Value, Money, and Consumption

The illusion that value emanates from the object itself (its price) rather than from the human labor and social relations that produced it — e.g. a $6 T-shirt hiding a garment worker's 12-hour day.

To un-hide the social relations concealed by price — tracing, say, a phone from Congolese coltan mines to Shenzhen assembly lines to a Berlin shop.

Value is cultural and differential: Americans eat beef and not dog because of a classificatory code; steak is costly partly *because* it is prestigious, not prestigious because it is costly.

Value is how people represent to themselves the importance of their own actions — a Gawan man's gifts extend his 'fame' and expand his self; societies set horizons of what is worth doing.

Rather than asking if a thing *is* a gift or commodity, trace how it moves in and out of commodity status over its social life.

Kopytoff's term for removing things from exchange to make them unique and unsellable — museums with artifacts, families with heirlooms, states with national parks.

Three ranked spheres — subsistence goods; prestige goods (cattle, cloth, brass rods); and rights in women — where trading up was a triumph and trading down shameful.

It flattened them, allowing anyone to convert yams into prestige goods — experienced by the Tiv as a moral catastrophe.

Medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, and means of payment.

Offering a dinner host $47 instead of a bottle of wine, or paying people to attend your funeral — money in the wrong sphere feels offensive.