The Social Life of Things

Posted on 22 February 2018 by Arjun Appadurai

Contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings The work strives to reveal the underlying social and political mechanisms that regulate taste, trade and desire and to demonstrate the ways people attach value to objects. Best Download The Social Life of Things author Arjun Appadurai For Kindle ePUB or eBook – kino-fada.fr Fairly sprawling discussion of economic anthropology, beginning with Simmel s thoughts on the formation of desire in modern subjects, and its relation to economic exchange Importantly, where Simmel was concerned to understand the relationship between a fully monetized, capitalist economy and modern subjectivity, Appadurai intends to universalize the commodity as the basic unit of all economic analysis, attempting to show how barter and gifting are in fact special cases of thisuniversal ca Fairly sprawling discussion of economic anthropology, beginning with Simmel s thoughts on the formation of desire in modern subjects, and its relation to economic exchange Importantly, where Simmel was concerned to understand the relationship between a fully monetized, ...Though the focus of this collection isclearly stated by the book s subtitle than its title and, therefore, less related to my own research than I had hoped there is an amazing amount of excellent scholarship in this collection that is at once compelling and innovative especially considering it was originally published in 1988 Of the book s over arching contributions often difficult to assess in an edited volume , the uniform commitment by all of the authors to focus their studies on Though the focus of this collection isclearly stated by the book s subtitle than its title and, therefore, less related to my own research than I had hoped there is an amazing amount of excellent scholarship ...Just could not get my head around what was being argued overall The sections on cloth production in India were interesting.comprehensive collection on commodities and consumption, but not as relevant to my research as I had hoped it would be.Informative, but that s about all.A must read if you work with materiality or theories of consumption I d skip Appadurai s introduction until after you have had a chance to read the collection of articles.It s a very tough read I didn t finish this one, but I ve read about as much of it as I could.

English
22 February 2018

Arjun Appadurai