Week Eight notes
Kopytoff
This essay has turned out to be one of the more influential ones from the Appadurai collection, The Social Life of Things. What Kopytoff does so skilfully is suggest that impulses to either exchange and hoard or possess (i.e. divert from exchange networks) are widespread across time and space, and are driven by cultural imperatives. Although commodities are conventionally defined as objects that are produced specifically for exchange (along with other characteristics that make them particularly associated with capitalism), Kopytoff in a sense redefines commoditization as the transformation of any thing, or service, into an alienable good (i.e. something you can give away). Questions of ownership, rights, morality and so forth flow from specific decisions to "commoditize" or conversely to remove objects from the networks of exchange.
The idea of a "commodity path" is a useful one for thinking about the many places and people with whom an object may be associated throughout its life (some of whom "own" it, some who don't, and some whose rights fall somewhere in between). Thinking about a commodity path reminds us that objects don't cease to be of interest upon point of exchange, but rather they continue to be subject of decisions to either reinsert them into exchange markets, OR to insulate them from it, all of which have a bearing on the object's value, as well as larger questions of value at the cultural level.
Kopytoff's concluding section on the degree to which objects can be propelled into exchange, even at the risk of offending dominant social morals, anticipates contemporary debates about organ donation, surrogate parenthood, and indeed the whole concept of a "public" which is supported through exchanges (taxes to services). As I pointed out in class, what may be a possible pattern in contemporary US is an objection to the commodification of certain kinds of THINGS (body parts, persons - i.e. unfree labour, certain "sacred" entities) but respect for certain kinds of capacities which it is felt CAN be offered for sale (in other words the capacity to bear a child (for someone else), body parts and fluids (assuming the donor isn't using them currently!) and voluntary labour, internships, apprenticeships and so on. Much of this hinges on the western assumption that consent is voluntarily given and can be withdrawn at any moment -- a nice thought but one that is in some arenas as hard to enforce here as it is in other parts of the world.
Foster
Is a more conventional examination of commodity chains, or the multiple linkages that are found along the path that stretches from primary production to consumption and after of a given commodity. It is economic at heart, but stresses the social complexity in commodity chains that comes out of the number of vertical integrations that have to be made with local practices/livelihoods connecting to the commodity chain, AND the intersection of commodity chains with each other, and with chains of merchant and productive capital. So in a port city, we might see various local industrial and craft practices interacting with the primary production and/or processing of material; we will also see the articulation of the port city personnel and institutions to larger, national and transnational policies, regulations, government tariffs and laws, and the activity of multinational corporations.
Foster's work invites anthropologists to think about how to do multi-sited ethnography to take in the kind of fluidity and diversity in contemporary industry around the world. However, as yet multi-sited ethnography has yet to seriously threaten the prevailing model of the lone, heroic anthropologist trying to figure it all out by themselves, isolated from others like them. In part this is a funding problem: what if only some of the team get funded and not others? How successful are collaborative/collective project proposals? It's also a methodological challenge, with ethnographers not all agreeing that multi-site ethnography can work very well (see debate between George Marcus and Judith Okely in Social Anthropology)
Myers
Myers's article covers many of the debates surrounding the uses and interpretation of art, as it has been shaped by the western art market. This market itself grows out of changing circumstances of artistic production, patronage and consumption of art, the growth of a "public," a cash economy and -- with respect to the art of other cultures -- western global trade and colonial power. Other seminal works on the topic of "primitive" art and its reception (and the problems of appropriation and misrepresentation that characterize it) include books by Sally Price and Shelly Errington.
Myers has been investigating Aboriginal art and painting for decades, and has written extensively on both the understandings of art in a changing world that come from his "informants" (Pintupi) as well as the transformations and reception of their art when it goes overseas. Of particular interest are notions of "rights" with respect to art. Where in the west "ownership" is a matter of intellectual property, copyright, and contract, for the Pintupi (and other peoples in Australia, and elsewhere) ownership is also something vested in kin relations and clan territory. In Kopytoff's terms, designs can't be commodified or exchanged because they belong to a person, but because they are the property of a group. This "ownership" even extends to forbidding some people from even seeing certain designs. This kind of control over the reproduction and use of designs and art products comes up again and again with the work of indigenous artists. In New Zealand, a formidable amount of case law and state policy has been developed to protect Maori rights over their art. In many parts of the world, in fact, international law and agreements have been enthusiastically embraced by indigenous peoples trying to limit the reuse of their "cultural property" around the world -- this is critical, since national law can only cover examples within a country's territory: it can do nothing about appropriations outside its borders.
The anthropology of art is a massive category of material culture in anthropology, and one that has rarely been looked at AS material culture. There is change going on now, particularly in the wake of efforts to demystify art as a category by analyzing its ideological components (e.g. Frankfurt School), its nature as work, and the link between art and cultural capital (and what is considered élite and what is considered trash).
A theme I felt emerged out of the readings this week was that of capacities instead of products: in other words, that the interest of a capitalist in labor is not as a thing ("labor power") but as a capacity, or the potential of a person to labor, and to make things or offer services. Kopytoff's discussion of commoditization very much takes what is exchanged as a thing, to be enjoyed in and of itself, but clearly the most loaded, exchangeable things (or things that are only exchangeable with considerable anxiety and ambivalence) are capacities, not things. For example, we may think of body organs, like kidneys or wombs, whose value is to do with their capacity for labor (haha), or how they fit inside a system of production. In contrast, easily reproducible body parts are more "thing-like" -- blood, plasma, sperm -- with hair as an interesting indeterminate case since "good" hair is much prized for making wigs. Slavery is problematic because it involves restraint upon capacity among adults who, according to liberal democratic principles, should experience relatively few restraints on their capacity to work, to pursue interests, to engage in sexual activity (or not to engage in sexual activity), to reproduce and so on. I do sometimes wonder if the somewhat lackadaisacal attitude towards slavery today among many people (if they don't think it's safely in the past) is because of a belief that humans in today's world play some part in their own loss of capacity and autonomy. Maybe they were over-trusting, and someone took advantage of them, got them into debt, and then extracted slave labor in repayment. Or unfree labor is exclusively the problem of "underdeveloped" countries without robust human rights. In other words, slaves are either complicit in the harnessing of their capacity, or are wretched people at the mercy of tyrants.
Becker, H.S., 1982.Art worlds. Univ of California Press.
Bourdieu, P., 1993.The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Columbia University Press.
Errington, S., 1998.The death of authentic primitive art: And other tales of progress. Univ of California Press.
Foster, R.J., 2005. Commodity futures: Labour, love and value.Anthropology Today,21(4), pp.8-12.
Geismar, H., 2013.Treasured possessions: Indigenous interventions into cultural and intellectual property. Duke University Press.
Gereffi, G. and Korzeniewicz, M. eds., 1994.Commodity chains and global capitalism(No. 149). ABC-CLIO.
Marcus, G.E., 2007. Response to Judith Okely.Social Anthropology,15(3), pp.361-364.
Myers, F.R., 2002.Painting culture: The making of an aboriginal high art. Duke University Press.
Okely, J., 2007. Reply to George E. Marcus.Social Anthropology,15(3), pp.364-367.
Okely, J., 2007. Response to George E. Marcus.Social Anthropology,15(3), pp.357-361.
Price, S., 2001.Primitive art in civilized places.University of Chicago Press.
Scheper-Hughes, N., 2001.Commodity fetishism in organs trafficking.Body & Society,7(2-3), pp.31-62.
Vora, K., 2009. Indian transnational surrogacy and the disaggregation of mothering work.Anthropology News,50(2), pp.9-12.