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This essay explores the critical vision of Francisco Barrera Lavalle about the Mexico’s Monetary Reform of 1905. In his critique, Barrera inserts an argument about the nature of the balance of payments in the Mexican economy: the disequilibria in Mexico’s trade balance were structurally recurrent given the characteristics of what the country exports: commodities and raw materials. Barrera believed that the authorities made the mistake of overvaluing the peso, assigning it a value higher than what silver currency was worth at the time on international markets. Barrera also dismissed the idea that monetary stability could be achieved by suspending the free coinage of silver currency. Finally, Barrera held that banks should be obligated to pay their banknotes in gold, as they were in Great Britain and in the United States, not in silver coins.

This essay uses Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and Mauss’s description of the hau as the spirit that connects the giver to the gift to examine notions of production, value, and collectivity in the Santa Fe silver mining Cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico. This case allows us to look at how fetishism on the one hand, and “hauism” on the other, can work together to form a hybrid form of value wherein silver participates in both commodified and giftlike processes. More broadly, it helps us to examine the relationship between the production of value and the production and legitimation of social groups.

China around 1900 was an enormous domain with approximately 400 million people, almost all of them desperately poor. Most were farmers, working intensively on small tracts of land using relatively primitive technology. It was in many respects a Malthusian economy, with high death and birth rates and many residents living close to the subsistence level.

A hitherto unknown manuscript from the 1620s, whose only extant copies appear to be in Dublin, shows the balance of trade being forcefully developed, without the concern for the East India Trade that marks Thomas Mun. It goes on to consider economic and monetary policy, particularly the relative valuation of gold and silver, more closely.

In the first millennium AD when international trade brought silver coins to Madagascar, they were melted down for jewelry or cut into pieces to meet the needs of small-scale local trade. The Merina culture of the highland interior saw in the original uncut silver coin an image of completeness and perfection. Such coins became obligatory ritual offerings acknowledging the sanctity of the sovereign. “Ritual economy” is brought into fine grain relief when pieces of “all-purpose money” are used in ritual prestation and when markets become a symbol of morality indexing political legitimacy. Today traditions of the highlands have co-opted the royal offering of “uncut coins” for local ritual purposes and local ritual specialists engage in symbolic assaults on “all-purpose money.” This chapter draws upon Merina royal oral traditions, ethnohistoric accounts, and contemporary ethnographic work with Betsileo ritual specialists to argue that the poetic and the syncretic necessarily enter into discussions of the economic.

Heavy metals play a crucial role in the economic development of any nation. Industries utilizing heavy metals, consequently, emanate a large volume of metal-containing liquid effluents. Since metals are non-renewable and finite resources, their judicious and sustainable use is the key. Hazardous metal-laden water poses threat to human health and ecology. Apart from metals, these industrial effluents also consist of toxic chemicals. Conventional physical–chemical techniques are not efficient enough as it consumes energy and are, therefore, not cost effective.

It is known that biomaterials namely microorganisms, plants, and agricultural biomass have the competence to bind metals, in some cases, selectively, from aqueous medium. This phenomenon is termed as “metal biosorption.” Biosorption has immense potential of becoming an effective alternative over conventional methods. The authors in the present chapter have used secondary data from their previous research work and attempted to develop few strategic models through their feasibility studies for metal sustainability.

This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.

The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.

As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.

This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.