Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities : (The Social Life of Things Revisited)

The empirically rich and analytically provocative contributions to this volume focus on Africa and on the process through which commodities come into being. Commodifcation is shown to be a powerful tool towards understanding the modern world, especially South economies and South-North interactions today. It greatly illuminates the three central concepts things, agency, and identities, and thus is conducive to the much-needed dialogue between anthropology and economics. In the book, some of the original contributors of A. Appadurai's edited collection from 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective meet with today's prominent names in the field (Jean & John Comaroff, Paul & Jennifer Alexander, R. Dilley, M. Rowlands, and award-winning N. Rose Hunt) and with scholars of the next generation: B. Weiss, R. van Dijk, J. Roitman, J. Leach, and I. Stengs. Together with W. van Binsbergen and P. Geschiere, this team explores the dynamics of Commodification.