Reflections on Arjun Appadurai's "The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective"

The anthropological perspective on commodification

Review of the Marxist school

Before discussing the anthropological perspective, let us review the Marxist and business theories of commodification so as to later compare the anthropological perspective. Is it a separate third perspective or is it a sort of "hybrid" of the two dominant schools?

There are two major schools of thought when it comes to commodification. One is often called the "Marxist" school of thought and the other is called the business school of thought. The Marxist school is somewhat liberally referred to by this name given the way it appears to also have evolved from the Frankfurt school (Adorno & Horkheimer for example) as well as other scholars such as Lukács and Veblen.

Lukács

For example, Lukács was in a dialectic with Marx when he wrote about reification and provided a foundation for later "Marxist" notions about commodification: commodification as subject vs. object, turning anything (including culture) into something that can be bought or sold, and he even seemed to provided the basis for commodification of intellectual property with his idea that intangible objects or even ideas could be turned into actual "things" to be bought and sold.

Veblen

Veblen set up the idea of conspicuous consumption--meaning commodities are often used to convey messages about social belonging or class. (A notion related to our own work in the paper "Mixed exchange: Commodification and decommodification").

Review of the business theory

Business theories of commoditization (as commodification is usually called in business disciplines) became popularized in the 1990s to mean that products become largely undifferentiated (on all counts except for price), mass produced, uniform, and fungible. While the Marxist term commodification can (and often does) speak to issues of ethics and morality, the business focus is on preference, gain, advantage, or convenience--things that can be extrinsically measured based on certain standards. These standards are necessarily subjective to a degree, but the key is that any subjectivity be, as Simmel noted, "only provisional and actually not very essential" (1978, Appadurai also employed this definition by Simmel 1988, 4).

Appadurai's approach

As is usual for Appadurai, he produced a work that was decades ahead of its time in his 1988 piece "The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective." A summary of his work deserves more than one sentence, but allow me to try to reduce it to just that: Appadurai took a "provisional" definition of commodities (as "objects of economic value") and then observed that these commodities' value and the way they are exchanged has political underpinnings. 

In my mind, Appadurai noted the connection between the social and cultural aspects of commodities (as described in the Marxist school) and the relationship between commodification as it would come to be defined in business theory over the coming decade (Appadurai wrote this in 1988 and commoditization became popular in business theory over the 1990s). 

• Appadurai notes that "things" (commodities) have economic value rooted in the (potential for) exchange of those things in an economic sense, but he notes that those values are socially created based on socio-historical context and social perceptions of demand for those objects.
• Objects of economic value also having social meanings inscribed in their forms, uses and trajectories. 
• The study of commodities are of broad "independent" interest across several kinds of anthropology:
• Economic anthropology because commodities are the basic unit of economic value
• Cultural and other anthropologists because commodities are the stuff of material culture
• Social anthropologists and social exchange theorists because commodities are at the heart of not only economic value, but of gifting (we took this approach to discuss how commodities can be described as decommodified when given as gifts)
• The study of commodities are of broad "independent" interest across several kinds of disciplines outside of anthropology.
• Appadurai also writes about how complex the notion of commodity has been historically (especially in Marxist writing)
• Are commodities to simply be defined as "primary goods" (as in the neoclassical economic sense) and not open to further analysis?
• Or are commodities something else and open to further analysis (as is the case in Marxist approaches)?
• Goods associated with the capitalist mode of production (material representations of capitalism)?
• An extrinsic object that satisfies wants (Marx argued for this in Capital)
• Or are commodities defined by their use and exchange value, by exchange (in markets), or by being purchased with money (also ideas Marx seemed to explore in Capital. As Appadurai notes, Marx's discussion of commodities in Capital was one of the most "difficult, contradictory and ambiguous" among Marx's writings. This is pretty telling in my opinion, given the way that most of Marx's writings were difficult, contradictory and ambiguous.)
• Marx wrote: "To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange" 
• For Marx, commodities were intricately tied to money in an impersonal market (again, something we explore in another paper--the way impersonalization often has a commodifying effect, and personalization a decommodifying effect.)

After discussing these Marxian ideas about commodities at some length, he offers a revised definition of commodities: "any thing intended for exchange." 

Conclusions

As I have discussed throughout this blog, that might not be enough due to the way many articles in the project "The need to define commodification" use commodification in a way that transcends that, but does align with the Marxist/Lukácsian notion of object/subject. Being "objectified" is highly related to the idea that the thing is intended for exchange, but it could also simply describe viewing the thing as an object of exchange (whether or not one intends to actually exchange it). 

Additionally, some exchanges, such as relational exchanges, have the opposite outcome of objectification--they make something more "subject" and more humanized. They make the person (or thing being exchanged) less of a commodity. Exchanging friendship or confidence in someone humanizes (makes subject) a person rather than objectifying them. This broader definition of exchange (which transcends simply market or commodity exchanges, or exchanges of tangible/material objects) is offered within the framework social exchange theory(ies). (We also discuss it at length here).  

A major challenge in the commodification literature is to define it based only on the unit of analysis of the given study. But, the current definitions for commodification of a material object do not work for definitions of commodification of a society, or of a person. (See here for a quick summary in table form.) I have argued for this definition as one that works with any unit of analysis observed in our project on "The need to define commodification" (this contains some modifications over the previous versions):

“An increase in the way some thing (be it a person, culture, material object or so forth) is esteemed, valued or represented vis-à-vis commodities, which are defined broadly as anything used, seen, represented or intended to be used as an object for exploitation or gain (of any kind, though often in a market) rather than as a subject of intrinsic worth.”

Highly germane to the current project are the ideas that:

• "Commodity" is a very complex notion, 
• although neoclassical economists would like to limit it to something like "primary goods", it does not fulfill the desired use for sociologist, anthropologists and most other scholars.
• Anthropologists (based solely on this piece by Appadurai, however seminal it may be) would like to use commodification in a way that recognizes the economic value of commodities, but also in a way that recognizes their social nature:
• They are socially defined (however, "provisional" and "unessential" [Simmel 1978])
• Linked to politics and political systems
• Appear and are exchanged and interpreted based on socio-historical context
• (Here it would be nice to add Veblen[1899] to Appadurai and say that commodities are used in intentionally and unintentionally in ways that convey messages about social position)
• Commodification has a broad appeal from economic to social anthropology and a broad appeal across disciplines outside of anthropology. 

Applicable to another project we call "Mixed exchange: commodification and decommodification"

• Commodification can be explored in terms of what is being exchanged or why things are exchanged (we took the latter approach, while Appadurai took the former)
• Appadurai suggests that there is a broad appeal across disciplines to employ notions of commodification. We used social exchange theory, which has already attempted to build such a bridge, as a foundation for discussing commodification in a cross-disciplinary way.  
• In Capital Marx noted that commodification and impersonalization are related. This connects nicely with the way we employed social exchange theory in an effort to bridge disciplinary conversations about the connection between exchange and commodification. Every exchange has a personal (relational) and an impersonal (commodity) component, and increasing one of those either commodifies or decommodifies an exchange. 

In a single sentence, if we take Appadurai's piece as representative of the anthropologists position, they have taken a position somewhere between business and Marxist theories of commodification even before there was a solidified business theory of commodification. 

This may be a good position to be in given that there is historical evidence that the business and Marxist schools have common origins and only became divided starting in the 1990s, and that many articles today show evidence that they would favor (or at least derive greater utility out of) a broadly accessible conceptualization. 

There is evidence that it has only been recently that the business and Marxist theories drifted apart (discussed elsewhere in the History of Commodification). This gives more evidence to that observation as Appadurai, even before the 1990s when commoditization began to be conceptualized in business theory, put anthropology on a course that is more all encompassing (and not limited to one school of the other) in terms of the way to conceptualize of commodification. So, there is historical evidence (including, I suppose, this piece by Appadurai) that the commodification was once united rather than divided into distinct schools of thought that are rather inaccessible to one another.

Additionally, we find that many articles on commodification do not adhere strictly to the Marxist or business theory of commodification, but have "carved out" new space somewhere in between. The difficulty is that there has not been a solid conceptualization of commodification that works in this way. Current conceptualizations are either exclusive to the Marxist or business definitions or to just one unit of analysis (material objects, culture, society, people, labor). Therefore, the definitions often do not work for other units of analysis or in the "middle space" between Marxist and business definitions. 

Finally, I am being very liberal to use the term "definitions" in the paragraph above, as we find that the "workaround" for not having a proper conceptualization of commodification is to describe rather than define it. Scholars often cite similar works to their own which have described commodification in certain ways, in lieu of defining it in a clear way. Consequently, there are rarely clear conceptualizations. This is resulting in greater fragmentation of the term commodification as it seems to be developing one meaning for scholars of globalization, another for scholars of tourism, another for those who study intellectual property and so on. 

The following definition (already cited above) applies to all units of analysis and fields of study:

“Commodification is an increase in the way something (be it a person, culture, material object or so forth) is represented or intended to be used as an object for exploitation or gain (of any kind, though often in a market) rather than as a subject of interpersonal, affective or intrinsic worth.”