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that indeed point in these directions; yet it is important to recall the observation
noted above that commodities, or more accurately, the commodity-form of things
is not inherent to them. Commodities are made, not born. The commodity-
form, put differently is really just one phase in the complex lives of things and ideas
(Appadurai, 1986). Even in the conventional world of commodities produced exclu-
sively for sale by profi t seeking capitalist fi rms, commodifi cation is tenuous, incom-
plete and ephemeral, not monolithic, complete or necessarily lasting. As Sayer
(2003) intriguingly discusses, consumption is a form of de-commodifi cation in so far
as it reverses the ontology of things from exchange-value back to use-value. Using
the same term, but in a different way, Henderson (2004) has argued that the circuits
of value and of commodities in a (more than) capitalist political economy - and thus
of commodifi cation - are incomplete and 'leaky'. Even things produced exclusively
as exchange-values in order to meet social needs and aspirations via the money
economy can have politically charged, unpredictable lives, including mundanely
enough in Henderson's discussion, canned food donated as surplus to food banks
for relief. One implication then, is that commodifi ed food produced for exchange-
value ends up politicising (as opposed to depoliticising) the social allocation of food.
A similar line of reasoning might well be applied to myriad environmental concerns
linked to the commodifi cation of nature, e.g., the mountains of non-biodegradeable
and often toxic waste unevenly distributed across the globe and linked to consumer
culture as the detritus of commodifi cation. These represent simultaneously material
and semiotic processes of decommodifi cation that draw attention to the limits of
commodifi cation as the domination of exchange-value in production, and of some
of the limits of displacement in the provision of social needs. Likewise, efforts to
achieve fair, ethical, organic or otherwise alternative commodity circuits invoke
questions about the limits of commodifi cation, or alternatively, of the degree to
which decommodifi cation constrains or bounds the domination of exchange-
motivated production. This is not so much about whether or not things are com-
modities, but the degree to which commodifi cation has taken hold of their social
allocation, and what a politics of commodifi cation has to say about that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work, like all writing and scholarship, is the product of collective authorship.
I would like to thank a number of specifi c people who commented on earlier drafts,
including the BFP collective, Max Boykoff, Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Emily
Eaton, Emma Hemmingsen, Mark Kear, Diana Liverman, Bruce Rhoads, Neil
Smith, Tricia Wood, and Tom Young. Any errors, omissions, ambiguities, misrep-
resentations and the like are my sole responsibility.
NOTES
1.
For a discussion of how some of these issues have unfolded in the agrarian and food
literatures, for example, see (Goodman, 2002; Guthman, 2002; Whatmore, 2002;
Winter, 2003).
2.
This critique has been accompanied by a parallel concern with consumption as an end
in itself, as opposed to for the provision of need, as for example, with so-called status
