Reviews for The Spatial organisation of culture

The average rating for The Spatial organisation of culture based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-10-04 00:00:00 Erja Vaajoki 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 this more universal category. Appadurai never really demonstrates the analytical value of this convoluted move, and seems more intent on demonstrating the inadequacy of different theories of value generated in radically different times and places by placing them alongside one another to highlight their incongruities. The more interesting portions of the essay draw on Bahannon’s examination of ‘paths and divergences’ of commodities, and the various anthropological work that has examined ‘mythologies’ of commodification from the point of view of producers, middle-men and consumers (e.g. Taussig’s work on commodity fetishism). Overall, as my committee chair put it, this essay is a study in ‘how not to do economic anthropology’.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-18 00:00:00 Salvatore Distefano Though the focus of this collection is more clearly 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 particular objects in order to illuminate how their symbolic, market, and cultural value is constituted not through innate qualities, but by specific circumstances of time and place, was remarkable. In particular, the chapters that dealt with this issue while simultaneously considering questions of authenticity and value were of greatest interest to me, and Appadurai's introductory essay, which gracefully and clearly engages with thinkers as complex and varied as Marx, Benjamin, and Baudrillard is as helpful today as it was in 1988.