The Cultural Biography of Things- Igor Kopytoff PDF

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Nicholas Nerys Professor Zimmerman SOC 4900 Reading Response #3 Igor Kopytoff. 1988. The Cultural Biography of Things

Igor Kopytoff starts this piece by investigating the commoditization of slaves. Kopytoff defines a commodity as “a thing that has use value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart, the very fact of exchange indicating that the counterpart has, in the immediate context, an equivalent value” (pg. 68). Slaves are actual, physical people, but get treated like objects and commodities. After a slave is sold or placed somewhere else, it loses its commodity status as it tries to rebuild themselves in their new environment. The slave now has to try to build a new life, fit in with new people in a new society, and ultimately create a new identity. He explains how things can move in and out of the commodity status throughout their lifetime. According to Kopytoff, products or goods, are neither commodities nor noncommodities. These objects become commodities through the process of commoditization. In his piece, Kopytoff defines commoditization as, “…best looked upon as a process of becoming rather than an all-or-none state of being. Its expansion takes places in two ways: (a) with respect to each thing, by making it exchangeable for more and more other things, and (b) with respect to the system as a whole, by making more and more different thing more widely exchangeable” (pg. 73). This concept of commoditization can be closely linked to our previous reading by Karl Marx, The

Fetishism of Commodities and The Secret Thereof. To make an object more widely exchangeable, it must have value not only to the owner or person producing the product, but to other people in a society and it must be useful to them as well. Commodities may experience singularization in the commoditization process. Singularization makes a commodity special, giving it a deeper meaning and worth. Kopytoff believes and argues that singularization is important to an object’s value in a trade or exchange. In other words, singularization, not just the amount of labor put into a product determines its value. Kopytoff suggests that Marx missed this in his piece we recently read. “For Marx, the worth of commodities is determined by the social relations of their production; but the existence of the exchange system makes the production process remote and misperceived, and it ‘masks’ the commodity’s true worth. This allows the commodity to be socially endowed with a fetishlike ‘power’ that is unrelated to its true worth” (pg. 83). This piece written by Igor Kopytoff is an excellent piece to read to learn more about the study of things and commodities. Kopytoff says that commodities should not just be physically made, but be labeled by people and connect to their culture to give it a deeper worth. Kopytoff also explains that not all manufactured things are commodities because “only some of them are considered appropriate for marking as commodities” (64). For a thing, object, or even person to be marked as a commodity, they must be a commodity at one time and not a commodity at another given time or in a different situation. With that being said, the same object can be a commodity for one person and not for another person. Every object or commodity has a deeper worth than people may see on the outside. We must find the deeper meaning and worth of every object as if they were living objects....