1

Losing our Chains:

Rethinking Commodities through Disarticulations

Marion Werner and Jennifer Bair1

Introduction to a theme issue of Environment and Planning A, guest edited by Jennifer

Bair and Marion Werner

Not for circulation or citation; The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this

article is published in Environment and Planning A 43, 5: 998-1015, 2011.

Over the course of the last decade, the commodity chain construct has informed

many studies of international trade and production networks in sociology, geography,

history, and, more recently, anthropology. The interdisciplinary appeal of the chain

heuristic lies in its ability to ground abstract-prone analysis of economic globalization in

the everyday practices of firms, workers, households, states, and consumers. The

commodity chain concept was developed by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein

in the late 1970s to differentiate their understanding of capitalism’s territorial scope from

methodologically nationalist approaches to economic change. Instead of understanding

economic development as a sequential process whereby national markets evolve in the

direction of expanded foreign trade, the authors suggested

1 This paper represents a fully collaborative project. We are grateful to the discussants at the two AAG

panels on Disarticulations, Eric Sheppard and Melissa Wright, to the contributors, and to the Sociology

department at Florida Atlantic University, especially Farshad Araghi and Phil Hough, for graciously

hosting the workshop that led to this special issue. We are also grateful to Melissa Wright and Jim

Glassman for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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…[starting] with a radically different presumption. Let us conceive of something

we shall call, for want of a better conventional term, ‘commodity chains.’

What we mean by such chains is the following: take an ultimate consumable

item and trace back the set of inputs that culminated in this item, including prior

transformations, the raw materials, the transportation mechanisms, the labor

input into each of the material processes, the food inputs into the labor. This

linked set of processes we call a commodity chain. If the ultimate consumable

were, say, clothing, the chain would include the manufacture of the cloth, the

yarn, etc., the cultivation of the cotton, as well as the reproduction of the labor

forces involved in these productive activities (1977: 128).

For Hopkins and Wallerstein, a final commodity is the outcome of linked processes

connecting actors and activities across space; by studying the processes constituting a

particular commodity chain, it is possible to get analytical purchase on the complex and

concrete determinations of the global economy.

World-systems theorists mobilized the chain construct to reveal the emergence of

an international division of labor incorporating core and peripheral countries alike into a

global capitalist economy. Later iterations, including Gereffi's global commodity chains

framework (Gereffi and Korzeniewciz 1994) and the global value chains approach

(Gereffi et al. 2005; Gibbon and Ponte 2005), have shifted from the long-range, macro-

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historical perspective of world-systems theory to a more industry- and firm-centered

model of organizational analysis.2

In reaction to this recent turn, several scholars sympathetic to the overall thrust of

the commodity chain project have called for the need to “embed,” “territorialize,” or

“spatialize” studies of transnational commodity production (Bair 2005; Dicken, Kelly,

Olds, and Yeung 2001; Dussel Peters 2008). As evident from these disparate terms, these

critiques do not represent a coherent theoretical agenda; rather they indicate a shared

skepticism about the influence of micro-social network analysis and transaction cost

economics on the study of commodity cum value chains (see Bair 2005).

Just as the original commodity chain framework burst disciplinary bounds, so too

has the ambit of its critique. Economic geographers argue that the empirical focus on

firms as meso-level actors, although yielding valuable insights into the governance

dynamics internal to production networks, has translated into a flattening of power

relations and an even further relegation of space to the empirical background (Dicken and

Malmberg 2001). Feminist scholars argue that the chain heuristic freezes complex and

relational circuits of economic activity into a fixed territorial framework where

consumption is presumed to be located in the “core,” while production takes place in the

“periphery” (Leslie and Reimer 1999; Ramamurthy 2004). Furthermore, both world-

systems theory and commodity chain analysis largely externalize social difference when

tracing macro divisions of labor, giving short shrift to the gendered and racialized forms

of labor central to the shifting geographies of commodity production (Fernández-Kelly

2 While the GCC and later GVC approaches share an interest in the chain as an analytic for comprehending

the connections between various kinds of economic activities, there are important differences between them

which have been discussed elsewhere (Bair 2005; Gibbon and Ponte 2005).

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1983; Mullings 2004; Ramamurthy 2004; Werner 2010). In addition to the specific

insights described above, what we take from these critical engagements with the

commodity chains framework is its generative if largely unrealized potential for inter-

disciplinary theorizing of the on-going processes by which global networks of

production, trade, and consumption are continually given expression in concrete

historical and geographical relations (see Peck 2005).

Our own collaboration has been nursed by this potential and by our respective

experiences researching the volatile trajectories and shifting geographies of garment and

textile production over the past decade. The work that we have done on the changing

configuration of the apparel commodity chain led us to the conclusion that the

commodity chains literature evidences a general and systematic bias: Specifically, the

extant literature is characterized by a theoretical and empirical emphasis on

incorporation. This is manifest in the tendency of researchers to pursue the newest

production frontier of a particular commodity in order to analyze how a region becomes

linked into a chain and how this incorporation impacts local actors. We became

increasingly aware that the commodity chains approach tends to downplay, if not ignore,

the fact that changing geographies of global production reflect moments of inclusion and

exclusion. The latter refer to those processes by which regions and actors become

disconnected or expulsed from commodity chains that may be incorporating new regions

and actors elsewhere. Production volatility, precipitous booms and busts, and historical

patterns of dis/investment and dispossession are effaced by the literature’s “inclusionary

bias” towards expanding production frontiers. How would our understanding of

commodity chains, networks, and indeed, the “global economy” be different if analytical

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attention focused upon the layered histories and uneven geographies of capitalist

expansion, disinvestment and devaluation?

The Special Issue that we have the pleasure to introduce here is the result of both

our own efforts to respond to this question as well as those of talented scholars from the

diverse disciplinary locations of sociology, geography, and feminist studies. In our role

as conveners of this conversation and guest editors, we frame these contributions under

the concept of “disarticulations:” in the broadest sense, an approach to commodity

production through the lens of the reproduction of uneven geographies. In this

introduction, we draw out the theoretical lineages of disarticulation and briefly

summarize the contents of the special issue. In the five papers that follow our

introduction, the concept of disarticulations is taken up through empirically rich,

theoretically-informed, and grounded studies. Taken together, the collection affords a

processual understanding of commodity chains as expressions of an ongoing and

continuous interaction between the production of goods, places and subjects and their

iterative incorporation and expulsion from primary circuits of capital accumulation.

Taken together, these studies demonstrate how connections across space and time are

forged through processes of disjuncture and disruption that selectively transform, or

disarticulate, existing social relations and forms of production.

Disarticulations and the Uneven Geographies of Commodity Chains

The power of a disarticulations perspective lies in connecting an analysis of

global commodities to the politics of disinvestment, devaluation, and place- and subject-

making which make their production possible. In elaborating this concept, we draw

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insights selectively from recent revisions of the Marxist concept of “primitive

accumulation,” feminist analyses of gender and production, and long-standing debates

surrounding the question of “articulation.”

Recent Marxist scholarship interrogates the complex geographies of what were

hitherto considered historically distinct stages of capitalism in classical Marxist

approaches: that is, of expanded reproduction, on the one hand, and primitive (or

originary) accumulation, on the other. In the classical view, the era of capitalist

accumulation based on the appropriation of surplus value from exploited labor is

premised on a prior phase of separating labor from its means of production through

extra-economic means such as violence, fraud, and theft (see Perelman 2000; de Angelis

2001). The intensification of market forces worldwide, and the rolling back of the

commons in the broadest sense of non-commodified social relations, has foregrounded a

rethinking of these processes and their historical and geographical connections (see

Glassman 2006 for an excellent review). Rather than conceiving of capitalist relations of

production as a “second stage” of accumulation, Massimo de Angelis describes the

common character of accumulation and primitive accumulation. “The divorcing

embedded in the definition of primitive accumulation,” he argues, “can be understood…

as a reassertion of capital’s priorities vis-à-vis those social forces that run against this

separation” (2001: 14). This play of forces, between what is constituted as within

capitalist relations of production and what is positioned as their interior limit, is not

confined to the prehistory of capital, but is rather an ongoing dynamic of capitalism

which repeatedly reproduces the spatial and social boundaries of “regular” accumulation.

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A rethinking of primitive accumulation and its geographies has gained broad

attention in anglo-American academia via the work of David Harvey and his notion of

accumulation by dispossession. Harvey emphasizes capital’s imperative to create its own

exteriority as a means to guarantee the reproduction of accumulation (2003). He draws

inspiration from Marx’s notion of the industrial reserve army, created through the

expulsion of labor from capitalist relations of production. “Modern industry’s whole

form of motion… depends,” Marx concluded, “on the constant transformation of a part of

the working population into unemployed and semi-employed ‘hands’” (1976: 787).

Generalizing from this imperative of capital to create its own provisional outside, Harvey

trains our attention on processes that render both workers and resources external to

capital’s primary relations of production in order to seize upon them again in an “original

accumulation” sort of way. Specifically, crises of overaccumulation, he argues, release

assets at close to zero cost in circumstances where the holders of overaccumulated capital

appear as buyers of last resort, frequently related to, as Luxemburg writes, the open

display of “force, fraud, oppression, [and] looting” (quoted in Harvey 2003: 137).

At the heart of Harvey’s and de Angelis’ distinct engagements with primitive

accumulation is an attention to the relationship between capitalist relations of production

and the forces that define its social and spatial contours. These engagements are central

to our notion of disarticulations. In our view, and in contrast to Harvey’s formulation

linking dispossession to moments of crisis, the contours of capital accumulation and

those people and places provisionally externalized from its relations are best understood

through everyday practices and struggles over value. Processes of devaluation, for

example, are an inherent dynamic of capitalism, but they cannot be reduced to the logic

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of capital. For one thing, capital alone does not determine whose labor will be exploited

and where. The availability of labor and its differential valuation are inseparable from

constructions of social difference based on interlocking and overdetermined hierarchies

of race, gender, nation, and class. Returning to Marx’s observations about the industrial

reserve army, consider that labor thrown out of primary circuits of commodity production

or made available through dispossession is most often not the same labor “ready to hand”

at a subsequent moment of expanded reproduction.

The case of women in export factories in the global South is here exemplary.

Harvey discusses the impact of rapid industrialization in the global South on women who

“provide the bulk of labour power” in light manufacturing industries. While

acknowledging the exploitative and punishing conditions in which many such women

work, he asks “whether the problem in Indonesia, for example, was the impact of rapid

capital industrialization on life chances during the 1980s and 1990s or the devaluation

and deindustrialization occasioned through the financial crisis of 1997-98 that

demolished much of what industrialization had achieved” (2003: 163-164). Contending

that the second development “did far more damage to the long-term hopes, aspirations,

and possibilities of the mass of the impoverished population than did the first,” Harvey

draws out the implication that “primitive accumulation that opens up a path to expanded

reproduction is one thing, and accumulation by dispossession that disrupts and destroys a

path already opened up is quite another” (ibid: 164).

Our interest here is not in evaluating which is better for women workers and their

communities: expanded reproduction through the incorporation of feminized labor into

capitalist relations of production, or the expulsion of that labor from wage employment.

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Rather, our point is that the disposability of women workers is not an inexorable

consequence of capitalist crisis, but rather an ongoing outcome of reproducing capitalist

relations of production within specific historical contexts that are shaped by social

difference (Wright 2006; Bair 2010). Particular episodes, like the Asian financial crisis,

may throw the relationship between gender and capital into particularly sharp relief, but

this relationship is irreducible to such moments of crisis.

An anecdote from our fieldwork in a region of Mexico called La Laguna is

illustrative here: In an interview with a large garment firm, the owner recounted the

company’s growth and decline in rich detail, explaining its considerable investments in

new technologies and new departments, the precipitous downturn in production in recent

years, and the impact on employment, which had fallen by half. When we asked how the

proportion of women in the workforce had changed over this period, given that women

workers formed the majority of the factory workforce in the late 1990s, the owner

himself was surprised by the low figure (30% female) that the manager next to him cited

in response to the question. Upon learning that more than two-thirds of the bodies seated

behind sewing machines on his production floor were male, he looked around the table at

his six male colleagues and exclaimed with surprise, “strange, isn’t it guys, that we’ve

become a company of men!”

To be sure, significant shifts in the global garment trade have occurred over the

past decade, precipitated in large measure by trade liberalization and the phase-out of

quotas on clothing imports. The changing geography of textile and clothing production

globally is reflected in the local crisis in La Laguna’s apparel industry, as our interview

with the struggling garment firm described above suggests. But neither the causes of this

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crisis, be they fluctuating currencies and/or a new trade regime, nor its consequences, be

they factory closures and/or massive lay-offs, are sufficient for explaining the way in

which this and other remaining export factories in La Laguna have become companies of

men. It is the particularity of dispossession, we suggest, as a structurally contingent

process stretched over and reproducing the terrain of social and geographical difference,

which explains this outcome and underwrites capital accumulation more generally. In

other words, while dispossession gestures towards the tendency of capital to conditionally

exclude certain kinds of resources, like labor power, from circuits of accumulation, this

concept alone cannot explain whose labor will be provisionally externalized where.

Disarticulations, we argue, lend dispossession its concrete geographical and social form,

reworking the uneven geographies of capitalism.

Addressing the contours of social and spatial difference and how these are

selectively disconnected from circuits of commodity production is thus a central part of

our concern. It is insufficient, however, simply to extend commodity chain analysis by

studying the people and places that have been excluded from them. In our view, moments

of exclusion or expulsion are not simply obverse instances of the moments of

incorporation that are studied in much of the literature; what is needed, rather, is closer

analytical attention to the relationship between inclusion and exclusion as ongoing

processes that are constitutive of commodity chains. Thus, we call for a deeper

engagement with the processes that engender the forging and breaking of links between

circuits of commodity production, people and places. In order to address these dynamics,

we turn briefly to the concept of articulation that emerged from a set of debates which

partly prefigured the current re-engagement with primitive accumulation.

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At the time that Wallerstein and other world-systems theorists were formulating

their commodity chains framework, the term “articulation” was central to the modes of

production controversy at the heart of Marxist development debates (see Foster-Carter

1978; also Hart 2007 for a recent review). French Marxist economic anthropology and

neo-Marxist anti-colonial scholars were debating how links are forged, or articulated,

between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. World-systems theorists

staked a decidedly negative position in these debates, rejecting the very premise of

multiple modes and insisting that, since the long sixteenth century, the world economy

expressed a single, capitalist mode of production differentiated into core, periphery, and

later, semi-periphery. Commodity chains were one way that world-systems theorists

understood relationships between these three regions of differentiated, but singular,

capitalist development.

We do not know whether the rejection of the modes of production premise

influenced the original formulation of the commodity chains framework by Hopkins and

Wallerstein, nor do we suggest any theoretical homology between links in commodity

chains and links between modes of production. Our point is simply to note that the

world-systems tradition of commodity chain research has paid relatively little attention to

how links in these chains are forged. This omission seems to have left the framework

especially vulnerable to functionalist interpretations of the circuits of commodity

production that are studied through it.

If world-system theorists attempted to move beyond the vexing question of

capitalist/non-capitalist connections by redefining the totality of uneven geographies as a

single world capitalism, Stuart Hall seized upon the problematic of linking itself, that is,

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“articulation.” In his famous essay on the topic, Race, articulation and societies

structured in dominance (1980), Hall reinterpreted debates on colonial capitalism – and

specifically the relationship between race, class, and capital accumulation – through

articulation as both the material and ideological work to link up relations of production

and complexly structured social formations. Drawing on Althusser and Gramsci, Hall

called for an understanding of articulation as the forging of a unity out of difference.

Such a unity is not the expression of an identity, but rather a contingent structure

maintained by the on-going, and relatively autonomous, material and ideological

processes of linking different social and structural elements. For example, rather than

reduce race to class or theorize race outside material relations, Hall argued that “[o]ne

must start… from the concrete historical ‘work’ which racism accomplishes under

specific historical conditions—as a set of economic, political and ideological practices…

concretely articulated with other practices in a social formation”(338).

Rethinking the links in commodity chains through processes of articulation and

disarticulation trains our attention on the kind of on-going work that Hall signals. As we

argue in our previous discussion of primitive accumulation, gender and export

manufacturing, such an analysis requires thinking through both the concrete work of

historically particular sets of social relations to secure commodity production, and the

related processes of devaluation and exclusion that facilitate the remaking of these

networks and chains. In bringing these insights to bear on the study of commodity

networks and chains, we make an important corrective to Hall’s generative framework:

the work of linking is both social and spatial. It is not only the work of linking up

constructions of social difference with processes of valuation and capital accumulation,

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but also that of reproducing geographical difference by linking and de-linking places as

commodity chains are formed and re-formed. In attending to disarticulations in this

sense, as dynamic processes that iteratively reproduce the subjects and places included

within and excluded from global commodity production, the study of commodity chains

can more fully grasp the uneven geographies that condition their possibility.

* * *

The papers presented in this Special Issue take up the challenge of rethinking

commodities through disarticulations via research into the linking and unmooring of

people and places to and from transnational circuits of commodity production. The

collection assembled here grows out of ongoing conversations at two paper sessions at

the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers and a spring 2009

workshop at Florida Atlantic University. As will be clear to readers of this special issue,

the original call for work on commodity disarticulations that inspired this conversation

yielded diverse contributions drawing upon varied theoretical orientations. Each of the

articles skillfully weaves together rich, empirical studies of commodity production with

the author’s (or authors’) unique interpretation of a disarticulations perspective.

Moreover, contributors engage with questions of power and politics in their studies,

gesturing towards the difference a disarticulations perspective can make towards both a

new understanding of commodity chains and critical notions of the politics surrounding

them.

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In the first paper of the special issue, we deploy the concept of disarticulations in

order to make sense of a dramatic but short-lived surge in garment exports from La

Laguna, a region of north-central Mexico that fashioned itself the “blue jeans capital of

the world” during the 1990s. We historicize the blue jeans boom and the bust that

followed it by locating both within the region’s long involvement in extra-territorial

circuits of textile trade and production. For most of the twentieth century, La Laguna’s

economic and social landscape was dominated by cotton, and after a dramatic episode of

land redistribution in the mid-1930s, much of this cotton was grown on collective farms

called ejidos that were created from expropriated hacienda lands. In explaining how

Mexico’s most important cotton-growing region became a center for the production of

jeans made from imported (cotton) denim, we emphasize the confluence of two factors:

First, the legacy of the 1936 agrarian reform, which created a class of landed

smallholders in La Laguna, but then slowly dispossessed these farmers, first by

cultivating their economic and political dependence on the ruling party, and later by

withdrawing state support in the context of a sweeping restructuring of the country’s land

tenure policies that created a new property rights regime for ejidal land. The dislocations

we describe in La Laguna’s agricultural sector coincided with a second, protracted crisis

among industrial producers following the collapse of Mexico’s state-led industrialization

model. La Laguna’s NAFTA-era export dynamism thus relied both on trade policies that

encouraged a reorientation of domestic firms from the national market towards export-

oriented production for U.S. buyers, and on processes of disinvestment that made

devalued assets, both human and material, available to fuel a short-lived but ultimately

ephemeral blue jeans boom. We argue that a specific rural industrialization program that

15

established cooperative sewing factories on a number of La Laguna’s ejidos represented

the crystallization of these disarticulations in both the agricultural and industrial sector,

and the way in which La Laguna continues to be produced through the various moments

of linking and de-linking to the cotton-textile-apparel chain.

In a similar vein, Phil Hough examines three episodes of disarticulation in the

Caguán region of Colombia. Hough shows that the process by which the region becomes

linked into each new chain emerges from and reflects the contradictions engendered by

the previously dominant mode of capital accumulation. In the 1950s, the Caguán became

incorporated into a domestically-oriented cattle commodity chain producing meats and

hides for the national market. This form of cattle-raising was land-intensive but labor-

expulsive, and the political and economic marginalization of the peasantry on which it

relied set the stage for the Caguán’s incorporation into the cocaine commodity chain in

the late 1970s, under the auspices of the FARC. By the 1990s, cattle-ranching was again

dominant, but the incorporation of the Caguán into a dairy commodity chain producing

dry milks depended on the expulsion of the FARC by the Colombian government and the

heightened, ongoing militarization of the region. Hough emphasizes the relationship

between these moments of linking, de-linking, and re-linking, and the exercise of

politico-military force, either by the state or by para-state organizations. The dialectical

and processual understanding of the disarticulations concept developed by Hough

highlights the relations of domination and occasionally force that undergird commodity

chains, and argues for a view of such chains as political constructions rather than the

natural expressions of sectoral logics or market dynamics.

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Intricately weaving together the articulation of new subjectivities with changing

forms of commodity chains, Priti Ramamurthy explores the concrete historical work that

caste accomplishes in relations of production of cotton seed. The author traces these

connections through a study of upper caste, large landowners’ abandonment of the

commodity, on the one hand, and the incorporation of Dalit (formerly untouchable castes)

smallholders, on the other, as the global cotton seed commodity chain is reworked over

complex social and spatial terrain in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. Through subtle and

rich ethnographic analysis, her contribution explores the paradoxes of exploitation and

opportunity that mark the participation of these smallholders in the global cotton seed

network. Ramamurthy interprets these paradoxes through smallholders’ narratives and

presentations of self, crystallized in an affect of “perplexity.” Own-account farmers

describe cotton seed production on their small plots as a sign of caste advancement,

lending a degree of status connoted by what they describe as “our labor for us,” in

contrast to their experiences of tied and poorly remunerated labor and humiliating

practices of caste domination. At the same time, cotton seed production brings with it

intensified exploitation and significant indebtedness, yielding slim to no returns, one of

the reasons why large, upper caste landholders have abandoned the commodity. High

aspirations and ambivalent outcomes constitute what Ramamurthy describes as

smallholders’ vernacular calculus of the economic, “the matrix through which

smallholder’s consent to labor and their incorporation in the global commodity chain

becomes intelligible.” This framing of smallholders’ experiences demonstrates the

shortcomings of economistic frameworks, including World Bank discourses on

productivity and small land tenure. The disarticulations and re-articulations of class and

17

caste evidenced in new production arrangements and emergent caste-based political

movements create new conditions of subjection and exploitation in this global

commodity chain.

In their contribution, Christian Berndt and Marc Boeckler reinterpret a

disarticulations perspective as the ambivalent “play” of framing and overflowing that

underpins commodity chains. Drawing on science and technology studies and actor-

network theory, the authors argue that the making of commodity chains always implies

framing – or the severing of connections -- and, simultaneously, the management of

related overflows: those human and non-human relations that interrupt the uniformity of

the commodity and the possibility for its exchange. Their case is made through the

analysis of that inveterate north-south traveler, the tomato. What connections must be

made and cut in order for a seemingly uniform tomato to supply northern consumer

markets year-round? The authors train our attention on at least two systems: first, the

controlled opening and closing of borders to Mexican and Moroccan tomatoes timed to

protect domestic production during the growing season in the US and the EU. The

management of borders produces fragmented agrarian spaces in Mexico and Morocco,

where export agricultural enclaves are framed as modern markets, and marginalized areas

appear as both their exterior and as justification for liberalizing land regimes. Second, the

authors analyze supply chain systems that, on the one hand, set and enforce standards

along the chain, seemingly dissolving north-south differences, and, on the other, create

borders to reinstantiate this difference in order to contain overflow. Racism and

nationalism combine with chain surveillance technologies to reinscribe the southern

tomato as an alien commodity when overflows like Salmonella are to be managed.

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Overall, Berndt and Boeckler’s contribution demonstrates how framing and overflowing,

similar to disarticulations, reproduces uneven power relations and geographies through

the on-going work of constructing and stabilizing the tomato commodity chain.

The final contribution by Lieba Faier similarly interprets disarticulations as a host

of relationships that are both effaced by commodity chains and repeatedly interrupt their

organization. Faier focuses on the unstable and complex natural-cultural ecologies and

human-nonhuman interactions that both constitute and disrupt commodity exchange. Her

insights draw upon ethnographic work with collectors and traders of the matsutake (or

pine) mushroom in Japan. The possibilities for matsutake exchange are shaped by

changing weather patterns, forest use practices, geopolitics and the related spread of pine

wilt disease that has attacked the mushrooms’ tree hosts in many regions in Japan. These

contingent relationships condition the participation of particular areas and peoples in

matsutake exchange in highly unequal ways. For example, matsutake pickers in a rural

region with few economic opportunities experience these ecologies as part of a more

general feeling of vulnerability to “the global” (global warming, global trade, global

nature, etc.). Their experience stands in contrast to centrally positioned traders in Tokyo

who transform these uncertainties into business opportunities, and narrate their actions in

terms of “mastery” over the instabilities introduced by matsutake ecologies. Thus,

matsutake commodity chains are revealed to be far more than the linking of various

regions and actors (human and nonhuman). Rather, they are shaped by shifting ecologies

that de-link places and people from these chains on the one hand, and condition the

position and power of human actors on the other. Faier’s contribution gestures towards

the challenge of considering how nonhuman relations and ecological differences shape

19

inclusions and exclusions in commodity chains and thus offers much to the development

of a disarticulations perspective.

* * *

These papers, and the general notion of a disarticulations perspective that

underpins them, offer an important corrective to the study of commodity chains. As long

as these chains are imagined as positive nodes in global production networks that are

assumed to reflect taken-for-granted uneven geographies -- rather than links shot through

with disconnections that reproduce these geographies -- both our understanding of

commodity production and the possibilities for forging progressive politics around them

will remain limited. Perhaps, by bringing dis/articulations to the fore, new, creative

possibilities can emerge for creating counter-hegemonic connections across the vast

social and spatial differences that make much commodity production possible.

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