Andrew's Wiki
Social Life Things

it’s an edited vol of essays from anthropologists and social historians; Appadurai writes intro

Intro

• “Economic exchange creates value…what creates the link between exchange and its value is politics, construed broadly.”
  • Seriously? why are you replacing three hundred year old theories of value with “politics?”
• And the book “justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social lives.”
• Simmel: value is a judgment of objects made by subjects, not inherent in the object. Nonetheless, understanding value occurs where “that subjectivity is only provisional and actually not very essential” 73
  • what I found on that page of Simmel: that aesthetic value like all value happens when a feeling is projected by the subject onto the object, and the quality now looks like it’s inherent in the object; and then what happens is you have a distance from the object b/c it merely provokes feelings: rather than you actually having to interact w/that object anymore
  • “we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them” Simmel again
    • exchange for Simmel: “consists on only in exchanging values but in the exchange of values” (sacrifice), so value is in Appadurai’s words a “commensuration of two intensities of demand”
  • for Simmel, value comes from exchange, doesn’t pre-exist exchange: “the difficulty of acquisition, the sacrifice offered in exchange” (simmel’s words)
    • scarcity is the “objectification” of this fluid balance (instead of scarcity already determining value up front)
• Method/goal of book: “exploring the conditions under which economic objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time” 4
  • “desire and demand, reciprocal sacrifice and power [rather than absolute] interact to create economic value in specific social situations”
• “consumption is subject to social control and political redefinition”
• he says commodities are the product only of “modern industrial economies”
  • critiques Marxist understanding of commodities as “purist”
  • commodities: “a particular type of social potential” diff from ‘products’ ‘goods’ ‘artifacts’ “but only in certain respects” so that commodities exist in “a very wide variety of societies”
• Clearly Appadurai doesn’t understand hist mat, doesn’t understand where Marx’s ideas came from: “attenuated as soon as he becomes embroiled in the details of his analysis of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.”
  • apparently this guy thinks that ideas come from the sky and then are applied to the earth…as Marx has ideas and then suddenly wanders to the factory, ‘oops this is cool’
• He’s just marketing off the market value of commodities in academia right now