From life force to slimming aid : exploring views on the commodification of traditional medicinal knowledge.

The commodification of traditional knowledge is a lively topic for academic debate, with opinions ranging from categorical rejection of this process, to views that it could be a liberating act. This debate is often characterised by generalisations and a lack of empirical engagement. This paper presents a case study of the commercialisation of traditional medicinal knowledge of the San in Southern Africa. A scenario survey in 3 communities reveals a range of different views amongst individuals and communities, much of which could be linked to differing local and historic socio-economic factors. Although the survey indicates that commodification is widely accepted, the subsequent use of a ‘life story’ approach to examine the actual commercialisation of the Hoodia (Hoodia Gordonii—a plant with appetite suppressant properties), shows that this acceptance is problematic. San informants reflect on it as a pragmatic choice informed by experiences of deprivation and economic hardship, resulting in a process which changes the cultural meaning of the plant and undermine its traditional healing power for the San themselves

Judge Higginbotham\u27s Atelier of Scholarship

Symposium Honoring Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr

Selling Your Self in the United States

In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person encounters adopting a form of corporate personhood? How does one foster relationships or networks that will lead to a job, not just a circulation of one’s brand identity? Based on research in Indiana and northern California, this article explores the conundrums of marketing oneself as a desirable employee on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and so on. I address the reasons why the increased use of social media contributes to popularizing a notion of self-branding. I also discuss the quandaries people face when using social media to create this self-brand. In sum, this article investigates the obstacles people face when they try to embody a form of corporate personhood across media, a form of self putatively based on the individual, but one that has been transformed into a corporate form that people can not easily inhabit

Competing biosecurity and risk rationalities in the Chittagong poultry commodity chain, Bangladesh

This paper anthropologically explores how key actors in the Chittagong live bird trading network perceive biosecurity and risk in relation to avian influenza between production sites, market maker scenes and outlets. They pay attention to the past and the present, rather than the future, downplaying the need for strict risk management, as outbreaks have not been reported frequently for a number of years. This is analysed as ‘temporalities of risk perception regarding biosecurity’, through Black Swan theory, the idea that unexpected events with major effects are often inappropriately rationalized (Taleb in The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable, Random House, New York, 2007). This incorporates a sociocultural perspective on risk, emphasizing the contexts in which risk is understood, lived, embodied and experienced. Their risk calculation is explained in terms of social consent, practical intelligibility and convergence of constraints and motivation. The pragmatic and practical orientation towards risk stands in contrast to how risk is calculated in the avian influenza preparedness paradigm. It is argued that disease risk on the ground has become a normalized part of everyday business, as implied in Black Swan theory. Risk which is calculated retrospectively is unlikely to encourage investment in biosecurity and, thereby, points to the danger of unpredictable outlier events

Moral Economies of Food in Cuba

The way people produce, exchange and consume food in Cuba is underwritten by cultural and political economic rules as well as economic self-interest. These "rules" are not just formed from the top down, but also from the bottom up, though, as I will explain in this paper, norms established by what I call the national moral economy often give cultural form to local practices of food provisioning. Despite extreme scarcities in the early 1990s and continuing difficulties obtaining food in the present dual economy, Cubans often frame farming and household provisioning in terms of the national moral economy. The latter is, in turn, structured by values that have developed in Cuba over time such as asceticism and hard work

What is ambiguous about ambiguous goods?

Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital virtual ones. Ambiguity may arise in many ways, but this article examines one specific process: ambiguity that occurs when entities appear as objects that blur category boundaries. Ambiguity is created around pre-existing categories through socio-material entanglements. This article explores how a central category in consumer capitalist societies-property-takes on ambiguous forms in distributions and recirculations of prestige items in the massively multi-player online role-playing game Final Fantasy XI. Prestige objects are powerful, sought-after armour and weapons acquired in the game world by completing difficult battlefields or tasks, often in large groups. When discussing these items, respondents are not confused actors trying to make sense of slippery things. Instead, they produce ambiguities around property by blurring distinctions between gifts and commodities. Blurred boundaries help resolve tensions arising from different orderings of people, relations and things. Hybridised property forms allow selective alienation of goods, allowing participants to privilege some relations and connections over others. With this article, I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interest in non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. 'Ambiguous goods' is not a viable category for thinking about things, people and relations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things-whether they are digital, virtual or neither-are related. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Rethinking material culture of sustainability: Commodity consumption, cultural biographies, and following the thing

This paper advances geographical perspectives on household sustainability by extending the range of insights from consumption scholarship that are brought to bear on the issue. Research that links consumption to the dynamics of variously sustainable practices currently dominate, resulting in a particular and partial reading of material culture. I suggest that geographical approaches to the social life of things may yield new insights into materiality and household sustainability. Specifically, I argue that ‘following the thing’ – which is typically focused on commodity chains – could usefully be extended into people's homes. This is not introduced as a way to acknowledge the connections between points in a network, rather, it is positioned as a set of theoretical and methodological resources that can be utilised to explore the movement and placing of things as they move through a critical juncture – in this case the household. To illustrate, I present material drawn from two empirical studies of households in the UK. The first is an ethnographically-informed study of how food becomes waste; the second is a quantitative survey of laundry habits. Attention is paid to the ways in which the ongoing categorisation and valuation of things shape their trajectories and move them in directions that give rise to (adverse) environmental impacts. To conclude I sketch out an agenda for future studies, consider how a focus on households can yield more comprehensive biographies of things, and address the implications of this analysis both for consumption scholarship and for engagement with sustainability research and policy beyond human geography