Karababa Foster Tracking Globalization

8/2/2019 Karababa Foster Tracking Globalization

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18TRACKING GLOBALIZATION

Commodities and Value in Motion

Robert J. Foster

The rhetoric of economic globalization invokesthe movement of goods, money, information usually rapid, sometimes promiscuous, alwaysexpanding. Images of hyper-mobility abound,for example, across the landscapes of capitaldepicted in corporate television advertisingsince the 1990s (Goldman et al. n.d.; see alsoKaplan 1995). Likewise, academic literature onthe cultural dimensions of globalization, typi-fied by Appadurais influential 1990 essay,deploys the liquid trope of flows non-isomorphic movements of images, people, andideas that describe shifting configurations orscapes: mediascapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes,and so forth. While questions have rightly beenraised about the intensity, extent, and velocity ofthese movements, what concerns me here is howthe current fascination with border-crossingmobility has prompted investigations into thesocial and geographical lives of particular com-modities (Jackson 1999). This detective workis not restricted to specialists. Consider, forexample, the spate of popular books devotedto tracking through historical time and geo-graphical space such commodities as cod and

salt (Kurlansky 1997, 2002), potatoes and dia-monds (Zuckerman 1998; Hart 2002), coal andtobacco (Freese 2003; Gately 2001). (For globalflows in the art market see Myers in the previ-ous chapter.) It is as if renewed interest in thesociospatial life of stuff in following tangible,ordinary things such as glass, paper, and

beans (Cohen 1997) has emerged as a thera-peutic defense against the alienating spectersof globalization.

Inside the academy, it is undeniable that thecommodity is back (Bridge and Smith 2003:257). Commodities from bluefin tuna (Bestor2001) to maize husks (Long and Villareal 2000)

have provided material vehicles for narratingeconomic change, political power, and cul-tural identity. Improvising upon Kopytoffs(1986) rich idea of commodity biographies,researchers have traced the movement ofeveryday things through diverse contexts andphases of circulation. Many of these exercises

begin with the aim of demonstrating how suchmovement links geographically separate localesand connects producers and consumers strati-fied by class, ethnicity, and gender; they endwith an argument about how the meaning ofthings shifts as a function of use by humanagents in different social situations. Researchersthus do not simply trace the movement of com-modities in the mechanical manner of a radaror a bar code scanning device; more important,they trace the social relations and material link-ages that this movement creates and withinwhich the value of commodities emerges.

At the same time, researchers emphasize theways in which the active materiality of non-human things the heterozygosity of apples(Pollan 2001) or the erucic acidity of rapeseed(Busch and Juska 1997) constitute these very

social contexts of use. That is, researchersacknowledge how materiality is an irreduciblecondition of possibility for a commodity biog-raphy a condition that sometimes challengesor exceeds the attribution of meaning to things

by human agents (Keane 2005). The overallresult is a paradoxical form of self-aware, criticalfetishism an attitude of inquiry well suited tomaking sense of economic circumstances inwhich accumulation of wealth and creation ofvalue seem mysterious and occult (Comaroffand Comaroff 1999). This attitude responds,moreover, to a world in which peoples per-spectives on distant others are often filtered

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through commodity consumption and/or itsdenial. Hence, tracking commodities and valuein motion becomes a means for apprehendingthe global consciousness (Robertson 1992) andwork of the imagination (Appadurai 1990)often associated with globalization.

Critical fetishism a heightened appreciationfor the active materiality of things in motion entails certain methodological questions andchallenges, which recent writings in anthropol-ogy and geography address. For anthropolo-gists, the exigencies of tracking commoditiesdefine a mode of fieldwork that Marcus hasidentified as doing ethnography in/of the worldsystem (1995). This sort of fieldwork requiresethnographers to work in and across multiplefield sites, to follow people (e.g., scientists and

traders), images (e.g., Rambo and Pokmon),and commodities of all kinds (e.g., coffee andflowers) as they move from place to place and/or from node to node within a network of pro-duction and distribution. Marcus asserts thatMulti-sited research is designed around chains,paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositionsof locations in which the ethnographer estab-lishes some form of literal presence, with anexplicit posited logic of association or connec-tion among sites that in fact defines the argumentof the ethnography (1995: 105, my emphasis).Tracking strategies thus bring anthropologycloser to geography at the same time as they

introduce an element of radical contingencyinto the ethnographic project, especially in caseswhere relationships or connections betweensites are indeed not clear, the discovery and dis-cussion of which are precisely in fact the mainproblem, contribution and argument of ethno-graphic analysis (Marcus 2000: 16).

Geographers long used to following thingsand mapping distributions as culture areas have debated what sort of understanding offar-flung commodity networks critical fetishismought to accomplish. Harveys (1990: 423)exhortation to deploy the Marxian concept offetishism with its full force has been met with

sympathetic rebuttals that getting behind theveil of the market implies both a privilegedposition for the unmystified analyst and anundue emphasis on the site of production asthe ultimate source of a commoditys value(see, e.g., Castree 2001). Instead of tracing a linefrom acts of guilty consumption to the hiddentruth of exploited producers, some geographershave taken up anthropological preoccupationswith symbols and meanings in order to empha-size the strategic interests and partial knowl-edges with which particular actors encounterand construct a commodity at different moments

in its circulation (for a brief review, see Bridgeand Smith 2003). Critical fetishism, in thisapproach, begins with acknowledging thefragmentary and contradictory nature of theknowledges through which commodity systemsare imagined (Leslie and Reimer 1999: 406;see, e.g., Cook and Crang 1996a).

Critical fetishism, in short, challenges a geo-graphical view of globalization as a spreadingink stain and instead promotes a spatial recog-nition of globalization as partial, uneven andunstable; a socially contested rather than logi-cal process in which many spaces of resistance,alterity and possibility become analytically dis-cernible and politically meaningful (Whatmoreand Thorne 1997: 287, 289). This view is an effectof switching metaphors, of abandoning the

opposition between local and global in favorof the idea of networks longer or shorter net-works, always in the making, composed ofpeople, artifacts, codes, living and non-livingthings (Law and Hetherington 1999). In thisregard, both anthropologists and geographersextend the work of Bruno Latours (e.g., 1993)science studies, including his emphasis on therole of nonhuman actants in lengtheningnetworks and sustaining connectivity. Trackingcommodities in motion perforce becomes partof a larger strategy designed to identify the col-lective agency, distributed within a network,that enables action at a distance one of the hall-

marks of globalization (or global modernity)according to theorists such as Giddens (1990;see also Waters 1995).

Network methods and concepts haveemerged as flexible means for historians andsociologists as well as geographers to question

both the concept of globalization as a single,uniform process and the assumptions under-pinning talk of a global economy (see, e.g.,Cooper 2001; Long 1996; Dicken et al. 2001; seealso the journal Global Networks). At the inter-face of anthropology and geography, networkmethods and concepts have been used to bringexchange value and use value, markets and

meaning, within a single analytical framework(Bridge and Smith 2003). An expanded defini-tion of value creation is instrumental in thisregard (see Munn 1986). Value creation refersto the practical specification of significance,that is, to actions that define and make visiblerelations between persons and things.1 Valuecreation, in this expanded sense, encompasses

both the political economists preoccupationwith human labor as activity that producesmeasures of (quantitative) value and the culturalanthropologists apprehension of (qualitative)value as the product of meaningful difference.

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What is at stake, then, in the strategy oftracking specific commodities in motion isthe promise of a revised approach to cultureand capitalism. Cultural analysis becomes lessa matter of formulating a distinctive logicor code shared by a group of people livingin one location and more a matter of tracing anetwork in which the perspectives of differ-ently situated individuals derive both fromtheir different network experiences and fromtheir perspectives on other peoples perspec-tives their approximate mappings of otherpeoples meanings (Hannerz 1992: 43). Thissort of analysis enhances appreciation of howcommodities in motion engage desires andstimulate the imagination in the constructionof both personhood and place (see, e.g.,

Weiss 2002). Economic analysis, in turn,becomes less a matter of charting the operationsof institutions whether transnational corpo-rations (TNCs) or nation states and morea matter of tracing a network of dispersedand disparate value-creating activities andrelationships. This sort of analysis enhancesappreciation of the extent to which culturefigures in the construction of commodities(through design, branding, and marketing; seeCook and Crang 1996a) and in the productionof monopoly rents (Harvey 2001). Followingcommodities in motion thus also leads to apolitics of consumption emerging around

contests over control of the knowledge intrin-sic to value creation (see Maurer, Chapter 1 ofthis volume).

COMMODITY NETWORKS

The metaphor of the commodity networkaims, above all, to foreground the connec-tions between commodity producers and con-sumers, especially unequal connections betweenNorthern shoppers and Southern growers of,for example, flowers (Hughes 2000), coffee

(Roseberry 1996; Smith 1996), bananas(Raynolds 2003a) and tomatoes (Barndt 2002)(see also Redclift 2002 on chewing gum). Yetthe metaphor lends itself to multiple glosses.2

I here discuss three overlapping interpretations:commodity chains or value chains; commoditycircuits or commodityscapes; and hybrid actornetworks. The second of these interpretations,which I discuss in greatest detail, marks a con-vergence between anthropology and geographygrounded in ethnographic practice and closeattention to the meanings that people attributeto things.

Commodity Chains/Value Chains

Commodity chain analysis remains stronglyassociated with the world-systems theory of

historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein(1974).3 Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986: 159,quoted in 1994a: 17) define a commodity chainas a network of labor and production processeswhose end result is a finished commodity (seealso Hartwick 1998, 2001). For Gary Gereffi, asociologist and prominent proponent of globalcommodity chain (GCC) approaches, A GCCconsists of sets of interorganizational networksclustered around one commodity or product,linking households, enterprises and states toone another within the world economy(Gereffi et al. 1994: 2). Global commodity chains

possess three main dimensions: an input-output structure; a territoriality; and a gover-nance structure (Gereffi et al. 1994: 7; see Dickenet al. 2001: 989 for a summary). Gereffis workhas concentrated on governance structures,introducing an important distinction betweenproducer-driven and buyer-driven chains.Buyer-driven chains, which Gereffi suggestsare becoming more common in more indus-tries, are chains in which controlling firms donot, themselves, own production facilities;rather they coordinate dispersed networks ofindependent and quasi-independent manufac-turers (Dicken et al. 2001: 99). These chains

characterize and effect the spatial and temporalreorganization of production and exchangenetworks often associated with contemporarycapitalism just-in-time manufacturing sys-tems and, more generally, the transition fromhigh-volume, vertically integrated corpora-tions to distanciated, high-value enterprisewebs (Harvey 1989; Reich 1991). It is the contractstructure of these chains that interests Gereffi,for this structure invests the ability to governthe chain not with firms producing the com-modities, but rather with large retailers, brand-name merchandisers, and trading companies.Accordingly, the lead firms in buyer-driven

chains focus on product development andmarketing while outsourcing production andproduction-related functions to subcontractedsuppliers.

Gereffi has been criticized for underempha-sizing the other dimensions of commoditychains. Dicken et al. (2001), for instance, arguethat Gereffi envisions the input-output structureof commodity chains in a way that obscures thecomplex vertical, hierarchical, and dynamicorganization through which flow materials,designs, products, and financial and marketingservices. Similarly, Smith et al. (2002; see also

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Friedland 2001) accuse Gereffi of ignoring therole of state regulation and organized labor inaffecting the governance and location of com-modity chains. These critiques form part of alarger effort to complicate the understandingof commodity networks by recognizing territo-rially embedded strategic actions internal tothe nodes or sites of production and retailingwithin any chain (Smith et al. 2002: 47) and byunderscoring the complexities and contingen-cies that exist within and between actors(Pritchard 2000: 789). This effort has been espe-cially a feature of research on the global restruc-turing of agrofood industries (see, e.g., Arceand Marsden 1993; Busch and Juska 1997). Long(1996) accordingly proposes a model of globalactor networks that form and reform in

response to the interests, options, and knowl-edge of the actors who comprise the networks.These interface networks in turn form part ofcomplex food chains that link producers totraders, state agencies, transnationals, super-market businesses, agricultural input suppliers,research enterprises and eventually the con-sumers of the products (Long 1996: 52).

One of the great virtues of commodity chainanalysis besides its emphasis on process is that itputs the question of value creation and appro-priation front and center; indeed, the termvalue-chain analysis has been proposed asmore inclusive of the variety of scholarly work

being done on inter- and transnational eco-nomic networks (Gereffi, Humphrey et al.2001; see Porter 1990: 404), and the privilegedgeographic scale of Wallerstein-inspired com-modity chain analysis (see Smith et al. 2002).Nevertheless, Gereffi does not give explicitattention to the conceptualization of value in theinput-output structure, that is, the value-addedchain of products, services, and resources linkedtogether across a range of relevant industries(Dicken et al. 2001: 989). Gereffi, like otherproponents of GCC approaches, imagines therepeated movement from input to output asessentially linear, a sequential process of value

addition of adding more products and ser-vices.4 In this sense, of course, Gereffis viewis consistent with that of Hopkins andWallersteins (1994b: 49) view that any com-modity chain contains a total amount of appro-priated surplus value a total amount of wealththat is unevenly distributed along the length ofthe chain. This uneven distribution practicallydistinguishes the periphery of the world systemfrom the core, where surplus value is by defi-nition accumulated.

The conceptualization of value addition inGCC analysis derives from the same continuist

narrative of value found in many Marxistaccounts, as Spivak (1985/1996) has noted (seeAnagnost 2004). This narrative a narrative ofincremental growth is meant to identifyinequalities and, in its development policy ver-sions, to recommend how firms and/or coun-tries can upgrade, that is, gain access tohigher-value activities in a global commoditychain. For this purpose, it is of clear importanceto measure value (or value-added increments)precisely, for example in terms of profits orprices. In doing so, however, the narrative priv-ileges exchange value over use value or, putdifferently, quantitative value (unequal sharesof the total appropriated value in the chain)over qualitative value (the meaning of com-modities to the user/consumer). The continuist

narrative refuses the possibility of bricolage, ofputting commodities to uses for which theywere not designed (Spivak 1985/1996; 128).This refusal effectively strips the definition ofvalue of its historical and affective charge(Spivak 1985/1996: 126). In addition, I suggest,the continuist narrative obscures importantaspects of value creation in commodity chains,especially in the buyer-driven chains becomingmore common in complex assembly industriessuch as electronics and automobiles as well asconsumer goods industries that produce food,clothing, and toys. The circuits of culture or com-modityscape approach to commodity networks

address this shortcoming directly.

Circuits of Culture/Commodityscapes

Gereffi has identified a reorganization of theinput-output structure of value chains resultingfrom an increase in the importance of activitiesthat deal with intangibles such as fashion trends,

brand identities, design and innovation overactivities that deal with tangibles, the transfor-mation, manipulation and movement of phys-ical goods (Gereffi, Humphrey et al. 2001: 6).Put differently, tracking commodities and valuein motion now requires far greater attention to

culture the transformation, manipulation, andmovement of meanings. This requirement isobvious in the case of mobile commodities suchas world music (White 2000) and aboriginalart (Myers 2002) which entail validations of cul-tural authenticity. But it is equally compelling inthe case of commodities that now circulate inincreasingly differentiated consumer markets,such as coffee and fresh fruits. The symbolicconstruction of these commodities throughintensive marketing activities, including marketresearch into everyday consumption practices,directs attention to both outside and inside




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meanings. While outside meanings refer to thesetting of the terms within which a commodityis made available, inside meaning refers to thevarious significances that various users attributeto a commodity (Mintz 1986: 167, 171). The exer-cise of power impinges upon the shaping of bothkinds of meaning. Hence the call of Cook andCrang (1996a: 134) for a focus on the culturalmaterialization of the economic, such that the cul-tural is increasingly [recognized as] what is eco-nomically produced, circulated and consumed.

Within geography and cultural studies, acircuits of culture approach has emerged forstudying how the movement of commoditiesoften entails shifts in use value, that is, shifts inwhat commodities mean to users (includingproducers) situated at different nodes in a

commodity network (see Hughes 2000; Leslieand Reimer 1999 for discussions). This approachdiverges from GCC analysis in three relatedways. First, it refuses to treat production as theprivileged moment or phase in the story of acommodity and instead traces the articulationof several distinct processes. For example, intheir study of the Sony Walkman, du Gay et al.(1997: 3) contend that to study the Walkmanculturally one should at least explore how it isrepresented, what social identities are associ-ated with it, how it is produced and consumed,and what mechanisms regulate its distributionand use. A prime concern of this strategy,

which derives from media studies (Johnson1986; see Jackson and Thrift 1995), involvesdemonstrating that the uses and meaningsintended or preferred by a commoditys pro-ducers and designers are not necessarily thesame meanings received or endorsed by a com-moditys consumers/users. Consumption, inother words, is neither a terminal nor a passiveactivity, but is itself a source and site of valuecreation. In this sense, the circuits of cultureapproach adopts a view of consumer agencycharacteristic of polemics in material culturestudies that put consumption in the vanguard ofhistory (Miller 1995a; Chapter 22 this volume).

Second, as the metaphor of a circuit implies,the movement of a commodity is treated asreversible and nonlinear, without beginning orend. The circuit, moreover, is not a simple loop,

but rather a set of linkages between two ormore processes that is not determined or fixed.For example, advertisers and manufacturersconvene focus groups and employ ethnographicfieldworkers in order to anticipate and modifyhow consumers will respond to product repre-sentations and designs; unanticipated con-sumer responses ensure that the research neverends and instead applies ever new techniques

(Gladwell 1997; Cook, Crang and Thorne 2000b).Cook and Crang (1996a: 132, 141) have thusargued for new cultural material geographies bydeveloping the idea of circuits of culinaryculture. They view foods not only as placedcultural artefacts, but also as dis-placed, inhabit-ing many times and spaces which, far from

being neatly bounded, bleed into and indeedmutually constitute each other (Cook andCrang 1996a: 1323). The notion of displacementemphasizes movement and interconnection,questioning any essential link between culturesor peoples and bounded places (Crang et al.2003). More specifically, the notion of displace-ment emphasizes how although consumption(of food, for example) takes place in localizedcontexts, the definition of these contexts emerges

through connections to spatially expansivenetworks or commodity-specific systems ofprovision (Fine and Leopold 1993; Fine 1995).Furthermore, the materials moving throughthese systems are themselves represented (byretailers, for example) geographically as ofparticular origin or provenance: Jamaicanpapayas or Sumatran coffee (Crang 1996; Cook,Crang and Thorne 2000a ; Smith 1996).

The trope of displacement also implies his-torical and spatial variations in knowledgeamong people linked within a circuit of culture(or commodity network). Some geographers,such as Harvey (1990), treat these variations as

the result of ignorance or mystification wherebyconsumers become oblivious to the traces oflabor exploitation occurring at distant sitesthat mark the items on display in supermarketfresh produce sections or on clothing storeracks. The segmentation of knowledges (Arce1997) is, in this view, effectively a result ofsuppression a lack or absence of knowledgeabout, say, where a product comes from andwhy it is such a bargain. By contrast, thecircuits of culture approach views situated orsegmented knowledges as the contingent out-come of a variety of practices, including theactive desires of consumers, the symbolic work

of marketers, and the imaginative agency ofproducers who hold ideas about the people forwhom they grow carnations or the places wherethe garments they stitch end up. This approachenjoins researchers to identify the means bywhich the whole variety of actors in a com-modity network create and contest what any oneactor in any one location knows. As a result,these researchers explicitly eschew the role oflegislator of revealing an unknown structurevisible only to the eyes of a trained social scien-tist, of exposing as a veil of illusion what mostpeople regard as truth (Latour 2000: 11819).




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Instead, these researchers assume responsibilityfor representing things things-in-motion inall their complexity and uncertainty. As Cookand Crang (1996a) argue, critical intervention (orcritical fetishism) here takes the form of workingwith the fetish rather than attempting to get

behind it.Lastly, while the GCC approach is not

entirely indifferent to the place of consump-tion (consumer demand) in a commoditychain (see, e.g., Collins 2000; Goldfrank 1994;Korzeniewicz 1994), the circuits of cultureapproach shows decisively how consumptionmatters. Empirically, this emphasis on con-sumption, along with the recognition of seg-mented knowledges, translates into a focus onthe definition of quality, or what might be

called the construction of qualitative value value produced within a system of differences(see Myers 2001; Foster 1990). Cook (1994), forexample, documents how trading managersworking in the headquarters of major foodretailing companies such as Safeway mediatethe introduction of new, exotic fruits to UKshoppers by producing instructional materials.Glossy brochures and manuals re-enchantfood commodities, qualitatively distinguishingkiwi and mango from ordinary fruits whilesimultaneously educating consumers aboutthe proper features and uses of these foods.Furthermore, the bare fact of availability of

exotic foods distinguishes some retailing out-lets from others, thus generating qualitativevalue along another dimension of comparison.

The processes of constructing qualitative valueramify in circuit-like fashion, connecting retailersnot only with shoppers but also with agriculturalproducers. Arce (1997: 1802) relates the story ofa group of women flower growers from Tanzaniawho were brought to the Netherlands in order tosee firsthand the operation of flower markets andthus to learn well the importance of quality, thatis, to learn well the perspective of Dutch flowerconsumers, as mediated by flower retailers (seeHughes 2000). Tracing the commodity network

through which their flowers move, the womenwere invited to internalize the value of flowers(Arce 1997: 181) and perforce to recognize asirrelevant criteria of texture, size, and so forthwhich informed their own enjoyment of flowers.Arces commodity story indicates how domi-nant definitions of quality routinely attrib-uted to the tastes and preferences of sovereignconsumers percolate through the often fragilelinks in a distanciated commodity network(Raynolds 2003b). The control by retailers overthe definition of quality displaces growers fromany privileged position in such a network; the

local production of globally competitive andmarketable carnations, grapes, mange-tout, etc.requires awareness and knowledge of otheractors in other places, what Hannerz (1992) callsa network of perspectives. If re-enchantedcommodities incite consumer fantasies aboutfaraway people and places, then the productspecifications of trade managers likewise inciteproducers to imagine their location in a spa-tially extensive network of relations.

Definitions of quality entrain unequal social,political, and environmental consequences, espe-cially for contract farmers. Images of healthyeating in the United States and Europe trans-late into the use of health-damaging pesticides

by Caribbean peasants and Central Americanproletarians striving to produce unblemished

yellow bananas (Andreatta 1997; Striffler andMoberg 2003). The quality standards appliedto export grapes from Brazil intensify laborrequirements, which employers meet by hiringtemporary, nonunion female workers at lowwages to do the culling, trimming, harvesting,and packing tasks with the most significancefor the products final quality (Collins 2000:104). Nevertheless, as Long and Villareal (2000:743) insist, we ought not to lose sight of how themovement of a commodity within a network ofrelations entails myriad negotiations over valueand its definition. Quality as defined by retail-ers and trade managers is one among many def-

initions; other use values struggle to be realized.By adopting an actor-oriented perspective ontransnational commodity networks, then, weare able to recognize the moments of value con-testation that take place at critical interfaceswherein normative discourses and social inter-ests are defined and negotiated (Long andVillareal 2000: 726; see also Arce 1997; Long1996).5 These contests might hinge on a collision

between incommensurable knowledges say,the knowledges of scientists, bureaucrats, andpeasants linked in a commodity network (Long1996). But, more generally, multiplicities andambiguities of value inhere in the workings of

all commodity networks. A maize husk mightthus have value for US consumers as an artifactof traditional ethnic cuisine; for Mexican peas-ants as a flexible currency for securing harvestlabor; and for Mexican migrants in the UnitedStates as festive reminders of home (Long andVillareal 2000). Ethnography multi-sited ornot of a sort unassociated with the GCCapproach is thus necessary to apprehend howthe use and meanings of specific products their qualitative value are continuouslyreassembled and transformed within situatedsocial arenas (Long and Villareal 2000: 747).




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By highlighting the construction of qualita-tive value, the circuits of culture approach bothunites economy and culture within a singleanalytical framework and defines a point ofintersection between current work in cultural/economic geography and rural sociology, onthe one hand, and anthropology, on the other.Anthropological attempts to track commoditiesand follow objects in motion derive from arebirth of material culture studies during the1980s that gave new attention to contexts andpractices of consumption (see Miller 1995b fora review). Similarly, Appadurai (1986) andKopytoffs (1986) use of the notion of commod-ity biographies, with its emphasis on the circu-lation of commodities, recovered consumptionas an important activity through which people

negotiate and renegotiate the meaning orqualitative value of things. To a large extent,this emphasis on circulation recalled classicanthropological discussions of exchange epito-mized in Malinowskis famous (1922) accountof kula. Appadurai (1986) not surprisinglydrew explicitly on more recent ethnography ofkula exchange in formulating his ideas aboutthe paths along which things moved and thediversions to which they were subject.

Appadurais essay also aimed to undo theconceptual dichotomy between gifts and com-modities that informed many analyses ofexchange in and beyond Melanesia (see, e.g.,

Gregory 1982; Strathern 1988). Instead of askingwhat is a commodity, Appadurai (1986: 13)asked when is any thing a commodity, that is,in what situation or context is a thingsexchangeability a socially relevant feature. Athings commodity candidacy thus varies as itmoves from situation to situation, each situa-tion regulated by a different regime of valueor set of conventions and criteria governingexchange (see Bohannan 1955; Steiner 1954).Accordingly, all efforts at defining commoditiesare doomed to sterility unless they illuminatecommodities in motion (Appadurai 1986: 16).Control over this motion its trajectory, speed,

transparency, and very possibility marks theparameters of a politics of value (see alsoWiener 1992).

The notion of regimes of value allows forthe possibility that exchange situations differin the extent to which the actors share socialconventions and cultural criteria for evaluatingcommodities. Thomas exploits this possibilityin his study of how Europeans and PacificIslanders appropriated each others thingsto satisfy divergent agendas; he thereby ren-ders an historical account of these entangledobjects muskets and soap, barkcloth and

shell money as a particular example of thesuccession of uses and recontextualizations(1991: 29) that characterizes the social life ofmost things. Thomas, moreover, underscoresthe mutability of things in recontextualization(1991: 28); and this theme of mutability per-vades the work of many anthropologists whohave tracked globalization through the move-ment of commodities across cultural boundaries.A good deal of this work, including Thomass

book, concerns the recontextualization of colo-nized peoples material culture in the muse-ums or homes of metropolitan art collectorsand tourists (see Myers 2002; Steiner 1994;Phillips and Steiner 1999). But other workdeals with everyday consumer goods that takeon new meanings as they travel from their

original sites of production/consumption.Weiss, for example, juxtaposes the lived expe-rience of coffee in Tanzania and Europe, andsituates the consumption of African-Americanhip-hop styles in the lives of Tanzanian youth(1996, 2002). Mankekar (2002) illustrates how

brand-name commodities such as Hamam soapand Brahmi Amla hair oil enable diasporicshoppers at Indian grocery stores in Californiato create variable notions of homeland andfamily. Even branded commodities that com-monly portend an imperialistic cultural homo-geneity, such as McDonalds fast food (Watson1997), Coca-Cola soft drinks (Miller 1998),

Disney theme parks (Brannen 1992), and Barbiedolls (MacDougall 2003) have all been shownto be pliable, subject to domestication by usersfrom Taiwan to Trinidad. Indeed, a double goalof anthropologists studying cross-cultural con-sumption has been to recover the agency ofpeople often represented as passive recipientsof foreign imports and to demonstrate, if notcultural resilience, then the emergence of newforms of cultural heterogeneity (Howes 1996;Tobin 1992).

Appadurais conceptual framework easilylends itself to following roving commodities(Inda and Rosaldo 2002) across spatially dis-

tinct social realms, to delineating a commodityecumene, that is, a transcultural network ofrelationships linking producers, distributorsand consumers of a particular commodity orset of commodities (Appadurai 1986: 27; seeEiss and Pederson 2002). This sort of exercisein composing a commodityscape results in themapping of a network of perspectives (or circuitof culture) that offers insight into how peopleslivelihoods and imaginations are shaped rarelyreciprocally by the livelihoods and imagina-tions of people elsewhere (see Collins 2003).Multi-sited ethnographies organized along




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these lines are still few and far between Mintzsgroundbreaking historical (1986) study of sugarremains a model for many anthropologists

but their contours are becoming clearer. Hansen(2000), for example, explores the world of sec-ondhand clothing as a system of provision,that is, a comprehensive chain of activities

between the two extremes of production andconsumption, each link of which plays a poten-tially significant role in the social constructionof the commodity both in its material and cul-tural aspects (Fine and Leopold 1993: 33).Her research took her to Salvation Army thriftshops in Chicago, sorting plants in Utrecht,warehouses and wholesale stores in Lusaka,and retail outlets and markets throughoutZambia. Accordingly, Hansen well recognizes

the constraints involved in choosing vantagepoints from which to consider and composethe commodityscape of secondhand clothing.Hansens own theoretical interests in the recon-textualization of cast-off clothing as desirablefashion and in the ways in which Zambiansselectively use clothing to construct and contestsocial identities lead her to foreground the hardwork of consumption (2000: 183).6

Steiner resolves the problem of studying thespatially extensive circulation of African artobjects by focusing ethnographically on theactivities of African traders, middlemen wholink either village-level object-owners, or con-

temporary artists and artisans, to Western col-lectors, dealers and tourists (1994: 2).7 Thisfocus accommodates Steiners interest in docu-menting a crucial phase in the commodity

biography of African objects, namely themoment in which traders move objects from atraditional sphere of value as ritual or sacredicon to a modernist sphere of value as objetdart (Steiner 1994: 13). In so doing, Steinereffectively illustrates how the commercial pur-suits of traders simultaneously bridge anddivide the segmented knowledges of producersand consumers. In other words, Steiner locateshimself as a field researcher in the market

places of Abidjan and the supply entrepots ofthe rural Ivory Coast in order to trace theinterface of two distinct value regimes. Similarly,Myers (2001, 2002) has documented theemergence of an Aboriginal fine art market

by tracking the circulation of acrylic-on-canvaspaintings through a transnational network ofpersons (Aboriginal artists, governmentadvisors, gallery owners) and institutions(state agencies, mass media, art museums)that uneasily articulates radically differentunderstandings of ownership, creativity, andpersonhood.

Anthropologists are deliberately applying afollow the thing method to an ever-wideningrange of commodities from mineral specimens(Ferry 2005) to marriage beads (Straight 2002)and shea nuts (Chalfin 2004). Bestors (2001)ambitious research program mimics the move-ments of its highly migratory object, the bluefintuna, propelling the anthropologist from thedocks of Maine fishing villages to commercialtuna farms off the coast of Cartagena to Tsukiji,Tokyos massive wholesale seafood market-place. Like Steiner, Bestor focuses on middle-men, the various traders (buyers, dealers,agents) whose activities connect producers tomarkets and, through markets, to distant con-sumers. In this sense, his ethnography makesvisible the political economy and fragmentary

social structure of the global tuna commoditynetwork. Like Hansen, moreover, Bestor choosescertain sites from which to compose the com-modityscape, privileging Tsukiji because of itsdominant effects in governing both the eco-nomic and cultural terms (i.e., the dominantdefinition of quality bluefin tuna) of the globaltuna trade. The creation of value, qualitative andquantitative, revolves around the managementof segmented knowledges, that is, around thestrategic deployment by traders of an image ofsuperior Japanese culinary tastes and essentiallyinscrutable expertise in all things sushi (cf.Walsh 2004). Bestor, then, is as interested in

describing the work of the imagination as indemonstrating the work of consumption, that is,in describing the imagination of commodities intrade, as items of exchange and consumption, aswell as the imagination of the trade partner andthe social contexts through which relationshipsare created, modified, or abandoned (2001: 78).Foster (2002) similarly describes the ways inwhich transnational advertisers, Australian cor-porate officials, and Papua New Guinean con-sumers all variously imagine themselves andeach other as part of a global soft drink com-modity ecumene. Ramamurthy (2003) juxta-poses the contradictory yearnings of rural

Indian women for polyester saris with thesimple view of the needs of these female con-sumer-citizens held by the male managers of theTNC which produces the saris. The big promiseof multi-sited ethnography thus lies in its capa-city to combine a synoptic view of commoditynetworks (the system) with the situated views ofpeople whom the networks connect (multiplelife worlds) (Marcus 1995). The contingency andcontradictions of the situated views qualify thestability and coherence of the synoptic view.

Composing commodityscapes and tracingcircuits of culture present a paradox. These




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approaches distinguish themselves from theGCC approach by their thicker descriptions,often ethnographically based, of the ramifyingsocial processes and relations that generate andtransform the value of commodities in motion.But the conventional methods of thick descrip-tion what Geertz (1998) calls localized, long-term, close-in, vernacular field research andClifford (1997: 58) dubs a spatial practice ofintensive dwelling are at odds with thedemands of following mobile things acrossmultiple sites occupied by very different sorts ofpeople speaking very different sorts of vernacu-lars. The risk, as Bestor (2001: 78) puts it, is thatmulti-sited research eventuates in drive-byethnography, thin and superficial description.As ethnographers geographers (Cook et al.

2004) as well as anthropologists take up thechallenge of tracking globalization, they willmore and more confront the question of revisingtheir field methods (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).They may perhaps even conclude that the con-ceit of the solitary and heroic fieldworker nolonger serves well (Foster 1999) and that fol-lowing commodities in motion inevitablyinvites team-based fieldwork (see Banerjee andMiller 2003 for an instructive example).

Hybrid Actor Networks

Constructing hybrid actor networks requires the

researcher to thicken description beyond eventhe density of circuits of culture or commodity-scape approaches. This requirement stemsfrom the radically deconstructive and non-essentialist (semiotic) approach of actor networktheory (ANT), which recognizes no discrete andindependently existing entities but, rather, onlyrelational effects or outcomes.8 These effects ofnetwork relations might include such familiarunits of social analysis as firms or nationstates (or even persons) as well as familiareveryday objects such as telephones and tea.Networks are, in other words, materially het-erogeneous or hybrid, built of both human and

non-human elements, each of which exercisesagency (as actants) in affecting the length andstability of the network. Constructing hybridactor networks is thus a way of telling stories,of narrating how networks take and holdshape (or not), enrolling new people andthings. It is the ongoing and uncertain perfor-mance of networking the network as actor rather than the fixed morphology of networksthat occupies the attention of the storyteller.

As a framework for thinking about globaliza-tion, ANT first of all provides a way of account-ing for how action at a distance happens. Instead

of postulating global forces or institutions (suchas TNCs) that affect local situations, ANTencourages researchers to investigate empiri-cally how networks of relations hold and extendtheir shape through geographical space. (Putdifferently, ANT encourages researchers toshow how networking produces or makes spaceas a material outcome (Law and Hetherington1999).) It is the creation of more or less lengthynetworks, enabled in part through new com-munications technologies, that effects and sus-tains global reach the connection of separateworlds into a single world. For example, Law(1986) has described the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Portuguese expansion in terms of thecapacity of documents (maps and tables),devices (astrolabes and quadrants), and drilled

people (navigators and sailors) to hold eachother together in a continuous network. Sincenetworking always occurs specifically andmaterially, following it step by step never takesone from the micro level to the macro level oracross the mysterious limes that divide the localfrom the global (Latour 1993: 121). Actor net-work theory thus obviates familiar binary dis-tinctions between the global and the local or

between core and periphery; questions of net-work connectivity eclipse questions of spatialscale (Whatmore and Thorne 1997: 28990).

By no means all ANT-inspired research onglobalization adopts a strategy of tracking com-

modities in motion or delineating commoditynetworks (see, e.g., Olds and Yeung 1999). Butsuch work that focuses on agrofood networks

begins by recognizing that breaking downthe global-local binary ... is intricately tied upwith breaking down the nature-society binary(Whatmore and Thorne 1997: 292; Whatmore2002). For example, Busch and Juska (1997) nar-rate the emergence and decline of the networkthat grew around post-World War II efforts ofthe Canadian Defence Board to change indus-trial rapeseed into edible (canola) oil, therebysecuring a self-sufficient national market. Thematerial properties of rapeseed, however,

object-ed to the enrollment of rape plants in thisnetwork. That is, the desirable quality of therapeseed was bundled (Keane 2005) togetherwith an undesirable but copresent quality, eru-cic acidity. Hence, as an effect of the rapeseedsmateriality, the enrollment in the network ofagricultural researchers who developed tech-niques for breeding low erucic acid rape(LEAR).9 In turn, the successful production ofLEAR enabled the extension of the rapeseednetwork during the 1970s when, under pressure,

Japan opened its domestic market to importedoilseeds. The story of the rapeseed network




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thus traces shifting combinations (or hybridcollectif; Callon and Law 1995) of differently con-stituted actants with varied material properties;neither nature nor culture, but states-of-beingthat fall somewhere in between. The notionof hybrid actor network consequently expandsupon Marxs vision of nature as a product andcondition of the labor of human beings a product and condition that strikes back(Latour 2000).

In one significant sense, ANT confounds thestrategy of tracking commodities, for only as anentity a rapeseed comes to be enrolled,combined and disciplined within networks(Murdoch 1997: 330), does it gain shape andfunction; its shape and function materially aswell as semantically are not fixed. For example,

Whatmore and Thorne (2000) narrate stories ofelephants on the move that show how thebodies of nonhuman animals become enmeshedin extensive networks of wildlife conservationand science. At different moments or nodes inthese networks, the bodies of African elephantsmaterialize as digital records in a computer data-

base, romantic images in travel brochures, andcorporeal presences in zoos and game reserves.Nevertheless, ANT is potentially applicable tocommodity networks of the sort studied byGCC and circuits of culture approaches.Whatmore and Thorne (1997) describe the FairTrade coffee network which links UK con-

sumers and organizations with Peruvian coop-eratives and producers. Their concern, besidesidentifying the heterogeneous actants bothhuman (customs officials, banking clerks) andnon-human (coffee beans, earthworms) in thenetwork, is to demonstrate how, despite theirdifferences (see Raynolds 2002), alternativeagrofood networks enroll many of the sameactants as dominant commercial networks inattempting to extend their reach and to keeptheir components ordered and strongly related.

As the discussion of Fair Trade coffee indi-cates, the hybrid actor network approach is notindifferent to issues of power, largely under-

stood as asymmetries within or between net-works. Actors do not always enjoy equal optionswith regard to enrolling in a network, and someactors may function more as intermediaries(enrollees) than as agents (enrollers) within anetwork. Some networks reach farther andendure longer than others. Unlike the GCC orcircuits of culture approaches, however, thevocabulary of hybrid actor network studiesdoes not formulate questions of value creationor accumulation (but see Busch and Juska1997). Instead of adumbrating a theory ofvalue adequate to the patterned inequalities of

distanciated commodity networks, the politicaleconomy of hybrid actor networks risks becom-ing an account of the masculinist strategies of(mostly human) actants to position themselvesas efficacious agents. As Busch and Juska (1997:7045) note, because the hybrid actor networkapproach is empirically driven, it is relativelymodest in its scope (what is explained) as wellas in its potential for generalization (what can beexplained). The most significant critical importof the approach might well lie in its capacity asa sophisticated language for challenging theknowledge practices and ontological dualismsperformed by powerful people politicians,scientists, and bankers and encoded by author-itative nonhuman entities laws, machines,and the engineered bodies of plants and animals

(Whatmore and Thorne 1997: 301).

CONCLUSION: POLITICS ANDPROSPECTS

All three approaches to commodity networksimply a politics of knowledge. For example, allthree approaches offer the strategy of tracingnetworks as a tool for undermining represen-tations of globalization as an inexorable total-izing process, and of the global economy asan integrated whole. By treating the activity of

building commodity networks as contestedand contingent, these approaches counter rep-resentations of capitalism as a juggernaut orleviathan that induces hopeless acquiescenceand political passivity. They open up other waysof knowing and perforce identify possibilitiesfor active resistance for destabilizing domi-nant networks and building alternative ones. Itis in this general sense that following commodi-ties and value in motion accomplishes criticalfetishism.

Similarly, all three approaches offer networksolutions to the problem of connecting con-sumers with producers, of overcoming spatial

distance and gaps in knowledge in order to pro-duce an ethical, more equitable relationship.Yet each approach raises worries about thepotential of the others to effect progressivechange either in the working and environ-mental conditions of producers or in the every-day consciousness of consumers. In particular,critics wonder whether the thickened descrip-tions required by both circuits of culture andhybrid actor network approaches blunt the criti-cal edge of commodity chain analyses informed

by labor theories of value and committed toexplaining social inequality. Leslie and Reimer




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(1999: 407) ask if circuits of culture accounts, bynot foregrounding exploitation and its causes,lose sight of the political motivation for tracingcommodity networks. Hartwick goes further,characterizing as uncritical fetishism ANTspreoccupation with nonhuman actants andhybrid networks: another device for hidingthe real relationships between consumers andproducers (2000: 1182). What, then, are thepolitical dimensions of each approach to com-modity networks, especially the implicationsfor a new politics of consumption? What sortof alternative commodity networks does eachapproach envision? How might researchersintervene practically in the commodity net-works that they track?

The political rhetoric of commodity chain-

inspired analysis is one of unmasking andexposure, of revealing a network of connectionshidden by spatial distance or the magic systemof advertising or even, as in the case of hybridcorn seed (Ziegenhorn 2000), by the state-sanctioned force of trade secrecy. This rhetoricpoints to how the tension between knowledgeand ignorance determines both the trajectoryand the value of commodities in motion(Appadurai 1986: 41; see Hughes 2000). Henceresearchers and activists alike attempt to repairthe disjuncture in knowledge that renders con-sumers of expensive apparel or toys or freshfruits ignorant of the abuses suffered by the

poorly paid producers of these commodities.The awareness and concern of educated con-sumers in the North can thus be harnessedto empower exploited workers in the Souththrough a range of efforts to improve laborconditions. These efforts include variouspromising fair trade and organic labelingschemes that guarantee minimum producerprices as well as corporate campaigns to pres-sure retailers into ensuring that brand-namecommodities are made under non-exploitativeconditions (Gereffi et al. 2001; Hartwick 2000).Such schemes inevitably involve political con-tests over the definition of fair labor and envi-

ronmental standards and remain vulnerableto cooptation by corporate niche marketing(Murray and Raynolds 2000). They rely, more-over, on faith in public education on the

belief that educating consumers about theirresponsibilities and educating producers abouttheir rights are necessary if not sufficientmeans for creating long-distance cooperationand achieving social justice. Connecting andeducating consumers and producers in thisway will therefore require new forms of peda-gogy and curriculum (for example, see Miller2003; McRobbie 1997), media activism (Klein

1999), and labor organizing among workers,unions, NGOs, religious groups, and studentactivists (see, e.g., the Web site of the NationalLabor Committee).

There is much work to be done in mappingcommodity networks that function withoutpublicity, including networks of non-agrofoodcommodities such as pharmaceuticals (van derGeest et al. 1996) and recycled goods such asused tires and scrap steel. The goal is not tocompile an exhaustive inventory of commodi-ties, but rather to devise ways of understandingthe worldwide circulation and accumulation ofvalue that do not presume and privilege eithernation states or TNCs as central actors (Dickenet al. 2001). There is even more work to be donetracking flows of illicit commodities such as

drugs, blood diamonds and weapons (vanSchendel and Abraham forthcoming). Theanthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2000)has begun to expose the networks that linkorgan donors, doctors, and transplant recipientsin a shadowy transnational trade of humanlivers, kidneys, and other body parts. Scheper-Hughes has also created Organs Watch, aninternational human rights and social justiceorganization dedicated to producing and dis-seminating an accurate and evolving map of theroutes by which organs, surgeons, medical capi-tal, and donors circulate (Organs Watch, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/biotech/organswatch/).

Her efforts have brought the operation oforgan trafficking worldwide to the attention ofa wide public audience (Rohter 2004).

If commodity chain analyses encouragedefetishization by exposing the network to con-sumers, then circuits of culture/commodityscapeapproaches suggest how consumers enchant thenetwork by reembedding it in relations of trust.In this sense, Fair Trade initiatives enable con-sumers and producers to overcome the disem-

bedding effects of the impersonal market andto relate to each other in terms that go beyondprice, terms that reembed an abstract system(Giddens 1990) in social relations predicated

upon other values (see Foster 2002). (Likewise,organic or Green standards enable consumersto reembed commodity production and con-sumption in natural processes (Raynolds2000, 2002).) Fair Trade brings consumers andproducers closer together not in pursuit of acommon understanding of quality, as in the caseof the Tanzanian flower growers, but in pursuitof an equitable distribution of value.10 FairTrade thus engages the imagination, enablingconsumers to situate themselves in a spa-tially extensive commodityscape. Cook et al.(2004) have argued that geographers require




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new techniques to provide consumers withresources to imagine their location in commod-ityscapes, especially given that retailers andmarketers compete to provide resources oftheir own design. These techniques might entailunconventional forms of writing commoditynetworks (compare Clifford and Marcus 1986) forms that, like Cooks multi-sited ethnographicdescription of a papaya commodity network,might mimic strategies of montage pioneered

by film makers (Cook and Crang 1996b).Similarly, Cook, Evans et al. (2004) also advo-cate new forms of non-didactic public education(see Miller 2003); they are as skeptical of thepersuasiveness of the demystifications advo-cated by Hartwick (2000) as Hartwick is dubiousabout the obfuscations of ANT. The challenge

Cook, Evans et al. (2004) identify is one ofenabling consumers themselves (Cooks geog-raphy students, specifically) to deal with theirown perplexity (Ramamurthy 2003) anawareness that their subjectivity exceeds andconfounds all appeals to shop ethically, patri-otically, or hedonistically.

Every hybrid actor network approach empha-sizes the porosity of boundaries between peopleand things, and thus provides a consistent ana-lytical language for discussing many of theanxieties provoked by contemporary commod-ity networks, such as concerns about geneti-cally modified food and Mad Cow Disease

(Whatmore 2002). This language similarly pro-vides a way of discussing the efforts of manyFair Trade and Green activists to create alter-native commodity networks assemblages ofpeople and things that exclude certain actants:chemical pesticides, growth hormones, vora-cious middlemen, and so forth. These effortsoften encounter limitations imposed by work-ing within and against dominant marketarrangements such as commercial practices ofcertification (Raynolds 2003b). The emergenceof community-supported agriculture (CSA) in which community members share the har-vest and its risks with local organic farmers

(Henderson 1999) can thus be understood asan attempt to shorten the network, that is, toshorten the food supply chain through whichhouseholds provision themselves. In otherwords, hybrid actor network approachespotentially re-present things to the public insuch a way as to modify the representation thepublic has of itselffast enough so that the great-est number of objections have been made to thisrepresentation (Latour 2000: 120). It is thuspotentially a political language, one that moti-vates action based on a relational ethics(Whatmore 2002).

The language of hybrid actor networks likethe encompassing metaphor of commodity net-works offers a way of thinking critically aboutthe flows of objects (and people) so often asso-ciated with globalization. But dialects of thislanguage are also spoken across the landscapesof capital conjured out of less critical represen-tations of globalization. Hence a promotionaltext for the NYK (Nippon Yusen Kaisha) Groupabout the challenges of global shipping: Todaythe logistics of moving goods around the worldis coordinated on an increasingly complex andimmense scale. To answer specific customerdemands, the NYK Group has expanded itsglobal network while evolving its services andmeans of transport. The NYK Group claims tofocus always ongemba its Japanese for on

site, where goods are actually put in motion.Here, then, is the language of ANT lengthen-ing the network, which always remains local,in order to effect action at a distance spoken ina New Yorker magazine advertisement. Can,indeed, the study of commodity networksmovefast enough in modifying the representa-tion the public has of itself when it is onlyone of many competing global connectivitydiscourses (Ramamurthy 2003)?

As techniques for tracking globalization,mapping commodity networks and followingthings in motion are not ends in themselves. Theinitial methodological emphasis on discrete

things must give way to an emphasis on rela-tions. Theoretically, the method ought to expli-cate how value quantitative as well asqualitative is variably created and unequallydistributed in and through contingent rela-tions or assemblages of persons and things.Politically, the method ought to extend theinsights of material culture studies about con-sumer agency, moving beyond a celebration ofthe capacity for creative self-fashioning throughrecontextualization of commodities and towarda vision of responsible consumer-citizenship.This vision entails articulating consumeragency in the practical form of Fair Trade or

CSA with networks of people and things thatperform social justice and environmental care.Making both these conceptual and ethical link-ages will redeem the promise of commoditynetwork analysis as critical fetishism and avoida devolution into unreflexive cartography.

NOTES

1 Or, more precisely, the manifold relationsbetween things and things, things andpersons, and persons and things.




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2 Leslie and Reimer (1999), Hughes (2000),Raynolds (2003), Bridge and Smith (2003),and Hughes and Reimer (2004) all provideuseful reviews.

3 Commodity chain analysis bears affinitieswith both commodity systems analysis andthe French filire tradition in the sociologyof agriculture (Friedland 1984, 2001; Raikeset al. 2000).

4 Gereffi does not assume, however, thatmore value-added always accrues at nodesin the chain where manufacturing and dis-tribution (as opposed to raw materialextraction) occur. The GCC approachexplains the distribution of wealth withina chain as an outcome of the relative inten-sity of competition within different nodes

(Gereffi et al. 1994: 4).5 At these interfaces which occur within aswell as between regional settings, discontinu-ities in social life (and thus potential shortsin the circuit of culture) become visible:such discontinuities imply discrepancies invalues, interest, knowledge and power ...[T]hey depict social contexts wherein socialrelations become orientated towards theproblem of devising ways of bridging,accommodating to or struggling againstother peoples social and cognitive worlds(Long 1996: 55).

6 Hansens interests in consumption make

the systems of provision approach to com-modity networks particularly congenial,especially given its attempt to considerconsumer behaviour not in terms of someall-encompassing motivation (emulation,rationality, etc.), but rather in terms of thehistorical and social conditions underwhich specific commodities are made mate-rially available (Fine and Leopold 1993).

7 Ethnographies of transnational womentraders higglers or suitcase traders(Freeman 2001) and shuttle traders(Ykseker 2004) have effectively linked(and critiqued) globalization studies with

gender and womens studies (see alsoBarndt 2002; Ramamurthy 2003).

8 ANT originally developed in the 1980s aspart of sociological studies of science; it isassociated with the work of Bruno Latour,

John Law and Michel Callon (see Murdoch1997). For a plea to keep ANT messy andvital in the face of its success as portabletheory, see Law (1999).

9 Mintz (1986) similarly pointed out howthe intrinsic properties of sugar cane,which must be cut when ripe and once cutrapidly crushed in order to extract the

juices, conditioned the factory-like laborof cultivating and processing the crop.

10 Hence the report in the New Internationalist,a magazine devoted to issues of globalsocial justice, of the UK visit of a Ghanaiancocoa farmer on tour sites along the cocoatrail, including the large chocolate pro-cessing plant, Cadbury World (August1998, Issue 304).

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Corrections to Chapter 18, Tracking Globalization Robert J. FosterNovember 2. 2005

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