For next class on money

See this lecture on social life of money:

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Notes on class discussion (Session 8)

After a brief introduction to the readings selected for the session, we discussed at length how consumers produce meaning in brands. The point of debate was - if new marketing governmentality is after all just transforming consumers into dupes. In theories which look at consumer as central to the process of production of value, what we often miss to see are the processes of production which Marxists are accused of overemphasizing. Several scholars studying contemporary practices of consumption are of the opinion that the Marxian understanding of resistance has to change drastically. The question raised in the class against such an exclusive focus on consumption was – are some of these scholars overlooking the process of production and the inequities inherent in it? Related to this, another question was raised on consumer complicity in perpetuating structural inequalities and exploitation at the production end by participating in the co-creation of value of commodities. We also discussed how such a view would stand in relation to consumer boycott movements and resistance.

While trying to understand brands and how they operate at consumer’s end, the question of choice was raised, and the class felt that ‘choice’ has to be accounted for as ultimately we choose certain brands over others. Closely allied to the question of choice, was the question on consumer’s trust and its role in consumption of brands. We further discussed the instability of brands and how they are at the risk of losing value when they acquire too many meanings. One of the most important points raised showing an important gap in all this discussion on brands was about the hierarchy of branded products and how many scholars have not looked at it at all. The class felt that hierarchy of products and the presence of other competing brands of the same commodity type have to be factored in to understand how brands operate. Besides accounting for this hierarchy, the class also discussed how differences between products have to be considered too. For example, a jewellery brand may not operate the same way as a beverages one. A general theory of brands may not account for all kinds of products available in the market. We further discussed how generic, non-branded products can be studied in relation to brands to understand how brands acquire multiple meanings. We discussed how this would help us also to account for global variants of capitalism in which consumers are not that obsessed with brands, instead of just stopping at explaining the dominant American version characterized by the obsession with brands. Some examples discussed in this context include – how Colgate in many parts of India stands for toothpaste like Xerox for photocopying.

Further we discussed the interplay of materiality and immateriality, tangibility and intangibility in the value expressed through brands. We came to a conclusion that brand is not fully encompassed in itself, and that it is always spilling over. We also raised a question which was more or less left unresolved - what happens when brands lose their value? Discussing brand fetishization and detachment of a brand from the commodity, we spoke on how a brand gives us a sense of continuity through years though what a brand used to sell many years ago is not the same product it sells today.

Discussing the proliferation of consumer niches and the efforts at the production end to cater to such niches, we felt that there is not much difference between the games that producers play to project themselves as producers of authentic local (vying for GI tags) and global products. We also spoke about how all processes (production, distribution and consumption) are getting more and more systematized nowadays. We concluded the session by a point on globalization and how it produces the same kinds of effects everywhere – but there are local and regional variants. People have options and options have politics to them. The politics and the contestations of value do not revolve around the thing itself, and value is all about what kinds of value one generates.

Notes on session 8 (Brands, Fakes and Piracy)

The readings for this session are very interesting because the question of the creation and generation of value is approached through brands and their consumption. The question of consumption we began to engage with in the last session comes all the more forcefully in readings selected for this session. Though still grappling with the materiality of things and commodities, these set of readings encourage us to think about the immaterial and intangible aspects which infuse value into commodities.

Foster’s article focuses on two distinct questions of value creation and value calculation in brands in trying to understand how brands are created and how they accumulate value extracted from many sources. Foster examines commodities in their contemporary form, in their association with brands, which becomes very important in deciding the value of a commodity. He also accounts for new modes of exchange of commodities manifest nowadays online and shows how the changing consumption practices are pivotal in creation of brand value of the goods. Forster’s article extends the scope of Marxist theory of value primarily based on production by brining in the element of consumption into the process of production. Drawing on Daniel Miller’s work, Foster introduces the term consumption-work which erases the neat and distinct separations between the processes of production and consumption characteristic of the contemporary information economies.  He demonstrates how consumers are morphing from ‘passive purchasers’ and ‘loyal customers’ to ‘active agents’ and ‘co creators’ of value along with producers and other actors. The new ‘prosumer’ becomes the source of surplus value which is extracted almost for free and sold back by the producers in the form of brands. Foster highlights the major shifts in the production process as brands become primary containers of value in commodities. Brand value, he argues is created ‘in the interaction between the firms and the consumers’ and the allied activities of marketing and advertising central to creation of such value are increasingly carried out by consumers who engage with brands and its content online. The producers’ role in the process witnesses the shift from controlling the flow of commodities to governing, curating and directing the flow of information and content generated by consumers on brands to enhance and build the brand image. Though brand stands out as different from other commodities, the processes of brand evaluation which calculate and fix the price of brands make them commensurable with other commodities. Such processes of evaluation further complicate our understanding of brands and the value expressed through them. For Foster, the process of evaluation of brand actually reveals ‘how brands are socially constructed’ opening up possibilities for political resistance.

If Foster’s article discusses the creation of value through brands in general theoretical terms which can be used to understand brands across contexts, Cavanaugh and Shankar shed light on specific facets of brands (in their case, authenticity) which are consciously and carefully constructed by producers. The introduction of discursive and linguistic elements into the material context of goods to show not only how materiality of goods is discursively and linguistically constructed, but to also show how language also has material elements which are summoned by advertisers to construct a kind of authenticity acceptable to specific ethnic and racial consumers seems very innovative to me. Methodologically this opens up a new possibility for those studying advertisements.

The articles by Nakassis and Newell investigate brands by looking at their ontological opposites ‘counterfeits’ to understand multiple meanings they come to acquire. Nakassis, particularly, is interested in historically understanding the origin of trademark and other material and immaterial social meanings (which he calls surfeits) closely associated with brands today which make them not just commodities for exchange but things having strict legal and social boundaries. The surfeits, he argues have the potential to transgress such boundaries and are perceived as excess that threatens to ‘decentre’ the brand value of a commodity. Newell shows how brands cannot exist without their counterfeits. She approaches brands from a very interesting angle of bluffing and makes illuminating connections between bluffing as performance and bluffing as creation of value in a brand. Playing on the concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity, she demonstrates how all commodities are just copies of mass production. They are like masks which everybody knows (public secret) hide people who are just ordinary and known behind them.

Dent’s article discusses multiple and contradictory meanings and subjectivist positions associated with piracy in Brazil. Piracy in Brazil, Dent argues, is viewed simultaneously as redemptive and reflective of national culture rooted in creative mixture (that tries to set right the inequalities inflicted by the international corporate), and as an anxiety ridden terrain of perdition and degeneration evoking polarised feelings which are not clearly divided among people and groups. For him, these subjectivist positions are taken up by both producers and sellers in informal markets fighting for formalization, and consumers of pirate goods whose attitude towards pirate goods is ambivalent and context dependent.

One observation that I cannot resist sharing with you – I have noticed that the questions of piracy, contraband goods and counterfeits are mostly raised within the post colonial third world economic contexts, and even it is raised in the first world context, it will be qualified by racial and ethnic specificities. This question has remained with me for a long time now. Is informality and informal modes of consumption only restricted to these nationalities and ethnicities?

Week 7- Commoditisation and commodity circulation

In continuation with themes set out in Entangled Objects, this week’s readings introduce us to a major transformation in anthropology as a discipline- the focus on material culture, which essentially examines how the things we make and circulate reflect our beliefs about the world.

All five readings are based on concepts highlighted or laid out by Appadurai in his essay on the Social life of things.  This essay is therefore presented as an anchor for discussion this week. 

The crux of Appadurai's argument is that commodities have social lives. By following things in motion, we can understand the human and social contexts within which they circulate and subsequently how value is generated or attributed by societies.However, Appadurai also makes clear that there are different regimes of value- recognition of which is of primary importance to the material culture approach. 

Appadurai argues that there is a need to follow things, “for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories”. Thus, what he seeks to offer  is a  minimum level of “methodological fetishism”as a corrective to over sociologized understandings of human transactions.

Simmel's notion of value is the entry point for Appadurai's analysis. While for Simmel, generation of value lay in the process of exchange, Appadurai argues for a focus on objects in the process of exchange. He also works with a criticism of the typical Marxian understanding of value generation which tends to dichotomise gift and commodity societies, and understands commodities as existing specifically in capitalist societies. (though such a dichotomy is not necessarily true of Marx’s writings). Appadurai challenges this view. He breaks with the production dominant model of value generation to a trajectory approach of commodities and consumption.

This approach offers us an understanding of the social genesis of value, which for Appadurai lies in politics that  links values and exchange.

Some of the themes that could be discussed with respect to his essay include

•   the idea of regimes of value as against cultural context

•  tournaments of value

• movement of goods on destined paths and their diversions

•  generation of demand and desire

•  types of knowledge with regard to commodities and their life histories and the commoditisation of  knowledge itself in complex societies

• knowledge and advertising in capitalist societies

• politics of value

As with Appadurai, Kopytoff argues for understanding commoditisation as a phase in the social life of things. He however identifies a critical difference between complex and small scale societies in terms of the homogeneity of the criteria used for  valuation of object. In simple societies, the level of homogeneity is much higher than in complex societies. The peculiarity of complex societies is that their publicly recognized commoditisation operates side by side with innumerable schemes of valuation and singularisation devised by individuals, social categories and groups, and these schemes stand in 'irresolvable' conflict with public commoditisation as well as with one another. 

The interesting point that Kopytoff makes is the over emphasis in the west against the commoditisation of the human sphere. Do his arguments make a case for the existence of a moral economy/morality in capitalism?

Anna Tsing in keeping with Appadurai's framework looks at the trajectory of an object from production to consumption. Two insights from the piece seem interesting: 1.Commodities are not always created by  conventional  factors of production, but tap into non-capitalist social relations as exemplified by the supply chain model (which is free from alienation and the need to discipline the work force), 2.Subsequently this could be the way out of theoretical orthodoxy  wherein capitalism is understood to be a monolith marked by relations of violence, inequality and injustice. She breaks the  monolith of capitalism by empirically examining the trajectory of matsutake mushrooms, to show how gifts become commodities through the act of assessment, and how the commodity eventually transforms back into the gift at the stage of consumption. 

As a result she highlights the sophisticated nuances of the Capitalist system and  the fluid career that objects have. 

Miller’s article summarises the direction which material culture as a thread of anthropological inquiry has taken. He reiterates many of Appadurai’s arguments, particularly breaking of the gift-commodity dichotomy. He also seeks to overcome the good-evil dichotomy this traditional dualism embodies.Miller's contention is that  the study of kinship which has been the staple diet of anthropology will be replaced by the study of consumption, He argues that the construction of social relations is increasingly carried out  through the process of consumption with goods replacing persons as the key medium of objectification for projects of value. Further, consumption is sought to be understood as detached from a critique of capitalism; the focus is only to ascertain the actual significance of cultural productions and norms on the lives of persons and communities. 

The final article by Michel Callon et al, makes a case for the proliferation of actors involved in the organisation of markets; this includes not only experts of various kinds but also economic agents themselves. Markets are therefore understood to be reflexive spaces. In keeping with some themes highlighted by Appadurai, an important point that emerges in the examination of the 'economy of qualities' is the significance of knowledge in the construction/ reconstruction of a commodity. In particular, Callon highlights the role of consumers in ''qualifying and re qualifying'' commodities and how  it is necessary for producers and market strategists to account for consumers' evaluations. 

All five articles emphasize looking at objects and how they circulate as opposed to types of exchange. It appears that  Appadurai's approach is basically a  reworking of old ideas of economic anthropology, to help us move away from questions of where the source of value lies( structure vs.agency).  Instead, we examine how value plays out processually in different regimes as part of political and social contexts. 

-Keya and Savitha

summary of class discussion - Session 5 (Rashmi and Krupa)

In this session we read geographers who looked at globalization of capitalism and have contributed to the corpus broadly classified as globalization studies. The purpose of the readings was to understand what ‘spatializing’ means to geographers. The readings in this session do not fetishize space as a fixed category; instead they open up discussions around materialization of space. While each of the writers comes from a different tradition they are all rooted in a materialist perspective.

There was a quantitative revolution in Geography in the 1960s with the aim to look at and derive patterns. The 1970s were the decade of Marxist geography, starting with David Harvey and others, who situated space in the material actions of people. As an interpreter of Marx, Harvey writes more like a philosopher and does not strictly confine himself to his discipline. While he spatializes Marx, he appears to have generally accepted the inescapability of the capitalist system as the dominant framework. However he would like us look at alternative constructs of space-time within this dominant framework and builds on Munn’s notion of short term and long term cycles (domains).

For him, time is not separate from place and both place and space are not purely containers - they are dynamic and very much co-constitutive of the practices of people. He also doesn’t agree with the separation of space and place ... for example in architecture space is considered negative and place making positive because the place making process gives identity to the space and makes a place (by meeting utilitarian needs and expectations) out of it.

Katz also doesn’t separate place and space. However her approach is clearly political and not purely analytical; she takes a position and defends it. She also writes from a feminist geography position but in the process questions feminist standpoint theory as not being robust enough to make connections between the spheres of production (economic / wage labour) and social reproduction (non wage labour, usually undertaken by marginalised communities) and suggests a research strategy (of Topographies and Countertopographies) to link various place specific resistances to globalisation’s impact - space-time compression which leads to inequalities and generally impacts the social reproduction sphere in a particular domain more.

Hart also differentiates global and local but advocates a nuanced approach and undertakes ethnographic work to illustrate how different space-time constructions articulate with each other.  She incorporates insights from agrarian studies into her efforts to understand globalization and considers it morally wrong to create value by reducing it elsewhere and advocates a middle ground between economism on one hand and voluntarism on the other. She is also unhappy with the caricaturing of Marx and suggests looking at political economy, culture and geography in a more robust way.

Hart and Roberts suggest that there are strong racial, class and cultural biases to dispossession and one cannot just blame economics (gloablisation?) although capitalism does sustain primitive accumulation as an ongoing process.  All the writers critique the Neo-liberal discourse of man as an economically rational human being as they feel it leads to dilution and ultimately loss of value systems.

Notes on Session 6: Circulating Objects

The readings, from the last session on ‘Circulating Objects’,  seemed to all convey a similar point about the ‘entanglement’ of objects within different spheres of circulation, although an object-centric approach to explain this has been taken only by Nicholas Thomas in his book ‘Entangled Objects’.  The central point that the readings seemed to be making was the need to historicise and contextualise traditional economies within the context of the colonial encounter, unlike the earlier works in economic anthropology that we read (e.g., Munn, Mauss, etc.) which sought to capture a pristine view of traditional societies and their practices of exchange. However, these works also did not present a simplistic evolutionary account of how traditional communities are transformed by the colonial encounter; but as Thomas puts it, show how new values and meanings emerge through active processes of ‘appropriation’ and meaning making.

Thus, Thomas’ book focused on examining how objects acquired new values through the different stages/projects of colonialism. What stood out prominently for many of us, in discussing how Thomas historicises the processes of exchange was his method. Using a comparative approach, drawing on historical material and combining it with present day ethnography, Thomas tries to arrive at a balance between ethnographic detail and general theory, and uses this to question some of the assumptions central to anthropology  – such as the native desire for Western goods; the romantic notions of how a pre-capitalist  societies were based on non-economic modes of exchange, such as exchange of 'gifts'; the overpowering effects of colonialism and capitalism in doing away with traditional values and practices; the myth of metal/technology as providing the big break central to Western imagination of progress and development; etc. Instead he presents the ‘natives’ as agents who actively participated in these various projects of colonialism,  recognizing that these forms of 'engagement' occurred within asymmetrical situations of power. Focusing on ‘objects’, which haven’t received much attention within anthropology, and reading them differently when compared to material culturists (who do not consider the ‘mutability’ of objects), Thomas tries to present  the social changes in traditional societies and their practices, and their historical linkages with colonialism, through their material culture. 

Discussing his work also raised questions about the role of the anthropologist, and his/her method and sources of data. For example how does the anthropologist present the current moment in its historical context? This raises questions about the sources of the data, the reconstruction of history, reading of historical material through our present post-colonial lens and status, and so on. Other problems it raises is about the ethical position of the anthropologist when he/she is involved in using his/her knowledge to support indigenous claims and rights over land /property/historic objects, when this knowledge may itself reveal how these claims have be ‘re-appropriated’ by ‘neo-traditionals’ (a term that Thomas uses) who may themselves have no direct connections with the land. Thus, ‘Entangled Objects’ produced a rich source to discuss and critique the directions and developments in  economic anthropology as a field, but also related problems of history, method and the position of the ethnographer.  

In discussing the other two works (Humphrey and Jones, and Sharon Hutchinson), we saw how these works also complicate our understanding of ‘commodities’ and ‘gifts’, and the different forms of exchange, by arguing for how both these different forms of exchange can exist within the same society. Undertaking a discussion on barter, Humphrey and Jones drew examples, from both, traditional societies, as well as modern, capitalist societies such as America, to show how barter, as a form of exchange, cannot be understood as a stage that existed before the full development of capitalism. Further, they tried to present a more nuanced account of barter, when compared with economic theory which has viewed it only from a utilitarian perspective,  demonstrating the social rules and conditions that enabled a system of barter – such as the of availability of information, and more importantly the presence of good will and mutual perceptions of ‘trust’ and’ fair trade’. Using these two points as the preconditions for the functioning of barter, they argue that barter exchanges are not one-off commercial or economic transactions, but are long-standing social relationships.  

Similarly, Hutchinson, historically traces the changes in the practices of cattle exchange and bride wealth among the southern Sudanese Neur, and demonstrates how, modern interventions, such as money and markets, do not simply come to replace earlier forms of economies and exchanges, but interact in complex manners to create new forms of exchange.  Through her work, Hutchinson tries to show how the Neur maintain distinctions between ‘the cattle of money’ and ‘the cattle of girls’, and thus, strive to maintain traditional values and meanings against the onslaught of capitalist markets and money (thus, also presenting a counter to Marx’s account of money as a homogenising force). Yet, she also shows how the Neur appropriate the money form in making certain conditions possible (that in the traditional Neur society may not have been possible): for example, by widows or unmarried women in maintaining their own independent households; by a man with no sisters in ‘buying’ cattle to be given as bride wealth.  Thus, in Hutchinson’s account of social transformation, the introduction of markets and money cannot be simply seen as an evolution towards more modern forms of economy. Rather, she demonstrates in a complex and layered manner how social meanings and values enter the economic realm, while economic values and practices of exchange also transform social practices, through the active intervention by human actors.