Looking beyond the digital veil: an investigation of the (de)commodification of three “Vietnamese spices”

ABSTRACT

The contemporary global spice trade is a multi-million dollar industry that frequently relies on Global North consumers’ romantic visions of spices and their cultivators in the Global South. From fieldwork with ethnic minority farmers in upland northern Vietnam growing star anise, Cinnamomum cassia (often marketed as cinnamon), and black cardamom, and from a content analysis of digital marketing websites, it becomes clear that astute practices of commodification and de-commodification are invoked at different nodes along these spice global commodity chains. In this paper we investigate the strategies deployed by Vietnamese state officials, Vietnam-based exporting companies, and overseas importing and retail companies to promote and market these three spices. We find major disjunctures between the “geographical indications” approach advanced by the Vietnamese state to link products to particular places and peoples, and the “placeless” strategies mobilized by private Vietnamese and Chinese exporters. Global North importers further complicate the story, often attempting to de-commodify or de-fetishize the spices on digital-marketing platforms. By focusing on the final nodes along these commodity chains – yet to be studied or critiqued – our findings raise important questions regarding the implications of such divergent marketing strategies for farmers at the initial nodes of these spice chains.

KEYWORDS:

• Spice
• star anise
• cinnamon
• black cardamom
• Vietnam
• commodity chains
• digital marketing
• de-commodification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. We found that Vietnamese grown C. Cassia and star anise are more widely traded on the international market and we were able to identify more retail websites for these spices than for Vietnamese black cardamom which we determined is far less commonly traded internationally.

2. Some farmer interviews were completed by research assistant Ngô Thúy Hạnh, without the first author present with lengthy debriefs afterward, but all quotes in this article are from interviews with the first author in attendance.

3. Our individual analyses of the online marketing strategies we found for China, North America, Europe, and Australia websites are included as Supplemental Material for this article.

4. Some of the websites change their visual and textual content fairly frequently, hence our analysis is based on the text and images we recorded when we first accessed the websites.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.