Commodity Cultures: The Traffic in Things

Focusing on the commodification of various forms of cultural difference, this paper reviews recent work within the 'globalization' and 'creolization' paradigms, outlining an agenda for future research. Rather than condemning commodification as an unwarranted threat to the 'authenticity' of local cultures, the paper argues for a more complex understanding of people's relationship with the world of goods. Using a variety of examples, it is argued that the 'traffic in things' is associated with a wide range of meanings and a diversity of responses. Informed by recent debates in anthropology and material culture studies, it is suggested that geographical metaphors (such as distance and displacement) provide a more productive way of engaging with contemporary commodity cultures than do visual metaphors (such as unveiling or unmasking). Other means of transcending the distinction between cultural and economic geographies are also discussed.     

Mapping Value in a ‘Green’ Commodity Frontier: Revisiting Commodity Chain Analysis

Analysis of commodity chains has provided important insights on how power, resource and market access mediate the distribution of benefits and risks. Given this analytical potential, Commodity Chain Analysis (CCA) is now being applied to the study of biofuels and carbon markets to gain systematic insight into the circumstances, relationships and transformations involved in their production and exchange. By building on and adapting this approach to three distinct case studies (biofuels in Madagascar and forest carbon in Cambodia and Laos), this article contributes new insights on the emergence of value within market environmentalism. The analysis highlights methodological challenges in applying CCA to commodified forms of nature, and the significance of knowledge and value negotiations. All three cases illustrate that it remains highly uncertain whether or not market exchange can ultimately be realized. As in the case of traditional commodities, pre‐existing conditions of power and access shape modes of production and network configuration. Parallel and intersecting commodity networks (e.g. for land and timber) also require us to think beyond the traditional single‐commodity focus. Thus, the authors call for an expanded analytical focus in applying CCA to non‐material ‘green’ commodities which places greater emphasis on value negotiations and connections within new ‘commodity frontiers’.     

Pacific Coconut: Comestible,Comfort and Commodity

ABSTRACT

As the title implies this special issue concentrates on the coconut in its older usages and its transformation into commodities. The coconut has many histories, with specific intersections with each Pacific island society, indeed each community and family. This brief introduction seeks to give an overview of its penetration into the lives and societies at several levels, from small clans to major companies, from growers to governments, all implicated along the commodity chain. In spite of the coconut’s ubiquity, the historiography has never addressed it fully but taken it rather as a given, one player in capitalism in the region, yet in fact, for over a hundred years, it was the star product upon which many governments and people across the tropical Pacific depended for income. We hope that some aspects of the coconut’s complexity and meaning are brought to light in the following new contributions to its history.     

Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure

This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. We do this to show how the development of flood infrastructure in Jakarta is shaped by the logic of capitalism through mutually implicated tendencies of socionatural differentiation and equalisation. These processes render waters, resources and labour as similar across places and times to produce different spaces for different populations, within and beyond city boundaries. This theorisation reveals how the urban inequalities (re)produced by flood infrastructure are intimately linked to inequalities (re)produced through the urbanisation of the non‐city.     

Theorizing Access: Forest Profits along Senegal's Charcoal Commodity Chain

The questions at the centre of this article are: who profits from commercial forestry, and how? Through access mapping with commodity chain analysis, this study examines the distribution of benefits from Senegal's charcoal trade and the multiple market mechanisms underpinning that distribution. Benefits from charcoal are derived from direct control over forest access, as well as through access to markets, labour opportunities, capital, and state agents and officials. Access to these arenas is based on a number of inter-related mechanisms including legal property, social identity, social relations, coercion and information control. A commodity chain is the series of relations through which an item passes, from extraction through conversion, exchange, transport, distribution and final use. Access mapping involves evaluating the distribution of benefits along the chain, and tracing out the mechanisms by which access to benefits is maintained. It sheds light on the limited role of property, the embedded nature of markets, and the role of extra-legal structures and mechanisms in shaping equity and efficiency in resource use. It does so in a socially situated, multi-local manner, spanning the geographic spread of production and exchange. It also illuminates the practical issues surrounding establishment of community participation in benefits from and control over natural resources.     

An Information-theoretic Analysis: An Application to Soviet-COMECON Trade Flows

This paper develops a classificatory methodology designed to assign geographic entities to groupings based upon the multivariate flow profiles displayed by the entities and a dispersion statistic designed to detect dynamic shifts in these flow profiles over time. Information statistic, provide the mathematical basis of the analysis and the changing trade profiles of the member nations of COMECON provide an illustrative case study.     

Christian Capital: Singapore,Evangelical Flows and Religious Hubs

Recent scholarship has pointed out the ways in which religions are increasingly commodified, primarily through two mechanisms: the monetisation of religious objects and practices, and the materialisation and extension of religious-symbolic power through new technologies and practices. These two mechanisms of monetisation and materialisation provide very concrete ways of understanding religious commodification, but they do not provide a complete picture of how religious capital is created and sustained in the holistic context of society, city and nation considered in relation to international capital flows. “Christian Capital” includes not only the commodity, consumerist and media empires particularly associated with global-reach “megachurches”, but also the less-tangible situational, relational, human-social and influential wealth created between religious agencies and their urban-national contexts. Using the case of Christian agencies in Singapore and their strategic creation of transnational influences, this paper offers a conception of Christian capital that incorporates not only the materialisation of religious influence in terms of finances and commodities, but also its expression in less tangible but significant ways in terms of the creation of an international “brand” of Singapore Christianity.     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.     

Protecting the Environment the Natural Way: Ethical Consumption and Commodity Fetishism

Abstract: One of the ways that conservation and capitalism intersect is in ethical consumption, the shaping of purchasing decisions by an evaluation of the moral attributes of objects on offer. It is increasingly important as a way that people think that they can affect the world around them, including protecting the natural environment. This paper describes commodity fetishism in ethical consumption, and the degree to which this fetishism makes it difficult for ethical consumers to be effective both in their evaluation of objects on offer and in influencing the world around them. It looks at three forms of fetishism in ethical consumption: fetishism of objects, fetishism of the purchase and consumption of objects, fetishism of nature.     

Inter-regional migration and social change: a study of South East England based upon data from the Longitudinal Study

"Data from the [Office of Population Censuses and Surveys] Longitudinal Study are used to trace the social class effects of migration between the South East region and the rest of England and Wales in the period 1971-81. The analysis begins with the migration streams into and out of the South East of those people who were in the labour market (including the unemployed) at both census dates. The paper then proceeds to an analysis of the migration streams of those who entered or left the labour market between 1971 and 1981. Finally, the effects of the migration streams on the social class composition of both the South East and the rest of England and Wales are summarised. The results are interpreted in the light of debates about change in the British urban and regional system."     

Modeling Residential and Business Telecommunication Flows: A Regional Point-to-Point Approach

Regional telecommunication flows, measured in terms of numbers of messages and conversation minutes, are analyzed with a systematic random sample of toll calls characterized by their timing, duration, cost, and origin-destination (O-D) locations. Point-to-point models are econometrically estimated, with such independent variables as destination market size, O-D distance, and average and time-of-day (TOD) prices, for the residential and business sectors separately. The results indicate that (1) the demands for calls and conversation minutes are price-inelastic and slightly elastic, respectively, (2) business demand is relatively more price-elastic than residential demand, (3) distance is a strong determinant of telephone demand, and (4) most TOD demand substitutions resulting from TOD price changes would take place between the daily and evening rate periods. Several areas for further research are outlined.     

Approaches to the Roman Empire: A Perspective

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