Commodities and Globalization Anthropological Perspectives

Today'¬"s growing fascination with flows of people, commodities, technology, capital, images and ideas across national and other boundaries poses fresh theoretical and methodological challenges to anthropology. Commodities offer a particularly useful window on globalization because they, unlike electronically conveyed capital, transport cultural messages. These ideological or symbolic transfers are of particular interest to economic anthropology. This collection considers how conceptions and roles of commodities may change in response to widening spheres of economic interaction and exchange. The essays in this volume are ordered under two themes. Those included in the first section, '¬SCommodities in a Globalizing Marketplace,'¬ address historically and culturally defined variations in meanings and practices associated with commodities in globalizing markets. In Part Two, '¬SThe Circulation and Revaluation of Commodities'¬, contributors analyze how commodity producers'¬" experiences are informed by colonial and post-colonial history, state directives in the marketplace, and locations in dependent or marginalized regions. The chapters all focus on the production process as it responds to, is distorted by and increasingly is controlled by the determination of the value of those commodities outside a '¬Slocality'¬.

Jane L. Collins is professor of rural sociology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) Winifred Creamer is associate professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University Catherine S. Dolan is a lecturer in development and gender studies at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia in England Angelique Haugerud is associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University Peter D. Little is professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky Stuart Plattner is program director for cultural anthropology at the National Science Foundation Nicole Polier has taught anthropology and gender studies at Yale and Wesleyan Universities Bruce D. Roberts is assistant professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University (Moorhead) Mitchell S. Rothman is associate professor and coordinator of anthropology at Widener University (Chester, Pennsylvania) Lois Stanford is associate professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University M. Priscilla Stone is director of international studies at Washington University in St. Louis Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is professor of anthropology at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, in Mexico Bob White is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz Randy Ziegenhorn is visiting assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa