Commodification and its consequences: Consumption and authenticity
SAN266, week2, February 27, 2018


Group work
•What is commodity?
•What is commodification?
•Do you know any authors/works focusing on commodification or exchange of commodities? How they
conceptualised commodities and exchange of commodities?

Gregory. Gifts and Commodities. 1982
•Gift exchange (gift societies/economies):
•Transfer: obligatory, unlimited by time (relationships last in time)
•Transactors – mutually obliged and related or transfer creates rekat
•Objects – inalienable (taonga)
•Commodity exchange (commodity societies/economies):
•Transfer: voluntary, time is limited by transaction
•Transactors – unrelated, relation is defined and motivated by transaction
•Objects – alienable, value is commercial
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Gregory. Gifts and Commodities. 1982
•Ideal types of exchange and of societies -> Form of transaction is characteristic for a type of
society and social relations
•Gift societies – clan-based, qualitative social relations, reproduction of social beings
•Commodity societies – class/based (production), quatitative social relations, social reproduction
of things
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Critiques/expansions
•James Carrier. 1995. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700:
•Commodities are gifts
•Arjun Appadurai. 1986. Social Life of Things; Kopytoff.1986. Cultural biography of things
•The status of things changes in tournaments of value or during their biographies – things become
commodities in the process of commodification and can be decomoditified.
•Nicolas Thomas. Entangled objects. 1991
•Things are promiscuous: they change their meaning and status as they move from context to context
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Group work two:
•The movie Gods must be crazy shows usual European preconception about first contact of
non-capitalist societies with consumer goods. Watch beginning of the movie and describe how it
depicts effect of consumer goods on non-capitalist society.
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•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdmpofujRmc&list=PLI8IGY1FbP5259LiXrPa38nPjxfBGBH_4&index=10
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Consumer culture and modernity
•Don Slater: Consumer culture as the culture of modern West – related to activities, institutions
and values defining western Modernity: choice, individualism, market relations
•Romantization of no-Europeans as authentic; romantization of Europeans as only real heirs of
industrial revolutions
•In SAN:
•Otherness (as object of the study of SAN) is constituted as unfragmented culture opposed to
modernity
•Modernity and social changed interpreted as a loss of authentic culture

Western myths on consumption
•Consumption means a loss of authenticity
•Consumption is an act of free choice
•People have different attitude to consumption than to production, attitude to production is more
superficial
•Mass consumption related to increase in irrational desires replaced more utilitarian and rational
relation to material culture
•consumption is in opposition to production
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Consumer culture and modernity
•In SAN:
•Otherness (as object of the study of SAN) is constituted as unfragmented culture opposed to
modernity
•Modernity and social changed interpreted as a loss of authentic culture

Antropologists are coming, hide TVs!
http://wemovetogether.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/anthropologists.jpg


Consumption as a threat to authenticity
•Anthropology until 1970’s ignoring consumption – chapters on social change
•„social change“- consumption as a threat to the concept of culture
•Interpretations of consumer goods:
1.Incorporation to cosmology, ideally through ritual (Carsten – money, Torren - Drinking cash,
Miller – Christmas, Cargo cults)
2.Desctruction of cosmology – (Bohannan and Bohannan – spheres of echange at Tiv, Comaroff and
Comaroff – Godly beasts, beastly goods)
3.

Cargo
•Cargo cults:
•Millenarian movements first described in Melanesia, encompass a range of practices that will
result in the appearance of material wealth, particularly highly desirable Western goods
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•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmlYe2KS0-Y

Cargo cults – Vanuatu, John Frum Army



Spheres of exchange
•Bohannan and Bohannan. 1968. Tiv Economy.
•Spheres of exchange: Goods and services belong to distinct value categories and can be exchanged
only within the category (sphere of exchange) they belong to
•Tiv: 3 spheres of exchange (subsistence goods, ritual and prestigious goods including slaves,
people)
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Important works
•Marshall Sahlins. 1974. Original Affluent society
•There is no natural desire to own goods or to own a lot. Against evolutionist hypothesis that free
time evolves with affluence in late stages of social evolution
•Nancy Munn. 1986. Fame of Gawa
•Consumption is not utilitarian/functional
•Marilyn Strathern. 1988. Gender of Gift.
•Property and production are not neccesarily related
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Daniel Miller
•Daniel Miller. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption
•Focus on modern western society and consumption, consumption as creation of culture in capitalism
•Daniel Miller (ed.). 1995. Acknowledging Consumption.
•Research of consumption transforms anthropology as discipline
•Global mass consumption means that people define themselves and their culture through commodities
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Miller, Mintz, Tambiah etc.
•Consumption is a means for creation of cultural forms. Creates modernity as heterogeneous praxis
•Comaroff 1996:20 „culture is constructed through consumption“
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