Lively commodities and encounter value

Abstract

Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified, but fails to analyze the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway's concepts of 'lively commodities' and 'encounter value', foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy.

Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity

“…Picking up on these leads, a more recent body of work on ‘lively commodities’, takes nonhumans’ fabrication of political economic activity as a central concern (Barua ; Collard ; Collard and Dempsey ). A key axis of these new commodity geographies is that ‘vital or generative qualities’ of commodities are fundamental to valorisation, qualities that ‘can produce capitalist value as long as they remain alive and/or promises future life’ (Collard and Dempsey , 2684).…”

“…A key axis of these new commodity geographies is that ‘vital or generative qualities’ of commodities are fundamental to valorisation, qualities that ‘can produce capitalist value as long as they remain alive and/or promises future life’ (Collard and Dempsey , 2684). Specific interventions examine what characteristics of life, the qualities of the lively materials being commodified, matter in the production of the commodity (Collard and Dempsey ), and assay how nonhuman potentials have differential bearings on commodity surfaces (Barua ), the socio‐spatial pathways of their use (Colombino and Giaccaria ). Conversely, other strands focus on how commodification alters the nature of the being that becomes the commodity (Collard ), illustrating ways in which living organisms’ dual ‘wild’ and ‘commodity’ lives are produced through distinct technological assemblages and spatial ecologies (Collard ).…”

“…Conversely, other strands focus on how commodification alters the nature of the being that becomes the commodity (Collard ), illustrating ways in which living organisms’ dual ‘wild’ and ‘commodity’ lives are produced through distinct technological assemblages and spatial ecologies (Collard ). Drawing inspiration from Haraway's heterodox readings of the labour theory of value (Haraway ), this work moves toward positing more‐than‐human diagnostics for understanding commodification (Collard and Dempsey ), circulation (Colombino and Giaccaria ) and the production of surplus value (Barua ).…”

“…First, the paper disentangles specific sites and histories of the emergence and production of value‐generating life. Scholarship has focused on the quiddity of lively commodities, moving toward ‘achieving greater precision about the category “life”’ (Collard and Dempsey , 2695), to develop appreciations of ‘diverse animal ethologies and bodies … lumped under the appellative “lively commodity” and subsumed by the term “encounter”’ (Barua , 727). Questions on where and when – historical geographies marking the capture of living labour (Chakrabarty ) – have received relatively less attention.…”

Complexity, Dynamism, and Agency: How Can Dialectical Biology Inform Geography?

“…Recent work on lively commodities has tried to bridge the divide between emerging work on non-human agency and materiality and Marxian concepts of labour, value and commodification. For example, Maan Barua (2016) demonstrates how, in encounters between humans and large animals, for example between tourists and elephants, the physical features of the animals contributes towards what, following Donna Haraway (2008), he calls "encounter value". The intention here is to move beyond the notion, common in political economy, that non-humans are a mere resource or a substrate on which human labour occurs towards seeing animals themselves as active participants in a process of capital accumulation.…”