Book summary “The Social life of things”: summary

Introduction

Things have a social life where economic value, exchange, and desire are continuously shaped by politics, culture, and social relations rather than pure market utility.

You likely assume that objects gain their worth from utility or the labor required to make them. Mainstream economic theories and traditional Marxism treat production as the ultimate source of value, leaving exchange as a secondary result.

Arjun Appadurai challenges this view in The Social Life of Things by demonstrating that commodities carry complex social biographies. Economic exchange actually generates value rather than merely reflecting it.

The volume brings together anthropologists and historians to examine how material culture circulates across societies. You will explore several guiding questions as you read the chapters:

• How do ordinary objects transform into sacred commodities?
• Why do certain cultures practice restraint instead of conspicuous consumption?
• What mechanisms regulate the flow of things through regimes of value?

1. Commodities and the Politics of Value

Economic exchange is the source of value rather than its consequence, mediated by politics, regimes of value, and commodity phases in social life.

Drawing on Georg Simmel, economic value is a judgment made by subjects. Objects are deemed valuable because they resist the desire to possess them. This economic distance is overcome through the exchange of sacrifices, and politics governs the agreements that sustain these regimes of value.

Defining Commodities

You should not understand commodities as a fixed kind of thing produced exclusively by capitalism. A commodity is a specific phase and situation in the social life of any object.

By breaking away from a strict production-dominated Marxist view, you can analyze things across their total trajectory through several key concepts:

• commodity phase;
• commodity candidacy;
• commodity context.

A commodity is defined as any thing intended for exchange or whose exchangeability is its socially relevant feature. Methodological fetishism often obscures this social life by treating value as an intrinsic property of things rather than a product of social relations.

Paths and Diversions

The flow of commodities in social life is driven by a shifting compromise between culturally regulated paths and competitively inspired diversions. Societies establish conventionalized routes for the circulation of goods. Individuals and groups constantly attempt strategic diversions or subversions of these paths to accumulate reputation, fame, or profit.

Diversions can remove objects from commodity circuits into enclaved zones or draw protected things back into active exchange.

In the Kula ring of the Massim islands, shell valuables travel along established paths called keda while participants strategically orchestrate diversions to build partnerships and gain fame.

Participants also manage possessions through the concept of kitoum, which establishes personal ownership and control over specific valuables. Enclaved commodities are shielded from standard market exchanges by cultural taboos or legal protections. Tournaments of value operate as specialized arenas set apart from routine economic life where elites contest for status, fame, and the disposition of central tokens of value.

Art auctions in the contemporary West function as tournaments of value by instituting a concrete community of exchange among peers through agonistic speculation.

2. The Cultural Biography of Things

Objects have cultural biographies that track their origin, ideal careers, age markers, and ultimate disposal to reveal hidden aesthetic and political judgments.

You can study things through a biographical approach similar to people. This method maps socially recognized statuses and ages. You ask where an object came from, how its use changes over time, and what happens when it breaks down.

Among the Suku of Zaire, a hut has a typical ten-year lifespan starting as a home for a couple. It transitions to a guest house, a widow's house, a teenagers' hangout, a kitchen, and finally a goat or chicken house before collapsing.

Spheres of Exchange

Human societies organize value into discrete, hierarchical spheres of exchange governed by separate moral codes rather than a single homogeneous market. You find that multi-centric economy systems impose cognitive order on a heterogeneous world through distinct commodity spheres. These spheres operate independently with their own rules. They often feature a moral hierarchy where upward conversion is considered appropriate and downward conversion is shameful.

The Tiv of central Nigeria maintained three distinct exchange spheres before the colonial period:

• subsistence items;
• prestige items;
• rights-in-people.

Brass rods served as the bridge for upward conversion in this system. Every exchange system contains an inherent drive toward optimum commoditization. The process expands as far as existing exchange technology allows. The introduction of money in nonmonetized societies invariably leads to wider commoditization and the merging of previously separate exchange spheres.

Singularization

Culture counteracts homogenization through singularization, setting certain things apart as sacred, priceless, or legally protected from further exchange. You observe that slavery represents a process of social transformation where a person is initially commoditized by capture or sale. They are subsequently resocialized and singularized into the host society. Rather than a fixed status, slavery begins when an individual is stripped of identity and turned into an exchangeable commodity.

Historically, slaves in various societies were captured or sold, stripped of identity, and later rehumanized and reindividualized by acquiring new statuses within the host group. Through reinsertion and resocialization in the host group, the slave acquires new statuses, moving back toward a singular individual while remaining a potential commodity through resale.

To prevent excessive homogenization, cultures use collective prohibitions, ritual monopolies, and restricted exchange spheres to keep certain items unique. Terminal commoditization prevents resale by law or fiat.

Kings of Siam held monopolies on albino elephants. British monarchs maintained rights to dead whales washed ashore, expanding the visible reach of sacred power through singularized objects.

3. Value in the Eastern Solomon Islands

Commemorative efforts and artistic skill create durable objects and sacred valuables that remain entirely outside ordinary commodity exchange.

Bronislaw Malinowski distinguished between ordinary commodities in conventional markets and valuables exchanged only in restricted contexts. William Davenport describes objects created in the Eastern Solomon Islands that are completely beyond potential exchangeability. Certain durable goods are produced by combining labor and materials but cannot be further exchanged.

Commemoration and Community Effort

You find that organizing funeral observances requires calling in personal credits established by helping others and creating new personal debts. Failure to repay these debts can result in the creditor seizing corporate matrilineage garden land. Close kin organize funeral distributions as an expression of gratitude to the community for sorrow and prolonged bereavement.

A small feast is given by close kin to the community 5 or 10 days after burial. The decennial commemoration ceremony represents the supreme social and economic effort of the community. A -murina involves massive resource pooling, region-wide reciprocal feasting, and community-wide public displays.

Communities in the Eastern Solomons undertake ambitious construction projects, such as building great trading and bonito canoes dedicated to important deceased persons. Great presentation vessels commissioned for a -murina measure 4-5 meters in length. The supreme commemoration -murina is celebrated every decade or so.

When you manage these projects, you follow specific community guidelines:

• assess total community resources favorably before initiating a commemoration;
• commit resources to honoring the dead through ambitious architectural and craft tasks;
• feast and entertain any and all participating guests upon completion.

Ritual Disposal

The application of exceptional aesthetic skills and rare artistic talents transforms ordinary commodities and economic objects into sacred, decommoditized goods. Master craftsmen utilize complex design and sculptural skills reserved for sacred contexts, such as crafting ritual food bowls and sacred canoes. This adds a spiritual dimension that removes the objects from the secular economic domain.

On the island of Santa Catalina, commemorative wooden vessels are carved specifically for ritual food presentations and are never exchanged again. Wooden food bowls are used every day for mundane purposes or allowed to molder away after being used once in a sacred ritual presentation.

Sacred and ritual objects are never traded, sold, or desacralized, but are instead isolated and allowed to slowly disintegrate in designated sacred enclosures. Traditional religious items and leftover ritual garbage are treated with deference and permitted to molder away naturally because there is no ritual procedure for desacralizing them.

In 1964, Davenport obtained communion bowls from Natagera on Santa Ana under the strict condition they enter museum collections. The leader's most sacred ritual bowl was left behind to disintegrate in the village. Santa Catalina was visited in 1966 and only one community still observed full traditional rituals.

You handle sacred material through strict isolation practices:

• isolate sacred objects, trash, and garbage from sacred meals in small enclosures inside canoe houses;
• allow unserviceable sacred canoes and ritual vessels to rot away in place.

4. Consumption Among the Muria Gonds

Consumption is not merely about the physiological destruction or utility of goods. You see it as a way to reincorporate items into the social system and attach them to personal identity. Goods become attributes of personal identity and signifiers of social relationships once acquired. Consumption is a phase in the cyclical process of social reproduction rather than a terminal point.

Lord Rothschild hanging a Cézanne painting in his sitting room makes him a member of an elite group of consumers. You recognize this as a category from which others are excluded.

While some newly enriched communities embrace exotic consumer goods as creative works of art that transcend their labor, others exhibit extreme conservatism due to strong communal pressures. When economically empowered, groups use consumer goods to totalize their experiences and dialectically negate the harsh conditions of their labor. Groups embedded in tightly knit egalitarian structures avoid conspicuous consumption outside traditionally sanctioned channels to prevent social ostracism.

Prosperous Sri Lankan fishermen spent their earnings on unusable television sets. They bought garages without access to roads and rooftop cisterns with no water flow while imitating urban elites.

The Traditional Consumption Ethos

Enhanced economic productivity among the Muria Gonds has created a class of wealthy families who accumulate wealth they dare not spend because acts of conspicuous consumption are seen as socially threatening. Traditional consumption ethos lags behind modern economic productivity. Because the Muria fear social ostracism and disruption of egalitarian norms more than anything, rich families are obliged to consume as if they were poor, inadvertently becoming even wealthier.

Tiri, recognized as the richest man in Manjapur, wore a traditional short loincloth and a turban. He wore a standard blue shirt using handloomed cloth and refused to buy shoes, trousers, or a bicycle.

Tribal finery, silver jewelry, and brassware that signify tribal identity to outsiders did not originate indigenously. The Muria adopted them in historical imitation of higher-status Hindu groups. The Muria adopted non-Muria prestige goods from Marwari merchants and Hindu traders while imposing their own collective evaluations upon them. You find that these items are purchased to express conformity and adequacy to the village image rather than individual distinction.

Marwari merchants traded silver jewelry originally from Rajasthan in Bastar markets. Muria girls purchased these items with their own money as personal adornment rather than a store of family capital.

Rich Muria Families

Wealthy Muria household heads navigate their economic success through different behavioral strategies. You see choices ranging from hyper-conviviality to extreme puritanical conservatism or architectural excess.

You can classify wealthy Muria survival strategies into distinct behavioral patterns:

• Dhol Saukar maintained popularity by becoming a living embodiment of the high value placed on copious eating and drinking;
• Tiri and his mother maintained extreme parsimony and puritanism in personal consumption while fiercely protecting their wealth;
• Ram Saukar avoided spending on personal goods while investing heavily in unnecessary multi-story buildings and a stone hut.

Ram Saukar owned 35 acres of prime paddy fields and numerous buffalo. He chose to sleep year-round on an open threshing floor wearing a filthy woolen pullover and cotton g-string.

5. Varna and Prehistoric Wealth

Prehistoric societies assign prime value to rare, durable materials lacking utilitarian use value, establishing social ranking and ascribed status through elite grave goods.

Material culture plays an active role in creating high status rather than merely reflecting it. You can see this in prehistoric Britain around 2000 B.C. when gold, amber, and bronze were first used in contexts indicating a new way of expressing high prestige.

The Case of Varna

The Varna cemetery in Bulgaria provides concrete archaeological evidence that gold was treated as a material of highest prime value in an early chalcolithic society. By 1982, researchers found 204 total graves at Varna, which included 35 symbolic graves or cenotaphs. Four of the richest graves contained a total of 2,200 gold objects with a total weight of 4,921 grams.

Five major arguments establish the high value of gold at Varna:

• its proximity to key body parts on masks and bodies;
• its use in symbolic scepters;
• the practice of dissembling where lesser objects like stone axes were covered in gold leaf to deceive viewers;
• its economical use as sheet metal to maximize surface area rather than mass;
• its intrinsic brightness and incorruptibility.

In Grave 43 of the Varna cemetery, a male aged 40 to 45 was buried with a gold penis cover and a gold scepter, while Grave 4 featured a gold-leaf-covered stone axe.

Aspects of Value

Many prehistoric societies ascribe prime value to specific commodities that lack utilitarian use value and labor value, treating them as having intrinsic worth. Prime value is a symbolic construct and an ascribed intrinsic value assigned within a cultural context. Unlike labor value or use value, prime value applies to conspicuous, rare, and durable materials like gold, amber, and jade.

Simple gold objects at Varna and amber in Wessex graves possessed no special utilitarian use value or high labor value, yet commanded prime value. Rich gravegoods accompanying children's burials at Varna indicate the presence of inherited or ascribed status rather than purely achieved status. Children's graves such as Graves 17 and 110 at Varna contained rich gravegoods indicating high status, pointing toward the emergence of a chiefdom society.

6. Sacred Commodities and Medieval Relics

Medieval saints' relics belonged to a rare category of objects that were treated simultaneously as persons and as commodities bought, sold, and stolen. Although relics were venerated as sources of personal supernatural power, they were circulated much like ordinary goods. Examining their production, exchange, and theft reveals the cultural parameters of commodity flow in the medieval Latin West between 750 and 1150.

Medieval saints' relics operated simultaneously as persons and commodities, circulating through systems of gift-giving, theft, and professional commerce.

Count Odo of Champagne sacked Commercy in 1033 and seized the arm of St. Pantalon as booty, which was later sold to Abbot Richard of St. Vanne for one silver mark. The high economic and spiritual value of a relic was not intrinsic to the corpse, but depended on communal belief in the saint's special favor with God and the efficacy of their remains. Ordinary human corpses were treated as sources of pollution or contamination and disposed of quickly. Relics required three shared beliefs: that the person was a special friend of God, that their remains deserved special treatment, and that the specific bones belonged to that saint.

Circulation Mechanisms

When a relic was transferred to a new community, it became an unproven object that had to undergo public ritual authentication and demonstrate miraculous efficacy to acquire true value. The act of transfer cast doubt on the relic's authenticity. Communities subjected newly acquired relics to formal public sessions, examinations of documents, and rigorous testing through miracles to establish their genuine status.

Monk Balgerus of Bergues-St.-Winnoc traveled to England in 1058, stole the remains of St. Lewinna from a Sussex monastery after overcoming miraculous resistance, and transported them back to Flanders.

Theft and Commerce

Professional merchants operated regular trade networks in saints' relics alongside traditional systems of gift and theft. Specialized dealers negotiated prices, practiced quality control, and traveled between Italy and Frankish territories to supply churches with the remains of Roman martyrs. A Roman deacon named Deusdona systematically collected relics from Roman cemeteries during winter and crossed the Alps in the spring to sell them to northern churchmen like Einhard during feast celebrations in 835.

The systematic theft of relics allowed rising political and religious communities to acquire high-prestige objects while escaping subordinate debt to original donors. Stealing or forcibly seizing relics through raids or calculated burglaries bypassed the hierarchical obligations tied to papal gift exchanges, objectifying the sacred items into independent commodities. During the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the sack of Constantinople resulted in a systematic, multi-month pilfering of relics managed by Bishop Garnier de Trainel for distribution across France and Belgium.

10 Key Ideas

1. Economic exchange generates value rather than merely reflecting it, and politics governs the agreements that sustain these regimes of value.
2. A commodity is a specific phase and situation in the social life of any object rather than a fixed kind of thing produced exclusively by capitalism.
3. The cultural biography of an object maps its socially recognized statuses and ages by tracking its origin, ideal careers, age markers, and ultimate disposal.
4. Human societies organize value into discrete, hierarchical spheres of exchange governed by separate moral codes rather than a single homogeneous market.
5. Culture counteracts homogenization through singularization, setting certain things apart as sacred, priceless, or legally protected from further exchange.
6. Master craftsmen utilize exceptional aesthetic skills and rare artistic talents to transform ordinary economic objects into sacred, decommoditized goods that are allowed to molder away naturally.
7. Groups embedded in tightly knit egalitarian structures avoid conspicuous consumption outside traditionally sanctioned channels to prevent social ostracism and the disruption of egalitarian norms.
8. Prehistoric societies assign prime value to rare, durable materials lacking utilitarian use value, establishing social ranking and ascribed status through elite grave goods.
9. Medieval saints' relics belonged to a rare category of objects that were treated simultaneously as persons and as commodities bought, sold, and stolen.
10. Slaves undergo a process of social transformation where they are initially commoditized by capture or sale, stripped of identity, and subsequently resocialized and singularized into the host society.