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market driven allocation, making the commodifi cation of water a political fl ash-
point (Page, 2005; Bakker, 2007). This is an example, however, of ways in which
'the economy' is socially embedded via notions of a moral economic order that
governs the social allocation of nature as a set of entitlements (Thompson, 1971;
Scott, 1976; Booth, 1994). These kinds of arguments present rather fundamental
diffi culties for the utopian ideal of markets as a sole means of allocating goods and
services (Polanyi, 1944).
The lineages of these observations are broadly evident in a recent literature which
examines the contradictory and highly specifi c ways in which non-human nature is
made to circulate in the commodity-form. Considerable scholarship has explored
the various ways in which highly specifi c, lively and unruly, material and contested
'natures', including water (Bakker, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2005); fi sh (McEvoy, 1986;
Mansfi eld, 2003); trees (Prudham, 2003; 2005); wetlands (Robertson, 2006); fossil
fuels and minerals (Bridge, 2000; Bridge and Wood, 2005); genes (McAfee, 2003);
organic foods (Guthman, 2002; 2004), etc. are extracted, cultivated, refi ned, pro-
cessed, represented and made to circulate in the commodity-form, and with all
manner of political and ecological implications. A common thread in the literature,
echoing Polanyi, is that there is nothing 'natural' about nature's commodifi cation.
Rather, considerable work is required on various fronts to circulate nature in the
commodity-form.
For instance, one key theme in recent literature concerns the ways in which com-
modifi cation actually turns on the apparent dissolution of important qualitative
differences in the rendering of distinct things equivalent or commensurable. Castree
(2003) refers to this as abstraction , a process by which systematic representations
dissolve the specifi city of things (any specifi c things) in favour of their aggregation
into classes of things. A good deal of work along these lines has been inspired by
William Cronon's (1991) book Nature's Metropolis , and in particular, a chapter
on wheat called 'A Sack's Journey'. Cronon traces a series of technological and
organisational innovations underpinning the emergence of Chicago as the premier
market for wheat in the United States during the 19th century. He examines in
particular how the convention of transporting wheat in sacks from individual farms
gave way to aggregation, allowing more effi cient transport in rail cars, mass storage
in grain elevators, and highly fl uid forms of exchange including sophisticated futures
markets. For Cronon, a key and socially mediated development was the conversion
of continuous differentiation in wheat quality into discrete categories or grades of
wheat that sold at different prices corresponding to standardised grades. These
grades helped dissolve the specifi city of wheat and the farms from which it had been
shipped in individual, identifi able sacks. Perhaps the chapter's most compelling line
of argument is that the expansion of Chicago's wheat market, with all this entailed,
could not have occurred had the abstraction of wheat not allowed for it to be
aggregated in ways that replaced the sack but still made wheat 'legible' to buyers
and traders.
This and work along similar lines suggests that acts of representation and in fact
what might be called social relations of abstraction are necessary in order for dis-
crete things to be rendered commensurable and exchangeable, particularly where
money is involved. A curious feature of abstraction, however, is that difference is
both dissolved (as kernels with different characteristics are lumped into the same
grade) but also renegotiated and reproduced in legible forms, e.g., as discrete grades
of wheat. Without this, the complex circuits of material and symbolic exchange in
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