The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective by Arjun Appadurai

The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective by Arjun Appadurai

PART 1

Toward an anthropology of things

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: commodities and the
politics of value
ARJUN APPADURAI
This essay has two aims. The first is to preview and set the context
for the essays that follow it in this volume. The second is to propose
a new perspective on the circulation of commodities in social life. The
gist of this perspective can be put in the following way. Economic
exchange creates value. Value is embodied in commodities that are
exchanged. Focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than
simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to
argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics,
construed broadly. This argument, which is elaborated in the text of
this essay, justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have
social lives.1
Commodities can provisionally be defined as objects of economic
value. As to what we ought to mean by economic value, the most
useful (though not quite standard) guide is Georg Simmel. In the first
chapter of The Philosophy of Money (1907; English translation, 1978),
Simmel provides a systematic account of how economic value is best
defined. Value, for Simmel, is never an inherent property of objects,
but is a judgm ent made about them by subjects. Yet the key to the
comprehension of value, according to Simmel, lies in a region where
“that subjectivity is only provisional and actually not very essential”
(Simmel 1978:73).
In exploring this difficult realm, which is neither wholly subjective
nor quite objective, in which value emerges and functions, Simmel
suggests that objects are not difficult to acquire because they are

valuable, “but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to
possess them” (p. 67). What Simmel calls economic objects, in particular,

exist in the space between pure desire and immediate enjoyment,
with some distance between them and the person who desires them,
which is a distance that can be overcome. This distance is overcome
in and through economic exchange, in which the value of objects is
determined reciprocally. That is, one’s desire for an object is fulfilled
by the sacrifice of some other object, which is the focus of the desire
of another. Such exchange of sacrifices is what economic life is all

The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective by Arjun Appadurai