Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Commoditization vs. Trafficking

I had not heard it put quite this way before.  Regardless of whether this is logically defensible, the author does seem to make a valid empirical point:  exchange is more acceptable than "trafficking," for many people. (Click for a more readable image)


A Marxist wrinkle on the Aristotelian distinction of trading things as things and trading things as commodities.  Except it's a lot clearer than Marx.

From "The Cultural Biography of Things," by Igor Kopytoff, in The Social Life of Things, edited by A. Appadurai, Cambridge Press, 1986, pp. 64-95.

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Do you have suggestions on where we could find more examples of this phenomenon?