Textures of Value: Embodiment and Experience in the Mongolian Cashmere Industry

FAIN: FEL-282878-22

Kathryn Elizabeth Graber
Indiana University, Bloomington (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)

Research and writing leading to a book on the language used to create and transform value in the commodity chain of Mongolian cashmere from herders to consumers.

This book project explores the production and global circulation of Mongolian cashmere to determine how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and subsequently transform society and culture through their transnational movement. Drawing on field research primarily in Mongolia and secondarily in Scotland, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hong Kong, Textures of Value holds in view an entire commodity chain. It focuses on interactions, such as between herders and their goats, between brokers and herders negotiating prices, in political debates over the future of Mongolia’s economy and environment, and at points of sale to consumers. How, at these different nodes in the circulation of cashmere fiber, is value dynamically produced in interactions? Which systems or regimes of value “travel” from one node to another, and which do not?

Associated Products

Textures of Value: Tactility, Experience, and Exclusion in the Cashmere Commodity Chain (Article)
Title: Textures of Value: Tactility, Experience, and Exclusion in the Cashmere Commodity Chain
Author: Graber, Kathryn E.
Abstract: Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co-opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber’s relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very different stakes: the families of Mongolian herders who comb goats together each spring, the brokers and buyers who weigh it and feel it to adjudicate it for fashion houses, and the advertisers and marketers who decide what is desirable in global markets of end consumers. This article examines three nodes in the production and circulation of Mongolian cashmere to show how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and travel, or not, from one context to another. I focus on interactions as moments of qualic evaluation. Here embodied, tactile experiences of qualia—which might seem to be immune to perceptual difference and “outside culture”—in fact differ. The example shows how valuation in a transnational commodity chain depends on both exploiting semiotic gaps in the chain and nonetheless meeting a threshold of commensurability, neither of which is divorceable from physicality.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12280.
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Economic Anthropology
Publisher: Economic Anthropology

Textures of Value: Embodiment and Experience in the Mongolian Cashmere Industry (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Textures of Value: Embodiment and Experience in the Mongolian Cashmere Industry
Author: Graber, Kathryn E.
Abstract: SEA at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. The larger project from which this paper is drawn explores the production and global circulation of Mongolian cashmere to determine how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and subsequently transform society and culture through their transnational movement. [...] Commodity chains have long been studied by economic anthropologists and historians, who have followed the “same” material stuff, such as sugar, salt, or tea, across transnational contexts to show how those contexts are inextricably interconnected and how inequality is socially produced (e.g., Appadurai 1986; Besky 2014; Kurlansky 2003; Mintz 1985). This project develops and extends a new approach to this problem by focusing on how inequality is produced linguistically, as individuals negotiate value over and over again in the production and circulation of a commodity. Building on several recent and ongoing studies, this project is rooted in approaches to commodity chains that examine how semiotic mediation shapes the circulation of goods (Cavanaugh 2007; Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; Faudree 2015; Gal 2017; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012; Tsing 2015). I extend such work by showing that, through the relative transparency and opacity of the value regimes operating at different nodes in a commodity chain, some people are marginalized through a kind of semiotic exclusion. Tactile experience of qualia—which might seem to be immune to perceptual difference and “outside culture”—is in fact different at different nodes, informed as it is by different expectations and value regimes. I suggest that we can best see this exclusion in operation by comparing interactions drawn from all parts of a commodity chain at once. The paper focuses on the experience and evaluation of tactility at three different such points.
Date: 6/1/2022
Conference Name: Society for Economic Anthropology

“Buryatia on Edge: ‘Normality,’ Disruption, and Belonging in a Borderland of Russia.” Dialogue with Kristina Jonutytė in series “Politics on the Edge: Rupture, Transformation, and Imagination.” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Buryatia on Edge: ‘Normality,’ Disruption, and Belonging in a Borderland of Russia.” Dialogue with Kristina Jonutytė in series “Politics on the Edge: Rupture, Transformation, and Imagination.”
Abstract: This panel had to do with some of my prior research, but I was in Scotland thanks to my NEH fellowship so have included it here.
Author: Graber, Kathryn E.
Date: 11/8/2022
Location: Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and Eastern European Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland

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