No Magic Tricks: Commodity, Empowerment, and the Sale of StreetWise in Chicago

Abstract

Use‐value and exchange‐value are pragmatic features of commodity exchange which are apparent from the careful study of specific interactions, as well as from the viewpoint of economic processes at large. While Marx's well‐known attempt to describe this pair of concepts in Capital (2001) takes the latter tack, I attempt here to take the former—i.e., to approach the composition of the commodity from the point of view of the pragmatics of interaction. In doing so, I offer a semiotic model of the valuation of commodities which differs from accounts given by Kockelman (2006) and Agha (2011). The ethnographic object at stake in this essay is StreetWise, a Chicago street newspaper said to have “empowering” effects on its vendors.

Nancy D. Munn (April 13, 1931–January 20, 2020)

“…A precise and painstaking writer, Munn produced slowly, but her relatively modest publication record (two monographs and a handful of major articles) belies her impact on social and cultural theory. Although her own fieldwork was carried out in Indigenous Australia and Papua New Guinea, areas that are commonly identified with the most traditional styles of anthropology, her influence can be seen in research on topics as different as middle‐class English consumerism (Miller 1987), Romani ethnoracial identity (Lie 2020), art schools (Chumley 2016) and transnational remittance payments (Chu 2010) in China, the taste for bacon (Weiss 2018) and the economics of street people in the United States (McGill 2013), and brands and commodity chains globally (Foster 2008). As we note, her own final incomplete project brought her back to the urban world of the industrial nineteenth‐century United States.…”