Commodities

The anthropology of commodities has a significant history, although it has picked up pace and intensity since the 1980s. Commodities generally are understood as goods that are subject to market exchange; yet anthropologists also have expanded, problematized, and relativized this definition. The anthropological study of commodities often is framed in terms of research on consumption or consumer culture; it is also linked with studies of globalization, cross-cultural encounter, and large-scale economic transformation. Scholarship stretches across disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries, impacting and impacted by developments in economics, political economy, cultural studies, sociology, and geography as well as sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, economic anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. This article centers on theoretical and ethnographic perspectives from sociocultural anthropology. However, certain key texts from beyond the discipline are included, particularly when their impact on anthropological analysis has been significant and ongoing. While the study of commodities goes back at least as far as Adam Smith, Karl Marx (b. 1818–d. 1883) was an early and continuing influence on anthropological understandings and definitions of the commodity. Early-to-mid-20th-century anthropologists typically described economies that were not centered around commodity exchange but involved other modes of exchange closely tied with kinship, cosmology, and ritual; commodities were conceptualized mainly, implicitly or explicitly, in the effort to define these other forms of exchange by contrast. In the 1980s–2000s, these frameworks were revisited as anthropologists presented new theories of exchange and value. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, some anthropologists incorporated Marx’s materialism, paying close attention to long-term histories of colonization and capitalist expansion. Such work helped opened the door to a new generation of studies that focused on the trade and consumption of commodities as integral to the processes of cross-cultural encounter, cultural change, and capitalist “modernization” happening around the world. By the 1990s, the conversation had shifted for many anthropologists to the study of globalization: How had sped-up production and new communications technologies impacted cultures? How did commodities and commodity images, circulated transnationally, serve as vehicles of cultural expression or transformation? In the 21st century, anthropologists are investigating the social and political as well as economic arrangements associated with neoliberalism through attention not only to commodity consumption, but more broadly to commodification—of emotional labor, reproductive capacity, or linguistic ability, for example—as an increasingly salient aspect of contemporary life. Attention also has turned to how efforts toward “ethical consumption” are reshaping consumerism around the world—not necessarily with the intended political and environmental consequences.