Anthropology and the commodity form: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum

Anthropologists working in the political economy tradition have generated a sizeable amount of work that focuses on commodities. This article discusses approaches that focus on the form and structure of the commodity, in particular the work of Lukács, Sohn-Rethel and Benjamin, and uses them to examine the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, an institution where encyclopedic statistics and anthropology were especially conditioned by commodity relations. These authors help the anthropology of commodities to grasp both the relation between political economy and culture, and the influence of commodity on the discipline itself.