Annotated Bibliography
Appadurai, A.
1986 Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. A. Appadurai, ed. Pp. 3-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In the introduction to this respected volume, Appadurai explores “commodity” as a phase through which an object passes rather than an absolute, inherent quality of the object’s nature. He begins with the assumption that exchange creates value, and that social relations, ideas, and contexts (“politics”) link value and exchange. The path that the object follows in and out of commodity status is socially relevant, and “commodities represent very complex social forms and distributions of knowledge” (41). Consumption and exchange are thus communicative acts.
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Hamann, B.
2002 The social life of pre-sunrise things: Indigenous Mesoamerican archaeology. Current Anthropology 43(3):351-382.
Hamann discusses what she calls “indigenous Mesoamerican archaeology,” the practical and symbolic reuse of ancient objects, architecture, and altered landscapes by later Mesoamerican peoples. Two common Mesoamerican views-the concept of artifacts as “survivals from a previous age of creation” and an idea of object animacy-are used to demonstrate an indigenous parallelism to the idea of things having “social lives.”
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Jeudy-Ballini, M., and B. Juillerat, eds.
2002 People and Things: Social Mediations in Oceania. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
This volume seeks to bridge the language gap and theoretical disjuncture of French and English speaking anthropologists by providing French works on various aspects of Oceanian exchange in English. The ways in which objects may be constitutive of identity are given special attention, as are explorations of the social underpinnings of exchange systems. Particularly interesting are the pieces on gendered exchange: Douaire-Marsaudon’s “The kava ritual and the reproduction of male identity in Polynesia” and Lemonnier’s “Women and wealth in New Guinea.”
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Kopytoff, I.
1986 The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. A. Appadurai, ed. Pp. 64-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This essay examines the social process behind commoditization. Kopytoff stresses the cognitive aspects behind the production of commodities, in which the object is “culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing” (64). Adopting a cultural biographical perspective in which the existence of an object is traced from collection of raw materials through use, discard, and reuse to final destruction reveals the different ways in which the object has been culturally construed. Commodities are also discussed in contrast to singularized objects, as are differences between modern Western and non-Western societies.
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Malinowski, B.
1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
In addition to being a foundational ethnography, Malinowski’s study provides one of the first descriptions of the social life of things through his discussion of the Kula ring. In this exchange system of the Massim Archipelago, non-utilitarian goods-necklaces and armbands-are traded in a circular pattern. The act of trade, more than the possession of objects, creates social status, and during Kula trading cycles networks of obligation and reciprocity are established and maintained.
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Mauss, M.
1954 The Gift. I. Cunnison, transl. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
(Originally published as Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques in Annee Sociologique (1923-4).
In this classic text, Mauss discusses the cross-cultural phenomenon of gift-giving. Gifts are described as total social facts or total prestations which have potential religious, moral, or other social meanings in addition to their economic value. Exchange of gifts is discussed in terms of social obligations; gifts are not disinterested. Because of the motivations behind gift-giving and their status as total social facts, the exchange of gifts helps shape the nature of social life.
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Miller, D.
1987 Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Daniel Miller argues that consumption-particularly mass consumption-has been ignored by anthropologists to the detriment of material culture studies. He uses the concept of objectification to describe “a series of processes consisting of externalization (self-alienation) and sublation (reabsorption) through which the subject of such a process is created and developed” (12). Objects are critical to the ways in which society and the individual create themselves. The philosophical argument is made with reference to the works of Simmel, Hegel, and Marx and is fleshed out using examples from Oceanian non-industrialized and Western industrialized societies.
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Skuse, A.
2005 Enlivened objects: The social life, death and rebirth of radio as commodity in Afghanistan. Journal of Material Culture 10(2):123-137.
This interesting case study explores the movement of a particular potential commodity, the radio, within the social and economic spheres of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. For those living in poverty, material wealth is often transitory, and strategies are used to maximize returns and utility from possessions. Goods are therefore both tenuous and tenacious. In Afghanistan, radios serve as symbols of modernity and connection with the outside world, sources of entertainment, and as objects which may be sold and reconverted back into wealth if needed.
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Thomas, N.
1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thomas emphasizes the “promiscuity” of objects’ social lives. Through the investigation of how Indigenous peoples appropriated European things and vice versa, Miller illustrates how exchange was a social as well as economic act. Miller also emphasizes the materiality of the gift or commodity, arguing that the physical object has been underemphasized in favor of the social relations demonstrated by its exchange.
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van Binsbergen, W., and P. Geschiere, eds.
2005 Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited). Münster: Lit Verlag.
Compiled almost twenty years after the original discussion, this volume extends the concepts presented in The Social Life of Things to reflect modern political and economic realities. Case studies from Africa and Asia are used to examine the world of finance, relations between production and consumption, and the limits of the concept of commodification. Arjun Appadurai’s article on “Materiality in the future of anthropology” and Colin Renfrew’s piece “Archaeology and commodification: The role of things in societal transformation” are particularly useful additions.
