Mahogany

“Depending on the historical context,” writes Jennifer L. Anderson in Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America, “mahogany has been regarded as utilitarian (cheap and abundant), precious (expensive and rare), desirable (sensual and exotic), respectable (refined and genteel), deceptive (duplicitous and false), and nostalgic (elegiac and reminiscent),” (15). This sentiment reflects what can now be described as a trend in our readings; and the further recognition of the social life of things. In yet another instance, we are made to understand the transient existence of commodities, or at least some commodities. As with other luxury goods, emeralds and red coming to mind, mahogany’s life as a commodity depends on the subjectivity of culture; especially as a reflection of status. Thus, as other commodities we have explored illustrate, certain things – oft depending on their use, availability, and, more often than not, cultural reception – enjoy lasting, continuous use while others die off. Mahogany seems to have straddled this line in a way; never fully dying out, but certainly filling a limited niche role in contemporary society.

After our first weeks’ readings (Appadurai!), I very much hoped for a more expanded idea of commodity. Now, after surveying a wide variety of commodity histories, I am ever more certain of the need to expand the definition and concept. As Kent and Susan point out, people have proved to be very much in the same boat as our other subjects throughout this semester (factually and figuratively). A single line in Mahogany, for instance, hints at the enormity of human commoditization: “Compared to other places where slaves enmeshed in the tangled web of the Atlantic slave trade might end up – as plantation fodder on a sugar island, up to their knees in the rice paddies or tar pits of the Carolinas, or in a sweltering tobacco field in the Chesapeake – the mahogany forests of Belize might have been one of the more tolerable outcomes,” (157). Broken down, this single sentence points to the movement and utilization of people as a commodity across an incredible space and for numerous purposes. Moreover, and beyond Anderson’s depiction of slavery, the experiences of laborers, from the extractors and polishers Lane’s emeralds to the cutters and refiners of Mintz’s sugar, demonstrate that the movement and utilization of people very much reflected the movement and utilization of things. With this in mind, I would really like to see studies on people and ideas using the same structure these scholars have applied to things; and if nothing else, this course has opened my eyes to viewing people, things, and thoughts in a much broader light.

(Sorry for the late post, I somehow forgot to hit publish at 3am!)