Mangal, Simone Alicia

SIMONE ALICIA MANGAL, then a student at University College London, London, United Kingdom, received a grant in October 2008, to aid research on 'Aluminium: The Social and Environmental Value of Commodities,' supervised by Dr. Daniel Miller. Despite a conspicuous global preoccupation with markets and socio-environmental problems, commodity value studies dwell on production and circulation values and not socio-environmental values. This study in Trinidad and Tobago focused on socio-environmental transformations and nation-wide conflict over the commodity, aluminium, prior to the construction of an aluminium smelter. Topics of research interest included: the values claimed by different actors; how actors interacted to secure the values important to them; and how various values became associated with, or disassociated from, the commodity were studied in the villages adjacent to the smelter site; the Environmental Impact Assessment process; the Legal Courts; routines of anti-smelter activists; and the Media. The study exposed 'socio-environmental' values that were distinct from the labor or exchange values traditionally considered in Anthropology. Socio-environmental values were being masked and unmasked in a struggle in which the globalized system for socio-environmental valorization of a commodity came into friction with the values of the people of Trinidad, and eventually failed to enable the creation of the commodity. This study of what happens when a society turns its attention to its values and questions global market values addresses gaps in relevant conceptual frameworks in Anthropology, Economics, and formal regulatory and trade mechanisms aimed at making 'markets' socially and environmentally responsible.