This paper presents a comparative study about the resilience of two sea nomadic groups of Southeast Asia – the Moken of the Myeik Archipelago (Myanmar/Thailand) and the Orang Suku Laut of the Riau-Lingga Archipelago (Indonesia). While they might have been historically valued for their seafaring skills, sea nomadic groups have increasingly been described as “uncivilised” and subsequently marginalised through state expansion and the commodification of marine and coastal resources. Drawing on James C. Scott’s concept of state simplifications, we examine how state-led developments, tourism or pearl farming threaten their access to marine spaces and redefine their livelihoods. Although the Moken and Orang Suku Laut have not been able to ward off state control completely, they have developed counter-exclusion and resilience strategies to maintain their presence in Southeast Asia’s maritime waters and coastal areas. These include developing alliances with Chinese intermediaries along patron-client relationships, selectively engaging with environmental initiatives or mobilising more than-human actors. The Moken rely on decentralised networks and mobility to negotiate shifting powers, while the Orang Suku Laut consolidate kinship-like ties with patrons and leverage their reputation of black magic (ilmu hitam) practitioners to resist state intrusion. This paper illustrates their astounding degree of agency and creativity in their effort to preserve their cultural identities and rights to the seas and coastal regions they inhabit. The struggles and strategies of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut may thus offer conceptual tools for challenging the territorial imaginaries of the modern state and envisioning more plural futures for oceanic worlds.

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill (1882), by Cirilo Villaverde, is often read as a Cuban antislavery novel, yet its treatment of the remains of formerly enslaved people has received little scholarly attention. This article examines the scenes following the suicides of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí, focusing on the interval between death and burial—what I term afterdeath. In these scenes, the novel stages a tension between the narrator’s foregrounding of the corpses through description and their erasure by the enslaver characters in dialogue. This tension reveals that the decomposing bodies function as “unproductive remnants” that resist the novel’s speculative logic of valuation and cannot be recuperated under contemporary insurance practices. By foregrounding decay rather than spectrality, the study delineates the limits of commodification in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and argues that the corpses constitute a critical site for re-thinking representations of death, value, and resistance in slave societies.

This article offers a new way to think about objects of memory, focusing on how a single item can take on various roles – from a cherished personal keepsake through a commercial product to a powerful political symbol. By examining the ‘Bring Them Home’ dog tags created in response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, the article explores how these dog tags emerged as expressions of empathy for the hostages and their families, then evolved into a powerful symbol of the current historic moment, and eventually came to reflect diverse political positions on the conflict and even on broader human rights issues. Drawing from media reports, interviews, and visual evidence, the article highlights how these dog tags were worn during local protests, featured in international discussions, dominated the Israeli public space, and were integrated into everyday life, serving as a compact representation of both political identity and protest.

Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

Tehran Auction, established in 2012, rose to prominence during a period of severe international sanctions, economic instability, and institutional fragility in Iran. The auction represents a turning point in the evolution of Iranian art, in which its value increasingly aligns with luxury goods, a change that reflects a broader semi-neoliberal transformation in Iranian cultural policy. To analyze this shift, this article draws on concepts such as symbolic capital (Bourdieu), institutional theory (Dickie), and aesthetic politics (Rancière) to trace how market pricing mechanisms shape artistic legitimacy in Iran. Particular reference is made to paintings by Sohrab Sepehri, which have achieved the highest sales in the history of Tehran Auction. It is argued that his paintings function as markers of status, enhancing collectors’ cultural capital. This phenomenon mirrors the role of luxury brands in Tehran, where material possessions signal social distinction.

This article describes how Egyptian state documents are scattered between governmental institutions, private collections, and the second-hand book and paper market. This scattering raises a practical question about the conditions under which official documents become discardable and commodifiable by bureaucrats, their families, and second-hand dealers. This scattering also raises a theoretical question about the nature of a state which takes uneven care in keeping a record of its own institutional past. After outlining the difficulties of access one faces in official archives in Egypt, the article fleshes out the sociological profile of different custodians of state paperwork—including families of bureaucrats, peddlers, and dealers—and the conditions under which state documents become commodified to this day. The overarching objective is not just to show the well-known limitations of national archives as a source of historical material, but also to show how actually existing “state archives” go well beyond the remit of official institutions, with notable consequences over our conception of the state.

Institutional actors should aim to increase the long-term market value of their firms. This claim implies that firms should adopt a profit-maximizing mission. Business ethicists have been too quick to dismiss moral defenses of profit maximization. Even though there are limits to the moral benefits of profit maximization, a profit-maximizing approach is still morally better than alternative approaches to defining an institutional mission.

I argue that alienation objections to housing markets face a dilemma. Either they purport to explain distributive injustices, or they hold that markets are objectionable on intrinsic grounds. The first disjunct is empirically dubious. The second undermines the motivation for objecting to housing markets, and overgeneralizes: if markets are objectionable due to alienation, so is all large-scale social cooperation.

There is an ongoing debate over the moral limits of the market. Many participants endorse the plausible idea that a market’s moral status depends, at least in part, on its consequences. For example, Satz holds that markets whose operation undermines citizens’ ability to interact as equals are bad. And Brennan and Jaworski maintain that markets trading in any good or service permissibly possessed may be arranged to operate without bad consequences. This plausible normative claim about markets depends on a descriptive one. Namely, that individual markets have descriptive properties which would provide a suitable basis for their consequentialist evaluation. This descriptive claim, I argue, is false. Markets’ consequences are a joint production. There is no principled means by which the consequences of one may be distinguished from those of another. Thus, the plausible idea is false. A market’s moral status cannot depend on its consequences.

Thousands of people will suffer and die this year because we do not donate enough substances of human origin, including blood plasma. To solve this, some recommend that we allow commercial organizations to assist in collecting these and that we permit donor compensation as a tool to encourage donations. Many object to these proposals, including for semiotic or expressive reasons. But insofar as these objections rely on meanings and these meanings are social constructs, we can revise the meaning of these practices to avoid commodification. Revision may work in principle, but in practice some complain that changing meanings may be too difficult or practically infeasible. This essay attempts to show that this is not so in a wide range of cases and uses the case of commercial compensated blood plasma collection as an illustration. Getting people to conceive of this practice not as payment for blood plasma but as compensation for the time, effort, and inconvenience associated with the giving of plasma is practically feasible and preferable to prohibition.

Over the last century seed systems have undergone a process of commercialization, resulting in the transformation of seed from a common good into a commodity. Countries such as the United States are dominated by the private seed industry, which has succeeded in reducing crop diversity and increasing farmer dependency on commodity seed (i.e., seed that is bought and sold) through such mechanisms as seed hybridization, intellectual property protections, and the proliferation of genetically engineered crop varieties. Commodity seed has become necessary to support food production, but concurrently has created a positive feedback loop that solidifies corporate control within the seed industry while concurrently disincentivizing traditional agricultural practices such as seed saving. In contestation, growers nationally and globally have called for change both within and outside of market structures – advocating for the revalorization of the vast array of social, cultural, and environmental benefits that seeds have that are not being properly protected by those with the most power in the seed industry. Using insight from 31 semi-structured interviews with growers involved in Vermont's farmer seed systems, this study elucidates some of the non-commodity values that growers hold for the seeds they source from both non-commercial and commercial sources. Our results highlight how growers appreciate such non-commodity values as provenance and diversity and are working to provide a social and environmental safeguard for seeds through seed saving. At the same time, many growers also acknowledge the convenience and modern necessity of commodity seed, highlighting the importance of supporting alternative seed industry structures that are more socially and environmentally responsible. These findings stress the importance of acknowledging the multidimensionality of US farmer seed systems, whereby market and non-market exchanges can coexist and work toward creating more just and sustainable seed systems without ceding to complete commodification devoid of social import.