Search

The article examines transformations in long-distance trade in a highland community in northeast India over a period of 35 years. It links changes in demand for trade goods to shifts in the political subjectivities of the Wancho as they are incorporated into the Indian state and to the consumer choices made by chiefs and commoners, women and men as they utilize opportunities to alter patterns of labor inhering in the local conceptions of gender and social rank. The movement of mass-produced consumer goods into rural communities around the world has given rise to a volume of anthropological work on the social meanings of consumption.