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Commodities, brands, love and kula: Comparative notes on value creation In
honor of Nancy Munn
Robert J. Foster
Anthropological Theory 2008 8: 9
DOI: 10.1177/1463499607087492
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Anthropological Theory
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
http://ant.sagepub.com
Vol 8(1): 9–25
10.1177/1463499607087492
Commodities, brands,
love and kula
Comparative notes on value creation
In honor of Nancy Munn
Robert J. Foster
University of Rochester, USA
Abstract
Can Marcel Mauss’s insights into the relations between persons and things help make
sense of the nature of branded commodities and the operation of long distance
commodity chains? Can these insights, when coupled with Marxist critiques of
fetishism and labor exploitation, underwrite a politics of value that mobilizes the
practices of knowing consumers? This article reconsiders gift giving in order to
understand how brands operate as media of exchange between companies and
consumers. It compares the rhetoric of brand stewardship in current business
literature with Nancy Munn’s account of the exchange of Gawan canoes for kitomu, a
category of kula shells over which owners exercise proprietary rights. In so doing, the
article develops a framework for comparing processes of value creation and circulation
that substitutes a series of partial analogues for a monolithic opposition between gifts
and commodities. It concludes by taking up the question of a politics of ethical
consumption, and the crucial role of knowledge in such a politics.
Key Words
brands, commodity chains, gift exchange, kula, politics of consumption, value
creation
THE ENIGMA OF (SOME) COMMODITIES
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its
analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties. (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1)
Brand-name commodities – not cola, but Coca-Cola® – lend Marx’s observation special
force. Their vendors market them as singular and incomparable (‘Accept no substitutes!’)
9
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
in order to enhance their desirability and hence exchangeability, that is, their substitutability for money and, by this very same token, all other commodities.
Kevin Roberts, Chief Executive Officer Worldwide of the advertising agency Saatchi
and Saatchi, confronts this particular enigma of the commodity in his book, Lovemarks:
The Future Beyond Brands (2004), and on his website, www.lovemarks.com. According
to Roberts, ‘brands have run out of juice’, and the challenge is to find an idea that will
‘take brands to the next level of evolution’. For Roberts, that idea is Lovemarks.
Roberts tells potential clients that anything can be a Lovemark. Indeed, he makes his
pitch by way of examples that include the Tide brand of laundry detergent, the
educational institution known as Cambridge University, and the European nation-state
of Italy. Lovemarks require, in effect, the reinvention of people, products, services and
institutions as ‘super-evolved brands’, all of which possess the following characteristics:
Lovemarks connect your company, your people, and your brands.
Lovemarks inspire loyalty beyond reason.
Lovemarks belong to your customers.
Lovemarks are the ultimate premium profit generator.
If it goes without saying that Lovemarks belong to your customers, but your premium
profits do not, then is there anything new here that speaks to conditions for the creation
and appropriation of value within contemporary neoliberal capitalist globalization? The
idea of Lovemarks certainly resonates with the announcement by two business consultants that we have entered an ‘experience economy’ in which staging memorable and
personal experiences has replaced both delivering intangible services and manufacturing
tangible goods as the activity characteristic of ‘the next stage of economic value’ (Pine
and Gilmore, 1998: 98). But the idea is also consistent with geographer David Harvey’s
critical assessment of monopoly rents and the commodification of culture. Harvey argues
that because of the competitive pressure generated by cheap transport, rapid communication and state (de)regulation, capitalists increasingly seek to ‘trade on values of authenticity, locality, history, culture, collective memories and tradition’ (Harvey, 2001: 109).
The problem so clear to Marx – the eternal need of capitalists to secure competitive
advantage through constant innovation – is solved not by changing the means of production but by changing how meaning is produced, or how the relationship between persons
and things is construed and managed.
The question of meaning is linked in another way to the geography of global
economic competition, for many ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ commodities travel vast
distances along spatially expansive commodity chains of which consumers are seldom
aware. We can, Harvey says, ‘in practice consume our meal without the slightest knowledge of the intricate geography of production and the myriad social relationships
embedded in the system that puts it upon our table’ (1990: 422). Yet, what consumers
do know about commodities is hardly irrelevant to consumption. Accordingly, as some
observers have noted, the structure of many commodity chains now reflects ‘an increase
in the importance of activities that deal with intangibles such as fashion trends, brand
identities, design and innovation over activities that deal with tangibles, the transformation, manipulation and movement of physical goods’ (Gereffi et al., 2001: 6; see also
Gereffi, 2001: 33 on the growing importance of brands). In other words, the links or
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FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
nodes in a commodity chain where the meaning (or ‘product experiences’) of commodities is determined are increasingly important as sites and sources of value creation.
This claim applies paradigmatically to Coca-Cola, perhaps the world’s best-known
brand. Coca-Cola is an icon if not a cliché of globalization. As a tangible good, however,
it is something – with the exception of the famously secret concentrate – assembled from
locally procured materials: water, sugar, bottles, cans, labels and so forth. What is global,
if anything, is the brand. And it is the connection of consumers worldwide with the
intangible brand that The Coca-Cola Company itself sees as its ultimate source of value;
hence the company’s long-standing investment in marketing, especially advertising. In
its consolidated balance sheets for 2002, The Coca-Cola Company lists goodwill, trademarks and other intangible assets with a value of approximately $3.55 billion; the 2006
Interbrand survey ranked Coca-Cola number one and estimated the brand to be worth
$67 billion.
The Coca-Cola Company 2002 Annual Report, titled ‘Creating New Value’, asserts
that ‘The creation of new value begins with a commitment to innovation – the kind of
insight, creativity and determination that brings to life new ideas, new products and new
consumer experiences’. Value creation so defined hinges on managing relations between
consumers and the brand. Douglas Daft, then CEO of the company, explained to share
owners that:
Responsibility for the world’s most beloved and valuable brand requires extreme care
in how, when and why we extend it. We don’t risk consumer loyalty to the brand or
seek an artificial bump in volume by spinning out product after product to chase the
latest fad. But we do ask ourselves continually how we can bring more people to
Coca-Cola.
Not only must brand extensions in the form of Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke and so forth
be made judiciously, but the brand must be associated with people’s emotional experiences: ‘Value is: connecting with the world’s passions’. On a global scale, this requirement motivates the company’s sponsorship of both the Olympic Games and soccer’s
FIFA World Cup tournament – ‘the world’s only truly global sporting events’. It also
underwrites the efforts of The Coca-Cola Company to reproduce demand for its
beverages: ‘Value is: refreshing a new generation of consumers’. From its television sponsorship of American Idol to its nightclub marketing in Europe, the company pursues
unconventional ways to forge ‘deep connections’ with teens and young adults, ways ‘to
speak to them on their terms – and on their turf ’. Underlying these various initiatives
is a single goal: ‘to create experiences for young consumers that are rewarding, unexpected and true to the Coca-Cola brand’.
The identification between people and brands sought after by Kevin Roberts and
Douglas Daft is, from Harvey’s perspective, a form of fetishism that obscures relationships between consumers and producers. For Harvey, a Marxist labor theory of value
(still) makes good sense of commodity chains and social inequality on a global scale.
Despite their differences, however, Roberts and Daft, on the one hand, and Harvey, on
the other, all identify ‘deep connections’ between persons and things as the grounds of
value. In so doing, they recall insights into the creation of value inspired by Mauss’s
analysis of gift exchange as the circulation of ‘things which are to some extent parts of
11
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
persons’ by ‘persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things’
(1967: 11). Can these insights into the social life of things also help make sense of
the nature of branded commodities and the operation of long distance commodity
chains? Can these insights, when coupled with Marxist critiques of fetishism and labor
exploitation, underwrite a politics of value that mobilizes the practices of knowing
consumers?
This article lays out an affirmative response to both questions. I suggest that the
increasing importance of intangibles – specifically, brands – in globalized consumer
capitalism encourages us to revisit analyses of gift exchange in order to understand better
how durable relations between persons and things take shape in practice. In so doing, I
turn to discussions of the creation of value in Melanesian societies, where person–object
relations in gift exchange have been starkly contrasted with the impersonal nature of
anonymous commodity transactions. While I do not repudiate this contrast – not least,
on political grounds – I do seek to soften it by identifying similarities in the way that
value is created in gift exchange and in commodity branding.
Mauss’s analysis was intended to make sense of how certain objects are put into circulation by agents who do not relinquish claims to these objects. This sort of circulation
defines what Annette Weiner (1992) called ‘the paradox of keeping-while-giving’ – the
paradox of how difference and hierarchy are generated out of reciprocal exchange. I argue
that this paradox likewise informs the problem of value creation raised and resolved
(ideally, at least) by brands. That is, I want to identify similarities in the ways that value
is created in gift exchange and commodity branding by focusing on how control over
objects put into circulation enables a conversion of equivalent exchange into a renewable source of surplus value. I look, as have many others before me (e.g. Appadurai,
1986), to kula exchange – specifically, for analogies between commodity chains and kula
‘paths’, and between the reputation of brands and the ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ of kula transactors (Mazzarella, 2003). I conclude by taking up the question of a politics of value,
and the crucial role of knowledge in such a politics.
FOLLOWING THINGS: NETWORKS OF VALUE
One response to the challenge of studying globalization – understood broadly to designate accelerated though non-isomorphic flows of capital, people, images and objects
(Appadurai, 1996) – has taken the form of fieldwork that deploys a variety of tracking
strategies and organizes itself around notions of networks, paths and chains (see Marcus,
1995). Network methodologies that track commodities in motion – following things in
and out of different social contexts, across diverse physical locations – ought therefore
to be of theoretical interest to political economy, for these methodologies enable the
question of value to be addressed from a circulatory perspective, that is, by way of a
‘conjoined analysis of spatially and temporally distinct episodes of production and
exchange’ (Eiss and Pedersen, 2002), not to mention consumption.1 One such network
methodology – commodity chain analysis – remains strongly associated with world
systems theory. Hopkins and Wallerstein thus define a commodity chain as ‘a network
of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity’ (1986: 159,
quoted in 1994a: 17). I choose to highlight commodity chain analysis here because of
the centrality it gives to the concept of value.
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FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
A leading proponent of commodity chain or, as it has been more recently called, valuechain analysis is the sociologist Gary Gereffi (see e.g. Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994;
Gereffi et al., 2001). Gereffi’s work has concentrated on the governance structure of
commodity chains, introducing an important distinction between producer-driven and
buyer-driven chains. Buyer-driven chains, which Gereffi suggests are becoming more
common in more industries, are chains in which ‘controlling firms do not, themselves,
own production facilities; rather they coordinate dispersed networks of independent and
quasi-independent manufacturers’ (Dicken et al., 2001: 99). It is thus the contract structure of these chains that interests Gereffi, for this structure invests the ability to govern
the chain not with the firms producing the commodities, but rather with large retailers,
brand-name merchandisers and trading companies. Accordingly, the lead firms in buyerdriven chains focus on product development and marketing while outsourcing production and production-related functions to subcontracted suppliers.
Gereffi has been criticized for paying less attention to other aspects of commodity
chains. Dicken et al. (2001), for example, argue that Gereffi envisions the input–output
structure of commodity chains in a way that obscures the complex vertical, hierarchical
and dynamic organization of production and design. My concern is different, namely,
that Gereffi does not attend to the conceptualization of value in the input–output structure, that is, the ‘value-added chain of products, services, and resources linked together
across a range of relevant industries’ (Dicken et. al., 2001: 98–9). Like other advocates
of commodity-chain analysis, Gereffi imagines the movement from input to output to
input again as essentially linear, a sequential process of value-addition. In this sense,
Gereffi’s view is consistent with Hopkins and Wallerstein’s (1994b: 49) idea that any
commodity chain holds a total amount of appropriated surplus value – a total amount
that is unevenly distributed along the entire chain. In fact, this uneven distribution of
value practically distinguishes the periphery of the world system from the core, where
surplus value is accumulated.
My criticism of Gereffi’s discussion of value – and of value-chain analysis in general
– focuses on the conceptualization of value-addition. My criticism is thus akin to Spivak’s
(1996) criticism of the ‘continuist narrative’ of value found in many Marxist accounts
(Castree, 1996/97; see also Anagnost, 2004). This narrative as deployed in value-chain
analysis – what can be called the narrative of incremental growth – is meant to identify
inequalities and, in its development policy versions, to recommend how firms and/or
countries can ‘upgrade’, that is, gain access to higher value activities in the chain. For
this purpose, then, it is of paramount importance to measure value (or value-added
increments) precisely, for example, in terms of profits or prices. In doing so, however, I
submit (with Spivak) that the narrative privileges exchange value over use value or, put
differently, objective value (unequal shares of the total appropriated value in the chain)
over subjective value (the meaning of commodities to the user/consumer). The
continuist narrative refuses to recognize the possibility of bricolage, of putting commodities to uses for which they were not designed (Spivak, 1996: 128); it refuses to recognize the irreducible heterogeneity of use-value: ‘[Use values] become specific use values
only in specific contexts of use and since those contexts can change so too can use values
themselves’ (Castree, 1996/97: 71). The continuist narrative thus effectively strips the
definition of value of its historical and affective charge (Spivak, 1996: 126). In doing so,
13
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
furthermore, the narrative obscures an important aspect of value creation characteristic
of the buyer-driven chains through which brand-name commodities commonly move.
THE DUPLICITY OF VALUE CREATION
What aspect of value creation in value chains, then, goes unrecognized by the narrative
of incremental growth or value addition? What features of buyer-driven commodity
chains, in particular, and contemporary mass consumption and commercial culture, in
general, go unremarked upon? In short, I suggest that what remains untheorized is how
the creation of value for many consumer products and services depends not only upon
the extraction of surplus value from the labor of the producer, but also from the meaningful use to which the consumer puts the product. This aspect of value-creation is
absent from both value-chain analysis and classical Marxist analyses that locate the
unequivocal and exclusive origin of value in the realm of production (Castree, 1996/97).
Yet, it is openly celebrated by many people actively involved in the marketing and advertising of products to consumers, people who talk more and more about the power of
consumers and the importance of brands (see Klein, 1999). These people – including
Kevin Roberts and Douglas Daft – profess the need for their clients to establish profound
emotional connections between consumers and brands. Pine and Gilmore, in fact,
identify this need as the key to the experience economy: ‘While prior economic offerings – commodities, goods, services – are external to the buyer, experiences are
inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged
on an emotional, physical, intellectual or even spiritual level’ (1998: 99).
The details of this commercial discourse bear consideration, for they suggest that the
source of value for commodities today lies ultimately in the labor of love. A recent
interim report of Cadbury-Schweppes to its shareowners proclaims: ‘Working Together
to Create Brands People LOVE’. The word ‘LOVE’ is a multi-colored pastiche of letters
drawn from the labels of Cadbury’s familiar confectioneries. The message seems clear:
Cadbury-Schweppes is as much in the business of making brands as of making sweets.
The question I ask, then, is how are we to understand the place of brands – and, indeed,
the place of love – in value chains, and thus revise the continuist narrative of value
creation?
Kopytoff (1986) affords some purchase on this question with his assertion that
‘commoditization’ and ‘singularization’ are opposing tendencies in all societies. Singularization denotes the tendency to remove certain objects from the realm of commodity
transactions, in effect, to invest these objects with incommensurable value, thereby
rendering them non-exchangeable. According to Kopytoff, this tendency is especially
manifest in highly commoditized societies, such as those encompassed by capitalist
markets, in which it is sometimes said that the only thing that money cannot be
exchanged for is love.
Kopytoff recognizes that his dual classification produces certain ‘paradoxes of value’
in which objects valued for their pricelessness – such as a Picasso painting – are nonetheless periodically priced when they come up for auction. That is, what Kopytoff calls ‘two
different systems of value’ (1986: 80) converge in a single object. I suggest that this
paradox, a variant of the enigma with which I began, is central to the creation of value
in buyer-driven commodity chains. These chains create value by transforming commodities into singular objects – branded objects – that nonetheless circulate as objects of
14
FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
exchange or commodities. Manifestly objects with a price, and hence an exchange-value,
these objects nonetheless accrue the significance of singularity, if not uniqueness. This
is how branding ideally functions.
The value of a branded object therefore derives from two sources. On the one hand,
there is the labor of the producers. Looked at from this angle, buyer-driven commodity
chains often present cases of extreme commoditization. The labor of some of the
producers in the chain – assembly workers in apparel sweatshops, for example – is, above
all, generic (unskilled) and cheap. Various tactics insure that this labor stays generic and
cheap, from physical coercion of the workers themselves to threats to relocate plants to
countries with an even cheaper and more docile labor force.2 Indeed, the very location
of these plants as well as their working conditions are often shrouded in secrecy; here
truly is Marx’s hidden abode of production. From a complementary Maussian point of
view, the operation of this segment of the value chain accomplishes the almost complete
detachment of the producer’s personality from his – more likely, her – product. This is
one point in the commodity chain where value creation – in the form of extracted
surplus labor – takes place.
The second source of value creation involves the reattachment of the alienated
product to another personality, that is, to the consumer. It is this reattachment that is
facilitated through branding. I hasten to add that branding involves more than the labor
of the special workers who design logos and fabricate advertising campaigns (labor which
is better compensated and less generic or more skilled than that of assembly workers).
Branding also involves the unpaid work of consumers, whose meaningful use of the
purchased products invests these products with the consumer’s identity. Such meaningful use is integral to successful brands. It is never a guaranteed outcome, of course, but
when it happens, the persons of consumers animate branded things as much as viceversa. Put differently, the persons of consumers enhance the value of brands. In effect,
consumers transfer control over aspects of their persons to corporate owners of the
brand, who defend their brands legally as protected intellectual property (see Coombe,
1998 for an incisive discussion of this transfer). This is another point in the commodity chain, then, where value creation in the form of extracted or appropriated surplus
labor – ‘consumption work’ (Miller, 1987) – takes place.
Put differently, and not too subtly, brands represent value appropriated through a
process akin to kidnapping. Branding involves a trade in affections that I can illuminate
by means of an unlikely analogy with dog stealing in Victorian London. Dog stealing
constituted an artful and systematic class attack on a relatively new form of bourgeois
possession, pets, whereby a terrier worth 5 shillings might bring 14 pounds – the difference between the dog’s impersonal market price and the ransom paid by an emotionally
attached (often female) owner (see Howell, 2000: 38). That is, dog-stealers exploited pet
owners’ ‘dependence on animals’ and their ‘affections and sentiments’ or love, as well as
a gendered ideology of the domestic sphere as a realm of ‘values beyond price’ (Howell,
2000: 46). Dog-stealers dared put a price on that which ought to be priceless, namely,
aspects of one’s own personhood. Consider the words of a correspondent to The Times
in March, 1845:
Of all the combinations of rascals which infest this mighty city, there is not one, in
my opinion, more hateful than the dog-stealer. Other thieves take our property, –
15
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
these rob us of our friends . . . They make trade of our affections. They take from us
one whose good qualities we should be happy to recognize in many of our human
friends; and they compel us to a course of sordid bargaining with a knife at our
favourite’s throat. (quoted in Howell, 2000: 48)
Dog-stealers thus sought, like Kevin Roberts and Douglas Daft, to link the worlds of
sentiment and the market, to expand the boundaries of the market by encompassing an
economy of singularized sentiments imagined to operate on other, non-commoditized
terms. Indeed, the dog-stealers respected the fiction upon which their trade rested, never
actually ransoming kidnapped dogs (a brutal commodity transaction!) but instead
‘restoring’ through concerned intermediaries ‘found’ dogs – often over and over again.
It follows, then, that my evaluation of consumption work diverges from that of Daniel
Miller (1987), to whom I owe the term and the idea. For Miller, consumption work
represents a positive form of human creativity in industrial societies – practical activity
through which individuals can singularize or appropriate anonymous commodities and
thus pursue the project of self-fabrication routinely denied them in the realm of production. My aim, by extension, is to emphasize how this activity of appropriation is itself
vulnerable to appropriation, that is, to capture by the various agents of branding.
Commercial ethnography now plays a significant role in this process of capture or reappropriation (see, e.g. Gladwell, 1997) – a process which can be seen as an organized
attempt to reassert a continuist version of use value, that is, to short circuit the possibility of using commodities in ways for which they were neither designed nor advertised.
Consumption work, the realization of specific use values in specific contexts, thereby
becomes a potential source of value – for brand owners.
This two-sided process of value creation – extreme commoditization on one side and
the appropriation of consumer singularization on the other – informs Kevin Roberts’
vision of an advertising agency that puts ‘relationships and customers right at the centre’.
Roberts explains that Lovemarks elicit both high love and high respect from consumers;
in this regard, they are the opposite of ‘basic commodities’ such as iron or sand that
command low respect and low love. Lovemarks entail ‘mystery, sensuality and intimacy’;
they tap into the biographical, sensual and emotional experiences of consumers.
Creating Lovemarks therefore requires inserting products into stories that shape people’s
relationships, such as the story of Isabella Alexus, so named because she was born in her
parents’ luxury automobile. Creating Lovemarks involves tapping into the dreams of
consumers, as well as the sensory pleasures that consumers derive from products and
services. Creating Lovemarks requires establishing a relationship of trust with
consumers, of empathy, of positive emotional response bordering on passion. Creating
Lovemarks, in short, means making love. Here, then, is a succinct and plain statement
of my claim that surplus value is created through appropriated consumption work, that
is, through the emotional attachment beyond reason of consumers to certain brands –
the brands successful enough to be called Lovemarks.
THE ENIGMA OF GIFTS IN MELANESIA
A quick excursion to Melanesia – the locus classicus of gift exchange – affords a perspective on processes of value creation different from that of Victorian London. From
this perspective, the sale and use of branded commodities appears not as a form of
16
FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
kidnapping, but, rather, as a form of keeping-while-giving (Weiner, 1992; Godelier,
1999). Keeping-while-giving enables brand owners to accumulate value by establishing
control over consumption work, that is, the means by which commodity users represent
the importance of creative activities to themselves.3
Nancy Munn’s discussion (1977; see also 1986) of the manufacture of canoes on Gawa
– a small but important island link in regional kula exchange – is directly pertinent. For
Munn, value refers to the relative importance of people’s creative activities – gardening,
building, giving – which can take the perceptible form of material objects – yams,
canoes, kula shells – that themselves can be ranked relative to each other. Munn’s
approach perforce identifies subject–object relations as the grounds of value; it is therefore not incompatible with more conventional Marxist labor theories of value (see
Graeber, 2001: 45). ‘Creative action’ and ‘making processes’ are for her a way of talking
about labor in a greatly expanded sense. Munn accordingly treats exchange (of food,
canoes, kula shells) as well as production as modes of value creation. (I have already
followed her lead in treating consumption as a mode of value creation, since Miller’s
notion of consumption work as self-fabrication explicitly builds on Munn’s analyses.)
The social life of Gawan canoes takes them through a series of transformations, which
I simplify here, beginning with the production of the canoe on the beach out of bush
materials. Once complete, the canoe then becomes an item of exchange between the
matriclan of the builder and his affines; the latter may, in turn, pass the canoe along to
another recipient, thus creating a canoe ‘path’ (ked) internal to Gawa. Canoes move in
the opposite direction of the gifts of food – raw yams and taro – that are made in the
name of a woman as part of her marriage payments. The last Gawan recipient of the
canoe gives it overseas, where it travels through additional links and extends the path
into the southern part of the kula ring. Payments for the canoe take the form of cooking
pots and armshells (mwari) which return to the canoe’s owning (and building) clan,
sometimes directly and sometimes back through the path along which the canoe has
traveled. The armshells become the kitomu of the building clan. The term kitomu refers
to ‘a class of kula valuable over which the possessor has absolute proprietary rights’ as
well as to actual instances of this class (Munn, 1977: 45). A man may use his kitomu in
a variety of ways, including putting it into kula exchange on a reliable path of partners,
such that the necklace (veiguwa) he receives in return for the armshell becomes his
kitomu, for which he may again receive a kitomu armshell, and so on.
The trajectory of Gawan canoes describes a developmental process in two related
ways. First, the circulation of the canoe generates an ever expanding space-time, articulating processes of social reproduction (marriage and mortuary exchanges) internal to
Gawa with an inter-island or regional world. The ultimate conversion of canoes into
kitomu – permanent possessions that can travel far away from Gawa and return home
– generates a level of space-time ideally capable of generating itself through the unending
self-reproduction of armshells and necklaces. That is, kitomu should continually
generate the material expression of their own value and return this value to the owner
of the kitomu. Second, the circulation of kitomu in kula exchange opens up the possibility of enhancing the ‘name’ or ‘fame’ of individual transactors. As Damon (2002)
explains, ‘names’ rise and fall – reputations expand and contract – in relation to the
number and rank of kula valuables that pass through a man’s hands. Not only does the
acquisition of kitomu increase the possibilities for exchange maneuvers, but kitomu
17
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
themselves may be deployed in ways that over time increase the rank of the kitomu itself,
moving from middle to higher categories within the ranked classification of shells
(Damon, 2002: 115; Munn, 1977: 46). Kitomu thus potentially make a man’s name
more visible (‘seen’) or known farther and farther away from home.
From the perspective of kula exchange, the process of value creation in which both
brands and Gawan canoes are implicated involves a paradox of keeping-while-giving.
Gawan canoes are transformed into kitomu, objects over which the owner exercises
absolute proprietary rights; though given, they are effectively kept.4 A kitomu, moreover,
has the capacity both to reproduce itself indefinitely and to climb in rank, thus sustaining and even increasing the size of its owner’s name. Similarly, although branded
commodities circulate in exchange for money, the brand itself is kept as the legal
property of its owners; the commodities circulate as satellites of the brand, material
tokens that an owner might even destroy without, of course, destroying the brand. The
use of branded commodities by their purchasers sustains and even increases the market
value of the brand; the brand, that is, represents the importance of the consumption
work of consumers to themselves. Accordingly, the purchase of a branded commodity
is double, both the purchase of an alienable commodity over which the purchaser has
absolute proprietary rights, and the purchase of the right to use an inalienable possession
– the brand. It is the latter aspect of the purchase that is the source of greater value – all
the more under current conditions of economic globalization.
The similarity between canoes/kitomu and brands extends to the practical dynamics
of keeping-while-giving in each case: there is radical uncertainty in both. Despite the
ideal that kitomu reproduce themselves indefinitely and automatically, the exigencies of
kula exchange never guarantee this outcome. Kula fame requires stable paths, that is,
trustworthy connections between kula partners in the form of an inter-island chain of
relationships. Without such paths in place, shells can be diverted on to other paths or
into non-kula exchanges (such as canoe payments!). Hence Damon’s (2002: 121) claim
that the ‘names’ generated by kula action rise and fall; they are the contingent effects of
contested action. Hence, too, the elaborate strategies described by Munn (1983) in
which partners attempt to turn each other’s minds, to seduce each other with their
beauty and attractiveness, indeed, to make themselves the exclusive object of each other’s
passionate attention – or love.
By comparison, a brand returns to its owners the value of which it is a symbol only if
consumers or users continue to entangle branded commodities in actions regarded as
important or meaningful enough to motivate future purchases. That is, the value of a
brand is never assured; its recognition by consumers or users as a symbol of their own
creative activities must be continually renewed. Consider, for example, the minor
controversy that unfolded in 2006 around the misuse value of a certain brand of vintage
bubbly. Frédéric Rouzard, managing director of Louis Roederer, the company that makes
Cristal, a high-priced champagne celebrated in the lyrics and videos of many hip-hop
artists, was asked if the embrace of Cristal by hip-hop music was hurting the brand.
Rouzard replied: ‘That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people
from buying it. I’m sure that Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their
business’ (see Steinberger, 2006).
Rouzard’s comment prompted Jay-Z, rap impresario and Chief Executive Officer of
Def Jam Records, to stop selling Cristal at his New York and Atlantic City nightclubs
18
FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
and to announce plans to omit henceforth all references to Cristal from his songs.
Rouzard’s comment also prompted a radio commentary on the situation by Todd Boyd,
professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California’s School of CinemaTelevision (aired on National Public Radio’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon, 31 July
2006). Boyd argued that the ‘hip-hop community’ ought to be paid directly for what
amounted to free advertising. That is, Boyd urged hip-hop to gain control of its own
marketing muscle by endorsing only products that endorsed hip-hop.
The Cristal boycott highlights the efforts and resources invested by brand owners in
marketing and advertising. Marketing and advertising must represent the brand to
consumers in a way that consumers recognize as consistent with their own usage; hence
the investment in commercial ethnographic research. Hence, too, the constant and ever
mutating attempts on the part of brand owners – Louis Roederer notwithstanding – to
remain deeply connected with consumers, indeed, to make love with consumers (see
Foster, 2007).
Finally, it is worth noting that kitomu (as well as kula ‘names’) and brands index a
relationship of identity between subjects and objects; that is, subjects and objects are
aspects of each other’s value definition (Munn, 1983).5 This relationship is sometimes
made visible in the names that are bestowed upon both children and kitomu. Damon
says that ‘Important people lay the names of valuables they handle on infants born about
the time valuables are obtained’ (2002: 128). Reciprocally, Damon (2002: 124) tells of
an older man whose son worked for the regional representative to the House of
Assembly; this man named one of his new necklaces ‘Parliament’, thus putting into
circulation a thing that bore an aspect of his particular relational personhood. These
stories of naming kula shells of course recall the story seized upon by Kevin Roberts as
evidence of a Lovemark, in which an infant girl is named after the Lexus in which she
was born. The animation of things by persons and vice-versa signals the creation of value
in both the exchange of kula shells and the consumption of branded commodities.
There are, however, limits to the analogy. The value of a brand – like that of a
kitomu – represents the creative activity of people linked together in a chain of
relationships. But this creative activity – especially that of consumers – is appropriated
by brand owners in a way that differs from how kitomu owners become famous
through the use of their shells by other kula partners. This appropriation occurs
through a process in which consumers must pay (monopoly) rent for the use of a brand
that has become entangled with their particular biographies and passions. Put differently, the brand is like a kitomu, but a stolen kitomu. It represents the creative activity
of producers and consumers, but belongs to neither as such. Brands belong to brand
owners (individual shareholders and corporate persons), for whom they generate
premium profits. Keeping-while-giving in this instance is a form of both value creation
and appropriation.
I hasten to reiterate that consumption work, and therefore its appropriation, can be
regulated only roughly – perhaps with even less success than the regulation of workers
in a gated and guarded sweatshop. As in the case of Cristal, commodity consumption
often defines a site of struggle between the imaginative, idiosyncratic activity of creative
consumers and the strategies of brand owners to monitor this activity and incorporate
it into collective representations of the brand. In this struggle, what brand owners know
about consumers is at stake. But what consumers know and do not know about the other
19
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
people to whom they are linked in a commodity chain is equally an issue in the creation
and appropriation of value.
CONCLUSION: KNOWLEDGE AND THE POLITICS OF VALUE
A value chain on which hangs at one end a social relationship of exploitation approaching dehumanization might well include at the other end a relationship imagined as
nothing less than love, a deep emotional attachment between a consumer’s singular
personality and a distinctively branded commodity. The transformation of the first
relationship into the second is central to the process of value creation in many buyerdriven commodity chains that supply apparel, toys, and footwear to consumers in the
global North. To describe this transformative process as simply one of adding value via
the expert labor of the marketer is inadequate, and not only because such a description
erases the active appropriation of the love of the consumer as the intellectual property
of the owners of a trademarked, copyrighted brand. The description is also inadequate
because it obscures how the process of value creation relies upon what consumers and
producers do and do not know about the social and environmental conditions under
which each other lives and works. Put differently, the narrative of value-addition
obscures what has been called both the ‘construction of ignorance’ (Cook and Crang,
1996) and ‘segmented knowledges’ (Arce, 1997).6 Under such conditions of ignorance
and segmentation, I suggest, the investment of brands with meaning by consumers and
the appropriation of such meaning by brand owners are facilitated.
Gaps in knowledge are of course a feature of ‘imperfect’ markets in general and long
distance trade (including kula exchange) in particular. Appadurai has speculated that
‘culturally constructed stories and ideologies about commodity flows’ intensify and
proliferate ‘when the spatial, cognitive, or institutional distances between production,
distribution and consumption are great’ (1986: 48). The mythologies that surround
Melanesian cargo cults – secret knowledge about the source of goods produced elsewhere
(see Lattas, 1998) – provide an extreme if familiar anthropological example. But the
notion of constructed ignorance or segmented knowledges also invites us to think about
globalized commodity or value chains as networks of not only production and exchange,
but also of perspectives – as networks of people’s perspectives on other people’s perspectives (see Hannerz, 1992; Foster, 2002: chapter 7). Certain disjunctions in these
networks of perspectives make the creation of value – the achievement of Lovemarks –
more possible than less. Consumers might cultivate awareness of the multiple tropical
sources of the coffee they buy, but remain ignorant of the circumstances under which
the beans are produced. Coffee growers might know the metropolitan destinations of
their products, but remain ignorant of the circumstances that determine fluctuating
market prices or the reasons why their beans are rejected by buyers. In other words, the
creation of value hinges on the capacity to shape and exploit the distribution of knowledge among peasants and wage-laborers in the hidden abode of production and distant
consumers in the well-lighted aisles of supermarkets and department stores.
While disjunction in commodity networks is neither new nor exclusive to capitalism,
what might be new here is how thinking about value chains in terms of networks of
perspectives encourages a form of labor politics that takes shape as a politics of knowledge. The management of knowledge, what different actors connected in spatially extensive networks of production, exchange and consumption know about their place in the
20
FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
network and their connections to other actors, is now a crucial feature of value creation.
This much is clear from the activities of so-called ‘anti-globalization’ activists who strive
to make visible the conditions of production in which Nike sneakers, Gap blouses and
Mattel toys originate. The goal is to overcome a disjunction in perspectives, to connect
persons with other persons who all share an interest in some particular commodity or
category of commodities. Hence the report in the New Internationalist, a magazine
devoted to issues of global social justice, of an attempt to bridge worlds of knowledge
with the visit of a Ghanaian cocoa farmer to the UK. The farmer toured various sites
along the cocoa trail, including the large chocolate processing plant, Cadbury World, to
learn what happens to the beans he grows (August, 1998, Issue 304). But it is also clear
from the activities of certain companies, for whom segmented knowledge can often
impede the flow of commodities, that the management of knowledge matters greatly.
Arce (1997: 180–2) relates the story, for example, of how a group of flower growers from
Tanzania were brought by KLM airlines to the Netherlands in order to see firsthand the
operation of flower markets and thus learn well the importance of ‘quality’ – that is,
learn well the perspective of Dutch (northern) flower consumers, as mediated by flower
retailers.
Arce’s story recalls the similar way in which the Australian colonial authorities
attempted to combat what they saw as the ignorant notions of value informing cargo
cults by producing films to show native audiences how a pair of trousers begins in the
cotton fields of Queensland and eventually makes its way from field to factory to
steamship to tradestores throughout Papua and New Guinea (see Foster, 2002: chapter
3). The success of this pedagogy was equivocal at best, and it would be likewise dubious
to assume that ‘filling gaps in knowledge’ will translate into immediate political action
on the part of defetishized consumers. (How could it, given the heterogeneity of use
values?). Nevertheless, the politics of value chains entails a politics of knowledge,
opening up a variety of possibilities for both corporate actors and their social critics to
pursue competing agendas for achieving ends that are at once economic and moral. The
accomplishments of student activists in joining and forging transnational coalitions with
trade unions and religious organizations in order to publicize and protest against sweatshop labor in the garment industry is one compelling example of this politics (see
Hartwick, 2000 for further examples).
I conclude, then, by stressing that what network methodologies promise, when
applied to commodity chains, is not only a way of thinking about value creation that
complicates and enriches the narrative of incremental value addition. These methodologies also promise a progressive and ethical kind of political economic analysis. Dicken
et al. (2001: 106), for example, have observed that ‘a network methodology expands the
horizons on which our actions can be seen to be influential and within which we might
be held to some ethical responsibility’ for the ‘claims of distant strangers’. The goal of
this sort of analysis, put in the marketing terms examined in this article, would be to
replace one kind of love relationship with another; that is, to replace the love of a
consumer for a brand-name product with the love between fellow participants in a
geographically far-flung but shared moral economy. This latter kind of love is not amor
(romantic/erotic/sexual love). It is closer in essence to caritas (charitable/self-sacrificial
love) or what might be called caring at a distance, the corollary of the capacity to act at
a distance so unevenly enhanced by globalization. (But caring at a distance must go
21
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 8(1)
beyond one-sided charity, the wounding charity that active donors give to passive anonymous recipients and that neither challenges inequalities nor requires reciprocity.) Thus,
having softened the opposition between gifts and commodities for analytical purposes,
I now reassert it for political and moral purposes. The goal here is unapologetically
remedial, hardly revolutionary: a redefinition of person–thing relationships evocative of
the moving conclusion to The Gift, in which Mauss urges his readers to assume ethical
responsibility for the social relations of value creation and to do this exactly by making
commodities more like gifts.
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited from the comments of Nancy Munn, Rupert Stasch and Nancy
Foster. I thank Stéphane Breton and Maurice Godelier for encouraging me to pursue
the analogy between brands and kitomu. An abbreviated version appeared as ‘Commodity Futures: Labor, Love and Value’ in Anthropology Today (August 2005 21[4]).
Notes
1 For reviews of the promising work being done on commodity networks in anthropology, geography and sociology, see Bridge and Smith (2003), Foster (2006), and
Raynolds (2002).
2 Gereffi et al. (2001: 6) blandly note: ‘As intangibles have become more important,
tangibles have become increasingly commodified, leading to new divisions of labor
and new hurdles for developing-country producers to overcome if they wish to enter
these chains’.
3 On this point, my argument converges with Mazzarella’s (2003) insightful discussion
of ‘the gift of the brand’.
4 Munn notes: ‘If a kitomu is wrongly given off a path, the owner has the right to
retrieve it without the recipient’s objection, for it is his personal possession, like a part
of his body’ (1977: 46).
5 Branded commodities, like kula valuables, sometimes enhance the person of the user
by being worn as bodily adornment.
6 It is worth noting that Munn’s (1983) Gawan ethnography is remarkably sensitive to
how unevenly distributed knowledge about paths, partners and the movements of
shells shapes the practical dynamics of value creation in kula exchange.
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ROBERT J. FOSTER is Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies and Mercer Brugler
Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Social Reproduction and
History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange and Custom in the Tanga Islands (1995), Materializing the
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FOSTER Commodities, brands, love and kula
Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea (2002), and Coca-Globalization:
Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (2008). His research interests include globalization,
material culture, and value creation. Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Rochester, 445
Lattimore Hall, Rochester, NY 14627–0161, USA. [email: Robert.Foster@Rochester.edu]
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