Commodities Beyond Europe

One of the things that I enjoyed most about this book is that it shows us that commodity networks of Latin American commodities don't end once they reach Europe.  While we intrinsically have this idea that commodities are globalized to an extent where they can continue on to all points, the books we have read thus far us reach usually end that journey once they reach port in either Seville or Liverpool.  The Colour of Paradise shows us that commodities not only have a life beyond the reaches of Europe but actually take on new meanings and significance based on where they end up and the religious necessities of the society they travel to.  Calling back to The Social Life of Things, the emeralds in this book take on characteristics based on the society peering at them.  In the Muslim east, the so-called 'gunpowder empires', the emeralds don't just represent wealth but have a religious connotation that link them to the divine.  This is similar to the early uses of both tobacco and chocolate as we read last week. 

Compared to those two commodities though, emeralds do not initially have an innate divine aspect from their native Andean origins but instead gain them in the Muslim societies they are traded into.  The value of the emeralds is also ruled by the society, in that Andean emeralds were seen as inferior to so called 'Egyptian' emeralds, despite nearly all sources of emeralds coming from Latin America and those emeralds actually being inferior to the Latin American emeralds.  This is a clear demonstration of what Appadurai was trying to express: that the perception of a commodity's value was based on what society thought of the commodity and not any innate characteristics of the commodity itself.