Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2003, volume 21, pages 257 ^ 268

DOI:10.1068/d2103ed

Guest editorial

Intimate encounters: culture ^ economy ^ commodity

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
John Masefield (1878 ^ 1967) Cargoes

``(A)cademics tend to pick on Coca-Cola as their favourite image of ... superficial

globality... . Nothing could be further from the Trinidadian case. Here Coca-Cola
both as brand and in its generic form as a `black' sweet drink becomes an image that
develops as much through the local contradictions of popular culture as part of an
implicit debate about how people should be. If one grants that the red sweet drink
(a traditional category) stands for an image of Indianness then its mythic potential
emerges. This is an image of Indianness with which some Indians will identify... .
But equally for Africans and others the identity of being Trinidadian includes this
presence of Indian as a kind of `otherness' which at one level they define themselves
against, but at a superordinate level they incorporate as an essential part of their
Trinidadianess. The importance of the ethnicity ascribed to drinks is that individual
non-Indians cannot literally apply a piece of Indianness to themselves to resolve this
contradiction of alterity. Instead they can consume mythic forms ... Africans drink-
ing a sweet red drink consume what for them is a highly acceptable image of
Indianness that is an essential part of their sense of being Trinidadian.''
Daniel Miller (1998a, page 180)
Introduction: the commodity is back
Commodities have made a striking resurgence within the academy over the last decade
after being relegated for a generation or more to a lower drawer in the dusty backrooms of
economic geography. These are not, however, `your father's' commoditiesöthe stuff
(mellifluously articulated by John Masefield) of sailing ships, sandalwood, ironware, pig
lead, and cheap tin traysöabstract accountings on colonial balance sheets, objects
exchanged, mapped, and recorded with all the certitude and precision that their rendering
as `objects' provides. The commodity today is an altogether more intimate affair, as Daniel
Miller's ethnography of Trinidadian beverages illustrates. With their identities less certain
and more fluid, commodities are now described as having biographies and geographical
lives, as things thatöthrough exchange and consumptionöbecome active constituents
258 Guest editorial

of social relations and coparticipants in the unfolding of the world. Relieved of their
traditional role as the `dead world' of economic cargoes and anthropological artifacts,
commoditiesöand their circulationöhave gained new life. It is in this `living world' of
`things in motion'öwhere `the social' is ``as much constituted by materiality as the other
way around'' (Miller, 1998b, page 3)öthat commodities have become a window through
which to understand the sociocultural construction and regulation of economies (see Lee
and Wills, 1997).
From fashion and food to furniture and flowers, then, the commodity has emerged
as a particularly effective vehicle for exploring reciprocal relations between the
`cultural' and the `economic'. At one level this collective seizing on the commodity as
a research focus can be explained by reference to the political economy of academic
research in which emergent postcolonial `culture industries' were spotlighted during the
1990s as potential growth areas (and, therefore, were deemed suitable targets for funding).
At an intellectual level, however, commoditiesöobjects produced for exchange, upon
which various social meanings are bestowed öprovide a unique window on the
co-construction of the `economic' and the `cultural'. Through production, circulation,
and consumption, commodities shuttle back and forth between the poles of use
value and exchange value. But commodities also embody emotional value in the
meanings and attachments bestowed upon them by cognizant consumers. Recent
work within anthropology and geography focuses on this tension to broaden conven-
tional economistic interpretations of the commodity öwhich, ever since Karl Marx,
has been considered the `economic cell form' of capitalism (see Watts, 1999). For
example, by examining the social processes through which things become commodified
for exchange and then decommodified through use, this work highlights the multiple
sociocultural constructions of the economic form (Cook and Crang, 1996). Thus
for Miller (1987; 1998b) ethnographies of material culture provide a means for
understanding capitalism as a set of cultural practices rather than as a unitary eco-
nomic logic. Teasing out the multivalent and fluid nature of commodities has thus
become a significant strand within this new cultural geography. As Alex Hughes
and Suzanne Reimer (2003) put it in the introduction to their forthcoming book
Geographies of Commodity Chains, the ``pursuit of commodity stories'' has thus become
an increasingly prominent activity.
Intimate encounters with things
At the heart of this work on the `living world of things in motion' is a recognition
that we live in a more-than-human world. To speak of `things' in this context, there-
fore, is to recover a role for the nonhuman by demonstrating how the production,
exchange, and consumption of commodities are constitutive of social relations: in
other words, that commodities `make a difference' to the way social processes play
out. Expressing this intimacy with things is hard to do: it involves thinking about
encounters with objects not as place-bound intimacies, but as local articulations of
material flows that are more extensive in time and space: it can require suspending
received convention that things are objects (products of dead labor) in order to
consider how they might instead be subjects (active participants); and, over a century
after Marx's warnings about the beguilingly ``obvious, trivial'' (1965 [1867], page 71,
in Colletti, 1992, page 38) nature of commodities, it risks fetishizing the commodity
all over again. Researchers have experimented with a range of epistemological,
methodological, and narrative devices to confront these challenges and express the
intimacy and rich range of our encounters with commodities. We identify and briefly
discuss four of these narrative devices as a way of positioning the papers that follow.
Guest editorial 259

The social lives of things

It is increasingly recognized that commodities ``have lives'' or ``biographies'' öas Igor
Kopytoff (1986, page 66) puts itöand that these lives take shape as a result of the
diverse encounters between people and things as they move through time and space
(Appadurai, 1986; Watts, 1999).(1) This work takes an almost voyeuristic interest in the
`social life of things' and seeks to trace ``the forms, uses, and trajectories of things-in-
motion in order to illuminate their human and social context'' (Dwyer and Jackson,
2003, page 270). The apparently anthropomorphic conceit that things can have `lives' is
purposefully arresting and tries to capture at least three ideas: that items, from the
sacred (for example, Geary, 1986, on saintly relics) to the mundane (for example,
Gregson and Crewe, 1998, on car-boot sales), have histories that can be recovered
and narrated as `life stories';(2) that the identity and meaning of these objects are not
innate but arise out of the interaction of objects with social context [see, for example,
Parminder Bhachu's (1998) work on interpretations of the Punjabi suit by Asian
diaspora women in Britain, cited in Peter Jackson (2002)]; and that, as a result, the
meanings of a commodity are not only plural and contested, but also mutable over
time and space.
This common interest in commodity lives, however, belies a diversity of approaches
for their exhumation, narration, and interpretation. These include ethnographic
approaches drawn from anthropology which seek to describe the biography of a thing
in terms of its `career' via such questions (following Kopytoff, 1986, page 66) as `where
does the thing come from and who made it?', `What has been its career so far, and what
do people consider to be an ideal career for such things?' `What are the recognized
``ages'' or periods in the ``life'' of a thing, and what are the cultural markers for them?'
They also include ethnographic approaches that are less focused on the histories of
objects and more focused on the role things-in-motion play in defining human lives
and, in particular, social and geographical patterns of stratification (for example,
Miller, 1998b). Such ethnographic techniques are used to contextualize commodities
within prevailing cultural practices and to understand the utility, meaning, and symbol-
ism of commodities from within the frame of reference of those who interact with
the commodity. This `lateral' approach (Jackson, 2002, page 9) stands in contrast to the
`vertical' frameworks of commodity-chain analysis that draw from political economy.
These tend toward a literal rendering of the commodity chain as a set of sequential
processes (production, circulation, and consumption) and focus on the way value and
knowledge are distributed socially and geographically up and down the chain [Gary
Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz (1994); see also Deborah Leslie and Suzanne Reimer
(1999) and Adrian Smith et al (2002), amongst others, for critiques of linear approaches
to the commodity]. Hughes's (2000; 2001) work, for example, on the construction
of knowledge in the global cut-flower trade is indicative of such an approach and
stresses the `vertical' politics (that is, `up' and `down' the chain between producers
and consumers) of transnational commodity networks.
In these accounts of commodity chains or networks, the `life' of a commodity refers
to its movement and physical transformation (fabrication, use, disposal, and possible

(1) Kopytoff (1986, page 67) elaborates on the value of this approach: ``Biographies of things can

make salient what might otherwise remain obscure. For example, in situations of culture contact,
they show... that what is significant about the adoption of alien objects ... is not the fact that they
are adopted, but the way they are culturally redefined and put to use. The biography of a car in
Africa would reveal a wealth of cultural data ... . All of these details would reveal an entirely
different biography from that of a middle-class American, or Navajo, or French peasant car.''
(2) `Lives' and `life stories' have become popular tropes in nonacademic writing on commodities

(see, for example, Cohen, 1997; Ryan and Durning, 1997; Petroski, 1990; 1994).
260 Guest editorial

recycling) during the various stages of production and consumption. The physical `chain'
provides a tangible (yet often all too opaque) connection between the real lives of
producers and consumers. The record of social activism around commodities as diverse
as furs, diamonds, brand-name apparel and sports goods, cut flowers and mangetout,
however, indicates the capacity of these chains for ferrying dystopian imaginaries of greed,
inequality, and brutality directly into the parlors of postindustrialism (Bridge, 2001,
page 2169). Indeed, the opportunity which the biography of a commodity provides for a
strident and shocking juxtaposition of consumers and producers can expose producers to
commercial risk. One response among those seeking more ethical, egalitarian, or less
socioecologically harmful methods of production has been to make the geographical life
of a commodity more transparent: increased interest in management devices such as
traceability, certification, and `chains of custody', for example, is evidence of this (see
Hale, 2000; Hartwick, 2000; Hughes, 2001; Miller, 2003).
`Lateral' and `vertical' approaches to the circulation of commodities may provide a
convenient shorthand for understanding significant cleavages within current work, yet
they do not exhaust the range of approaches mobilizing the language of commodity
lives. An alternate perspective derives from actor-network theory (particularly the
work of Bruno Latour, 1993) and adopts, as its entrëe into the `biography' of a
commodity, the biographer's sense of life as a set of relations. From this perspective,
then, the properties or character of an object are not inherent to it, but emerge out of
the network of relationships which define the circulation of a commodity (see, for
example, Bingham, 1996; Whatmore and Thorne, 2000). This work explores the inter-
section of the lives of commodities with `lived bodies' through such intimacies as
eating, cultivating, and claiming ownership (patenting) of living species. By examining
the mutual constitution of commodity (nonhuman) and human lives in the context of
such `real' commodities as coffee, soybeans, and elephants, this work throws into
stark relief the ``porosity of the imagined borders which mark `us' off from `it' '' (that
is, the nonhuman world) (Whatmore, 2002, page 120). Applications of actor-network
theory to the commodity, then, can illuminate how the production, exchange, and
consumption of a commodity make a difference to the commodity and how encounters
with the commodity make a difference to the social relations in which it is caught up.
In sum, recent work on commodities demonstrates a remarkable degree of convergence
around the trope of `commodity lives' or `biographies of things'. The apparent com-
monality, however, is only superficial and work on commodities exhibits considerable
variationöfrom political economy to the new cultural studies öin what `having a life'
is understood to mean, and in the methods chosen for illustrating and analyzing these
lives.
Geographical circulation of commodities
It is the spatiality of commoditiesöthe fact that commodities circulate geographically,
are produced, exchanged, and consumed in different places and at different times, and,
as a consequence, interactions with commodities are necessarily spatialized öwhich
makes our intimacy with them both interesting and problematic. As we necessarily
interact with only discrete parts of much broader and more inclusive commodity chains
or commodity circuits, our encounters with a commodity (like eating mangetout,
drinking coffee, or wearing cotton clothing) provide knowledge of the commodity
that may be vivid, yet fundamentally partial. Many of these interactions with commod-
ities consist of fleeting öalthough often terminalömoments in `global' commodity flows
and networks. Indeed, the increasing prevalence of long-distance provisioning systems
for even the most mundane of commodities presents a paradox. On the one hand,
reductions in communication and transportation costs have resulted in the stretching
Guest editorial 261

of commodity chains over ever-greater distances, increasing the separation between

production and consumption and exacerbating the problem of commodity fetishism
(see Boge, 1995; Kloppenburg et al, 1996). Yet the same processes also open up possi-
bilities for defetishizing the commodity by increasing consumer awareness of the
socioeconomic and environmental conditions under which commodities are produced.
Miller (2003; see also Miller and Slater, 2000) explores this paradox by mobilizing an
ethnographic approach to examine how individuals actually use and interact with their
(as opposed to the) Internet. His work (with Don Slater) suggests that the Internet may
provide a mechanism for `disintermediation'öputting the consumers and producers
directly in touch with each other and creating a space for thinking critically about the
social responsibilities that consumption entailsöbut that there are also significant limits
to its capacity for defetishizing the commodity. At the heart of Miller's approach to the
politics of global (and local) commodity systems is a recognition, then, of the distantiated,
translocal geographies of commodity circulations (see also Smith, 2003).
Commodity surfaces
A significant part of acknowledging the constitutive role of material things in social
life has been to explore that most intimate point of interaction between people and
things, the commodity surface. It is, for example, on the question of the surface of a
commodity that the charge of commodity fetishism turns: on accepting the surface
appearance of a commodity as true form and its properties as inherent rather than as
derived from a history (and geography) of social production and circulation. But
what is the most appropriate response to surfaces? To some, the surface of a
commodity is a superficial distraction that masks the true exploitative nature of its
production. One's objective, then, could be to pursue a ``politics of reconnection''
(Hartwick, 1998, page 433) by unveiling the commodity and revealing its `real' essence
[see, for example, David Harvey's (1990) call for revealing the hidden geographies of
exploitation].
To others, however, such an approach is na|« ve and unduly privileges academic
knowledge over popular, consumer-based knowledges. Jackson (2002, page 6), for
example, argues that there is something increasingly hollow about calls to `unveil' the
commodity fetish. Referencing the work of Ian Cook and Phil Crang (1996), Jackson
urges an exploration of the possibilities afforded by alternative metaphors of `displace-
ment' and `entanglement' and `circuitry' (see also Miller, 2003, on Slater's notion of
`disintermediation'). The perennial hunt for fresh metaphors evinces a desire to capture
the way commodities circulate through various states and phases (conventionally, those
of production and consumption) but in ways that frequently are far from linear, seldom
frictionless, and in which the characteristics of a commodity are mutable and its
meanings ambivalent: the search, in other words, is for language that can express the
`turbulence' of commodities (Whatmore, 2001). Thinking about commodities through
the lens of displacement involves taking commodity surfaces seriously, or ``getting
with the fetish'' as Noel Castree (2001, page 1521), following Michael Taussig (1992),
puts it. This emphasis on commodity surfaces involves ``paying less attention to
deepening or thickening surfaces, and more to thinking about their productivities,
what they are used for. The issue becomes not, then, the authenticity or accuracy
of commodity surfaces, but rather the spatial settings and social itineraries that
are established through their usage'' (Cook and Crang, 1996, page 149).(3) The politi-
cal moment that arises out of working with the fetish, then, is the performative

(3) Cook and Crang (1996) also draw inspiration from Taussig (1992).
262 Guest editorial

possibilities that commodity surfaces provide for imagining and enacting alternative
geographies.(4)
Other attempts to take the surfaces of commodities seriously stress not the political
potential of their reinscription, but the physical endurance of commodity surfaces over
time and space. It is now, perhaps, axiomatic that commodity surfaces are multivalent
(indeed, deeply ambivalent, see Dwyer and Jackson, 2003) and subject to myriad
interpretations, yet such surfaces are more than just projections of the user, `accidental
modalities' that may be layered on or peeled off in different spaces and times.(5) As
the accumulated legacy of interaction with people and other commodities, surfaces can
be `sticky' in that they live on as the commodity circulates. Leslie and Reimer (2003)
illustrate how, as a signifier of authenticity, such layerings of meaning can have positive
aesthetic and monetary value with the example of used furniture where use over time
lends a patina to wood or leather.
Getting `all cultural'?
How can we capture and hold in suspension the simultaneously `economic' and `cultural'
dimensions to our interactions with things? The commodity may provide a particularly
effective vehicle for understanding the coproduction of `culture' and `economy', yet actually
to demonstrate coproduction is no easy trick and significant tensions remain. For example,
an emphasis within current work on commodity consumption and circulation (as opposed
to more traditional concerns with commodity production and exchange) deliberately
redirects attention to the personalized and often domestic spaces in which we encounter
things (shopping, eating, interior design). Such inclusive geographies are especially valua-
ble correctives to the uncritically partial and overly economistic perspectives of the past.
Yet, as practice, research on consumption raises new challenges of how to capture
analytically the multiple dimensions and nonterminality of commodity consumption
while still retaining a sense of the structuring and stratifying processes that produce a
commodity, and through which the commodity then passes before consumption. There is,
in other words, a tension which can cede commodities to the cultural turn and let slip (or
significantly underplay) the more conventional concerns of political economyösuch as
processes of exclusion that attend commodification of the public weal (Polanyi, 1944;
see also Christie, 2001; Shiva, 1997)(6) or the sociospatial reallocation of wealth as the
(extra-local) exchange value of a commodity trumps (local) use value.
Another tension concerns the relationship between positive and normative approaches
to commodification. To what extent does research on the semiology of commodity
surfaces, for example, create a space foröor forecloseödiscussion of normative positions
about consumption? Having teased out the social relations along a commodity chain, what
does it mean to then evaluate these relations in moral terms? Andrew Sayer (2003) notes
that, although commodification is indifferent to moral wealth, in most accounts it
``exposes consumers to the influence of symbolic domination, with its prioritisation of
positional goods monopolised by the dominant classes, and its stigmatisation of those
whose access to internal goods is restricted'' (page 355). As he points out, ethnographies of
consumption suggest something rather different (see, for example, Miller, 1998b; 2001)

(4) Such political moments are often interpreted as opportunities for imagining more `progressive'
geographies. This may indeed be the case, but there is no necessary relationship between a political
moment and the sort of politics to which it gives rise. `Working on commodity surfaces', in other
words, need not be a progressive act.
(5) Leslie and Reimer (2003) use this phrase of Le Corbusier (1987, page 115).
(6) In attempting to convey the massive cultural and economic shift represented by the commodi-

fication of land, Karl Polanyi describes the process as ``perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings
of our ancestors'' (2001 [1944], page 187).
Guest editorial 263

by demonstrating consumption to be an activity in which moral sentiment can play

a significant role. These empirical accounts open a space, Sayer argues, for recovering a
more refined moral take on consumption. This would dispense with the conventional elite
rhetoric about consumption as the triumph of appearances (value) over (moral) worth,
and would evaluate the morality of the full range (and scales) of social relations that
commodity consumption involves. The implication, therefore, is that work on commodity
cultures can be leveraged as a normative critique in quite sophisticated ways when one
makes explicitöand then actively worksöthe tension between the moral and aesthetic
dimensions of writing about commodities. Leslie and Reimer (1999) make a similar point
in their argument that metaphors of circuits and circulation (which invoke a seemingly
endless and unstructured continuity, as opposed to a commodity chain in which the forces
constructing the chain are foregrounded) can cause one to lose sight of exploitation.
Whatever the discursive metaphor adopted, at the heart of a politics of commodities
and commodification lies a recognition of the mutually constitutive roles of production,
exchange, and consumption.
Culture ^ economy ^ commodity: the papers
The authors in this theme issue reflect upon these `intimate encounters' with commodities.
They share an interest in commodification (and, to a lesser extent, decommodification) as
processes and explore the ways in which commodities are produced, circulated, consumed,
and regulated through the geographically embedded practices and circumstances of every-
day life. They contribute, therefore, to the broader critical rethinking of commodity
cultures, the politics of consumption and meaning, and, more broadly, the cultural ^
economic dichotomy within human geography and cognate `disciplines'. Three of the
five papers (Claire Dwyer and Peter Jackson, Deborah Leslie and Suzanne Reimer, and
Andrew Sayer) were presented at a special session we organized at the New York Annual
Meetings of the Association of American Geographers in 2001. The paper by Bill Maurer
was presented at a symposium organized by Adrian Smith and Susan Roberts at the
University of Kentucky in 2000, and we are pleased to be able to include the paper by
Daniel Miller which shares many of the same themes as the other papers and presents
them in a novel way. Taken together, the papers eschew heroic claims to transcending
boundaries of the `cultural' and `economic' and provide careful, empirical work on the
`economic' and `cultural' coproduction of commodities, which demonstrates how such
boundary crossing might be done in practice. They exemplify, therefore, what Jackson
has identified (2002, page 4) as an increasing interest in empirically demonstratingöand
in demonstrating the significance oföhow the `economic' and `cultural' are mutually
constitutive (see also Smith, 2002).
In ``Commodifying difference: selling EASTern fashion'', Dwyer and Jackson
address the active process of producing cultural difference, via work on clothing firms
engaged in `ethnic' design and production. They argue that commercial cultures involve
multiple transformations of meaning as commodities move through the commodity
chain. In particular, Dwyer and Jackson explore the ways in which commodity mean-
ings and the reflective value of commodities involve a series of transformations as
clothing becomes part of the lives of consumers. The companies with which they
engage draw upon a range of `ethnic' meanings in the production of their brands. At
the same time the companies explicitly use `ethical trading' and corporate social
responsibility in the commodification process (see also Hale, 2000; Hale and Shaw,
2001; Hughes, 2001). Dwyer and Jackson also draw out the importance of how these
images and issues `travel' along the design-clothing commodity chain to product
consumers. They combine both product-centered and person-centered approaches to
commodity meanings and commodity chains by showing how tensions surrounding
264 Guest editorial

notions of `ethnicity' and `authenticity' are common to both products consumed and the
meanings that consumers say are embodied in the clothing. This leads them to suggest that
commodity meanings and commodity cultures provide a ``thoroughly ambivalent space''
(page 290) through which cultural difference is negotiated. Their paper, then, maps out
precisely howöin the context of fashionöcommodities constitute a range of `intimate
encounters' across spaces of production and consumption.
In their paper on ``Gender, modern design, and home consumption'', Leslie and
Reimer discuss the meanings associated with modern furniture and use it as an opportu-
nity to rethink the gendering of modernism. Modernism is often assumed to be masculinist,
yet, they argue, this ignores the fact that the meanings of modernism are reproduced in
differently gendered spaces. As meanings associated with modernism are not solely those
of the architects or designers, but are also produced at large via interaction with commodi-
ties (like furniture and fashion), the gender of modernism is inherently more complex. They
focus on the domestic spaces of fashion as an entry point for critiquing the conventional
position that modernism is (uniformly) masculinist. In their paper, the commodity chain is
loosely used as an organizing device, enabling them to emphasize how the gender of
modernism is interpreted differently at different points along the commodity chain. In this
way, Leslie and Reimer draw similar inspiration to Dwyer and Jackson in a reading
of commodity chains not simply as chains of production but also as involving flows of
meaning that become transformed as commodities move through various parts of such
chains. Thus they argue that, yes, modernism might be masculinist in the production phase
but that its gender becomes rather more ambivalent and complex when consumption is
considered. In this way they are able to show how the cultural meaning of modernism
emerges from the interaction of the commodity with specific contexts, rather than its
identity (and gender) being transmitted seamlessly and intact along the chain as a whole.
In their paper they directly address the `surfaces of the commodity' and the way these
surfaces are differentially constructed and contested along the commodity chain in ways
that enable (and constrain) a politics of gender.
In his paper on ``Uncanny exchanges: the possibilities and failures of `making change'
with alternative monetary forms'' Maurer explores notions of equivalence, remainders, and
exchange in the context of alternative numerologies of money and finance. He develops
previous work on local currencies and local exchange trading schemes (LETS) (Lee, 1996),
and extends this to provide also a novel engagement with the practices of Islamic banking,
little explored in the wider literature. In the paper he inverts the conventional, common-
sensical argument that `number games' are simply rationalizing or abstracting acts to show
how they are essentially metaphysical (and therefore moral) practices. He mobilizes the
notion of the remainderöthe `not quite'öand draws attention to how ostensibly balanced
economic transactions (that is, those that are considered `fair' precisely because they
appear to have no remainder as both sides in the transaction are considered balanced
or equivalent) nonetheless create some form of residue whose distribution or allocation
entails moral choices. More simply, the remainder seems to provide a way of accessing the
`morality' of market exchange.
In a provocative paper on ``(De)commodification, consumer culture, and moral
economy'', Sayer also considers issues of morality and commodity in his attempt to
recover a moral dimension in radical political economy to counter the elevation of the
aesthetic. In working through the ideas of Adam Smith and Alasdair MacIntyre, Sayer
shows the utility of the moral-economy approach to understanding commodification
and consumer cultures. In parallel with Dwyer and Jackson, Sayer seeks to explore the
ways in which the act of consumption and the use of commodities ``involves a process
of decommodification or recontextualisation in which the emphasis is on use value
(and sign value), not on exchange value, and in which the incorporation of goods within
Guest editorial 265

signifying social practices, the stuff of culture, looms large'' (page 344). Sayer draws
upon the distinction between internal and external goods as a way of reframing Pierre
Bourdieu's work on symbolic capital and its role in domination. An emphasis on
internal goodsöthe understandings, satisfactions, benefits, and meanings associated
with certain practices or `commodities'öenables us, Sayer argues, to appreciate the
normative basis of much consumer behavior: namely that consumers pursue the con-
sumption of commodities not only because they are associated with certain forms of
class-influenced perceptions of these commodities (as external goods), but because they
provide recontextualized meanings for those involved in the act of consumption.
Miller extends the theme of commodity fetishism and the articulation of production
and consumption through the commodity to ask whether the Internet can defetishize the
commodity. His exploration of what he calls three moments of failureöthe failure to
resolve theoretically the issue of commodity fetishism, the failure to understand the
emergent force of the Internet in the realm of commodity consumption, and Miller's
own `failure' to gain funding for a project involving the Internet as a means of educating
children about their positionality on commodity circuitsörevolves around a common
theme of how it is possible to facilitate consumers in understanding their positionality
in globally unequal flows of commodity production and consumption. In particular, he
suggests that, to overcome commodity fetishism, consumers require interaction with
the full range of producers in a commodity chain and an immediacy of experience. In
the context of a school-based education project, for example, children could end their
projects by consuming the very commodities that they have tracked through the various
sites of production, distribution, and consumption. In this way, then, Miller's paper
adds to the call öwhich runs through many of the papers in this issue and in the wider
body of work on commodities and their cultures and economies öfor work that takes
the intimacy of the commodity encounter as a potentially political moment and which
explores the productive possibilities that these intimacies might afford.
Conclusion: commodity lives at the margin
Many of the papers in this theme issue take everyday objects as their entry point
for engaging commodity economies and cultures. From these intimate encounters
(shopping, fashion, food) they each work outward to develop a critique of the
coproduction of `economy' and `culture'. In particular, they focus on the constitutive
role of meaning in the production and consumption of commodity cultures. As such
they reflect a trend in recent work for a concern with the ``mundane practices of
everyday household production and reciprocity'' (Smith, 2002) that enable a more
catholic conception of economic forms.
Fashion, furniture, food, and other practices such as alternative currencies and
Islamic banking are each considered as activities that span and combine the utilitarian
and the aesthetic and, therefore, these are logical places to start to inquire after the
coproduction of the cultural and the economic. It is, therefore, no surprise that it is
upon such commodities that researchers have chosen to concentrate their attention.
But perhaps the test of this approach is its ability to illuminate at the margins. What
might it mean to apply it, for example, to less-obviously `cultural' (and more tradition-
ally `economic') commodities? Candidates include those material commodities which,
in abundance, undergird the experience of postindustrialism (oil, electricity, automo-
biles) as well as those which, in scarcity, define impoverishment and destitution (staple
foods, clean water, housing). Could one turn the kind of analytical eye that so carefully
works through the cultural practices of beverage consumption in Trinidad on the
cargoes romanced by Masefield, both mercantile exotics (ivory, apes, and incense)
and prosaic industrials (coal, firewood, pig lead) alike? Many of our encounters with
266 Guest editorial

such conventionally `economic' commodities as timber, computers, or petroleum are in

practice no less intimate or less visceral than those with commodities that represent the
nucleus of contemporary work on commodity cultures. There are several suggestive
possibilities. Work by Michael Watts (1992; 2001) on the political economy of oil, for
example, shows how oil as a commodity is entangled with diverse cultural practices
that extend from Islam in Nigeria to Western banking. Similarly, the automobile
industry presents an emergent set of practices that exemplify the coproduction of the
`economic' and the `cultural': automobile producers, for example, increasingly strive to
`manufacture difference' by increasing design intensity and incorporating customer-
design options that complicate simple notions of a linear commodity chain; while
research by Julie Froud et al (1998) on the role of secondhand car retailingöa set of
practices that reassert the exchange value of objects that were temporarily decommo-
dified through useösuggests that this sector is more significant than the formal
economy of first sale.(7) And the work of Sarah Whatmore (2002) on agro-industrial
soybeans demonstrates how standardized, mass-produced food crops öthose whose
circulation encompasses the extremes of intimacy (ingestion) and remote exchange
(global markets)öare situated at the nexus of knowledge practices that defy separation
into realms of `cultural' and `economic'.
This is not a call for an additive research process involving the analysis of more and
more commodities and of more and more complex understandings (although these may
be important). Rather it is to suggest that one might test the limits of recent approaches
to the commodity by reaching into the margins to embrace those commodities that
currently lie on the edges of contemporary research but which areöby many metricsö
of considerable economic and political significance. Like the papers in this issue, such
work would highlight the theoretical and political significance of considering the mutual
constitutions of culture ^ economy, production ^ consumption, and practice ^ politics in
the everyday, intimate, and lived worlds of the commodity. It is this intermingling of
culture ^ economy ^ commodity that provides for the intimacy of commodities, embody-
ing identities that are less certain and more fluid than in many traditional renderings.
And it is in this living world of `commodities in motion' that a politics and theory of
everyday practices in the culture ^ economy might be found.
Acknowledgements. We thank the contributors to this theme issue and Gerry Pratt for their
patience and forbearance during the long process of seeing these papers into print as a collection.
We also thank Noel Castree, Ian Cook, Phil Crang, Nigel Thrift, and Sarah Whatmore for
participating in the ``Culture ^ economy ^ commodity'' sessions at the Annual Meetings of the
Association of American Geographers in New York in 2001. Adrian Smith also thanks Susan
Roberts, Roger Lee, Bill Maurer, and the other participants for organizing and collaborating
on the ``(Re)-working culture/economy'' symposium held at the University of Kentucky in 2001,
with the support from the Graduate School and the Department of Geography at the University of
Kentucky. Thanks also go to the referees who provided valuable advice on the earlier versions of the
papers presented here and to Andy Wood and Gerardo Castillo who provided comments on an
earlier draft of this introduction. The usual disclaimers apply.

Gavin Bridge, Adrian Smith

(7) See
also Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe (1998) for a discussion of the role of secondhand
car-boot sales in the United Kingdom in the `secondhand economy'.
Guest editorial 267

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