ANTH1002 Anthropology and the Global

Neil Maclean

What is a commodity and what is commoditization (commodification). A commodity is a thing that has both a use value and an exchange value. The use value consists of the qualities of a thing. These may be functional properties (a tool), symbolic, or aesthetic properties (a flag, a piece of music) or the connection a thing has to a particular place or person. Most consumer items we are familiar with combine the functional, symbolic and aesthetic. The exchange value is the quantitative estimation of its value that allows a commodity to be exchanged for other things. This can be direct barter, where there might be a convention that that, say, three fish are swapped for a hand of bananas, or exchange could take place through the medium of money. While there has been a long technical debate about the relationship between exchange value and price, we can usefully think about the exchange value of a thing as its price. If you look for definitions of the term commodity you will find that most immediately refer to the characteristics of commodity markets. In other words the point of a commodity is not just that it is bought and sold, but that the market for a commodity brings as many buyers and sellers together as possible. In doing so it enables particular transactions but it also sets the price of the commodity. A defining characteristic of globalisation is the tendency for the size and geographical scope of such markets to increase and indeed become global. Looked at in this way a commodity is not simply a thing but can be thought of as a class of things (for example, barrels of crude oil, or software) for which there is a single market. We talk about what the market will bear for a particular class of commodity. The market may be institutionalised as in the case of a stock exchange, however more broadly it is all those buyers and sellers who are linked by the flow of information on what sellers have to offer and what buyers are willing to pay. It is this flow of information in the process of setting a price that makes it a single market. Commodities, then, are both the general classes of things sold on the commodity exchanges, AND the various things that individuals consume every day! The tendency of such markets is for any one example of a commodity to be simply interchangeable for any other example. Different sellers become increasingly indifferent to who their buyers are and where come from and buyers become indifferent to the identity of sellers and where a particular product comes from. In the technical discussion of markets this is referred to as fungibility. More broadly however this is one aspect of the process we generally refer to as commoditization. This is one of the reasons that, within the literature on globalisation, commoditzation is linked to discussions of deterritorialisation. But just as deterritorialization brings reterritorialization in its wake, so is there a tendency for global markets in some classes of things to produce ever finer distinctions. While petrol and silicon chips and instant coffee may be increasingly 1

interchangeable (generic), the market in coffee beans (for instance) is at the same time increasingly linked to distinct nationalities and awareness of local ecological specificity. In other words commoditization can become a part of creating new kinds of identity, and the marketing of local commodities that enter the global pool of commodities is frequently one aspect of that identity. There is a second, but equally important, tendency of commoditization that authors are concerned with in the course readings we have selected. This is the extension of the commodity form of value to a range of things that have not in the past been regarded as commodities. This is the tendency for everything to have a price put on it. In this course we draw on Scheper-Hughes example of the development of a global trade in human organs as one example of such a process of commoditization. Another extreme example is slavery, in which human beings are treated as things for the purposes of economic calculation. But the problem is not just one of turning the human body into a commodity. There is also a tendency for the intangible properties of relations between people, such as love and care, to become commodified as services. Commoditization then is no longer simply about things. From this perspective commoditization poses one of the fundamental moral struggles of contemporary globalization. If we understand this process as an inherent tendency of all societies that are organized around the market, then the issue of where to draw the line between whats for sale and what isnt, between what has a commodity (market) value and what is priceless, has become afundamental moral and political problem. Scheper-Hughes article is both about attempts to regulate this line, and moral perceptions of that line, particularly on the part of the poor. The concern that Christens informants have with properness reflects this dilemma as well. Ongs discussion of the tension between the instrumental and moral aspects of family relationships provides another example, as does the expanding global market in nannies and the commoditization of domestic relationships that is part of that. While the moral aspect of these dilemmas is important, please do not lose sight of the fact that such dilemmas reflect the processes by which an economy is being fundamentally changed in character. For instance, one consequence of processes of commoditization can be radical changes in economic relationships previously based on the gift. It is important, however, to recognise that globalisation is not just about the expanding march of commoditization. Schram for instance, demonstrates how monetary transactions remain embedded in a local cultural context defined in terms of kinship obligation and the ethos of the gift. As importantly then, in the contemporary global context, commodified transactions do not necessarily displace gift exchange, but may rather be linked to gift relationships in the distinctive ways in which people and things circulate in global contexts. 2

A final point. It is important to recognise that a condition of the kinds of process of commoditization we are examining, their scale and geographic scope, is money. These days we tend to take the fact of money for granted. We take the standardisation of national currencies, the local availability of money, and the global exchangeability of currencies for granted. In a term I mentioned above, we take the fungibility of money for granted. It is important to recognise how recent achievement this has been and the scale of the political and institutional labour that has gone into money.