No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Commodity Production and the Sociology of Work: Ideologies of Labor and the Making of Globalization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2012
Extract
A common feature in almost any world atlas is the colorful, symbol-driven commodity maps that identify national and global regions by the production of specific types of crops or the extraction of natural resources found there. Oranges grow in the state of Florida in the United States; copper is mined in the northern region of Chile; perhaps tiny representations of sheep indicate that Australia is a major producer of wool. These visual productions of space are both compelling and misleading, implying that access to the world's bounty is as simple as knowing where things are located within a larger division and ordering of the world. Yet oranges are not indigenous to Florida, and their contemporary mass production is made possible largely by the employment of undocumented migrant workers and the legal exclusions that make them a cheap source of labor. Without well-funded and meticulously crafted campaigns urging residents living in temperate climates to purchase and consume oranges year round, oranges' profitable hold in Florida would likewise not be sustainable. Such complexities raise the question, where are the maps that illustrate the dynamic cultural, labor, and political relationships between the commodities and the places where they are produced?
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2012
References
NOTES
I am grateful for the comments and thoughts provided by the editors of the journal, and to Carolyn Brown in particular for encouraging me to write this review essay. I would also like to thank Aaron Windel for his initial feedback and conversations on this topic.
1. All three books owe a debt to anthropologist Sidney Mintz's pioneering work on the history of sugar and the role that sugar plantations played in the slave trade, settlement of the Americas, and in both transforming consumption practices and in being transformed by them. Mintz's integration of social, cultural, and economic history around a single commodity clearly informs these works. See Mintz, Sidney, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
2. Citing sociologist Robert Miles, Zimmerman argues that “racism functions … as part of the labor process—not merely as an ideology—because it shapes the way work is organized and exploited” (14). See Miles, Robert, Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Anomaly or Necessity? (London, 1987).Google Scholar Similarly, as Howard Winant has suggested, the foregrounding of race is important because scholars have often failed to theorize how race was a “constitutive element” and a “key causative factor in the creation of the modern world” rather than a “manifestation of some other, supposedly more profound or more ‘real’ social relationship.” Winant, Howard, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York 2001), 19.Google Scholar
3. Something that Zimmerman does not address is the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, some Southern planters embraced the idea of replacing freed black slaves with “coolie” Chinese labor, based on their belief that the manumission of slaves meant that they would be impossible to control as ostensibly free laborers. For this history, see, Jung, Moon-Ho, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (London and Baltimore, 2006).Google Scholar
4. In this respect, Okihiro follows the lead of Timothy Mitchell, who examined how histories of development projects in Egypt omitted or otherwise silenced narratives that exposed the failure of experts to ultimately control the natural environment and its agents, such as the malarial mosquito and excessive sediment from river damming. As Mitchell argues, these environmental agents did not conform to the narrative of modern progress that colonial and native technocratic experts espoused. Mitchell, , Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).Google Scholar
5. Oddly, Okihiro does not explicitly address the theory of Bruno Latour (or for that matter, Mitchell, cited in the previous note), which in some respects challenges his argument that pineapples represent historical formations in that they carry human ideas about the relationship between the temperate and the tropical. Latour might suggest that pineapples need to be understood as having an ontological “realness” that exists outside human constructions of their meaning. Okihiro's “historical formations,” for example, still privilege how human epistemologies make sense of the pineapple in a social context. Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York, 2005).Google Scholar
6. See, in particular, Takaki, Ronald, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu, 1983)Google Scholar, which focuses on sugar plantations.
7. Jung's important book argues that Filipino, Japanese, and Portuguese plantation workers were successfully able to incorporate racial and ethnic difference into the movement to organize laborers, even though the planter elite sought to pit these different groups against each other. Jung, , Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (New York, 2006).Google Scholar