by
Wim van Binsbergen & Peter Geschiere (eds)

Commodification:

Things, Agency and identities: The Social Life of Things revisited

Berlin/Munster: LIT, 2005, 400 pp.

 

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Based on an international conference held at Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1999, and constituting one of the results of the WOTRO (Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research) wide-ranging programme on 'Globalization and the construction of communal identities', the book Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities (Wim van Binsbergen & Peter Geschiere, eds., 400 pp; Berlin/Muenster/Vienna/London: LIT) was published in December 2005

blurb on back cover:

Twenty years ago, Arjun Appadurai’s edited collection The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986) brought about a major change in our perspective on material things in circulation. A domain hitherto reserved for economics was accessed by anthropologists concentrating on commodities and wielding new conceptual tools such as ‘tournament of value’, ‘cultural biography of things’, and ‘politics of consumption’. In the present book, some of the original contributors of 1986 (Arjun Appadurai himself, and leading British archaeologist Colin Renfrew) meet with today’s prominent names in the field (Jean & John Comaroff, Paul & Jennifer Alexander, Roy Dilley, Mike Rowlands, and Herskovits award-winning Nancy Rose Hunt) and with brilliant scholars of the next generation: Brad Weiss, Rijk van Dijk, Janet Roitman, James Leach, and Irene Stengs. Together with the editors, Wim van Binsbergenand Peter Geschiere, this exceptional team explores the dynamics of Commodification: Things, agency and identities. Since the mid-1980s, the setting has changed enormously, as a result of the end of the Cold War, globalisation, the triumph of ‘The Market’, and terrorism. The present book’s em­phasis is on Africa rather than on Asia and Europe, and on the process through which commodities come into being. The empirically rich and analytically provocative contributions, and Wim van Binsbergen’s extensive Intro­duction (which also reflects his recent work in philosophy and long-range historical comparison), show commodification to be a powerful tool towards understanding the modern world, especially South economies and South-North interactions today. Commodification does not exhaust the ontological dimension of things, agency, and identities; but it greatly illuminates these three central concepts, and thus is conducive to the much-needed dialogue between anthropology and economics.
    Wim M.J. van Binsbergen (1947) is Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and Professor of the Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He taught at the Universities of Zambia, Leiden, Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam (VU), and Durban. His recent publications deal with globalisation, interculturality, truth and reconciliation, and Valentin Mudimbe.
    Peter L. Geschiere (1941) is professor of African anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He taught anthropology at Leiden, New York, and Witwatersrand; and history at Rotterdam and Kisangani. His recent publications deal with globalization and identity; capitalism and autochthony; and nationhood.
    Leading figures in international African Studies, Peter Geschiere and Wim van Binsbergen have worked closely together since the 1960s. In 1985 they published Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment. In 1992 they initiated the Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research’s (WOTRO) Programme on Globalization and the Construction of Communal Identities. This programme has engaged dozens of researchers, in the Netherlands and internationally, in the study of cultural dimensions of globalization. One of the programme’s outcomes is the present book

click here for the book's Table of Contents

click here for the book's full cover

click here for a preview of Wim van Binsbergen's introduction ('Commodification: Things, agency, and identities: Introduction', pp. 9-51)

which however also requires access to the book's 'Cumulative Bibliography' (pp. 351-378, click here for a preview)

the book also contains the final version of Wim van Binsbergen's paper ‘ ‘‘We are in this for the money'': Commodification and the sangoma cult of Southern Africa' (pp. 319-348)

This book appears in the series: Ethnologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft
Bd. 8, 2005, 400 S., 34.90 EUR, br., ISBN 3-8258-8804-5

copies may be ordered directly from the publisher, LIT Verlag

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