Appadurai and Carrier both give us some useful insights into various approaches to objects. Carrier provides a fairly concise overview of theoretical approaches to objects as signs or signifiers of status, as well as their role in mediating private interactions between individuals. Though this short piece is more an introduction than an article with an argument, it is made clear that Carrier critique of those approaches s/he describes is that they are too abstract in their focus on overarching structural focuses and do not make room for a more detailed analysis in terms of ‘interpersonal, private, structures of social relationships.’
It is difficult to comment on or critique this observation as it is not given room in the selection to be very meaningfully fleshed out. As someone who is generally suspicious of non-structural approaches and the supposed distinction between private and public spheres, (I find them to be depoliticizing and too subjective to provide any use on a broader scale), I’d be very interested to read an elaboration of this concern of Carriers. S/he for example admits that the private and public are intertwined and cannot be neatly distinguished. I would then suggest that perhaps there should be an increase on a theoretical focus on this intertwining than necessarily attempting to separate them and privilege one over the other. I understand the inclination to pay ‘more attention to private practises’ in order to ‘understand the nature of the public realm,’ but if the opposite is true also, which I am convinced it is, then why the need for distinction?
Appadurai’s piece is a significantly more detailed discussion of the circulation of commodities in social life. He asserts that value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged, and argues that the link between exchange and value is political. He guides us through an understanding of what objects he considers commodities (“things with a particular type of social potential”), and decides thus that commodities are not exclusively the domain of capitalist societies.
One thing I found particularly interesting was the consequent troubling of the notion that barter and gift-economies do not involve commodities simply by virtue of the fact that they do not involve monetary exchange. His critique of the over-romanticising of gift economies struck me rather deeply, as someone who is frequently in the midst of those who engage in exactly such a romanticization (teenaged anarchists who worship Kropotkin a bit too much – formerly guilty as charged...). His understanding of non-capitalist societies to also involve commodification was really useful in helping to reveal a broader more dynamic understanding of commodity, recognize the “calculative dimension in all forms of exchange” and shift the understanding of commodities from being objects as such to one of them as “things in a certain situation.”
Given the new, situational, understanding of commodity, Appadurai then touches upon the necessary fluidity of the commodity state and the way in which it can be seen as a temporal phase of an objects biography. The notion of individuality and subjectivity of commodity exchange comes up here as well in a much more elaborate and convincing way than as discussed by Carrier, though I still don’t necessarily understand this analysis to be separate from or negate broader structural and ‘public’ understandings of commodities and their perceived value. In the case of cross cultural exchanges, divergent understandings and assumptions about an objects value are clearly shaped by differentiated broader and politicized understandings and it seems obvious that an interrogation of both ‘regimes’ is necessary for an understanding of these more specific exchanges. (I’m not saying that Appadurai is suggesting that they be separate – he clearly stated that commodity exchange is necessarily political, I was just musing on the possibility that this sort of thing may have been what Carrier was getting at...)
In an attempt to stop myself from deconstructing and discussing every aspect of the things I found interesting or compelling about Appadurai’s piece (there are a lot), I’ll end by posing the (rather broad/vague) question: “Given an understanding of commodity exchange as political, can there ever be such thing as an anti-oppressive, anti-hierarchical system of exchange? How silly is Parecon on a scale of 1 to Cheryl Misak?”
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