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- Convenors:
-
Kelley Sams
(University of Florida and Walden University)
Giorgio Cassone (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
- Discussant:
-
Stephen Gudeman
(University of Minnesota Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Global Flows/Mondes en mouvement: Flots globaux
- Location:
- FSS 1005
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel proposes a collective reflection on the social and political consequences of the large-scale circulation of commodities. We explore how the flow of "things" creates new connections between goods and people that go well beyond the economic sector.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes a collective reflection on the social and political consequences of new modalities of circulation of commodities (medication, art, recycled food, ceremonial objects, etc.). From the beginning of the 20th century, Georg Simmel highlighted the complex processes engaged in the creation of shared meanings and the determination of social, moral, and economic value involved in exchange. This perspective was instrumental in the development of Appadurai's framework approaching goods as "things" with social lives, and carrying value "inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories" (1986:5). We would like to open up a debate often limited by geographic and disciplinary boundaries to explore how the exchange and flow of "things" impacts the collective imaginary, and creates new connections between goods and people, at increasing speed and scale, well beyond the economic sector.
For this panel, we are calling for contributions that display concrete empirical ethnographic evidence related to the circulation of commodities. These case studies should address the following questions: How do ethnographers observe and describe this political reshaping provoked by the production, circulation, and regulation of commodities? What methodological challenges are related to the follow up of such processes (multi-sited multi-scale ethnography…)? How are new networks of social actors formed by the flow of goods, and act upon it in return? The contributors are expected to focus on the consequences of the circulation of specific commodities on the socio-political imaginary and power relationships in different contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Hector Guazon (University of the Philippines)
Paper short abstract:
This ethnographic research analytically describes how material things, acting as extension of selves, inflect shared structures to help manage identity, give permanence to relationship, and ground sense of "placeness", and, in the process, becomes enabler of cosmopolitan desire and purpose.
Paper long abstract:
This study highlights the intersection between things, persons, and places by considering how material things and its flows - DVDs made by local musicians and videomakers about the bundles of roses in styrofoams produced in Bahong, La Trinidad, Benguest Province and sold in key cities of the Philippines - provide understanding on how the cosmopolitan problem of inflecting local village life and sociopolitical relations becomes the problem of locating subjectivity.
In doing so, the study, firstly, looks into the circulation of material things, their inflections within the everyday life worlds, and the ideological understandings of diverse forms and processes that turn them into one thing in one village and another in other locations; secondly, explores the various forms of mediations and constraints - religious, cultural, political, and financial - that contour the possibilities of material things in particular places and times; and, finally, examine the ways in which material things (re)shape cosmopolitan subjectivities, made manifest in agents' desiring and feeling their way through creating an expanded purpose.
By this, my study presupposes that the ways the agents mould and reshape their material things, selves, and local village life are conditioned by predetermined structures - social class, symbolisms, rituals, and beliefs - and, by unveiling the particularities within which agents' translate these structures in practice, reveal their cosmopolitan imaginary that is nuanced, novel, and wide-ranging, even as they are overtaken in significance by others, given the sociopolitical realities where they are embedded.
Heribert Beckmann (Heidelberg University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will show how observing and describing the socio-political life of rice as a commodity in rural Tamil Nadu requires combining and contrasting both an actor-network and a meshwork perspective. I will further reflect on the implications of such an approach for ethnographic writing.
Paper long abstract:
Rice has been cultivated in Tamil Nadu for hundreds of years. In the last four decades, with the Green Revolution and economic liberalization, the flow of rice has changed dramatically and new networks involving complex sets of actors and power relations have formed, as rice cultivation and consumption have become deeply commoditized. Nowadays, almost the entire cultivated rice is sold to and processed by governmental and private corporations, while most cultivators purchase rice imported from various locations across India for consumption. In my research I follow rice through its cultivation, distribution, and consumption in and beyond a particular rice-cultivating village.
In this paper I will describe the actors and dynamics involved in enacting rice as a commodity both from an actor-network (Latour 2005) and a meshwork perspective (Ingold 2011). I will show that different actors alternate between embodied / relational and discursive / objectified ways of experiencing, imagining, and articulating the changing qualities and value of rice as it journeys through different networks and meshworks. I will further show how, when translating research experience into ethnographic description, I am faced with the same tension between enacting rice either as an enmeshed "thing" or a bounded "object" (Knappett 2011). I will argue that contrasting these two ways of describing and imagining rice opens up productive ways of critically reflecting on the socio-cultural and political-ecological processes that shape people's engagement with and perception of rice as well as on the socio-political process by which field experiences are abstracted into ethnographic description.
Giorgio Cassone (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
Paper short abstract:
Regulation and practices concerning the global circulation of food frame the flow of edible goods excluded from the official consumption chain. Starting from two ethnographic sites in Europe, this intervention explores food recycling practices, and the circulation and valorisation of unsold goods.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses food-recycling practices: the research, reclamation, circulation, and consumption of food rejected from the urban food cycle and the transformation of "garbage" into an edible, social and political object.
Regulation and practices concerning the global circulation of food frame the flow of edible goods that are excluded from the official consumption chain. This situation produces new practices around food through which social actors «constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into 'opportunities'» (de Certeau: xix).
Through a rigorous observation of food recycling practises we discover that food-recyclers develop specific knowledge that contributes to their social, economic and political practice of salvaging food. They mobilise skills to decode and explore the city and its activities; to interact with actors and norms; to reclaim and transform food that they use, not only to secure nutrition, but also as social resource for creating and consolidating groups around food-sharing (and specific ideologies) of each group.
The ways of knowing and evaluating reality, the skills and knowledge concerning food-recycling circulate, are transformed and reproduced collectively in groups.
In conclusion, starting from a good that has lost its market value and from practices that surround it, we can identify different political and economic practices, aimed at the maintenance of individual and "activist" groups, in which the production and reproduction of solidarity and sharing networks design morals and political economies parallel to the market economy.
Aline Rochedo (UFRGS)
Paper short abstract:
Some jewels play main roles in life circles and mark the exchange of social status between those who donate and who receive. My research focuses in symbolic and political meanings, circulation, transformation, ownership and transmission codes related to jewelry in family circles in Brazil.
Paper long abstract:
Having as subject the relationship between people and things, my research focuses on symbolic meanings, affective logics, and circulation, transformation, ownership, and transmission codes related to jewelry in family circles in South of Brazil. Those are ornaments valuated through affective settings, and their meanings, uses, and itineraries vary among different social groups. Departing from narratives triggered by artifacts passed on through generations, I explore elements of production and reproduction of genealogical memory and prestige that become symbols of certain groups. On the basis of preliminary statements of heirs and fragments of inventories, I infer that logics which conduct acquisition, circulation, and uses of theses goods perpetuate and legitimize a social status; that the jewels biographies interfere in the way memory is passed on; and that individual and collective identities connect the living and the dead through this class of objects.
Inayat Ali (Fatima Jinnah Women University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will consider vaccine as a commodity which affects –makes or breaks – the ship of relations among various stakeholders especially in Pakistan.
Paper long abstract:
Vaccination, in general and in Pakistan in particular, is one among the highly circulated commodities in the world and having highly socio-political consequences such as making and breaking of relationships between global donors and national governments; between federal governments and provincial governments; between governments and citizens and so forth. The relation-ships run – make or break – through the help of numbers and beliefs. The global donors, e.g. WHO gives guidelines and funds, the national governments obeys and receives and it continues at the local level. The local people refuse on the basis of certain beliefs, which most of the time never reach at the global level. It means the vaccine affects the ship horizontally and vertically.
This paper, therefore, will address how ‘science of numbers’ affects the relationships in terms of cases identified, children covered, families refused, children died due to no-vaccination and after due to vaccination. Further, it will talk about how a ‘fake’ vaccine was circulated in the country in order to know the hideouts of Osma-bin-Ladin, which later on exacerbated the ship of relations among above-mentioned stakeholders. The data is based on my PhD fieldwork in Pakistan, which I conducted in 2013 onwards.
Casey Miller (Brown University)
Paper short abstract:
Although rainbow flags are made in China, until recently Chinese queer activists were largely unable to obtain these global symbols of queer identity and pride in their own country. This paper examines the flow of rainbow flags in and out of China as an allegory of the globalization of sexuality.
Paper long abstract:
The first rainbow flag representing LGBTQ pride and identity was hand made by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978. Now a global symbol and commodity, rainbow flags are made in China and exported for consumption abroad. However, until recently, rainbow flags were not widely available for purchase inside China.
This paper examines the circulation, meanings, and uses of rainbow flags in China, where they are a coveted commodity among many Chinese queers that is at once foreign and domestic, transnationally circulated yet often locally unavailable. Chinese queer activists use a variety of means to acquire rainbow flags, including smuggling them into China in the suitcases of travelers or making their own flags out of locally available materials, recalling Baker's original hand-made flag. Even as Chinese queers use rainbow flags to index their membership and belonging in an imagined global queer community, they also imbue the symbol with new meanings as it is reworked to express and enact Chinese forms of queer affect and activism.
Intervening in the anthropological literatures on globalization and sexuality, I contend that the case of rainbow flags in China suggests new ways of thinking about the globalization of sexuality and queerness that emphasize simultaneity and imbrication rather than similitude and alterity. Complicating depictions of Chinese queer activism as nonconfrontational, silent, and invisible, I show how Chinese queer activists exploit the relative anonymity of rainbow flags in China to enact a "politics of semi-visibility" while at the same time participating in transnational forms of queer activism.
Maja Dolinar (University of Ljubljana)
Paper short abstract:
The circulation of popular media content on socio-political imaginary of the Arab world is not fully clear, thus the focus of the paper is on examining the influence of popular transnational television drama series from Maghreb and Mashrek on the formation of Pan-Arab imagined community in Morocco.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will reflect on the social and political consequences of circulation of popular television drama series in the Arab world. Mass media accelerate the colonization of cultural and ideological sphere, as they ensure the images, representations and ideas, around which social reality is constructed. This coincides with the idea of an imagined community, where mass media are responsible for the spread of information about common origin and where they are central in articulation about national and transnational processes with the local. Regionalisation and transnational nature of the Arab satellite media enabled television drama series to become the most popular television genre within the Arab world. Since most media studies predominately focus on investigating the phenomena of Al-Jazeera (Kraidy 2010), there is a severe lack in understanding how popular television content that is transcending borders is shaping identities and community belonging. The main focus of the paper will be on the influence of popular television drama series from Maghreb and Mashrek on the construction of Pan-Arab imagined community amongst Moroccan women. Based on extensive empirical ethnographic evidence from Morocco, collected in 2011-2013, the main focus will be on how transnational television drama series influence the construction of transnational Arab identity and whether or not the circulation of popular television series represents an effective tool in the process of forming a nation. The paper will thus provide important reflection of the influence of circulation of media content on socio-political imaginary and social relationships in the Moroccan context.