 ) become things-in-rest in archaeological contexts.”

“Anthropology has a long tradition of examining the mutually constitutive relations between economic transactions and social ties (e.g., Appadurai, 1986), with a vibrant contemporary research area dedicated to the anthropological study of money, debt, and credit (e.g., Mauer, 2006; Maurer et al.,…”

“Mintz’s study of cultural meanings corroborates other anthropological evidence that demand, fashion and taste are central to a cultural account of the origins of capitalism (e.g., Appadurai, 1986; Mukerji, 1983).”

“2 Because objects have “social lives,” that is, they are not wholly depersonalized and alienable (Appadurai 1986), the distinction between gifts and commodities is fuzzy, reaffirming Marcel Mauss’s (2016) insight that gifts are never “pure”: they entail a mixture of instrumentality and obligation,…”

“…of research on luxury illustrates, from an identity perspective, luxury has been mainly studied in terms of economic capital, which can be consumed conspicuously to signify consumers’ social standing and identity (Appadurai, 1986; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Wiedmann, Hennigs, and Siebels, 2007).”