Commodity Lifecycles

While it is highly unlikely that anyone will look at this blog/post until a week from now, and despite having no assigned reading to discuss until then, I was inspired to share the following insights/musings/speculations I had following our last class discussion. This was concerning the collected essays published under the title From Silver to Cocaine (2006). The assigned chapters covered cochineal, tobacco, sugar, cacao, bananas, and cocaine respectively. The authors were encouraged by the editors to think about their commodities from the perspective of "commodity chains" which attempt to clarify the "opaque" connection between producers and consumers, i.e., what happens from when the banana is picked and placed on the boat to the time it is placed in your grocery bag.

Much was said in class about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of commodity chains as a way of looking at commodities, e.g., should they be seen as linear or web-like. The editors of the present volume have not, in my opinion, committed themselves to one interpretation or the other. They talk about the "production and consumption ends of commodity chains as well as the many intervening steps of processing, transportation, and marketing" in between--which sounds linear--while on the same page describing the "large tapestry of global commodity trade," which sounds web-like. (15)

Of ironic interest, in the essay on cochineal, Carlos Marichal is surprised by the "scarcity of studies on the transatlantic dye trade" considering the "critical input of natural dyes to the key sector of textiles in the European economy for over three centuries." (77) However, we had just finished reading Amy Butler Greenfield's study of cochineal published in the same year as Marichal's essay.

But one of the strengths of From Silver to Cocaine was its side-by-side comparison of many different commodities, which invites the reader to draw similarities/contrasts between them. For instance, while cochineal was an important and valuable source of red dye in the 15th and 16th-centuries, it was ultimately replaced by industrially manufactured dyes and thereby rendered irrelevant, perhaps stripped of its status as a commodity (decommodified?). Meanwhile, sugar, cacao, tobacco, and cocaine still enjoy commodity status in the post-Industrial Revolution present.

The insights gained from a broad reading like the one mentioned above are invaluable moving forward, whether or not it was the intention of the editors/authors of the present work to afford us it. Understanding how commodities live and die, how nations/economies/cultures respond to them, and how they interact with each other is more than likely a fundamental objective of this course. Personally, I am still struggling with a question raised in our first meeting about what commodities are in the first place. Are they the things themselves, i.e., the bugs from which cochineal is derived, or are they the values projected on things by different cultures, i.e., scarcity or various cultural meanings of the color red? Perhaps both simultaneously, although I tend to think (perhaps mistakenly believing I'd be supported by Appadurai) that any thing has the potential to become a commodity if a particular culture makes that determination. In that case, the thing itself is demphasized, and the various meanings attached to it take precedence.