Samenvatting: Arjun Appadurai – The Social Life of Things
Ch 1 – Introduction: commodities and the politics of value (Appadurai)
Essay with two aims:
o Preview other essays in volume
o Propose a new perspective on the circulation of commodities in social life.
Economic exchange generates value, embodied in commodities.
By focussing on objects politics become the link between value and exchange.
This makes that objects, just like people, have social lives.
Commodities: objects of economic value.
Simmel: economic value: not a property of objects, but a judgement made by subjects.
o It’s not that objects are valuable, but objects that resist our desire become valuable.
o There is a space between desire and enjoyment, and the person who desires moves
somewhere in between, overcoming the distance through means of economic
exchange by which the value of objects is determined reciprocally.
o The desire for one object is fulfilled by sacrificing another that is desired by the other.
Economic value is not just value in general, but a definite sum of value that results from
commensuration, the exchange between sacrifice and gain.
o The demand for an object, as the basis for exchange, gives an object value.
Exchange is not a by-product of value, it is the source of value.
This book aims to explore the conditions under which economic objects circulate in different
regimes of value in space and time.
o This requires one to look beyond the Western assumption that every “thing” has a
label attached made up of “words” and often relates to attributions of them.
The spirit of commodity
In what does a commodities sociality exist?
o Marx (narrow): commodity: a product intended for exchange, as these emerge under
the institutional, psychological and economic conditions of capitalism.
o Marx (today): commodity: special kind of manufactured goods associated with
capitalism shaped after European organizational and technical forms.
o Marx (broad): commodity: an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies
human wants of some sort or another.
To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it
will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange.
Even for Marx the economy was aimed purely at production, and evolutionary.
o Appadurai: commodity: any thing intended for exchange.
Things with a particular type of social potential, distinguishable from products,
objects, goods, artifacts and other things, in certain respects.
Exchange: the production of use value for others.
Barter: exchange of objects without reference to money and with maximum reduction of
social, cultural, political or personal transaction costs.
o Chapman: commodities should be kept separated from barter, since the former
assume the use of money objects, instead of using money as measure of equivalence.
o Appadurai: commodities and barter have a commonality of spirtits, since both have an
object-centered, impersonal and asocial nature.
This makes barter a special form of commodity exchange where money plays
an indirect role, which is something that almost all societies ever have known.
Gifts: opposed to the profit and calculated spirit of commodity circulation, linking things to
persons to embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations.
o Bourdieu: gifts are a particular form of commodity exchange where the ration contract
of self-interest is disguised and delayed in time.
Ch 1 – Introduction: commodities and the politics of value (Appadurai)
Essay with two aims:
o Preview other essays in volume
o Propose a new perspective on the circulation of commodities in social life.
Economic exchange generates value, embodied in commodities.
By focussing on objects politics become the link between value and exchange.
This makes that objects, just like people, have social lives.
Commodities: objects of economic value.
Simmel: economic value: not a property of objects, but a judgement made by subjects.
o It’s not that objects are valuable, but objects that resist our desire become valuable.
o There is a space between desire and enjoyment, and the person who desires moves
somewhere in between, overcoming the distance through means of economic
exchange by which the value of objects is determined reciprocally.
o The desire for one object is fulfilled by sacrificing another that is desired by the other.
Economic value is not just value in general, but a definite sum of value that results from
commensuration, the exchange between sacrifice and gain.
o The demand for an object, as the basis for exchange, gives an object value.
Exchange is not a by-product of value, it is the source of value.
This book aims to explore the conditions under which economic objects circulate in different
regimes of value in space and time.
o This requires one to look beyond the Western assumption that every “thing” has a
label attached made up of “words” and often relates to attributions of them.
The spirit of commodity
In what does a commodities sociality exist?
o Marx (narrow): commodity: a product intended for exchange, as these emerge under
the institutional, psychological and economic conditions of capitalism.
o Marx (today): commodity: special kind of manufactured goods associated with
capitalism shaped after European organizational and technical forms.
o Marx (broad): commodity: an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies
human wants of some sort or another.
To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it
will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange.
Even for Marx the economy was aimed purely at production, and evolutionary.
o Appadurai: commodity: any thing intended for exchange.
Things with a particular type of social potential, distinguishable from products,
objects, goods, artifacts and other things, in certain respects.
Exchange: the production of use value for others.
Barter: exchange of objects without reference to money and with maximum reduction of
social, cultural, political or personal transaction costs.
o Chapman: commodities should be kept separated from barter, since the former
assume the use of money objects, instead of using money as measure of equivalence.
o Appadurai: commodities and barter have a commonality of spirtits, since both have an
object-centered, impersonal and asocial nature.
This makes barter a special form of commodity exchange where money plays
an indirect role, which is something that almost all societies ever have known.
Gifts: opposed to the profit and calculated spirit of commodity circulation, linking things to
persons to embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations.
o Bourdieu: gifts are a particular form of commodity exchange where the ration contract
of self-interest is disguised and delayed in time.
