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Commodities, brands, love and kula

Comparative notes on value creation In honor of Nancy Munn

University of Rochester, USA, Robert.Foster{at}Rochester.edu

Can Marcel Mauss's insights into the relations between persons and things help make sense of the nature of branded commodities and the operation of long distance commodity chains? Can these insights, when coupled with Marxist critiques of fetishism and labor exploitation, underwrite a politics of value that mobilizes the practices of knowing consumers? This article reconsiders gift giving in order to understand how brands operate as media of exchange between companies and consumers. It compares the rhetoric of brand stewardship in current business literature with Nancy Munn's account of the exchange of Gawan canoes for kitomu, a category of kula shells over which owners exercise proprietary rights. In so doing, the article develops a framework for comparing processes of value creation and circulation that substitutes a series of partial analogues for a monolithic opposition between gifts and commodities. It concludes by taking up the question of a politics of ethical consumption, and the crucial role of knowledge in such a politics.

Key Words: brands • commodity chains • gift exchange • kula • politics of consumption • value creation

Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1, 9-25 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1463499607087492


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