ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a position of broad agreement with the idea that modern Western brands are just a particularly extreme and influential example of a cultural practice that becomes necessary in almost any economy of a certain scale where there exists a combination of mass-produced goods, aspirational consumers, and transregional systems of exchange. The discussion begins by reviewing how relational models fit into broader anthropological and marketing theory and then considers how object values and commodity brands relate to the operation of larger scale distributed economies. If theoretical perspectives on value has much longer Western and non-Western intellectual history, they have been perhaps two particularly important academic contributions over the last couple of decades. The urban growth and cultural expansion of 4th-millennium Mesopotamia was responsible for a pattern of city states, transregional linkages, and more standardised commodities that has had a profound and long-lasting impact on the history of the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean.
