Summary of Week 7 discussion (Keya and Savitha)

Week 7

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Discussion on Commoditisation and Commodity Circulation

The discussion began with questioning whether a material culture approach neglects the social conditions/circumstances within which objects are produced. With regard to Appadurai’s arguments, some of us wondered whether he was making a case for agency, or privileging action over structure.

There was some disagreement over whether Appadurai was reversing or reworking Simmel’s emphasis on exchange. Is he shifting the focus to the object rather than social relations that mark moments of exchange, or is he claiming that it is the object that determines value and not exchange?

An interesting insight gained through Appadurai’s approach is the idea of commodities with meanings. The fact that certain objects lend themselves to political manipulation more than others, reflect their socially inscribed meanings. For instance, Gandhi’s use of khadi was strategic.

While discussing Kopytoff in relationship to Appadurai, the class generally agreed that Appadurai seems concerned with social life in a commodity, and Kopytoff focuses on the commodity in social life. Is Kopytoff’s approach more clearly representative of the material culture approach (in documenting the biography of objects)? One question posed at this stage of the discussion was whether the material culture approach privileges luxury goods, over regular everyday objects.

The challenge with a material culture approach seems to be how the ‘social’ is to be accounted for. In this context, some questions were raised about Appadurai’s understanding of the commodity. Is he working within a Marxist framework or adopting a different direction? He claims to be working with a criticism of the Marxist understanding of commodity but the class didn't seem entirely convinced. Further, there seemed to be some confusion over how Appadurai defined a commodity vis a vis a a 'good' or 'product' - something Callon does better in his essay.

Kopytoff, through his distinction between singularization and commoditization, tries to account for what can and cannot be commoditized. Culture seems to be presented in this analysis for what accounts for singularization or non-commoditisation. It is within this frame that the distinction between people and objects is made, with human bodies or substances resisting commoditization.

An observation made in the discussion was the importance of knowledge in consumption practices. Without understanding the ‘value’ of product A and product B, one would not be able to partake in its consumption. Does this not mean that without the social fabric, objects have no meaning?

At this point, Anna Tsing is relevant as she argues that different actors can have differing sets of knowledge about objects, such as the matsutaki mushrooms.  In processes of consumption, production and circulation, different actors attribute differing meanings to the mushrooms. At the picking stage, for instance, the refugees and veterans see mushrooms differently.

An important point of discussion that emerged from Tsing (despite two different essays having been read by some of us), was how supply chain capitalism co-opts non-capitalist transactions within its fold. There were some questions about whether this reflected the possibility of some transactions remaining outside the control of global capital, or  if all transactions have ultimately been subsumed by the capitalist system?

A point of debate was what Tsing meant by ‘overcoming theoretical orthodoxy’. Did it mean capitalism had a less violent side to its accumulation, or that different actors within the system may interpret their positions differently? In the process of attributing different meanings to their situation in the capitalist economy, are actors exercising some form of agency? Does the systematic finding of new avenues to tap into labour and natural resources, apart from primitive accumulation, mean that the system has become less violent?

At this juncture Callon's article on economy of qualities was also discussed, particularly the argument of how consumers are now part of the production process becoming 'prosumers'. Consumers are no longer passive recipients of commodities but through various forms of ICT and continuous interaction with producers are now influencing production choices and processes. Some of the questions raised during the discussion included whether there is a greater fetishisation in products as a result of the involvement of the consumer? Isn’t it making the consumer more and more disassociated from processes of production? Fair trade labels for instance seem to have created a ‘brand- value’, removed from actual production processes.

 We concluded with Miller's essay that summed up the trends and approach of material culture and the the shift of focus to consumption. Why did this shift occur? Commoditization as an idea becomes important in the 80’s when the west experienced a period of excessive consumption. Further, this was also the period where anthropologists of the west began looking at their own societies; and began to realise that consumption marks capitalism as much as production and social relations.