A growing fascination with flows of people and commodities poses fresh theoretical and methodical challenges to anthropology. This collection of essays considers how conceptions and roles of commodities may change in response to widening spheres of economic interaction and exchange.

TodayAIs growing fascination with flows of people, commodities, technology, capital, images and ideas across national and other boundaries poses fresh theoretical and methodological challenges to anthropology. Commodities offer a particularly useful window on globalization because they, unlike electronically conveyed capital, transport cultural messages. These ideological or symbolic transfers are of particular interest to economic anthropology. This collection considers how conceptions and roles of commodities may change in response to widening spheres of economic interaction and exchange. The chapters all focus on the production process as it responds to, is distorted by and increasingly is controlled by the determination of the value of those commodities outside a localityO.

Part I: commodities and globalization. Part II: commodities in a globalizing marketplace
Soukouss or sell-out? what it means to be restructured
the globalization of agricultural commodity systems
tracing social relations in commodity chains. Part III: the circulation and revaluation of commodities
profit markets and art markets
the commodification of hybrid corn
the impact of colonial contact on the production and distribution of glaze-paint decorated ceramics
the commoditization of goods and the rise of the state in Ancient Mesopotamia
always cheaply pleasant
commoditization, cash, and kinship in postcolonial Papua New guinea
from handicraft to monocrop.