International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 3, No. 3,1999

Communities and Other Social Actors:Rethinking Commodities and Consumptionin Global Historical Archaeology

Lynda Carroll1

The relationships between people and commodities, and the processes throughwhich goods are entangled with people's lives can be better understood with afocus on the community. The concept of community offers a way to understandthe entanglement of individuals and small groups with global processes. In addi-tion, a focus on the community allows historical archaeologists a scale of analysisto consider the links between people, communities, and global networks of ex-change, as commodities are exchanged in and out of local, regional, or globalarenas.

KEY WORDS: consumption; commodities; community.

This volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology beganas a series of conference papers presented at the Society for Historical Archaeol-ogy's 1998 Annual Meetings in a session entitled "Commodities in Global Per-spective." The initial goal of this session was to draw out the relationships be-tween commodities—or products for exchange—and global political economies.As a result, each paper discussed various aspects of the processes through whichcommodities are linked to larger scaled political economies. More importantly,the papers collected in this volume—entitled "The Entanglements of Commod-ity and Community: Consumption, Production, and Process in Global Histori-cal Archaeology"—tie together the relationships created between commodity andcommunity.

The relationship between commodity and community has become a majorissue in contemporary social sciences, and follows in a long tradition of discussionsand debate most often attributed to Braudel (1972), Wallerstein (1974), and Wolf(1982). This tradition argues that communities have been transformed on the global

1Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University. SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000.

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scale by processes such as colonialism and capitalism. These processes includesthe spread of commodities throughout the globe, coupled with the exploitation oflabor on a global scale. However, major critiques of using global level analysesargue that these studies say little about local level processes or human agency (e.g.,Asad, 1987). Thus, in reaction to analyses that looked only toward the global level,many scholars began to examine the level of localized groups or individuals. Yetthis approach also has limited success in integrating the local and global scales ofanalysis; "[w]here world-systems theory had too little to say about local situations,many scholars now begin and end with the local" (Roseberry, 1988, p. 171). Thus,global processes and local actors are dichotomized.

What are the processes that entangle people and objects together on the globalscale, but allow people to create and maintain distinct social groupings? For ex-ample, in his book Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin Barber (1995) observes how thisprocess operates today, as religious fundamentalism and nationalist movementsstand face to face against globalization, and mass produced commodities spreadthroughout the globe while communities are fragmented and redefined. Whenfaced with so-called homogenizing processes of modernity, such as globalization,the expansion of global markets, or the rise of consumer capitalism, how do peoplecreate, maintain, recreate, and even reinforce group identities and social group-ings? Apparently standing in direct opposition to one another, these processes arenevertheless intricately intertwined, comprising one of the great dialectics of themodern era.

One way to better understand the entanglement of individuals and groups withglobal processes is by examining the community—the focal point through whichwe can look at relationships on the local scale of analysis, as well as the interac-tions between communities, entering in and out of regional or global processes.Indeed, Roseberry (1991, p. 14) argues that the concept of community, defined as a"political association, formed through processes of political and cultural creationand imagination—the generation of meaning of contexts of unequal power," iscentral to understanding the political economies of anthropological subjects. Thelinks connecting communities with one another are created on regional and globalscales through relationships of power and exchange. These relationships are reifiedby the commodity.

In Capital (1971), Marx argued that the commodity is a product for exchange,that objects take the form of commodities when their production is organizedthrough and for exchange. Through their exchange, commodities are given value.In this perspective, labor is the central key to understanding commodities, and notsimply the consumption and spread of these goods. Marx argued that because thecommodity is part of exchange relationships, any discussions of the commodityshould address the social conditions surrounding its production. The majority ofdiscussions focusing on the commodity have come out of this approach, privilegingissues of labor and production (Miller, 1995a, p. 142).

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A current trend in the study of commodities is specifically the process of con-sumption, or commodities in use (e.g., Appadurai, 1986; Bourdieu, 1984; Douglasand Isherwood, 1981; Lury, 1996; Miller, 1987, 1995a, 1995b). As the way thatpeople reproduce themselves as social beings, people consume commodities tomaintain and reproduce social relationships, thus giving commodities their usevalues.

Processes such as commodity production or consumption are often examinedas if they can be isolated and addressed independently (Lury 1996, p. 79; seealso Wurst and McGuire, this volume). These two entangled processes have beendifficult to reconcile with the social relations that their exchange fosters or thesocial contexts in which exchange occurs.

For many, the great watershed for discussing commodities came in 1986with Appadurai's volume The Social Life of Things. This important collection ofpapers presented a new perspective on the circulation of commodities in sociallife, arguing that their "consumption is eminently social, relational, and activerather than private, atomic, or passive" (Appadurai, 1986, p. 31). The use andexchange values of commodities are mediated through what Appadurai (1986,p. 3) called "politics of value," in which the value of commodities are both con-textual and dynamic. Kopytoff's (1986) contribution also added to that argumentby stating that things have social lives (or cultural biographies) themselves, whichextends from the context of a commodity's production to the various stages ofits use.

It is important to remember that the context in which commodities are pro-duced, circulated/exchanged, and used is the community. Made up of classes, en-gendered groups, age grades, households, or other social groupings, the communityprovides the context in which goods are made for exchange, and in which bothexchange and use values are created. Using the community as a way to address theproduction, consumption, and exchange of commodities, we can see how powerrelations operate on the local level and are connected to the global. Commodi-ties and people are entangled within their local communities, and at times within aglobal one. Thus, transformations on the global and local scale are best understoodby examining the relationships between commodities and communities.

For several reasons, the processes in which goods are entangled with com-munities are especially relevant to historical archaeologists. Although discussionsabout commodities are an important research topic and tool for archaeologists(e.g., Preucel and Hodder, 1996, pp. 106-107), they are particularly important forhistorical archaeologists (e.g., Henry, 1991; Orser, 1992), because one of the maingoals of historical archaeology should be to explain the development of the mod-ern era (e.g., Baram and Carroll, n.d.; Kohl and Fawcett, 1995; Orser, 1996, p. vii;Silberman 1989). In the processes involved in developing of the modern world, anincreasing number of the goods have been commodified—produced specificallyto be exchanged—as more people are alienated from their own labor.

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In addition, the discipline of historical archaeology is especially receptiveto addressing large-scale exchange; in the processes of colonialism or emergentcapitalist relations, local communities throughout the world were increasingly en-tangled within global exchange networks. Indeed, most groups historical archae-ologists study are linked on a global scale (e.g., Falk, 1991; Orser, 1992, 1996).More specifically, the emerging field of global historical archaeology considersthe links between people, commodities, and global networks of exchange to be atits very core.

The papers presented in this volume center around issues related to the en-tanglements of commodities and communities, in which consumption, production,and other social processes can be examined using historical archaeology. Most ofthe papers specifically take a global perspective in their approach to commodities(see for example, Baram, Carroll, Mrozowski, Scarlett, this volume). More impor-tantly, all of the authors in some way examine how communities or segments ofcommunities are entangled within processes that link them to a global community.

In the first chapter, Baram addresses the introduction and consumption of cof-fee and tobacco in the Ottoman Empire. Relying on archaeological evidence andthe historiography of the modern era in the Middle East, Baram shows how the useof these commodities of pleasure affected social activities in the Ottoman world.The consumption of these commodities specifically entangled various communi-ties throughout the empire within larger imperial and global political economies.

Using case studies from South Africa and Virginia, Mrozowski addressesthe relationship between European colonization, the rise of capitalism and theincreased use of abstract space. Through the commodification of nature, the re-lationships between micro and macro-level environmental changes, and politicaland economic events, Mrozowski shows how groups were entangled with largerscaled sociopolitical processes.

Scarlett examines a community of Mormon potters in the American GreatBasin and investigates how ceramics were commodified in relation and reaction tolarge scale modernization movements. These trends are compared to other parts ofthe Anglo-European world system, such as Australia. Linking the commodifica-tion of ceramics to local, regional, and international systems of meaning, Scarlettexplains how the process of industrializing modern pottery factories helped toinfluence local ceramic traditions.

Once again returning to the Ottoman Empire, Carroll addresses the productionand consumption of Ottoman ceramics as they relate to large-scale exchange net-works and power relationships. Linking these processes to relationships of power,this art of the state served its community as a symbol to create prestige for someclasses of Ottoman society while inspiring others in the creation of new ceramictraditions. Carroll also links these processes to groups outside of the Ottomanworld.

In the final chapter, Wurst and McGuire relate the processes of productionand consumption back to what they argue is the key issue in anthropology—using

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material culture to negotiate social reproduction within classes. By arguing thatthe two processes of consumption and production are not only interrelated, butare both a process of social reproduction, the authors critique studies that focussolely on the consumption of commodities, because they reinforce ideologies thatobscure inequalities and power relations in global capitalism. In addition, Wurstand McGuire also address the major critique of studies focusing on commodities inthe modern era; focusing on either the consumption and production of commoditiesin isolation of the other is a false dichotomy.

The following papers address a wide variety of the processes involved in thecreation, lives, and exchange of commodities in the modern era. Hopefully, thediscussions presented in this collection of papers will invite additional dialoguesconcerning the entanglement of commodities within and between communities inglobal perspective.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank each of the participants in the SHA session entitled"Commodities in Global Perspective" for participating in that meeting and fortheir contributions to this volume. On behalf of all the contributors, includingmyself, I would especially like to thank Charles E. Orser, Jr., who kindly servedas discussant for these papers in Atlanta. His time, efforts, and discussion weremost appreciated. I would also like to acknowledge that only with his advice andinterest in these papers was I able to undertake this endeavor. Finally, I would alsolike to thank Laurie Miroff, Charlie Cobb, and Randy McGuire for their commentson various versions of this preface; I am grateful for their excellent suggestions.

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