CALL FOR PAPERS for an international conference Commodification and identities: |
Social Life of Things revisited
Amsterdam, 10-13 June, 1999
convenors: Wim van Binsbergen & Peter Geschiere
sponsored by: The WOTRO (Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research) Programme on Globalization and the construction of communal identities; The African Studies Centre, Leiden; The Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences; The Amsterdam School of Social Research; The Centre for Non-Western Studies, Leiden University; The Trust Fund, Erasmus University Rotterdam
The last in the
series of conferences organized by the five-year NWO/WOTRO
programme1 Globalization and the
Construction of Communal Identities will focus on the theme
of commodification. It is, indeed, relevant to focus
on the ambivalences and the enigmatic aspects of this apparently
unilineal and global process in a time characterised by
the almost undisputed rule of the market, reinforced by an
increasing obsession with consumption and consumerism, both in
popular imagination and in scientific analyses. In this context,
we are happy to relate this conference more specifically to one
of the recent milestones in the debates on commodification and
culture: the collection The Social Life of Things, by
Arjun Appadurai and others (1986). Fifteen years after the
symposium which led the basis for that book, it will be rewarding
to take stock once more. Here our leading question will be: In
what respects did subsequent theoretical debates and empirical
studies enrich our understanding of the crucial but often
enigmatic links between commodification and culture? Relating our
conference to The Social Life of Things is all the more
tempting since our programme closely collaborates with Chicago,
notably with Arjun Appadurai, in the Interdisciplinary Network on
Globalization (ING) together with University of Stockholm
and several institutes in the South (CEBRAP, Sao Paulo; CODESRIA,
Dakar; MEA, Cairo; CSSS, Calcutta). Besides Arjun Appadurai, we
intend to invite other contributors to the 1986 collection,
together with colleagues who in other contexts have contributed
to the commodification debate whether within the ING
network or otherwise.
At the time, Social Life of Things highlighted several
important developments in anthropology and cultural studies in
general. Of crucial importance was the effort to break away from
the unilineal implications of the term
commoditization, as the inevitable and irreversible
thrust of North Atlantic, and increasingly global, society under
conditions of capitalism. Instead of contrasting commodities with
things that are not (yet) commodities the Marxian
juxtaposition of exchange value versus use value the
attention was rather directed towards the varying commodity
potential of all things. Whether things are turned into
commodities or, inversely, withdrawn from commodification
processes was argued to depend on their social
history or their cultural biography2.
The emphasis on possible shifts and reversals, and in general on
cultural and historical aspects, indicated that the
politics of value are as important as so-called economic
laws for an understanding of the vicissitudes of
commodification processes in various parts of the globe.
For anthropology in particular, Social Life of Things
signalled also a remarkable return to objects as a focus for
research. The increasing uncertainty in the discipline due to the
collapse of the various unilineal meta-narratives led to a
rehabilitation of material culture. In the sixties
and seventies this had become, in many anthropology departments,
a somewhat quaint specialization, which main-stream
anthropologists tended to relegate to museums, not to say to
reservation anthropology. But in the eighties there
was a renewed interest in objects. They turned out to be
apparently solid starting points for understanding the paradoxes
of accelerated global flows and an increasing obsession with
fixing identities and cultural closure.3 Things became
once more an object of fascination for social scientists, but now
as markers of the varying ways in which people mapped their
itineraries in a changing and uncertain world. In this
perspective, the notion of commodification helps to understand
crucial transitions and experiments, provided due attention is
paid to its culturally determined limits, reversals and
improvisations.
The question is
to what extent subsequent debates along these lines have opened
up new insights. Several focal points emerge for the papers and
the discussions at the conference:
With these
complementary and contrasting contributions from a variety of
disciplines, we are confidently looking forward to a conference
which will not only advance our theories and comparisons beyond
the position taken in Social Life of Things, but which
will particularly enhance our understanding of the many
ramifications of the role of things in processes of globalization
and the (un)making of identities in the world today.
Proposed
participants will be invited by the organisers to submit the
title and abstract of their proposed paper by 1st October, 1998.
Upon acceptance, they are invited to submit their paper for
circulation by 1st May, 1999.
The
convenors
Wim
van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere
1
This programme, organized under the auspices of Netherlands
Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), is
financed until the end of 1999. Previous conferences in our
series addressed issues of identity, development, ethnicity and
popular culture, all in relation with globalization. For the last
conference in this series, we prefer the term
commodification rather than the more common
commoditization without, however, intending to
be dogmatic about this -, since the former term lacks the
implication of a unilineal, more or less automatic process.
2
Appadurai (1986: 34) proposes to distinguish the social
history of things from their cultural biography
(a notion developed by Igor Kopytoff in the same volume). The
latter refers to the Werdegang of a specific thing, while the
former is more general, referring to a type of things.
3
Cf. Appadurai (1986: 5) on methodological fetishism
(Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human
actors encode things with significance, from a methodological
point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their
human and social context). See also Douglas &
Isherwood; Miller; Meyer & Geschiere. For a parallel
rehabilitation of the role of things in western culture: see
Baudrillard, Bourdieu.
4
Appadurai, Hannerz, Robertson, Featherstone; van Binsbergen,
Meyer & Geschiere, van der Veer.
5
Appadurai on the production of locality; Robertson on
glocalization.
6
van Binsbergen, Hannerz, van der Veer passim
7
Cf. Appadurai (1986: 57): It is in the interest of those in
power to completely freeze the flow of commodities (...). Yet
since commodities constantly spill beyond the boundaries of
specific cultures (...) such political control of demand is
always threatened with disturbance.
8
Cf. the International Conference on Globalisation,
development and the making of consumers: Or what are collective
identities for, The Hague/, March 13-16, 1997, which our
programme organised jointly with EIDOS (European
Interuniversity Development Opportunities Study-Group) and
the African Studies Centre, Leiden; meanwhile, an extensive
volume Modernity on a shoestring (eds. R. Fardon, W van
Binsbergen & R. van Dijk), based on this conference, has gone
to the press.
9
Cf. the papers for another conference of our programme on
Fantasy Spaces The Power of Images in a Globalizing
World, organized by Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Birgit
Meyer for August 1998.
10
Cf. Jewsiewicki.
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