I have described what Karl Polanyi called the formalist approach to economy, effectively neoclassical economics: a concern with people allocating their limited resources between alternative ends. Economists call those ends “preferences”, take them as given and do not investigate them, or even really care about them. This is most obvious in their approach to markets. There, a mass of people with a variety of preferences and a range of resources are treated as an undifferentiated mass called something such as “market demand”. All that seems to be important is the transaction of money for objects. In the preceding chapter I showed the way that something else concerns many economic anthropologists: the ways that the circulation of objects reflects and affects social identities and relationships. For Marcel Mauss, and for anthropologists generally, objects that circulate in this way are called gifts, while objects that circulate in an impersonal market are called commodities.

This anthropological use of the term “commodity” is different from the Marxian use. There, as I noted previously, what is important about a commodity is not the sort of transactions in which it circulates but, instead, that it is produced with the intention of selling it, such as the cloths described in Chapter 2 (see Carrier 2018a). Further, in the market such commodities commonly are fetishized. This means that they are presented, and seen, as bearers of use and exchange value that are stripped of the processes and relations by means of which they are produced and brought to our consideration. On a supermarket shelf the bottle of soft drink tells us that it is cool and refreshing and its price is displayed. Nothing, however, tells us about the people who thought it up and made it, the drivers who brought it to the store or the assistants who put it on the shelf.

The anthropological use of “commodity” differs as well from common use, which shares that fetishism. In that use the term refers to an object that is mass-produced and with few or no distinguishing features, such as table salt or plain white T-shirts. Firms do not want to make or sell such things, but commonly seek to distinguish their wares in some way.