Textures of value: Tactility, experience, and exclusion in the cashmere commodity chain

Abstract

Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co-opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber's relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very different stakes: the families of Mongolian herders who comb goats together each spring, the brokers and buyers who weigh it and feel it to adjudicate it for fashion houses, and the advertisers and marketers who decide what is desirable in global markets of end consumers. This article examines three nodes in the production and circulation of Mongolian cashmere to show how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and travel, or not, from one context to another. I focus on interactions as moments of qualic evaluation. Here embodied, tactile experiences of qualia—which might seem to be immune to perceptual difference and “outside culture”—in fact differ. The example shows how valuation in a transnational commodity chain depends on both exploiting semiotic gaps in the chain and nonetheless meeting a threshold of commensurability, neither of which is divorceable from physicality.