Full Description
Today's growing fascination with flows of people, commodities, technology, capital, images and ideas across national and other boundaries poses fresh theoretical and methodological challenges to anthropology. Commodities offer a particularly useful window on globalization because they, unlike electronically conveyed capital, transport cultural messages. These ideological or symbolic transfers are of particular interest to economic anthropology. This collection considers how conceptions and roles of commodities may change in response to widening spheres of economic interaction and exchange. The essays in this volume are ordered under two themes. Those included in the first section, "Commodities in a Globalizing Marketplace," address historically and culturally defined variations in meanings and practices associated with commodities in globalizing markets. In Part Two, "The Circulation and Revaluation of Commodities", contributors analyze how commodity producers' experiences are informed by colonial and post-colonial history, state directives in the marketplace, and locations in dependent or marginalized regions. The chapters all focus on the production process as it responds to, is distorted by and increasingly is controlled by the determination of the value of those commodities outside a "locality".
Contents
Part 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Commodities and GlobalizationAnthropological Perspectives Part 3 Commodities in a Globalizing Marketplace Chapter 4 Soukouss or Sell-out?: Congolese Popular Dance Music as Cultural Commodity Chapter 5 What It Means to Be Restructured: Nontraditional Commodities and Structural Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa Chapter 6 The Globalization of Agricultural Commodity Systems: Examining Peasant Resistance to International Agribusiness Chapter 7 Tracing Social Relations in Commodity Chains: The Case of Grapes in Brazil Part 8 The Circulation and Revaluation of Commodities Chapter 9 Profit Markets and Art Markets Chapter 10 The Commodification of Hybrid Corn: What Farmers Know Chapter 11 The Impact of Colonial Contact on the Production and Distribution of Glaze-Paint Decorated Ceramics Chapter 12 The Commoditization of Goods and the Rise of the State in Ancient Mesopotamia Chapter 13 Always Cheaply Pleasant: Beer as a Commodity in a Rural Kenyan Society Chapter 14 Commoditization, Cash, and Kinship in Postcolonial Papua New Guinea Chapter 15 From Handicraft to Monocrop: The Production of Pecorino Cheese in Highland Sardinia Chapter 16 Index
