Introduction: commodities and the politics of value

“The biographies of copper artifacts would be similar during the manufacturing stage because they had not yet acquired their unique histories (Appadurai 1986: 42; Schiffer 1972).”

“While there is some value in this view, it has been recognized in much recent sociological and anthropological scholarship that labels like luxury or necessity are often static and misleading, and not always mutually exclusive (Appadurai 1986: 3-5, 16; Kopytoff 1986: 76-80.”

“In the sense that commodities have ‘‘social Trade liberalization facilitated the presence of inter-lives’’ (Appadurai 1986), western-made items national evangelization in Tanzania, while liberaliza-brought into to Tanzania appear to have carried with tion, in combination with post-socialist…”

“…as a semiotic process, giving way to an analysis of immaterial commodities, Asif Agha proposes that a strict reading of use-value makes ‘invisible’ (Agha 2011: 22) and obscures the visible signs of ‘commodity formulations’ – the metasemiotic practices, institutional discourses or the indexical…”

“Just as we might examine ‘‘the social life of things’’ [Appadurai 1986], photographs can be explained by their maze of entanglements, the way they unpack the workings of memory.”

“Commodities constantly spill beyond specific ‘regimes of value’, because valued objects move in and out of a commodity status. for Appadurai (1986), the question is situated beyond the conflict between use and exchange value, but it is metaphorically an opposition between ‘gift’ (the qualitative…”

“When social distance between producers and consumers is great, traders (and a host of other intermediaries) have historically acted as bridges along which commodities and the knowledge and desire to use them can flow (Appadurai, 1988).”

“To Lund and others, weapons’ personalities resulted from their circulation among, and associations within, human society: weapons gained personhood from their social lives (cf. Appadurai 1986, 3).”

“The first is how taking credit and paying interest become legitimate economic transactions: how the moral categorisation of what can be monetised and what is excluded from economic circulation shifts over time (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986; Zelizer, 1985).”

“As Appadurai (1986) put forward, in the context of displacement, home emerges as a significant trope.”

“…en contextos culturales distintos y por diferente tipo de gente, mientras que otras “seguirán un único trayecto desde la producción al consumo” (Appadurai, 1986:23; véase también el concepto de “singularización” de Kopytoff, 1986:73-77), viendo restringida su entrada al estatus de…”

“For Appadurai (1986, 13), it was Simmel’s nexus between desire and the circumstances in which objects were circulated that caught his intellectual curiosity.”

“Appadurai adds: ‘This tension itself has its source in the fact that not all parties share the same interests in any specific regime of value, nor are the interests of any two parties in a given exchange identical’ (Appadurai 1986: 57).”

“…that in the West where, it has been argued, consumption has become the main axis for articulating identities and for meaningful social action (Appadurai, 1986; Bourdieu, 1991; Douglas, 1997; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Howes, 1996; Miller, 1995; Miller, 1998) It could be argued that the…”

“A profane commodity can be exchanged easily for something of equivalent value: it is not revered through association with loved ones, other people or as part of a collection (Appadurai, 1986).”

“Some recent studies enjoy use of this spirit idea - the ‘spirit of the commodity’ (Appadurai, 1986) and, after a fashion, the ‘morality’ of money (Bloch and Parry, 1989) may be included.”

“For example, it has been acknowledged that material culture objects continually transform in meanings through their own accumulative biographies (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986).”

“…brings to the fore the way the Christian values of fraternity, solidarity, equality and virginity for unmarried women are strategically used to reproduce, change or even to give people greater agency over customary practices, besides inserting these practices into the gift regime (Appadurai 1986).”

“In economic anthropology, the tremendous social significance of different modes of transfer and exchange has long been recognized (Appadurai, 1986; Bourdieu, 2005; Malinowski, 2002; Mauss, 2002; Polanyi, 1992; Simmel, 2004; cf. Carrier, 2005), but these insights have so far not been brought to bear…”

“According to Appadurai (1986) commodities can be seen at a basic level as things “intended for exchange, regardless of the form of the exchange”.”

“However, commodification can be usefully perceived of as a phase in an objects life (Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986).”

“Despite its social categorization as an illicit substance, Ecstasy is still subject to the dynamics of consumption culture (Fitzgerald, 2002) and the long-established patterns of demand that act as constraints in commodity exchange and consumption (Appadurai, 1986).”

“The lifeless body is strange, perhaps even repulsive, and it begins a process of grief that changes the social meaning of a particular human body (Appadurai 1986; Baker, Motley, and Henderson 2004).”

“Yet, as Appadurai (1986, 41) notes, ‘the production knowledge that is read into a commodity is quite different from the consumption knowledge that is read from the commodity… these two readings will diverge proportionately as the social, spatial, and temporal distance between producers and…”

“That is, a commodity is not one kind of thing, but a phase in the life of some thing ( Appadurai, 1986 ).”

“The relevance of tangible objects flows in the analysis of exchange relations in consumer society is undeniable (Appadurai, 1986).”

“As much as Appadurai (1986) sees demand as "the economic expression of the political logic of consumption," this idea enables a more visible dominant power of American cultural products as well as the American capitalist global system.”

“However, they are important precisely because they illustrate the very real way in which clothes have ‘lives’ (Appadurai 1986) – complex value beyond material function or economic worth.”

“Appadurai has advocated that it is “things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” ( Appadurai 1986: 3). By looking at the practical and symbolic concerns behind the movement of iron objects through their trajectories we have a vantage point for interpreting “the human transactions and calculations t…”

“…involve strategic action and intentionality, especially by elites (Blanton and Fargher 2008; Levi 1988; Ortner 2006: 134–137); and the degree to which cultural knowledge and material resources are considered to be distinct (Appadurai 1986; Blanton and Fargher 2008; Giddens 1984; Sewell 1992).”

“Exchange provided a buffer against resource fluctuations (Arnold 1992; Cohen 1981); redistributed food, raw materials, and finished products (Torrence, 1986); provided access to prestige goods ( Appadurai 1986; Bennyhoff and Hughes 1987: 161; Hughes 1978: 53; Munn 1986); created pathways for information sharing; and s…”

“…forms of ownership centered around managing possessions and extracting value from them (see Nadaï and Cointe, this volume), the logic of private property on the market is fixated on alienation (Slater 2002), letting go of what you own and being adequately compensated in return (Appadurai 1986).”

“…trade change with increasing imports from China to Ghana, the institutional and spatial journeys of goods become more complex and culturally informed mythologies or stories about the goods emerge (Appadurai, 1986) to shape the frameworks people use to interpret their experiences with those goods.”

“How might one conceptualise the role of vision, or the senses more in general, in economic exchange? In regimes of value (Appadurai 1986 ), how might the senses play a role in the valuation of things – and people?”

“First, the concept of enlivenment, a term usually equated with the social process whereby goods are given meaning, and thus enlivened in the individual, social and semantic sense (Appadurai, 1986).”

“A rich and growing multidisciplinary literature has attempted to situate objects as either foci of analysis in and of themselves (Appadurai, 1986; Ingold, 2004; Jullien, 1995; Law, 2002) or, as gateways into understanding of social and economic practices (Ingold, 2000; Kopytoff, 1986; Mitchell,…”