Appadurai. The Social Life of Things. 1986 [PDF]

Citation preview

' '



C- (,' .._) [



The social life of things



J



Commodities in cultural perspective



Edited by ARJUN APPADURAI University of Pennsylvania



The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell



all manner of books was granted by Henry Vlll in 1534. The University has printed



and published continuously since 1584.



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge London New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney



Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP 32 fast 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia



Contents



©Cambridge University Press 1986 First published 1986 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalogi,ng-in-Publication Data



Contributors



page vii



Main entry under title: The social life of things.



Foreword by Nancy Farriss



Includes index. 1. Commerce - Social aspects - Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Economic anthropology - Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Commerce - History - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Appadurai, Arjun, l 949GN450.S63 1986 306'.3 85-19529



Preface



ISBN 0 521 32351 7



Xlll



Part I Toward an anthropology of things Introduction: commodities and the politics of value



British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data



The social life of things : commodities in cultural perspective. I. Economic anthropology 2. Raw materials I. Appadurai, Arjun 306'.3 GN450



ix



3



Arjun Appadurai



2 The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process



64



Igor Kopytoff



Part II



Exchange, consumption, and display



3 Two kinds of value in the Eastern Solomon Islands William H. Davenport 4



Newcomers to the world of goods: consumption among the Muria Goods



95



110



Alfred Gell



Part III



Prestige, commemoration, and value



5 Varna and the emergence of wealth in prehistoric Europe



141



Colin Renfrew



6



Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics Patrick Geary v



169



Contents



v1



Part IV



Production regimes and the sociology of demand



7 Weavers and dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet Brian Spooner 8



Qat: changes in the production and consumption of a quasilegal commodity in northeast Africa Lee V. Cassanelli



195



Contributors



236



is Associate Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule (1981 ). ARJUN APPADURAI



Part V 9



10



Historical transformations and commodity codes



The structure of a cultural crisis: thinking about cloth in France before and after the Revolution William M. Reddy



261



The origins of swadeshi (home industry): cloth and Indian society, 1700-1930 C. A. Bayly



285



c. A. BAYLY is Fellow of St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, and Smuts Reader in Commonwealth Studies. He has published The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920 (1975) and Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (1983). v. CASSANELLI teaches in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Shaping of Somali Society: Reconstructing the History of a Pastoral People ( 1982).



LEE



Index



323



WILLIAM H. DAVENPORT teaches anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Curator for Oceania at the University Museum. He has done field research in Jamaica and the Solomon Islands and historical research on pre-European Hawaii, and has published extensively on all these areas. PATRICK GEARY is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida. He is the author of Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (1978) and Aristocracy in Provence: The Rhone Basin at the Dawn of the Carolingian Age (1985).



teaches social anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries: Umeda Society, Language and Ritual (1975). ALFRED GELL



IGOR KOPYTOFF of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania is coeditor (with Suzanne Miers) of Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives ( 1977) and author of Varieties of Witchcraft: The Social Economy of Secret Power (forthcoming).



Vll