Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market

Description

"Commodification" refers most explicitly to the activities of turning things into commodities and of commercializing that which is not commercial in essence. The mass marketing of pets, the rise of the coffin industry, the conversion of preacher into salesmen and the globalization of Taleggio cheese are some of the surprising topics in this volume that show how friendship, death, spirituality and artisanship all have a price after being commodified. This collection of essays gives a perspective on creating consumer products and consumer identities when what's for sale goes well beyond the thing itself. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents I: Boundaries of the Market Introduction 1. The Give-and-Take of Consumer Culture Notes II: Love and Money: Intimate Relationships and the Market 2. Buying Your Friends: The Pet Business and American Consumer Culture The Trade in Birds The Trade in Aquarium Fish Pets as Commodities Notes 3. The Commodity of Self: Nineteenth-Century Human Hair Jewelry Transformation to a Commodity of Self The Tension between “Style” and “Artistry” Eighteenth-Century Hair Workers The Case of Samuel Folwell, the “Real” Hair Worker Nineteenth-Century Hair Work Katharine Schmitt, Hair Worker “Gums and Bobbins”: The Dangers of the Marketplace Notes III: Goods and Services: Expanding Market Relationships 4. An Undesired Necessity: The Commodification of Medical Service in the Interwar United States Merchants of Service A Commodity Unlike any other Disorderly Consumers A Troublesome Kind of Commodity Notes 5. “Preserving Their Form and Features”: The Commodification of Coffins in the American Understanding of Death The Coffin in America: Gentility’s Influence Established and Challenged Respectability and the Commerce of Death The Metallic Burial Case: American Respectability and Modernity Notes IV: God and Mammon: Selling and the Sacred 6. Healthcare as Product: Catholic Sisters Confront Charity and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865–1925 Social and Medical Needs and the Hospital Marketplace Entrepreneurial Enterprises The Attraction of Scientific Medicine Spiritual Agents of Care Measures of Success Spirituality as Commodity Notes 7. “Preachers and Peddlers of God”: Ex-Slaves and the Selling of African-American Religion in the American South Notes 8. The Politics of Ghee Adulteration and Its Public Resolutions in Calcutta, c. 1917 The Role of Ghee in Indian Cuisine “Unwelcome Middlemen”: The Marwari Community in Calcutta The Adulteration of Bengal Legislating Adulteration Marwari Adulteration of Ghee in 1917 Legislation and its Role in Making Adulteration Visible Postscript Notes V: Village and Nation: Community, Identity, and the Market 9. Marketing Community: State Reform of Indian Village Property and Expenditure in Colonial Mexico, 1775–1810 The Remaking of Indian Society, 1521–1700 The Bourbon Reforms and their Impact in the Tierra Caliente Indian Reactions to the Bourbon Reforms Conclusion Notes 10. Commodifying Chinese Nationalism: MSG and the Flavor of Patriotic Production Creating a Nationalistic Consumer Culture The Place of Chinese Entrepreneurs in the Movement National Products Movement Biographies A Capitalist with Chinese Characteristics “I am a Local Product” Defeating “Enemy Products” The Limits of Patriotic Production Purifying National Products of their Foreign Components Broader Patriotic Activities Biographies as Patriotic Packaging Notes 11. Packaging Skills: Calibrating Cheese to the Global Market Roots, Co-Ops, and Stamps Cheese for Customers, Cheese for Friends Publicizing Landscapes of Skill Conclusion Notes Contributors Index