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No Magic Tricks: Commodity, Empowerment, and the Sale of S treet W ise in C hicago
Author(s) -
McGill Kenneth
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12009
Subject(s) - valuation (finance) , commodity , advertising , value (mathematics) , magic (telescope) , semiotics , business , sociology , computer science , linguistics , philosophy , physics , finance , quantum mechanics , machine learning
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. W hile M arx's well‐known attempt to describe this pair of concepts in C apital (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 K ockelman (2006) and A gha (2011). The ethnographic object at stake in this essay is StreetWise , a C hicago street newspaper said to have “empowering” effects on its vendors.