ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the different types of ‘social currency’ that shape the webs of social commitment and debt generated within commodity networks. It highlights the strategic interplay and handling of cash and non-cash values as they relate to diverse transactions, organisational practices and cultural meanings associated with the trajectory of a specific Mexican product – maize husks. It argues that commodity configurations should not simply be visualised, as they often are in commodity-chain analysis (e.g., Gereffi and Korzeniewics 1994, Bonnano et al. 1994), as disembodied sets of relations generated by the demand for a product in national and transnational markets. They must also be viewed as the outcome of the series of interlocking encounters and relationships that take place between the various exchange actors who endeavour to defend and reproduce their own enterprises, livelihoods and cultural repertoires.2
