Beyond exploitation/empowerment: re-imagining Southern producers in commodity stories

One of the most dominant strands of research within cultural geography's ‘materialist turn’ is that of commodity stories. Through everything from phones to flowers, geographers have attempted to reveal the myriad connections between (Northern) consumers and (Southern) producers. Following commodities and tracing their networks, this research tends to privilege consumption as the primary site of social and cultural meaning within the global economy. Where producers are the focus, the theoretical framework for understanding their lives is typically a developmentalist one, foregrounding exploitation and/or empowerment. Thus, we learn little from commodity stories about the ordinary lives of Southern producers and the co-production of the sociocultural and the economic through their everyday practices. This paper argues that deeper sociocultural analysis of the processes of production is necessary to balance the current dominance of consumption-led commodity stories and, more importantly, to open up space for a re-imagining of Southern producers. Through the personal accounts of fourty beadwork producers in Cape Town, I explore how the everyday practices of craft production sustain existing social relations, generate new networks, and help to shape both a sense of belonging and a sense of self. This commodity story reveals Southern producers' lives to be both richer and more mundane than dominant constructions suggest.