THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THINGS Discussing the trajectory of things, Appadurai (1986) notes that "even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context" (1986:5). In a like manner, Kopytoff (1986) considers the "cultural biography" of a thing by looking at an object "as a cultur? ally constructed entity, endowed with culturally specific meanings, and classified and reclassified into culturally constituted categories" (Kopytoff 1986:68). Questions about that biography might be, "Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things?" (Kopytoff 1986:66). The answers to such ques? tions reveal the social life of an object, and its changing meanings. Appadurai (1986) moves beyond the gift-commodity dichotomy, what he calls the "exagger? ation and reification of the contrast between gift and commodity in anthropology writing" (1986:11), and suggests the need to look for "the commodity potential of all things" (1986:13). He argues that an object might be in one state in one situation and in a commodity state in another, hence his concern with a "total trajectory" of a thing "from production through exchange/distribution, to con? sumption" (Appadurai 1986:13). Moving from the theoretical to the methodological, Appadurai considers the "commodity situation" in the social life of a thing "the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, or future) for some other thing is its socially relevantfeature" (Appadurai 1986:13). The commodity situation has three com? ponents: (1) the commodity phase of a thing's social life, which carries the idea "that things can move in and out of the commodity state" (Appadurai 1986:13), and is related to what Kopytoff refers to as a thing's cultural biography or life history (Kopytoff 1986:14-15); (2) the commodity candidacy of a thing, which "refers to the standards and criteria ... that define the exchangeability of things in any particular social and historical context" (Appadurai 1986:14); and (3) the commodity context, being the "variety of social arenas within or between cul? tural units, that help link the commodity candidacy of a thing to the commodity phase of its career" (Appadurai 1986:15).